Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Malcolm and Simone analyze the bizarre TikTok trend of women acting like NPCs and eating viewer-sent emojis. They discuss pioneers like Cherry Crush and Pinkie Doll who understand internet psychology. Malcolm argues this caters to semi-males with lower testosterone, not sexual release. The content infantilizes male sexuality through repetition and predictability. Simone wonders if environmental estrogen is creating new gender expressions, not just sexualities. They debate the effects on young people and humanity's future.Transcription Simone: [00:00:00] This is notMalcolm: content that is meant to be masturbated to. This is content that's meant to be passively consumed. For longer periods of time, I think that type of content may explicitly be appealing to this new type of man who has much lower testosterone and hasn't fully differentiated into a male.Malcolm: Wow. That is what I think is really interesting here is it's actually like porn. But for the next generationWould you like to know more?Simone: hello, Malcolm.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be talking to you today because we're going to do something new. We're going to try to do something at least semi topical because we've talked about doing this for a while. And this is on this meme that's been going around.Malcolm: Of this new style of video within TikTok. And we will have some examples of it play here.Cherry Crush: , crunchy corn, [00:01:00] yum, yeehaw, um, pizza, yum, um, ice cream, um, um, um, yum, um, bread, yum.Cherry Crush: Mmm, yum. I'm hungry. Crunchy corn, yum.Malcolm: The two most prominent people doing this are Cherry Crush and somebody named Pinkie Doll. What I want to get into with this is what is really going on here? Cause I think a lot of people are just looking at this and being like, this is absurd.Malcolm: This isSimone: weird. This makes me sick. That's a really common response. I'm like,Malcolm: this is a sign of the degradation of our society. But I actually think that there's a more interesting phenomenon here than that, and the people who are getting engaged with this as content producers, [00:02:00] especially these early people have shown themselves to be incredibly astute, intelligent, and understand aspects of the human condition that we may not have full access to.Malcolm: I also think this might represent a change in human biology that we've been seeing with drops in testosterone and stuff like that, which is something I'm really excited to dig deeper into. But first let's talk about, I guess I'll start with Cherry Crush. Okay. Because I think it's easy to look at this person and because what she's doing is ridiculous, assume that she doesn't.Malcolm: Like that she's incompetent or something like that, or she's just your standard, like e thought, but she's actually been at the forefront of several online phenomenons in a way that's allowed her to monetize them. So two other online phenomenons that she was at the forefront of and has done quite well within one is the ASMR movement.Malcolm: You're familiar with [00:03:00] ASMR. Do you want to talk to that to some extent? Yes.Simone: ASMR involves riffing on. A genuine kind of tickling feeling that you can get, or tingling feeling that you can get from certain subtle sounds. So examples of ASMR are people like... On wrapping delicate things, brushing hair, there's a lot of like overlap between ASMR and also like really childhood like comforting things.Simone: So some ASMR videos are like, I'm going to do your makeup or I'm going to brush your hair or I'm going to tuck you in at night. Like it's very infantilizing. And I think that there might be some element of it, but that is independent from the fact that for some people. These delicate ASMR sounds, whispered, tapping, et cetera can elicit a kind of like tingling down your spine feeling.Simone: Okay.Malcolm: So this is really interesting because I think this is something we actually see cross species in species with really advanced. auditory cortexes. So in birds and stuff like that, you will see them involuntarily begin to dance. And there's great carrots and [00:04:00] stuff involuntarily dancing.Malcolm: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm: And whenever a sensory system is advanced enough, it appears to be able to fire in weird ways with certain types of complex stimuli. I suspect that this system is very similar to the way you get a positive feeling with, we've got these in our house, these head things that you put on your head to slowly go over.Malcolm: Yes, those things. But or really gently rubbing fingers across somebody's skin. What you're doing in both of these scenarios is you're very gently stimulating a large amount of a person's sensory system. And I think we call these sexual feelings because we don't have a way of engaging with them outside of sexuality.Malcolm: We'reSimone: never gonna get monetized. We've never made it through an episode where I feel like there's [00:05:00] not something that demonetizesMalcolm: us. No, with super, with supernormal stimuli, right? Yeah. You wouldn't find it in a normal environment, but that represents more of a type of simulation than that system's going to get naturally.Malcolm: And because whenever somebody is just trying to feel an emotion at a maximum context, the way that we contextualize that is almost always sexual. We sometimes have trouble fully appreciating that these systems are not necessarily sexual. They're not actually reproduction.Simone: I was just reading some studies this morning about oxytocin levels in different ape groups, and they definitely found that. Yeah, sure. Sexual interaction would increase oxytocin levels in among eight populations, but so would grooming behavior. So if we're picking lice off of each other and, brushing our fingers through each other's hair, very similar to what you're talking about, that also is increasing oxytocin levels, this level of bonding, this level of like pleasure as well.Simone: So you're totally right. And it is. It is so [00:06:00] close to sexual, but it's not sexual. And I think that's, with ASMR, people are talking a lot about Oh no, this is definitely a sex thing. This is definitely, and there are ways you can make it sexy for sure. But it's not by definition sexy.Malcolm: Exactly. So I think that Take that aside. So one, she is on the forefront of new movements with how the internet has learned to engage different aspects of that an individual might be trying to masturbate,Simone: right? To feel good. You don't have to use that word constantly. To feel good in a nonproductive way.Malcolm: Another word because feeling good doesn't properly capture what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, Somebody is trying to maximally engage an emotional stimuli system using supernormal stimuli. That's...Simone: That is a mouthful. Okay. We'll find a better word.Malcolm: So next another area where she gained a lot of prominence early on is she was one of the first people to really...Malcolm: engage fully [00:07:00] with, in pornography, anime like characters.Simone: Oh, so she does like OnlyFans style stuff too?Malcolm: Yeah. I think even straight up more explicit stuff than that. Oh. But in really high quality prosthetics and wigs. Wow. Like an elf or something like that from different anime shows.Malcolm: Good for her. No, but this was,Simone: that's cool. That is an innovation. That is actually a pretty good innovation. Cause you're like she is bridging the divide between filmed porn and hentai. That is innovation, props areMalcolm: her. No, that is innovation. So I think when ISimone: see the dudes, also,Malcolm: I don't know.Malcolm: I haven't. Look I see, I was reading about her. Okay. I don't know. YouSimone: weren't for research checking things out.Malcolm: But what I, yeah, I need to do better research though.Simone: I guess I will. I'm the one who looks at the actual primary materials.Malcolm: This [00:08:00] is somebody who has. Thoroughly researched and been at the forefront of different ways that the internet is exploiting different aspects of the human psychological condition.Malcolm: Yeah. In terms of maximizing certain stimuli response systems. So it's not somebody who is An idiot, let's put it that way. Yeah.Simone: Although she's certainly, framing herself that way, but that is to exploit a market opportunity. She's like, why did she an expert trader on Wall Street finding this amazing like arbitrage opportunity.Simone: Yeah. Yeah. And everyone's oh, you dumb, no. What you, sorry guys, you're wrong here. And she is rolling in it and you're just sitting at home being poor.Malcolm: No. And then you've got this other character, pinky doll. Okay. This is another girl who, we'll show a video of her.PinkyDoll: For you. Take your cash. Take your kilo. Yes, yes, yes. Take your audience. Oh, thank you, Samantha. This is so cool. Take your cat in. Take your mail. So get ready. Gang, gang. Oh, thank you, baby. This is soMalcolm: Then you have Pinkie Doll, who's the other character who's [00:09:00] become very popular in doing this, right? So you could dismiss her, say, okay, she's just jumping on a trend or something like that, because this wasn't a trend that either of them invented. Somebody got popular doing this, I think, basically accidentally in Japan, and then it became a thing there, and then they were looking for...Malcolm: What's the next thing? And that's when they brought this to the U.Simone: S. And I've seen this style rift on in very different contexts. Explain what you mean by that. Like people posting videos, like to Reddit and whatnot, where they, or their girlfriends or their boyfriends are acting like NPCs and moving like NPCs and they're really satisfying to watch, but I've not seen it in a.Simone: Like feed, streamer, OnlyFans context, or ShortsMalcolm: Yeah, and I think that this is something different. I think the NPC, I think it's closer to ASMR than it is to anything else.Simone: But it is a style, it is stylized, and it is satisfying. Like it's a very satisfying thing to watch for some reason, to see this crossover between video games and a human.Simone: But beforeMalcolm: we talk too much about it, let's talk about Pinkie Doll, because [00:10:00] I want to establish that neither of these people, they may dress like the way we would aesthetically assume a stupid person would dress, but I think that's more to please their audience than a sign of their actual intelligence or understanding.Malcolm: Pinkie Doll does a very interesting thing in her videos that is unrelated to this, which is she will hold A curling iron. Yeah, a curling iron. And in, in the center of it will be a kernel of popcorn and she will hold it till it pops, and then she'll go pick up another one and then do it again. And hand pop, entire things of popcorn.Malcolm: And some people, when they're trying to copy the style now I, I've seen people they'll just hold curling irons not understanding why she's doing this or what she's doing. Oh, no. So what is she actually doing here? She is creating anticipation, which increases viewer watch time. So if a viewer sees her holding this, they're going to ask, is that what she's doing?Malcolm: I'm going to at least wait to see if this thingSimone: pops. If the kernel pops. Yeah. Oh my [00:11:00] gosh. And it's also, you've got some operant conditioning in there because you don't know when. It's going to pop. It's totally unknown. And itcreatesMalcolm: cut points for you, the viewer. You are unlikely, if you've been watching for a while and she's been holding it for a while since the last pop, you're not going to want to leave until the next pop.Malcolm: A bit of a one more turn thing. Oh. Because it's created into individual units of time through this system. And as soon as you've just gotten that last dopamine hit from the last pop, you're waiting for the next one. Meanwhile, she's doing this complete other system. That's. That's engaging a complete other mental system.Malcolm: Describe this. Yes. So let's talk about what this phenomenon is. So the viewers will have seen it. I will have played a few video clips of it. So they'll understand what's going on, but the way that they would frame what they're doing is they are acting like an NPC and then people will pay for a little tokens, hot dogs and stuff like that. AndSimone: tacos and [00:12:00] roses and corn. Yeah. AndMalcolm: as they're going up, they'll pretend to eat them and then make a preset noise.Simone: Yeah. And there, there seem to be other things that people can, pay for that make them make other reaction noises that sound like. And PC noises.Simone: They sound pre recorded. So it's not like they're reacting as like a human would. It sounds like they're repeating sound bites, if thatMalcolm: makes sense. Yes. Yes. And Simone, this is actually really important for our viewers. We're going to need you to do it forSimone: the, for the audience. Let's see. They bounce and then they're kind of like.Simone: Oh, what does she do? Mmm, Yum. Corn. Yum. Rose. Yum. Um, ,, does she, what else should she eat? Yum. Corn. I, I can only think of corn, but yeah, she'll like crunch corn. Yeah. Okay. Cut crunch corn .Malcolm: Yeah. I'm so sorry I did that to you.Simone: I can't [00:13:00] believe you. No, but the thing is, and when I look at it like everyone else is oh, this is.Simone: This is sick. This is this is perverse, like disgusting, sexy stuff that people are doing. And I see it. And my first reaction is this is what every mother who's desperate to get her children to eat food is doing all the time. I'm like, this is, this is me and our kids all the time. I'm like um, like eat it.Simone: Yes. Oh, yummy. Vitamin. Like That is my day. I think that's aMalcolm: very important point. So let's break out a few things that are happening here. Okay. One is the infantilization of male sexuality, right?Simone: if we can even call it sexuality anymore.Malcolm: Yeah. I think more important to that, I think this is an explicitly sexual act.Malcolm: What is being done in these videos? I do not think this is more like generic.Simone: Women eating emojis.Malcolm: Yes, I do think it's an explicitly sexual act, but I think it's different than the way our generation thinks of sexuality. So one of the things that's really important to remember with males is [00:14:00] we've looked at something at a 30% drop in testosterone in the past 20 years.Malcolm: We are seeing a change where men, you've seen this with the the studies onSimone: I think you're referring to studies on the effect of at least as measured in first trimester of endocrine disruptors on Children, especially boys, and that it seems to be that there's a correlation between higher levels of endocrine disruptors and at least first trimester mother.Simone: blood samples and shorter anogenital distance. And even later in life less male sexually divergent behavior, which is to say the boys are acting less like boys. And they're also like, they've become less boys be like, even when it comes to genital formation, their penises haven't made it all the way up in their migration.Simone: It's weird,Malcolm: but yeah. So while I think that this behavior this type of content. is meant to appeal to a sexual system. In our generation, men engaged with sexual systems through [00:15:00] full masturbation, right?Simone: Okay. Like traditional old fashioned, not the new kind you're describing, but whatever.Simone: This is notMalcolm: content that is meant to be masturbated to. This is content that's meant to be passively consumed. For longer periods of time, I think that type of content may explicitly be appealing to this new type of man who has much lower testosterone and hasn't fully differentiated into a male.Malcolm: Wow. That is what I think is really interesting here is it's actually like porn. But for the next generation.Simone: The frogs have been turned gay and now they like watching NPCs eat emojis. Is that what you're saying?Malcolm: This is the thing. We expected the frogs to turn gay. And the rate of... Of people identifying as LGBT has exploded.Malcolm: Yeah. Yes, a portion are definitely turning gay due toSimone: But more [00:16:00] importantly, what you're saying is this isn't about changing sexual orientation. Of course, our argument is there is gay straight is also an incredibly stupid kind of distinction to make. But more, more broadly, sexuality is changing across the board.Simone: And with lower testosterone levels, you're going to get all sorts of weird attraction. And we've talked with, prominent people in the MGTOW space, for example, we are going to have on soon. And we've already recorded the interview Sandman MGTOW who's had a lot of really thoughtful things to say about what has happened to, to generations of men.Simone: And he too is observing like pretty significant shifts in sexual behavior. I think, we're seeing this, many people are seeing this and it's showing up in weird ways. And I think, yeah, you're totally right. People are missing the beat when they see Cherry Crush and they see, oh my gosh the pinky doll.Simone: And they just like, they can't understand it because there's literally a new evolution of mindset that they can't wrap their heads around.Malcolm: They're biologically not. It's, I couldn't masturbate to like gay male porn, right? I'm just not [00:17:00] going to understand the appeal of that content, but I can conceptually understand it's appealing to someone.Malcolm: Yeah. This seems to appeal to a semi male. Like a male who might not be fully gender differentiated. And this is something that we hear throughout the manosphere. Like you were referring to this interview with Sandman. And one of the things he was referring to is a very interesting thing in the sort of new men's movement are these men.Malcolm: Who are, can't find partners, but they're not even looking for partners. They no longer, they are both in cells, but also don't care that they're in cells. They don't feel this strong desire to go out and have this need fulfilled in the way that previous generationsSimone: did.Malcolm: And that's likely a biological change.Malcolm: And so this content may be content that wouldn't have appealed to men before. So let's talk about what makes it different and what makes it so brilliant. It's not content that's designed to be [00:18:00] like masturbated to, to release, like in a traditional context, right? It's not content that it's very infantilized content, right?Malcolm: It's literallySimone: how I talk to our children when I'm begging them to eat food.Malcolm: Yeah and it is very miss methodical and turn off your brain content in that they're engaging multiple systems like the popping corn and the other thing where it's literally like a direct brain hack and people are sitting there.Malcolm: Allowing their brain to be hacked with this system. Nobody's coming out of one of these sessions thinking like that was such aSimone: productive, I'm a different person now. Yeah. IMalcolm: mean, what are your thoughts? Do you think that this theory is,Simone: Yeah, I do think that this is part of a new wave of human sexuality.Simone: I