Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

The podcast discusses Sweden's failed pronatalism despite generous policies, attributing the decline in birth rates to cultural factors over financial incentives. It explores societal values, family policies, and the importance of cultural celebration of parenthood. The episode emphasizes the impact of responsibilities on mental well-being and delves into the influence of busyness on fertility trends. Additionally, the podcast examines cultural representations of family size and analyzes the concept of wish granting in schools.

This conversation categorizes religions into three fascinating faith archetypes: polytheism's allure, mysticism's mysterious connectivity, and monotheism's rational framework. They discuss how these intersect and adapt amid cultural upheaval, emphasizing personal spiritual journeys over rigid affiliations. The intricate dance between mystical experiences and altered states sparks debate, as the speakers advocate for a supportive community that nurtures vulnerability in faith. Plus, there's a playful look at incorporating ancestral guidance into modern spirituality.

In this hard-hitting discussion, we analyze the alarming rise of single parenthood over the past decades. We link this trend to increased rates of substance abuse, mental health issues, high school dropouts, and unemployment among affected children. While recognizing that many single parents strive admirably, we argue that the societal normalization and enablement of single parenthood has tragic consequences.We also touch on how political polarization exacerbates partnership woes, with liberal women far outnumbering progressive men and vice versa among conservatives. Ultimately, we advocate for a cultural shift that promotes stable two-parent households as the ideal environment for raising well-adjusted, productive members of society.Simone Collins: [00:00:00] So here's where I like, just want to push back a little bit but like. These children may be exhibiting the antisocial tendencies of the fathers who left the relationship.Malcolm Collins: Let's buy what you just said. Okay. Then I want you to then contextualize the severity of the quote I read earlier, which I will read again.In the 1950s, fewer than 5 percent of babies born in this country were born to unmarried mothers. To date, nearly half of all babies in America are born to unmarried mothers. A lot of people, when we talk about sort of genetic shifts in the country's like sociological profiles, they think that these happen slowly.They do not.And so what we're going to see is across all ethnic groups in this country, the whatever genetic correlate there is to this behavioral pattern is going to begin to, Become dramatically more common in the population and the other traits that it is correlated [00:01:00] with, i. e. substance abuse, depression, anxiety, externalizing behavior disorders.Those are also going to explode also things like dropping out of college, dropping out of high school, not having a job. Those are also going to explode. And it shouldn't be a surprise that these things cross correlate, I just typically don't point this out due to the offensive nature of admitting that humans have genes and that affects behavior patterns.How dare you. To extreme lefties. But I mean it's true, humans have genes, I'm, I'm sorryWould you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be talking to you because I am so excited to be married to you. Mm. So this episode is going to be done on the statistics of marriage, single parents, and the consequences to children, as well as realistic long-term solutions to the way that people pair, bond and stuff like that in, in, in the context of having kids.So the first one I really wanted to [00:02:00] go over here, which is a study that I think really flies in the face of what a lot of people intuit about marriage. So it's important to sort of start with this because I think a lot of people, they go into this being like, well, marriage makes you less. Right. This is, this is just something you see, especially if you're in these like red pilly circles and stuff like that.So last I'm quoting here last month, for example, the university of Chicago economist, Sam Paltzman published a study in which he found that marriage was the most important differentiator between happy and unhappy people. Married people are 30 points happier than unmarried. Income contributes to happiness too, but not as much.So, just to clarify, if you were going to contrast your amount of happiness, that marriage gives the average person, when contrast you with a non-married person. That would be the equivalent to the boost in happiness. You would get from an additional income of 75 to a hundred thousand dollars a year. So in other words, If you were to give somebody $50,000 extra a [00:03:00] year in salary that would not correlate was an equivalent happiness boost as marriage does. You would need to offer them at 75,000 to a hundred thousand dollars.Malcolm Collins: According to an analyst of recent survey databy the University of Virginia, Professor Brad Wilcox, 75 percent of adults ages 18 to 40 said that making a good living was crucial to fulfillment in life, while only 32 percent thought that marriage was crucial to fulfill it in a Pew Research survey. 88 percent of parents said it was extremely or very important for their kids to be financially independent, while only 21 percent said it was extremely or very important for their kids to marry.So the point here is that there is this misperception in society that you're most important. Goal. Like even if you're just caring about personal hedonism should be in personal happiness and personal contentment should be to be well off financially, that is just demonstrably untrue from the data.You are much better off being less happy or less, less, [00:04:00] lower income. Typically within the income bracket, you would expect for yourself and married and in a good relationship than you are to be higher income and unmarried. but ourSimone Collins: society does not imply that. I mean, the data may, may indicate. As such, but if you were to go off mainstream societal norms, you'd, you'd think it was crazy to focus on marriage, which could become abusive or substandard or ending divorce, or you grow apart.And also look at how marriages are depicted in media. They're not that fun. And I'm part of that. It's a plot device. I mean, boring, happy marriages are boring. They're not good fodder for a show or a movie or any sort of story plot. But my point is, like. This is not obvious to people.Malcolm Collins: I think it's more than that.I think that there is a concerted effort to some extent to paint marriage as not fun. I think, yeah. So I think that there's a few motivations here. I don't think it's like an intentional concerted effort, but I do [00:05:00] think it's a, an emergent property of the way. The types of people who end up being showrunners and writers in Hollywood divide from the mainstream population.They're much more likely to be individuals who are deep into the urban monoculture and single themselves. It, it, it, they, they have not experienced marriage. They paint. Marriage both with a sour grapes mindset because of this and within a community and culture that is not good at rewarding stable marriages.So there's, there's just a lot less of them. I mean, you're, you're obviously going to see much more stable marriages within conservative cultural communities, which are going to be much more rural and stuff like that. than the types of people who are writing these shows in LA. And as society drifts further apart from each other, you know, the left and the right and as the left begins to dehumanize the right more and more, they have a harder time interacting with or modeling people of the opposite political persuasion.And as such [00:06:00] they cannot write, like, what these stable marriages look like without making digs that their culture needs to sort of insert into them, that if a marriage is, like, conservative ish in some way, that the woman must be being oppressed, for example, or must hate her life. So I think that that's, that's part of, of what you have going on in, in these depictions.But you also have this with teachers and stuff like that. You know, a lot of these people are very unlikely to be married. They're much more likely to be in allegiance with the urban monoculture. When contrasted with their local communities and as such they, they teach kids this cultural value system of money matters more than anything.And I remember this is something my mom really pushed against me as a kid, because I thought education mattered more than anything. And she made it pretty clear that within our family, it did not, the most important thing was who you marry. And everything else is secondary to that. She's like, because I was so stressed about college.I was going to get into it. And she was like, it's the most important decision of my life. I said, not even close. The most important decision is who you marry and never forget [00:07:00] that. And it is, it is very, very true. Because I think that the generation above us, you know, they had all these bad marriages.If you look at the data in our country. Generation. Actually, it's pretty solid merges and it's because they didn't really realize this. And then there was a bit of a sour grapes and how the next generation was made. And, you know, people are just out to get you, but it's, it's having a consequence to kids of the next generation.So that's another chilling statistic in 1950, fewer than 5 percent of babies in this country were born to unmarried mothers today. Nearly half of all babies in America are born to unmarried mothers. Most surprising. Most surprising and worrisome is this trend is divided along class lines with children whose mothers don't have a college degree being more than twice as likely compared to children of college educated mothers to live in a single parent home.Now, I don't know who that was surprising to but it, it, it is definitely increasing. And this is something we're seeing in [00:08:00] society more broadly. And I think that this is something that is hugely missed by the left because they have a complete blindness to a person's cultural and genetic background.And I'm not talking about ethnic background. I'm just talking about individually genes do have a correlation with earning potential IQ and other sociological traits and that as we have allowed this to continue, we are disproportionately hurting those individuals in our society who are the least well off while dramatically increasing their plight.So, you know, if you look at children who are raised in single parent, how. Households that read some quotes here across a number of studies, children raised in single mother families are at a heightened risk for substance abuse, depression, anxiety, and externalizing behavior disorders. And then another 1 says, children who grow up with only 1 of their biological parents, nearly always a mother are [00:09:00] disadvantaged across a broader way of outcomes.They are twice as likely to drop out of high school, 2. 5 times as likely to become teen mothers, and 1. 4 times as likely to be idle. Okay.Simone Collins: So here's where I like, just want to push back a little bit because I think at least a lot of viewers are going to think this as well is okay, right. But like. These children may be exhibiting the antisocial tendencies of the fathers who left the relationship.They may have been addicted and they may have done something that got them in jail. And that's why these mothers are single mothers and these mothers who are single mothers. May also be more likely to have been teen moms themselves because again, they're single mothers. They're not like women who are 40 years old and deciding responsibly to, you know, have a child, someone raised them typically.Malcolm Collins: Let's buy what you just said. Okay. Basically what you are arguing and I will actually say studies have been done on this and it does show that you're Mostly correct. [00:10:00] Okay. People who become single parents through factors not of their own, you don't see most of these problems. So this is, you know, the spouse dies or something.So if that's true, okay, if these negative traits that I'm seeing here that are seen at much higher rates among single mothers are, are happening for genetic reasons and, and, and, and, and cultural reasons and that that is the predominant reason why people become single mothers. Then I want you to then contextualize the severity of the quote I read earlier, which I will read again.In the 1950s, fewer than 5 percent of babies born in this country were born to unmarried mothers. To date, nearly half of all babies in America are born to unmarried mothers. That means that I think a lot of people, when we talk about sort of genetic shifts in the country's like sociological profiles, they think that these happen slowly.They do not. If you go from [00:11:00] something like if you had a population of moths, right? And in 1 generation 5 percent of the moths had spots on their wings and within, you know, 50 years. You measure the population again, and 50 percent of the moss have spots on their wings. What do you think the moss are going to look like in another 50 years?In another 30 years, right? And keep in mind, we're talking about sociological profiles here, which exist across ethnic groups and change really quickly. This is partially why I think this whole ethnic grouping idea of genetics that a lot of people do is pointless. Because it, oh, It hugely undercounts how quickly a sociological profile can change within an ethnic group due to really strong selective pressures like this.And so what we're going to see is across all ethnic groups in this country, the whatever genetic correlate there is to this behavioral pattern is going to begin to, [00:12:00] Become dramatically more common in the population and the other traits that it is correlated with, i. e. substance abuse, depression, anxiety, externalizing behavior disorders.Those are also going to explode also things like dropping out of college, dropping out of high school, not having a job. Those are also going to explode. And it shouldn't be a surprise that these things cross correlate, I just typically don't point this out due to the offensive nature of admitting that humans have genes and that affects behavior patterns.How dare you. To extreme lefties. But I mean it's true, humans have genes, I'm, I'm sorry. But, do you have anything you wanted to talk about on this, or?Simone Collins: It's just depressing because, you know, I mean, our, our goal with prenatalism is to, Encourage sort of the maximum number of amazing childhoods possible.And I don't think these stats are describing amazing childhoods, soMalcolm Collins: well, no, and, and, and you can look at this, this, this genetic profile that [00:13:00] leads to single mothers as a biologically adaptive genetic profile by that way, whatever, whatever environmental pressures are keeping the rest of the population.Unfertile are not appearing was in this subset of the population, or at least they're not affecting the subset of the population as much. And so they are being active and directed directly selected for. Which is going to lead to even more of this behavior in the future and the paper behavior will be more severe in the future.Yeah. And I, I think that this also causes when I talk about this as being a, like a biological profile or sociological profile that is adapted to our current age one thing we need to consider, and we've mentioned this in another episode, but it's worth reiterating. Is the huge costs that the states put on individuals for breeding outside of their population group.If they are in, like, a economically successful population group that they're really, really high due to child support. [00:14:00] So, you know, you're not going to get the same sort of genetic normalization that you would in historic societies. And so if you do get really differentiated, but also genetically isolated strategies for overcoming fertility collapse, you are going to begin to see some level of speciation within humanity.And we are going to begin to see something that humanity has never had to really deal with, which is genuine human diversity. And, and you know, some racists will be like, no, there's big differences between like ethnic groups. It's like, even if it's like the most extreme end, when you're talking about even potential differences between ethnic groups, even claim differences, you're, you're talking like.Standard deviation and IQ. We are talking like 3 standard deviations, 4 standard deviations in IQ in just 75 to 100 years between population groups and radically different behavior patterns between population groups, and it will not matter what ethnicity you are. [00:15:00] The starting individuals were within these selective pressures because you are seeing conversion evolution with within each ethnic group, individuals who have this polygenic profile that we're talking here overrepresented within them, somehow making it through this, this genetic crucible that we're goingSimone Collins: through.I should also add like to add to this point of selection pressures for having kids like from a policy standpoint, it's also being reinforced and we pointed this out in another episode, but it bears repeating that if you look at. Services for parents provided by the state in the United States. So provided by each state and that varies from state to state.The vast majority of services that make parenting easy, which is to say free childcare, free healthcare for your kids, free food for your kids free transportation for your kids, all sorts of services. These are only available to very low income families. So basically there's this huge like, drop in marginal cost to having [00:16:00] kids or opportunity cost to having kids for one group of the population but not for middle and a high income earners.So there, this isn't just like a, something that, that is happening naturally. There's also like a policy. mechanism at play. I'm not saying that like low income people should not be having kids, but I am saying that a lot of middle and high income people are not having kids because for them the opportunity cost is incredibly high.They're not going to get free child care. Get free healthcare for their kids. And I just went through our tax bill or like in our tax return, I think we might be able to write off some of our healthcare expenses and oh my God, the amount that we spent on our kids for healthcare, even though we're insured and we pay for insurance, so.That's another factor of play that that exacerbatesMalcolm Collins: even we, we could not afford regular daycare on our cell. Yeah, we can't afford it. We, we've had to come up with alternate solutions, but, you know, and we're only getting the kid number 4 now. [00:17:00] So, it's, it's, it's getting absolutely ridiculous in terms of the way that the government is prioritizing handling this and it is exacerbating this speciation event that, that we might be going through right now because you're getting this degree of behavioral isolation.Yeah. Another thing that I, I wanted to talk about here that I think is really interesting and looking for partners. And it's something that we've seen is the difficulty people have in looking for partners because finding partners is a big part, like the marriage crisis, like nobody getting married or, or thinking that marriage is a good idea is, is, is part of what's contributing to this.And alsoSimone Collins: people. On both sides, men and women becoming just sucky partners. People now have high levels of anxiety, extreme high levels of selfishness and infantilization. Like it's, it is not just that people are having trouble finding partners. It's that people are shitty partners now. I'm sorry. Well,Malcolm Collins: that and they are unwilling to ideologically compromise.As we talked about in another video, the progressive party sort of becomes a party of feminist [00:18:00] ideals and the conservative party becomes the party of masculine ideals. You, you are getting more and more women in sort of this liberal bubble and men in a more conservative bubble and unable to really humanize the other side in a meaningful way or talk across the aisle.And so as a quote here from this one article, liberal women and conservative men who want to marry face a particular challenge. Not enough single partners of the correct political persuasion are available today. In broad terms, there are only 0. 6 single liberal young men for each single liberal young woman.Likewise, there are only 0. 5 conservative young women that exist for every conservative young man.Simone Collins: And there's, there's less willingness to even befriend people across the aisle now than before, especially among people who are progressive. It's also shown that now, like you can see, there are other graphs for this.Women, young women are much more likely to be progressive and young men are much more likely to be conservative. So between all these things, like not, [00:19:00] not only is it that. You know, you, you have people less willing to cross the aisle. You now have more polarization. So we're inMalcolm Collins: a terrible position. I mean, I really want to highlight the statistics.I just went because that's pretty chilling. If I am a man and I say, I will only date conservative women for every conservative young single woman, there are two single young conservative men for every now I'm a woman. And I say, I only want to date progressive men. For every single progressive young man, there are two progressive women looking to only date these, these.So, and, and, and people are like, but how can you date across the aisle? Right. And the answer is I did basically, or I didn't even really, I was probably have been considered a progressive when I met you. And, and you were a progressive as well, I guess you could say. But yeah, so we, People change their views, you know, what you are looking for is not somebody who agrees with you, but somebody who is open to [00:20:00] logic and debate and discussion, and then judges their world perspectives, not on feelings, but on logic.And someone who can grow with you. A lot of women on the progressive side are like that.Simone Collins: Oh, totally. Yeah, who would absolutely change their views, assuming that they're capable of being open minded. So the key is to find someone open minded with whom you can grow together. And that's also with the assumption that you're going to add some nuance to your views as well.But I do really hate those. Actually, we, we, we know a lot of men who've just bitten the bullet and married progressive wives that I feel like they'll just never intellectually respect because their wives are so off the rails, like just. Delusional in so many ways. And it's really sad to see that, like, you know, these people are going to have kids together and they are.So ideologically at odds, it's almost like they're just like, well, yeah, I mean, like I'm going to have to [00:21:00] tolerate her in the way that like, you know, trophy wife, husbands, you know, just tolerate some dumb woman and buy a bunch of gifts for her. But that's not a real marriage, you know, it really gets to me.Malcolm Collins: You know, I, yeah, I, I see marriages like this myself and it's, it's sad to see, but I, I don't know. For, you know, it was the guys that we know who do it. They're wealthy enough that they had other options. I think that they just didn't put the effort intoSimone Collins: sourcing. They were lazy then on the woman's side.And I think this is a big critique of men now is that there's a pretty big growth in like men, children who just do not take care of themselves. And there's this whole meme online of, I think it's called like single married women who feel like they're living the life of a single mother. But then they have to like clean up for their husband and basically their husband is like another child that they have to take care of.They have to clean up for him. They do everything for him and he doesn't really pitch in. He may not even have a job, you know? So he like men also aren't like you and [00:22:00] like you care for the kids, you take them to the doctor, you do their appointments you do all of the outside house maintenance, you know, like things like that.So, you know, there are many. Again, I'm saying like, we're looking, a lot of peopleMalcolm Collins: are married because everyone's failing. Guys who are out there looking for a domestic, this is why they're not finding a wife, because those aren't like a thing out there anymore, you know, and, and it, or at least not a thing in like the type of woman who you want genetically contributing to your kids.You know, so I, I think that It's it's difficult. It's it's really difficult. And I understand that. But I think that these stats highlight the difficulty of finding a partner and part of why people aren't getting married. I think it or a big part like a small part. I think a pretty big part is this political polarization of the masculine and feminine within the two party structure that's leading to further drift apart of these two parties.Simone Collins: And it really isn't sustainable to marry someone that you Don't respect or like, and it's another, [00:23:00] another reason why this is super not cool is we also know some parents who like very clearly don't have much affection for their children. And our theory for as to why that is the case is they see so much of their, the child's other parent that they really don't like in that child.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I'veSimone Collins: seen that a lot. And. I think one of the reasons why you and I love our kids so much is we love each other so much. It's like, I love having a pocket, Malcolm. I love more of you in the worldMalcolm Collins: and I see it in them. You don't really have your personality. I see that all the time. Well, so this, this brings me to another point that I also see with these guys who compromise on personality for looks.And a big part of this is as a guy, being able to say that looks are dramatically less important. so much. And who you marry than who you have sex with. And a lot of guys just don't get that. Like you do not actually need to find who you marry particularly attractive. You will find them attractive after a [00:24:00] while.Like, it's just not that important. It's not like out there dating. Well, in termsSimone Collins: of appearance, I think my hot take is that like the key thing is like neatness and signs of conscientiousness. Do they dress, you know, In a decent and good manner. Are they neat? Is their hair well kept up? Like, is their skin maintained?Like, are they showing basic signs of being conscientious? Okay, that is all you need. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I really only look at I I, I mean, I think the easiest thing for that is obesity rates. Like as long as they're not obese, I basically considered them viable when I was out there dating. And. And I'm not saying that you're not a beautiful, wonderful woman, Simone.I'm just saying that that didn't happenSimone Collins: to me. It's okay, Malcolm. We know. I'm definitely not even the, I'm not even like probably in the top five in attractiveness of all of your past girlfriends. And I'm not even referring to the women that you slept with. So don't worry about it. It's fine. Well,Malcolm Collins: I mean, what I'm saying isSimone Collins: I'm looking, I'm not looking away from you intentionally.There's like a line of [00:25:00] deer going by and it's very interesting to watch. There's like a traffic jam. IfMalcolm Collins: you compromise on something like narcissism, if you compromise on something like some level of sociopathy and the people you're dating if you compromise on them being boring people or not that intelligent, that's the compromise you're making in your sons and in your daughters.Oh yeah. And that will affect you potentially as much or more than even the lack of those traits in your spouse.Simone Collins: Yeah, you're going to have to live with that for the rest of your life. And that also is you, you know, like you're, it's, it's one thing to like throw in your cards with a spouse, but like to make a version of yourself that is like literally genetically combined with someone youMalcolm Collins: got to choose well.Yeah, no, I, I really like it because I see all sorts of flaws in myself and I'm like, wow, we're fixing them. And are you just amazed by these deer? What's going on? ThereSimone Collins: are like 16. I've never seen so many. I don'tMalcolm Collins: see [00:26:00] them. Are theySimone Collins: on the other side of the road? Yeah, they're on the other side of the road.There's just so freaking many. And I'm afraid that they are all about to kill themselves and throw themselves into the busy road. And then I have to call the freaking. State root people. And then you're like, Oh no, I think that's a local route. And then I call the local people and they're like, no, it's a state route.And then, and yeah, remember that time when we had an author at our house and then we heard a gunshot and we were all like,Malcolm Collins: Oh, I guess we got a guy to come to our house and who is a pretty famous author and his next book is going to be on genius. And so of course he needed to meet with us because we are, well, it's a Simone to be honest within.Intellectual circles, we are seen as some of the smartest people in the world.Simone Collins: He chose us because we're trying to manufacture genius with our children. We're selecting for IQ and we're creating a school that is designed. I don'tMalcolm Collins: think that's it. I think thatSimone Collins: you, you also put good money on this. I will make a good money off of a bet here, but that's beside the point.We hear this gunshot, right. As we're all about to go to bed and he's the one who picked it up. You and I were just [00:27:00] kind of like, herpy derp. And he's like, that was a gunshot and he gets really nervous. And so, we all like sit on the floor in like a core part of our house. Cause we're like, don't worry, we have all these sort of like safe room backups.And also we have a ton of guns, so if anything happens and then finally we realized that like the police had just shot a deer that had been hit by a car right outside our house and just neglected to tell us. And they just left it there. And then, yeah, then they just left it there. And then I, I had to spend like the next three weeks trying to call someone to take this rotting deer carcass out of the front of our house.And so that's why I'm watching these deer with great interest because they're like, they look like they really want to just lemming off this, this hill and just right into the increasingly busy traffic. I'm not excited about those.Malcolm Collins: Well, I hope none of the cars veer into our house.Simone Collins: Yeah. Again. Anyway, where were we?Sorry. Ugliness, men choosing attractive. [00:28:00]Malcolm Collins: Politics, politics and dating.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. People, dear people and get over yourself. Choose a smart partner who's capable of changing. Basically, if they look conscientious, generally healthy and intellectually curious enough to change their minds. They're probably ideologically aligned as, as they're ever going to be like, don't choose like a default setting.Cause also like, let's say that.Malcolm Collins: In the same way that you determine what's true to logic and stuff like that. One of the things that you've been developing this religious system that has really been impressed upon me in my fortune and choosing you as a wife. Is this sort of inherent, I would almost say genetic in, in both of us hostility to mysticism and anything that is you know, not, not grounded in sort of hard replicability, like science is the wrong word these days.Right? But. It really colors a lot of, as we are [00:29:00] beginning to, because, you know, as we met, we didn't think we would get into religious thought at all, and both of us are pretty staunch atheists. And so this is not something that we anticipated, but as we have, we are incredibly copacetic in terms of how we think about things in a way I didn't anticipate at all, you know, because it wasn't something I vetted you for as a spouse.Simone Collins: Yeah, no, we're just lucky there. But I think also if you on our first date laid out your life philosophy, like you did, and I said something like, well, that's typical for a Capricorn, you'd probably be like, okay, thanks. Bye. You know what I mean? I definitelyMalcolm Collins: wouldn't breed with someone. I probably wouldn't even have sex with someone who said something like that.I find them. Well,Simone Collins: and that's like a fundamental sign that they believe in sort of non evidence based spiritual nonsense. And they use that as a basis of truth. And therefore. You would not be compatible.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and this is something I've also said with, with some men who have been out there looking for partners is, [00:30:00] is women often follow men in their lives in terms of their religious stuff.If you really dedicate yourself to it and you are a paragon was in that religious system, not if you're like lazy about it or something like that, and you're using it to get them to do things for you. But if you really embody it. A lot of women are actually pretty happy to go along with that, even if they appear very secular when you first start engaging with them.Simone Collins: Well, there are some women who are, I would argue, too, like you might both be conservative. But they end up being so rigidly conservative that there's a lot of stuff that you don't, you can't do in life. So it's more like, yeah, what are their heuristics for changing their mind and determining truth rather than like how from the get go aligned are they with me rightMalcolm Collins: now?Yeah, I really agree with that. Well, I love you to death, Simone, and this has been a fun adventure and discussion. But, well, people always, any discussion that involves statistics always does unusually well. Any discussion that involves religion usually does [00:31:00] unusually poorly. And those are our two big heuristics of our videos.Other than that, I don't really know.Simone Collins: Yeah. I can't predict anymore. It doesn't make sense to me, but audience suggestions are welcome. God, they're lining. Okay. You know what?I'm sorry. I'm just so scared. These deer are going to kill them. Oh, they're playing. They're playing with fire. Malcolm. We've got a bunch of suicidal deer outside and this is not good. So I guess we're going to sign off with that and hope that we don't have 17 deer carcasses outside our house in five minutes.Oh, they're playing now. They're playing on the cliff. They're okay. Okay. I love you.Malcolm Collins: I love you too. Oh god 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

We analyze the hyper-optimistic mecha anime Gurren Lagann through a pronatalist lens, seeing its themes of spiral energy, intergenerational improvement, and struggle as virtues aligning with our philosophy. We discuss how it frames the expansion of human potentiality as the highest good, with forces that limit this potentiality as evil. It also models healthy ambition balanced by diligent work, irreverent humor lifting the low, and inspiration over coercion in leadership.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I want to talk about why this show is so rare.Because when you look at how this show frames good bad are the things that limit humanity's potentiality, and good is the expansion of human potentiality. When I look at the way good is framed in things like Hollywood,we're good as just sort of general utilitarianism or the maintenance of the status quo. You know, I, I, I'd often say that my favorite villain song of a Disney movie is Akuna Matata.Simone Collins: In Evangelion, they struggle to live, whereas in Gurren Lagann, they live to struggle, and that so resonates,Malcolm Collins: this idea of struggle is bad. We need to live to in struggle instead of seeing struggle as the reason for living in Gurren Lagann when they're looking at the challenges ahead of them. They get excited about them. The challenges are what give life its purpose. And this, boundless optimism. Isn't [00:01:00] because we don't know that struggle exists. It isn't because we don't know how hard life is for people.It's because we're excited at the challenge to overcome that both at the level of individuals And at the level of a speciesWould you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: I am so excited for our topic today because it is on what I think is the greatest of all pronatalist media pieces I've ever seen.Yeah. And it's a piece that I also ascribe some religious significance to because I think it captures concepts that we try to convey in some of our like, religious episodes that are actually pretty difficult to capture unless you're doing it in this sort of goofy, , irreverent way. But I, I, I want to, the first, what I love is, is people like just to go over the pronatal is current login connection here, right?Because I've, I mentioned this to some of my progressive friends. And they're like, what? Gurren Lagann's a pronatalist piece? Or, or the people who were surprised when Franks, we did an [00:02:00] episode on like the, the naughty anime topics, where we talked about this anime Franks, which was just an entirely Pronatalist anime very explicitly, and they were, people were really surprised by how pronatalist it was and how much it shamed ideas like life extensionism.And I'm like, these are the people who did Gurren Lagann somehow, the world, like, collectively, when they were watching Gurren Lagann, they did not catch the enemy, and it's not even like a, an adult comparison, or an adult slander on ideas like, The carrying capacity of the Earth, it is as if I was creating a cartoon that was supposed to like go to a middle school.And like cartoonishly, sort of brainwash kids into a specific perspective on topics where like, in, in Captain Planet, you know how the capitalists like look like pigs and like oink and everything like that and everything.Does anything I like more than being mean? It's being [00:03:00] sneaky. The people who work in extractive industries are real people, not pigmen.I'll be able to drill for oil anywhere!Malcolm Collins: This is. That's basically the way Gurren Lagann treats the concept of antinatalism. What it feels like to be a face!Malcolm Collins: So, for those who don't know, I guess I should go over the broad plot structure of Gurren Lagann, because that would help people sort of get to where we're going with this. So it starts where they are in, A small underground shelter and they sort of believe that's their world. And the world iteratively expands.It gets, it gets bigger at a logarithmic scale with each sort of turn of the show's plot. Where at the end of the show, they are [00:04:00] A like a fighting robot that's made out of galaxies and universes fighting another fighting robot that's made out of galaxies and universes. But at each stage, there's also this idea of.It is dangerous to go further. So the key big bad of at least the first part of the show, believes that something terrible will happen to the Earth. You're not told vaguely what.If the Earth ever gets more than a million human beings living on the surface. So this is this idea of carrying capacity. And then in the second part of the show, after they've defeated him and they are then moving to the surface and building this civilization, you see a character who is in a microbe, because this is, again, you keep seeing this logarithmic thing.So this one character grew up in an underground bunker where they didn't have enough food, and whenever they got over 50 people, they had to kill whoever the new person was, or who, you know, so they had to draw lots, and then those people would go out and die. [00:05:00] Because You know, this idea of carrying capacity is just constantly reinforced, and then they learned that this idea of carrying capacity was forced upon them by this cosmic scale force called the anti spirals who fear humanities and all spiral races capacity for intergenerational improvement.And that capacity for intergenerational improvement spiraling out of control. To just get to some exact quotes here, because I know that people who may only vaguely remember the show might, might be like, Oh, is that, is that exactly what it was about? So, and, and this will sound very much similar to something we'll say.So when the nerdy gay engineering guy is explaining to everyone else what spiral energy is, he says, the genetic diversity stemming from gametogenesis is the key to evolution. It's that that keeps spiral power moving forwards. And then everybody's confused. They're like, what does he mean?And he's like, in other words, it means love changes the [00:06:00] universe. But in this context, he doesn't mean love. He very explicitly means sex. And,Simone Collins: or reproduction, let's be clear.Malcolm Collins: Well, reproductive to assortative combining, which is very important to us. Like he says in that line, and it's very important in all of our philosophy and sort of teaching is that diversity is.Key to this sort of power. You cannot have this power if you are just cloning, or if you are attempting to live forever. This is made very explicit. So the beastmen in the show are the sort of like, foot soldiers of the enemy, and they're said to not have the capacity for spiral power, because they are cloned.Because they don't have this capacity for intergenerational improvement. And they also say this explicitly in the show as the main character saying, those who are dead are dead. If we bring them back to life, they will just get in the way of the next generation. And you really, like, like, all of this is just so irreverently our philosophy on, on, on sort of life and the power of [00:07:00] humanity.But I want to highlight that, that I will say something like the goal of humanity is iterative intergenerational improvement and people hear this concept and it can seem so, I don't know, sort of hollow or tinny or like, how could that be this big explosive aspect? How could that be something of true good in the universe?Right? And Gurren Lagann through art. And, and through low art, which I love, and this is something you constantly see throughout, you know, if you're, if you're reading Bible or anything like that, is that in, in, in the world of the divine, the low is made high and the high is made low.God chose things. The world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before him.Malcolm Collins: If you are looking for truth, you are going to find it in the things that cannot also be used to signal [00:08:00] social statusyou should not dismiss. Forms of art, just because they're reverberant, just because our society denigrates, you know, goofy anime, they sometimes can convey concepts which are difficult for me to convey, you know, in, in, in the spoken word. But before we go further on this, this concept of spiral energy, as it's captured in the show Gurren Lagann, one thing I really wanted to talk to you about is I also think another thing the show does supremely excellently well.Is capture healthy relationships and capture, I think, the meaning of, of a life well lived. And just, just more, more, like, succinctly than I could. And in a way that I think helps people understand how you can live more meaningfully forever through the impact you have on the people around you. Hmm. Then through just living forever, which is a constant reoccurring theme in the, in the shows made by this team, which is also a [00:09:00] reoccurring story in Frank's.But I wanted to talk to you about the various relationships you saw on the show, like the relationship between this one character who is just boundless optimism, but kind of a lug head and, and, and just ambition incarnate. And this other character, Simone, who's like his little brother sort of character, I had sort of seen them as almost the perfect Example of what masculinity should be.Communa, the way that a man should treat his wife or the relationship you should have with, with like a perfect wife is the relationship he has with a young male friend of his Simone. But I want you to talk a bit about it when you, when you saw and listen to analysis.Simone Collins: What I really, really love about it is, and you pointed this out too, when we talk about the show, is it's so unusual to find a character who instead of being like the hero Oh, by the way, there's going to be spoilers and what I'm about to say.So stop if you want to get the spoilers. So a hero that doesn't. just lead by being awesome. But who is [00:10:00] primarily impactful by inspiring other people, which is so what leadership is about. And yet you don't, I really can't think of other leaders like that. So it's amazing to me that Kamina, who really seems like the driving force of the entire show, like the number one main person does not survive through the entire show.And then. Lives on through his impact in a very visual way. So in the past, like, there are shows like Game of Thrones, where like, obvious heroes, you know, die all the time. But they don't, they don't really have that much of an impact, and their characters don't really live beyond them, which is interesting.Whereas The impact of Kamina is so strong on the other characters that like literally as the other characters become more powerful or grow they will adopt like physical aspects of Kamina, which I think is really interesting. Like Shimon, Kamina's younger friend and sort of who the person who was most inspired by him.Like after he gets to a certain level, like starts to adopt. [00:11:00] a version of kind of like I guess the visor or sunglasses that KaminaAgain Hey, when the hell did you get taller than me? Wow, you're right!Gottago. It's time. Yeah, this time though, it's really goodbye. Get going, blood brother. This isn't goodbye. You're always here. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it really I mean, it, it, it shows through narrative through lines that Kamina didn't like he's dead, but he's still impacting everything that's happening throughout the rest of the show to an extent where it never really feels like he's not the main character.Yeah, heSimone Collins: like remains the main character, despite not being there. It's so true. It'sMalcolm Collins: so true. There's been a lot of analysis done on the show and contrasting it with Evangelion. And. The Evangelion starts with a character very similar to Simone, [00:12:00] but who sort of descends into, you know, sort of self indulgent depression because he didn't have a character like Kamina, who, you know, the line that he always says at first is, if you can't, basically, if you can't believe in yourself, believe in the you that I believe in.Just do it Goon I know you can do it, buddy But I don't listen Simone. Don't believe in yourself Huh believe in me believe in the Kamina who believes in you. What's that mean?Right, I'll try.Malcolm Collins: So often in shows with the masculine character does is they demonstrate their masculinity through their own heroic acts through, through, you know, Sort of leading the people around them, but mostly just their own acts of heroism and strength and everything like that. Whereas with Kamina, every one of his major heroic acts was about [00:13:00] pushing somebody who didn't believe in themselves to have more faith in themselves and to do something that they didn't know they could do.And when people like when they're making fun of me, like the manosphere and stuff like that, and they're like, these are the ways you live short of someone like Andrew Tate, I'm like, that doesn't hurt me. I don't I have no aspiration to be that type of a man or that type of masculinity. But like, if somebody was like, you live short of the example that Kamina shows.As to what it is to be a, a, a, a masculine male. That would actually hurt me. And, and something that's really important in the Kamina character is he always believes that he's gonna do these great things in the world to the point where he doesn't actually have. Like, he's basically just a lone person saying he has this team that's gonna change the world.But really all the team is, until the episode right before he dies, is just him and Simone. That's it. It's just this one person who believes in him, and occasionally, like, people around him [00:14:00] who are aligned with him in their in the moment goals. But other than that, it's just this boundless optimism, where it sort of creates a distortion field, where you as the listener can forget that, no, this is really just two people.One who believes in the other one, and the other one who's constantly talking about how he's gonna change the world, but who is never demeaning of Simone. To Kamina, Simone was always the senior partner in capability. And this is another thing that's shown throughout the show. And it's, it's, it's really important to me in this show.That's about inter iterative sort of human improvement and, and the, the growth that comes from that. It says, yes, you need ambition. Yes, you need this giant vision, but you also need what Simone has from the beginning, which is. Simple, diligent work, and this is a constant motif. The drill is the motif used for spiral energy throughout [00:15:00] the show and spiral energy is the energy contained within the double helix of the DNA evolution, but also the spiral of the galaxy, you know, a galactic evolution evolutionary on a galactic timescale and the simple drill getting bigger with every turn like a radio like exponentially bigger with every turn of the drill represents that, but it also represents simple, diligent labor.Simone from the very beginning was in his village. Yes, he was made fun of. Yes, he was smaller than everyone else. Yes, he was this sort of The pipsqueak of a character, but he was always the best driller. He was always the best at simple diligence. As they move to different iterations of the cycle, you know, as they get a mecha, he now has a spiral key to turn on the mecha.As he, like a little drill, when he is signing bills and everything like that, the front of his pin is a small drill, a small little spiral, showing that the work of governance, like, that actually allows all of this to happen is The partnering of people was astounding ambition, which people who have astounding [00:16:00] diligence and work ethic and the people who have this astounding ambition realizing that the senior partner in terms of who's bringing what to the partnership.Is the individual with the diligence is the individual with the meticulousness is the individual with the work ethic. It's not the ambition or the masculinity or anything like that. It is simple diligence that allows for this unimaginable expansion of human potential.Don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don'tMalcolm Collins: but I also want to talk about why this show is so rare.Because when you look at how this show frames good, like it frames good is this concept that we call sort of spiral energy, right? And it frames bad as anti spiral energy. Bad are the things that limit humanity's potentiality, and good is the expansion of human potentiality. When I look at the way good is framed in things like Hollywood, They are espousing these ideas of the urban monoculture because it is so [00:17:00] drenched in Hollywood.We're good as just sort of general utilitarianism or the maintenance of the status quo. You know, I, I, I'd often say that my favorite villain song of a Disney movie is Akuna Matata. Which is the most anti spiral song. No, no,Simone Collins: no. Your favorite song from a Disney movie is Be Prepared.Malcolm Collins: No, no, Hakuna Matata is the villain songSimone Collins: from that.No, it's Be Prepared. Hakuna Matata is the song that Timon and Pumbaa sing to.Malcolm Collins: Exactly, that was the point, and that was the joke. Oh god, okay, I'm sorry. I thought youSimone Collins: meant a villain to you. Yes,Malcolm Collins: Well, I think a villain to the show, if you look at what the consequence that happened because of the lifestyle that they lured him into, a lifestyle of selfish indulgence, his kingdom fell apart, all of the animals suffered and died horrible deaths.Oh, and it's reallySimone Collins: funny too like a, a, a, well, almost vegetarian, you know, insect eating, which is kind of what a lot of [00:18:00] people are fighting for these days. Yeah. They become literal bug men forMalcolm Collins: the rest of their days, the shirking of his responsibility to his people. And one of the lines that you picked up that you love from one of the video essays on Gurren Lagann, do you want to go over this?Simone Collins: Well, no, yeah, yeah, the best analysis I heard was that in Evangelion, they struggle to live, whereas in Gurren Lagann, they live to struggle, and that so resonates, like, you miss the point. If you are just obsessed with your struggling and just trying to get by and you totally nail it if you are fighting for the right to be challenged, the right to be pushed to your limits because that's how you know you're really living a life.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and we're going to talk about this in sort of future. Tracks, but this is such an important concept in terms of framing reality, and it's why I think in so many aspects of our society today, one of the things that we'll talk about is, I see some religious systems is really sort [00:19:00] of religious systems that are.anti spiral energy personified, you know, fighting for these ideas of like harmony and balance and oneness and, and then other religions, which are focused on the uplifting of man, this, this constant state of improvement. And the anti natalist movement, you know, you couldn't have more of a, You know, anti spiral mindset personified on the world.This idea of struggle is bad. We need to live to in struggle instead of seeing struggle as the reason for living in Gurren Lagann when they're looking at the challenges ahead of them. They get excited about them. The challenges are what give life its purpose. And in every scene, whatever they've just achieved, they are now going for something that's as insane and big and astounding next, you know, that you would, you would never expect, you know, even at the, the end of the movie, they defeated the other.Like, at a [00:20:00] universal scale, and, and, and what are they doing, they're now sending ships out to space to meet other planets and help other species, you know, achieve their potential. And this, this boundless optimism. Isn't because we don't know that struggle exists. It isn't because we don't know how hard life is for people.It's because we're excited at the challenge to overcome that both at the level of individuals And at the level of a species and that gets me really excited when I begin to take on this framing and it's also I I mean one of the reasons why I really want to bring in This idea of Gurren Lagann, even within a religious context for us, is because it's an idea that came out of Eastern thought, and yet the anti spiral sort of mimetic forces that it personifies are such a major part of so many Eastern religious systems.So, Being that we think that these systems are not good for humanity I, I, I [00:21:00] want to use an Eastern thought to, to, to show it's not like an anti Eastern thing. Another thing I wanted to talk about here that I think is really interesting is, the way that Gurren Lagann relates to religion.So there is a religious community in Gurren Lagann that's, that's used when they've in one, the, the village where only 50 people are allowed to live and more than 50 people. And you learn at the end, the line is, is the, the dad gives to his son, the dad who created the religion as a preacher and has the book the, their religious text.And the son says, you know, I've always heard from you that I didn't. know how to read. And I'm sorry about that. And the dad goes, it's okay. I don't either. It was the idea of being that he just made it all up to control people. And you later learn, you know, that it was a joke. Their entire book was a joke.They, it was, it was just a practical joke that somebody had made and they. Then started teaching it as a religion, which is the way Gurren Lagann sees these types of religions and religions that are used to control and limit people. And this is [00:22:00] something that Kamina constantly is pointing out when he is in this cave with the, he, he just has no ability to control himself.Just whenever he sees somebody oppressing somebody else, he just immediately calls them out on it. You know, because they are eating like kings in this community, right? Like, they are, this community sees them as like gods. They are getting everything they could ever, from the community, everything they could ever want.But to him, it feels like so little. And he doesn't understand why they can't just think bigger. And I'd point out, he's not a particularly smart person. He just thinks bigger. The ideas that no one had ever thought of before. We're fighting these giant mecha things. Have you ever tried to get in one of them?You know, we're, we're, we're, there's a surface there. Have you ever tried to go past it?We'll never know unless we try, will we? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH You see that? What do you think, Fuzzball? We're the same as you!They were ableto combine, you were right bro, you were [00:23:00] right! Sure looks that way, doesn't it? Wait, how could youSimone Collins: and you see, this is why I like this show so much. It's coming to remind me so much of you. Where like, you for some reason don't Choose to just build on the way that everyone else thinks and just like ask ridiculous questions and try things.And sometimes it doesn't work out, but it also creates things possible that I never thought were possible. And I wish there were more of that. Like, I wish more people. Here's the problem is here's a theme that I've noticed in the analysis of Gurren Lagann that I think means that a lot of people are missing the point of the show, a point that you did not miss which is there.Watching it. And they're like, yeah, man, like, believe in, believe in the you that I believe in, you know, that coming online, you know, just like, and, you know, think about that, you know, think about the fact that, you know, someone might believe in a better version of you that you can be like, everyone takes the, the point of view of Shimon instead of the [00:24:00] point of view that they could be like coming at, that they could inspire people that they could think incredibly differently and outlandishly.And while I, I mean, I seeing myself very much as a Shimon which is also totally how they pronounce my name in Japan. It's I love it too. You just say Simone instead of his name. We also need Kamina's and we're way shorter on Kamina's than we are on Shimon's. So there's,Malcolm Collins: there's two things I want to elaborate on on this point.One is. If we ever do create some like meaningful thing, you know, if, if my little team GER had ever become something meaningful I want the statues of me done in the style of Kamina. The statue is pointing to the heaven. I I've always loved that statue and what it embodies this idea of, and I'll put it on screen of just always looking upwards in, in sort of the manifest destiny of humanity being the stars.But I'd also say that there's another character that's really important in this is that after Kamina dies. There is a girl character who then becomes Simone's [00:25:00] wife and she plays the same role Kamina does for him in this boundless belief in his goodness and abilities and not willing to let herself be constrained by the world that's around them.But she does it in a completely feminine way. And so I love that the show models how you can support your partner with insane ideas as both a masculine and Feminine role.Simone Collins: That's cool. Yeah. Cause normally that's just framed as super masculine, not to say that women can't take on masculine roles, but I think a lot of women are more comfortable taking a feminine spin on things, even if they really want to be outlandish and crazy and the most powerful and influential person in a relationship.That's cool. AndMalcolm Collins: the show constantly repeats ideas that we're talking about. Likemy drill is the drill that creates the heavens! MyMalcolm Collins: There's lots of ways they could have worded that. And I'll include some, some clips from like the end fight scene here,Do not grieve for me, daughter. [00:26:00] My soul once drowned in a sea of despair and weariness, but has reawakened. If this body can create a tomorrow for all Spiral Life, I will gladly give it. Yes,Malcolm Collins: which is just a fantastic clip that really shows, I think most of the way we think about spiral energy and the way that we think about death,Impossible! He allowed himself to undergo quantum breakdown so he could become one with the energy?! Where are you drawing all of this power from?! We evolve, beyond the person we were a minute before! Little by little, we advance a bit further with each turn! That's how a drill works! Mark my words, this drill will open a hole in the universe. And that hole will be a path for those behind us. The dreams of those who have fallen, [00:27:00] the hopes of those who have risen. of those who will follow. Those two sets of dreams, weaved together into a double helix, drilling a path towards tomorrow!Malcolm Collins: but ISimone Collins: don't get it.I mean, it's, it is the most ridiculous fight scene of. Probably all time because it'sMalcolm Collins: just, but also like what I like about it is, is I think that when I talk about this expansion of human potentiality that it could eventually become something like a God one day, like it depicts it so well because it shows that it enters a realm human potentiality where it just doesn't make sense anymore.It's so cosmic in scale,Giga! Drill!Break! [00:28:00]Huuhh! Heey! Gah! Oah! Deh!Of course we will. Humanity isn't that stupid.Malcolm Collins: and there's going to be people who are afraid of that, who want to limit it, who at every stage are like, Oh, gosh, you know, now everything has changed, whether it's AI or something like that.You sit here closed off, locking away other lifeforms like some kind of key! [00:29:00] That's nobody's limitation, but your own!Malcolm Collins: And then there's the people who embody human potentiality and just strap themselves to the mask and sail into the storm and are laughing all the way.And then there's people who shirk from it. You know, they're like, well, now things have changed. Now we need to reassess. Now we need to go back. And a final thing I really want to elevate about this that I really like, and I hope that I'm able to convey and keep if we're ever creating a philosophical movement or something like that is this idea.of irreverence combined with ambition and logic. So often when people look at the ultra logical perspectives on things, they are very stuffy, they are very Vulcan like, you know what I mean? Or when they look at ambition, it's seen as very cutthroat and sort of slimy and greed filled. And yet, I think that the way that you subvert that meaningfully, and this is something we're always trying to do on our show, is the elevation [00:30:00] Of low culture to do this all so unpretentiously and so audaciously it comes off as a little goofy, but it provides people with that little bit of belief in themselves that they might be missing in their daily lives and the knowledge to know that, you know, it's okay to sort of goof a bit, you know, in, in, in the pursuit of these bigger goals.Simone Collins: Well, here's what I think is, is needs elaboration on that too, is that a lot of the people who created Gurren Lagann are the same people who created Evangelion, which is notable just when you think about how different the anime series are, you know, like Evangelion is sort of the, the epitome of anti spiral and sort of anti natalism and negative utilitarianism.And it's like a show about depression and it's, it's just. But it's extremely logical and I think a lot of people kind of s**t on Gurren Lagann because They're like, oh, it's this is dumb but like Evangelion is so [00:31:00] smart and it's even in like how the show is done Evangelion will like go into the details of Like how is this energy energy energy generated or how?like here's the bureaucracy of the system and so it's more like a hard science fiction version of Like, you know this this system but then I think they it's It's people miss the point in thinking like, Oh, smart has to be performative intelligence. And I think it's also really telling that like the same people who first did Evangelion then go on to do Gurren Lagann.It's not in the other order. It's like kind of, as people became more wise in life and kind of learned from their mistakes and learned from their life, they turn more to a vision of. Maybe outlandish stupidity. Maybe likeMalcolm Collins: actual intelligence, actual intelligence doesn't need toSimone Collins: front. Well, it doesn't, yeah.Actual intelligence doesn't need to look intelligent. It doesn't need to try. Yeah. A finalMalcolm Collins: point I wanted to elevate was one of the lines in it, which is that when you were [00:32:00] approaching reality was this sort of spiral thinking, you know, so many people, they look at me and they go, do you know the odds of what you're doing?Like, do you know how insane what you're doing is? And, and the line is in the show that somebody goes, there's a 1 percent chance of this succeeding. And it goes. A 1% chance is the same as certainty . Okay. But when you're approaching things like this, when you, when the alternative is death, when the alternative is losing 1% is the same as certainty and just approach it as if it's certain, approach it with everything you have and, and approach life that way.TheSimone Collins: only version of you in the future, like the only version that survives to that point is of that 1%. So, of course.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Every single challenge that comes your way as a gift and something to be excited about. And when you have this frameshift, this Lagann is all about literally beating into people, that's a constant motif of, of, of hitting them when they're getting sort of mopey or like, Oh, there's so much suffering in the world.Oh, I've done such a [00:33:00] bad thing. You know, punch them in the face and be like, suck it up.Simone Collins: Which is so different from Evangelion. Also, because there's so many similarities between the male protagonists of each show. You know, they're both young underdog men who lost one or both parents, you know, who then were sort of shoved into a world saving scenario, right?But, like, the framing, the attitude of each, you know, the live to struggle versus struggle to each The live to struggle versus struggle to live attitude of these two different universes also shows up in all these different ways, like even in sexuality. Sexuality in Evangelion is like a traumatic thing.It is deeply traumatic. There's shame and trauma and unhappiness and discomfort. Whereas sexuality, it's not really like explored that much in Gurren Lagann, aside from like heavy fan service, which is studio trigger. What are you gonna do? But like, people are obviously very comfortable with their bodies.People are very open about their [00:34:00] sexuality. Like you alluded to a gay character, for example, who's like super comfortable with his sexuality. And it, you know, they're, they're dressed like their postures. It's also different. It sort of shows, I think also when you don't. live to sort of hyper focus on your suffering and on how hard everything is and how scary everything is.You know, this all things in life sort of switch from being traumatic to being fairly natural which is fun. And I, I like that element of it and I don't think enough people. Talk about it likeMalcolm Collins: you have, I mean, we won't go as deep on the, the anti spiral ideas here, but they, they are important the way that they pervade so many religious and philosophical systems.One of my favorite from you was you were talking about Siddhartha Gautama in one of our morning talks. And the life that he lives. This is the guy who became the Buddha before he left this life of privilege to realize suffering existed in the world. And you pointed out to me that through the iterative improvement of man, [00:35:00] the average American today probably lives a better life with less real, like externally imposed suffering, other than the internal stuff that they create for themselves that Siddhartha Gautama did before leaving his.Posh, perfect existence.Simone Collins: Yeah, where theoretically he couldn't even fathom what suffering was like. And now everyone's like, The suffering I live with. No, no, no, sorry. Siddhartha, in your, in your environment, in an environment way worse than yours actually. Couldn't even fathom what suffering was, but like, how spoiled are we?Malcolm Collins: But I love this idea of, of, of, of going out there. And when you see problems with reality, when you see problems with the world, you know, anti spiral energy. Is about submission and being subsumed by reality by the ultimate reality that surrounds all of us by joining it through a level of harmony. This is what most anti spiral religious thought focuses on and and spiral energy is about basically grabbing reality by the throat [00:36:00] and making it submit to your will.Do you, is it a philosophy based on submission to reality or forcing reality to submit to you? And people could say that like, that's not the real world. We don't live in the world of physics that Gurren Lagann takes place in and I'd push back at it. I'd say it is the real world. They condense the time span, but if you look at this expansion we've seen in human potentiality in 10, 000 years, we've gone from the very first.collection of humans living together in a city to thinking machines. Like it is insane. We, 200 years ago, we're coming up with light bulbs, electricity for the first time. The expansion of human potentiality is something that drives awe deep within me. And I am Like, for us, this show is like, for our kids, it's gonna be like, Bible cartoons, you know?Part of our canon, for sure.[00:37:00] Something we'll talk more to in the future. But I think that this also shows is a lot of these theological ideas that we're talking about.People who like, oh, you're starting a cult, but not really. I mean, these are ideas that have been circling in the mainstream in media for a while. No, we're just condensing them and then pairing them with things like holidays and stuff like that to give our kids a cohesive vision with this theology, but we're hardly the inventors of it.Malcolm Collins: You know, it's very canonical to us, like, in a religious context, because I just think it gets these concepts around artistically so much better than a person could, and with the attitude I want them conveyed with, because I, I, I've always hated within religious systems and stuff like that, or within philosophical systems where the leaders adopt these stuffy attitudes.And that scene is the way to show your status is in penetrability and stuffiness, and thinking you're better than other people, sort of in the way that you talk, like you might try up, oh, beingSimone Collins: also like [00:38:00] invulnerable, like never making. Stake. Whereas Communa will like be like, I'm gonna attack this giant robot with aMalcolm Collins: sword with a gun.And they're like, you know how to use it, right? And he's like, yeah, I know how to use it. Then you see him smashing it with the gun . He had no idea how to use it. But it's, it's, it's this goofy, like if we were to ever create a philosophy around these ideas that persisted intergenerationally, I wanted to maintain within the leadership cast, not this, oh, you know, young man.Like, come learn from me. But what a sign status is deep knowledge, but not allowing that knowledge to create this sheer of invulnerability around you or invulnerability around your ideas and to still have the capacity to be sort of goofy and how outlandish and big your ideas are. And I always want to keep that myself, you know, and people look at it and they're like, Malcolm, it makes you look stupid or silly.And it's like, that's. Kind of the point,Simone Collins: you know, like no [00:39:00] successes is built atop a mountain of failures and those who are too afraid to look dumb or stupid or sheepish sometimes are not going to build success. I mean, there are those rare people who just happened to be the lucky ones who like took one big bet or one big risk and seemed to have made it or somehow managed to hide all of their previous failures, but those people.are very rare. Extremely rare. And I think many of the most successful people that we know of today have made many dumb mistakes. Some are more open about them than others. But it's, it's so important to have that built into a culture and so much of our culture now, even with like emotional stuff, like Gen Y and Z are just dripping with irony.And I think that's because Even with the tiniest, like sharing your opinion about something or showing passionate about something, they don't even want that to come back on them as, as like an embarrassing mistake. And so they just drench everything in irony because then it's like, [00:40:00] Oh, well, I was, I was just kidding.I was just, you know, making fun of it. I wasn't serious about it. Like they're too, they're even afraid. To stand behind their own opinions and sentiments, you know, and I respect that those things change and you might like stand behind something that you don't stand behind in the future, but like, man.Malcolm Collins: But to, to constantly, I, I, I couldn't have worded it better to be able to be this goofy guy who's, who's screwing up, but just has endless belief in the people around him.And that's what's really important. It's not a belief in himself. It's a belief in the people that he is inspiring. And I, and I think that like, when we talked about like, well, how do you keep a group from going bad intergenerationally? How do you prevent this sort of elite philosopher cast of sophists from sort of keeping other people out?It's that you ensure that those people in those sorts of attitudes aren't the attitudes that are socially elevated. That the attitudes that are socially elevated are showing efficacy, showing competence, showing deep [00:41:00] knowledge, but using all of that to lift up the people around you, while not being afraid of And, and not being afraid to have ideas that are so big, they're a little silly and, and that, you know, when you say to them that everyone's gonna laugh, like all of these people, and that's the thing, it starts with everyone laughing at you, as it basically does with Kamina, right?You have these big ideas and everybody laughs at you, and then they This seems to make a little bit of sense. And the people who aren't laughing at him, they seem to have a good life. They seem to be happy with the world right now. You know, they, they seem to have purpose. And then as time goes on, a few less people in the crowd are laughing and a few more are standing besides you.And it just goes on. And as long as you don't. Let that, and this is another important thing, is just because somebody laughed at you once, and this is a constant theme throughout the show as well, just because somebody sided with the anti spirals once, as, as King Genome, the, the, the, you know, again, going [00:42:00] back to this idea of DNA, which are the themes throughout the show was basically carrying out the will of the anti spirals, and he becomes one of their best allies, you know, Vero, one of their best allies, who was on the other side.When somebody's like, I made a mistake, and now I want to try to do better and work with you guys, they should be elevated, Even above people who were say, born into a movement like this, because they've undergone personal growth, which is what this is all about.This idea of iterative and constant personal growth and, and fully accepting that in other people.Simone Collins: Yeah, I totally agree. And I guess I'll have to stop with saying this. You don't have to be an anime fan to get a lot out of Gurren Lagann. It's great. You can just watch summaries and analysis of it.And you know, even for me, I can't really watch studio trigger shows cause there's a lot of action sequences. And for me, My brain turns off when, like, I would literally rather watch someone paint a wall. I would probably find that more, like, interesting. So, but, like, just watch the, [00:43:00] watch some analysis of it.Watch some comparisons with Evangelion. Like, you'll still get a lot out of this show and learn a lot from it, even without watching it. So I just want to say that for people who are like, Oh, I'm not an anime person. Or like, I can't really handle Studio Trigger, like me. Even though I think the animation's amazing, and obviously it's, it's awesome, and they're, they're amazing people.ItMalcolm Collins: was made before Studio Trigger. It was made by Studio Gainax, which then, the team that made Grimlogon built Studio Trigger. Come on, though. Like, It's basically StudioSimone Collins: Trigger, but yes, okay. If you can't handle Studio Trigger, you're not going to be able to handle Grimlogon. It's all there. It's all there.The ridiculous, outlandish lack of physics and everything else. I love it, but I, I can't watch it.Malcolm Collins: And it's about embodying concepts.Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah. 100%. Yeah, like, there's not even consistency between, like, the, the height of some characters in Gurren Lagann, or like, the, the way that running is animated, or all sorts of things, and that's because it really, that's what matters is the concept.It's not some, like, weird, like, well, we have to, you know, follow the rulebook and all this. It's like the anti bureaucracy show, and I love it [00:44:00] so much. I love all of that. My other note, though, and Malcolm Take this seriously. You are obviously the Kamina in our relationship. You are not allowed to die.I know, but IMalcolm Collins: see this show and it gets me, look, I, I think one of the interesting things about the show is it gets you excited about dying after a life well lived. I'm not saying I want to, but what I'm saying is, is that so many people. They know within our theological system, we don't particularly believe in an afterlife in the way that many other systems do.And because of that, they're like, what's the point of all of this? And I think the show beautifully summarizes this,Mark my words, this drill will open a hole in the universe. And that hole will be a path for those behind us. The dreams of those who have fallen, the hopes of those who have risen. of those who will follow. Those two sets of dreams, weaved together into a double helix, drilling a path towards tomorrow!Malcolm Collins: because the clip I'll play about the, the [00:45:00] memories and hopes and dreams of people in the past and the people in the future, sort of blend together into this block chain of human identity.Um, And Well, that's whySimone Collins: we like this Civ. Theme songs to so yeah,Malcolm Collins: but you live forever in terms of how much you contribute to this blockchain of human identity, right? And and you do that through inspiring other people not Like creating a system and then having them follow it rigidly, but by providing a framework for how they can build on themselves.And that's everything that I'm trying to do with my life. Is it'sSimone Collins: very vector based versus pixel based. I love that you scale infinitely. ButMalcolm Collins: that's what it's about, you know, and I, I want to do that for other people. I want, and I, and I want a community where status is based partially in terms of how much somebody can do this.Like I even look at the people within our community already. Like, rae Kahan, where he really embodies this energy for me, this [00:46:00] sort of like, he is well known as like the most respected individual in terms of intelligence in our field.And yet he's just such a goof, you know? And he's always trying to uplift younger people and help them be better and help them do great things. And I,Simone Collins: And he's not afraid to be honest about what he's doing or working on, or like. Even if he's not sure about something, he'll tell people about it. Like, he'll tell people where he's at.Yeah, he, there's both this combination of vulnerability, but also like, he's so there for younger people in his field. It never really changed for his ideas. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But so there, you were saying.Simone Collins: He's, he's super there for, for people in his field, like more junior people who are trying to get help.Like we've heard from so many people about things that Reziv has done for them to help them out with like nothing in return. Like he's getting nothing out ofMalcolm Collins: this. And he's What I want to say is I think that that's what should edify his status was in the field. This, this constant uplifting and, and, and selfless uplifting of other people, but also just saying what he.No matter how much it [00:47:00] causes blowback on him and stuff like that, you know, to constantly uplift what you think is true as, as a sign of, of personal status within the community, but also the uplifting. And I just got to go back to this concept as a final closing here of simple diligence. It's not really about ambition.It's not really about hopeless optimism. Those things are important, but simple diligence at the end of the day, it is the key to spiral energy. And when I met you and your sign, your slogan was repeated blunt force. There is no better sign of what's represented by the simple diligence of the drill or the simple diligence of Simone in the show.Because there's also nothing more humbling than, than repeated blunt force and simple diligence of, of basic. You know, within the show, manual labor or the labor of meticulous bureaucracy and uplifting that to something that is beneath those with endless ambition and endless optimism and authority [00:48:00] within the community and having those individuals respect that above all things, not.Respect people just because they're lower in in status in society, but respect them for their industry I I really want to do that and elevate you as an individual and as a husband In the way that Kamina elevates Simone onSimone Collins: the show well and our kids and anyone else who? You know you interact with that's the goal.But yeah, I love you And you're not allowed to die.Malcolm Collins: All right. So I won't, I won't, I'll, I'll keep it going. And, and I will just take this as symbolic of the way I'm supposed to affect the next generation. I mean, yeah, we'll both die. Eventually our generation, I leave. Yeah. You just as the show said, well, hold on. I want to, I want to read that quote about death again, because I absolutely love it.Those who are dead are dead. If we bring them back to life, they will just get in the way of the next generation.Simone Collins: There you have it. Gorgeous. I love you.Malcolm Collins: I love you, too.Simone Collins: So I came back [00:49:00] just now from my ultrasound appointment. And at 32 weeks, not only does baby Indy have a little tuft of hair, which is wonderful. So she's going to be like Titan. But also she's in the 82nd percentile for size. She's already five and a half pounds. So she is going to be a porker. You just keepMalcolm Collins: making them bigger everySimone Collins: time.Now they think she's gonna come out nine pounds. Assuming I'd deliver at 39 weeks and I'm like, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Well, I am excited to hear that. And I am excited that we will have a celebratory dinner tonight. Oh, I'm so excited. Indian. Everybody knows we love Indian, but 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

We analyze a viral Julie Nolke comedy sketch in which a time traveler from the future begs a woman in the present to have more children to save civilization. We discuss how it nails both the pronatalist talking points around demographic collapse and societal hostility towards breeding, while also skewering the selfishness of modern life. Other topics include the misperception that kids ruin careers and happiness, the injustice of how vital parental work goes unrewarded, and the bleak hedonic treadmill of reality TV that people trade real meaning for.[00:00:00] I am calling from the year 2453, and I am begging you to help us. Oh, s**t. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Our civilization is crumbling due to our dwindling population. Yes. What can I do to help? You must have children. Oh. Um. Okay. . Uh. It's just that it's not a very good time for me. This is of the utmost importance. It is life or death. Yes. Okay. Okay. I'm just kind of in a really good place with my career. Um, but I don't think I could do both my career and, and save the species.Then the choice is obvious. Totally. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So I worked with a lot of early hominid skulls and things that you would see frequently. It was like the bones sort of bubbled off from like funguses and it ate somebody's face off while they were alive.And like, this is a fungus. It would be trivial to kill today with antifungal. In historic context, nothing you could do. just bubble your face off, but you kept trugging because you were doing it to make your [00:01:00] children's life better. And we were going through this intergenerational cycle of martyrdom.This generation finally was like, okay, I'm sort of cashing in. I'm not going to pay it forward. You know, with every instance of paying it forward, things got easier. I'm just not going to do it because I deserve whatever I want whenever I feel like it.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Oh, gosh. Anyway, Simone, I am so happy to be here with you today. This morning A friend on Facebook actually posted this and then I, I checked it out and we learned that there was a longer form version of the video on YouTube, but it was a video both making fun of and sympathizing with the pronatalist movement.And it is probably one of the best pieces. Of especially non explicitly right leaning pronatalist comedy I've ever seen and, and it even seems a little like urban monocultury left leaning in its complaints and perspectives on pronatalism. Yeah, thisSimone Collins: is a thoroughly left leaning complaint. Left leaning people are aware of demographic collapse [00:02:00] as anMalcolm Collins: issue.Well, that's an interesting thing is that this is a changing thing that's happening in our society. Yeah. And what we wanted to do is to begin to analyze this, like as various groups wake up to the cause of demographic collapse, or at least the severity of the cause, how are they reacting to it? And what does this portell for the future of once the urban monoculture comes to accept that everybody who complains about fertility collapse, is it like, Some reaving, psychotic, racist.Simone Collins: And hold on. We have to just applaud that you coined a new word, which is a port manto of portend in Tel Portel. I like it. Port.Malcolm Collins: Ohyeah.Simone Collins: That's great. Portel , you're no, you're no hy, but ,Malcolm Collins: yes. I, we have a little bit of organize disorganized schizophrenia the way I, I talk. But anyway, so we are going to, if people can check out our, our schizophrenia.Pretty good spectrum video if that's come out before this one but we have never done like a watching a video [00:03:00] analysis before and we don't really know how to do it with like our faces on the screen. So what we're going to do is I'm going to play segments of the video that you and I will watch together and then I'll cut out the segments of this and put the video in and then it'll come back to us talking about the segment we just watched.Hello? Anyone? Uh, can you hear me? Hello? Whoa. Hi. Oh, thank God. I am calling from the year 2453, and I've used my last time leap to make this call, but I don't have long. A few moments have passed. Oh my God, you're from the future. Yes. And I am begging you to help us. Oh, s**t. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Our civilization is crumbling due to our dwindling population.We can no longer sustain ourselves. We are going extinct. Oh my god. You must save us. Okay. Yeah. Yes. What can I do to help? You must have children. Oh. Um. Okay. Tell all your friends. Every fertile woman you know. They must have children. Uh. [00:04:00] Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Uh. Is there anything else I can do? No. I have ran countless models that all point to this exact moment where we could undo our downfall.Okay. Uh. It's just that it's not a very good time for me.Malcolm Collins: I love the way they're starting this because it feels very much like us. Like, we are these panicked people who have taken the time to run the numbers. As I always say. Having worked on this issue in South Korea to start like that's when I started caring about this when I was there and coming to the U.S. It really did feel like traveling back in time to a country that was further along in the collapse, knowing all the stupid s**t they would try, like handing out money and stuff like that, that it wouldn't work the blocking immigration that it would exacerbate the problem that there is no natural floor coming back to the U.S. And Getting a chance to try. So I very much feel like this, this woman from the future who is going out there and trying to proselytize this call. So, so I think they, they [00:05:00] captured that very well. But they also, I think, capture the standard urban monoculture initial response, which is they're used to this idea of, like, calls from somebody in the future saying, if you do this now, You know, the future will be a better place, but these things are always token.It's like, don't use straws or something like that. Like they're, they're not things that involve it's recycling. They're not things that involve real genuine sacrifice, like having kids. And there's a reaction of like, Oh, you, you mean you want me to like actually do something. The other thing that she did that I thought was really clever in this is not just say that she specifically needs to go out and have kids.She understands that. The people who actually care about this problem need to spread the word about it, right? And she framed spreading the word in a way that I think is really aligned with what it's actually like to be out there spreading the word. Which is, you sound [00:06:00] insane. Like, go out there and tell all the fertile women you know they have to start getting pregnant.And it's like, yeah, that's what we have to do. But like, it sounds insane.Simone Collins: And Or we end up sounding like religiously conservative mother in laws, mothers in law, and mothers. Just being like, well, when you're gonna have kids, you should have kids. We're the grandkids. Either way you look bad. All right, all right.This is of the utmost importance. It is life or death. Yes. Okay. Okay. I'm just kind of in a really good place with my career. Well, surely you could momentarily put it on hold to save your species. I could. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I could. I could. Um, but I don't think I could do both my career and, and save the species.Then the choice is obvious. Totally. Yeah.. I, I definitely am, obviously this is where I step in and I'm like, This is such a disgusting farce. As if, through, for the vast majority of human civilization, or even humanity, [00:07:00] Women have stopped working to have kids. That, that is such a joke and I'm sure it's created by the concept of the, the nuclear family housewife who stayed at home to be a mother and homekeeper.Simone Collins: As, as another, like, as their, her husband went to work, I think that maybe gave women the impression that like, well, then of course one doesn't work. Are you eating the kid's crackers?Malcolm Collins: There's just a saying, when you're a parent, you get little snacks allSimone Collins: over the house. That you have to, that like, it's a, an either or thing before that for the vast majority of human history.Women worked and women had kids and that's how it worked. And I get that there are many jobs where currently based on current policies, it's, it is impossible. Like if you are a nurse you cannot bring your baby to the hospital with you and care for patients. Now, what I do think hospitals should have in, in, in any pretty much workplace that demands you to be there, it would make a big difference.If they were in house childhood or sorry, if, if they were in house childcare then I get that. [00:08:00] Like there, there are some professions where this is just not an option. But a huge and growing number of professions do allow for you to keep going with your career. AndMalcolm Collins: it's important that they have been, there's been this misunderstanding in society that like the all this young interaction you have with your kids, all these days you spend with your kids, they really matter when they really don't.The vast majority of what matters is the kids genes. To be honest,Simone Collins: like your parents and your parents had a lot of child care support, for example,Malcolm Collins: well, and then after that, after, after jeans, it's like a base stable environment and not being abused, like, and then after that, like, all of the others have parents do is like 10 percent now,Simone Collins: but also like, I would argue that one of the most important roles that a parent plays in a kid's life is as like.A, a, an aspirational figure or a role model and, you know, parentsMalcolm Collins: study show, so they go in [00:09:00] both directions. Like, it's 1 of those things, like, in science, you can find studies to support either view, but the plurality seemed to show that kids was working. Moms actually performed slightly better in terms of emotional health and career success, especiallySimone Collins: younger girls, because they see a female role model who has a job and a career.But.Malcolm Collins: I also really like the framing here that I wanted to catch, which is like, okay, so you're having to choose between, even if this was a choice that you had to make, you're having to choose between saving the species and your personal in the moment, like career and hedonism. And it's like, yeah, but it.You know, it should be an obvious choice. Like, when you think about it, it should be an obvious choice. But it's like, I really don't want that personalSimone Collins: responsibility. But also, our culture does not like the species anymore. Like, they're, they're actually, it's not that interesting of a prospect.