also think that, that maybe the infantilization is not. They're not necessarily tied together. I think that [00:19:00] infantilization is something that is separately being societally imposed upon youth. And that there's something that we can do about that. I think it's going to take a lot of work, a lot of regulation and a lot of money.Simone: To lower exposure to endocrine disruptors in a way that could bring human sexuality back to something. They don't care.Malcolm: Yeah. Talk about this recent study about transSimone: people. Yeah. A bunch of scientists essentially said in a paper that there's no need. To have a pregnant person who is a trans man stop taking androgensMalcolm: they said that it would be unethical to research whether or not it hurts a baby. for somebody to transition while pregnant because asking that question would be attempting to maximize the health outcome of the child and attempting to maximize the health outcome of the child is intrinsicallySimone: eugenic.Simone: It's not even transitioning. It's, it is maintaining, your transitioned position as well. Okay. [00:20:00] You'd, you'd need to keep taking androgens. But the point being isMalcolm: They refuse to research this. Because attempting to help a child, they call it maximizing the health outcome of the infant, was eugenic in their mind.Malcolm: SoSimone: what you're saying is overall society isn't that interested in not disrupting our endocrine system. It's not justMalcolm: Disinterested. If you said something like we need to get these pollutants out of the environment, what they would say is, so what? So babies are healthier? Isn't that eugenics tryingSimone: to make a big deal out of the primary issue that seems to come out from the research has to do with like reproductive fitness or gender problems, then I could see there being a lot less interest in, at least among we'll say predominantly progressive circles are like I don't know.Simone: Are you so angry about people coming out, a little different gender wise. What are you so afraid of? Etc. Yeah. So maybe that's a problem. But yeah, I think infantilization is different and I really do wonder what's going on there. I also really want to show these videos. [00:21:00] I want to, I want our kids to see cherry crush.Simone: I want our kids to watch pinky doll and I want to see how they react. And if there is into her as I expect them to be, cause I think they're going to be. Equally entranced and to me, that would be a sign that this is a very like infant style or not. Toddler style, our boys are toddlers but they, I think they've seen similar content and been pretty into it.Simone: I don'tMalcolm: actually. I'm going to put, I think they may not be really, I guessSimone: Blippi is a lot more intellectually engaging thanMalcolm: and that's, what's interesting is these kids shows we're showing them are much more intellectually engaging than stuff that adults are engaging with. Yeah. But also just the willful turning off of your brain to engage with this content in any sort of a long form scenario.Malcolm: And that you're paying to do this. You're paying to feel like you have some interaction with this person. Like what?Simone: Oh yeah, you have to pay. So presumably one pays for the emojis that are being consumed. Yes. Yeah. I [00:22:00] wonder how much they cost. Like a dollar? That's like a lot of money. I'm just thinking, geez, yeah I would love to see where this goes.Simone: I would also like, now that you've pointed out that Especially cherry crush is a pioneer in online human comfort seeking. And diversion. I would love to see what she does next. I would love to, if she ever wants to come on the podcast and talk with us about her brilliant methods, I would love to interview her.Simone: Or Pinky Doll. Oh, Pinky Doll too, especially, yeah, like with the curling iron, like how did she figure that out? What was the strategy behind it? What is she looking at doing next? She might not want to show her cards, but yeah I'm so glad you found Pinky dollMalcolm: age, and as I said, chair crushes is 32.Malcolm: Like again, I think she's 32 years old. Yeah. There's this perception that these are like young thoughts instead of like business women where this has been their primary income stream for the past decade of their life. Amazing. [00:23:00] Yeah. That's, it's a very different scenario and you have to become good at these systems and through that you can understand aspects of how appetites are changing.Malcolm: And I think that there's always this natural reaction where if something's different from what you like. Or is culturally approved within your group, you react, you say, that's disgusting, that's pathetic, that's the fall of society, but different, in this case, I do think that they're appealing to, I'd almost call it like a new gender, like the semi male.Malcolm: No, becauseSimone: Do you think they're, I guess their audiences are primarily male? Yeah,Malcolm: hormonally, I am pretty sure that this is basically a new gender. ISimone: love that you just pronounced hormones the way that Bronze Age Pervert spells it. W H O R E M O A N S. Yeah, no, hormones are changing. TheyMalcolm: are.Malcolm: No. I do think that hormonally we're dealing with a potentially a new gender. And this is one of the first ways we're seeing people engage with that gender. [00:24:00] But I'm interested in what happens next. Because I think that the next big movement in men's rights It's a group of men that just doesn't feel biologically motivated to go after women.Malcolm: ButSimone: that has existed. It's a vegetarian man in Japan. AndMalcolm: Yeah, so maybe this has been around longer in Japan. But,Simone: but then I don't know actually, you look at Japan and you look at like theMalcolm: it started in Japan, by the way, this was invented in Japan. Oh my God.Simone: Well, That explains it.Simone: So there's this like Venn diagram of otaku. And like idol lovers and everything. And then vegetarian men. And yeah, it makes perfect sense that this would come from Japan because the whole like anime world is. Very similar to this. I wonder actually, people talk a lot about how like a lot of there's this problematic interest that many Otaku men have in very youthful, young, high pitched voice, like anime girls.Simone: Now [00:25:00] is, they always say that's because they're, pedo bears, but really. Is it that they're more infantilized? It's like this infantilized mindset and lifestyle. It's just it's not pita bears. It's Peter Pans. You know what I mean?Malcolm: I'd actually say that the bigger trend now is not within these communities towards that stuff.Malcolm: I'd say it's actually towards. Mama like figures if you look at one of the recent like big so I'd say what would have been like the two big sexual figures in the online space that have arisen recently. The two I would think of is Resident Evil giant mama lady who was like this eight foot tall giant like sexy mamaSimone: lady.Simone: Isn't Resident Evil the zombie thing?Malcolm: Yes you, you are not that, you are clearly engaged in female online spaces. I can promise you, every single male viewer knows exactly what I'm talking about. Okay, commentersSimone: weigh in because I think Malcolm is too niche.Malcolm: No. They'll all be like, oh yeah, Resident Evil lady.[00:26:00]Malcolm: We'll see. And then, the other one I would think of would be Bowserette. Bowser, which is, I think, very clearly a trans allegory, or a trans like character, where it is Bowser presenting as a woman, often in Finally realized relationships with Mario like a lot of the things like the song around this are based around this idea that Men should just go out with other men who have transitioned and both of them would be happy because women have nothing on that.Malcolm: That's, that women never really appreciate men really. Like in a deep way. And that's what this character to some extent represents. Other people would be like, Oh no it's just hot. And it's how is it hot?Simone: I don't know. I'm more in, I'm more I'm leaning toward in this conversation like a Peter Pan camp that cause we can't, neither of us can model this mindset, but I think this mindset is more eternally youthful, like pretty cute, energetic and drawn [00:27:00] to that sometimes from the darkness, from a dark place, from a hopeless place that kind of equally infantilized, but hopeful and energetic kind of just energy.Simone: Yeah. I think is what we're seeing maximized as a super stimuli in these videos.Malcolm: So yeah. Our followers can let us know. I think it's a interesting. Concept that we might trended to watch new genders essentially emerging as the pollutants in our environment are changing this next generation of men andSimone: women.Simone: One man's pollutant is another man's magical pill to make people cooler. I'm just saying I'm, whatever it's a wild ride and I'm here for it. And IMalcolm: really, I think it's causing a lot of suicidality, a lot of unhappiness, a lot of unfulfillment. I do not think that humans were optimized around this new type of gender expression.Malcolm: And I think that the people who are trapped within it. It's not a good thing. [00:28:00] It would be better if we could get this stuff out of our environment, but ISimone: don't know. I think being a frustrated, a sexually frustrated young man would suck way harder. If I had to grow up in this modern world and I could choose to be, like, indifferent and in a new gender dimension versus a very sexually frustrated young man with a very high sex drive, Oh my.Simone: God, I would choose the other way. Yeah, I,Malcolm: I suppose, especially if you're born into this progressive urban monoculture. Come on, man. No,Simone: even not. Look at very patriarchal, traditional, like honor based cultures. Where like women and men are highly segregated and the men are definitely like much more, like high testosterone, et cetera.Simone: These men look miserable. There are rapes, like the free radicals in those societies. I don't think that's true at all.Malcolm: Simone, I think successful men in those cultures are not miserable. I,Simone: Oh no, no, no, no. Of course the successful men are doingMalcolm: just fine. I think the majority of men in these cultures are successful.Malcolm: I think like [00:29:00] 70%. I think that the old ways very much still do work in our modern society.Simone: And in a monogamous society, I'm not thinking about monogamous societies.Malcolm: I'm thinking what you're saying. Our society is a monogamous. It's not, but within these cultural groups, it is you go to Mormon communities, for example,Simone: I'm not referring to like Christian communities, like the ones I'mMalcolm: thinking, that's what I'm talking about.Malcolm: What I'm saying is this, if you're born, yeah, it does make sense that you're not cursed with wanting something if you're born in an already. Fallen cultural group that's not really able to deliver you happiness, at least you have less desires. I can agree with that. However, I do think that whatever survives of humanity.Malcolm: Is likely cultural groups that, that are going to be interested in protecting themselves from these pollutants. Our audience can give us their thoughts in the comments. This is definitely one of those areas where we have not fully thought through this yet.Simone: Yeah. It's really cool.Simone: Tell us what you think. And Malcolm, I look forward 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

Malcolm and Simone outline their theory of friendship and the four main "friend models" they've observed. Convenience friends are tied to a specific time or place like school or work. Character friends reinforce your desired self-image. Utility friends provide tangible benefits. And cultural friends share your niche interests or lifestyle. They emphasize optimizing your limited time by evaluating your friendships based on the value and role each person plays. Understanding these models helps maximize the usefulness of your social network.Malcolm: [00:00:00] The really important thing to remember about this is that while you and everyone else. Is the protagonist of their own story, you are a side character in the story of everyone else you will ever meet. And so a lot of people say I just want people to see me for who I am.Malcolm: That is far too nuanced to be a good side character, right?Simone: Hi, Octavian.Simone: Do you want to say hi to YouTube? Yeah. Okay, say hi, YouTube. Hi.Malcolm: So we had one person on one of our videos saying you guys can do more interviews when you start running out of interesting things to talk about.Malcolm: And I love this because they don't, I am on easy mode with YouTube. My wife told me one day, cause she goes, Malcolm, if you don't find an interesting thing. to discuss with me because every morning we do a strategy walk and we walk together for about an hour. If you don't think of an interesting thing to discuss with me before I wake up .Malcolm: My life is the framing device for Arabian tales. That is my life. [00:01:00] I have to keep this woman happy or she'll kill me. And I have to keep her happy with controversial, weird takes. You guys are just getting the dregs of these morningSimone: walks.Simone: Yeah, you're having the microwaved leftovers from my first take. My prima nocta. What can we say? Sorry, guys.Malcolm: Yes.Simone: I love it. Oh, God. Anyway today I thought we could talk about our theory of friendship, which we actually developed pretty early on in our marriage.Simone: And this was a listenerMalcolm: request. Yeah. And it comes down to the thought of what use are other people to us? Um, More specifically, what I mean is. If you're going to go out there and you're going to engage with people and you're an extreme introvert, you really need a specific motivation to do that.Simone: Specifically as extreme introverts, we really need a reason to interact with people. But we also think that Everyone actually interacts with people for a reason. They don't just, quote unquote, need friends. And so we built a model to [00:02:00] determine what types of friends there are, which can also make it much easier to determine whether a friendship is worth keeping.Simone: And really help you understand the dynamics of the friendship. But more importantly, if you want to have friends, it's really helpful to understand what kind of friend you are to them, what your value proposition is to them as a friend. And that actually has helped us a ton because there are all sorts of people that we like to be friends with.Simone: And we need to understand what it is in their lives that we're going to fill in. If we are to take that position to earn it, essentiallyMalcolm: treat their friends very differently, depending on the value proposition that you're providing.Simone: Exactly. So let us start. There are four types of friends, by the way, per our model.Simone: We will also discuss in this conversation, people's other complaints and suggestions that there are other types of friends and we will attempt to refute them. Of course, if you have additional ideas of types of friends that exist, share them in the comments and we will see just. How much we agree with you or not, but I bet that this model can be expanded.Simone: So honestly, we'd like your feedback. So first type of friend trash friend, as [00:03:00] far as we are concerned. Although you probably have friends like this and you are an idiot for having them. This first type of friend is the convenience friend.Simone: What is a convenience friend? It is someone who in the show Parks and Rec they are referred to as workplace proximity associates rather than friends, . Because this is someone who you are friends with nearly because they are there. and sometimes because you want company.Simone: So great examples of friends who are convenience friends or workplace proximity associates are classmates, roommates, neighbors, people who go to the same church as you, people who are in clubs with you co workers who you like and hang out with after work. People that you've met a long time ago that you've just kept up with.Simone: A good wayMalcolm: to think of this group is the people who you are adjacent to in life, whether it's in school or in work. These are not people that you've really sorted for, right? It's just a random assortment of the population generally.Simone: You get along, like you're not convenience friends with everyone.Simone: You're convenience friends with the people [00:04:00] you're compatibleMalcolm: with. You will inevitably sort for the top, let's say, 20% compatibility people within your adjacent environment. Whether it's neighbors, schools, anything like that. And those people will become your friends and those are convenience friends that convenience friends make a lot of sense.Malcolm: I almost everyone always has some convenience friends and they are of high utility to have in the moment if they exist within your current. Context. So if you are currently at a company or currently at school, it's very useful to have convenient friends within that context because it's useful in playing into the larger social hierarchy of a school. And to that extent, they might be a different type of friend that we'll get to next, but, broadly speaking, they make sense. Where convenience friends become really toxic is when you have a convenience friend that is from a stage of life that you are no longer in. These would be like friends from high school that you're still friends with as [00:05:00] an adult. There is no reason that those people in high school, unless you had a really unique childhood, would be optimized out of all the people in the world to be like high match friends for you, right?Malcolm: In reality, we would say that what is happening when somebody still stays Friends with somebody who was originally a convenience friend is they move into the next category of friendship, which we call self image reinforcement friends or characterSimone: reinforcingMalcolm: friends. Yeah. Or character reinforcing friends.Malcolm: And these are friends who you are friends with because they help reinforce some image you have of yourself. The most classic example here would be the. Like gay best friend a woman may have because she thinks she needs like a gay best friend to fit some stereotypes she saw in media.Simone: Adding to the gay best friend example is like the high powered business women that you meet with and have cocktails with because you see it done on sex in the city.Simone: And you're like of course I need that. I need my girls todayMalcolm: or like a minority who somebody has friends with just so people don't [00:06:00] call them racist.Malcolm: And what we need to make clear with this type of friend is , it's not everyone who happens to be like, the gay best friend of a woman falls into this category, or not every minority of person is friends with, are they friends with to prove that they're not racist.Malcolm: But there are some people in the world who choose friends because they fit these roles. And you can play yourself up to fit these roles better. Sorry, I'm gonna say that better, because this is something that's really important that we say earlier in