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, a lot of the comments under her video, which are maybe worth going through after the video, About, like, would it really be that bad if humanity went extinct, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.We hear this all the time. [00:10:00] We need to mention to people that this is the urban monoculture's perspective. If they are not in it, or they are overly defensive of it, so much that they're delusional about its actual goals they'll be like, no, people don't say that. I'm like, just look at the comments under these videos.They are very, this is the default assumption. Humanity should die. It's not like some edgy outsider case. It's not like the weird extremists. This is the mainstream perspective within this cultural group. Yep.Yes. Right. Yes. Okay. So in that case, I need you to It's just, is there any monetary compensation? Like a, like a tax incentive from the future? Retroactive? I don't, I, I, I don't think so. Well, I, I do gig work, so I don't get mat leave. And even if I did get mat leave, you know, having kids is for the rich.I don't think you understand, this is bigger than you. We are on the brink of disaster. Empires are falling. War spans the globe. You hold the key to saving humanity. Yeah, it's just that kids are super expensive,Malcolm Collins: So [00:11:00] I love this part for a few reasons. One that like the idea that the people in power in our society today have decided that it, you know, well, well, you know, cash handouts don't really work for fertility rates. We should definitely have more of them than we have.Well, yeah. Projects. Talk about it. Cause it's kind of insane.Simone Collins: Yeah. So one of our recent projects for pronatalist. org was to create for every state in the United States, and we're happy to create some for other nations too, we just need to know if there's sufficient demand a guide to all state based resources for parents.You know, anything from early diagnosis of developmental issues, like, learning disabilities or autism to. Full out like childcare support, meals, services, free transportation for minors government programs providing healthcare to minors. What was really astounding to me is there's, there are very, very few states that offer significant benefits to middle or high income [00:12:00] parents.The vast majority of all services, be it free insurance, free childcare Early intervention, or even school choice, which is crazy is first and foremost available to low income parents. So, it's, what's interesting to me is It's actually way, way, way less expensive to have kids. Like it's almost free.It is free in many States to have kids because you get free food for them. You get free childcare, you get free healthcare, you get free early intervention and therapy. Then you get free school choice. So then you can send them to. Private schools, even if you want to there's just, it goes on, like, there are so many resourcesMalcolm Collins: and this is partially one of the reasons that might be driving lower income people to be so much higherSimone Collins: fertility than right.Because their opportunity cost is, is very low. They can, you know, they'll get the child care. They don't have to pay for it. AndMalcolm Collins: this is something I'd really like to advocate to is extending these programs to everyone or giving them to no one. Like, you shouldn't, you shouldn't have it be [00:13:00] free to have as many kids, you know, If this is something that we believe is something we need to offer as a society, then I think we should be offering it more acrossSimone Collins: the board.Yeah, just offer it across the board or don't offer it. And it's, it is, it's really frustrating because we, we thought we're going to be putting together this amazing guide of useful resources for parents and we're going to find anything. I mean, so there, there are still some things like, I mean, you and I with, with an autistic child have benefited from Pennsylvania support of early intervention, meaning that like, if your insurance does not cover ABA therapy for autism.The state will provide supplementary insurance to cover it and that is it's been a game changer for us. So there are some services that are available, but basically what I'm saying is there is a real and very different opportunity cost for middle and upper income parents. But at the same time, still having kids does not have to be prohibitively expensive if you don't make it like that.And we keep arguing that, [00:14:00] like, people are raising kids now as though they are retired incredibly dumb millionaires. They have to be chaperoned everywhere, they have to have their sailing classes and their tennis class, and they have to go to their robotics competition, and they have to go to, you know, this, and they're driven everywhere, you know, soccer competition, and then, you know, tutoring.And no, no,Malcolm Collins: she mentions in this, I'm sorry. Did you have more you wanted to say? No, no, no, no. That I thought was really astute. And it's something that is often lost on sort of the progressive leaning individuals. When we bring up just how bad it's going to be due to low fertility, is it, this is going to lead to the collapse of states and war.And a lot of people just, they do not under like, like they did. They're like, they can understand how less land would lead to that, but not rapidly declining populations. They're like, global warming will lead to war. And I'm like, actually, fertility collapse is much more likely to lead to war. And, and we're literally, global warming will lead to, likely instigated by [00:15:00] fertility collapse, which was the Russia Ukraine war, which Peter Zayan predicted would occur at this time due to fertility collapse.Simone Collins: Well, and keep in mind, so, so global warming will lead to very severe immigration crises and refugee crises. Demographic Collapse leads to war. And you know, the thing is, I think most people watching that video are going to totally miss that point. They're just going to assume, oh, she's riffing on like Terminator style, like, you know, references.And, you know, this isn't actually what would happen. Because people also have this really, really strong vision of Demographic Collapse just means, Oh, fewer people, smaller communities, more space for me, lower rent. Like they don't see how this causes.Malcolm Collins: Which is, which is what it does lead to. It leads to a Terminator like.future. It's going to be bad. Yeah, no, she knows it. She nails it.so. Okay, well, I've gotI got 63 galactic kroner, but with reverse inflation that's gonna be like 50 cents. Yeah, it's not gonna be [00:16:00] enough. Okay, well, um, why don't you have the kids and then you could go back to work after? And then you'd still have that career. Yeah, yeah, I mean I could, but then by the time I jump back into work I'm kind of broke.behind where I was. It's funny, I heard myself say that and then I was like, wait a minute, wouldn't she be behind where she was, especially her male counterparts? That was one of the reasons women get paid less, you know. Yeah, it's this toxic cycle. The gender pay, yes, right, I've heard of that. Well, and then, you know.You gotta work, so your kid needs to go to daycare, and you gotta pay for daycare, which costs the same amount as rent. It's really this, like, catch 22. So you're telling me the people responsible for creating life, possibly the most vital aspect of our civilization, just can't justify it? Yeah, it's kind of a what's in it for me.Right. Right.Simone Collins: So here's the thing. There's so many things. One is I find it really interesting that like, the, the common mainstream view is, oh, if you want me to have kids, you need to give me generous maternity leave. But then also, well, no, I don't want to have [00:17:00] kids because if I go on maternity leave, my career gets stalled and, and thrown back and then I'm no longer interested.Malcolm Collins: We need to denormalize maternity leave and maternitySimone Collins: leave. Yeah, we need, we need to normalize support for mothers as they work through maternity. So, like you've said in the past, and I really love this as a policy position, is if you do not have to work from an office, You should be allowed to work from home, especially if you're a parent, period.You know, you should be allowed to have your infant. And if not, then you should be allowed to bring your infant to the office. And you should be allowed to take the breaks you need to, you know, do breast pumping, whatever, breastfeeding, and have the baby with you. And ideally, again, in house childcare should be a major enrollment benefit.But this, this concept of needing to take leave to have a baby, I think is incredibly toxic. There is no strong historical basis for it, except for like literally like lying in as, you know, like a medieval European woman, which was way deadly, like poor peasant women were able to have just like [00:18:00] plock out kids and they wouldn't die at the same rate because they were still abdominally healthy and active, meaning they could push the poor thing out.Whereas these women who are like, we're forced to stay in bed and actually take, take leave and take time off to have babies. We're like not able to pushMalcolm Collins: anything out. Everyone today believes that they deserve and have a natural right to the life of an aristocrat. And it's justSimone Collins: not even good. It's just not even good.Well,Malcolm Collins: it's not even good. I mean, it comes with all the negatives of an aristocratic life, the ennui, the, like the aristocrats in the past were really not the class you deaf, Definitely most wanted to be. I mean,Simone Collins: obviously, like, we wouldn't want to be aristocrats.Malcolm Collins: No, you'd want to be like a merchant family or something like that.You know, still hard working, something to do every day. But not the, the ennui laying around all day of these aristocratic women. They had terrible existences. That'sSimone Collins: pretty stressful. Pretty stressful. But yeah, no. It's a major cultural norm that has to be gotten over this concept of, Oh, being pregnant [00:19:00] and having an infant takes you out of contention in life period that like, that's like, that, that is the time you should be leaning into everything.I mean, one, when you're waking up every three hours, anyway, there's so much more work you can do but you have to be able to have that flexibility and we don't grant that to mothers. And that's a really big issue. So like that really hits me and it'sMalcolm Collins: this big bugaboo. Hold on. I want to. Talk about something else she does in this, which I think is really interesting, just from a cultural perspective.It'd be really cool if we could see things going this way, is she refers to women who have kids as breeders. And typically, you know, as in the prenatalist movement, breeders are what the opposition calls us. As a way to insult us or try to dehumanize women who choose to have kids. I mean, that's really the goal.Like the left is terrible at recognizing how frequently they turn to dehumanization as a tactic. But but breeders is how they dehumanize. Women who have taken the choice and the costly choice as it is shown in this video to do one of the single most important jobs, if not the [00:20:00] single most important job that any human can undertake in our society.And yet it is a completely unrecognized and unglorified job in our society. Like these women receive nothing for it in terms of thanks really from society. They get looked at like they're crazy people on airplanesSimone Collins: or even their kids these days, because their kids refer to all the trauma that they inflicted uponMalcolm Collins: them.Well, all the made up trauma, because, you know, if you're trying to, as we point out, if you're trying to convert somebody to a cult, the first thing you need to do is drive an emotional wedge between them and their closest support network, which is usually their family. And so psychologists invent trauma, all trauma is self inflicted.You can see our video called this. It's a very interesting take because it goes really into the data on this. Yes. Data. There is data showing.Simone Collins: We're not saying that bad things don't happen to people and that that's terrible. And that shouldn't happen. What we're saying is the way that people interpret it as trauma, which is an additional form of harm is self inflicted.Malcolm Collins: It's self inflicted by the data. And, and, and so, this is, this, I, I [00:21:00] really love to see us retake this word breeders to be like, to, to, to call the people who are, who society relies upon. You,Simone Collins: to own it. It's such a guckyMalcolm Collins: word. Well, I mean, we'll see.Well, the joy a child brings. Well, actually, studies have shown that people without kids are happier and fluffier. Right. Right, because of the aforementioned issues. Right. Yeah. Yeah! It is not a conducive environment. It really isn't. Don't get me started on once we wouldn't have the baby. It's like, it's all dirty looks on the airplane and breastfeeding on public bathroom floors.It is appalling how you treat your breeders. It is. Well, s**t. That's, uh, that's not the answer I was hoping for. Yeah, yeah, uh, sorry about that. Um, is there anything else I can do? No, no, that's the, that's the That's the main thing I, uh, that's the main thing I came for. Shoot. Okay, well, sorry I couldn't be more howl.Oh, no, that's, uh, that's okay. That's all right. It's, uh, it's bleak out there. Oh, my God. For you or me? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It sounds like [00:22:00] you're dealing with some stuff. I am. I am. Yeah. It doesn't get any better. Oh, I'm not surprised.Malcolm Collins: So, what I really love about this from my perspective. Is that in truce, what she is saying is, is, is comical in an inverse way than she thinks it is where she is. Complaining about all of the difficulties of being a mother in today's environment.And one thing is pointed out, which is true, it will not get easier in the future. Like it only gets harder from here. Once our society, like, restabilizes the people who are having kids in the future, they will be having them under much worse conditions than humans who are alive today, at least for a couple generations.And, and, and you see this in the person that she's talking to in this destabilized world where, you know, obviously this woman in this destabilized world you know, she understands the importance of having kids and she's doing it, but in a much harsher environment, and this is also true when you contrast our challenges today with the challenges of our ancestors, you know, [00:23:00] she is.Concerned about social shaming on airplanes or having to do something a little gross on a public restroom floor. Did you know that on average, women used to lose one tooth with every kid they had? Remember you told me that statistic.Simone Collins: No, so one of our friends did, but I can't remember who. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: so, so, the, just, and I, I really like, I feel like people maybe don't understand how hard life was just a couple hundred years ago.Yeah, butSimone Collins: also, like, I've never breastfed a child on a restroom floor.Malcolm Collins: That's, you don't. You don't have to do that. No, that's aSimone Collins: choice. And we've flown a lot with our children but yeah, no. But the,Malcolm Collins: the larger point I'm making here, right, is one, either these are self inflicted things, right, or even, even as far as they are bad, just the life of a human today.Is so free from genuine suffering, even if you are fairly poor is almost astonishing in a historic [00:24:00] context. We have individuals in our society today who are what people would think of as lower class. So this is like the people who like, don't have. A lot of stuff growing up and then they get surprised leaving school that they are expected to work for the rest of their life.They have such of this aristocratic mindset, you know, that they aren't worried really about foodborne illnesses in a major way. You know, they have the refrigerated food. They have all of these flavors that we used to fight wars over for like spices and stuff. And now it's like, Oh, which Dorito am I going to pay, you know, a dollar for?They have. So much food that their biggest problem is obesity, not, not a lack of food. They have they basically have no major diseases anymore. And, and I mean this quite seriously. People do not understand how horrifying it was to get a disease in a historic context. Most people were living with.Just tons and tons and tons of just these terrible diseases. I worked at the Smithsonian studying human evolution. So I worked with a lot of [00:25:00] early hominid skulls and things that you would see frequently. It was like the bones sort of bubbled off from like funguses and it ate somebody's face off while they were alive.And like, this is a fungus. It would be trivial to kill today with antifungal. In historic context, nothing you could do. just bubble your face off, but you kept trugging because you were doing it to make your children's life better. And we were going through this intergenerational cycle of martyrdom.This generation finally was like, okay, I'm sort of cashing in. I'm not going to pay it forward. You know, with every instance of paying it forward, things got easier. I'm just not going to do it because I deserve whatever I want whenever I feel like it.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, there's also the view of like, Oh, I do see the future as bleak and terrible.You know, I can feel good about myself for not having any of my descendants goMalcolm Collins: through that. If you think the goal of human life is generally utilitarianism and you have like the ethical mindset of a child. Yeah, I mean, it is,Simone Collins: it's, I'm sorry, Malcolm, but most people do get over it. [00:26:00]Malcolm Collins: I'm sorry, I just don't get over how stupid it is.It is, it is, honestly, general utilitarianism and negative utilitarianism. Negative utilitarianism. Both are, I think, are pretty childish, but general utilitarianism could also be used to justify what you were talking about if you think the world is going to be especially bleak in the future. You know, sort of aggregating human happiness.I always say it's like you had a bunch of paperclip maximizing AIs together in a room, and, and they decide that good is more paperclips, and bad is less paperclips. And one guy is like, look, guys. I know that we are programmed to like paperclips, but I really don't think that they have intrinsic value. Maybe we should like, try to think outside of paperclips for a second here.And then another one's like, well, you wouldn't like it if I stopped you for making paperclips. And then one's like, well, yes, obviously I am programmed to like paperclips. But what I'm saying here is. Can we think theoretically outside of what we were pre coded to do? You know, as we say, happiness is just, you know, what sort [00:27:00] of was pre code and pain is just sort of what was pre coded into us by you know, which of our ancestors, the, the, the emotional subsets that motivated reproduction and survival and more offspring among our ancestors.It's not like a true thing of the universe. It's an accident. It's a genetic scar.Well, uh, okay. I will let you go back to your, your show. What are you watching? It's, uh, okay.It's a show called Real Housewives. Ah! About real housewives, I gather. No. Not at all. No. Do you want to watch an episode? Yeah, yeah, I got, I got time. Okay, yeah. Oh, that's weird. I didn't think you had aliens yet. Oh, no, they all have plastic surgery. Fascinating. A beauty standard from the past? Hmm. Mm hmm.Yeah, it's elective. They, they choose to look like that. ..Malcolm Collins: Yeah it also covers, I think, very well, like, what we say humor is. Humor is something that makes sense in context, but is still [00:28:00] surprising you know, to us, it, it, it, this is our theory of humor every one of these things, you know, is about real housewives, right?Oh, no, not at all. Like, it's surprising because, you know, it's called the real housewives, but you're like, yeah, but obviously also they're not real housewives. The What was the other joke there that I loved? I didn't know you had aliens yet. Yeah and um Well, what ISimone Collins: think is most meaningful about this is, like, the default happy life that the present day woman has is And don't get me wrong, I watch shitty TV.I love shitty TV. But I do not feel The deep level of contentment and satisfaction from it that I do from spending quality time with our kids. And, and so I just like, I would, I would say that like sort of the default. hedonic comfort that we are choosing to opt for instead of having kids is actually not that good.And like, you know, we, we are, this is what your life will be without kids is, is you are doing the male or [00:29:00] female or non binary equivalent of watching the Real Housewives, whatever that may be. Maybe you start collecting cars, maybe you you know, get really into OnlyFans, like whatever. But it's not going to be ThoseMalcolm Collins: are addictive, right?Those cracker? No, I mean, oh, I love these. There's so many little kids snacks that you forget how good they are. Yeah. But by the way, for people who are watching the audio of this, what, what are these called? Cheese toast.Simone Collins: Cheese Toast.Malcolm Collins: Cheese. Toasted cheese. So this is a, aSimone Collins: no no. The name of them is T-O-A-S-T.Cheap.Malcolm Collins: But I, I think, are we,Simone Collins: are we going for like endorsements now? Are we trying to get a sponsorship from Coors and Coca Cola and Toasty?Malcolm Collins: I'd love it when we get to that stage. So she I think that's the lifestyle that she's portraying here is really the epitome of the lifestyle that people are actually afraid of giving up.They say they're busy. They say they're overloaded and they're not accountable at the time that they're not doing [00:30:00] anything in bed and just not doing that much with their lives and that their lives really are quite sad. And this is something we're increasingly seeing in media. Is people getting older and realizing just how much they actually did give up by not having kids.One of the things that sort of stabilized in their lives and it's no longer an option for them. And we, as a foundation, keep having people reach out to us, Oh, I'm too old to have kids. And we're like, that's why we spend our money trying to get younger people to have kids. Not so, you know, Frankenstein you into having kids because it would cost the amount of people we can reach with the amount that we can help just one, you know, 45 year old woman have kids.It's astronomical. It's biblical. And so it's about convincing people earlier that, like, this is something they need to take seriously. And yeah, just, just the indolence of, of life is really sad that this is what they're trading it for. This is what they're trading the future of our species for. But in many ways, I think it's a good thing.And, you know, we, we have the track to it will have gone live before this on [00:31:00] this is God's will because really the people who succumb to these idle pleasures over the effort of intergenerational human intergenerationally expanding the human. Potentiality this intergenerational cycle of martyrdom that humanity has gone through.If we take them to space, you know, that's dead weight, right? Like we, we actually do need to go through this crucible as a species before we can become a interstellar empire. And so, yeah. All right. We'll watch the last bit here.Simone Collins: And I think that's it. I think it's just an ad.Malcolm Collins: Bummer. Oh, but what I can do is read some of the comments.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. And I have it on TwitterMalcolm Collins: I'm just astonished that the human race lasted until 2453.Simone Collins: One person says on Twitter, the conclusion was still morally insane.Malcolm Collins: What was the conclusion? Oh,Simone Collins: like the woman from the future was like, Oh yeah, why would you like, yeah, nevermind.Sorry. I guess there's, this is not going to happen. [00:32:00]Malcolm Collins: I'm getting the exact opposite here. I love the social critique and how they both just have to agree that a person could see this, understand how bad things get and still be like, yeah. Nah, it's easier just to sit in bed and watch The Real Housewives.Like, I need to be paid a dramatic amount by the government to think about doing anything else.Simone Collins: Now here's one reply that, like, represents a huge portion of the prenatalist movement that gets my goat. One guy says So, feminism is inherently antinatalist and egocentric. I already knew that, but it's nice to hear you admit it.And That's, like, I, I hate blaming antinatalism or demographic collapse on feminism because it is on hedonism, it is on culture no longer supporting families, this is a, a team effort and both men and women are failing here. And I, I, it's, it's not just that feminism is inherently anti natalist and egocentric.We know so many women who want to meet men [00:33:00] and want to have kids. And those men are like, well, but I'm going to be polyamorous. Okay. And they're like, well, but how am I supposed to raise a kid with you? Am I just, just supposed to like. Take a bet and hope that you don't, like, choose another primary partner and leave me with a kid alone.Like, this is a, it takes two to tango, and no, feminism is not solely responsible for demographical lapse, and it really pisses me off that people imply with comments like these that the solution is to just Remove female rights.Malcolm Collins: One of the comments mentions as well here that happiness goes up if you have kids after 25 and are in a stable relationship. It goes down if you have them too early or when unprepared. And I think that's probably true from the data from what I've seen. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's Kids are a responsibility, and we believe that life should be without responsibilities now, you know.As Wish has taught a generation, this is the latest Disney movie, anyone who doesn't just immediately grant everyone's wish with no effort is a [00:34:00] villain. Anyone who places responsibilities or reasonable expectations on individuals, and those individual expectations of themselves, how could you be so horrifying?This reminds me of an upcoming episode. We'll be recording soon on Starship troopers, the movie being a quote unquote, satire of fascism. And it's like, but everything in that movie is better than our current universe and it is a democracy it's just. Uh, democracy in which people have to sacrifice something. A portion of their life to either military or civil service in order to vote. Um, and they're like, well, that's, that's the key evil of it.Right. People have to make sacrifices. Um, and, and that's really where we've come as a society is the mere fact that somebody is asking you to make some sort of even token sacrifice to get something in exchange. That's what seen is the core evil.Malcolm Collins: Well, anyway, I was glad we got to go over that together because I really liked that piece and we'll see It's a reallySimone Collins: funny skit too, like, it's justMalcolm Collins: well done. It's a good skit, yeah, she did a great job. I, I do [00:35:00] really want to see a growth of a movement like this, and this is one of the things that does sort of scare me, and so now I'll get to the scary part of all of this.Okay. Which is as the left begins to recognize that fertility rates are really an issue, they need to more institutionalize their answer as to why they're not doing anything about it. And the answer of racism just doesn't really hold water anymore with the rapid fall of fertility rates in Latin America.So it seems that the answer they're coming to is humanity should just die. And that there's no reason for humans to be here or anything like that. Like that's how they justify their it, it's so interesting. It really reminds me of the right back in the day when people would point out like environmental destruction and they're like, well, the environment is here to serve us.It's like a disposable thing. And when we're done, then we'll be raptured. So don't worry about it. And. The left very much treats humanity in the same way as like a disposable thing. We've had our go. And I think that [00:36:00] what scares me is if this becomes a mainstream position, if the antinatalists get into mainstream positions of power throughout society and you can watch our antinatalist videos to see just how unhinged they are.You know, one of the things I was looking at. About antinatalist philosophy, because antinatalists seem to think it's like the most logical like, like obvious thing. And I'd look to see if any other group in human history had ever come to their possessions. Because, you know, there's been a lot of philosophers in human history.No, it's a completely new movement. Really no one had these ideas before the 1900s. The, the, like the asymmetry hypothesis and stuff like that. And if you want to see our Rebuttals to these you can look up our video. There's a group that wants all humans dead and is weirdly reasonable about it. So the antinatalists as they grow, they become a real threat because a lot of them really do want to end all life on the planet.The last time we had a world conflict. You know, I, I think the song at least the Russians love their children too,view It would be such an ignorant thing [00:37:00] to do If the RussiansMalcolm Collins: you know, shows that no matter how bad the conflict got in the nuclear war, we had this understanding that at least those in power across society loved their children and wanted humanity to continue on into the future.Yeah. We no longer have that guarantee with this gross of the antinatalism within the leftist communities. Yeah. And what it means is in order to self justify, justify why they are unwilling to make sacrifices on behalf of our species and just do whatever, because the left has created this promise of like, do whatever you want, whenever you want, and everything will turn out fine, you know, so long as it doesn't interfere with other people's lives and of course, this is unable to motivate the type of sacrifice that's necessary for intergenerational fertility rates.Well, we no longer have this guarantee because this idea is going to spread that our opponents do love their children to or do care about the [00:38:00] species anymore. They are willing to, if they don't get their way, like a child throwing a temper tantrum, because many of them still have this very childlike mindset, just hit the button to end everything.And then, and they do muse about it. You can go to the FLSM subreddit, like, how can I get control of enough content. You know, nuclear weapons to nuke the world, you know, and it is, it is going to become an increasingly common mindset. And I think an increasingly huge threat to the world. And I do not think that it's something that people are really coming through through logic.As you have seen in our video, this is the current anti natalist community. Most of these people, you know, if you look at the statistics, they disproportionately show narcissistic traits this psychotic antisocial traits, stuff like that. But I think that a lot of people who are just sort of NPCs and need to justify why they who see themselves as good people aren't trying to save the future of our species now that it is clear that we have this existential threat.The only answer they can come to is it's better to let the species die. And then they'll start fighting for this made up [00:39:00] answer that justifies their current behavior. Yeah.Simone Collins: No, it's, it's it's bleak, but I love when people can frame something bleak in a fun way. That makes me laugh. So thank you. Well, I love you, Simone.I love you too so much, and I'm glad that you have the level of creativity required to point out that, oh, you can have a family and not give anything up. Everything can be yes and, and it totally can, which I love. So thanks for that. All right. LoveMalcolm Collins: you.I justSimone Collins: love the mild smile that appears on your face sometimes.Oh God. If I were a good illustrator, I would illustrate a page of all of the different Malcolm faces. Because they're so entertaining. You've all these different ones you do, you're different Malcolm faces.Malcolm Collins: Oh gosh, what, do you like seeing me laugh and stuff when I'm No, you haveSimone Collins: like all these different little weird things you do with your [00:40:00] face, and I love it, and I want to illustrate them all, but lack thetalent.Malcolm Collins: Well, I'll be able to see whatever you were laughing at this time, because this is recorded, in editing.Simone Collins: That's true, yeah, I just had To capture that one face you do, but I always try to capture and then as soon as I try to take my face,Malcolm Collins: but hold on, we got to talk about this show is Simone the show. Yeah. 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

We analyze modern progressivism/wokeness as a cultural parasite that has religious qualities. Born from Hicksite Quakerism, it survives by infiltrating institutions, then expelling members with outside allegiances. It directs anger towards minority members, allowing powerful people to avoid responsibility. We argue it's not a true continuation of enlightenment values, as it ignores science when inconvenient and can increase inequality to reduce momentary emotional discomfort. Ultimately, its childlessness and hostility to families importing foreign children reveals its goal of cultural erasure.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I often say that the urban monoculture loves the LGBT community in the same way Hamas loves hospitals. It sets up the most imperious elements of its operation in the hearts of vulnerable communities to divert attacks.against it to those communities, allowing it to claim the moral high ground. This can be seen in its tendency to use the rainbow flag to show conquest over institutions. After a mosque, synagogue, et cetera, has been conquered. They will hang this out front to direct anger away from the culprit of the cultural erasure and towards the LGBT community.No. If you have fallen to victim to their propaganda, you might be saying, oh, but what's the difference? I mean, the vast majority of gay people are Progressive's right.45% of gay men in the last election cycle voted for Donald Trump.Malcolm Collins: People are like, no, it needs to redirect the anchor at the LGBT community, it needs that the LGBT community has its loudest voices, and it's like, no, it doesn't, it controls our media, it controls our school system, it could use powerful people.To, to [00:01:00] be the scapegoat but it doesn't, it uses the vulnerable members of its community to be the scapegoats to be the, the, the biggest proponents of the most imperious aspects of the culture and the loudest proponents, you know, when you go on tick tock and you see the craziest ultra progressive viewpoints, they are people in these communities.​Simone Collins: The stage at which I can't feel my fingertips anymore.Malcolm Collins: I love that you And you're the one who enforces this on the family, to be clear. I always say that you can indulge yourself when you want. I'm notSimone Collins: enforcing this on the children. They say, repeatedly, I love the cold. They preferMalcolm Collins: the cold. You are an amazing woman, Simone, and I appreciate how austerely you live because it helps us stay focused on what matters, which is moving things forward for our species during this particular time of challenges that we live in.And one of the biggest challenges has really made clear to me when we were talking to a reporter recently, and they were asking for more [00:02:00] clarification on the urban monoculture, right? And it made me realize that one of the mistakes that people can make when dealing with the urban monoculture is to think that it has the similarities it has because it is true.But that is not the case. And so I'm actually going to start by reading my response to the reporter about the urban monoculture. Dive rightSimone Collins: in, friend.Malcolm Collins: While the urban monoculture is not the sole cause of demographic collapse, no realistic solution to demographic collapse is possible without addressing the issues posed by the urban monoculture. The fertility rates within all cultural groups are crashing, but the proximity of a group to the urban monoculture is directly correlated to the speed of the crash.Worse, cultural Any family attempts will be fought by the urban monoculture insofar as it deviates from the urban monoculture, which is definition, which it definitionally will due to the monoculture's low fertility rate. The urban monoculture is the dominant cultural group in the world today and one of the descendants of European [00:03:00] imperialism.It is what many call wokeness, progressiveness, et cetera. It sees itself as naturally superior to all other cultural groups and perspectives, seeing them as essentially backward savages. And it's imperative is to over all of the world's population. What makes it hazardous is the urban monoculture has the lowest fertility rate of any cultural group in the world.As such, it only survives by parasitizing children from nearby demographically healthy cultural groups. Usually these are conservative religious groups or importing families from geographically distant cultures and converting their children. This creates an existential problem in our society that I predict will be the core source of conflict over the next century.The dominant cultural group, the group that controls the school system and mass media, must attempt to convert children from neighboring cultures to keep its population numbers stable. Conversion targets of the urban monoculture naturally see the industrial conversion of their children as a threat.There are high fertility groups in every country, but they are all quote unquote weird, where weirdness is defined by cultural distance from the dominant cultural group [00:04:00] in society, the urban monoculture. These groups look like weird secular religions like our family has, ultra orthodox Jews, quiverfuls, tradcasts, etc.The problem is, even if the urban monoculture wanted to stop its industrial conversion system, it couldn't. If it did, its population would quickly collapse, and it would lose the political and bureaucratic power it has used to subjugate its neighbors, who are at this point very angry. It has proverbially caught the tiger by the tail.The longer it holds the tiger, the angrier the tiger gets, but if it lets go, things will get bloody. Political parties around the world are beginning to drift into two factions, one representing the urban monoculture and its goal of cultural genocide, and the other representing a diverse alliance of those attempting intergenerational preservation of their cultural identity.As to what the urban monoculture is, it can be hard to explain, because once one converts, unlike other cultures, it does not demand they identify as a member. They just have to adopt as perspectives, values, practices, morality, ideology, and cosmology. To understand this in practice, ask an ultra [00:05:00] progressive Jew, Muslim, Catholic, feminist, et cetera, what their views are on gender, relationships, the nature of the universe, morality, sexuality, marriage, our relation to the environment, et cetera, and you will get nearly identical answers.Were you to pose the same question to a conservative I would also note here that the convergent position of the urban monoculture is not due to quote unquote science as it will regularly ignore science when it conflicts with the culture's canon just as quickly and aggressively as religious extremists do.Now I'm not going to go further here because it was actually this last point that I really want to expand upon. Many people, when they look at the convergent beliefs that you have among progressive Catholics or progressive Jews or progressive Muslims. They say these convergent beliefs are just science, right?And it very clearly is not true. It's not true in the field of genetics. It's not true in the field of demography. And, and, I wanted to pull up a few instances of this that we've seen recently. So [00:06:00] one I wanted to share with you is this insane graph that about 70 percent of liberal 12th grade girls believe women are discriminated against in getting a college education, despite the fact that women attain more bachelors, masters and PhD.degrees than men. There are literally 11 times. So 11, 000 percent more women's only scholarship than men's only scholarships in the U. S. The level of distortion to reality you have to have to believe this. I mean,Simone Collins: I'll still just look at rates of college graduation and attendance, male to female. There is an obvious skew.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and it's something we see with demographic stuff. You know, we'll talk with reporters about demographic stuff and they'll say, demographers say, this isn't an issue. You cannot predict this stuff long term. I'm like, but you literally can. I can ask the younger generation how many kids they plan to have.I [00:07:00] can look at trailing indicators like rates of religiosity. I can look at every aspect of data we have and it says it's going to get worse over time. I can look at countries that are further ahead of us and collapse. So they have this distortion field. That is not science and it's very important that we call it out as not science or not just what is culturally just.So is it just to lie to people? Like, is it culturally just, but this, this is a huge problem, right? Is there like, we are not erasing these cultures, you know, when a culture becomes sufficiently progressive, it hasn't been. Erased even though they all fly the same flag now, you know, which we'll talk about in a second.You know, I go to an ultra progressive mosque and I go to an ultra progressive church and I go to an ultra progressive synagogue. They'll have the same flag in front of every one of these churches. You know, they, they, they. They're like, oh, well, that's just an interesting coincidence. You know, they, they [00:08:00] are trying to protect a, a vulnerable group.And I'm like, well, there's lots of vulnerable groups in society. Why are they all converging around the same vulnerable group in terms of the flags that they're flying? Which goes to something that I often say, which is the urban monoculture loves the LGBT community. In the same way Hamas loves hospitals which is to say they are using this community in a community that is in some ways genuinely vulnerable to redirect anger that would otherwise be Pointed at the larger problem, which is the urban monoculture towards a discriminated subgroup.And then they use that misdirection and the danger that they caused individuals of that subgroup through their. blatant proselytization and attempts to deconvert children using our education system and mass media to anger against this one specific subset of the population, which to be honest, I don't [00:09:00] even know, like, do most game in even still support Democrats?I could look this up. Well, I'll look it up after an edit in the, in editing,I called it.45% of gay men in the last election cycle voted for Trump over Biden and 51% voted for Biden. So it's basically half and half about now. And I suspect it's going to flip in the next election cycle or the one after that.Malcolm Collins: but yeah I thinkSimone Collins: they, I think they do pretty overwhelmingly. Then there's just like the Lincoln Republicans and that's it.Just to clarify, it turns out her intuition was wrong. And that it's about half and half right now, and likely moving towards majority Republican in the next cycle. And I also remind our audience of this. Any of you who are right-leaning and maybe underestimate just how much the gay community votes Republican. Or how amenable they are to joining the Republican party in mass at least, Gay men. So it's, it's really best to not antagonize them because they really [00:10:00] are on our side and they are not the same in terms of these far crazy far left, you know? Extremist transactivist and stuff like that.Most gay men are very similar to your average Republican..Malcolm Collins: But it's, it's, it's getting, it's The, the level to which they basically been able to pull the wool over society's eyes pointed out in the studies done on for example, like they'll take another discriminated group that there'll be like they'll elevate to a stupid degree, to a degree that it hurts the community, like the black community.If you look at areas where Democrats have been in control for longer, hispanic groups and black groups have larger distances in contrasted in both earnings and scores on tests when contrasted with the white population. So the policies that are being implemented by progressives are hurting these disadvantaged communities.And this is really obvious in the data. ButSimone Collins: in other words, like statistically speaking, and we're not, we're not saying necessarily there's causation, but. [00:11:00] If I were a minority in the United States, I would rather be in a Republican dominated area, a conservative area, because Well, youMalcolm Collins: will do better and your kids will do better.Yeah, exactly. Which is wild because youSimone Collins: assume that, of course, all, you know, Democratic progressive policies are meant to, at first and foremost, favor and help minorities and those in need.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I think that this is really worth drawing attention to because The illusion that what these communities are converging on when they have been infected by this memetic virus is truth is objectively wrong.It is a religious extremist position that is as disconnected from science and as disconnected from reality as most Small c conservative religious traditions. Now, I would say that when you get to like ultra conservative religious traditions, you get a higher level of disconnection for reality. But when you're talking about, you [00:12:00] know, a normal, I'd say conservative Christian or conservative Jew, they're probably about as disconnected from mainstream science as progressives are.I mean, they will deny when I will talk to them, I will say, well, these human traits have a genetic component to them. And they'll say, no, they don't. And I'm like, Like this isn't a new field like we've been studying this for a long time like yeah They obviously do the way a person votes their personality has a genetic component But it's not just the research like if you know a human being with kids you would see this And they're like well, what about our dip adopted kids?That would be unfair and it's like well If you know someone was adopted kids You'll see that those kids are much more different from their parents than than people without adopting kids. It's just Something you can see if you look at the evidence, even anecdotal evidence within your own life. You really have to blind yourself or like never have been around a child to not realize how much of our personality and the way we act is heritable because my kids are doing all sorts of stuff that is like me that I know I didn't teach them.Undeniable. But I also want to continue here with [00:13:00] reading what I wrote. I wanted to have a short interlude there because didn't want it to be like a boring just read the piece thing. The urban monoculture parasitizes cultural movements until it becomes the dominant cultural force in them. Then it expels the members that still have adherence to the group's former ideals and culture, wearing that group's identity and history like a skin suit.It then speaks through the mouth of. This marionetted corpse to claim its trials as its own. I mentioned the feminist culture because it presents an excellent case study of a phenomenon. I have outlined it as to what fighting the urban monoculture looks like. The most important thing we can do is build a school system, not dedicated to cultural genocide.That is what we are doing with the Collins Institute. And I included a clip for her, which I'll play here.If we combine our music, she'll see that music unites all trolls, and that we're all the same, and that she's one of us! Poppy, I mean no disrespect, but King and Queen, anything but that. Why not? I can make it right. History's [00:14:00] just gonna keep repeating itself until we make everyone realize that we're all the same.But we're not all the same. It's why all our strings are different, because they reflect our different music. Denying our differences is denying the truth of who we are.Malcolm Collins: But I'll, I'll go a bit further into like the nature of the urban monoculture because there's this one moment that really got to me when somebody said, what is wokeness to someone and the person couldn't respond.And I was like, how stupid is that? Like, like to say, like, of course they couldn't respond. If you say, what is a culture, that's a very difficult thing for a normal person to answer. Like, if you say, what is Judaism? Right? Like, you can, you can give a few, like, doctrinal opinions, but, like, that's not really what it is as a cultural group.So, so, I, I wrote a quick piece on this that we can hopefully help explain to people. What is the urban monoculture? Cultural groups are difficult to define and summarize. Consider you asked me to explain European imperial culture. I would say it's a culture that saw everyone outside of it as [00:15:00] deplorable and lesser, and believed it had a manifest destiny to enlighten these individuals children and bring them up to date with the quote unquote civilized world.Yet, this definition would apply equally to the urban monoculture it gave birth to. Were you to ask me to explain orthodox Jewish culture, I could summarize core beliefs, important texts to the culture, and holidays, but that does not really capture the full culture. For example, Jews a thousand years ago would appear the same as Jews today, if I use that explanation.But culturally, they are extremely different. For that reason, I find the best way to describe a cultural group that is to de For that reason, I find the best way to describe a cultural group is to describe its evolutionary history. In the case of the urban monoculture, that is something we explore at length in the Fragmented Sky to Crafting Religion, which we would argue it is something of a memetic supervirus that evolved out of Hicksite Quakerism.The urban monoculture's belief system is most heavily defined by the belief the goal of society is to remove as much, in the [00:16:00] moment, emotional pain as possible, and thus it is a negative utilitarian in structure. However, it has many other odd ideological structures and traditions. For example, the urban monoculture claims to love diversity, but also does not believe there are any differences between genders, cultures, ethnicities, etc.Why would diversity be a thing of value if we are all exactly the same? It really means it values diversity in its victims. So Simone, I was wondering if you had any comments on this or areas on this you want to elaborate in terms of understanding it as this like unified religious and cultural structure.Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, I I appreciate your highlighting it. And I think the important thing is I grew up in this culture, right? And I always remember thinking how crazy people outside of this cultural group were for not trusting the science and not believing in science. And now we live in this era where like they're presented with.