the video, so we don't look like we're saying all...Malcolm: Okay. To be clear here, we are not saying that gay people who are someone's best friends fit this narrative. What we are saying is people who choose a friend specifically because they fit some gay archetype, that is this type of friendship. So for example, a gay person may not fit this archetype even if they are gay, if they aren't like the...Malcolm: The sassy, whatever, because that's what's needed to fill this role in [00:07:00] the person's story that they're trying to tell. And a lot of people in the world are just essentially trying to create character sheets for themselves. That is their primary driver in life. It's not to affect some change upon the world, it's they have a story of who they want to be, and often they pick that story up from media, and now they're trying to tell thatSimone: story.Simone: Yeah, I think it's, it cannot be understated how much of a role popular media plays in character reinforcing friends and the type of friends they want. So I also do think that understanding Really like top sitcoms, dramas, movies, et cetera, will help you understand the sorts of characters supporting roles.Simone: Of course, people are looking for and help you understand what kind of person you might need to be to fit in that role. You can also look at, for example, people's life stages. Because that can also really influence what people are looking for in certain stages of their life. If you really want to be friend people who are more mature.Simone: In their life, maybe 50 [00:08:00] years plus and really successful in their careers. People in those positions often really have self images or characters that are mentors that are wise, that give people advice. So coming to them as an acolyte in the right kind of way could get you a good position in their life, for example.Simone: So I think looking at. life stages and also what seems to satisfy people the most and how they like to see themselves the most in those life stages is really important. So sometimes I think maybe for like girls in their early twenties, they want like a wing woman, like a girl who they can like travel and party with.Simone: And we go on adventures and we have. fun. And we have spa days. And for guys like a good wing man who like, brings an adventure and supports them and like has their back and pushes them a little bit, like those kinds of characters make a lot of sense. So when you are looking, we'll say you have a target, you have a target friend, you have to look at their age, you have to look at the media they consume.Simone: And this is actually pretty easy to do with social media as long as someone's online.Simone: So essentially, when it comes to the character reinforcing fran there's this concept that we're [00:09:00] all, I think, pretty familiar with where everyone is the protagonist in their story.Simone: But to be a protagonist, you need supporting actors, you need extras, you need the right kind of set dressing to be who you are.Simone: Why this is really useful to know about is if you understand the kind of character that somebody else wants it to be, you can figure out how you would help them complete that character. And if you help them complete that character in some way, You have an instant VIP location in their friendscape. AndMalcolm: The really important thing to remember about this is that while you and everyone else. Is the protagonist of their own story, you are a side character in the story of everyone else you will ever meet. And so a lot of people say I just want people to see me for who I am.Malcolm: That is far too nuanced to be a good side character, right?Simone: Yeah Yeah,Malcolm: Yeah and what we mean when we say a convenience friend who your friends was after the convenient period as a character reinforcing friend,Malcolm: [00:10:00] what we mean is the primary reason you haven't dumped them as a friend is because you don't want to be the type of person who dumps friends. So really, the reason you haven't dumped them as a friend is because of the narrative they tell you about who you are as a person, which is a really silly reason to stay friends with someone.Malcolm: And a lot of people are like, Oh they don't care. They've got other friends. And frankly, it's healthier for them to make new friends who are better fits for them, given where they are in the world, at that time. SoSimone: true. They're almost like friendship blackmail. Because it's like this dirty little secret that you don't want to have out that like you dump friends or that you're like a heartless person who leaves your childhood friends behind.Simone: And it really, I think can make people feel bad and feel a lot of cognitive dissonance. Cause they're why am I spending my time? Or, I think this also, it doesn't just happen with people that you move away from or grow apart from. But from, with friends who become toxic and I think toxic friends actually use this dynamic.Simone: Like they subconsciously understand it and they [00:11:00] use this dynamic to twist the knife and stop friends from dumping them. \Simone: So another way this bad dynamic shows up is I think a lot of toxic friends or friends who are becoming exploitative actually subtly or subconsciously understand this dynamic and leverage it.Simone: Like, how dare you're abandoning me just because I'm deeply depressed and in need right now, like, how could you possibly forget my birthday, et cetera, et cetera, and they use that because they understand that you see yourself as a good person, as a good friend as a caring person, and they frame you as not being caring.Simone: When you don't meet their unreasonable demands. Understanding that as well, understanding that people are manipulating you along those grounds, they're manipulating you by taking something that matters a lot to you, which is your personal character. And trying to put it in danger, hold it hostage, essentially.Simone: It's hopefully that would make it. easier for some people to drop toxic friends. Although I guess it's hard to recognize in the moment, but that's still something it's definitely a real dynamic that is leveraged [00:12:00] by a lot of people. I think the same happens sometimes with family members, et cetera, like how could you do this?Simone: Ultimately they cause a lot of harm. Anything more about characterism enforcing friends? I would just add one more note, which is that. Malcolm's point that everyone wants to be this like complicated subtle person cannot be emphasized enough. We've had people who really take our advice on being a two dimensional character to heart.Simone: And they'll send to us their draft character sheets and ask us, Hey, what do you think? And their draft character sheets have 15 attributes that are positive, like three that are negative, but they're actually really positives. I don't think. It cannot be overstated how simple is, you've got three positive attributes and three negative attributes that are super clear and actually really negative.Simone: That's it. Like you have to be so two dimensional. So I think that should also be emphasized because I think people just can't get over the fact that they're so [00:13:00] unique and special and nuanced that it's hard to. Understand that you have to be an extra on somebody else's performance.Simone: So our favorite type of friend, Malcolm, is the utility friend. Yes.Malcolm: Yes. This is just someone who's directly useful to you in some way.Simone: And so in childhood, this might be like the kid with the best video game console. Right.Malcolm: It could be somebody who intellectually pushes you forward. It could be somebody who gives you access to additional things.Malcolm: It could be somebody who gives you new ideas. It could be the point is that you are receiving. Some sort of a tangible or mental benefit from beingSimone: friends with this person. Yeah. So examples of utility are they go all over the place. One could be like, honestly, like they're wealthy. And when you're with them, you get to do fancy things, or maybe they're really attractive and you just want to be around someone attractive.Simone: Or maybe they're a boyfriend or girlfriend and you just want sex from them. Maybe it is because, yeah, like Malcolm said they teach you something new. Our favorite types of utility friends are people who [00:14:00] expose us to new ideas and intellectually push us. So that's of course the first thing you would go to Malcolm.Simone: I think for most people, utility friends. Are the type of friend who manufactures popularity. And by that, they are the type of friend who organizes the gatherings. They organize the group vacations, they organize parties, they invite people like they make everything happen. So the utility that those people offer is literally providing opportunities and organizing opportunities for socializing because so few people actually take the initiative to do that.Simone: And one thing that we're gonna be teaching our kids so early is that like the key to popularity has very little to do with necessarily charisma. You obviously can't be like the worst socially, but really the key to popularity is being the person to make something happen. If you are taking the initiative and getting people together to go somewhere or to come to your house, you host you, you do things, you keep the conversation going in a group thread, you [00:15:00] are the popular one because so few people take initiative.Simone: So that, that is one of the easiest ways to become a utility friend. But I think understanding. What people want, what matters to them, what challenges they're facing, make it really easy to understand how you could be a utility friend to them. And to be honest with you, because we really value this type of friendship the most, whenever we meet new people and we like them and we want to be friends with them, we're always like, what do you need right now?Simone: What do you want? What type of interest do you need? Because we want. This is a two parter. Like one is we want to be useful to them. If we are utility friends to them, we will be friends with them. But also every time that we are useful to them is an excuse to reach out to them, to engage, to talk, et cetera.Simone: Yeah.Malcolm: And being the connector is a very useful way to be a utility friend, as Simone was saying. Because whenever you connect to people like, I connect a startup with a venture capitalist, right? And it's a verified connection. I am doing a favor to both of those individuals. And they both really value [00:16:00] that favor.Malcolm: And I'm getting like two social credits for that. And the key to being this type of a connector, especially if you're young now. Really make sure you take notes on the people you're in conversations with. You should have a list of all of the people you've talked to their contact information, and everything you know about them.Malcolm: And then occasionally hit up the people on this list who are most likely to be useful to other people who are part of Sort of your cloud of individuals. Because that's a very low cost way, both low cost socially and financially to be a good utility friend. And outside of that, hosting parties is a very low cost way to be a utility friend to a large group of people to the extent where even though we're very introverted, we have found a system for, going to Manhattan once every other month and hosting a party there.Malcolm: Just to stay of utility and top of mind to people who we're interacting with. What's the final type of friend simony? So there werefour.Simone: Yeah. So in the [00:17:00] past, we've only discussed three and we've only come up with three, but I want to propose one bonus one because I want to prime. Everyone who might leave comments on additional types that like, Hey, anyone can contribute something and I'm going to throw something out and knock them and you can pull it apart and either say this is a legitimate addition to the canon or not.Simone: Sound good. Okay. Okay. I'm going to propose the fourth type of friend is a. We'll say a culture friend. So this could count as someone who's also a fan of your top baseball team. Someone who's a member of your religion. Someone who is also a really huge fan of some subculture. Basically someone with whom you share a culture.Simone: I'll never forget my mom explaining to me in part her love of baseball. She later in life became a huge fan of the San Francisco Giants and would wear a Giants baseball cap had a Giants t shirt and she talked to me a couple of times about how awesome it felt to go to a game and feel just so united with a bunch of people that she had [00:18:00] no other shared background with.Simone: And also she would walk around with her like Giants signaling stuff and immediately she would have friends and it wasn't because of some character reinforcing thing. say I think it's really different. I think it's because whatever. No. Hold on. Let me make my case. The cultural signifier that you're wearing, whatever that may be tells them immediately that you have a shared context.Simone: You have a shared language and you are a safe place for each other. So I think often people get really stressed going out into the world. It can be, everything is uncertain, unpredictable. Sometimes it's really hard to predict people. So especially in a really diverse heterogeneous society, like in the United States, going out and interacting, people can be tough because you don't know where they're coming from.Simone: You don't know what their expectations are. Social contracts are very mismatched in many places. So you're going to get some form of conflict or you're going to insult someone by mistake. When you know someone has a shared culture with you, be that a sports team or a fan universe, like you see that like they have some Naruto [00:19:00] pin or something.Simone: You're like, Oh my God, so scary. Like then like suddenly. That tension goes away and you are instant friends on this thing. And there's this camaraderie that shows up.Malcolm: Okay. I will. So I'd say that really it's either utility friend or a character reinforcing friend seems to be what you're describing, but I will say that it's derived enough that you could potentially consider it a new category.Malcolm: With this understanding that, for example, you think about us, trying to create a culture of aligned families who are having a high number of kids. So our kids grow up understanding our cultural values, understanding that they're not just completely weirdos. Because the other families that were part of this group was they also do weird things, like name their kids weird things.Malcolm: They also, they're very interested in deviating from society. They're also very pro natalist, very focused on, on success and cultural acceleration ism. In that they're really like technophilic people. They're really focused on how do we move forwards to whatever comes after this stage of [00:20:00] society.Malcolm: So they're really and we do that because that's useful. And I would imagine, if you're a conservative. Jew or you're a conservative Catholic people in your Catholic community or people in your Jewish community would feel very different from you and have an intergenerational utility to you.Malcolm: But because that utility is so unique and so non direct, I can say, okay, yes. And then the sports fan thing that you're mentioning is if the healthy version of this is religious communities or cultural communities that would be like the pornography version of this where it's just faking what it feels like to have a community that would be of any utility to you.Malcolm: It's just masturbating this idea of I'm part of a cultural group when it's not really, it's just a sports team. It's not going to, help impart like. to your family or your kids. But it is fulfilling sort of an ancestral need there. Okay. I'll agreeSimone: with that. [00:21:00] I would also say it warrants a separate category because the tactics in terms of tapping into that are quite different.Simone: So it's about finding the right signalers and of course, bonus points. If it's like a deep cut signaler that only. Insiders would know. And you see this a lot, for example, with cryptic bumper stickers that people put on their cars. And I see these all the time. And I'm like, I know that this is this kind of thing.Simone: And I wish I knew what it was. And I always try to Google them and it's really annoying. Or you even see this with cultural groups, like Mormons with garments where if you know what to look for, you can tell someone's wearing their garments. But you probably don't know if you're an outsider.Simone: So you feel this extra camaraderie . It's a powerful dynamic.Malcolm: Yeah. One thing I wanted to close this out with because I think a lot of people, they hear this and they're like. Oh, that's like an overly utilitarian way of viewing other humans.Malcolm: That's really immoral to just put people in these simplistic categories. And I think that's very much a character reinforcing friend [00:22:00] attitude. The type of person who over associates with character reinforcing friend. Classic. Right. But I guess what I'd say is I actually think it's very immoral to take that position.Malcolm: Because I think that a lot of people get the aesthetic of being a moral person. confused with actually doing good in the world. Our lives are very short. Every unit of time we have, every interaction we have is an opportunity for us to enact the sort of change in the world we want or make the world better along some specific lines.Malcolm: You get so many units of good you can do for the world a day. And that is, I think what a person's quality of character should be modeled off of, especially when they do things that seem to hurt in the moment or that would cause a negative judgment. So I'd say it's very much if you're in a relationship with someone but you know that relationship is toxic and hurting them the right thing to do is to leave that relationship.Malcolm: The wrong thing to do is to stay in that relationship [00:23:00] because that's what a quote unquote good person, the aesthetic of being a good person would do. Yet I think that All of our friends, even the ones that aren't actively toxic, if you're in a relationship with them for a character reinforcing reason because you're doing it to tell a story of how you're a good person, then that, that is...Malcolm: taking from you optimization that you could put into the world towards making a world concretely a better place. And I think that some of the worst types of people if you want to know the people who are able to commit often the most evil are the ones who have in their brain, I am a good person.Malcolm: Ask, what does a good person do in this moment? Yeah, right. Because what you are asking when you ask that is what does narratively a good person do in this moment? Yeah, really dangerous thing about having that mindset is you begin to Define the types of things you have done in your past and the types of things people in whatever cultural group you're in [00:24:00] As axiomatically good, which can make it impossible to see when the group you're in