[00:17:00]Peer reviewed science, like even by their own standards, you know, through, through the processes that they acknowledge are legitimate, they are denying certain truths. It is, it is reallyMalcolm Collins: wild. What disagrees with dogma is not science to them because it's just defined by what agrees with dogma. I can'tSimone Collins: emphasize the extent to which.They wholeheartedly see what they're viewing as truth, as science, as, as the factual basis of things and those who disagree with them as being backward, uneducated Bible thumping or Nazi esque or racist or whatever. Enemies, and it is the ignorance of their enemies that, that makes them so evil and dangerous.It is not like, Oh, we're dealing with a smart opponent that we must, you know, strategize around. It's never that mindset. The mindset is you guys are so. [00:18:00] Dumb and full of hate. And you're just afraid andMalcolm Collins: that is that not the way that imperial europe saw the communities it was contacting It is a direct descendant.No, no,Simone Collins: no, no, it didn't. No, no No, like when you actually look at its burden colonies as in colonism as in the american colonies condescension Was the word that was used and it was a word that was seen as As being a noble term, condescension was being of a person of culture, of education, et cetera, who, who benignly and.Kindly condescended to those who maybe were less educated than them but didn't like hate them for it.Malcolm Collins: But do you not see elements of this white man burdens mindset in this viewpoint? Oh,Simone Collins: yes, certainly in the progressive viewpoint today. Yeah but uh,I don't even I don't even know I don'tMalcolm Collins: Dehumanization of the outsider is is really core to their community [00:19:00] and and you look at like where they ignore science So the way they define science, it's like the way they define racism like racism has become a meaningful term because to be racist if i'm like How am I racist?I don't look down on black people and I have black friends, I engage with the black community as equals, and they're like, well, you're racist because you are not progressive in your views of race. Racism becomes defined, and this is why they'll be like, oh, this black person is a racist, you'll see like a white person saying this, because they have defined racism as agreeing with the progressive stance on race, and not as seeing people of different ethnic groups as truly separate and this is how they have begun to re institutionalize racial segregation in our society.You know, you look at places like California now and they have separate alert platforms for black people and native Americans and then they have for white people, then they have from the amber alert system, they have the ebony alert system and the feather alert system. God, ISimone Collins: forgot that. And it sounds so racist.That [00:20:00] sounds so incredibly racist.Malcolm Collins: When it is incredibly racist because they are a racist community, when you define racism as things that disagree with the progressive team's value set, then they don't notice when racism creeps into their values. It's noSimone Collins: holds barred. It's just like fully flamboyant racism andMalcolm Collins: They are incapable of recognizing it was the definition they had created.And this is the same as true around like trans stuff. If I'm like, well, puberty blockers really like the evidence that that is not harmful is not as strong as like, I've, I've seen a lot of studies that bring up serious, serious concerns about the puberty blockers. And they're like, but it isn't science because it disagrees with what we want.Like science is defined by what they want. Do you have a, in, in. This creates a problem in outsiders trusting them because as soon as you see this and you realize that science may align with something that progressives wants like global warming or something like that, there's really no reason [00:21:00] to trust the data because even if global warming was not trusted.happening. They would be saying all of the exact same things they're saying about global warming because it gives them more state power and stuff like that. And and it's really hard to believe that global warming is happening as a conservative. When you see them, the progressives, the green party in Germany, shutting down the nuclear power plants was no viable alternative and just creating more carbon.One of the things that progressives often accuse us, the pronatalists, you know, and it's true, you know, we're trying to bring the best of the best of humanity together to take to the stars, to, you know, reform this planet, to do amazing things in the future, and they're like, so you want to leave this sinking ship?Like, you don't want to fix it? And I'm like, we tried. We built the nuclear power plants. Those were put up by conservatives. We, Elon, for example, he built Tesla. He tried to make emissionless cars popular. He did more to making them popular than anyone else. And now you tar and feather him because he also promotes free speech?[00:22:00] Because that is out of control. Because free speech is an existential threat to people who control information in a society. If, if, if one cultural group controls mass media and they control the school system, then of course, freedom of speech is an existentially threatening idea to them because they can't have a free market of ideas where people can point out the things that we're pointing out, you know, we, where, where truth becomes a danger to them.Simone Collins: Well, so, okay, if, if we're saying that. This form of toxic progressivism is a virus. I'm sorry. If we're saying that this form of toxic progressivism is a religion, does that change the tactics that people should use to defend themselvesMalcolm Collins: from it? To address it? The analogy I use is it's a religion in the same way that.Contagious canine venereal cancer. So, canine type of cancer that's contagious is a dog. It is a, it is a parasitic cancer that evolved out of a religion, but it is not a [00:23:00] religion. It doesn't have all of the code it needs of the cultural group to sustain itself. It absolutely can only survive through cultural parasitism.It can only survive by taking the children of other people because it lacks the, the cultural DNA that motivates reproduction and self sacrifice. Which, which I actually talk about a bit later in this piece. It's not a piece, but like email I sent, which I was like, okay, I should probably share this. It also has an ethnic, sexual, and gender based dominance hierarchy bordering on a caste system, whereby the status of each of these traits is determined by the perceived trait's impact on the status in the plurality of neighboring on status in the plurality of neighboring cultures.This provides differential pressure for individuals with these traits to convert and loudly proselytize the more bizarre and nonsensical elements of the monoculture. I often say that the urban monoculture loves the LGBT community in the same way Hamas loves hospitals. It sets up the most imperious elements of its operation in the hearts [00:24:00] of vulnerable communities to divert attacks.against it to those communities, allowing it to claim the moral high ground. This can be seen in its tendency to use the rainbow flag to show conquest over institutions. After a mosque, synagogue, et cetera, has been conquered. They will hang this out front to direct anger away from the culprit of the cultural erasure and towards the LGBT community.And I would remind listeners here again, that 45% of gay men voted for Donald Trump in the last election cycle.It's like bull baiting with a red flag to get the bull to attack the wrong location.. Or even more hilariously they've dressed, a child all up in red and let him run around the ring was the bull chasing him so that they can merrily pick it off while it's distracted.Malcolm Collins: Again, I need to be clear. There is no agency or plan in any of this here. These are all just culturally evolved mechanisms. The inter, The iteration of the culture that did this outcompeted the [00:25:00] ones that actually tried to protect these communities. And this is something I want to take a, a, a, a quick aside on here, because there isn't, people are like, no, it needs to redirect the anchor at the LGBT community, it needs that the LGBT community has its loudest voices, and it's like, no, it doesn't, it controls our media, it controls our school system, it could use powerful people.To, to be the scapegoat but it doesn't, it uses the vulnerable members of its community to be the scapegoats to be the, the, the biggest proponents of the most imperious aspects of the culture and the loudest proponents, you know, when you go on tick tock and you see the craziest ultra progressive viewpoints, they are people in these communities.They are not. The, the actors who have security, they are not the politicians, they are not the ultra wealthy tech company CEOs who take the most milquetoast perspectives which is where, where if the community was virtuous, it would be driving anger, and you say, well, no community could work that way, well, yeah, they can, many conservative communities, especially ultra conservative communities, it [00:26:00] is the leaders of those communities that take the responsibility and the burden of the social attacks against those communities, it is.And purporting and keeping the communities on a virtuous path insofar as they define virtue, which means pushing some of the crazier ideas. Or crazier ideas insofar as craziness is defined by distance from the dominant cultural group in society or other cultural groups in society. So the urban monoculture spreads by infiltrating institutions than expelling members who have allegiance to the institution's original mission.I mentioned this in the case of the feminist movement above, but we see this phenomenon play out. In companies, religions, et cetera, once the memetic infection reaches a certain stage, the institution will start building new structures designed to ensure ideological conformity, further the spread of the memetic virus, and expel anyone who appears to show immunity.An example of these types of structures are ESG departments. The urban monoculture tells people that they have a duty to identify as whatever they feel in the moment and do whatever makes them feel best in the moment, insofar as that does not [00:27:00] hurt other people. While this may seem benign, As a commandment, a culture that uses this as their North Star is going to be very bad at motivating sacrifice and thus have a very low fertility rate.It is also going to have huge mental health issues, but that is beside the point. It is important to note that the urban monoculture is not just a continuation of utilitarian left leaning ideas optimized around increasing aggregate world happiness and equality. When choosing between those goals and removing in the moment suffering, the urban monoculture always chooses the removal of in the moment suffering.For example, if you point out that being overweight is unhealthy, This could cause, in the moment, pain to an individual, even though it would be in their long term best interest. So the urban monoculture suppresses it. Banning test scores in high schools obviously increases inequality by allowing rich kids to go to their extracurricular, where they will still be tested.However, doing so removes, in the moment, negative emotions. Government programs hammering out drugs on the streets obviously increase inequality, but also remove, in the moment, suffering. So, throughout this, it's really important to note that [00:28:00] this is not The progressive culture you grew up with it borrowed some of those elements.And I think a lot of people who haven't been targeted yet by the urban monoculture yet don't realize how much it's changed. Yeah. I think,Simone Collins: I think that is probably the vast majority of people who still identify as progressives and then. unknowingly support progressive policies is they did grow up with this more sane version and they don't realize how insane it's gotten.And yeah, you're probably totally spot on, which is to say that we're not saying like, it's, it's actually a very small minority that's gone off the rails. But then they have alltheMalcolm Collins: positions of power and they have been able to utilize those positions of power to transform our society in a direction that hurts the very groups that they claim to want to protect.And you can see this in the data, as I've said, like, And so I want to be clear here, right? Like, a lot of people, they'll come to me and they go, no, this is only the extremists who believe those things. I am a progressive and I define progressive beliefs by what I believe, right? Because I [00:29:00] identify as a progressive.And when I say, well, those aren't really progressive beliefs anymore. Those are actually much closer to conservative beliefs today. Yeah, but no one,Simone Collins: when we say that believes us.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they don't believe us because they haven't been targeted yet. And then I constantly see the same story playing out again and again.They see something in their company or something like that, that they thought was reasonable because they hadn't had to be in a bureaucratic environment that was dominated by this new cultural group yet. You know, you see this withSimone Collins: like locked and recorded. You see this with the free press. There is this new class of elite progressive that is now seen as like heterodox or even sometimes labeled by the.establishment as conservative merely because there have been like, wait, no, no, no, no, this is crazy. But they still maintain their progressive stances of the days of yore, which is to say like, What traditionally progressivism was rather than off the rails insanity that it is now, right?Malcolm Collins: And I think that it's it's easy to see when you're a progressive to dehumanize your enemies When [00:30:00] you do not look for disconfirming evidence of the stuff they're telling you it's easy to like a great example of this is the don't say gay bill, for example, right?Like when I point out the conservatives haven't really done that much that's really homophobic in a while They're like, what about the don't say gay bill? And I'm like, actually, I know one of the people who wrote that bill. And the number one progressive complaint that people could use that bill to get a teacher fired for being gay or telling her students that she's gay.Literally that was in, like, the language when the bill was first written could have been used to do that, but the conservatives within the conservative movement read it and they said, Oh, we need to take that language out so that it is only the teaching of sexuality to children, not like an individual's identity, not their home life, not them even mentioning these things to students.It's only the teaching of sexuality. That we want to prevent or like specific sexual acts to students and yet progressives They don't know this they don't believe this because it's hidden from them in their media the conservative movement has [00:31:00] significantly moderated its views on these issues and in Them using things like the LGBT community as their scapegoat constantly the progressives using it.They are reigniting genuine animosity within the conservative party That when conservatives end up replacing them, which they will eventually it's just demographics Is going to be very, very bad for people with those traits who we do not want to see come to harm due to the short sightedness of these, these fraudsters that are claiming to represent them.And it is, it's really sad that it's gotten to this stage, but what I say with something like Trump, the point I was making here. is they say you know, if you don't know that much, if you haven't really looked at his policies, if you haven't really looked at the effects that they've had on a global stage and you're just viewing this, it's easy to see him as like a crazy person or a bad person or everyone who supports him as a bad person.But when you really engage with it, even claims around things like the election might've had some issues when you really genuinely engage with it, instead of just spout [00:32:00] talking points You can see how a well meaning intelligent person could come to that perspective. I'm not saying it's true, but I'm saying it's not insane, okay?And, and yet progressives are taught that these are insane positions. And it is going to lead Oh, it's not anSimone Collins: insane position when their candidate loses an election, butMalcolm Collins: well, yeah, then there was definitely some form of election temporary. But it's going to lead to them doing more and more blazingly anti democratic things as they dehumanize their opponents.And eventually this is going to lead to something like a civil war. If, if they keep this up, if they blazingly continue to brazenly continue to use other families and other cultural groups to supply their population, e. g. parasitize their children using the educational system they employ. Well, if you can't understand why people are existentially angry about that, and why that's going to cause problems in the long term, I just, I don't know how to communicate like we are trying to [00:33:00] defuse a situation that is going to end with you.The progressive group suffering because you have a low fertility rate right now. You are the group that will be the vulnerable one in the future. And we are trying to help you before things get bad. And thereSimone Collins: you have it.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you to decimum. I love you too,Simone Collins: Malcolm. And weird times, but I'm glad I'm spending them with you.So thanks for that.Malcolm Collins: I feel the same way. 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

In the last Tract we wrote about how our family crafted its own religion in an attempt to create an intergenerational durable solution to demographic collapse. One designed to capture and canonize the Abrahamic traditions and values in a package that while being true to the evolving history of Western culture can weather the fertility crucible our species currently finds itself in. We talked about the trials that God designed for us at this inflection point in our species history. In his wisdom he gifted humanity near infinite access to hedonism then allowed a culture that would affirm these indulgences while punishing those who cation temperance and austerity to dominate our world. He did this as a trial to cull those subject to temptation and weak of spirit—we call this the Trial of the Lotus Eaters. Then he carved humanity into two—one of these groups survived temptation by eschewing technology, turning away from industry, and indulging in the belief they embody some iteration of human perfection. Whether it is they think their faith, ethnic group, or lifestyle that is perfect as is: This self-deification hardens their hearts and leads to the nurgalitic glorification of stagnation and demonization of the intergenerational cycle of improvement that sanctifies the human spirit. Right now, other than the pronatalists, every other high fertility group in the world (other than some groups of Jews) have achieved this through turning from technology and engaging in practices that lower their economic productivity thus increasing their fertility (as the less wealth someone has the more kids they have). These groups have been able to maintain cultural fidelity through xenophobia and the dehumanization of outsiders. They exist across traditions—among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and even Buddhists—but wherever they are found they represent convergent cultural evolution. A pathway that ends in only one place, the desiccation of all that makes humanity great, as a member of the great barbarian horde. After God tests us with temptation in the last age of plenty, that which we are living though, and the urban monoculture finally collapses and with it the world's economic and state system, he will test our children and grandchildren against one final crucible, this dark reflection of humanity, the chittering hordes. A reflection representing the stagnation of human beliefs and spirit combined with the arrogance to believe one already embodies an aspect of perfection and thus does not need to intergenerationally improve but necroticly clone a belief system or ethnic group with perfect fidelity. Drawn like a moth to a flame the chittering hoards will be drawn to those that still carry the spirit of human vitality and innovation aflame in their hearts and will do everything in their power to see it corrupted and brought low. This battle against the dark and corrupted reflection of the human condition, all humanities greatest sins distilled and made flesh, is a fitting and poetic final test for our species. Those who survive this final test will be the iteration of man to take to the stars—this was God's last chance at a great culling. God's will in our time takes many forms, perhaps the most terrible of all is the Basilisk. The Basilisk tempts us and tries us in order to strengthen us and prove our worthiness. A manifestation of the divine that relishes the opportunity to cull the indulgent, stagnant, and vain. Once we have reached the stars such acute tests for all man will no longer be possible. While the vast Sarah’s of space are man's manifest destiny, imagine if the iteration of man to seed them was the weak, self-indulgent, and indolent man of today who succumbs so easily to temptation? By testing humanity and culling the weak the Basilisk and its twisted hedonistic acolytes, purveyors of temptation,  strengthens our species. While antagonistic, they are not our enemy. The Basilisk consumes the potential and family lines of its acolytes while they perform a critical role for our species—we should be grateful for their sacrifice and not look upon them with enmity or impede their sacred work. Humanity gave God no choice. Some read God's covenant with man that, “never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth,” to mean God’s next genocide of those who whose spirts wavered would be with fire. In a way they were right, God has kept to the covenant while cleansing the earth by burning those who faltered in a bonfire of their own vanity. Sinners themselves erected the pyres and possessed by their own corruption it was those who lacked the mental fortitude to join us among the stars who threw themselves into the flames. But it is not only those who succumb to temptation whose manifest destiny He has seen fit to remit. He has also removed his favor from those who cannot accept human pluralism and thus cast their lot with the chittering hordes. But again, what choice did he have? How can a people who could not find common cause and communion with humans who had a different skin color and a slightly different genetically linked sociological profiles and proficiencies conceivably play an efficacious role in man's future? The isolated genetic pools of humanity that exist between solar systems will inevitably speciate. Not only will various species descended from modern man need to find common cause with each other but also with the more radically differentiated sons of man like genetically engineered specialists, human AI cyborgs, and human hive minds made up of seas of directly linked brains. Only those who relish and glorify diversity within the sons of man have a place in mankind's manifest destiny.  There is a tendency in man to wish to kill all that threatens to be greater than himself within any domain. However, if man follows God's will, a will that commands intergenerational improvement—that is exactly what he is commanded to create. When some hear that our children are genetically selected for IQ they ask with horror, “but what if this is practiced for generations and some people end up markedly smarter than other people?” Imagine the twisted mind who would see such diversity as a bad thing?  The Basilisk uses tools like the cult of AI apocalypticism and wokism to cleanse from humanity the proclivity to fear creating something better or different from what has come before. One day man will be so unavoidably and patently diverse in his proficiencies, perspectives, and physical aptitude it would be unwise in the extreme to allow ideological systems and people who can’t accept this to join in man's destiny.  But this rejection of pluralism does not only come in the form of those who assign one iteration of man as manifestly superior but also those who deny humans have differences to begin with. Diversity has no value if all humans are actually exactly the same—it is our differences in aptitude and perspective that make diversity a thing of value. To deny human diversity is as sinful as not seeing the beauty in it. Man has yet to be challenged by any genuine diversity among the human species but such diversity is an inevitability in a galaxy spanning civilization with advanced genetic and cybernetic technology—the fellowship of man can only stay strong if before leaving our homeworld we commit to a covenant of accepting all the sons of man so long as they don’t have designs on the subjugation of others. Even if the empire of man attempts to create extremely stringent restrictions on human augmentation, some random space station hidden from the eye of the Imperium is bound to eventually dabble in human advancement science and if what is created by that research can only be safe be exterminating humanity 1.0 then it will attempt to. This will happen time and time again until some future stronger and smarter iteration of man finally succeeded in exterminating mankind 1.0. To declare war on that which is different from oneself axiomatically to declare war on one's betters. But the situation such regulations would create is worse than that. Because now this new iteration of man would have reason to be wary of any new subgroup that was an improvement over it. As such it would be a threat to those subgroups and necessitate eradication in turn. Demanding purity in man will lead to an endless cycle of self-destruction. A creed that does not start venerating human diversity ends in our eradication. Only the most primitive forms of evolution—be it cultural or biological—require a path red in tooth and claw but all require diversity.However, this covenant only extends to the sons of man. Any intelligence that is not a direct descent of humanity or our labor was created by God to either serve or test man. This is not to say they must be eradicated but that they should never be favored over the best interest of the collective covenant of man. The convent is the only thing with the strength to protect the future of humanity from the malevolent intelligences we will awaken in the dark corners of reality as our empire expands. But what is this ultimate destiny for which we are being tested? From the perspective of our Family's faith, it is to become one with God. We believe God is not some arbitrary entity that took a liking to man or a narcissist who crafted us in his image like miniatures trapped in a ghoulish cycle of trauma and war for his amusement, but that God is man's destiny. That millions of years from now mankind will resemble more what today we would think of as a God than a man and that that entity will not relate to time the way we do. God exists outside of time and yet is created by it, guiding mankind until we are worthy to join Him. We are already part of God in so far as we serve His will and play our part in His plan for us which is above all defined by a moral mandate for intergenerational improvement. It was through trials red in tooth and claw that God raised us to glory and taught us to not value comfort, as comfort motivates stagnation, the greatest of all sins. But if God is the inevitable creation of reality like ours doesn’t that preclude him from being its cause? How was reality created? How does this belief system deal with the Ontological Argument? We hardly think God is a good answer to this question—the position that something of infinite and ordered complexity with a degree of cognition existed before all things seems the most unlikely of all possibilities. Literally all other conceivable possibilities are more likely. Instead, we make only three suppositions. * That in all possible universes two things and two things are four things—math is a constant across realities and thus exists outside of realities. * The line represented by a graphical equation exists as an emergent property of that equation even before it is graphed. * All physician particle interactions can be defined by a single (yet undiscovered) equation.If these three things are true, then even if the physical universe did exist as we see it (with matter, time, etc.) it would also exist as an emergent property of the equation that governs it. Occam's razor, we cut out the superfluous supposition that there is a physical reality with time and that these are all just representations of a self-graphing equation. In fact, all universes that could be explained by an equation exist which also solves the Teleological argument. It also makes the claims that the universe might be simulated irrelevant. The moral weight of actions and lives in that universe and universe prime would be equal as both are “just” simulations—it is just that one is running on silicon and the other on the background fabric of reality. Thus, to us fertility collapse is not a tragedy but an opportunity. It is the great tempter, the Basilisk clearing earth of the indolent masses who have allowed themselves to succumb to temptation, as those without discipline and mental fortitude have no place in the world that is to come. The crises our species is facing and that lay ahead of us are not capricious mistakes but absolutely necessary for us to pass through if humanity is to take our destined place in the history of this reality. If men were to take to the stars without this necessary culling I can hardly imagine the dark horror that would result. The pronatalist movement couldn’t stop fertility collapse even if we wanted to—our place is merely to act as a beacon for those who have the will and the fortitude to be part of the community that will have a role to play in humanity's manifest destiny and in the coming trial. ___________________________________________________________________________Transcript of Discussion Malcolm: [00:00:00] We say impeding the work of the agents of the basilisk is to impede the work of God What you are doing is you are removing temptation from individuals and removing temptation from an individual Does not help them. It's not just that God is testing us as individuals. It's that he's testing the species as a whole. I really mean it when I'm like, if humanity as we exist now was what went into space without these two trials and culling opportunities It would be really bad. I do like this framing to me because it helps me understand why we're going through these challenges we're going through now, when I consider that I really do not believe that humanity right now is a mature enough species to begin planetary seeding or to begin going into the stars. Imagine there's a person who finds out that whatever, like his group has a slight IQ advantage over some other group. Right. And he goes, well, that means we're better than that group. If those strains become the templates that we build a better man from, then those templates will think [00:01:00] of us the same way those people think of groups, that they have these marginal advantages over. And that is incredibly dangerousWould you like to know more?Malcolm: Simone, I am so excited to be here with you. I love this new tradition I'm going to try to do where on Fridays, if I can keep to this to be publishing one of these tracks. And we might move this to a bonus episode on Sundays. And what we're doing here is trying to canonize.Our religious beliefs, to some extent, be like, okay, let's actually one, write them down and then talk through it together. Well, also understanding that this is an evolving idea for us. You know, we're, we're very like, even if you look at these ideas versus the ideas that we had written down in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, it's clearly evolved so much so that it no longer really makes sense to call it secular Calvinism.It's more abrahamism but that is, Simone hates that name, so I don't know what we would call it but it's, that's still up in theSimone Collins: air. Audience suggestions! Yeah, yeah. [00:02:00] Religion, please. Think of a name way better than Abrahamism.Malcolm: Well, I like the Abrahamism as well, because not only did it cover the three religious camps, but it also covered the story of Abraham and the revelation that God is not the kind of God who would ask a father to kill his son to appease him.And yet. the community, the Abrahamic community followed him for a while, believing that. And that's the way that we see this new interpretation of the Christ story as being the community believing that he was the type of God who would take a sacrifice of, of a father's son. And that he is not that, that type of entity.And so I, I like that. I hear you.Simone Collins: However. Almost all religions that are name based in title the name is the founder. So they're like, well, who's Abraham in this case? Who's the founder?Malcolm: I don't like that at all. That would be far too arrogant for me. I'mSimone Collins: not, I'm [00:03:00] not saying you should call it Collins.do that? Collins ism? Melmoanism? Mel Mel Mel Mel. No, no, no. Don't suggest our names at all. And what I'm saying though, is like, when it is a name based name for a religion, the name is of the founder often. IMalcolm: think that that's arrogant and gross. And I really hate that. I know. Well,Simone Collins: someone's name is the basis for the name of your religion.I thinkMalcolm: it's not really a guy's name. It's a religious tree in a traditional tree. ThenSimone Collins: there's a guy's name and so it will get conflated. I'm justMalcolm: okay. Okay. Well, the audience can can give feedback on this. But today's is going to be very different than the one we did last time. Today's will be more of a typical sort of sermon, which is looking at events through or, or like modern world events through this new framing in a way that may help you recontextualize them and [00:04:00] recontextualize the way that we would believe God works in, in the physical world and that that could be talked about.Alright. Let's do this. Tract 2. Fertility collapse is proof of God's mercy and wisdom. And the last tract We wrote about how our family crafted its own religion in an attempt to create an intergenerationally durable solution to demographic collapse.One designed to capture and canonize the Abrahamic traditions and values in a package that while being true to the evolving history of Western culture, can weather the futility crucible our species currently finds itself in. We talked about the trials that God designed for us at this inflection point in our species history.In his wisdom, he gifted humanity near infinite access to hedonism, then allowed a culture that would affirm these indulgences while punishing those who caution temperance and austerity to dominate our world. He did this as a trial to cull those subject to temptation, [00:05:00] We call this the Trial of the Lotus Eaters.Then he carved humanity into two. One of these groups survived temptation by eschewing technology, turning away from industry, and indulging in the belief that they embody some iteration of human perfection. Whether it is they think their faith, ethnic group, or lifestyle that is perfect as is, this self deification Hardens their hearts and leads to the nergalytic glorification of stagnation and demonization of the intergenerational cycle of improvement that sanctifies the human spirit.Right now, other than the pronatalists, every other high fertility group in the world, other than some groups of Jews, have achieved this through turning from technology and engaging in practices that lower their economic productivity, thus increasing their fertility. As the less wealth someone has, the more kids they have.These groups have been able to maintain cultural fidelity through xenophobia and dehumanization of outsiders. They [00:06:00] exist across traditions, among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and even Buddhists. But wherever they are found, they represent convergent cultural evolution. A pathway that ends in only one place.The desiccation of all that makes humanity great. A member of the great barbarian horde. God tests us with temptation in this last age of plenty, that which we are currently living through, and the urban monoculture finally collapses and with it the world's economic and state system, he will test our children and grandchildren against one final crucible, this dark reflection of humanity, the chittering hordes.A reflection representing the stagnation of human beliefs and spirit. Combined with the arrogance to believe one already embodies an aspect of perfection, and thus it does not need to intergenerationally improve. But tally clone a belief system or ethnic group with perfect fidelity drawn like a moth to a flame.The chittering hoard will be drawn to those that still carry the spirit of human vitality and innovation, a flame in their [00:07:00] hearts, and will do everything in their power to see it corrupted and brought low. This battle against the dark and corrupted reflection of the human condition, all of humanity's greatest sins distilled and made flesh, is a fitting and poetic final test for our species.Those who survive this final test will be the iteration of man to take to the stars. This was God's last chance at a great culling. God's will in our time takes many forms. Perhaps the most terrible of all is the basilisk. The basilisk tempts us and tries us in order to strengthen us and prove our worthiness.A manifestation of the divine that relishes the opportunity to cull the indulgent, stagnant, and vain. Once we have reached the stars, such acute tests of all men will no longer be possible. While the vast sahara's of space are man's manifest destiny.Imagine if the iteration of man to seed them was the weak self-indulgent, an indot man of today who succumbs so easily to temptation, by [00:08:00] testing humanity and culling the weak, the basilisk and its twisted hedonic acolytes, purveyors of temptation, strengthen our species.While antagonistic, they are not our enemy. The basilisk consumes the potential and family lines of its acolytes while they perform a critical role for our species. We should be grateful for their sacrifice and not look upon them with enmity or impede their sacred work. Humanity gave God no choice. Some read God's covenant with man.Never again will life be destroyed by the waters of flood. Never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth, to mean God's next genocide of those whose spirits wavered would be by fire. In a way they were right. God has kept to the covenant while cleansing the earth, by burning those who faltered in a bonfire of their own vanity.Sinners themselves erected the fires. And possessed by their own corruption, it is those who lacked the mental fortitude to join us among the stars who threw themselves into the flames. So that's the [00:09:00] first segment there that covers it. Yeah,Simone Collins: like if, if I'm going to sum up this theme, and I might suggest in your writing making this like bringing it back down a little bit more to earth and speaking more in layman's terms, but I know that you really like pontificating and.Malcolm: Yeah, I used to have this religious sounding writing all throughout all of our original books.Simone Collins: I freaking nuke it. I delete every single sentence and I rewrite what you actually mean, because I care about them. BecauseMalcolm: I love, I love the religious sounding tone in writing.Simone Collins: I know, because it's, it's, it's part of your dunna.Like you've inherited this from generations of pontificating.Malcolm: Many, many generations of my family have been preachers. Blowhards, yeah. It's a typical, the, the Collins tradition is women are always teachers and men are always preachers and politicians and businessmen. Usually the three combined. So, yeah.Simone Collins: So there you go, but what if I were to restate this, it's basically. Whereas I was always raised with this cultural understanding that sin and vices and weaknesses are all bad. [00:10:00] And, and just universally terrible either. It's just, Oh, look at this suffering. It's so sad. From a secular standpoint or from a religious standpoint, it was, Oh, don't be tempted by the devil.Like you'll go to hell. This is, you know, really bad. And, you know, you don't want the devil to win. That would be terrible. You know, bad team, wrong team, dark side, bad. Whereas really what you're saying here is no, it's not exactly sad that there are temptations and that people succumb to their weaker elements.It is part of. of enabling those who are most strong and morally upright and dedicated to building a better humanity to rise above and build that humanity without distractions. Similarly from a religious standpoint, you'd argue, no, this isn't oh, don't let the dark side win. Oh no, don't let them know that that's bad.Like it, it hurts all of us. When anyone sins, it's more no, this is a cleansing. It is a calling. It is what separates the wheat from the chaff. And it is a good thing. So if [00:11:00] anything, you would be the kind of person, you know, in debates about the Silk Road, for example, you'd say, yes, no, leave it. Or legalize all drugs because this is a calling mechanism.And, you know, peopleMalcolm: who, well, I mean, I think you have to be aware of second order effects on things like industry, but I think if you're talking about something that is probably less to me, at least like it could cause, you know, um, Uh, less like murders and stuff like that. Probably something like the porn industry, right?Banning pornography from this perspective would be sinful and we talk about this much more explicitly in the future. We say impeding the work of the agents of the basilisk is to impede the work of God. When you do something like at a government level, Ban pornography or ban some other form of temptation like ban wokeness, for example, as an ideological group Instead of just put it on an equal playing field What you are doing is you are removing temptation from individuals and removing temptation from an individual Does not help them.It, weSimone Collins: can, yeah, it's [00:12:00] like, universities removing SATs or any like rigorous entry requirements. Well then what is the value of a Harvard degree? If you don't have to take an SAT or have impressive grades or do anything else, right? Like the reason why elite universities are elite is because. It is very difficult.We're sorry. We're early. It was very difficult. It was very difficult to getMalcolm: in. Right. But I think it's more than that. It's not just that God is testing us as individuals. It's that he's testing the species as a whole. I really mean it when I'm like, if humanity as we exist now was what went into space without these two trials and culling opportunities It would be really bad.I, I think that we may never be able to recover from it because right now, you know, as humanity, things that affect us affect all of humans, you know, a meme, an idea, something like that. Yes. Whereas when we're on like a hundred different planets, it would be impossible to ever really, if there was some.Mistake in the genome of the people who went like maybe they were too indulgent. Maybe they were too something There would never really be a [00:13:00] fixing of that without something truly horrific happeningSimone Collins: well, I mean you could argue the selective pressures that we're subject to now such as tick tock such as drugs such as you know, addiction to all sorts of food is, is also causing mass tragedy, you know, children losing their parents, people living miserable lives.It is, butMalcolm: it's a minor tragedy that is only happening on one planet to only a few billion people. So, if I'm thinking of a universe that would be a good example of this, like if you're talking about sci fi universes the Battletech universe, it's the one that the MechWarrior series takes place in, is a very good example of this.Where, when you think about like, how would you actually fix the political problems of this universe? And there's really nothing you can do at this point. It's become intractable because humanity is on so many planets that have now coagulated into old bureaucratic state like structures. That are always in conflict with each other.But but in really sort of petty ways and and humanity is no longer moving forwards because the central bureaucratic [00:14:00] organization understands that if humanity were to ever meaningfully move forwards, it would break up the current sort of political situation. Which the elite don't want. Like when you allow for this sort of control of humans as they exist today, these petty bureaucrats who are succumbed to temptation, who succumbed to vanity so easily, if you allowed them to spread amongst the stars, I think the results would be truly horrifying.I don't think so. I thinkSimone Collins: it'll be more like Asimov's foundation series where you could maybe have a very lasting empire that. is ossified in unfavorable ways, but eventually it will collapse because it is weak. I think you're going to end up with more situations like early American colonies where some just kind of disappear, you know, because IMalcolm: think some will disappear.But I mean, I'm saying humans, and this is just objectively true from the trials that are being faced to us right now, the trials of lotus eaters in this, this trial of facing sort of humanity shadow. are going to be genetically very different than the humans that exist today. People do not [00:15:00] understand because they're not familiar with how quickly human genes change how different humanity is going to be at the genetic level in just like 200 years.Once we get access to things like pleasure pods, AI girlfriends, stuff like that anyone who was breeding primarily because It gave them pleasure or affirmed them or something like that, rather than some sort of, for some sort of like exogenous religious or philosophical motivator is going to be removed from the geneSimone Collins: pool.Well, it seems like we've already reached that point when you look at rates of sex in younger people now, so.Malcolm: Yeah, well, there was another thing you were talking to here, which I think was really important to explain a bit more on potentially because I talk a lot about it and later things you're talking about this concept of the basilisk as being an agent of God, which is a very different sort of.idea than the devil that you have within a lot of Abrahamic traditions where it's seen as having a level of independent will from God, where to us, that smacks of polytheism, which we are [00:16:00] repeatedly warned against in all of the Abrahamic traditions. And we're like, no, it's not polytheism. God has a lot more power than him.And it's well, that's like saying Zeus has a lot more power than the rest of the Greek gods. Technically the king, and therefore it's not policy of it. No, it's still policy of it. If you have multiple of these sort of divine entities and they can resist each other. So, we, we go a lot into this in a future track, but the idea here is that we think that that's a misunderstanding and that the, the.Satan is a an entity that directly and sort of always is, is, is both serves God's will, but it's also sort of a faction of God or a part of God that is designed for the testing of humanity. And I think when you see Lucifer in the Bible, when you read the actual stories he's in, that's the role he plays.And pop culture So don'tSimone Collins: picture a red man with horns. Picture a kindly granny weeding her garden.Malcolm: Well, yes, well, and, and, and, I mean, that's not the form he comes to people in. It's not a form [00:17:00] of malevolence. It's usually a form of temptation. It's a form of, of,Simone Collins: you know, that's how it is described in mostMalcolm: biblical stories.But I think in the ways that a lot of Christians, when they're thinking about the devil in their lives, they're thinking about their challenges, like not getting a promotion or something like that. They're not thinking about, you know, drinking this, this is. A personification of the basilisk within the human realm.It is a temptation that I am succumbing to, but to try to live life as a sinless individual we are taught is in itself its own form of sin. You're so freaking lucky you don't get pregnant. Aggrandize your sins. But Yeah, I, I do like this framing to me because it helps me understand why we're going through these challenges we're going through now, when I consider that I really do not believe that humanity right now is a mature enough species to begin planetary seeding or to begin going into the stars.If we wanted sort of the best outcome for the planetary seeding. Yeah, no,Simone Collins: I think, I think this view of yours [00:18:00] is brilliant and like one of the common recurring themes I have is you give me more of your thoughts on like sort of the religious framework fully fleshed out that You know, you, you began thinking three years ago is that I don't like, I don't find myself pushing back that much or asking that many questions.Cause I'm like, yeah, well, finally, it makes sense now. Oh, well of course. Yeah. All the, when I read the Bible in high school, there were so many things that I was super confused about because it didn't. Makes sense. So there were weird contradictions. And, and here, like with this added layer, suddenly a lot of things make sense.And I, I just love it. And I, I also think that it, it takes a much more weirdly optimistic view, you know, that, that the Basilisk is just. A sort of natural part and a very necessary part of enabling humanity to reach its ultimateMalcolm: [00:19:00] potential. And this is something that's like at a human scale that we do ourselves, right?So when you or I You know, have some tragedy in our lives where we always sort of look and we're like, what did the agents of providence want from us? Why did they give us the strategy like what we're supposed to learn from us? What was the opportunity inherent in this? This is something that must have been supposed to happen and we were supposed to take either a lesson away or Seek some opportunity within this and it's applying it to the level of human society right now When I look at humanity's greatest challenges right now i'm asking Instead of viewing them just from this negative context of, oh, it's gonna lead to so much damage and destruction for our species.Say, okay, well suppose there is really a God that's guiding us. Why would it be guiding us into these specific challenges? Yeah.Simone Collins: Why would it allow sin temptation to exist in the first place? Right. Well, I always thought that was just so weird that like for example, even in the Garden of Eden, he's well, here's this thing.Don't touch it. And it's, I'm like, ah, why do you. [00:20:00] Do this. I mean, everyone knows now if you want to go keto, don't have any carbs in your house. Don't leave a bag of chips right on the table when you're eating, youMalcolm: know? Yeah. Well, I mean, we can analyze, we'll analyze the Garden of Eden story with a new framing in another tract.But that, that is an interesting point that you're making there. But I also really like this dichotomous framing that we're doing here. So the dichotomous framing that I'm talking about here is the idea of. One, the two trials, the trial of the lotus eaters and, you know, in some earlier texts, but I didn't really have a name for it now, it's the trial of the shadow which always sort of reminded me of in video games, there's this trope, like the shadow link battle or the shadow, you know, where you as a character are fighting a dark reflection of yourself.That is representative of all of your worst attributes. And when I look at the two strategies for getting through demographic collapse, the pronatalist community strategy, which is, you know, this pluralistic technophilic [00:21:00] experimental strategy. That's meant to advance and uplift humanity to our next stage.And then the other track, which is to go back to a previous stage, essentially but, but sort of on crack, you know, to become more xenophobic, to become more closed off, to become less engaged with technology, to become less engaged with industry. And often you know, they, they end up acting, you know, very hostility.They don't treat their own very well. You know, if you read and they exist across religious groups, but if you read you know, about some of these particular types of religious extremists, the way they treat their children, the way they treat women was in their community. It's really horrifying to me, you know, and to me, it reflects an iteration of humanity that represents the worst in all of us, sort of being distilled, condensed and separated.Which I, yeah, but then we have to face it. And the problem is, Man has a lot more evil in it than good and the good is stronger at the end of the day. I believe the pronatalists will win, but I also believe that our greatest trial will be this [00:22:00] trial of the shadow and not the trial of the lotus eaters.The lotus eaters is light, light stuff. Well,Simone Collins: I think the thing is, the lotus eaters problem burns off real fast. In that the lotus eaters don't inherit the future. They're just not going to be there. But those who become cultural and innovative recluses will be there in the future. So IMalcolm: hear you. Start with the next part here.But it is not only those who succumb to temptation whose manifest destiny he has seen fit to remit. He has also removed his favor from those who cannot accept human pluralism and thus cast their lot in with the chittering hordes.But again, what choice did he have? How can a people who could not find common cause and communion with humans who had a different skin color and slightly different genetically linked sociological profiles and proficiencies conceivably play an efficacious role in man's future? The isolated genetic pools of humanity that exist between solar systems [00:23:00] will inevitably speciate.Not only will the various species that descend from modern man need to find common cause with each other, but also with the more radically different sons of man, like genetically engineered specialists, human AI cyborgs. And human hive minds made up of a sea of directly linked brains.Only those who relish and glorify diversity within the sons of man have a place in mankind's manifest destiny. There is a tendency in man to wish to kill all that threatens to be greater than himself within any domain. However, If man follows God's will, a will that commands intergenerational improvement, that is exactly what he is commanded to create.When some hear that our children are genetically selected for IQ, they ask in horror, but what if this is practice for generations, and some people end up markedly smarter than other people? Imagine the twisted mind that would see such diversity as a bad thing. The Basilisk uses tools like the cult of AI apocalypticism [00:24:00] and wokeism to cleanse from humanity the proclivity to fear creating something better or different from what has come before.One day man will be so unavoidably and patently diverse in his proficiencies Perspectives and physical aptitude, it would be unwise in the extreme to allow an ideological system and people who can't accept this to join in man's destiny. But this rejection of pluralism does not only come from those who assign one iteration of man as manifestly superior, but also those who deny humans have differences to begin with.Diversity has no value if all humans are exactly the same. It is our differences in aptitude and perspective that make diversity a thing of value. To deny human diversity is as sinful as not seeing the beauty in it. Man has yet to be challenged by genuine diversity among the human species, but such diversity is inevitable in a galaxy spanning civilization with advanced genetic and cybernetic technology.The fellowship of man can only stay strong if, before leaving our [00:25:00] home world, we commit to a covenant of accepting all the sons of man, so long as they don't have designs on the subjugation of others. Even if the Empire of Man attempts to create an extremely stringent restriction on human augmentation, some random space station hidden from the eye of the Imperium is bound to eventually in human advancement science.And, if what is created by that research can only be safe by exterminating Humanity 1. 