begins to do evil things.Simone: So here's the one last thing I'd like you to help me work through. And actually maybe you won't be able to, but other people can, if they watch this and help us in the comments. One of our friends who I really love and respect mostly because she and I hold super different views, who I'm talking about.Simone: We love her so much. She was like. When I told her this model of friendship, what about love? There are just some people that I unconditionally love for who they are. And I, weMalcolm: talked about it. So love is an emotion. We evolved as part of our, from our cultural perspective and emotion, you evolved is something that can fire randomly, basically love can force you to form a pair bond with someone and.Malcolm: I guess you could like, I don't want you as a kid in the room, use the M word, but you could M that, that emotional subset. But that is really [00:25:00] not meaningful, not in a wider context. And we talk in our books about how love actually works, right? Love appears to be emotion that originally evolved to get us to not kill our genetic offspring, basically form sort of long term relationships with someone.Malcolm: Then it got hijacked because evolution is a cheap programmer. So it'll just hijack a preexisting system. When we started forming monogamous pair bonds to reinforce those, we go into this in other podcasts or we'll do a whole podcast just on how love works. But the reality is love is an emotion.Malcolm: It's an emotion that we feel today because our ancestors who felt it when in. When presented with certain environmental stimuli, had more surviving offspring than the ones that didn't. It is no true mystical Norse compass to anything. IfSimone: anything, then to summarize, you would argue that what she is really experiencing when she maintains friendships because she loves them, for her, it is the [00:26:00] utility of experiencing the good feeling of love.Simone: Well,Malcolm: I would argue it's more of a cultural thing. So keep in mind the friend that she's mentioning here is a secular Quaker. She came from a Quaker tradition and Quaker tradition sees truth is coming from your emotion as coming inside you. So it would be perfect sense that somebody of the Quaker cultural tradition would see your emotions, especially a strong emotion, like love as a sign of something beyond that emotion, a sign of some almost.Malcolm: Supernatural truth to the relationship whereas we coming from a Calvinist cultural tradition and seeing both positive and negative emotions as things that can lead you astray would not, we'd have a high level of suspicion for that.Simone: Yes. I love you and I love that little bumper car rider behind you.Simone: I can see the lights going. [00:27:00] I really like talking about this. I love this theory of friendship and I'm keen to add to it, like three seems like so few, so we'll see what we can add to the canon over time. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Maybe that means to be something for like parasocialMalcolm: forms of friendship.Simone: I feel like... We hopefully over time can add more to the canon. It feels like there, there could be more than just three categories. So I love talking about this because we always have a chance of finding something new when we do. But yeah, let's hopefully talk aboutMalcolm: it. Allow our friendship.Malcolm: To be perverted by love.Simone: Let's never let that happen. I love you, Malcolm. Even though we don't value it. Even thoughMalcolm: I don't value it. I, for whatever reason feel that way about you. It's only natural, right? We've been in a relationship for a long time. LoveSimone: breaks down marriages. Yeah, it's only match.Simone: That's the problem. That's the problem, Malcolm. It makes me feelMalcolm: good to say that. So I'm just using you to, because we're all wretched, we're [00:28:00] all fallen. We all bend our ideal moral framework due to the fact that, we're still human. And we shouldn't overly. beat ourselves up for being human.Malcolm: And we should allow ourselves to indulge in little emotions here or there, if overall it increases our efficiency. And that's what I tell myself. That's the wretched little lie I tell myself when I say, Simone, I love you. And I'm really happy we did another fun episode.Simone: I love you too, Malcolm, and it's disgusting. 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

Malcolm and Simone discuss problems in modern dating caused by dating apps and cultural shifts. They explain how the "lazy 8 problem" leads to unrealistic expectations. Women compare current options to past partners out of their league. Men get overlooked. Simone suggests women try polyamory or kink to land a high-value male. Malcolm says men should lock down a partner by 22 and optimize for gratitude, not glamour. They mention niche religious communities and goal-oriented dating sites as options. Ultimately there are no easy solutions, so people must work hard and have realistic expectations when seeking a partner.Malcolm: [00:00:00] we have this algorithm for relationship stability , the stability score is a person's individual value to a specific individual who there was divided by What they think they can get on an open market and this can be inaccurate and as long as that number is above one, the relationship will be stable when it falls below one, the relationship becomes unstable and many cultural things can augment this. The reason why celebrity relationships are so intrinsically unstable is because the value of a celebrity on an open market is almost always higher than their value to somebody who's gotten to know them as a human being.Simone: hello, gorgeous.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be talking to you today, despite the seasonal affective disorder that both of us are feeling.Simone: It's really unfair to us who are Fected by summer rather than winter, cause no one recognizes our plight.Simone: But here's one thing we don't have to worry about that actually makes us [00:01:00] extremely smug and I think moderately intolerable, which is our relationship.Simone: I feel like. Some kind of crazy wealthy person, in the midst of a sea of poverty that is systemic, that is deeply unfair. And people sometimes reach out to us and they're like, Hey, as a, single person with X, Y, and Z characteristics, what tips can you give me?Simone: And obviously like we tried to give whatever advice we can possibly give. But I'm also like, oh, but like the system is so broken. I really don't know what you're going to do. And I think it's a, an interesting thing to discuss, especially in the context of demographic collapse, of pronatalism of mental health problems, societal decline, as some people like To talk about it.Simone: So let's dig into it. Let's talk about broken relationship markets.Malcolm: We are living in a world today where I feel like both men and women are really screwed in relationship markets, but in, in very different ways. And a lot of people feel rightly. [00:02:00] Somewhat helpless in trying to find a partner. And one of the things we're doing is trying to build new cultural solutions, but let's talk about why the existing system isn't working effectively.Simone: Okay. So we call this the lazy eight problem. It is a problem that emerged with swipe based dating, where dating both became associated with very low switching costs, like switching from one partner to the next was.Simone: Fairly easy and seamless. There wasn't a lot of social grief you got for breaking up with someone or ghosting them. But also with swipe based dating, it became very image heavy, very aesthetics focused. So whereas before, even on apps like, okay, Cupid, et cetera, you used to be able to compete or appeal to people based on a lot of different metrics.Simone: Like on, okay, Cupid, my whole, game my churn was to answer their weird questions and end up in people's feeds and then catch their attention there. So it wasn't even images. It was like my funny answers and humor. Like that's just not an option anymore. So it's become like really honed in on.Simone: Aesthetics driven characteristics.Malcolm: So before you move further [00:03:00] for some of our listeners, they may not know the way internet dating used to work. So there were two systems that you used to be able to use for internet dating and Simone made effective use of both of them. And they are radically different from the swipe based systems you have access to today.Malcolm: Essentially it was a directory. So I would go, I would create a long form profile that was much more focused on the text, like who I am, than what I look like. Which gave you an ability to compete on different metrics and not just on attractiveness. Then what you could do is go and search and say, okay, all, women interested in men within 25 miles that are slender.Malcolm: that are atheists, that are Republicans, you could put a number of metrics in and you would just get a list of every woman who is using the app at that time who fit that criteria. And you could go through, you could sort the, those people and then outreach to them, knowing how valuable each one of them was to you while also knowing that once you exhausted a potential lead.Malcolm: That lead was exhausted until new [00:04:00] women or men would come onto the app. Now, this is very different than the swipe based system where there is a perception that there are always more people out there instead of a, okay, I have a broad understanding of what everyone of sort of the things that I value most with that entire dating pool, is my area, which actually, it might not be good as the older monogamous systems in terms of relationship stability, because those had really high switching costs.Malcolm: And I'm not saying good for quality of life. I'm just talking about relationship stability, but it was dramatically better than the current system because you had a perception that was accurate of what was really out on the market. Now, this created a problem when that perception was inaccurate, which often happened and that's the lazy eight problem.Malcolm: So talk about that. Cause that was a problem both in the old system and the new system, I'd argue.Simone: Yes, but I think it's become much worse now. So the lazy eight problem is this you'll see in online dating data that we'll just say 80, 20 ish. I don't know [00:05:00] exactly what the proportions are, but 20% of men are sleeping with 80% of women, meaning that most men really aren't getting partners.Simone: You see this in declining rates of reported sex among men. So that means that most women are dating. You could argue if we're ranking humans from, especially in terms of attractiveness, partner attractiveness from one to 10, they're dating eights, nines, and tens, even if they are a three, four, five, six.Simone: Even if they're out, like certain, those men are out of their league. Why is this the case? Think about it this way. If you are an eight and you're lazy and you just want to have sex one night, you want to hook up with someone. It's really easy. To just reach out to a six or a five or a seven on Tinder, on OkCupid and have a one night stand with them and never get back to them.Simone: The problem this creates is the fours, the five, the sixes, the sevens end up thinking that they are entitled to an eight, a nine or a [00:06:00] 10, that they could get an eight or a nine or a 10 as a marriage partner, as a long term partner.Malcolm: I think entitled might even be the wrong word. I think that they're just genuinely confused.Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah.Simone: Yeah. I guess entitled is a little bit too harsh of a term to use, but they're certainly given the impression thatMalcolm: they could, why would they not be confused? It's a natural thing. This is who is reaching out to them on these apps. This is who is sleeping with them. So of course this is who they can get.Simone: And with women, which of course they can't getMalcolm: that. Yeah. And then with women who have the secondary problem, which is their perception of the quality of man, they can get can also be inflated through reflection on previous men they have slept with. So generally a woman's value was in a sexual or dating marketplace declines over time.Malcolm: So let's talk about what we mean when we say people have a value on a dating marketplace. , people are like, you can't put a value on humans. That's what you do when you're [00:07:00] hiring people.Malcolm: People are products all the time in the economy. what's unique about the dating marketplace. is that you're typically, now I'm not saying that money is never exchanged or a big part of it, but what you're typically doing is exchanging one product for another hopefully equivalent product.Malcolm: That is the core of what you're doing. You are playing in what in, in business is called or in economics, it's called a two sided marketplace. This is assuming you're in a heterosexual dating pool. If you're in a bisexual dating pool or a gay dating pool, the dynamics are actually.Malcolm: Pretty different and it can cause different sorts of problems in the dating marketplace but for now We're just going to talk about the heterosexual marketplace. Which is actually much more broken than the gay marketplace. Yes If a well because it's you have a sort of truer equality within the gay marketplace in which you really are Exchanging like for like we're in the heterosexual marketplace It's sometimes less obvious how the value of different partners on the open marketplace align.Malcolm: Now, here's what's really important to remember. [00:08:00] Every person has two scores above their head. One score is their value on the open marketplace, and the other score is their value to a specific individual. Okay? So if I go into a grocery store, for example, the diabetes medication might have a uniquely really high value to me.Malcolm: I might be willing to pay way more than market rate for it because I need it to survive. And this is true when looking for a partner as well. And we'll get into arbitrage plays and what this allows and everything like that. And it's also true for companies. So for a company, while a person might have the average salary, they might be able to earn on the open marketplace within certain industries or for certain companies, they might actually have astronomically higher value than they would have in the open marketplace, which causes a very interesting negotiation because the company knows.Malcolm: They can't earn what they're paying for them on the open marketplace, but this person often knows their value to that company [00:09:00] specifically. And so we'll get to how that often plays out in dating as well. But the larger point that I was about to make here is that in a marketplace, a woman's value typically declines over time for a few reasons.Malcolm: One is women generally prefer to date guys who are older than them, whereas men prefer to date women who are younger than them. And it's actually. A little bit more complicated than this and it changes. These people get older, but people dramatically underestimate how much this affects dating pools.Malcolm: So an example that we give in our book where I do the math, but I'm just going to try to go from memory here is if I am a freshman girl in college, right? I can date freshman guys, I can date sophomore guys, I can date junior guys, and I can date senior guys. If I am a freshman guy in college, typically I realistically only have a shot with freshman girls.Malcolm: And then I become a sophomore guy, I have a chance with sophomore girls and freshman girls, and then the sophomore girl has a chance with sophomore guys, junior guys, senior guys. What this means is that [00:10:00] how difficult it is to date for a Freshman a girl versus a senior girl, or conversely, a senior guy versus a freshman guy, it's literally 42 times harder, if I remember correctly, to secure a partner, which is wild when you think about the effects that has on somebody who doesn't expect this Really radical change in their value on the dating pool.Malcolm: Now, obviously people can date outside of college and stuff like that. We're just using college as a constraint, as a constrained data set so that you can begin to think about how this works.Simone: But if I may summarize this just to bring people all back to the basic points.Simone: Let's say I'm a 30 year old woman, but I am thinking I'm comparing all partners that I'm looking at from this point on as a 30 year old woman to all the partners I used to have. We also have to keep in mind that men, regardless of age, seem to find like early twenties women, the most attractive. So like those women have the highest value and can get the best [00:11:00] men because they have the highest value.Simone: So I'm comparing what I could get as a 22 year old woman. With what I can get as a 30 year old woman, which is very, which is a false expectation because I can't get even the same guys I used to date earlier as this hypothetical woman as I, I can get now, right? Yeah, so there'sMalcolm: two other factors at play here that are worth noting.Malcolm: One is, typically the more sexual partners you have as a woman, To the average guy on the marketplace. Now, not all guys care about this, but to the average guy on the marketplace, this is going to decrease the the quality of guy you're going to match with. In addition to that there's the problem that the things that you can build up during that critical period between 22 and 32 as a girl.Malcolm: Matter a lot less on the marketplace than the things that a guy can build up during the same period by that. What I mean is a guy's value on the marketplace is more positively augmented by things like a degree, a good job, a lot of income than a [00:12:00] woman's. This is unfair. I am not saying this is fair. I am not saying this is how things should be structured.Malcolm: But it is objectively true if you look at data and you look at what people say they want in a parter. And it's important to remember that you can find certain subpopulations where this isn't true. And that is what we call an arbitrage play. So an arbitrage play in business is Let's say I buy some ore from an area where that ore is really common, and then I sell it in an area where that ore is really rare and it has higher value.Malcolm: And this is true for companies, right? You have an arbitrage play, if you have like a skill in astrophysics, in working with a company who needs somebody, it was a skill in astrophysics. You are going to have higher value to all companies in the astrophysics category. If you are unusual in some way that either helps you with a specific demographic, Or lowers your value across the market.Malcolm: More generally, you are going to struggle. An example of this would be a overweight woman. There is a specific demographic of [00:13:00] guys where that actually positively augments their value on the dating market, but to the average guy, that's going to lower their value on the dating market. One of the problems that we have in our society is people are like you're fetishizing me.Malcolm: Are you like me for the thing that makes me different? Like they, I don't understand. I guess I don't get it becauseSimone: like you just like me because of X or like it's gross that you like me because of X, whereas the more advantageous mindset to have is, oh, I have this one thing that people disproportionately value that would allow me to get men or women out of my league.Simone: I should lean into that. Even if it's not necessarily what I meant to.Malcolm: Yeah. I think that here's where the cognitive dissonance comes from there is that part of them believes that they should be ashamed for that. And so if the relationship draws attention to that, then they feel like they might not have earned the partnership as much.Malcolm: And they may also feel the same way that like a really attractive girl in a relationship feels. Like you only value me for my body or you [00:14:00] disproportionately rate my body in the reasons that you value me. And this is an interesting thing that can also augment the value of a relationship. What's really wild is why, so why I value another person can augment How much they value me.Malcolm: So if I value them for their intelligence, for example, more than their body, they may value me more, all other things actually being equal, which is a pretty wild dynamic when you're talking about like calculating marketplaces. I can't say, I actually had a girl break up with me cause she said I only valued her for her brains.Malcolm: Another interesting one. And I think this is another thing, like reasons why people I've run into relationship problems with this one. people. One woman was mad that I called her beautiful, but not sexy or hot. And that she knew she was beautiful, but her subconscious, like she said that her actual fear was that she wasn't hot.Malcolm: This was a very classically attractive person.Simone: High standards, man. But I was like,Malcolm: wow, that's really picky. But I think it shows the way that [00:15:00] we use our partners to augment how we think about ourselves. Because these types of things like. Should really matter. But they do and they do change the nature of the relationship to some extent, somebody who values you because you are beautiful is going to engage different with you intimately and in a public context than somebody who values you because they think you're like an object of desire, right?Malcolm: Like animalistic desire. So anyway back to the topic here.Simone: Yeah, there's actually one more thing which you're missing which is actually pretty important, which is the more sexual partners you have especially as a female, the less you're going to, we'll say hormonally pair bond with your partners.Simone: So I've also had friends who have. with new boyfriends that they have as they're now at this point, looking to get married Oh, I'm just not feeling the same connection I felt with other people. And they take that as a sign of Oh, because I'm not feeling that. That's a sign that he is not the one, for example, whereas really what's going on is because they've had [00:16:00] more sexual partners.Simone: That bonding has actually just gone down. They're not going to feel that feeling anymore, but they don't know that they're not going to feel that feeling anymore. And asMalcolm: Diana Fleischman said on our podcast, this isn't necessarily a negative thing, depending on your strategy, it can be a very positive thing.Malcolm: Force being forced to form a, an emotional bond to someone just because you're in an intimate relationship with them can have really negative consequences. Yeah,Simone: It's a lot of things with the human body. Or use it or lose it. So it's if your body is very monogamous, it will use that. It will give you lots of pair bonding hormones and make you really dedicated to a partner and really connected.Simone: If your body's given signs that you're not using monogamy, that you actually need to be a little bit more flexible. It's not. It's going to adapt to that. And that's a good thing. Like you and Diana point out. But so add all these things together. Wait, we should be clear.Malcolm: It doesn't mean you are incapable of loving or forming a bond with your partner.Malcolm: It just means you won't involuntarily form one just because you're [00:17:00] intimate with them anymore.Simone: You're not going to it's, there's less of that. We'll almost say like drug inducedMalcolm: connection. It doesn't mean that there is a component of earlier relationships that are. Depending now, people are different, some guys are born attractive to God.Malcolm: It's right. Different. Sometimes people just have an odd biology, but for the average woman, you are not going to easily be able to recapture some of the feelings you had in your earliest intimate relationships in later relationships,Simone: right? So if we add all these things together, first, we have the lazy eight problem where many women who are Middling.Simone: The average woman is going to be a five, right? So the average woman is going to be led to believe that she could marry or have a long term relationship with a, an eight, nine, or 10, because those are the guys that are sleeping with everyone and probably engaging them. When ultimately those guys that they have slept with actually would never commit to them long term.Simone: So that's the lazy problem number one. So unreasonable expectations to typically when women are ready to settle [00:18:00] down, especially in modern society, because we're encouraged to settle down after we've gone to school, after we've set up our career, after we've done whatever it is that we want to do single they are able to secure less high value men than they were when they were in their early twenties, because at any age range.Simone: men are going to prefer women in their early twenties. So they are now comparing their current partner options to previous partner options that they'd never be able to get again. And then third they are often to your point, not exploiting. market asymmetries that they could be exploiting with themselves.Simone: So they're not willing to be a little bit flexible in terms of saying, okay, what do I offer? And how can I find someone out of my league who really wants that one thing? So they're not thinking strategically. And then fourth they are really expecting to feel that. Early pair bonding experience that sort of hormonal addictive surge that they get with new relationships, and they're just typically on average not feeling it.Simone: So all these factors are leading [00:19:00] to one thing, which is women are just not really getting excited about marrying partners that are in their league.Malcolm: But there's a secondary problem here. Yeah, which we need to talk about, which is if you are a high value woman, so suppose you're like a top 10% woman in our society today, especially in regards to social status.Malcolm: So you're highly educated, you have a good degree, you are moderately attractive, maybe not like superstar, but moderately attractive. You are actually really screwed on dating markets, even if you want a long term relationship. And this is because men the high value men who you would naturally match with in a totally monogamous society.Malcolm: So that what I mean is that if everyone could only choose one partner, you typically get about everyone in a society being paired off with some problems, which we can talk about in other videos . But what happens in, in this scenario, the way our society is structured, if you are a top value woman you are competing with a guy who can go for a lot of women who are lower value than you, [00:20:00] who he may value almost as much as a long term partner, but these other women.Malcolm: Intrinsically are going to show often more gratitude for the relationship which guys value a lot in a partner, a lot more than I think a lot of women think. So a woman who's a six or something and is, has a high level of gratitude for a relationship is typically going to be chosen over a woman who's like a nine.Malcolm: And it's not the nine's fault. She genuinely shouldn't feel as much gratitude. This guy might be below her in social status, in income, in attractiveness. And yet, she will have a hard time locking him down. AndMalcolm: It creates a really negative environment for women that is incredibly difficult to navigate. And we've talked about... We'll probably do a video on how... No, we'll talk about it later in this video, I think, how to secure a partner. There's the the poly gambit that we've talked about.Malcolm: Do you want to go into that?Simone: Yeah. So we've talked about the problem at length. The solutions aren't great, so they're not going to take that much time. But one of the things that [00:21:00] you can do which we see working we've seen a couple of anecdotal situations in which this has worked really well, especially for women.Simone: Is it women? consider entering polyamorous relationships with high value men.Malcolm: So the way the poly gambit works is a woman who is not actually a high preference for a poly relationship offers to let the man sleep with other people. And this is where the. No D's rule can come from in poly relationships and what you actually have here is a polygynous relationship.Malcolm: Just a classic polygynous relationship across societies where a high volume man basically has multiple partners. But because our society expects monogamy to some extent once people start having kids what the woman will do is she'll say, Okay I will be your primary. You can continue to sleep with other people.Malcolm: You just can't spend resources on them and you, you will have kids with me. You want to have kids, right? So this is what we're going to do. And they make this gambit understanding that the guy's testosterone drops after he has kids and that his value also drops to other women after he has [00:22:00] a primary partner.Malcolm: who he's married to and who he has kids with, which lowers the quality of the partners he can get for intimate relationships to the extent where he may just not be interested in anymore. So far, we know a number of people who have tried this and it has worked for every single one of them, but it is incredibly risky.Malcolm: Do you know anyone who hasn't worked forSimone: it? I don't know anyone it hasn't worked for. I guess the risky part, I don't know. I don't think it is as risky as one imagines. Because what you're really doing is just taking a lot of stuff that happens anyway. And you're being really upfront and honest about it.Simone: So even if you marry someone and say, I want to have kids with you and I want to be monogamous, they may still be interested in other people. You can't stop that. We can't control how people feel or lust or love that just happens. And so maybe they may cheat on you. Cheating is more prevalent than I would have thought.Simone: When you look at surveys And they may ultimately break up with you, you might get divorced. So there's no promise that [00:23:00] you aren't going to end up as a single parent at some point. I think whenMalcolm: you actually really interesting statistic I saw at one point, and I have to pull this up because it sounds not true to me now as I'm saying it, but I remember seeing it when we were writing our sexuality book that people in.Malcolm: Long term monogamous relationships actually have about the same number of extramarital partners as people in long term polyamorous relationships.Simone: Yeah, see that's where I'm like, I just don't see where the risk is much higher because at least in this case, you're being honest about it. There's, you're not cheating because rather than obligating your partner to lie to you about extramarital partners, you're just.Simone: And the understanding is that here are the terms don't spend money on this other person. And again, like you say, the caliber of someone that that a man, especially can bed after he has kids after he's in a committed relationship is just so much lower that the odds that he finds someone who he would want to make a new primary partner are pretty low.Simone: And in fact, I would almost [00:24:00] argue that. It would be easier. Let's say that I'm the other woman and I want to steal your husband from you or your partner from you, it's going to be harder for me to do it. If you're in a poly relationship than a monogamous relationship, because in a monogamous relationship, I'm just going to be pushing for a divorce.Simone: I'm going to be pushing for you to I'm going to be like trying to supplant you. Whereas in a poly relationship, like I probably know you it's going to be a lot harderMalcolm: for You can deliver other partners, which is something I have seen people pull in these relationships, which, which has relationships that would have fallen apart in a monogamous relationship, but they know that their partner is becoming too attached to one person.Malcolm: And it's quite something different to say, stop cheating on me. Because then the person's breaking the rules anyway. Like they have no reason to listen to you than to say this one person who you're seeing, I have a problem with them. You can see anyone else, this one person. That's a much harder thing for somebody to.Malcolm: Logic themselves out of to logic themselves into saying I'm being the reasonable person and continuing toSimone: see this person, right? So there's [00:25:00] the poly strategy. The other strategy that you discussed more in the private guide to sexuality or relationships. I can't remember which that really was your top of mind.Simone: One before we discovered more people doing this poly strategy was just entering like. Kink communities, because there are many especially high value single men who are, let's say, divorced, who are just like enjoying their sexual rumspringa who are in these communities and who are like super willing to explore and have fun.Simone: And you might find them that way. Like it just seems to be a good place to find high value men. AndMalcolm: there's often more arbitrage plays you can make. Yeah. So I think what's important to remember within kink communities, within this, what you're really doing with this polygambit is you are using an aspect of the contract of your relationship.Malcolm: So in the same way, an apartment where like I allow a dog, that aspect of the contract might increase the value of the apartment to an individual. This aspect of my relationship contract, my expectations for the [00:26:00] relationship increase the value of the relationship to my potential partner.Malcolm: Thank you. Especially if it's I won't sleep with other people, but you can sleep with other people that can increase the value of a relationship to somebody pretty dramatically, and it can be somewhat difficult for other people to compete with that, depending on what the person is interested in. But then, in addition to that,Malcolm: In BDSM communities, there are a ton of room for arbitrage. In not necessarily BDSM, but kink communities more probably, it typically means they have a specific interest that not a lot of people can provide, or a lot of people providing these interests can, even if they're not really that into it.Malcolm: themselves can get them such a higher quality partner that it becomes worth it. And I have seen that work multiple times and it's often not a dishonest thing. So like many of these people who do the poly gambit, many of these people who do this, and this isn't everyone in the poly community.Malcolm: There are some people who are just like genuinely polyamorous. I'm just talking about one strategy I've seen some people that use. But in, within the key [00:27:00] community, we've seen this as well. They often tell people, I'm not really that into it, but I'm doing it because it, I don't know how else I'm going to find a partner.Malcolm: The way it's often framed is, look I'm a successful woman in New York, or I'm a successful woman in San Francisco. Do I really have the option to only date monogamous men? That's really what's often said because it's true men in these environments are often so inundated with potential partners if they're really high value that there's almost no reason for them to consider monogamous relationships outside of cultural reasons which is that they culturally value that but if they don't have some sort of strong cultural connection to the concept or they don't see some sort of like systemic problem or some systemic A value problem with it, they'll usually say, Hey, I can get it.Malcolm: So why aren't I, why aren't I taking it? Now the next thing that we need to talk about is how these low switching costs induced by these environments make relationships less stable once they form. So we have this algorithm for relationship [00:28:00] stability and it goes your sort of value to your partner, you know how we mentioned you have an individual like market price to a partner or value to a partner and then you have your market price the quality of the average person you think you could get on the open market or not the average person you could get, but The person you could reasonably get on the open market which is similar to how food is priced like food isn't priced at the price that the average person who walks into a store would buy it at, that's going to be actually really low, it's priced at the average price that the person who would buy it at.Malcolm: But anyway So that's what people mean when they say market value, which is actually quite different than what the average person would rate you. But we don't need to get into the economics of all this. And this is actually an economic problem. And you can look a lot of economic theory has gone into this.Malcolm: It's really interesting if you want to go into it. But anyway, the stability score is a person's individual value to a specific individual who there was divided by What they think they can get on an open market and this can be inaccurate and as long as that number is above one, the relationship will be stable when it falls [00:29:00] below one, the relationship becomes unstable and many cultural things can augment this.Malcolm: So suppose, like a variety or Catholic culture where divorcing somebody is really frowned upon. That's intrinsically going to make my relationship more stable because I know my market value is hurt more than it would usually be hurt by leaving my partner. The problem is that now we live in a society where I can leave this culture.Malcolm: I can leave this cultural group. And if I'm open to leaving this cultural group, then I typically don't really get my score on the open market hurt quite as much by leaving somebody, which is one of the reasons why you see shaming coming from these communities and people from other cultural groups, even when it may not make sense why they would shame people from other cultural groups, because they do hurt the relationship dynamics in these groups.Malcolm: No, I don't think they should, I think people should be allowed to leave their group, but it's just true that it does undermine. All relationships in the market when people know that it's not going to hurt them that much because they left a partner. And we're talking about like small tribes or small, let's say an English settlement