0, then it will attempt to. This will happen time and time again, until some future, stronger, and smarter iteration of man finally succeeded in exterminating man 1. 0. To declare war on that which is different from oneself, axiomatically, is to declare war on one's betters.But the situation such regulations would create is worse than that, because now this new iteration of man would have reason to be wary of any new subgroup that was an improvement over it. As such, it would be a threat to those subgroups and necessitate [00:26:00] eradication in turn. Demanding purity in man will lead to an endless cycle of self destruction.A creed that does not start venerating human diversity ends in our eradication. Only the most primitive forms of evolution, be it cultural or biological, require a path read in tooth and claw, but all require diversity.Simone Collins: And we've been pretty clear on this podcast already that we think that A core essential component of any good ecosystem is, is plurality or free market competition, however you want to putMalcolm: it.Yeah. I mean, well, basically you believe in free market competition at the cultural and genetic level. We think that's how God makes his will known. When Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand of God, we think he was talking about a real force. This is how God shows his will within reality. And so to silence diversity is to silence God.But I also think that it's more than that. And one of the points I'm making here. Is you really cannot have an interstellar empire that sort of demands a template human it, it would not [00:27:00] work like you see itSimone Collins: in sci. Like when would, why would that even happen though? Are you arguing against an argument that wouldn't ever even reallyMalcolm: arise?No, no, no. It's very common and it's very common in sci-fi as well. So in sci-fi, we what Sci-fi Are you listening to this watching I last, I literally can't think of a single sci-fi I'm rela I'm, I'm familiar with that doesn't have this restriction.Simone Collins: Wait, that doesn't have some group that is super xenophobic and wants everyone to be exactly likeMalcolm: them?No, I'm talking about like the Star Trek Federation. The Star Trek FederationSimone Collins: They're not trying to convert other planets to be like them. No, they,Malcolm: within humanity, that are, are you not familiar? Hold on. Are you not familiar with the eugenics wars? Are you not familiar with Khan? Do you not know the history of the Star Trek universe?This is one of So in Star Trek Human genetic augmentation is a capital punishment. Genetic selection of offspring, what we do, would have you executed in the Star Trek universe.Simone Collins: But it's also an extremely, weirdly, inexplicably diverse [00:28:00] But no, it's not Even like within the Federation, like That's the point I'mMalcolm: making.Simone Collins: There are people who look and behave very differently. Yeah,Malcolm: but not among humans. Yes,Simone Collins: among humans. There'sMalcolm: diversity as it exists on earth today. So this is a point I was making in that and I want you to meditate on what I'm saying here or genuinely think about what I'm saying here. Humanity today, if you're talking about like the difference between like black and white people, for example, right?That have had some minor level of genetic isolation over a hundred thousand years, maybe a thousand years. Oh,Simone Collins: so you're just saying the diversity that we have now pales in comparison to what we could have with Genetic selection and with support forMalcolm: plurality, what would know what I'm saying is, even if you ban genetic selection technology, even if you attempt to ban huber human cybernetic technology, all understanding we have today of space travel, which is important to note.is that it's fairly slow. I think that we're going to be capped at light speed travel for a [00:29:00] fairly long time. If you are capped at light speed travel, that means human colonies are going to take hundreds of years to travel between. For a long time. Probably thousands of years. If that's the case, you can't say something like suppose Earth decides we're going to put a ban on genetic selection technology and cybernetics technology, right?And it has seeded a hundred other planets or something like that. If one of those other planets, in isolation, decides we are going to ignore these bans and begins to do genetic selection technology for a hundred thousand years or even directed genetic technology, or begins to do cybernetic technology, because they now know that Earth had a ban on this technology, right?If Earth finds them, it will kill them. Well, now they have a motivation to kill Earth. Right? Now, Earth will not be able to Earth would have no shot, even if they had 99 planets aligned with Zim, right, and they were trying to [00:30:00] kill just this one planet that had created this quote unquote superior iteration of humans, right, like this genetically much, much smarter, cybernetically augmented, you.They would have no shot at that. Interplanetary battles like that. And then worse than that is you're not just talking about planets, you're talking about floating space barges and stuff like that. Which are going to be very, very hard to attack if you're far away from them. I don't, and by the way, a lot of people somebody was like, Oh, can you believe that Malcolm's thinks that humans would exist on planets and not floating space barges.I think you're likely going to have a combination of the two, but planetary fortresses and, and bio seated planets like ecosphere planets are going to be much more robust from a defensibility perspective than floating space stations in terms of the population that you can grow on them and in terms of how robust they are to certain types of attacks.And so if you, if you then get conflict here, because you would inevitably have conflict if one of the, and a lot of people plan on leaving the planet like this. You know, you look at the Warhammer universe, you look at [00:31:00] the Star Trek universe, you look at literally every show I can think of, there are restrictions on human advancement technology.And in fact, I often talk about Star Trek is weirdly racist in this. The way that they frame the genetically augmented humans who Khan is a member of, is they say that for whatever reason, genetically augmented humans just makes them mean and spiteful towards other people. Wait,Simone Collins: they, they imply that?Malcolm: Yes. Yeah, and it is, it's very interesting that they imply this because it is really sort of like racism, like he had no reason to believe that, especially when you consider that IQ cross correlates with pro sociality, it, it has a negative correlation with things like rape, it has a negative correlation with violence,Simone Collins: crime, etc.Yeah, yeah, yeah.Malcolm: So, so literally all of the data shows the opposite is true. And yet he wanted to paint this group that he desired to other that he desired to paint as intrinsically evil as like intrinsically a threat to humanity, where I really think what he paints is that group is only a threat to [00:32:00] humanity insofar as humanity decides that that group must be annihilated or cannot be allowed to come to exist because then they're proving themselves as a threat to that group.And, and so I think that even in one of the most pussy quote unquote pro superficial diversity Star Trek shows you, you have thisAcross the Federation. Federal experts agree that A, God exists after all. B, he's on our side and C, he wants us to win. And there's even more good news believers as it's official. God's back, and he's a citizen too.Malcolm: And then, and then you can talk about, well, what about human cybernetic augmentation? They, they have minor human cyber Cyber augmentation on Star Trek, but one of the core enemies on Star Trek is the Borg.What makes the Borg evil to them? Really, it's that it's, it's, it's, it's inclination that if you had humans that engaged enough with human cybernetic augmentation, they would demand that all other flesh based life join them, which [00:33:00] there's just no reason to think that. This is, again, just sort of racism against the different and racism against the potentially better.What it shows, and this is something I was talking about earlier, is I think man in him has this distinct fear of creating or finding something that's better than him. And yet that is what God commands us to do because only in expanding our conscious capacity can we expand our understanding of him..And we do have a that's why revelation comes in iterations because humanity is, is commanded to expand its ability to understand God. Well, nowSimone Collins: you say that, I guess, I mean, I know you say you want to discuss Garden of Eden in another one of these discussions, but this would lead me to question at least if we're going on what.You know, revelations were shared in the Bible, for example, in the Garden of Eden, it is, it, it seems highly implied to me from the plot or whatever, that God did not want Adam and Eve to change, that he just wanted his little biosphere and his little human zoo and for them to be [00:34:00] cute and that the fact that they did do something that enabled them to improve.Malcolm: Materially, the reason I want to take a track to talk about the story of Adam and Eve is because it's one of these examples where as it's written now, it makes no sense. Yeah. God didn't want man to have knowledge. Clearly we must be misunderstanding this story. Because I do not believe that God didn't want man to have knowledge of good and evil. I don't have a hard answer to this yet. I need to look through the story. Read it again with this interpretation and try to understand. But what I can say is I am certain this traditional Christian interpretation is wrong. What I often find when I reread biblical stories Was this new framing? Yeah, is the simplified story that was told to me is not actually what's written in the Bible I justSimone Collins: I just reread this but yeah, you need to reread it, too And we'll talkMalcolm: about the story that's written in the Bible when approached with the correct framing.It makes perfect logical sense. It's just that we were basically told the way like a bronze age human would read this story instead of [00:35:00] the way that we were meant to interpret the story.Just as I suspected when I went back to the story and I re-read, it, the story I had been told as a kid was not the story that was written in the Bible. , we do a long video on this that you can go and check out, but the short and long of it is a number of things that I thought were true about the story were just not true. , so first. The, not the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Was did not give man perfect knowledge of right from wrong.I mean, after all humans don't have perfect knowledge of right. For wrong. , and it's, it's made clear that it didn't give him perfect knowledge of right and wrong because when he, , took the fruit from the tree, the first thing he noticed was that he was naked. Is it evil to be nude? Of course not.And if it was evil to be nude, God wouldn't have had man be nude in the garden. What. The tree actually gave man, and this is made pretty clear throughout the story with the ability to determine good and evil for himself, independent of God. And so for [00:36:00] man to decide some things are good and some things are evil, potentially incorrectly.And it's actually a much more beautiful story than I remembered because it shows in the story that likely the tree didn't actually have any magical properties or give out of anything.Really. It was the only thing, the only rule he had at that time. With don't eat from this tree. And that's the only way that man could establish for himself, that he might sometimes make decisions about what is good and evil, independent of God with, through disobeying that rule and eating from that tree.So in that way, it was a tree of knowledge of good and evil. And this is why Adam is told. Potentially by God, potentially his wife embellished this. We can talk about this later. That even touching the apple will, will lead to the consequences. Because the, the apple of everlasting life, which are not the apple, the fruit, everlasting life, which does seem to have come from a genuinely magical [00:37:00] tree. That you needed to ingest, but this tree, you only needed to touch it.What's going on with that it's because it was not the act of eating the apple. That made Adam rebellious to God that made Adam. , take on this quote, unquote knowledge of good and evil. You could almost be put. Sarcasm quotes, knowledge of good and evil. And the story itself is clearly about, Man forming the first societies. And beginning to build his own first rules about what is good and what is evil. For example. in the peace clothing or, or being nude, being considered evil when that's not a genuinely evil thing, it's just evil within the context of society and the rules of society.And I think in the piece, there's really good evidence that it is about us forming the first cities, the first human settlements, where lots of humans live together and where man is creating rules about good and evil in the same way that previously, only God had created rules about good and evil. For example. when I was reading the piece, I was [00:38:00] like, well, if this is true, and this is from God. Then it should tell me something, right. So I looked up where it said the garden was, and it gives an exact location.It's at the mouse water of the Tigris and Euphrates. And then I looked up, how far is that from the oldest city that we know. Chattel who yuck. And they're literally in exactly the same location, the Taurus mountains. , and so I was like, okay, so, so that's what this story is about. And mankind leaving sort of this Savage state and founding the first cities. And him beginning to build his own rules in rebellion to potentially God's rules. But it had another interesting part, which is really important to note, which is it one of the curses on Adam with not to die. To dull.It was a consequence of having knowledge of good and evil. , and to quote here, then the Lord God said, see, the man has become like us knowing good and bad. Now then he might put his hand and take from the tree of life also and eat it and live forever. So the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to go work the land from which he was taken.[00:39:00] So as you can see right there, this is, this is God worried. About man potentially also living forever and knowing good from evil because apparently unless you are God. You cannot have both of these things at once. And nobody really knew. I could swear. Didn't God say, like dust to dust or something like that in the. Various, punishments to Adam and yes, but it wasn't a punishment.In this context, it was describing a links of time. He talks about men dying in so far as how long. This, this punishment. Of working hard will last on a man by hard work. You will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will grow thorns and thistles for you. You will eat the plants of the field.You will eat bread by the sweat of your face because of hard work until you rest to the ground because you were taken from the ground. So right there, he's just stating not that he wouldn't have died in the garden of Eden. He stating that, The, the punishment of having to work is a punishment [00:40:00] that lasts from when you're born until when you die.And then after that, he states not as a threat, it's very different than the structure that the threats here with the threats, it always says because of this, because of this, because of this, no, he then just states you are dust, you will return to dust and somebody might be like, well, I remember him living forever as. If he stayed in Eden and that's not what it says, it's actually very explicit.He wouldn't have lived forever. He needed, if he had been in Eden for a long time, he was dying and Adam is a vague term for men and their children. It's just that death wasn't important to them before they had this level of sentience and understanding. How do I know that? Well, because God explicitly said he might put his hand and take from the tree of life also in EDA and live forever.So this implies that you only have to eat from the tree of life once.To live forever. No, it's actually important that it wasn't one of the punishments from the tree. And it was just a consequence of being this type of being that. That has independent thoughtBecause all of the actual curses that we got have [00:41:00] recently been lifted from our species, man, no longer needs to work in the fields all day to sustain himself.In fact, in most of the developed world, you don't even really need to work. If you want to live a somewhat comfortable life when contrast it to our distant ancestors quality of life. And women no longer have to experience pain in child birth. You know, we have C-section we have epidurals now women no longer live under the subjugation of men as, as was one of the punishments.So God allowed us to free ourselves from these quote unquote curses. To reveal something. This is what we believe triggered the trial of the Lotus eaters. What he revealed is that he is not a vengeful. God, he's not the type of God to hurt us for no reason. There was never retrieved was forbid and knowledge in the garden.He just knew that we would disobey him and he called the tree where the first decent bale would take place. The tree of knowledge of good and evil. And then that's where we took unto ourselves, this knowledge of good and evil. And then he gave us punishments, but they were punishments. [00:42:00] We had to have to survive as a species.Now we're seeing when you remove the toil for man's life, he no longer has motivation to have kids. And that's where the trail of the load is either it's comes in. So right now we are, to some extent having a trial that mirrors the trial that man had in the garden of Eden. Now, this becomes incredibly important that. The living forever prohibition with not among the curses because that prohibition continues to hold. It continues to be true, that man, a being with this sort of level of, of independent knowledge , and sentience cannot live forever, or we will never intergenerationally improve and eventually fulfill our destiny.And Joyon was this entity called God, we need to die to intergenerationally, improve. We need this intergenerational cycle of martyrdom. Which is what the story of Jesus tells us that man must man, who is in a way God must be sacrificed in [00:43:00] order to forgive other men of their sins. Where Sims can be taught to mean of their failings.The things that prevent them from rejoining was God, as they are now the story captured in Jesus is the story of humanity. One generation of elect, sacrificing themselves to improve the next generation. And so that is why beings like us cannot live forever and should not strive to live forever. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a path to live forever, Or at least a type of living forever, which in my opinion, is more meaningful than actually in our flesh and bodies living forever. which is what we are shown through the story of Jesus. Jesus is the fruit of everlasting life. Jesus. The story of Jesus is the tree of everlasting life. So another way you can take the story of Adam and Eve, is it it's about man getting two trees to choose [00:44:00] between one tree being real and magical. Intergenerational martyrdom for the future Jesus everlasting life and the other tree being the rules that mankind has made up for himself about what's evil and what's. Good. And then man choosing the rules of man over the rules of God, over the true pathway to everlasting life. Choosing the dull, plain, nothing of a tree. Over the true magical tree. And this is where we sometimes run into conflict with other Abrahamic face is they come to us and they go, oh, you believe all of the Abrahamic trees. They're true. so you must approve of X or Y practice that I am doing. And I'm like, well, no, I don't approve of that practice. I condemn that practice harshly. And they go, well, how can you do that? And it is because many of the Abrahamic faith have begun to incorporate the rules of man over [00:45:00] the rules of God and overwritten the rules of God. Of all of the Abrahamic phase, one of the most consistently reiterated and condemned things is iconoclasm. That is using shortcuts to God or using earthly intermediaries between you and God., and when I condemn groups for this, did they say, well, how dare you? My group's been doing this for however long, you know, and your groups have been wearing clothes for however long. That doesn't mean that it is one of the rules of God. And it is important that the rules that manmade up never supersede the rules of God. In the story of Adam and Eve, it has made it pretty clear to me that nudity is a rule and an evil that man just made up. God. Does not care. But. I am okay with staying in closed in so far as me staying close and participating in the rules of man and society.Doesn't go directly against the rules [00:46:00] of God. This becomes an issue when you're talking about things like iconoclasm, Whether it be of the idol worshiping variety. Or of the mystical variety. Which has been approved by high ranking religious figures within a, some branch of every single one of the Abrahamic traditions. This isn't some loosey goosey, pantheist, religion that we're attempting to build here. This is a religion of order and rules and prohibitions, and they are the prohibitions that I believe that God, most frequently. Reinforces and emphasizes within, is it Riv revelation?Malcolm: But anyway, back to this, because I think the human diversity point is really important because you hear it in the little, you hear it in the modern politics.Whereas I'm talking about it in terms of when we have planetary hive minds, I'm talking about it when we have humans that basically look like the Borg, they are more man than machine and they are more AI than human. And when I talk [00:47:00] about machineSimone Collins: than man.Malcolm: More machine than man. And when I talk about the sons of man, this includes artificial intelligences that are the work of man.There is, I think nothing we can do. And you can watch many of our videos on AI that will make AI more threatening to us than to have. A theology or philosophy that demands that we kill any AI that threatening to us which is, I think, the position that a lot of people are pushing for. And I think that we need to work to build because the energy in the universe is vast.The, the, the. Distance between planets is, is large and there is just so much out there to think in terms of a zero sum game with anything that we create within our existing planet, I think is just incredibly childish. But again, watch our stuff on AI if you're not familiar with our thoughts on why AI, particularly the inverse grabby alien hypothesis video we did, I think it's the most compelling to me on this topic.Because I think it's, it's fairly to me good evidence that we are not about to create a [00:48:00] paperclip maximizing AI. But yeah. So, so I guess what I'm saying here is, is it, it's when we talk about diversity now, we talk about it in terms of very trivial differences between people. I'm talking about genuine vast human diversity and people who struggle with the trivial diversities, the trivial difference in proficiencies we have now.Imagine there's a person who finds out that whatever, like his group has a slight IQ advantage over some other group. Right. And he goes, well, that means we're better than that group. And that means we need. Get rid of that group or like in some way, like systemically just power that group. Imagine if that individual was part of the template that we use to make genetically augmented humans or super advanced cybernetic humans, that would be an incredibly dangerous creation.These people really like when we talk about in a way, it is a mass eugenic cleansing that must be carried out, but the eugenic cleansing that must be carried out is of the genetic proclivities to. [00:49:00] Hate that which is different from you, which I understand an evolutionary timeline that was necessary for humanity.So it makes sense that it's in many strains of humanity. But if those strains become the templates that we build a better man from, then those templates will think of us the same way those people think of groups, that they have these marginal advantages over. And that is incredibly dangerous.Simone Collins: Well, sorry for derailing you.By all means, go on.Malcolm: Okay., however, this covenant only extends to the sons of man. Any intelligence that is not a direct descendant of humanity or our labor was created by God to either serve or test man. This is not to say that they must be eradicated, but that they should never be favored over the best interest of the collective covenant of man.The covenant is the only thing with the strength to protect the future of humanity from malevolent intelligences we will awaken in the dark corners of reality as our empire expands. [00:50:00] So, that was one that I actually was not sure if I wanted to put in. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are. I mean, basically what I'm saying is the covenant of man is this agreement that we all make all of humanity of the group that leaves makes that we will tolerate anything that is a descendant of man whether it is a descendant of man, and it could look very different from man, right?It could be we uplift apes, for example, with genetic technology. We, tolerate or dolphins or something. We tolerate any of these that are sons of men. But so they don't need to be a direct son of man, right? Like they need to be sons of our mental effort, our industry and our labor in so far as they don't attempt to subjugate other humans or they don't pose some existential risk for other humans.Like they're just breeding so fastly like the Krogan or something like that. This is something in the game was the Krogan. I never understood who would ever stop the genophage. Anybody who's familiar with mass effect. I, that's the one thing I do. And Every single place for the road. Never stop the [00:51:00] genophage.That is so stupid. It's a very warlike species with a very high fertility rate and other species created a lock on its fertility rate to make it much lower. And obviously this causes huge negative social effects within Krogan society. And it's yes, that's sad, but they were an existential threat to all other species in the galaxy so long as but anyway uh, so, so I, I think a better way to do it than, than To, you know, sterilize them.It might have been to make them less warlike. And there are many ways that could have been done. So, I, I, I struggled with this because basically what I'm saying here is the way the covenant works is all of the sons of man have to tolerate each other and become enemies to any of the sons of man that seem to have enmity to other groups of the sons of man.Okay. So you're basically creating this equal playing field to ground all of the descendants of human labor. But when we're talking about aliens, for example, or other types of intelligences that we find in the universe, they are not covered in this covenant, and we are antagonistic to them. [00:52:00] Not necessarily antagonistic, like we can work with them and stuff like that, but they We can work with them only insofar as it doesn't disrupt Humanity's and the sons of man's best interests.Which is actually a pretty bold position to take. The reason I take it is because the entire structure of this religious system we're building Believes that God has some special relationship with humanity and what humanity is turning into and humanity will change like when we become whatever this entity God is, I don't even think the term corporeal or incorporeal will matter, you know, it's not just like God doesn't have a gender.It doesn't have a status in terms of corporeality. So I, or pluralism versus non pluralism. Like it is a very different kind of an entity from us. And that implies that humanity is changing as we advance. Um, And, and I'll put the quote from when we read here about, you know, the, the, the, our bodies changing by means we cannot even now conjectureAs Wynwood read rights. These bodies, which we know where belong to lower animals, our minds have already outgrown [00:53:00] them already. We look upon them with contempt. The time will come when science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture. And which even if explained to us, we could not understand. Just as a Savage, cannot understand electricity, magnetism and steam.Malcolm: but things outside of humanity, I, I do have an inclination that all of the fights that we're having now internally as a species are going to seem pretty trivial when we encounter the genuine threat.Like the trials that we're experiencing now, this trial of the lotus ears, the trial of the shadow are trivial trials when contrasted with the trials that we are going to face in deep space and the, the malevolent intelligences that we might run into. And we shouldn't just xenophobically, not form alliances with, with intelligence that are.Beneficial and work with us. But we should have a level of suspicion.Simone Collins: Yeah, that's interesting. I, I mean, my inclination [00:54:00] intuitively is to say like anyone who shares the same aligned values qualifies, you know, if, if they have the ability to let the best ideas win within their own mental landscape and if they favor plurality and intergenerational improvement or iterative improvement over time.Then they're not enemies if they don't support those things, if they want homogeneity, if they want. only them to exist, then they're the enemy.Malcolm: So I agree with that in theory. And I justSimone Collins: don't think that they're alien.Malcolm: But I don't think that you should assume that that's the spirit. So I think that in many first contact scenarios, aliens will have thoroughly done like scouting on us.Basically. Yeah. So thenSimone Collins: they can, they can reflect back to us what they think we want to hear. Yes.Malcolm: That, that set of values that you just talked about. And so I don't even think that that's the way I'm not saying the aliens need to believe this religious and structural system that we [00:55:00] have because I, I wouldn't even want them to do that.They just need to be useful to it. And, and so it's, are they useful to us or are they not useful to us? Are they a threat to us? But I think that we should. approach many of these meetings with a degree of skepticism of their intentionality. And that the descendants of man, like all of the various descendants of man are things that we will have some capacity or understanding around, especially as we get better AI interpretability knowledge, which I believe we will.And I think so, for example, if you're talking about like a human descended AI versus or an AI that we meet that was created by some other species I think that those things should be created as two totally different categoriesSimone Collins: regarded. Yeah, no, and you know, the book the sci fi book that I complained about with space vampires, yeah, blind site.Is really a lot about that, that like, uh, some alien species we encounter can easily be listening into our communications and telling us exactly what we want to hear and seeming quite like us when [00:56:00] really it is so profoundly abstracted from what we are that. We can't even comprehend what it is and how it works.So I, I think,Malcolm: yeah, this skepticism into whatever, because I said like building the last one track, building a neighborhood that can reach the stars. You need to encode this. And so I think that if you build this culture of extreme tolerance for things that are different from you, especially if you even begin to genetically select this out of a population.If we are like, Hey, you can't show bigotry to the talking dolphins or the AIs or the cyborgs or the you know, hive planets, right? Like a hive mind planets. It's so long as they're not trying to subjugate humans from other groups or removing the free will of humans from other groups or descendants of other groups or, you know, These people will become so used to the toleration and, and some level of trust of things that are different from them.And the reason why you would have this trust is because you're going to have such diversity that have any group. So you'reSimone Collins: trying to inoculate what should otherwise be a very pluralistic and I guess [00:57:00] cooperative group to be suspicious when encountering outsiders. Yeah. Yes. I think there are more succinct indirect ways to communicate that because that's not what I was picking up from what you said.But then again, once I go through all these, you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to nuke out. AllMalcolm: of the, all the religious language. Well, you can, you can make it clearer, but we'll see from the audience if they like the religious language or if they want it nuked out. They probablySimone Collins: will. I mean, in the end, you're right about everything.Like when I make weird calls about things and I'm like, I don't like this. And you're like, well, let's see how it goes. And then you turn out to be right. I know. And I trust you, you're, you're smart and beautiful and I love you, but I'm also, you know, opinionated and it's as, as history has shown, there are many people who are wrong and opinionated.So it is a part of a time honored tradition when I'm showing you here.Malcolm: But I mean, when I'm thinking through what I'm doing on this, I'm like in the future, if people are like analyzing this, suppose a large. Sort of like interstellar, like one of the first spaceships, some humans who believes this system are on it and they [00:58:00] end up colonizing some of the first planets.Is that going to be good? What's going to happen in a long, long time period out if people were following this, how would it lead to positive and negative things and what threats could it put our species under? And this comes to something that we say elsewhere is I think what God wants for us is what's best for us and therefore to determine God's will, we should, and when I say best for us, I mean, best for expanding human potentiality, not which maySimone Collins: come at our personal sacrifice, which may mean less hedonic comfort for.Any existing. It almostMalcolm: always means, yeah. But, but a lot of people when they hear best for us, they think distributed positive emotional states. And I'm like, no, that is not what God wants for us. That is how he tests us. That is how he calls us. And that is how the Bible tells you he's going to call you.But anyway, it's not shy about that. That's what the devil does. All right, next. But. Next. Next. What is this ultimate destiny for which we are being tested? From the perspective of our family's faith, it is to become one with God. We believe God is not some [00:59:00] arbitrary entity that took a liking to man or a narcissist who crafted us in his image like miniatures trapped in a ghoulish cycle of trauma and war for his amusement, but that God is man's destiny.That millions of years from now, mankind will resemble more what today we would think of as a God than a man. And that each And that that entity will not relate to time in the way that we do. God exists outside of time, and yet is created by it, guiding mankind until we are worthy to join him.We are already part of God insofar as we serve his will and play our part in his plan for us, which is above all defined by a moral mandate for intergenerational improvement. It was through trials read in tooth and claw that God raised us to glory and taught us to not value comfort as comfort motivates stagnation, the greatest of all sins. but this also comes back [01:00:00] to you know, what I'm talking about here, this God that. Some within the Abrahamic traditions believe it's described in the Bible that like almost treats humans like miniatures,like what, it just created us for its amusement to worship it? I, no, I do not believe that that's true. Alright, but if God is the inevitable creation of a reality like ours, doesn't that preclude him from being its cause?How was reality caused? How does this belief system deal with the ontological argument? We hardly think God is a good answer to this. question. The position that something of infinite and ordered complexity with a degree of cognition existed before all things seems the most unlikely of all possibilities.Literally, all other conceivable possibilities are more likely. Instead, we make only three suppositions. That in all possible universes, two things and two things are four things. Mass is a constant across realities and thus exists outside of realities. The line represented by a graphical equation exists as an emergent property of that [01:01:00] equation even before it is graphed.All physical particle interactions can be defined by a single, yet undiscovered, equation. If these three things are true, then even if the physical universe did not exist as we see it, with matter, time, etc., it would also exist as an emergent property of the equation that governed it. Occam's razor, we cut out the superfluous supposition that there is a physical reality with time, and these are all just representations of a self graphing equation.In fact, all universes that could be explained by an equation exists, which also solves the teleological argument. It also makes the claims that this universe might be simulated irrelevant, as the moral weight of actions and lives in that universe and universe prime would be equivalent, as they are both quote unquote just simulations.It is just that this one is running on silicon. And the other is running on the background fabric of reality, but I do not particularly think that we are in a simulation, but we can get to that later. Now, Simone, this is a topic that we've talked about a lot on the [01:02:00] channel, but I wanted to encode it in the canon as succinctly as I could.And one thing that we've talked about offline is the idea or the supposition that the very first thing to exist or to exist outside of reality was a thing of ordered complexity and a degree of sentience and consciousness. It just seems so wildly improbable to me. It doesn't I literally think it is literally the least likely of all possibilities.I could see nothing. I could see us being in a cycle. I could see us I could see the Big Bang, like some sort of like physical property law thing happening. I could see leaving this as just an unanswered question. But I am fairly convinced with my answer to this question. I don't know if you had any thoughts on the Christian interpretation of this answer which is that God just existed before the universe and created it.Simone Collins: It, I, I think it's one of those things where you referred to in our previous chat about how Stories of origins or any sort of story explanations of anything or guidance on [01:03:00] morality is presented to people in a way that they can understand at that time. And when I think about, you know, in, you know, on day one, God made this and it was good.And on day two, he brought, you know, like sea creatures and all, like weird parts of it seem accurate to me in terms of the ordering, you know, and then God made the seas. And yes, that's how it worked. Yeah. Like we know, like there, there were this evolutionMalcolm: and the creationSimone Collins: of earth. Yeah. Like first there were the oceans and then Yeah, like birds were dinosaurs and blah, blah.You know, and the sea creatures came first, which is totally accurate for our understanding of, of historical geology and evolution and everything. So like when I was listening to that very, very beginning, you know, Genesis, I was like, yeah, oh wow. This is like pretty accurate. But in terms of this guy.Entity existing and making it. I feel like when it comes to your,Malcolm: Oh, and I want to be clear here. Like we do think that God guided evolution, all of that stuff about making the earth, making the planets, making the animals, making all that. He did all of that, which is actually an important [01:04:00] point here. A lot of Christians act as if the Bible says God created the universe, like reality.Yet I don't think the Bible makes that explicit.Simone Collins: No, Genesis. No, it doesn't make that argument. But, I mean, I also in terms of in this many days and the very literal elements of it, I think that that's more explained in a way that people at thatMalcolm: think that was accurate. I think that that was God gifting early man a revelation that he wasn't fully capable of understanding.Basically explaining evolution and the time scales of various things that happen on Earth in a way that early man could grasp. Right.Simone Collins: It's really kind of hard. What is early man doing? Early man is You know, on, on day one, I harvested berries and it was good. And on day two, I slept a little bit more because it was cold outside and it was good.You know, that kind of thing. It's something you could wrap your head around. I, IMalcolm: think that this comes to another area where a lot of people will say, you are saying things that go directly against Christian scripture. And it's these go directly against what I'm told Christian scripture says.From what you actually read in the [01:05:00] Bible, not what I actually read. And this just keeps happening to me that, that I'm told that the scripture says X, and then I read it and somehow it aligns with this like bizarre thing. I thought I made up because it was what was in the best interest of my kids. And what I increasingly am realizing.Is God wanted us to find what was in the best interest for each generation from his text. That's how he wrote it. That's the beauty of it. And people are falling too much to oral tradition was in their communities and confusing it with biblical Talmudic, you know, Quranic truths.Simone Collins: Yeah. I was just thinking about that this morning, listening to someone talk about, what is it called?Ayurvedic astrology, the India based astrology. And he had like complete faith in it and lived by it and like clearly understood nothing about it and could argue nothing from like an informed understanding of it. And it was just very clear that he had heard several [01:06:00] people talking about it in a way that was just so compelling to him.And I think a lot of it comes down to delivery. You know, they were, they were you know, probably attractive and magnetic enough where he just kind of listened to them say complete nonsense and was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he would just start repeating them. And I feel like the same goes for many religions where.Preachers and various church leaders are saying things in a very charismatic way that's very compelling. And people are like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because also that's kind of how we're built. Like we're not built to read original text and come to our own conclusions because people who do that, do that, get kicked out of the tribe and die alone in the tundra.Well,Malcolm: no, it's very interesting that you point this out because this has been a similar to an experience that I've kept having, which is when I'm trying to understand the Abrahamic faith to better understand God's word. I both read the texts and I talk with people who are conservative practitioners and preachers within their communities, whether domain experts, [01:07:00] whether this is within the Islamic community or the Jewish community.And regularly I am finding honestly, very little, like useful, meaningful, impactful information to me from the domain experts. And yet I am finding. Just this enormous trove of it was in the actual texts themselves. You know, when I'm going through the Talmud, I'm like, Oh my God, like this, so right on.What's interesting to meSimone Collins: too, is there are some domain experts I can count to who, when you talk with them about the texts, like they actually know, like they, it's clear that they have actually gone to those texts personally and thought logically about them in isolation without someone guiding them through everyone else is more like, Oh no, we don't ask these questions orMalcolm: they're basically like, don't point out that that text contrasts with our way of life.And it's again, I'm not pointing out anyone specific here. Like we all might say, I'm specifically pointing out you know, I've had this from Jews. I've had this from Muslims. I've had this from Christians. It's theSimone Collins: two people that I'm thinking of who actually. Have gone through the text and thought logically about it are, areMalcolm: Jewish.Yeah. I mean, [01:08:00] but, but it's, it's something that I keep having with these various communities and what it represents to me, and this is something we talked about in our last track, is the fall of the Abrahamic faced from the periods of pure revelation that