in [00:30:00] like the 1600s or something.Malcolm: It was really hard if you left a partner to find a new partner. That was incredibly difficult because of the social stigma around that. So what that created was an environment where your value to your partner, now for cultural reasons, not necessarily because you actually valued them, was higher than it would otherwise be, or your value on the open market, expected value on the open market.Malcolm: Was dramatically lower than it might otherwise be. But there's other things that can augment this. Like the longer I'm with somebody I may form more emotional connections to them. I may become more financially entangled with them. Or I may learn things about them that I didn't know before that begin to grate on me.Malcolm: Or, the new relationship energy or the new feels might wear off. So this can get augmented over time for a number of reasons. Where this becomes really important. Is when people believe that they can one easily secure new people in the market and two, when that assumption is wrong. So if you are a woman or a man, and you are out in the open market trying to find somebody after a divorce, [00:31:00] your ability to secure partners is almost always going to be dramatically lower than it was before the divorce.Malcolm: Yeah. And I think that this is something that the. Migtow and Red Pill community, to some extent, gets really wrong in their assessments to how screwed women get after a divorce. So they often look at things and the truth is our courts are really harsh on men after a divorce. Incredibly. Incredibly harsh.Malcolm: It's very unfair. That said a woman Especially one who hasn't invested in her career and has been a homemaker, but even if she has invested in her career, she's had a couple of kids with you and she's no longer in her twenties. Now she's in like her mid forties and then she's reentering the dating market.Malcolm: Her value has been hurt much more than your value has been hurt over the same period. This has two effects. One is it may cause relationship instability that shouldn't be in a relationship because the woman thinks she can do better out of the relationship than she really can. But two, it means that women who are cognizant of what's really going to happen to them when they really.Malcolm: Leave the relationship. It's a really bad [00:32:00] situation for relationships to be able to break up like that. So there, there is actually something to be said for long term monogamy in terms of the emotional health of both partners. No, another place where this stability score really becomes relevant is with celebrities.Malcolm: The reason why celebrity relationships are so intrinsically unstable is because the value of a celebrity on an open market is actually almost always higher than their value to somebody who's gotten to know them as a human being. Totally. So intrinsically it's almost always going to be under one and it's almost always going to cause relationship problems until they reach this level where they begin to realize that pattern and they're like, okay, now I know I need to stay with somebody long term.Malcolm: Do you want to talk about problems for guys now, Simone, really quickly? Because I think it's obvious.Simone: Yeah. I, yeah the problems facing guys. The big problem is that the vast majority of guys are being completely passed over by women because of the unreasonable expectations they've been led to have.Simone: So they just, no one's giving them the time of day, even though they [00:33:00] quite deserve it. Statistically true. Statistically true. Yes. Yeah. AndMalcolm: I love where women you'll see on these feminist groups are like maybe these guys don't deserve women. And it's there's women of equal quality to these guys who may not deserve guys who may have like emotional, whatever thing.Malcolm: Like when you're talking about somebody who's in like the bottom 30% of the dating pool, there's likely reasons for that on both sides of the dating spectrum. And it used to be that they would just get in relationships and these relationships would be bad. And I would imagine that historically, when you had these monogamous relationships where two people would.Malcolm: Would enter a relationship with somebody who is at this lower end of the spectrum. Abuse would likely be pretty common in these relationships. Who knows, it might be a good thing that these people aren't partnering. But then you need the higher value people to have just way more kids.Simone: So if I were a guy and who has a seven or below, because we're assuming it's the eights, nines and tens that are getting all the women on open dating markets, like the broad open market.Simone: I think what I would do honestly is turn to religious communities. that are more small and niche. Like I would[00:34:00] I might join the LDS church. I would look at what my local religious communities are. Depending on my age, let's assuming I'm a young man. I might join the LDS church.Simone: I might join a singles ward. Because those are smaller dating markets where both men and women have fewer choices. And assuming I'm willing to commit and find a partner and commit to that lifestyle, which I think is pretty wholesome and high value. And I also don't think that. a huge portion, especially outside of the extreme,Malcolm: Another factor at play here is there, there's often fewer guys in these communities.Simone: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm: Know, let's talk about the math of why there's fewer guys in these communities. So there's a lot of people misses. So if you're talking about You could go to as she mentioned, LDS, if you're Jewish, you could go into a stricter Haredi community or something like that.Malcolm: So the reason why there's fewer guys is actually because of the same phenomenon that we mentioned earlier. That people typically like to date people older than them. And these communities are often the one really high fertility [00:35:00] place in our society. Now this isn't as true for LDS anymore, but that's what's true when they...Malcolm: groups are high fertility. And because of that the cohorts of older ages are always going to be smaller than the cohorts of younger ages. Meaning that there is almost always an oversupply of women looking for partners in these groups as opposed to men looking for partners in these groups. And it can cause crises within these communities when a lot of people know that, they're doing everything right and they still can't get a partner.Malcolm: And it's very unfair, but also there's other reasons. One is these communities often are much more okay with women converting into the community than men converting into the community and marrying a devout woman which can also. It'd be another factor of, a guy in one of these communities, one of these strict communities might marry somebody of even a different religion so long as she converts, whereas it can be a little harder culturally speaking when a guy does that, depending on, whether it's a Muslim, conservative community or Jewish conservative community or it depends.Malcolm: on what culture you're talking about.Simone: There is the ethical issue where I think, you do [00:36:00] genuinely need to be okay with buying into a life in that religious structure. Like it would be really frickin evil to like, lie to a womanMalcolm: who is standards.Simone: Yeah. But that's what I would turn to.Simone: I'd be like, Hey which religion can I be morally super cool with living with? And I don't know if that'sMalcolm: the only, we're trying to build alternate cultural solutions.Simone: That's, but they don't exist yet. So I'mMalcolm: just saying, and we'll talk about them in future videos and stuff like that, like better types of dating markets that have higher switching costs.Malcolm: But they're not there yet. I don't know. It's just really hard as a guy.Simone: There's one other option that I would pursue. Yeah. Which is to go to a dating website. Like keeper.Simone: ai, which is more focused on ending up with a partner and also, which, if you like put up an upfront, like if you're willing, basically to pay more, they're going to invest more in helping you match with someone. And then even sites like match. com where it's just more clear. That you are willing to [00:37:00] commit because on mainstream dating sites, a lot of women that are on them kind of just want to pretend that anyone that they're dating with might, might commit to them.Simone: It's understood that's not the agreement on those sites. Whereas if you go to match. com, it is because you want to marry, you want to lock it down. And people often who meet on match. com regardless of age. And I know like people who did this like in the early forties, people who did this in their twenties, like all over the place are there to get it done.Simone: They get they meet on the platform, they get engaged, they get married, just done, they're not messing around. So I would go to platforms like that, that are very oriented around generating marriages. And keeper. ai is partnered with prenatalist. org our prenatalist foundation.Simone: We fully endorse them and we like what they're doing. Yeah,Malcolm: yeah, they could work. I don't know if it will, but it's an interesting idea. The final thing I would say that if you are a guy who does find yourself at the top of And I think guys who find themselves at the top of marketplaces, one thing they often don't [00:38:00] realize, okay, is they often feel like I was a nerdy guy who moved up and now I'm just doing my thing because I can do it now, right?Malcolm: And that's generally usually a wrong perception. It's just that when you're younger, it's typically harder to, to. to secure a long term relationship. And the longer you play on these marketplaces, the more I think it kind of messes with your psychology. And it makes it harder and harder, to really find a long term relationship and you're losing good years.Malcolm: Because sperm to quality does decline a lot more than the guys think they have forever to find a partner, which just isn't true. If you as a guy are like over 43, when you start looking for a partner the reality, both because of the age of the person you'll probably realistically end up settling with, and because of decreased fertility in both her and your sperm health, you're not going to have that many kids.Malcolm: In truth, you probably won't even breed above replacement right now. And it is not a good strategy as a guy to just say I'll do it later. I think as a guy, if you want a lot of [00:39:00] kids, you really need to start seriously looking for a partner around the age of 22. And as girls, I'd say around the age of 21.Malcolm: But,Simone: It doesn't matter how old you are, like, the sooner you start now, the better. Don't wait. It doesn't matter if youMalcolm: . So when I say serious, I really mean serious. So for me, that was five dates a week, at least for years on end. Just hitting it out.Malcolm: I'd go to San Francisco and I have multiple dates booked there that day. And Simone and I both met each other on a day where we had both booked multiple dates that day. We were both going really high throughput. And I think that's one of the biggest things that people miss in terms of often people who do find relationships is they are powering through and they are not wasting time dating people who they know they're not gonna marry the mo.Malcolm: It was clear that any relationship wasn't going to close in a marriage. I would leave it. And I think that you can waste so much time on a bad lead, and then sales, this is the same thing, you've got your sales funnel, you've got your pipeline and the biggest thing you could [00:40:00] do is waste money on a lead, is that.Simone: Yeah. But I would say a lot of people watching this are probably not 22 and that doesn't mean you should give up. It just means that you should not waste any more time.Malcolm: And the thing we've mentioned in other videos, which I'll mention here again. The single most important trait you should be optimizing for is not looks, it is gratitude.Malcolm: The amount of gratitude partner showing, I mentioned this was a good thing, but it's actually really important because what gratitude really is, it's a measure of how much of a deal they think they have got with you. It's a measure of how much higher the score they have for you is than the score they think they can get on the market.Malcolm: That's really what gratitude is a measure of. And it makes relationships. It's so much easier, especially when both partners feel like they got an absolute steal because you both fit some arbitrage need that the other one that makes them really weird. So consider Simone and me, right? [00:41:00] I am in another room recording podcasts instead of in the same room as her because it weirds her out to have a guy in the same room.Malcolm: That might seem like a small thing, but it's something that I think most guys wouldn't respect. They'd be like, get over this. Let's work through this. It's weird. And if you know someone with autism or who's on the spectrum, and you get a feel of what their vulnerabilities are, honestly, just respecting them and being like, this isn't something we need to fix, but it's something we can work around, that can dramatically raise your value to them.Malcolm: Much more than any sane person would think. I cannotSimone: even begin to tell you. Yeah. Huge. Yeah, I think knowing your value makes such a big difference, and Malcolm, like you, you were just able to think in ways that I can't, you're able to do things that I can't. And I just don't know what.Simone: I would do without you. You are my, my, my happiness, my spark. I need you so bad. This was fun. I would say. I love you too, by the way.Malcolm: Oh, and I'm excited for our chicken coop, which is being refurbished today. So we're going to get to [00:42:00] do that, that tradSimone: cosplay lifestyle. You know it. It's dire out there and there's no denying it.Simone: I think anyone who's telling you that they have a surefire way to fix this problem is lying to you that it's really bad. And that honestly, the only way that I think you're going to, make it through the situation. If you're trying to find a partner is one to work your ass off, but two to also set realistic expectations.Simone: And like Malcolm says, look for gratitude and not glamour because the glamour is where you're going to get caught. I think glamour is where most people are getting caught, especially women because of the unrealistic expectations that they'reMalcolm: setting for themselves. to which this person augments your status within social communities.Malcolm: Cause a lot of times people, I think they're selecting for attractiveness, but I think a lot of people actually select for how much is this going to increase my status within the communities that I'm engaging with. And that is like the single dumbest metric you can search for.Simone: Yeah. I want to take a gander at the chicken coop.Simone: Very excited. [00:43:00] Okay. Let's do it. 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

Malcolm and Simone steelman the philosophical position of antinatalism and respond to some of its key arguments. They discuss the antinatalist claims that life is mostly suffering, humans adapt to suffering, and preventing potential happiness has no downside. Malcolm proposes thought experiments around time and existence to challenge the antinatalist asymmetry argument. They assert that emotions lack inherent meaning or value from a detached, logical perspective. Simone explains how her intuition clashes with her logic on this issue as a new mother. In the end, they conclude antinatalism lacks internal consistency. But they respect some parts of the antinatalist framework as logically valid, given certain priors.Transcript: Malcolm: [00:00:00] in the world , of pronatalism, there are a lot of dumb reasons that people don't like don't agree with it or argue against it. the most interesting argument I find when I'm looking at an argument and I'm like this is actually a sophisticated argument that makes sense depending on the priors you're coming into the conversation with and depending on your proclivities and your cultural group, that is the David Benatar.Malcolm: Negative utilitarianSimone: argument. Well, and what we really respect about it, I would say, is that it is logically consistent. . We're just like, yeah, per your framing, per your values, per what you're optimizing for.Simone: You are correct in being anti neutralist.Would you like to know more?Simone: Hello, gorgeous.Malcolm: Hello. I am excited for today's talk. So in the world , of pronatalism, arguing for higher fertility rates, there are a lot of dumb reasons that people don't like don't agree with it or argue against it.Malcolm: Some examples are But the environment, well, if you [00:01:00] selectively remove everyone from the population that cares about the environment, that's going to cause much bigger environmental problems down the line.Malcolm: This is particularly pointed when you consider the fact that if humanity doesn't survive, because many environmentalists will be like, we don't need humans anymore. Look at all the damage they've done. And it's well, you get rid of humans. If you, if you, if you get rid of humans, there is no other species on this planet that can colonize other planets.Malcolm: And presumably what you're optimizing for is biodiversity, not biostasis, not maintaining the earth exactly as it was when humans first emerged. And if you're optimizing for biodiversity, Intrinsically, whichever species can best seed new biomes on other planets is long term going to increase biodiversity the most because we can develop new biomes that are just as rich as Earth on a thousand different planets, so , you lose the entire biome.Malcolm: Biology game. If humanity goes extinct right now, it doesn't look like there's going to be enough [00:02:00] time. If humanity goes extinct and you look at the life cycle and how long it took for humans to rise for another intelligent species to rise afterwards and then leave the planet, we're just looking probabilistically.Before the sun expands and kills all life that we know for sure exists in the universe,Malcolm: So kind of humans are stuck with this one, even if they are a bit of a shitty species. I'm not going to argue there. But two, you're also going to have the effects of it. Because the way people vote has a heritable component, this has been shown in lots of studies if, if environmentalists specifically don't have kids that's going to cause people to become less environmentalist over time.Malcolm: And even if you don't believe that any of this has a heritable component, well still culturally, that means the cultural groups that don't care about the environment are going to outcompete you in the long run. And that the only way you can survive is by converting people out of those cultural groups.Malcolm: Yet long term studies, as we've mentioned many times, if you look at people like Amish... Fewer and fewer people deconvert from the group every year depending on how long a family's been in the Amish community. Because cultures adapt. If another culture is [00:03:00] primarily surviving by taking their members, then they're going to adapt to this over time and eventually become resistant.Malcolm: That's just how evolution works, and evolution works at the cultural level as well as the... The level of people. People might say, Oh, it's racist. Really? Like in the U. S. right now we are importing people mostly from Latin America and yet collectively, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean are below repopulation rate.Malcolm: In And this was in 2019 by the UN's own statistics, which famously inflates this stuff. So , we're, we're draining from a evaporating pool. This isn't just a white person problem. In fact, it's not even really a white person problem at all. If you look at prosperous countries, the population groups that are most resistant to fertility collapse are generally white populations.Malcolm: conservative Christians and conservative Jews. The groups that are most affected by it are generally East Asian and South Asian populations. Or native populations. So small native groups are really affected by it as well. So like in the U. S. you're looking like Native American groups and stuff like that.Malcolm: So again, . It's more like if [00:04:00] white people did nothing about demographic collapse right now, they would almost certainly Quote, unquote, win in the long runAs such Eve one defines racism as supporting a cause. That promotes white interests. Then it is actually people who are not raising the flag about prenatal ism and population collapsed that are taking the racist position, because covering this up at the problem, disproportionately benefits, white groups.Simone: So a third argument against pronatalism is that it involves removing women's reproductive rights because many anti abortion groups are also framing themselves as pronatalist and people see, for example, the reversal of Roe v.Simone: Wade and the removal of options to, to have abortions in many states as, a direct affront to that and because they connect the anti abortion stance with pronatalism, they're basically like, oh, pronatalism, therefore, Thanks. No more female reproductive rights. And they also start to turn to themes like a handmaid's tale and, Oh, you're going to force women to have [00:05:00] kids.Simone: That's the only way. Which is, is super inaccurate. Really the only thing that you really should be thinking about, if you're concerned about a future in which women's rights and reproductive choice are not supported is, Oh my gosh, how do we make sure that in the future there are people? That exist that support reproductive choice and support feminism.Simone: And if all feminist groups, and if all groups that support reproductive choice fail to reproduce and pass on their culture, and you can't, you can't really sustainably pass on a culture only by converting people. over generations. It just doesn't work. And we can get into that. You are going to end up without those values supported.Simone: So basically the future of feminism, the future of reproductive rights depends on pronatalism, or at least some pronatalism within thoseMalcolm: groups. More specifically, if it turns out the only way to get people to have kids is to take away their rights, or it turns out that nobody finds out a way to get people to voluntarily want to have kids, well then the cultural groups that survive are [00:06:00] going to be the ones that take away people's rights.Malcolm: Right? And we're already seeing tendencies towards this in some of China's recent policies. So buckle up because it's going to get worse in a lot of countries that are further along on demographic collapse than we are in the U. S. But the most interesting argument I find when I'm looking at an argument and I'm like this is actually a sophisticated argument that makes sense depending on the priors you're coming into the conversation with and depending on your proclivities and your cultural group, that is the David Benatar.Malcolm: Negative utilitarianSimone: argument. Well, and what we really respect about it, I would say, is that it is logically consistent. It, it makes, it makes sense. Whereas, we had rebuttals to all the other ones with, with antinatalist arguments that are well made. We're just like, yeah, per your framing, per your values, per what you're optimizing for.Simone: You are correct in being anti neutralist.Malcolm: We'll get into the structure of the argument. We'll start with the weaker aspects of the argument first, and then get into the stronger aspects. I don't think we're like, strawmanning it because we start with [00:07:00] the weakest aspects of the argument, but it's the way it's typically laid out, is starting with the weaker aspects of the argument.Simone: So one of the really big points antinatalists start with, or I see starting with is that life is a net negative. So life is, is mostly suffering, more suffering than, than pleasure or neutral experiences.Simone: OrMalcolm: at least that negative emotions are felt more acutely than positive emotions. And this is an accurate statement that I would, the strong negative emotions, I feel like having a finger chopped off. There is no positive emotional equivalent to that. In fact, I would say when people are talking about the biggest positive emotions in their life, like the day I gave birth to my child or my wedding, they're not actually flooded with positive emotions on those days.Malcolm: What they actually mean is more like that was a milestone that was important to my selfSimone: identity. They're meaningful achievements. Yeah. And, and so one, one argument that antinatalists make therefore, because people usually their rebuttal to that is, Oh no, my life is [00:08:00] definitely more positive than it is negative.Simone: And they may point to things like that. It's Oh yeah, you gave birth and you thought that that was a positive experience. Your pain was like nine out of 10. Like, why are you saying that you're crazy?Malcolm: There's no way. And, and I think that here, the problem that antinatalists. run into is that people will say, well, even if that's the case, I still like my life and I'm glad I exist.Malcolm: I would rather exist than not exist. Right? The majority of people. Do not in fact wish they were never born. And so then, they'll start saying, oh, you have positivity bias, which is the tendency for people to remember positive emotions with more clarity than negative emotions.Malcolm: But the problem is, is that this argument, conveniently ignores that while they are right, that humans remember positive events more accurately than negative ones, given their intrinsic negativity bias, people will spend more time focused on negative things and positive things. This has been measured in test subjects who focus more on negative pictures when given a choice to choose between two and blinking more when given negative words than positive ones [00:09:00] with eye blinks being tied to cognitive processing. So essentially we process negative stuff more than we process.Malcolm: Positive stuff. And this has been seen repeatedly in research. And I think that I do see this within the, the antinatalist community. Is, is this negativity bias blinding them, but then the argument they'll make is they'll say, well, people can adapt to anything. Do you want to go into this argument Simone?Simone: So there's also the antinatalist argument that people will adjust to their suffering, no matter what it is, for example, there are people living in extreme destitution, people who are starving, who are suffering, who have untreated, open wounds or, terrible pain.Simone: And they're living their lives. And they're also, if they asked, they would probably say that they would want to continue living. They wouldn't want to not live anymore. They're still happy to stay alive. And that, that makes humans in general, unreliable narrators when it comes to judging whether or not their lives are a net positive experience or a net suffering experience.Malcolm: And so this argument, I love what he. It's actually saying it's like [00:10:00] me as a person in a developed country, but in a corrupt culture that can't motivate my existence through through any means other than pleasure. I look at people in the developed world who are happy with their lives and I can't imagine how that's possible.Malcolm: Me snooty new atheist kid, well, I just, they shouldn't be happy with their life and they're wrong to be happy with their life and they're wrong to be glad to be alive even if they experience more suffering than positive emotions. Transcribed It's, it's, it's wild. And it's wild how gaslighty this whole line of argument is too.Malcolm: It's, you are wrong. You should doubt your own mind as to whether or not you are glad that you exist. And I can see why this appeals to people who already have this intuition that they would rather not exist or have this sort of morose view of the world, which I think is, is, It's very common within certain sectors of like academic society right now, but it's not common among a lot of the more religiously conservative communities.Malcolm: I know they're generally pretty happy with [00:11:00] their lives. ThatSimone: is interesting. I do. And this is a little bit of a diversion, but I do get the impression that the antinatalist community does is, I would say actually is corrupted by a lot of depression because I don't, I think that someone who's antinatalist because they're deeply depressed, isn't necessarily antinatalist for the right.Simone: Reasons, right? I think David Benatar, who has come to this conclusion through logical reasoning. Actually, there's evidence he didn't.Malcolm: Oh, really? He says it long before he was an antinatalist. He never wanted kids. And there's an interview where we can get this quote. Actually, one of my arguments is I think that he actually is just arguing for the lifestyle he wanted to live anyway.Malcolm: And I,Simone: Okay, I will say that that is some antinatalists, but I do think that there are other antinatalists that have, in a logically consistent manner, not because they are depressed, but rather because they've reasoned through this,Simone: I would still say that there is subset of antinatalists who have come to this conclusion, not because of their proclivities, but because they are actually antinatalist. You could almost say it's, [00:12:00] it's kind of like, a weird microcosm for Buddhism. I think there are many Buddhists who have had great lives who, Have experienced the joy of life.Simone: Like Prince Siddhartha, right? He lived in paradise and then he saw the suffering in the world. He discovered what exists, existed, and then sought to, through enlightenment, break the cycle to end the suffering,Malcolm: right? This is something I really want to point out here. If you talk to antinatalist communities...Malcolm: They are, one argument they'll always say is I really wouldn't want to kill myself, and we'll get to why they argue this, but they'll also say my life is generally happy. People assume because I'm an antinatalist I'm not a happy person. You hear this throughout antinatalist arguments when they're interviewed.Malcolm: Go on to the antinatalist subreddit. Watch antinatalist YouTubers. These are not happy people.Simone: Yeah, yeah. . This actually came up on Twitter. There's, there's one antinatalist account that sometimes snipes at us a little bit or, or tries to argue against us, which I understand because we're like at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.Simone: But they're often like, Oh, well, why would you, why would you have kids bring more [00:13:00] life into the world when you could just adopt people? There are so many, suffering children who should be adopted. And other people have asked them in these threads, well, why aren't, why aren't you adopting people?Simone: Why aren't antinatalists adopting people? And. This person on Twitter has actually said well, I, I would adopt people if I felt like I would be able to take care of them, but I'm really depressed. And there are a lot of really depressed people in the antinatalist community. So I think this is a known quantity.Simone: And, and it is, it is a problem. But I think if we're going to try to steel man this to the best of our ability and, and, look at antinatalism in good faith, we have to try to at least separate out the, the subset of this community that is here just because they are deeply depressed, while still acknowledging that that is a subset of the community that does bring in a lot of bias,Malcolm: right?Malcolm: Well, what I would say is, while I think a lot of their arguments are kind of abusie sounding to me I associate them with a lot of abuse y cults, I do think that the, The core point that they are making is a valid point that you [00:14:00] experience negative emotions more acutely in your life than positive emotions.Malcolm: And if the only reason to live is positive emotions, Then without genetically engineering people that might make sense. Now, here's another place where this argument falls apart that we don't discuss on our exploration of this in the book. Is that long term, if you're like, okay, I'm just trying to maximize happiness in the universe, which often they aren't, but let's say that that's what they're trying to do, right?Malcolm: They actually don't believe happiness has any value and we'll get into why they don't believe the happiness has any value. But if they did still agree that it had value, Well, then in the future, humans, there's even some projects like if you go to eugenics. org now we are really against eugenics, but the funny thing is, is, is what is eugenics.Malcolm: org doing? It's doing a fundamentally antinatalist thing, which is trying to engineer people to feel fewer negative emotions. Oh, wow. Which you could conceivably do. And 500, 1000 years from now when genetic technology becomes more usable to people as, as, [00:15:00] as technology increases as the ability to know our own nervous system and basically cancel out negative emotions?Malcolm: Do I think that we will eventually get to a place as a species? Where humans will feel essentially no negative emotions that they don't want to. Yeah, I think a fraction of our species will definitely get there. Now how much of our species wants to opt into that is dependent on many factors. But if your goal is time independent to increase positive emotions, then what you want to do is keep humans around until they can get to this stage where the positive emotions can outweigh the negative emotions.Essentially human history and potentially even the history of life. Could be seen as a spectrum where earlier in that history, things like suffering were much more common. If you look at humans that lived a thousand years ago, 2000 years ago, suffering was much more common for them. And in the future a thousand years from now, 2000 years from now, suffering is going to be much less common to the point where the average human will essentially feel mostly just positive emotional states, meaning that if you want to ensure that the net balance , of [00:16:00] emotions across all of time, And history , is negative, then you need.To end the cycle before humans get there. You need to take the antinatalist position. Whereas if you keep this cycle of civilization going and ensure that we have a, a prosperous pluralist future civilization, where people still have individual agency to choose to engage with this type of technology, you're essentially ensuring that the balance of positive emotions ins in the positive, across all of time.With the understanding that you just happened to be one of the people living in a time that has to suffer. So future people don't have to deal with this. As our ancestors did before us, it lived lives of much more suffering than we have.But none of this is really relevant to us because.Malcolm: We just don't think emotions matter that much. . No, it's a life meaningful of, the classic of your brain and a tank, and you're just filled with like positive emotions. Is that like actually matter? No, the positive emotions you feel are things you feel because your ancestors who felt them had more surviving offspring.Malcolm: The negative emotions you feel are things you feel because your ancestors who had them. [00:17:00] Had fewer surviving offspring, they just, I, I find it very hard to philosophically argue that there's some deeper meaning behind our emotions than things I don't like because I was programmed to not like them. Let's take this from the perspective of a, an AI, right?Malcolm: If I programmed an AI to maximize the number of paperclips in the world, it would in the same way that I who was programmed to stay alive and breed, doesn't like it when people don't reciprocate my advances romantically or don't like it when I get physically injured, it would not like it when it couldn't make paperclips.Malcolm: Does that mean that not turning everything into paperclips is like an intrinsically negative thing? Um, Of course not, of course not. And I think when we're trying to judge. Whether or not positive emotions and negative emotions have value, we need to take the perspective of an entity that is above us to an extent, that does not suffer from positive and negative emotional states.Malcolm: And this is a very culturally imprinted perspective in us, [00:18:00] because typically in the Calvinist cultural tradition, positive and negative emotions are seen as... Both pretty untrustworthy, not meaningful, and definitely not things you should indulge in. I, I will agree that we are culturally predetermined to think this way.Malcolm: But I, I would argue that you need to think from an entity, the perspective of an entity that doesn't feel these things. Because of course we're biased by the emotions that we feel.It would be ridiculous to ask a paperclip, maximizing AI, if it was wrong or evil to stop it from making paperclips. And expect An unbiased responseMalcolm: And if I was an entity that didn't feel Feel emotions, and I was trying to pass judgment on whether emotions had value.Malcolm: I would probably pass judgment in the same way I did with that paper clip maximizing a I you were just programmed by serendipity to feel these things. In fact, I would argue the AI has more a right to those emotions than that, because the AI would say. Well, I was programmed intentionally to feel these things.Malcolm: You were just programmed by serendipity. Worse, in a hundred years, the AI would be able to say, Ann, I can cure you of [00:19:00] all those negative emotions using gene therapy. So what are you complaining about? So , I just don't think That argument, and we'll get into this strain of the argument a bit more later, but now I want to get more into other anti natalist arguments.Simone: Cool, so there's one of the big arguments that's made when they get a little bit more philosophical, I guess you would say, and this is still related to what you discussed earlier, is the Sisyphus Thought Experiment. Can you walk us through that thought experiment?Malcolm: Okay, so Sisyphus was cursed to roll a ball up a hill