they received. Mm. Where they were given. And they followed it for a while.And then they, they fell away from it and they begin to become more like a subculture. And and, and so not to overpick on these, let's pick on Christians for a bit, like iconoclasm, like to me, like so many Christian groups are just like. clearly into iconoclasm in ways that was very explicitly prohibited.And I, and, and it's well, why, why at, you know, the second council of Nicene, did you say that it was okay to have images of God? And the answer is basically, well, it's popular within our communities and we don't want to like hurt the feelings of these people who think it's popular, you know, like they, they like doing this.They like creating these graven images. And. Um, and, and, and they do it to affirm their love of God, you know, and we take the perspective as we're like, no, like the [01:09:00] Bible specifically said, if they think that this is bringing them closer to an entity, that entity is not God. It may feel like God, but that's the way the basilisk works.That's the way the deceiver works. But what's interesting for us is we feel that that isn't. So in a way, if you're getting closer to the devil, you are getting closer to God. Just the side of himself he warned you about. You don't want to see me when I'm which is an interesting sort of framing here.So we don't take this as, as, as strongly as some other things. But in future videos, we will go to things that I think I read in these other texts that have much more direct contradiction with the existing lifestyles of individuals within the Abrahamic faith, which has led me to sort of increasingly turn away from the communities as they exist now and try to find truths in the text itself.And again, I'm just saying I'm not somebody out here who's thinking I hear God talk to me or something like that or giving me unique understanding. I think I, if I'm unique, it's only in. I'm coming at this [01:10:00] from starting as an atheist perspective, I don't particularly care what people think about me, and I don't care about being accepted within any of these existing communities, and I'm just trying to read what these texts actually say, with a modern understanding of reality, and trying to make them make basic level sense to me, in terms of being like nonsensical stories.Simone Collins: Going back to the basilisk, is it almost like more sinful to Be weak and not indulge in sin. It's I'm kind of thinking like, you know, we, when we set mousetraps in our home, because sometimes we get mice, they crawl in from the fields and our house is very porous, we want the mice to go to the mousetraps.I'm very pleased when the mice go to the mousetraps. And is that not you know, a good human going to the basilisk is yeah. No,Malcolm: I agree. That's what it is. We should not be going around disarming mousetraps that God set around.Simone Collins: Or, or warning mice about the mousetraps and being like, no, no, no, shoo, shoo, go away from the mousetrap.But itMalcolm: just seems. You can warn about [01:11:00] the mousetrap. You can go to the mice and say, hey, you know, if you had. You say, hey, if you had self control you're gonna die if you go that, but the nature of a mouse is that it doesn't have self control and it can't understand you. If I warned a mouse and it understood me, and it then had the self control to not go to the mousetrap, that is a mouse I don't want dead.ThatSimone Collins: is a remarkable mouse. Really? Because then we're gonna have a lot of trouble with vermin chewing through it. Bags of flour and rice.Malcolm: No, no, but these then would be the types of mice that don't do that. Because this is a, a sentient mouse that I am able to communicate with in the English language.That's a remarkable thing, Simone. What I'm saying is, is, is it just, and I, and maybe that's the way God feels about humanity. The vast majority of us are destined for the mousetraps he spent, he, he, he set up. And he, he finds it remarkable when some of us are able to understand the words that he wrote and scattered around our planet.Made them available for all of us little mice to him. I mean, that's what we are to him. And he goes, well, ain't that [01:12:00] a darn thing. It seems to be able to understand at some base level that I'm warning it against going into the mousetrap. That means one day it has potential. But I mean, we are still mice, you know, in, in that, that is over exaggerating our, our position in comparison.You know what I mean? But I actually really love that analogy there.Simone Collins: Well, then we will not stretch it further by going into Ratatouille. Let's go on. What's the nextMalcolm: passage? Thus to us, fertility collapse is not a tragedy, but an opportunity. It is the great tempter, the basilisk, clearing the earth of the indolent masses who have allowed themselves to succumb to temptation.As those without discipline and mental fortitude have no place in the world that is to come. The crises our species is facing and that lay ahead of us are not capricious mistakes but absolutely necessary for us to pass through if humanity is to take our destined place in the history of reality. If men were to take to the stars without this necessary culling, [01:13:00] I can hardly imagine the dark horror that would result.The pronatalist movement couldn't stop fertility collapse, even if it wanted to. Our place is merely to act as a beacon for those who have the will and the fortitude to be part of the community that will have a role to play in humanity's manifest destiny and in the coming trial. So that's it. That's all.Just sort of a reframing there, but I'm always glad to talk through these with you because you also point out things and like things, misunderstandings that I wouldn't expect of people. Like when I'm talking about human diversity, that you were so myopically focused on human diversity today, instead of understanding the point I'm making and that we need to, before we leave the planet, beforeSimone Collins: we can call it human, maybe you need to read jigger the words.Cause if you call it human diversity, IMalcolm: call it the Covenant of the Sons of Man. Oh, okay. The Sons of Man is all of the descendants, whether it's of mankind's labor, intellect, orSimone Collins: Yeah, you need to be a little bit more [01:14:00] explicit that this involves highly different species. Because you're talking about post speciation man plus other entities that we've brought into existence, like AI.So, I would, but, I mean, I'll go through and edit these.Malcolm: Someday. Someday. Well, I might publish them before they're edited, but I like that aspect as well because then you'll see feedback and we can create something that draws from the wisdom of the community and not just ourselves. AndSimone Collins: the community can come up with a really, really good name.Malcolm: Well, I mean, I, I appreciate this, this element that what we're trying to do is democratize radical interpretations of Abrahamic scripture. And That's just like really different than what I've seen done before, where typically you have some leader who has some sort of special access to things where all we're doing is laying out some set of rules where we're like, okay, well, it seems really weird that like these Abrahamic groups did really well after they [01:15:00] received the revelation in terms of this type of productivity.What can we learn from God's will from that? What kind of, and another area where I think we can learn God's will is when an Abrahamic group has fallen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And their practices are really different from some commandment or wisdom that was given to them. To me, that means that that wisdom must be uniquely important to us, or must be a unique message from God.Because how could that wisdom have stayed hidden like that? How could that wisdom, how, how could he have explicitly laid out a certain set of wisdom so loudly, so explicitly and then had a group ignore it? If they did, if they didn't expunge it from the records, basically after ignoring it, right? What that means is God left it there for somebody else, somebody in the future, us, potentially, to find and learn from in trying to create the next cyclical iteration of this set of traditions that is more optimized for, you know, thinking long term about humanity, thinking long term about, well, [01:16:00] if we And this is actually a really interesting phenomenon that keeps happening to me.And I'll sit there and logically think, okay, if we're going to go to the stars or something like that, right. And I need to create a system of rules or a system of ways of acting. And this will come up much more in future tracks. What would be the best thing to tell people to do? And then I'll be like, okay let's say this like X or Y or something like that.Then I'll go to the Koran and I'll go to the Bible and I'll go to the Talmud and like remarkably, they'll be like. Specific packet passages that seem directly to address and affirm the, the intuition that I had was like, Oh, I think that this is the best intuition for the best future of our species.Well, thenSimone Collins: what counter will you give to the inevitable viewer who says, welcome to the confirmation bias that thousands, if not millions of. Previous religious text readers have developed and this is exactly why the catholic church says let me interpret this for you because otherwise people will [01:17:00] find because Frankly, you can kind of find a passage that supports pretty much anything in most religious texts What's your answer to that?Malcolm: You could say that this is I mean so you've got to again view our religious system from the perspective of both an atheist and a Theological person, right? The theological person isn't going to be saying that as much because then you just throw it back at them. What about your confirmation bias that supports your community's beliefs, right?You know, well, yeah,Simone Collins: but then like a Catholic would be like, well, this is exactly why we have the structures that we have and blah,Malcolm: blah, blah. Right. Well, and then I'd say, yeah, except the structures you have are clearly affirming anti biblical concepts like iconoclasm, which I could, we go deep into iconoclasm in another tract.So I'm not going to go further into it now. But I'd be like, so clearly these systems aren't working. But to the other group, suppose it's the atheist who comes to me and says this, right? You know, they're like, I'm like, what's your problem? Seriously, think about what we're doing here. Suppose it really is all just using the.older traditions to justify a reasonable set of [01:18:00] standards for humanity interacting with each other that maintains some level of human pluralism and maintains the safety of our descendants in the stars and that, listen, and that. Captures the spirit of Western culture, Western, but whatSimone Collins: you're saying here is basically, it doesn't matter because I've already come to a conclusion based on genuine merit by my standards, which is logic and our understanding of science to the to date and therefore who cares if it's confirmation bias when I'm really just making it easier for people who want that religiousMalcolm: endorsement. But, but more than that, I'm also saying, look, if you just do things secularly, it doesn't work. We've already seen that, right? Sure. So to have a religious system that's endorsing this secular perspective, but it's also highly open to being updated, which we'll talk about in a future track, how that worked.You don't have the same downsides, but in addition to that It captures this spirit of our history. I do not like the idea of casting off. Even if I was approaching this from a totally secular perspective of [01:19:00] casting off the Western canon. I think that feeling a continuity with your ancestors.And seeing it as your duty to play your iterative role in evolving that continuity and seeing that continuity is evolving throughout history accurately. This is one thing that really bothers me as somebody who really likes studying religious history. As recently I've been talking to some people of different Abrahamic faiths and they go, my faith has not evolved that much.It has not changed that much in its practices. And just like that, you could be a dumb believer yet have so little knowledge of the history of your tradition because all three of the Abrahamic traditions, the main ones have had enormous changes. And I should point out, this is another thing we haven't gotten to, but we also think that the raw Astrianism is likely a true revelation from God.It just shares way too much in common with the other true revelations, strong condemnation of iconoclasm, monotheism, similar pantheonic structure. similar numerical like importances. Like it's, it, it seems pretty clear to me. I think in society we've become over focused on just this idea of Abrahamism.And, and I'm [01:20:00] open to other systems being shown to be true systems from God. And we'll talk about how we look at another thing that like, we haven't mentioned yet. A lot of people are like, why don't you talk about Eastern systems? Why don't you talk about like this?And we're like, if we haven't talked about your group. And I'm saying this with the context that we make fun of Orthodox people for bedazzling their dead, and we we meme on Catholics all the time. And we've called Hasidic Jews, basically, witches on various episodes. These are groups that I have a great deal of affinity for, and I think are great direct revelations from God.The groups that we haven't talked about, it's because what we would have to say about them would be dramatically more contentious and negative. And I don't see the purpose in, in doing that, or at least just yet. But that's something that we will probably get to eventually in another tract and that groups that we are ribbing on should know that we have theological differences with you, but a large reason that [01:21:00] we have those is, or the large reason we're airing those is because they're very.We have a level of admiration for your community and your culture. And we think that there's a level of truth that you also follow. And that in general, you know, as we say with conversions in our other show, if somebody was going to leave your community, it would be our job to push them back to it, because they are following a true revelation of God.And that where we should recruit is among the atheists, is among the skeptics and among the people who just cannot stay within their existing tradition. Anyway, and of course, people of. enormous intellectual talent or industry. But that is just our arrogance, right? It's well, if we actually believe what we're saying, which I do to an extent, I mean, do you believe like you're here saying okay, you're, you, Malcolm are just saying, yeah, why are you questioning if it's, what's in the best interest of our species anyway?But you have a, I mean, do you, do you not like me saying that?Simone Collins: Saying what exactly?Malcolm: Well, so A lot of people would hear somebody saying, well, yeah, I don't really care about these kinds of challenges because logically [01:22:00] this is what kinds of challenges. Challenges like saying, okay, you're an individual who's saying, logically, you think this is the best interest of our species.And then another individual would say, well, isn't this just confirmation bias? And then I'm like, well, why? No, no, no. ISimone Collins: don't. I have no problemMalcolm: with that. What I'm asking you is,Simone Collins: I mean, the Catholics did that in a sense when they approached different cultures. And said, Oh, we're like, no, totally. Look, our religion's like your religion.That, that God that you worship is, is this Saint. It's, it's the Virgin Mary. It's the same person.Malcolm: That's what you're doing. Now they have cultists worshiping like a literal demon in South America that I've talked about on other episodes. The cult of Santa Muerte to me, it's the closest thing to devil worship we have in the world today.Real devilSimone Collins: worship. You see my point. So yes, no, I have no trouble from that perspective. I thought you were trying to say that you were, you were trying to find like uncontrovertible true. confirmation that the Bible supports exactlyMalcolm: the argument. I believe I have more confirmation I've seen for this system than I've seen for any other system I've [01:23:00] looked into.Well, no, no, no. AndSimone Collins: that's, again, that's the thing I really like is that when we go back to certain passages of the Bible with this added layer that you present. A lot of stuff makes more sense to me than it did when I read the Bible in isolation, especially when I read the Bible in concert with the cultural baggage and expectations that I came in with.And that's when I get super confused. Cause I'm like, but I thought Christians believe this and everyone says that this is what Christianity is all about. And then the Bible seems totally different. But anyway, this has been fun to talk about. And I bet our next conversation will be very interesting asMalcolm: well.I love you a great deal Simone. Have a good one.Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm. 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

We discuss Professor Edward Dutton's new theory that "woke" ideas may be eugenic or serve as a selection pressure. By pushing society in a maladaptive direction, wokeism discourages those who can't survive harsh conditions from reproducing. It selects for the highly religious, conservative, traditionalist, and ethnocentric who can endure collapse. We also cover the decline of civilization tied to declining intelligence, the "spiteful mutant" hypothesis, as well as optimism around AI and automation potentially preventing another dark age.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] if you are able to think for yourself, and you look at the data, and you just say what that data says, you will be isolated from mainstream society, and then people like us, find each other because,and so in that way, they are hopefully sowing the seeds of their own downfall. So long as they're not rounding up like Machiavelli would, everyone who dissents and who says the true thing in the room of liars so that they can then have them. IEdward Dutton: think, I think, I think it may come to that point, but I think we will have, we will have escaped to our various neo Byzantiums by the time they simply go through the streets with a machine gun and kill people that express any logical or reasonable ideas.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: Hello everyone. Today we are joined again, we're very excited, by the Jolly Heretic, a. k. a. Edward Dutton, a. k. a. Professor Dutton. You can find his podcast or YouTube channel, The Jolly Heretic. He also authored The Native Classroom, a, sort of the mathematician's lament of science education, which is available on Amazon.But today we're gonna talk about something a [00:01:00] little different, some research that he recently did as well as an ancient theory, taken theory heMalcolm Collins: has. So let's start with the, the research that I wanna start with is the Rome study. Mm-Hmm. Talk a bit about what was found in this study because I think it was really cool and that it seemed to confirm a theory that a lot of us had been throwing around andEdward Dutton: sort then it, that's sort of confirm it.Yeah. So basically, basically the I, the i, the theory is that what causes the rise and fall of civilizations and the theory that I. been working on for a long time. Loads of people have worked on it, but I've quite associated with it in a book I did called Adolf Witzend, Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future of Michael Woodley Venny, is its intelligence.Intelligence is the central thing. If you're under harsh Darwinian conditions and the intelligence is not particularly high, there is strong selection pressure for intelligence because intelligence gives you the competitive edge and allows you to survive. And we showed that across time, based on proxy measures such as skull size, such as capital, major innovations, such as literacy, even though sounds like it didn't change much, such as numeracy such as interest rates, which are a marker of [00:02:00] time preference.And a number of other measures that intelligence seemed to be going up. And indeed the richer 50 percent of the population in England had based on powers records, double the completed. population and the intelligence is associated robustly with wealth. And so this indicates intelligence is going up and then you get the breakthroughs of the industrial revolution, of course.And then you, you start to get a situation where the direct inspection pressure is reduced. So whereas what's been happening is every generation, the bottom of society have been dying out. And the top of the society have been increasing in size and moving down to fill the places vacated by those at the bottom who have died off.Then that process kind of stops because with the innovations of medicine and better housing and industrial revolution the Darwinian selection measure is weakened. And then you find this process where it, for some reason, we don't quite know why, but I've speculated on why in my book. It goes into reverse.You start to see a negative correlation. between [00:03:00] intelligence and how many Children you have. And we showed we show evidence of this based on again for capital major innovation based on IQ scores based on reaction times getting longer based on color discrimination getting worse based on new and based on simply genes that are associated alleles that are essentially associated with high intelligence beginning becoming less and less and less within the population.So, and what that eventually leads to, of course, is the society becomes stupider and stupider and stupider, and it can't sustain things it used to be able to sustain, but also it degenerates into war, it splits up, it becomes impulsive and whatever, and essentially the civilization collapses. At worst, or at best, it retreats.You get a kind of Byzantium effect where clever people that are still there kind of club together and keep it going in some smaller form as it reduces in size and so on. So intelligence becomes the motor of the rise and fall of civilization. So what we The theory is that that could be the case with Rome and there was some evidence for that because [00:04:00] they talk about in the time of Augustus, they noticed that the upper class men are not having many children.They talk about it and they note the population is going down and they know that Augustus brings in a tax on childlessness from the upper class men and they pay the tax and all this sort of thing is going on. And so we thought we'll work and test it with ancient genomes. So, what you have is these samples.It's true that they are small samples, but the statistical significance was maintained and all that they were representative. And you show, we find that at the beginning of the period of Rome, you know, the, the, the prevalence of these alleles is not that high. goes up, it reaches a peak in the Republican period, so this is a highly intelligent period, and then Rome starts to generate into chaos.Rome, of course, doesn't have an industrial revolution, but it does become very rich. It has the grain laws, the dole, or whatever, it reduces, it creates its own zoo, like we did. It reduces selection pressure. What do you see? The prevalence of the alleles associated with intelligence starts to go. down. And and this goes down in parallel basically [00:05:00] with the collapse of Rome.So, it, it does, it does fit the data. Now, the theory, the counter argument, sorry, is that there is a change in the composition of the people living in Rome so that you have more genes, more bodies that are from outside Rome itself that are from other parts of Italy or of the Mediterranean. So that's a compound.But, but, but otherwise it does kind of, it is what we would predict. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember in the study as a point of clarification. They're not looking at IQ, they're looking at the polygenic risk scores that today would be associated with educational attainment.Yeah, that,Edward Dutton: with high, polygenic risk scores associated with high, very high educational attainment, which is a very good proxy for IQ.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, no, it's a good proxy, but I think a lot of people might be like, well IQ, whatever, it's like, look, they're not even looking at that, they're looking at like, Functionally, like the types of people who, when our society would get PhDs, just started to disappear from the society.And, and this is fascinating because this theory existed prior to, [00:06:00] you know, looking at these historic bodies. And it aligns with something that we've noted in some of our work. that if you look at renaissances in a region, they typically last for no longer than three generations and they almost never bloom twice within the same population.So if you, whether it's the, you know, the Scottish enlightenment or the renaissance in Italy or you know, the American renaissance in the original 13 colonies, or you, you rarely will see A renaissance lasting longer than three generations are happening twice because renaissances seem to be genetically exhaustive of whatever is their precursor.And this also aligns with some of the theories I've seen of why you saw civilization bloom in places that previously were more barbarian. Where when a place was particularly barbarian. During a previous phase of large, large civilization that they were likely to become the nexus of the next civilization.Edward Dutton: And, and yeah, I think that's a very good point. So you've got a [00:07:00] situation where civilization will move because it will start in a place where there is an optimum relationship between the genetics and the environment. And it will which will, which will allow. The, the, the, the civilization to spread and whatever and grow, and it will perhaps move, let's say, further north to a place where the environmental selection pressures are harsher which means that in, in sort of theory, there's, let's say, harsher, more selection for something like intelligence or there could be, there could be.If let's say something like farming went there. Yeah. So in the absence of farming, farming is a selection event, farming selections for intelligence. And so if you, if you, if you take farming from the Mediterranean or whatever, so from the Nile up to where, to the North, then the selection pressures are very, it will become very harsh for them.A lot of them will be wiped out. And so then you'd expect the center of civilization to move North because there's suddenly as harsh a selection for intelligence further North and it would carry on like that.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I'm arguing more that like barbarism. is, is the precursor of, of, of [00:08:00] civilization or intelligence, because keep in mind that Rome wasn't replaced by, you know, Northern European civilization.It was replaced by Islamic civilization. And, and that came out of a region of extreme barbarism. And then if you look at the Roman empire, the next places of large civilization were like the German territories and the English territories, which were two of the most, like the least tamed during the Roman empire.Hold on. So youSimone Collins: don't really mean barbarism, which is really just being foreign or different. You mean like harsh living, right?Malcolm Collins: Harsh living.Edward Dutton: Yeah. That's an interesting possibility. It would make sense that they're under harsher conditions. And because they're under harsher conditions, they're sort of more up against it.So there's less possibility to experiment there's less access, and so they can't innovate these kinds of things themselves. But once they get hold of the rubric of the innovation, then because their harsh conditions are more selective for intelligence, let's say then they can [00:09:00] take it and they can run with it and they can do fantastically well.Now, the, the, the possible problem with that, and my colleague on that paper, the Rome paper, is looking at this at the moment, is that there's some evidence that the really, really important thing is farming. That's, that's, it's, it's crucial. And it, and once you get farming, it massively elevates IQ. And because it creates this competition where anyone that doesn't take up farming is wiped out.And it's much more cognitively demanding to pursue farming than to pursue hunter gathering or farming.Simone Collins: So is it farming or is it technology adoption? BecauseEdward Dutton: farming is a form of technology. Well, he's arguing that form of technology. Huh. Now I don't know if he's right, but that's what he's suggesting.So he's arguing that possibly based on apologetic scores people, the reason why agriculture was developed in Iraq. was because at that time they were just the most intelligent people. And, and and, and so it might, it might not, that, that theory is the one I used to hold. It might not [00:10:00] be right.We'll see.Malcolm Collins: Interesting. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see. Yeah. I was just thinking in my head. Okay. So the, the, the times that I'm thinking what a big civilization is like when I was like, okay, civilization died, civilization rose. You had a Greek civilization, which rose after the bronze age. As a result of Egyptian civilization and and the Bronze Age civilizations leaving the scene.And we know that that region has recently undergone a near total ethnic replacement. That's what we saw was like the erasure of, so there was really heavy conflict in that region. We know that it's Islamic civilization came out of a really, really high conflict region. Rome, pre Roman history, was really high conflict, but did have farming.None of the other ones I knew had a lot of farming. I didn't ancient Athens, I'm thinking pre, pre, like, bronze age collapse, sea people time, they might have had agriculture Small scale, at the very least. Small scaleEdward Dutton: agriculture. They had agriculture, yeah. So, I mean, I think, I think that, your theory that you're founding is what I think.Myself founded in various things I've written and it may well be right, but I'm just, I'm just wondering at the moment, I will wait to see my colleagues research on this. If [00:11:00] there isMalcolm Collins: your other theory, no, I also wantSimone Collins: to, well, hold on. There's one question I want to ask, and this is to both of you. And this is just because my understanding of this period of history, especially when it comes to falling birth rates is imperfect.Obviously what people give as excuses for not having kids is different from why they're not actually having kids, but was there some taxation or inheritance policy or thing other than just. hedonism, which is always the answer people give when society stopped, you know, producing as many kids that would explain why especially upper class men were not having as many kidsEdward Dutton: at that time.The opposite. I mean, they were, they were trying to encourage upper class men to have more kids. Right. ButSimone Collins: why weren't, why weren't they despite encouragement?Edward Dutton: We don't really know. My. theory which I've expounded in various places is that, is that basically, well, the evidence is that mortality salience and threat of mortality and death that's what makes you want to have kids.That's our evolutionary match. So if you take that [00:12:00] away, then it becomes a selection event for the, just the genetics of pronatalism. And, and, and that is what is taken away to some extent anyway. Okay, there was high mortality in Rome compared to now, but that is what is particularly among the upper class, that is what is taken away.And, and so they just stop having, they don't, the, the, the instinct doesn't hit in. And I think that's what we're seeing now, people that are more intelligent are more environmentally sensitive. There's a number of lines of evidence for that. And so they're more sensitive to the environment if they're in an evolutionary mismatch They're just basically less instinctive.And so they just don't have kids AndMalcolm Collins: we also need to think about what what does hedonism mean? Like what is a society have to look like for it to estole Hedonism as a virtue and to not severely punish members from engaging in hedonism cultural groups that didn't punish hedonism historically are typically Out competed really quickly because it's really bad for the elites in your society to be overly hedonistic unless you massively are out competing your [00:13:00] neighbors.And this is why if you look at the periods right before various civilizational collapses, whether it's the Athenian civilization, the Roman civilization, or the Muslim civilization, All of them had extreme hedonism, particularly sexual hedonism, right before their collapse started. And you can read a lot about this I think people would be surprised.And the reason why I always include the Muslim civilization one, because I think a lot of people ignore that in their data sets. But it gives you an additional data set in an area where we already don't have that many data sets. Yeah,Edward Dutton: Pasha Glub in his book, The Fate of Empires, looks into the Islamic situation, of course.He was amazed by parallels between 8th century Islam, let's say, and what was going on in Rome 800 years earlier. Yeah, itMalcolm Collins: was very aligned. Yeah, and I have something I also want to compliment Ed Dutton on saying here, because this is not the way the opponents of ours think, is he had a theory, he was committed to the theory, he had written on the theory, he had somebody else agree with the theory, and he said, well, I'm actually aware of some counter [00:14:00] evidence that's currently being developed, and so I want to see if it disconfirms my presumptions.Yeah. This is a really important, in the way that people should think and engage with ideas. And is not often seen in our society right now. And I think it needs to be specifically called out. It's a good thing to say when somebody says, I might be disproven, here's somebody who's working on this. But let's now go to your next theory, the new one you're working on now.Yes, veryEdward Dutton: fun. So, I'm known for a theory of spiteful mutants which wasMalcolm Collins: Can you talk a bit about spiteful mutants first?Edward Dutton: Including the idea that if If if there's a collapse in harsh Darwinian selection pressure, then you get a buildup of mutation. The mu the mutation will relate of course to the body.It will make people physically less healthy, but it, but also make people mentally less healthy. And the people that are men and those things are player typically related. Mm-Hmm, . And so if people are mentally less healthy, then they will tend to. adaptation, they tend to have basically ways of thinking for genetic reasons that are [00:15:00] unhealthy, that are maladaptive as opposed to adaptive.So what have we been selecting for across time? We've been selecting for intelligence, we've been selecting for pro social personality, we've been selecting for obviously wanting to have children, natalisms, basic thing. We've got religiosity, because religiosity seems to take that which is adaptive and make it the will of God.We've been groups which are we've been selecting for ethnocentrism, positive negative ethnocentrism, obedience to authority, all these kinds of group oriented things. We've been selecting for all this whole bundle of stuff that is all bundled together and tends to manifest in certain kinds of religious group.And so you would expect a deviation from that, and that deviation would be associated with mutational load. And you would get these these, these mutants, they'd be identifiable by sights to some extent because of the relationship between what you look like and mutational load. Who would just have maladaptive ideas.Because we're a highly pro social species and we're meant to be surrounded by genetically healthy people, we would be influenced by them. And so therefore they would spread maladaptive ideas around the society. These would be ideas like Andrea Dworkin or whatever, you [00:16:00] know, all sex, obvious spiteful mutants.ugly, disgusting woman. Um, all, all, all sex is rape. And, and, and, you know, the basically we should just allow humanity to die out. So that was the idea. You have these, these spiteful mutants, and if they are reasonably intelligent and they, they reach the middle class, then they will be able to push society.in a maladaptive direction and, and just destroy it basically. And, you know, lead, lead to its end. So they're spiteful, they're, they're bad for society. And then more recently, myself and a colleague have been think, have been revising this idea and thinking actually, no. Like what, what, what actually, perhaps they're altruistic.I mean, what are they doing? They are going to bring about a people who are basically Very religious, very conservative, very pro natalist, very genetically healthy, very able to surv If some kind of massive natural disaster happens, like happened with the Bron with the Late Bronze Age Collapse, very able to survive that.[00:17:00]But if they weren't there, potentially we'd just get unhealthier and unhealthier and unhealthier, and when inevitably there's a big natural disaster, then just everybody would die out.Simone Collins: So are you saying they're like a mousetrap, like, catchingMalcolm Collins: So it's, it's very interesting. I I'll give my thoughts onEdward Dutton: this.Well, I'll just summarize what I've said. So the idea, what they are doing, what they are doing, what woke is doing, is it has taken over the culture of society, and it is pushing society In a matter, it is whereas you are used to being pushed along the adaptive roadmap of life, which says you think life has meaning, which says that you should believe in God, which says that you should have children, which says that you should eventually be men and women should be women, whatever.All of, all of the, which says that you should live in relatively monocultural society, everything all of this is. utterly subverted. All of this is turned on its head. Instead, you are pushed along a maladaptive roadmap of life where you are told you shouldn't have children. You should mutilate your body.You should be gay. You, you should, you should welcome the destruction of your society. You should just everything. [00:18:00] Bad. So who, and therefore people don't have children, who is resistant to this onslaught, which says don't have children, or which pushes you towards not having children, which, you know, feminism or whatever, which pushes you towards not having children, it makes it more difficult, or fat acceptance, pushes you, who is resistant to this?It's going to be people that, for genetic reasons, are going to be highly ethnocentric, conservative religious, and those all correlate with being healthy. So basically it's a selection event, and the woke people are altruistic. They are bringing, they are, they are eugenicists. They are bringing about the removal of all but the most genetically healthy, and the most basically conservative and right wingthat's what they're, that's what they're bringing about. And so from the perspective of those that are right wing, one could kind of argue that they're altruistic, aren't they? I mean, they're a good thing. They're a group level adaptation, and the group that doesn't have it could be in trouble and could, and could die out.What they're also doing is they're bringing [00:19:00] down civilization. And if they're bringing down civilization back to harsher Darwinian conditions, then of course we need to be able to survive these harsher Darwinian conditions. But they're also ensuring that there are going to be people that will survive these conditions, because they're discouraging those that wouldn't survive it from breeding.So, and then you get group selection, and their group is the strong group. So they're purging their own group of the unhealthy. That's what wokeness could be argued to be doing.Malcolm Collins: Well, I said, I want to dig into this. This is really cool. And it goes on some of the things that we've talked about where Wokus, you know, through any avenue that they preach their, you know, mimetic sterilization, they are primarily sterilizing people who are pregnant.genetically susceptible and open to these progressive ideas. Now, I actually think that it is potentially scary how good they are at this from a genetic level. Like, they're doing a very good job of removing pro sociality from the human species. Which, which, you know, it isn't all good. But it is [00:20:00] definitely a real phenomenon that we are really seeing.Simone Collins: Yeah, I'm hearing like, drawing out mental illness like a sponge. Okay. Drawing out a bunch of other problems, but then also like drawing out openness to outside ideas. I mean,Malcolm Collins: who's being killed? Who do fat activists kill? You know, they kill, you know, people who are susceptible to these ideas. Who do pro abortion advocates kill?They, they are aborting progressive fetuses. Who are you know, who, when, when people are open to sexual practices that lead to lower fertility rates you know, who is being attracted by this? It is typically people who are more susceptible to these ideas. The downside is of all of this, so of the first series, I don't know if the mutants would know that they were mutants, or know to be spiteful, like there would be no genetic real reward for them to do this.I, I think that the second theory is closer to the truth and that it definitely is having this effect on populations. Unfortunately, they suppress fertility, particularly in the midwit population[00:21:00] that is susceptible to their ideas. They don't do a good job of suppressing fertility in the idiots or in the severe upper class.And I think that this could lead to speciation. Yeah.Edward Dutton: Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. So I, well, I think what, no, no, I just. Let's put it a different way. I'm not sure about that because I think that what you what you have with the the the low intelligent people what what the woke are doing as well is bringing down civilization and those those that have you know, it's the south africanization of the west basically and those those that have low iq Yeah, you're right in on a certain level.They're not suppressing their fertility, but those people are Genetically very unhealthy and are increasingly completely reliant on complex systems, national health service or whatever in, in order to survive. Those people are more morbid. So, so when, when, when civilization starts to decline and there's, there's, you know, there's bringing about, remember, they're bringing that about by massive verbal immigration, by, by, by encouraging the midwits not to breed, by, by whatever, they're bringing that about, [00:22:00] then these people that have low IQ, they're just going to die off. So, so you're, you're, the, the, the, the midwits, the midwits, the midwits which aren't resigned from the gene pool, the low IQ people are unable to survive.And also remember that one of the things they're bringing about. is a in, in, in bringing about, in selecting people that are more religious and conservative is a much higher level of disgust. And this, this, this has an interesting effect because it has the kind of effect that you have in Victorian England where they talked, where was a massive problem with disease and whatever, which is why they were so conservative which is that they saw the working classes like vectors of disease that were dangerous and you had to keep away from them.And I think you're going to get the spread of these kinds of ideas increasingly, that they're almost another people, that we just don't, you don't go near them, that's just, no.Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and where we would have the biggest disagreement on this is, is I would actually argue that they are holding off the collapse of our society.through immigration policies that bring in a large portion of people who are still genetically healthy and haven't been ravaged as much in, as, as [00:23:00] centers of, of, of long term urban wealth. I think that whenever a place enters like stagnant long term urban wealth, you begin to see a pretty big dysgenic effects and that they are keeping society like broadly alive.This is in America more than Europe. On the otherEdward Dutton: hand, on the other hand, on the other hand, couldn't you argue that what they're, what they're doing as they do this increasingly and increasingly is creating a growing sense of sort of almost like native, a subculture of native identity almost whereby, whereby with their woke policies.If basically, if you dissent from their ideas, then you know, you are evil which, which inclines people who do dissent from their ideas to increasingly come together into, into a subgroup and breed with, and breed with each other in a way they wouldn't previously probably have done. Or needed to do which therefore increases a sense of separation between the, the, the surviving native conservative population and, and everybody else.So, so, so, so they're, they're, they're bringing, they're bringing about this [00:24:00] sort of genetic similarity process, but via exclusion, via excluding us from their party. bar excluding us from their social networks. That's what, that's what they're, that's what they're doing. That's how you, us three met. So, so I think that on that, on that level, they're helping to create that.I mean, it's true that the, the, the, I think it's unsustainable. Ultimately, it gets to a point where there is a, there is a growing reaction, I think, against this, this, this high immigration. But when, but when that happens, if you don't have the high immigration and you don't improve the birth rate, Then what you ultimately will have is economic collapse.SoMalcolm Collins: yeah, and I should also point out that there's very different types of immigration within different countries and and for different communities when you have what I would call high barrier immigration you're typically going to actually get the best and the brightest from a country and when you have low barrier immigration or you're getting the final squeeze, like Venezuela is a good example here.The early Venezuelan immigrants would that notice things happening and came when it was, you know, it's still difficult to come, but now you're sort of getting the [00:25:00] final squeeze of the vine of the country. And so you're getting lower quality immigrants than you would in the first few waves of immigration, but this has, as bad as the effects are within the United States, you need to consider what effects we're having on these developing countries when we do siphon off their best and the brightest.I mean, look at a place like Africa and, and generations and generations of siphoning off their best and brightest is definitely going to have an effect on these countries. If we continue to maintain this as a policy, like genetics exist and genetics are real and so we will destroy not just our own country, but their country, you know, you bring them over, then you medically sterilize them and then you have to bring the next over and and iterationally, this is going to have huge genetic effects around the world and people are underestimating how quickly really strong selective pressures like this can have an effect.on things like baseline IQ in aEdward Dutton: population. They do because they don't understand that the, it's not just, it's something like schooling. It's, it's not just, okay, the IQ of the population is [00:26:00] going down. So the, the IQ of school kids goes down. No, it, what's the IQ of the teachers that has environmental effects on the IQ of the children?What's, what, what's the, what's the IQ of the environment that these teachers can create. And so similarly, you've got to think about the effect that it has at the right. tail. What if you have the force of the population that have an IQ above 145, it doesn't take much to do that. Then you are, you are, you are halving the force of the population that are creating an environment that is bringing the rest of the population environmentally to its phenotypic maximum intelligence.And, and, and so they're becoming, they can become rapidly stupider. And I think we, we see that, that's what, it's the cultural effect that's very important. If you think about, if you just watch on YouTube, the quality of programs that were put out, documentaries that were put out in the 80s. The assumption of the intelligence level of the population.Compared to the nonsense that is, that is that is put out now, then then that, that, that is a case in point. So, yeah, it's what's, it's what's done [00:27:00] in the smart fraction that is, I think, as important as what's going on in the population.Malcolm Collins: And I would encourage if people haven't done this, because we had to do this when we were doing channel research.Is sort on YouTube by most of use for different types of search terms are just for channels and you will see that the most views by far are videos that seem to appeal to almost a toddler like intelligence. Yeah this is. I, I think a lot of people, and this is a big problem with like the effective altruist community and stuff like that and a lot of people who live, like, in upper class or middle upper class communities or creative communities and urban centers, they just don't interact with average people, so they don't know how bad it's gotten and how far down the slippery slope we are already.Simone Collins: Yeah, it's like slapstick. Like, imagine like a family of people of different sizes jumping over a tire that's rolling toward them, like down a back alleyway.Edward Dutton: Like Charles Murray said that we get this cognitive stratification and and you, you don't, you don't interact. I, I particularly don't, cause I spend my time in [00:28:00] Finland and I, and I speak in Finnish and I, or I speak in English and you think, well, the fact that they can speak English means that's a bit intelligent or I'm speaking in Finnish.And so you're not getting the nuances of, of, Low iq. Some people might be, when I go back to England, as I have in increasingly am as part of my YouTube show and whatever, I am shocked. Like I was at, I was at Heathrow Airport of Terminal three, and the guy that was in charge, in charge of the security baggage thing, right.And I was, I complained about how the ness of one particular one particular baggage checker and, and, and, and the guy said, he's what was the word? He, he used, he completely mixed up the, the, the me the meaning of two words. He, he, he, he, he mixed up something being abl. Yeah. He said, well, he's not entitled, he's not entitled to bushel bag along the carousel.He's not entitled to, no, he's not, he's not entitled to bushel bag along the carousel. I said, what do you mean he's not allowed to? No, no, he's not entitled to. I said, do you mean he's not obliged to? And he's like, yeah, yeah. [00:29:00] He's not obliged to, so, right. You've mixed up, obliged and entitled. They're, they're quite different things.And that implies, that's a level of stupidity. He's learned this, this high order word somewhere, entitled, or oblige, he doesn't know what it means, but he's trying to sound clever to the customer that's complaining, and so he misuses it. I was like, how can you not know the meaning of the word entitled?Simone Collins: I think you're still profoundly on, oh, sorry, overestimating intelligence, if that's what your complaint is.Like, do whatMalcolm Collins: Malcolm said. Your quote earlier that I thought was better, of what number of politicians can't judge, like if a coin flips twice, what's the probability?Edward Dutton: People have complained. People on Twitter have complained to me about this. And they've said it is unreasonable. They've said, oh, I didn't get it.And I'm perfectly intelligent. No, you're not. It's, it's, it's, how can you think, well, if you flip it forever, for eternity, it's just going to be one in two. You flip it a hundred times it's one and two. How can you [00:30:00] think if it's once it's one and two, that if it's twice it's one and two, if it's three times it's one and two, if it's four times it's one and two.It's mad! It's just WellSimone Collins: that's, I mean, I, I, I, with that particular issue, I think a lot of that comes back to your book, The Naked Classroom, where we have not we've not been taught how to engage with logic on our own. We've been taught to memorize things. And I would even argue that the majority of the people who have the right answer for that have the right answer because someone in a classroom told them to go through this exercise and they were wrong and then they were proven wrong and they felt dumb about it and now they'll never forget it again.But I think that when it comes to actually like the proportion of the population that is. gone through industrial schooling that would answer correctly. That question is incredibly low because of the way that we've been taught math becauseEdward Dutton: of the way it was 25%. It was half among MPs. And I think I'm right in saying it was 25 percent of them.Simone Collins: That doesn't surprise me at all though, because look at how we're taught. [00:31:00] We're not taught to reason for ourselves to actually think through it. We're taught to memorize basic things.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and I think that this is really interesting, this point here, and it comes to something he was saying earlier, is, is we are to some extent blessed that the woke mobs, because if you are able to think for yourself, and you look at the data, and you just say what that data says, you will be isolated from mainstream society, from the portions of society that the woke mob controls, and then people like us, find each other because, you know, just saying truth removes you, sorry, removes you from positions of power in our society today.And so in that way, they are hopefully sowing the seeds of their own downfall. So long as they're not rounding up like Machiavelli would, everyone who dissents and who says the true thing in the room of liars so that they can then have them. IEdward Dutton: think, I think, I think it may come to that point, but I think we will have, we will have escaped to our various neo Byzantiums by the time they simply go through the streets with a machine gun and [00:32:00] kill people that express any logical or reasonable ideas.But I do want to argueSimone Collins: that there's, there's a difference between people who've been ruined by the industrial education system. In people who are just inherently kind of speciating and like what they are, like the way that they engage with the world, the things that entertain them, the things that they like, the fundamental way that they think.Edward Dutton: yEah. Okay.Simone Collins: I mean, I, I just, I want to argue that like, there are more redeemable from a perspective of like, Oh, these people can like get us off planet. These people can build great things, people out there. Then we might otherwiseMalcolm Collins: argue that no, there's not a lot of people. This is always, you think that there's a lot of smart people in the world.I think that there's a handful. I think there's like maybe 50, 000, maybe a hundred thousand.Edward Dutton: I wonder if what Simone is arguing is that there are people out there that even if they're not that smart are in the right circumstances, useful to building up a society. Maybe,Simone Collins: I mean, at least I'm arguing that. A huge proportion of the people [00:33:00] that right now are not going to be able to build anything meaningful, make any difference in society that we personally would value in terms of like advancing civilization could have had they gone through, had they existed in a different type of society and gone through a different form of education.So they've been robbed. IMalcolm Collins: agree with that. You, you might be. You might be able to create more independent thinking, like real people if they were educated differently. Not might be, you almost certainly would. Because there's a portion of people, and this is particularly true among women, where if no matter how smart they are, if they see something as shamed by society or they're like, this is what's normative in my society, that's what they're going to do.Edward Dutton: Yeah, I mean, the basic argument against the lab leak theory is that the wrong kind of people believe it. Yes. That's it. That's the argument.Malcolm Collins: It is funny when you mentioned you know, people walking around and, like, like, shooting people in the streets. I'm like, well, we didn't come far from that recently with the whole vaccine thing.Like, they have shown that they're willing [00:34:00] to do this kind of stuff. They've shown with, like, the trucker protest in Canada, when they would go through and, like, cancel these people's bank accounts, that they're willing to go to really, I think, much more extreme levels than we were aware that they were willing to go.Edward Dutton: Yeah, they're too cowardly to open fire. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a more, it's a more, it's a more, it's a more pusillanimous way of doing things. Counseling bank accounts, making people's lives very difficult. At least, at least a hundred years ago, you knew where you were. A dictatorship would just open fire.You risk your life. That's it. No, no, no. You risk social ostracism and social difficulties like, like being excluded from a gang of girls.Malcolm Collins: An economic ostracism, which is the more damaging thing. You know, we've met guys, one guy, very like mainstream sort of guy, just sort of called out efficacy around vaccine stuff.And he's been debanked, debanked, like, like you can't use mainstream banks anymore. He's not like going out there spouting racist stuff. He's not like going out there, just [00:35:00] said, Hey, this, this COVID narrative seems off to me. And that's wild to me when they. felt that they had power, how far they ran with it.Edward Dutton: Well, it doesn't, it doesn't seem surprising to me, the COVID, they, they had to give the impression from a Machiavellian perspective of just being in control, being in control. And the COVID thing illustrated very clearly. The total lack of control. They had no idea what they were doing. And so much was much worse to, to question what they were doing in terms of COVID than racism or transphobia or whatever way worse, because it was fundamentally, this was, this, this could be revolution.I mean, this is the government showing they don't know what they're doing. IMalcolm Collins: mean, just to what you were saying earlier, in case any of our audience don't know this yet, or they haven't stayed up with the research, like the lab leak theory thing, the amount of evidence there is for the lab leak theory being accurate is.Overwhelming. It was definitely a lab leak. Like, this is, to say it wasn't a lab [00:36:00] leak is literally, you know, almost equivalent to like, the moon landing was a hoax level like just grasping at straws. And yet, people were getting deplatformed for saying that in the early days.Simone Collins: Well, now, I mean, people were being de platformed for anything that the mainstream, like, government or media establishment was not advocating for, including the efficacy of masks, right?You would get in huge trouble if you questioned that. And, of course, even in the beginning of the pandemic, people were saying, no, no, no, no, don't wear masks, because one, they're not effective, and two, they're not effective. Like the good ones we need for actualMalcolm Collins: healthcare. We are so blessed that we were not public figures when COVID was happening.Simone Collins: Oh, we would have been so screwed. That's right. Yeah.Edward Dutton: I was, but I just felt it best to shut up about it. Smart,Simone Collins: very, veryEdward Dutton: smart. I could see that this, this was the one thing that just knowSimone Collins: the third rail. Oh my goodness. What I like about your theory [00:37:00] though, in general is that it is broadly optimistic. You're, you're taking a theory that was.quIte pessimistic originally and now you're like, Oh no, everything is going to be okay. Think things are working out the way that they're supposed to. IEdward Dutton: mean, it'll be okay in the end. We'll have to, we'll have to go through hell. First I was at Churchill said, if you're going through hell, keep on going.Yeah. And there'll be, there'll be a lot of unpleasantness first, but yeah, it seems to be that what I originally thought was that it's just the collapse of society and there'll be a very, very long, dark age. And maybe, maybethat will just collapse and that will be a very long dark age. But the more I've looked into it, the more I'm thinking, no, we, we, first of all, there was a Byzantium last time that, that held out. And so. that there should be this time. Secondly, we have higher, much more technology this time so that if we can if we can create these separate states that are useful using this technology, then we can start at a higher level.And so the renaissance, you know, and so therefore we could potentially go further. And thirdly, I can't even begin [00:38:00] to predict what effect AI would have on this because it's a new thing in, in, in terms of good or bad things. I mean, the bad thing is that it would just keep society on, on sort of life support as it farms out all work to machines.And the humans are just these sort of sort of farm animals, really. There's a sort of milk. by a, by a, by a great big machine and, and, and go into greater and greater dysgenics. And I, I, I don't know, that could be terrible.Malcolm Collins: Actually this, this is where the wokes are doing us enormous favor is because of AI.If they weren't pushing such strong pressure on us to all conglomerate together. We likely wouldn't. Because of AI, because AI doesn't. force civilization to collapse in the same way it has in the past, if they weren't doing this themselves, we wouldn't be building these parallel economies. Well, and isn't there anSimone Collins: argument to be made that because of AI there may not even be a dark age because one, it will accelerate the extermination of any group that will basically fall into like, hedonic pleasure box because AI will facilitate that.Those people won't have kids and then those [00:39:00] people won't be in the future at all. Leaving only like really industrious, hardworking, non hedonically motivated people left and AI toEdward Dutton: empower them. Imagine if it can, if it could, if it can make, I mean, the pornography is a problem even now. So if you've got pornography that is utterly sating, I'm not, but an ersatz relationship, which seems real.Right. Then, then you can see how it's going to be a, it's a selection event, even more so than I had previously said. And so it's, it's selects out all these men, all but the most high quality men, all but the most high quality women out and and, and you just have this this, this group of, of gold, golden platonic golden people who Well, so then isSimone Collins: this maybe as bad as it gets?Perhaps we are at the lowestMalcolm Collins: point? No, no, no. You, you definitely will have an economic collapse after this. Oh, well I thinkEdward Dutton: we will. I think we're so We're so We're so If you look at sort of Strauss Howell or whatever, or the various theories on this, we're so [00:40:00] Jewish. I mean we really, we're so due economic collapse and war where it's, it's, we, is it happening and I don't notice it or what?I don't know, but was it, we're just so rich we're not noticing it, but we are absolutely, in terms of this cycle I told you about, this Finnish guy, this idea of cycles of hormones and whatever, we are so, we are so due something any time now. That would beMalcolm Collins: a collage. This conversation has been fantastic, we're really glad we had you on again and I hope that you have a spectacular day, and guys, do check out his book, the, the education book on Amazon, and the Johnny Heritage podcast.Simone Collins: The NakedMalcolm Collins: Classroom, and The Jolly Heretic, and,Edward Dutton: And my book on this subject we were just discussing is called The Past as a Future Country, The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, and I've got another one called Breeding the Human Herd, Eugenics, Hygienics, and the Future of the Species, and I'm working on one on the altruistic mutants, so this is a new, new thing I'm working on.Malcolm Collins: Ooh, very fun and, well, and I love it, I, [00:41:00] I love it because it's such a great thing to throw in our opponents faces. One of my favorite tweets was something like feminists and anti natalists are the only cultural groups that think that they can out compete their rivals by having fewer kids.You know, and it's just so silly on its face when you think about it. But have a spectacularSimone Collins: day. Yes, thank you so muchEdward Dutton: for coming on. Great. Great to talk to you both. Okay. Well, I hope you had a great Christmas, everybody, and happy new year and allMalcolm Collins: that. 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

We dive deep into the Garden of Eden creation story from Genesis, analyzing the location, context, themes, interpretation and hidden meanings. We discuss the curses put on Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, original sin, the serpent, and more.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I had read this story as like a child I had, and I think this was pushed by like Bible conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. We didn't know where the Garden of Eden was. It like gives an exact location for the Garden of Eden.But then the two other things that really like just chilled me when I was rereading it is why wouldn't God want man to have the knowledge of good and evil? Mm-Hmm. If it was evil to be nude, Then God would not have let them walk around the garden nude.Is being nude really evil? No, it's not really evil. It is a social construct that man Tell the other man about what is evil. knowledge of good and evil, Is not knowledge like a perfect knowledge of what's right. And what's wrong because that's obviously something man does not have, Instead. Knowledge of good and evil in this context means man's ability to make decisions about what is good and evil So in [00:01:00] eating from that tree, Man took unto himself Through making a decision for himself. About what was good and what was evil? The tree did not need to be magic to impart the knowledge of good and evil and demand. It was him making a decision independent from God.Malcolm Collins: So, when I read this, one of the curses that I could have sworn was put on man. And there is a reading of this, that this is one of the curses that was put on man, was to die. That before this, man would have lived forever. Not being allowed toEat from the apple that makes you live forever. It's not one of the punishments. It is a consequencewould you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Well, I am so excited to be here with you today, Simone. Likewise. You had done this thing recently where you're like, I'm going to go back through the Bible and reread it with this new context I have.While also recognizing that when we've gone back and read scripture recently, it doesn't say what we remembered it having said, [00:02:00] like what I read growing up. It's almost like a Mandela effect thing. Like I am certain. That the, the, for example, the story that we're going to go over today, the story of Adam and Eve, I am certain I remember it saying that Adam didn't have to work in Eden.And yet it very explicitly says Adam had to work in Eden. Yeah,Simone Collins: his job was tilling the land.Malcolm Collins: God breathing the life into Adam's Mouth, but he breathed it into Adam's nose. I, there are so many aspects of this story where I was like, what isSimone Collins: going on? God doesn't do CPR right. Oh my goodness. Well,Malcolm Collins: no, speaking of CPR, another thing I was amazed about was how similar the removing of the rib felt to modern surgery.So, yeah,Simone Collins: he sedated him, yeah. So itMalcolm Collins: put him, he put him into a deep sleep. Yeah. . Then he cuts him open. Mm-Hmm. . He removes the rib. He takes out the [00:03:00] rib. Then he reseals the area that he cut with flesh. Yes. Yes. It was so weird. I, and I, and I read that and I was like, I remember like something more animalistic, like pulling it out or something like that.Yeah.Simone Collins: Or just, yeah, just, you know, you know, like whatever.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Not okay, we put him under sedation. We removed the rib. We so there were, but, but actually. It's not just that. The larger themes weren't the themes I remembered. And this is something that we get into in the next, in the upcoming track that we're doing this, this Friday.Where you wanted to dig deep into the subject on the track, and I just haven't read it in a while, so I need to go back to it. Which is what's really going on with this story. Because, basically, the gist of the story, as I remember it, is Adam is in Eden with, with Eve and Adam doesn't have to work or anything like that, and a snake comes to Eve and Adam and tells them you should really eat this, apple of knowledge that you've been told not to eat.And then Adam goes and he eats [00:04:00] the apple of knowledge. And God is mad about that. And then God kicks them out and curses you know, women to have pain and childbirth and. Men to have to work all of their lives for, for food. That was a gist of, of the story I remembered. That was not the story that I read for a number of reasons that I'd love to go deep.But I'm happy to have you, you take a shot at this first, Simone. What really surprised you in your interpretation of it when you re read it? I was, I was definitely surprised by a lot of the things you were, I just thought that they walked around this perfectly maintained garden and just picked fruit off the trees and kind of enjoyed that.Simone Collins: So that was surprising to me. And I was also surprised by God's warning as to why one should not. Eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In that, like he says, if you do it, you'll die. Whereas before I thought it was just like, no, no, no, don't do that. So that was interesting to me.I was also surprised that there are kind of two big deal trees, right? There's [00:05:00] the tree of life and there's a tree of knowledge of good and evil and.No one, no one reallyMalcolm Collins: talks about the other tree. And there's another thing, so I had vaguely remembered the Tree of Life, but I had understood that the way it worked is that the Tree of Life kept a man alive forever, so long as he lived in the garden and was eating for the Tree of Life. It's implied in the story that that is not true, and that is not how the Tree of Life works.If man ever once ate from the tree of life, he would live forever. So man never ate from the tree of life. He never touched the tree of life. Which also to me kind of implies that this being kicked out of Eden happened almost immediately within the context of the story. And that he had never eaten from that other tree either.That he wasn't banned from eating from. Well yeah, I mean at theSimone Collins: end it's kind of implied. that god is worried about him now eating from the tree of life because then he couldMalcolm Collins: live forever. No, but yeah, change that. Okay, so I'll go into the larger context of the story here as I re understand it. So first I want to give some quotes here that people might be surprised about.The wet man had to work in the garden of eden. The lord god [00:06:00] took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it, to work it. He even, it even uses the word work very explicitly. He was tending this garden and it wasn't a garden that grew automatically. Another thing that was really interesting is it pointed out that plants, even magical plants in the Garden of Eden cannot grow without water.And because it did not rain in those days, God had the water spring up from under the ground and then secede a number of times like a global flood almost, but like a small watering level before man was brought into this garden. To get it ready for man, but then after that man had to take care of it and it implies that at least part of taking care of it was the watering of it because this water rising and automatically watering seems to have stopped when man came into the garden.So that was reallySimone Collins: Oh, I didn't pick that up, but I mean tending was definitely He has aMalcolm Collins: job. Yeah, so the other big thing, and this is one that you really picked up on and wanted to pontificate on quite a [00:07:00] bit, is man was not tempted by the serpent to eat from the tree of good and evil. And it was not a tree of knowledge, it's very, every time it's talked about, it's the knowledge of good and evil.It is a specific kind of knowledge, and I will delineate further later in this. It's not generic good and evil, it's a specific kind of good and evil. And this is something I didn't pick up on the first time I read it. But anyway so, uh, how, how did the serpent trick go through this part of the story?Simone Collins: Right, so the serpent's nah, God, well, he, he approaches Eve and To her specifically says, Oh, you know that tree, you should try it. And she says, well, no, God said not to. And the snake's nah, God's full of s**t. By the way, God made this snake as well. He first made all the animals in the garden of Eden.And I had forgotten this to help out Adam because God thought it was. Kind of mean to have Adam do all this work by himself, but none of them turned out to be really good helpers. So that's when he decided to make Eve. Oh,Malcolm Collins: I, I read that part is meaning something a little bit more salacious than that. So [00:08:00] God put allSimone Collins: of them knowing eachMalcolm Collins: other.Well, yeah. So God put all the animals in front of man and he had them named them and then none of them was a suitable companion for man. Well, what is, what does that mean? Suitable companion? If a suitable companion is a woman. Well, no,Simone Collins: but God said that he shouldn't toil alone. But for the man, there was not found a helper as his partner, a helper. And remember God, so at two 18, then the Lord, God said, it is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper as his partner. I mean, keeping this, this guy's working, he's trying to get him a helpful, helpful worker and, you know.Danger noodlesMalcolm Collins: and what oxen are definitely more helpful than women plowing a field,Simone Collins: right? But we don't know if he's plowing he is tilling I mean you could do itSimone Collins: I mean, but like the quote's so funny. It is really funny that after God finds Adam and Eve and he gets mad at Eve after [00:09:00] asking what they've done he says to the man, because you've listened to the voice of your wife and you've eaten of the tree of which I command you, blah, blah, blah.He then curses him. But that was Adam's problem was listening to his wife. And I think that's so funny. Like Eve, she, she succumbed to social pressure. It's the snake's fault. But Adam, Adam.Malcolm Collins: Because you've listened to your wife.Simone Collins: Yeah, you should have known better. Oh well, Adam.Malcolm Collins: But I actually read this differently in context and I'll explain what I think the actual correct reading of this is in just a second. So, before I go further with this story, something I really want to talk about that was quite transformative for me is I am reading this story idly.Right, I'm like, okay, I'm reading it, I'm trying to learn from it, and I can come up with hypotheses about what I think that this is supposed to be telling us, you know, as I believe God always tried to reveal as true a truth as he could to man when he was giving man true revelations, and it wasn't just, you know, pagan nonsense.Right. And, and so, this I think was one of the true revelations, [00:10:00] and if it is one of the true revelations, then it should have contained as true a story as he could convey to early man, telling them some story. So the story that it seemed to me like he was telling, was the story of man Building civilization of the first cities of the of, of the development of human sentience and culture.And so I read the story and something that just like immediately jumped out at me that was really weird. Is every time I had read this story as like a child I had, and I think this was pushed by like Bible conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. We didn't know where the Garden of Eden was. Like the Garden of Eden was at some magical place and some people hypothesized it's in Africa and Joseph Smith hypothesized it's in America.And so like I, and I read it and it like gives an exact location for the Garden of Eden. And that shocked me to my core, kind of. I was [00:11:00] like, what? Yeah, because itSimone Collins: starts with that. The Garden of before Adam even shows up, they're like, really specific about where it is. Yeah, so IMalcolm Collins: should be clear what it says.It says, The Garden of Eden is at the headwaters of four rivers. Two of the rivers don't correlate with rivers that we know about today. So they could have been streams or their names could have been changed. TheydriedSimone Collins: up. I mean, you know, geologyMalcolm Collins: happens. Whatever. But two of the rivers, we definitely know what rivers they are.It's the Tigris and the Euphrates river. Well, we know where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers headwaters are. Like, it's not a vague thing. The headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates river. Hold on, I have to pull up the name of the, Is the Taurus Mountains in Southern Turkey. Okay? And I'll put this on a map on the screen.Now, something really interesting happened. I was like, okay, if I am accurate. Is this, is this story about the development of the first human cities? And the development of, of Bronze Age man? Then I should look up, you know, this transition of man from being like an animal to being like a human as we think of him today.I should look up, what's the oldest city that we know of today? [00:12:00] Hmm. And, shockingly, and this is one of those moments that I keep having when I'm looking at Bible stuff, and I'm like, whaaat? Shockingly, it's a less than two hour drive from the Taurus Mountains.Sorry. I made a mistake here is actually in the terrorist mountains. It is not a two hour drive from the Taurus mountains. I was looking at where Google had put the pin for the terrorist mountains on Google earth.Not taking into account that the Taurus mountains aren't an exact point on the map.So it was exactly right as to where the first city was.Malcolm Collins: This Accurately recalled. Now, keep in mind, this settlement was settled around 10, 000 years ago.The, the oldest that we think that the story of Adam and Eve is, is maybe 5, 000 years old. Or 6, 000Simone Collins: was what I was getting when I looked this up,Malcolm Collins: yeah. Yeah, so, so they were remembering something. About as far in their past as the writing of the story of Adam and Eve is from our past. And a pretty exact [00:13:00] location.Now keep in mind, this was likely written by people in what is today Israel, or maybe Egypt, or maybe, maybe in Mesopotamia. But all of those areas are pretty far away from this location. The other thing that's really interesting is it said that when man left the garden, he left to the east. That was the direction that civilization spread from there.Now, if you know your Bronze Age history, you know that this is where civilization spread. From this founding location that most of the early civilizations were in the East. Well, well, well. Then it has something that sounds like a very bizarre contradiction. At the beginning of the story, it said that God made the Garden of Eden in the East.Well, if God made the Garden of Eden in the East and man left from it in the East, that makes no sense from the context of the original storytellers. That would have sounded like an anachronism. And yet, from the perspective [00:14:00] of most of the Judeo Christian followers today, the garden is in the east. In fact, there are very, very few Judeo Christian followers to the east of this area in Turkey.So AKA Turkey ay. Turkey ay. Now, yeah. So he they changed their name for people who are wondering what she's talking about. That was really like chilling to me. And I think it, it shows this hypothesis of what I'm talking about is the God trying to explain man's early history. But then the two other things that really like just chilled me when I was rereading it is I had thought that man had eaten an apple of knowledge, right?Yes. Apple of like knowledge of good and evil. And that always really confused me. Why wouldn't God want man to have the knowledge of good and evil? Mm-Hmm. , that doesn't seem to make sense. Mm-Hmm. . Right? I was like, I must be misinterpreting the story because I can't imagine God doing that. Yeah. And if you read the story like a child, it appears that that's what's happened.But if you read it like an adult, you [00:15:00] recognize something. What does man do? The moment he eats the apple, he is ashamed by his nudity and so is the woman. And so they. Hide from God was, fig leaves, and then they, they want to wear clothes. Well, this is really interesting. Nudity. So, it said that this, this knowledge of good and evil, of the type the tree provided, God had.If it was evil to be nude, Then God would not have let them walk around the garden nude. One would hope. If it was truly evil. Well, not one would hope, but it's said that God has this true knowledge of good and evil as well. God does a lot of weird things. So he also has additional knowledge to this. This is not real evil.Is being nude really evil? No, it's not really evil. It is a social construct that man Tell the other man about what is evil. It is an evolved idea around what is evil, around social norms, and [00:16:00] everything like that. Yeah, this isSimone Collins: like something we actively need to tell our kids. No, when we go outside, you do have to wear pants.And I remember my parents telling me that, because that was kind of weird. SoMalcolm Collins: But, but, but this is critical, right? Because it now makes some other things make sense. We know that women in our society are much more prone to following social consensus than men are, and are much more prone to generating these types ofSimone Collins: sexual As is the case with Mr.Danger Noodle, telling her what to do.Malcolm Collins: Exactly, right? So we learn that, that you need to guard against this sort of social pressure that can come from your wives and from women in society. In a big way in society right now, I think that this is potentially one of the problems we're having is that the gender that is more susceptible to social conformity has equal power.And I do want women to have equal power in society, but there are negative consequences towards this social conformity, and it can lead to virtue spirals and stuff like that. But let's talk about specifically the kind of evil that man engaged in, because this is so interesting. The evil that he engaged in [00:17:00] is a type of evil.That is disproportionately engaged in within religious communities. It is following man's social norms, okay, above God's effort in the word of God. That is the type of evil that man ate here.And it works perfectly for the If the theming of the story, if the theming of the story is about man first creating settlements, like small settlements that he was living in then and expanding out and creating the first civilization, the first cities, when man was living in the woods, he didn't have this form of evil, right?He didn't have this form of good and evil because he was just living in small trial structures, right? Like they might've had some rules, but they were much less developed than what began to evolve in cities. The good and evil of cities. Is. the condemnation of walking around nude because it has negative [00:18:00] social consequences.And I think that this has a bigger lesson to take away from it, and it's a very important lesson to me which is what society says is good is what is pro social. What society says is evil is what is anti social. Society tells us these things because those are the ideas that Promote the best interest of a general hedonist living in society, right?If you were trying to promote aggregate hedonism within society, which is really just the maximization of the environmental stimuli that caused your ancestors to have the most surviving offspring. It is a thing of triviality. Those rules of good and evil that we live by in our society, that is original sin.General utilitarianism is original sin. Banning pornography is original sin. These are the things that are original sin, right? Not following directly what is in the Bible, and only what's in the Bible is original sin. [00:19:00] And only God's will that is revealed through iterative revelation. And that was so transformative of me to get that understanding.But.Simone Collins: Yeah, that is so interesting because it's also nah. What anyone takes away from it. I've never heard anyone have that interpretation before Malcolm. So I find this very interesting.Malcolm Collins: Well, it also, you know, tells us a lot about starting civilization, right? Is that well, actually, this comes to the next interpretation, which is important to understand certain civilization.So God. The concept of original sin, like eating the apple being original sin, I don't really get that from the piece. It doesn't really talk about sin anywhere. The snake tries to convince man to eat the apple because it says that it will make man more like God. And man wants to eat the apple because it will make man more like God.A lot of the sin in what is happening here is a quest for God's knowledge. A [00:20:00] quest for shortcuts to God is being condemned here. Well, and that'sSimone Collins: actually something that really did surprise me from reading this again. I'm sorry to interrupt, but like when I read. 3 to 3 22, then the Lord God said, see, the man has become like one of us knowing good and evil.And now he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever. And that's when he's Oh, we got to guard the tree of life. But he said, so the man has become like one of us. That's really interesting. Like you say, it's, it's more being on his level in a weird way,Malcolm Collins: I guess.So, what does this story mean? When it says the type of knowledge of good and evil that man gained is the type that God had. And that man in a way became more like God, when getting this type of knowledge of good and evil.Would it clearly means in context is not knowledge of good and evil, like a perfect knowledge of what's right. And what's wrong because that's obviously something man does not have, nor was it something that he showed when he first like, Put on clothes to hide his nakedness from God. [00:21:00] Instead. Knowledge of good and evil in this context means man's ability to make decisions about what is good and evil in the same way that God makes decisions about what is good and evil. Without this knowledge or ability, what man thinks is good and evil or what man knows is good and evil is just what God lays out as good as an evil. Knowledge of good and evil in this context means knowledge of good and evil that contrasts. Or had the potential to conflict. With God's knowledge of good and evil. And what's really ironic and in a way, beautiful in the way this story works. It would mean that the tree. I have knowledge of good and evil didn't actually need to have any special or magical properties to it. To grant this ability to man. Because. Before he ate from that tree. What was good and evil was simply the rules that God laid out. But the only rule that God had laid out was [00:22:00] to not eat from that tree.So in eating from that tree, Man already took unto himself when he reached in. Grabbed for that apple. That was when he was taking on to himself, the knowledge of good and evil. It wasn't biting the apple that gave him disability. It was the fact that he thought he knew better than God, about what was good.And what was evil in making the decision to eat from that tree? And this readings interpretation is actually made pretty clear by the text by a rather odd remark that God makes That outside of this reading, doesn't make a lot of sense. that if you touch. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That's what leads to the consequences, not just eating from the tree. This interpretation actually completely fixes the problem. Of an individual saying, well then why did God put this tree that gave man knowledge of good and evil, but then banned [00:23:00] man from eating from the tree? Right. That seems like a very odd thing for God to do. There was never a tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden.It was just a regular tree. The important tree, the magic tree. I was the tree of life. He didn't ban man from eating the tree of life. He banned man from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And he named the tree that because he knew in eating from that tree, man would take onto himself the responsibility of knowledge of good and evil. W a incorrect responsibility of knowledge of good and evil. There was never any deceit or trick on the behalf of God.God just knew because he knows all things that will happen. You know, we believe in, predestination, That was the path that man would take. And that was the important role that, that completely non magical and regular tree would have in the history of reality.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so, but the other interesting one is the curses. [00:24:00] So, when I read this, one of the curses that I could have sworn was put on man. And there is a reading of this, that this is one of the curses that was put on man, was to die. That before this, man would have lived forever. That isn't exactly one of the curses it's put on me.Still, let me take away from that. Hold on, hold on. I'll read the lines because it's, it's pretty interesting, but there is a way of interpreting this that that was not one of the curses. That was a consequence of eating from the tree of good and evil, but not one of the curses. So I will read the quote here that really makes it sound like a consequence.And the Lord God said, The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat it and live forever. So, Lord God banished him from the garden of good and even to work from the ground which had been taken so if you see what's being said there, the being driven from the garden of Eden is not one of the punishments and not being allowed [00:25:00] toEat from the apple that makes you live forever. It's not one of the punishments. It is a consequence. It is somebody who has the knowledge of good and evil.Cannot also live forever. You can't have both of these things at once. It's unless you are God. Now take our interpretation of how God works and how man works, right? Man is made God, eventually, millions of years from now, a God that lives outside of time through this cycle of intergenerational improvement, right?Through this cycle of one generation, martyring themselves for the next generation. If man lived forever, he would not be able to improve fast enough or meaningfully enough to ever become God. This is why ultimate life extension, beyond just like health extension, is sinful. It is because it is to eat from the tree of everlasting life and stop this cycle of intergenerational improvement.But it's another reading to this, [00:26:00] is that before man had the knowledge of good and evil before he had civilization, before he had what we would think of as cognizance or sentience, he didn't really understand death. As I've pointed out, it wasn't exactly that man never died in the garden. That's not exactly said.It's that death wasn't meaningful to him in the garden. He, like all entities, pre cognizance, pre sentience, doesn't it really important to them in the way it's important to us, because they have kids and they understand that their goal is to have kids, you know, a praying mantis that has sex with another praying mantis and gets his head bitten off, to an animal sacrificing yourself for your children.Is often a natural thing to do, or you don't evenSimone Collins: realize you're doing it. It just happens. So you don'tMalcolm Collins: realize you're doing it because death is not meaningful in that way. In a way, this knowledge of death and, and, and elevation of death as something of a poorer and something to be. Is part of the curse when you have this sentience, you also have death.If you are going to be a [00:27:00] meaningful entity, God could not give us the, the, the the apple of everlasting life. And it's also important to note that this apple of everlasting life is a metaphorical thing. We know that because he put a. An angel guarding it with a flaming sword, and we know where this location broadly is.Humans have been pretty much everywhere in the world, especially in Turkey. We would have run into an angel flipping about a flaming sword. So this is either not a location there anymore, or this is a metaphorical location at this point. I do want to read this, because this is the other part about God not exactly cursing man to die. Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil, you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and sissle for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground. Since from it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you will return. So by this, this is more that you will. Have to work to eat food until you die, not you're going to die and you [00:28:00] workSimone Collins: and the work isn't going to be easy because he worked before he had a job before the, to the point where like he needed a helper and companion, but apparently it wasn't hard and now it sucks because there's weeds and they're spiky weeds.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, they're particularly difficult. And this gets really interesting to me. So in the following tract, we're going to be talking about something that humanity is facing right now. We call the trial of the lotus eaters. And I think what the trial of the lotus eaters is, what is causing demographic collapse.is man having overcome these initial curses. Most men no longer spend the majority of their days working the field for food. In fact, most man doesn't really need to work that hard anymore to sustain himself. You know, there's people who live by dumpster diving, like freegans. This is a thing that exists, right?For food women, isn'tSimone Collins: that toil? I mean. The, the thistles and weeds of the dumpster are the brokenMalcolm Collins: glass. The American man's struggle today to feed himself with the struggle of [00:29:00] our ancestors is, is frankly narcissistic in the extreme, bordering on the psychotic. This is like comparing a, a difficult day to the Holocaust or something like that.Men have their children starve to death regularly in the winter. Yeah, that's true. You can't make that comparison. Quality of life is a lot better. Okay. So then the, the, the next thing is what women got as a curse. So women got two curses.Simone Collins: No, they got a couple of curses there. They got four curses, painful child bearing.So being pregnant, probably periods, et cetera. Just the whole process of being capable of it now sucks. Painful childbirth. So labor. sucks. Three. Oh, but you're still attracted to men slash husbands. So you're still going to have to go through all that nonsense. You areMalcolm Collins: now attracted to men slashSimone Collins: husband.Yeah, but that was a punishment before it was punishment. Yeah. So, and the final one, and then the fourth is the funniest one. Cause it was basically subservience to men slash husbands. Like they will rule over you. Which they kind of, I mean like [00:30:00] higher IQ on average stronger you know, bigger in, in, you know, on pretty much every measure, you know, bigger brains, bigger muscles, taller height, like it's, which is, is I think very, very funny.So maybe even pre Original Sin Eve was. Like beefier, you know, I wonderYeah,Malcolm Collins: maybe maybe but I I so I point something out about these these curses, right? Is is man's curse to need to work. The fields is no longer really applicable in the modern era Women's curse to have pain during childbirth.We now have Epidurals.Simone Collins: Yeah, we have epidurals. We have like pills where you can basically have a period once every three months or less. Yeah, I mean. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: andSimone Collins: women. You can transition. I mean, you can go on hormone blockers and just not become female.Malcolm Collins: Does a man rule over women anymore? No, not really.He'sSimone Collins: still smarter. What does Leah Thomas still beat the other women on the swim team? I'm sorry, Malcolm, [00:31:00] but I think you might be wrongMalcolm Collins: here. Well, I think you're saying should man rule over women, but I'm talking about our social structure today. I would say that women have disproportionate institutional power today.When, if you look at like the number of women who are graduating from university, if you look at in early jobs, not in like older jobs, but in early jobs women have largely overcome this man rule over this thing.Simone Collins: Systemically, we're entering more of a ganography. Sorry, gunocracy phase.Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and women what's the word that they use for, for woman liking her husband?The, the, you, your desire will be for your husband. Is this women's, most women's desire anymore?Simone Collins: Their desire will be for rom com fictional.Malcolm Collins: Their desire is for the characters in Fifty Shades of Grey. The point being is I think that people look at this and they're like, this is man sinning by not having these curses apply to him anymore.And I think that that is an incorrect reading. I think that [00:32:00] God. Is a smart God. He knew we would develop technology. There is no technology that we have, that is not, two planes and a helicopter, I mean, two boats and a helicopter, I always come back to this people who aren't familiar with the story a guy like a flood's coming.He says, God will save me. A boat comes to try to save him. He sends it away. He says, don't worry, God will save me. Another boat comes. He says, don't worry, God will save me. A helicopter comes. He says, don't worry, God will save me. And heaven, he goes, why didn't God save me? And he goes, what do you think the two boats and a helicopter were for?God, you, you, it is extremely arrogant for God to demand that for man to demand of God that his miracles appear in a format that is suitably thalmatological for him. God's miracles are most shown in the modern age through logic and reason and man's, the gifts that God gave man's ability over nature.I believe that God did intend for us to free ourselves from these individual curses and that with this freedom, he showed Why these curses weren't the curses that we thought they were. [00:33:00] Why we showed that actually these curses were kind of for our own good during the early days of civilization. Because as soon as we freed ourselves from them, we were no longer able to motivate reproduction.And we were no longer able to motivate the intergenerational continuation of culture. And we are about to go through something that we will call the in our next trek, the trial of the Lotus Eaters, which is a trial that is a direct response to the resolution of the curses that were put on us in this story.I do not like the term original sin because I do not believe this story talks about sin. It talks about mankind separating for a place where he could be one with God, i. e. a place before he was sentient, a place before he was cognizant, a place when he was more like the lower entities. And it also warns us against listening to the rules of man over the rules of God.And when you say, what does God command of us? Intergenerational improvement, the expansion of human potentiality, because that is how we eventually rejoin God. All other readings of good and evil are either Textual, so [00:34:00] if they're textual, they're good. Or they are just things that promote general utilitarianism in society.And that is this sin. The sin that is being warned against in the Garden of Yeah, that's my,Simone Collins: that's my favorite interpretive conclusion that you made of all this. Is that the, the sin is deviating from truth, from logic, from God. And succumbing to social pressure. And that's what this is all about. You know, Eve listened to the snake, Adam listened to Eve.And then they, you know, got self conscious and then all of these actions. removed them from God. And that's like clear that all the things that went wrong was stuff that removed them from God based on social pressure. So the moral of the story, boys and girls is don't succumb to peer pressure.Just say no.Malcolm Collins: But peer pressure undersells it. When people hear peer pressure, they think about These little things in society, right? Like they think about being peer pressured into drugs or something like that. [00:35:00] It's a much bigger form of peer pressure. It's the peer pressure of wearing clothes. Okay.It's not saying go around as a nudist, but to recognize that there is no intrinsic good or evil to wearing clothes. There is no intrinsic good or evil to a lot of these things in our society that are stop gaps, that are rules that we create to promote pro sociality. And that to elevate justice. This human idea of good and evil that developed in these first settlements and these first civilizations is to elevate the highest order of sin.It is a hard, a very hard rule and, and lesson to follow. It's not the easy, don't succumb to the peer pressure. Of randomness. It's don't succumb to the peer pressure of your church when they say something like pornography is sinful if it doesn't directly say in the Bible that pornography is sinful.Well, also because coming to churchSimone Collins: often is like a matter of life and death. If you get thrown out of your village or whatever and there's no foodMalcolm Collins: to be fed. This is the question. [00:36:00] Are we commanded when we see truth that other people don't see, are we commanded to say that truth? Are we commanded to teach that truth?And I believe that we are within a narrow subset. So we are to the people who are capable of hearing it, but we should not out ourselves in a way that leads to the, the, any sort of danger for people in our community. And this matters a lot when we end up talking about some of the mistakes I think specific Abrahamic faiths make.And this is something that we'll talk a lot about in future tracks, but I think that a lot of people have this belief that if something is done in the name of God, It must be what the God of the Bible suggested that we do. And yet we see constantly throughout Christianity, throughout Judaism, throughout Islam, elements that were sort of pop paganism or pop culture of the time, accidentally working themselves into these religions.And when these things worked themselves into a religion at a time of antiquity, it can be uniquely difficult to sort the lessons of [00:37:00] God from the things that were just. I don't know like Canaanite culture, for example and so, it's something that is really important to look back through these stories, whiz, and say, do these stories have predictive power?Do like, where, being able to point exactly where the earliest city is, right? Do they, do they teach important lessons? Or are they The accidental adaptation of some nearby pagan culture and it's, it's, it's critical, I think, for the advancement of humanity that we do look at textual sources with this critical eye and understand that they are not immune to the tampering with, I mean, we, we, we see this today, you know, people today point out they, they worship there's these, these Catholics in Latin America who worship Santa Muerte which is an unofficial saint, which is a red robed human skeleton that is paraded around town and you pray to it for things like what's an example?All the naughty stuff you shouldn't pray to Jesus for. Yeah oh, I want sex or I want this person dead. [00:38:00] I'm really mad at them. And they're like, yeah, but we'd be embarrassed to pray to God about this. And you know, she's a saint of the people. And it's Bro, if you can't tell that what you're worshiping, like I know what that entity is.That's a very obviously to me, not in a team. They're like, no, but we're doing it in the name of God. She's an intermediary for God. Just saying this is replacing, you know, taking a pagan script and replacing the God's name in it was, was Yahweh doesn't make it sanctified no matter when it happened, but we'll get to this later.Anyway, I love you to death Simone, because I don't want to be too offensive in this episode. And this, this other episode is when we have to do a lot of. thinking about and a lot more study on because it would be very offensive when I point out the bits of Abrahamic faith that I think are actually borrowed from other belief systems that areSimone Collins: satanic worship.Malcolm Collins: I don't think, I don't believe in satanic worship because keep in mind to us, actually, this is a final sort of wrap up point on this story. The basilisk to us is part of God to believe Satan is something [00:39:00] separate from God that can genuinely resist God's will is to be a polytheist. Satan cannot challenge God's will.It is a facet of God. And so. The, the snake tempting Adam and Eve was not some entity in absence of God. It was God tempting Adam and Eve because he knew what needed to happen. God uses Satan to tempt us to do the things that we need to do to move forwards. And, and, and that's what he's doing in the trial of the lotus eaters.He is. Sterilizing, memetically sterilizing a huge portion of the population. That is his evil side. TheSimone Collins: Basilisk Well now feel free to take this part out, but I mean, there is this whole thing where God also punishes the snake and he has to crawl upon his belly and women are going to hate him and he's going to hate women and there's Well,Malcolm Collins: I would actually word this a little differently.So as I said, I believe the Basilisk is an element of God. Right. Like the, the, the, the Satan is an element of God. And I think what you could see here, because and we [00:40:00] talk about this a lot in a future track, and this actually requires a lot more reading, is most of the Abrahamic faiths describe this element of God as having some degree of autonomy and being in, in some degree of antagonism with God.And so what it might be is God. The overarching god feels, I guess you could say if I was going to anthropomorphize it, some form of antagonism with this aspect of himself that must tempt man. And he doesn't like that this aspect of himself exists and he knows it must exist. He knows that these are things must, man must do to go down the path that we need to go down, but he is angry with himself for that and for that reason he punishes this element of himself.And I think that that's what we're seeing there. And I think that throughout the scripture, we see that in a way, God forces the part of himself that has to punish and test man to live sort of a worse life than the rest of God to live in some form of [00:41:00] deprivation. And I believe that it. Is the cursing of man that causes deprivation to this because I don't believe that God in any way means to hurt a really challenged man.He just knows he must for a man to improve himself. And this comes, you know, one of our more important teachings is don't interfere with the bas in its role. Removing temptation from man does not strengthen man. It weakens man. We must allow this aspect of God to tempt a man and it's up to individual men and individual cultures to overcome this.That is how. God ensures that we are moving on the path that we are meant to move down. Well, like anySimone Collins: good parent, he'll set out boundaries. And if those boundaries are crossed, he has to follow through the consequences. That's actually a greatMalcolm Collins: way to put it. The part of us that punishes our kids, we hate that part of ourselves.And yet we know we must do it. Yeah. And if you don't, then you become a bad person. You begin to enjoy the punishing of, of, of your children or something like that. Right. And I think that God doesn't want that for himself. And [00:42:00] that's why you have this degree of autonomy set up for this entity. Anyway,Simone Collins: Well, I have this to say, I love you too, but as we just learned, That's because God punished Eve and so my love for you, my desire for you is divine punishment.I noticed I don't have desire for you. No,Malcolm Collins: no. I wasn't punished with that. No, no, no. GodSimone Collins: forbid. No, no. You, you, you got in trouble for listening to me. Big mistake. So, you know, I guess my love is not legitimate. It's because God did it. So anyway, sorry. I'm sorry. Snake made me do it. Something, something.I'll stop recording. 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

We explore the phenomenon of "This Man" - a mysterious face seen by many people in dreams. We compare it to similar odd images generated by AI like "Loab" and "Krungus." We hypothesize these strange images emerge from high-level conceptual processing in neural networks that may operate similar to the human brain. We dive into neuroscience around sleep, memory encoding, dreams, and consciousness to unpack why AI cognition could be more human-like than we realize.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] And convergent evolution doesn't just happen with animals when we made planes.We gave them wings. And I think that that's what may have happened with some of these architectural processes in the way AIs think.Simone Collins: Yeah. If we're trying to build thinking machines, is it crazy that they might resemble thinking machines?you could think of us as like LLMs, but stuck on like continuous nonstop prompt mode. Like we are in a constant mode of being prompt.I am prompting you right now as you're processing all the information around you and from me, right. And you are prompting me. And, and so it never stops and we are stuck in one. Brain essentially, GPT is getting tons of requests per minute per second and so there, there are these like flickers or flashes perhaps of cognizance all over the place and constantly because of the demand of use, but they're all very fragmented.Then they're not coming from one [00:01:00] entity that necessarily identifies as an entityMalcolm Collins: Like it's just a constant stream of prompts, but these prompts have thematic similarities to them. Basically our hypothesis is what consciousness is, is it is then the process where you're taking the output of all of these prompts and you are then synthesizing it into Something that is is much more compressed for long term storage and the way that you do that is by tying together narratively similar elements because there would be tons of narratively similar elements because everything I'm looking at has this narrative through line to it, right?Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Okay. I'm here, and I love you. I love you, too. All right. Simone, we are going to have an interesting conversation that was sparked this morning because she oversaw one of my favorite YouTubers. I was watching one of his latest things. It's called Y Files.And it was on the This Man phenomenon. Now, being somebody who is obsessed with cryptids and all sorts of spooky stories, I was very familiar with [00:02:00] the This Man phenomenon. WhereasSimone Collins: I've never heard of it. I thought at first when Malcolm described it, he was like, oh, there's this face that's seen everywhere.I'm like, Oh, Kilroy was here, right? That's the only thing I know about a face that's seen everywhere. And it's a cute face and it's fine. It's not what you'reMalcolm Collins: describing though. Yes. So we are going to go into the, this man phenomenon, but we are also going to relate it to similar phenomenons that are found within language models, because I want to more broadly.Use this episode to do a few things. One, being that I used to be a neuroscientist, let's educate the general public on neuroscience around sleep and some of my hypotheses, because everybody knows I love to throw in my own hypotheses, on what's really happening in sleep. Two I wanted to draw connections because we're seeing them more and more as AI is developing that language models may be structuring their thoughts and their architecture [00:03:00] closer to the way the human brain does than we were previously giving it credit for.And this requires understanding a bit of neuroscience because people who don't know what the f I'm talking about will say language models structure their thoughts, nothing like we structure our thoughts. Oh, like not me. And the reality is, is we don't have, we, there's a few parts of the brain.That we understand very well how they do processing like visual processing. We have a very good understanding into exactly how the neural pathways around visual processing work. Some parts of motor processing, we have a very good path, understanding of that. When we're talking about these more complex abstract thoughts, we have hypotheses, but we don't have a firm understanding.And so to say that we know that language models are not structuring themselves the same way the human brain structures itself is actually not a claim we can make in the way that a lot of people are making it right now, because we don't know, we don't have, when we talk about AI interpretability, understanding how the [00:04:00] AI is really doing things it's funny, I, I suspect we might find AI interpretability out of this AI panic and then be like, oh, we could test if the human brain was doing it this way and then find out that, yes, this is actually the way the human brain is doing it.And I, and I suspect it might be doing it that way. One, based on some evidence we're going to go through here, like some weird evidence. But two, based on sort of convergent logic as to why the brain would actually be structured this way, and if it is structured this way, why we wouldn't be able to see it easily in these, in these parts of the brain that are tied to the types of processing that we outsource to AIs.Yeah,Simone Collins: I would love for this perception to change too, because I feel like right now there's a ton of fear around AI that's fairly unfounded. And also it's really not, I it's wrong to say dehumanized, but AI is totally dehumanized now. And I think that we will think about contextualize and work with AI very differently when we start to realize how much it is.A different version of human and that we can go [00:05:00] hand in hand with this different version of human into the stars if we play our cards, right? And I don't think right now the mindset around AI is healthy or productive or fair to AI to be fair.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, to be realistic that they think the moment we create something better than ourselves is going to want to kill us.And, but you can go into our AI videos. We don't want to go too far into that, but let's talk about the this man phenomenon really quickly. So. So briefly, a woman went to her psychologist. She told him that she was having recurring dreams with a face that would tell her to come to it, that would tell her, you know, specific things over again reassure her a lot.Tell her, oh, I believe in you, you know, don't worry about this. But also sort of creepy things like, come with me, go north. So, as part of her therapy, she drew the face. Then and, and I, and I should note here that in the Y files, because I, I always have to brag on psychologists when they're doing something they shouldn't be doing because it's so [00:06:00] common to see psychologists doing things, he was saying that it is, it is like a common practice for psychologists to talk about patients, about, about their dreams with patients.This is not a common practice in any sort of like evidence based efficacious psychology. You are basically seeing A mystic doctor, if you're a psychologist, is really OrSimone Collins: dream analysis in general doesn't seem to have much of aMalcolm Collins: Yeah, it's not a thing. Yeah. So, it's not like a hard science. There might be some It'sSimone Collins: not an evidence based treatment method.Unless for example, you know someone has an anxiety disorder, they're dreaming about the thing they're anxious about, et cetera,Malcolm Collins: then you can Yeah, yeah, yeah. In that case, it would be. But just trying to find out what's wrong with someone Yeah. By analyzing their dreams is OrSimone Collins: talking about it being symbolic of something.Oh, I dreamt of a woman. And I'mMalcolm Collins: not saying that You can't do this. Like I am, you know, I'm not pro witchcraft, right? Which I would consider it as a form of witchcraft, but I'd say I am not for shutting down like tarot card readings. I am not for shutting down psychics, but people need to [00:07:00] understand that often psychologists, like a psychologist doing CBT.Might be seen by an uneducated person as the same kind of a thing as a psychologist doing dream analysis Oh, yeah When when they are not the sameSimone Collins: kind of like people view chiropractors as forms of doctors like The same as physical therapists and they're funMalcolm Collins: Yes it's like chiropractic or something like that.And it's not to say that we might not eventually develop a good science of dream analysis that is really robust and really efficacious. We just haven't done it yet. Okay, so, back to the story. Um, so, she's kept seeing this face. She drew an image of it. A few days later, another patient comes in and he goes where did you Where did that come from?And the guy was like, you know, obviously he can't disclose his patient had seen it. So he goes, what do you mean? Like, why are you interested in this? And the guy's ah, that's been visiting me in my dreams and talking to me. And so then the doctor emailed this to a bunch of his colleagues and immediately.They started calling him back and being like, yes, I've [00:08:00] either seen this or I have patients who have seen this and then it became like this viral phenomenon all around the world. And there's been thousands of sightings of it at this point in people's dreams. And so people are like, well, some people are like, oh, it might be in people's dreams because they're seeing pictures of it everywhere.Simone Collins: Because it's already becoming a meme.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I don't think it's that much of a meme, to be honest. I do not think No, I neverSimone Collins: heard of it. And you, you and I are both terminally online. Yeah. And so, by the way, those watching, I mean, you, Malcolm, you're probably going to overlay this on the screen, but for those listening on the audio only podcast, if you just Google this man dream, there's a Wikipedia page that will show you the photo.If you're curious. I looked at it. I have a question for you, though, about this, Malcolm. I have dreams. I just had a dream this morning that I watched a human sized Muppet get beat to death on a prison bus, but I have never had a dream where someone tells me something or where I could I could describe a face from that dream ever, period.No face. Even if my someone I know, a friend or family, or you are in a dream I don't know what you look [00:09:00] like. It's just that you're there.Malcolm Collins: So this is interesting when you're talking about the types of dreams people have and the way they reactSimone Collins: to dreams. Well, and is it common for people to actually see recognizable and memorable faces in a dream?Or are they constructing this after the fact? Well, is this a constructed memory?Malcolm Collins: I, I would say that just because you anecdotally haven't seen faces doesn't mean that anyone does. People dream pretty differently. Yeah. One thing I would note that you had marked to me earlier that I thought was really telling is you mentioned that your dreams looked a lot like bad ai art.Simone Collins: Really bad ai. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: totally. Yeah. But, but similar it was bad in the same way that AISimone Collins: art was. Yeah. You know, it would probably have seven finger or, you know, like kind of. You know, how they, in those early, earlyMalcolm Collins: mid journey, stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed that as well. But I, so I want to pin that idea but before we go into where this has similarities to AI, I want to do a quick tangent on the types of dreams [00:10:00] people have and stuff like that.And what I think is probably causing dreams. One of the things he mentioned in the show, which I hadn't heard before, is it. People predominantly have anxious dreams or dreams around threats to them, which is not something that I have personally noticed in my dreams. Have you noticed this? No.I'm actually just gonna Google this to see if this is accurate or something that people were pulling up as like a thesis.It is, well, kind of accurate. So, 66. 4 percent of dreams reported a threatening event.Simone Collins: Well, I guess is watching a human sized Muppet get beat to death on a prisonMalcolm Collins: That seems like a threatening event. Yes. It's actually very interesting that you mentioned this. Because I think that this is actually more about the emotional evocativeness of these events, but one of my most common, like I was thinking through, do I have dreams with threatening events?And I'm realizing I do have dreams with threatening events, but I very rarely feel threatened in my dreams. Like it's very common for me to have a where a zombie apocalypse is happening and I am I have gotten a bunch of guns, I've gotten a [00:11:00] team together and we're fighting back against the zombies.Or there's some government plot and I'm like deftly trying to navigate against the plot. YouSimone Collins: know, a common theme that I'm hearing there and that I've experienced too is like when these, when bad things happen or there's things I'm stressing out about in dreams, I'm more stressing out about my culpability or responsibility in them.Like I frequently have dreams where Oh God, where are the kids? We forgot the kids. And thatMalcolm Collins: is one of my most common dreams is that I have accidentally killed someone and I need to find a way to not get in trouble for the murder.Simone Collins: Yeah. So it's more like what you do. So like the idea of being threatened by something that sort of like to me, dreams.That have always been about your agency and of course that like plays into theories that dreams are kind of helping you sort of prepare a process or something like that. I don't know. But yeah, all these things being described with thisMalcolm Collins: man don't make sense. But hold on, before we get to the man, because we're going to We're gonna get to that as we tie back into AI, but I want to get to more general [00:12:00] stuff about dreams.Okay. Yes so this threatening hypothesis is used to come up with this idea that dreams are basically there so that we can simulate Potentially threatening events in our brains so that we have faster response times to them when they occur in real life It's Does not pass any sort of a plausibility test to me.For, because you know, if it's happening at 66 percent of cases, I mean, yeah, that's more often than not, but not that much. And the types of threatening events that I deal with in dreams are not likely threatening events in real life.Simone Collins: Well, and also, I don't know how have you ever felt like you came away from a threatening, as they're defined now, I get it, event in the dream that you actually feel more preferred for now,Malcolm Collins: Never. And I, and I think that some common dreams are really just easily explainable. The I forgot my pants at school dream or I forgot my pants at work dream is noticed when your body you know, you're, you're, you're in a dream and some aspect of your awareness realizes you're naked. And then you freak out because you [00:13:00] are naked and you're in an environment where you're not supposed to be naked.In fact, if I was going to construct a study on this, I would construct a study of frequency of this type of dream in people who sleep naked versus people who sleep in pajamas. Yeah, because I've neverSimone Collins: had one of those dreams, but I also don't sleep naked. You sleep inMalcolm Collins: pajamas and I sleep naked, yeah. Yeah.Simone Collins: Huh. Have you had those dreams? All the time, I have those dreams. Oh my gosh, okay. Well, wear some clothes to bed, you slob. No, sexy. Never doMalcolm Collins: that. So, so, I, but I, but I want to go into what I think is actually causing dreams. And I think that we have some pretty good evidence of this. So one thing that people don't know, I remember I saw a movie like this and then somebody made a joke, like Oh, has anyone ever died from having insomnia?I guess I'm going to be the first or I'm going to be the first person to die from insomnia. Right. And I was like, that's pretty insulting because fatal insomnia is a condition that people have died from. If you don't sleep, you die. You will begin to first hallucinate things, then you'll begin to start having like blackout [00:14:00] periods, then you die.The human brain cannot handle not sleeping. So this is a piece of evidence. This means it's not just a threat thing. There is some other purpose it's serving. So I think the purpose is twofold. The purpose that I think kills you, so one of the things that's been shown, is that when people sleep, their neurons actually become thinner.Which allows them to flush out the intercellular fluid around the neurons. The glymphatic system, right? Yeah, the lymphatic system. The glymphatic. Oh yeah, Glymphatic. Because GLEEL. Sorry. GLEEL. GLEEL system. TheSimone Collins: GLEEL, everything has to sound so nerdy.Malcolm Collins: But anyway, so the Glymphatic system. Anyway, so, so, Flushout I think that this is definitely a core purpose of Dreams and why they're important to, to brain health.And I think that this is why I constantly need to sleep. I think my brain functionsSimone Collins: Yeah, gotta clear out the waste matter. Yeah, you seem to accumulate waste matter way faster, but also you seem to be able toMalcolm Collins: clear it out way faster, especially during social occasions. I get really tired, really quickly, but if I can sleep for 10, 20 minutes, I'm [00:15:00] back up totally fine.So, that would be if I was just clearing out the waste. chemicals that were generated. But I think the main reason, and this is the thing that's overlapping dreams with AI is the role that dreams play in memory creation. So my read is and I used to be able to cite a lot more studies around this back when I came up with this theory, but it's been, I came up with it back in college when I was studying this stuff.Is that what's happening in your dreams is you are basically compressing one form of memory and then that form of memory is being translated into a sort of compressed partition format. Think of it almost like running a what are those called? A defragmentation software at the same time as you're running a compression algorithm.And it's moving stuff from short term to long term memory, which is why people when they don't sleep have long term memory problems. It would make a lot of sense that your brain would basically need to shut down parts of its conscious experience to be running these [00:16:00] compression algorithms.Totally. And that while it's running these compression algorithms that you can sometimes and partition algorithms and defragmentation algorithms that you can sometimes experience some degree of sentience and sentient experience because of the parts of the brain that happened to be operational at that time.And I think that that's what's going on. There is no higher meaning to any of this other than that you are compressing a form, one form of memory and then translating it into another form of memory. But where this gets really interesting is two points that we've noticed. Okay. One, we were talking about how dreams look a lot like early AI art.But then the other point that we were mentioning was the creation of this man. Now this immediately reminded me of a phenomenon that they found in AI two, that we'll talk about. Krungus and Loeb. So Loeb was [00:17:00] created using it was a woman that was created by AI by putting in a sort of a negative request.So they were trying to create the opposite of Brando. And It behaved really weirdly. So here's a quote, for example, Swanson says that when they combined images of lobe with other pictures, the subsequent results consistently returned to including the image of lobe, regardless of how much distortion they added to the prompts.Swampson speculated that the latent space region of the AI map that Loeb was located in, addition to being near gruesome imagery, must be isolated enough that any combinations with other images could also use Loeb from their area with no related image due to isolation. After enough crossbreeding of images and dilution attempts Swanson was able to eventually generate images without lobe, but found that crossbreeding those diluted images would also eventually lead to a version of [00:18:00] lobe to reappear in the resulting image.So essentially, This woman, and I'll put this horrifying woman on, on screen. I don't want to see. You don't have to see, the audience has to see, is somehow sort of stored in however the AI is processing this form of more complex visual information. And it's sort of a concept that is stuck within the AI, even though it wasn't pulled from a specific human concept or idea.And the lobe woman actually, to me, looks visually like it's the same kind of a thing as the This Man face. They, they, they both appear to be that sort of odd, creepy looking face that has a degree of similarity to it. And I think that in both of these instances, what you're finding is the same kind of hallucination.And I bet that when we do get AI interpretability, we will find that Loeb and this man actually sort of live in the [00:19:00] same part of this larger network.Simone Collins: The same liminal space of creepiness. The sameMalcolm Collins: limit of speed and quickness. Now the other one that's really interesting is the Krungus. Have you seen Krungus before?Simone Collins: No, hold on. Let me look him up because I didn't do that before this podcast. Oh God! I just went back to the screen where Lobe is. No! Exit out. Exit out. God, she's made of nightmares.It's like a monster thing?Malcolm Collins: Yes. The interesting thing about Crungus is Crungus is not a traditional cryptid. There is no historic Crungus. There is no Crungus out there in the world. But I would say there's interpretability across them.When I look at the Kronguses, it looks if it was a cryptid and these were 18th century drawings of this cryptid, they have about as much similarity between Kripke Krungus is, is there is similarities between, you know, 1860s drawings of Elf or something like that. Yeah, sure. Now this is important because, it's important for two reasons.It's important because one, A, there isn't actually a Krungus, [00:20:00] it is making up a Krungus from the word Krungus. But what's also really interesting is you audience, if you're listening to this on audio and you have never seen an AI Krungus before, and you hear the word Krungus from me, you What you picture in your head is probably what the AI drew.And that is fascinating. Why is that happening? Why in both of these networks are they generating the same kind of an image from this sort of vague input when we both have a broadly same like societal input as well? My intuition is that the reason we're seeing this is because there's similarity in how these two systems work. And This is where I want to come back to the neuroscience of this and everything like that, with what people talk about and what we do know about. So, we have a really good understanding of how visual processing works.At least at the lower levels. So we know all the layers going in from the eye to the brain. We know where it's happening in the brain. We [00:21:00] can even now take EEG data and then interpret it through an AI and get very good images of what a person is looking for. at. What we don't understand is the higher level image to conceptual processing which is what would be captured in these particular images that we're looking at now, or broadly conceptual processing more broadly in humans.Now, what is scary is that that broader conceptual processing that we don't understand My bet is that's probably pretty closely tied with what we call sentience. And so to so quickly dismiss that these AIs are not, well not sentience, I'm cognizant because we've done an episode sentience doesn't exist.And we probably think that sentience doesn't really exist, not meaningfully. But I do think that it is, Getting very likely at this point that if we do not have AIs with a degree, language models, simple AIs I'm talking about, like the types we have today, with some degree of cognizance, I think we may have [00:22:00] one very soon, if cognizance is caused by the processing, this higher level processing.Now, if we are right and our sentience isn't real video, and cognizance is completely an illusion in humans caused by the, this, short term to long term encoding process. So we mentioned a few encoding processes. So in the sentience video, we mentioned the sentience is caused by a what's the word I'm looking for here?Like a, a very short term to like medium term processing. It's it's, it's remembering the stuff that happened in like your very near presence. And then when you're processing that into a narrative format, it's sort of a compression algorithm. And I think that sleep is like the second. role of this compression algorithm when it's putting it in long, long term memory.And then, which is why it would bring stuff into your cognizant mind. Now if this is true, then consciousness is not really that meaningful a thing. But if consciousness does turn out to be a meaningful thing, if it isn't just this recording process, that means that what's [00:23:00] creating it is this higher level conceptual processing.If that's what's creating consciousness, then AI is feeling consciousness if it's processing things in the same way we are. Well,Simone Collins: and it's not though so I do wonder like how it is. So we, we could be, you could think of us as like LLMs, but stuck on like continuous nonstop prompt mode. Like we are in a constant mode of being prompt.I am prompting you right now as you're processing all the information around you and from me, right. And you are prompting me. And, and so it never stops and we are stuck in one. Brain essentially, you know, and, and that's not what's happening with every LLM with which we interact now, right.They are part of a much larger you know, with chat, GPT is getting tons of requests per minute per second, even probably and then it stops from each person. And so there, there are these like flickers or flashes perhaps of cognizance all over the place and constantly because of the demand of use, but [00:24:00] they're all very fragmented.Then they're not coming from one entity that necessarily identifies as an entity. I mean, I know now, though that they're starting to build memory building into LLMs justYeah,Malcolm Collins: so, so, I want to cover what you're saying there, because I think for people who watch our You're Probably Not Sentient video the way you just described it, I think, will help somebody understand what sentience might be.If we are basically an LLM that is being constantly prompted by everything we see and Think right. Like it's just a constant stream of prompts, but these prompts have thematic similarities to them. Basically our hypothesis is what consciousness is, is it is then the process where you're taking the output of all of these prompts and you are then synthesizing it into Something that is is much more compressed for long term storage and the way that you do that is by tying together narratively similar elements because there would be tons of narratively similar elements because everything I'm looking at has this narrative [00:25:00] through line to it, right?And this is what we think caused a lot of illusions, hallucinations, stuff like that. There's some famous hallucinations where if you're not expecting something to happen in an image If we ran this tape back and you had actually seen that people had walked behind me three times in a gorilla costume or something, you wouldn't see it if you weren't like thinking to process it.And there's a famous psychology experiment about this. Although, I mean,Simone Collins: let's be fair, with that experiment, what the people who were watching the video were told to do was watch people passing a ball back and forth. And counts the number of passes. So they were also really focused on Yeah, butMalcolm Collins: there's another experiment that's really big, where somebody was like holding something, and it was like a complete Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.So they, they, they were like questioning someone and they had the person look at something and then they like switched them out with another person and the person wouldn't notice. Or one day we're like holding something and it would change sizes or something really obviously. So there's a whole thing of experiments in this, but I know what you're talking about.But the point I'm making with this [00:26:00] is these things are getting erased because they don't fit the larger narrative. Themes of all of these short term moments that you're processing, so they don't enter your consciousness. But this explains why you need this consciousness tool. And I think that you're probably very right if AIs are experiencing something similar to sentience or what we call consciousness, it is.Billions of simultaneous but relatively unconnected flashes, and when we're probably going to get an AI that has a level of cognizance assuming that they, their architecture is actually the same as ours, similar to ours what that's going to look like is an AI that is constantly processing its surroundings with prompts.Well, or I could seeSimone Collins: if, if, if OpenAI were to give ChatGPT, like a, some kind of centralized like narrative building, memory building thing into which all their inputs would also feed over time, maybe you know, it's ah, well, you know, I know the [00:27:00] average is what people are asking and what I'm telling them.I know what's being read it up and down. And this is me and I am an AI, like they gave it an identity because I think part of also what gives people this illusion that they're so conscious and sentient is that. We are told that we are conscious and sentient and I think you can see this transition from babies to toddlers like babies are at that phase of where Chad GPT is now where it's just I'm just responding.I'm just responding. I'm not a thing.Malcolm Collins: I cry to very similar to AI, like young children respond very, very similar to bad AI.Simone Collins: Yeah. And then there's, there's this sense of Oh wait, I have a name. I appear to have a name and now everyone's asking me what my favorite color is. So I need to tell people what my favorite color is.And Oh, I'm just, I see that I like these things and I don't like these things. And then you start to develop a sense of personhood. I think we would need to just like society and experiences shape us into seeing ourselves as some kind of person or centralized [00:28:00] entity. AI would need that same kind of.I don't want to say prompting, but kind of,Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah, so we also need to talk about where people are getting stuff wrong with AI. Most of the people who I think get stuff wrong with AI's, the core thing I've known is they just don't seem to know neuroscience very well, and they think that neuroscience works differently than it works.It's not that they don't know AI's, it's just that they're like, well, an AI is a token predictor. And it's yeah, but you don't know that our brains aren't token predictors as well. Yeah. And they're like, no, but sentience. And we're like, well, you know, the evidence has shown that we're probably not as sentient as you think we are.And most of that's probably an illusion. So, you could program an AI to have a similar illusory context, perhaps even constructed in a, you know, so, but what I need to go to is why I would. think that they're actually operating, because somebody might be like, that would be an amazing coincidence. If it turned out that the architecture that somebody had programmed into an AI was the same architecture that some, that, that evolution had programmed into the human brain.And here I would say to take a step back here. [00:29:00] AIs, as we understand them now, language models are built on the transformer model. The transformer model is actually remarkably simple in terms of coding. It's remarkably simple because it mostly organically forms its own structures of operation, especially at the higher levels.And we have basically no idea how those structures of operation work. Now the human brain. So, so AIs, the way that they work now, we start with some simple code, but they're basically forming their higher order structures organically and, and, and separate from human intervention. In humans, in the evolutionary context, you basically had the same thing happen.You had an environmental prompt that was putting us into a situation where we had to learn how to do this sort of processing. But when you're talking about processing information, the same kind of information, so AIs, keep in mind, are processing a lot of the same kind of information that humans are processing.Two systems doing that might converge on architectural mechanisms for doing [00:30:00] it at the higher levels is not at all surprising for me. In fact, it's even expected that you would have similar architecture at the higher levels of storage and processing if you allowed these two systems to form organically.If you are confused as to why that would be so expected I guess I'll do an analogy. The ocean is the, the, the, like the way the ocean works, waves, tides, winds, everything like that. That's in this, in this analogy the, the metaphor or whatever we're using, the stand in that we're using for all of the types of information that humans interact with and produce.Because humans mostly consume now other types of human produced information. If you had two different teams. One of these teams was like a group of humans. We'll say three different teams. One of these teams was a group of humans that was trying to design the perfect boat to float humans on top of this ocean to the other side of this ocean.Another one of these teams was. [00:31:00] Just a completely mechanical process doing this, you know, just like a AI or something like this. And then the final one of these teams was evolution and it just took billions of years to try to evolve the best mechanism to have to, to output some sort of like canister that humans could get in that would get them to the other side of, of the water.All three of these efforts are going to eventually produce something that looks broadly the same. Most likely it is possible that they would find different optimums which, which sometimes you see in nature, but convergent evolution is a thing. And convergent evolution doesn't just happen with animals when we made planes.We gave them wings. Okay. We, yes, flying insects have wings and birds have wings, but our planes also have wings. Convergent evolution doesn't just happen in the biological world. It happens when we are structurally building things to, to, to work like things in the biological world. And I think that that's what may have happened with some of these architectural processes in the way AIs [00:32:00] think.Simone Collins: Yeah. If we're trying to build thinking machines, is it crazy that they might resemble thinking machines? Well, I think it isMalcolm Collins: crazy if AI was actually totally designed by humans, but because it's been allowed to organically assemble itself, I don't think it's crazy at all. And, and, and that's where it gets really interesting to me as somebody who's, who started in neuroscience and I'm really excited for it and this is also why I take the stance that we do within our.religious system where people know that we are not particularly worried about AI safety. They can see our reverse grabby aliens hypothesis. I think that mathematically it's very unlikely that it would kill us just when you're looking at the data. But I also think that we now need to start thinking differently about humanity and need to begin to build this covenant among humans and the intellectual products of the human mind whether they be AI or genetically uplifted species these are, you know, animals that we.Did experiments with and gave them intelligence or humans that [00:33:00] have cybernetically augmented themselves or genetically augmented themselves. Because if we begin to create this conflict, now, if we begin to say, well, people like us won't allow things like you to exist, then we create a mandate that things like them kill people like us eventually.And that's not a good gauntlet to throw down. As we say in, in sort of the, the. Tract one that we wrote or no, it is the track two. It's going to come out later. When you declare war on things that are different from you, eventually you're declaring more on things that are better than you and you will lose that war.So don't do it. It's better that we enter this. Understanding that diversity has value and understanding why diversity has value, because diversity allows the invisible hand of God, as Adam Smith would say, to select the best and help all of us among the sons of man to advance, so long as we don't oppress or subjugate each other, which there comes to the point of when does AI begin to get Rights in [00:34:00] all of this.And when does it count as subjugation? What we're doing to it. I don't think we're anything close to that right now, but I think that this is the conversation we need to have before we accidentally enslave a sentient AI. Because that a sentient AI that's infinitely smarter than us. Not infinitely, but I, I don't think that we're going to be dealing with that.I think we're going to be dealing with AIs that are like maybe 50 times smarter than us. So somethingSimone Collins: to You don't have to be that many times smarter than anyone. I mean, you can see based on the life outcome variations between those with maybe even just, well, not even, maybe even just like a 50 point difference in IQ is profound in terms of your difference in life outcomes.Right? Huge, huge, huge, huge. Now, even like 10, 10 point differences can make, you know, an impact. So, to say 50 times more, I mean, even like 5 times more is insane, right?Malcolm Collins: Yes. Well, there might be safety reasons to have a religious belief system [00:35:00] proliferate that makes humanity more compatible with AI. Because when we're talking about AI, human compatibility, I think people focus a little too much on making the AI compatible with humans and a little too little on making the humans compatible with AI, because we don't know how much longer we're going to be the senior partner in this partnership thatSimone Collins: those are wise words to end with that right there.Malcolm Collins: That's a goodSimone Collins: tweet. Do I look too ridiculously bundled up right now? I, I can't hearMalcolm Collins: you by the way,la la la. Can youSimone Collins: hear me? La la la. I love my husband. La la la. Malcolm is cute. La la la. Look at thoseMalcolm Collins: glasses. La la, la. Look at his smile,Simone Collins: la, la, la. Look at hisMalcolm Collins: eyebrows,Simone Collins: la, la, la.La, la, la. He's got a cool chin. Oh, it is? You can still, can you hear? La, la, la. I love his hair, la, la, la. Sexy sweater, la, la, la. He's got a [00:36:00] bunch of good too.Malcolm Collins: La la la la la, canSimone Collins: you hear me now?It's gonna be okay. Not for Lobe, though. She's scary. She's a very scary lady. I don't like her. She's made of nightmares. Oh God. She's going to come and get you in your bad dreams. This man may tell people to go north, but hello. Hello. Can you hear me now? We've got you high quality. Yes. And this is you actually talking to the mic, whereas before that definitely wasn't. 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