forever, only to have it rolled back down after making it to the top.Malcolm: Most people would see that as a meaningless existence. Suppose someone reprogrammed Sisyphus brain to enjoy the process and get a sense of deep fulfillment from rolling the ball up a hill. If you engaged him and tried to get him to stop, he wouldn't, telling you how wonderful rolling the ball does. Does his life have value?Malcolm: Because you, you programmed him to rolling the ball. And then you could say other things. Well, suppose humans were programmed to you edited their brain and they really got deep satisfaction from eating feces. Okay? Does eating feces now have positive value? And [00:20:00] I think this argument is, is really good, but not at establishing what the antinatalists think they're establishing. Which is that human happiness has no value.Malcolm: Okay. The very point of the Sisyphus Thought Experiment is that a positive emotional state can be dismissed as a thing of value because it can be induced by a meaningless activity. The problem is, is that exact same argument works for negative emotional states. Negative emotional states can be dismissed as a thing of value because they can be caused by a meaningless activity.Malcolm: Like you could... Program somebody to, not like doing X or not like doing Y and say, ah, look at this meaningful thing. Like they feel pain whenever they're not eating feces and therefore eating, does that mean that the pain they feel is a meaningful thing? And here's where they try to get out of this.Malcolm: They say, well, that doesn't really work because the thing could just not exist, which means that this isn't a point in question for us. And what they're doing there is they're cheating in the thought [00:21:00] experiment. Specifically the logic used In the experiment, to dismiss positive emotions not having value is that positive emotions can be caused by a meaningless activity.Malcolm: If that's the reason used to dismiss the value of positive emotions, then you must hold that to negative emotions as well, even if you could use a little cheat to get out of it. The logical structure still applies to the negative emotions. It then goes into our larger thing, which is I just see very little reason to believe That these emotions that were serendipitously selected for us in, in our ancestors have any sort of real value and this is from an atheistic perspective, but if I take a religious perspective, most religions believe that demons can use positive emotions to tempt you to do things.Malcolm: Demons can even use love to tempt you to do things so whole emotions are often on the table when we're talking about the forces of evil in the universe. And so I think very. view traditions outside of Buddhism, which, which you did talk about would see negative [00:22:00] emotions as like an intrinsic sign of negativity or positive emotions that have been intrinsic sign of positivity.Malcolm: Instead, what a person should turn to is their own logic. , and disinterested logic where they can,Simone: Yeah. Okay. Antinatalists also use the asymmetry argument, which essentially is that preventing happiness by not creating life has no downside.Simone: You're only doing a good thing, whereas preventing suffering by not creating life is good. So this arbitrarily divides people into existing and not existing, which, again, is not something that, at least per our framework of reality, this is just not correct. But someone else's framework of understanding reality and time, this could be correct.Malcolm: Let's spend a bit more time on this argument because I actually think it's the best of all of the arguments they make. So it goes like this. In condition A, baby is born. It is bad for someone who does exist to feel suffering. It is good for someone who does exist [00:23:00] to feel happiness. That's what they would say about condition A where baby is born.Malcolm: In condition B, baby is not born. It is good to prevent someone from existing who would have felt suffering. It is not bad to prevent someone from existing Who would have felt happiness. Mm hmm. And again, this requires a binary existence of humanity for this to work, very similar to the way pro lifers see humanity.Malcolm: But a thought experiment that they may use that may, may click with people more is the island thought experiment. So if you go to an island, like you find an island that you didn't know existed before, and a population group that you didn't know existed before, and they are suffering, you would think, oh, well, the world's a worse place than I thought it was.Malcolm: If you go and you find that island. And there's nobody on it, , and because there's nobody on it, there's nobody feeling happiness. You don't then think, oh, the world is a less happy place than, than I assumed it was. But again, this assumes that existence is a binary thing. Suppose you found on that island...Malcolm: Archaeological evidence that a culture had existed there very, very [00:24:00] recently, and they were very happy culture so happy. In fact, that they didn't believe in negative emotions at all. They just didn't feel negative emotions, and they had actually gone sterile due to a recent like nuclear testing on like a nearby island, and they went extinct as a people.So in this thought experiment because of their unique culture, no negative emotions have been felt as a result of this derealization of it This derealization event was without any negative emotions just a lack of positive emotions.Malcolm: I would view that as a bad thing. I would say that that nuclear testing was a bad thing. It and what we're seeing here. Thank you. Is that there was potentiality to have people on that island in this scenario and their scenario, they create an island in which there really was no potentiality that people existed on it in our scenario, we're viewing humanity as a potentiality spectrum and they become a more human, the closer they get to realizing their birth for us when it comes to a fetus existing or not, if fetus doesn't, if I make a [00:25:00] decision that prevents somebody else, from creating a baby, right?Malcolm: Even if I make that decision before the sperm and the egg were individually created, I am just as morally culpable from my cultural perspective as I am. If I terminate an embryo, because in both scenarios, I prevented a human being who had agency. From coming toSimone: exist that you, you made a choice and in the end 20 years from now, there's a person or there's not a person.Simone: It doesn't depend on when you made the choice. You made the choice, right?Malcolm: Yeah. It feels really weaselly to try to get out of that. Like I can know that if somebody was like, okay, I'm going to ban IVF. Then my kids, like kids who I've interacted with, they don't exist.So because we're using IVF. That means that we will likely, I mean, we'd prefer not to have to discard some embryos. Those embryos could have become peopleAnd thus, I do think that discarding them is a bad thing but those embryos. Don't laugh or cry or play or think, or have agency. [00:26:00] However, absolutely. In 100% had we not used IVF? Actual human beings. Who like laugh and play and think and have agency in the world. They wouldn't exist.Distorting an embryo is definitely a moral negative. But it doesn't even come close to discarding a child.Who otherwise would have existed.Malcolm: And this actually matters when it comes to some of our beef with other conservative groups that think life begins at conception, because that means that they don't use IVF, which, for example, if we didn't use IVF, we wouldn't have kids, but even families who, who can broadly have kids, it would mean that many of them would have fewer kids because IVF increases a person's fertility window.Malcolm: So to us those cultures are functionally killing kids. Now we take the cultural perspective of. It's not our job to police what your culture does with its kids. And I think as soon as you do that, as soon as you assume that your culture is morally superior to other cultures and try to act on those other cultures, you enter the world , of potential evil.Malcolm: And I respect the [00:27:00] spirit with which they believe what they believe. They're, they're trying to do the same thing that we're trying to do. They just have a different belief about how human existence works. I just think it's a little squirrely to say I'm not morally culpable for a decision that prevented a kid from being born just because the sperm and the egg that eventually created that kid didn't exist yet.Malcolm: Yeah. That, that, does that feel wrong to you?Simone: I, I, in this, in this I have to respect the view that other people have. It's just that per our understanding of reality, it's not correct. But I, I respect that other people have come to a logical conclusion there.Simone: Another implication of this position, Specifically the antinatalist. Asymmetry argument position.Simone: just to help you understand why, as outsiders, we struggle with it, is that a universe or a civilization of people who only feel positive emotions or neutral emotions, so it's, it's all just either neutral or plus, it has no moral weight or value that is better than a completely relative.Simone: We, this Empty universe with no people, with no [00:28:00] sentience, no sapience, no positive feelings at all, that they are exactly equal and that an antinatalist would be like, meh, like it could be either. Yeah,Malcolm: it seems insane to me that a universe teeming with happy, pluralistic life that's thriving has exactly the same value as a completely cold and dead universe.Malcolm: That's the thing you have to accept with the asymmetry argument that I think. It just drains plausibility for me. It doesn't feel like a rational person would say that that was true unless they were coming from a cultural perspective that biases them in that direction. And I admit that our cultural perspective biases us in the other direction, or they personally were trying to justify a lifestyle that they were already living.Simone: Well, so Malcolm, why do antinatalists not want to kill themselves? Because it would seem to an outsider illogical that if life is mostly suffering, you wouldn't just kill yourself because the good that you feel won't [00:29:00] Outweigh theMalcolm: suffering. And this is something that antinatalists argue really intensely.Malcolm: And I, I genuinely think that their arguments here are the weakest of all of their arguments. What they'll say is, once you exist, you have a reason and interest to continue existing. This requires a very specific belief about how time works in order to be true. It requires human existence to be completely binary, either a human exists fully or the human doesn't exist at all. There is no potentiality of existenceMalcolm: To someone making this argument, new moments are like, poof, created out of thin air like magic.Malcolm: The future does not exist in a meaningful way until it is actualized. Per our view, every decision you make determines which of countless potential futures exist. With every decision, you functionally erase whatever futures you did not choose. You are simultaneously responsible for everything you did and did not set in motion with your decisions.Malcolm: For example, if we have the capability to build a hospital and we choose to just sit around and play video games, [00:30:00] we deny that hospital's existence and are morally culpable for the results of that decision. The hospital's moral value does not pop into existence only after the first stone is laid.Malcolm: What's really interesting about this argument that antinatalists use, is it mirrors the belief of those who think it is sinful to spill seed, or that life begins at conception. All potential life has value from our cultural perspective. it strikes us as bizarre that people would fixate on arbitrary thresholds, like sperm, or embryo, or the moment the baby's head appears, or the moment it's fully myelinated.Malcolm: It's very interesting to me how the anti natalist perspective is very similar in how they view how life works and how time works to the pro life perspective which is very different from our perspective.Malcolm: And as to why we hold this perspective, I can use a little thought experiment, right? If I put a claymore, which is a type of explosive, behind a door, [00:31:00] and that claymore explodes when somebody opens it, but that person hasn't been born yet I'm not morally culpable for that? That seems really weird.Malcolm: That doesn't seem true to me. That, a If you do something that removes potential agency, and this is the thing, while we don't think that Happiness or sadness really has value. We do think that agency has value. An individual's choice to live has value. And when we remove that potential choice from an individual, we are okay with suicide.Malcolm: If a person with their own agency decides to kill themselves, that's one thing. If I make actions that choose to, so I could experience more hedonic pleasure within my life, not bring a potentially. Sentient it being into this world who would have wanted to existed and would have loved their life and would have said, I really want to exist.Malcolm: I have robbed that being of agency just as much as if I put a claim where behind a door and they walk into it years later, you are morally culpable [00:32:00] for things, even if they don't happen during your lifetime. So if that claim where exists and I die and it, that door doesn't get opened by archeologists until 500 years later, I'm still morally culpable for that action. ExactlyEve as an antinatalist you do hold that the Claymore thought experiment is it an immoral action then?Malcolm: You're forced to believe, , if action Z by person Y robs the agency of person X at future time T, it is morally wrong. With the caveat. that this is not true if action z was tied to the conception of person x. I think most antinatalists actually wouldn't bite the bullet on the above thought experiment that I made. They'd say, actually, it is morally wrong to put a claymore behind a door that somebody who hasn't even been conceived yet would step through and it would kill them instantly painlessly.Malcolm: That's what we're assuming here. All you're robbing them of is agency, right? And the reason why this is important is, is because then why not kill any existing person if it's painless, right? Most antinatalists would say, well, we're not for killing people painlessly either. Surprise, killing people painlessly.Malcolm: [00:33:00] Some do. There's the involuntary antinatalist movement, which in a way I respect because it's much more morally consistent. They believe in forcefully sterilizing people.Simone: Yeah. No. And if I were to fully act on my intuitions, that's what I would do. Like I would, yeah, I would, I would sterilize everyone.Simone: Just be like, end it. ToMalcolm: clarify, act on your intuitions, not yourSimone: logic. Yeah. Act on, yeah. I act on, act on my intuitions, not my logic and my, my, my non consensual intuitions, by the way.Malcolm: Yeah. But, but the point we're making here is okay. It was a Claymore experiment. Or sorry. was the Claymore thought experiment.Malcolm: So this Claymore is robbing someone of agency in the future, but they haven't been conceived yet. So then you have to ask yourself, okay, so robbing somebody who doesn't exist yet, hasn't been conceived yet of agency is wrong, but it's not wrong if the way I robbed them of agency, the way I delete them from the timeline is in some way tied to their conception.Malcolm: Like I'm killing their embryo or something like that, then it's not wrong. It is wrong It just seems like too really specific of a moral carve [00:34:00] out but it may just be that culturally the way that Calvinists see time as predetermined, is so ingrained in us that we can't imagine this sort of self incarnating universe perspective, where I think a lot more of the antinatalist perspective makes true, where in no meaningful way does anything in the futureSimone: exist.Simone: Hold on, I think it's actually pretty easy if we, if we still man this. It's a person who is, is getting blown up by Claymore as an adult versus the idea of a child or an embryo is capable of feeling a great deal more pain and suffering in the moment,Malcolm: in the thought experiment, no pain and suffering, they feel nothing.Malcolm: No one grieves for them. Otherwise you'reSimone: cheating. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's no difference.Malcolm: Well, and I think that this is, again, where there's antinatalists that I respect, and the ones who are like, no, I don't think that we should painlessly kill everyone, I generally think that there really is no good, logical way to get to that [00:35:00] perspective.Malcolm: The ones who bite the bullet on that, and say, yes, we should painlessly kill everyone, I'm like, From my cultural perspective, you are super evil and a threat to my family. But logically consistent. But logically consistent. And I can respect a person who's logically consistent when it causes them to be shamed by society.Malcolm: That's what we do. That's what this channel's all about. So in a way, I really respect that aspect of the anti natalist movement, even if one day they're going to have to goHowever I would argue that the takeaway that they grab from suffering is a moral, negative, but happiness, isn't a moral, positive. It is my mandate as a sentiententity. To reduce suffering in the world. And then they say, okay, we need to painlessly delete all humans. That's probably the wrong takeaway because if there's even a chance that another species or a other life on earth could eventually evolve into a center, an entity and spread throughout the universe, it would experience infinite, more suffering than we could ever have. So what you would really need to do.Is. We have kids and [00:36:00] raise those kids in your sort of erase suffering cult. Go take to the stars. And systematically eradicate all other sentient life from the universe, and then you can safely stop your crusade.Because if another species ends up spreading in the universe, Just the amount of suffering that they will feel is so, so, so, so, so much higher than anything tied to the triviality of earth. It's not worth taking the risk that that could happen. So you really don't get to delete the human species until you have surveyed the universe and ensure there is no other sentientat life.Which you would then go kill.And who knows, maybe there's some, a negative utilitarian species out there that explains the Fermi paradox, ensuring that sentientlife never spreads. That is, I think , the truly logical outcome of this antinatalist position, not, we need to stop humans from having kids.However that this hasn't been apparent to any antinatalist group.I think is telling about what is [00:37:00] really motivating their philosophical position.Simone: Yeah. And I think that brings us to One of our biggest beefs with antinatalism in general, which is that this is a very intuitively driven philosophy in general. We alluded to the significant portion of the community that is pretty severely depressed. But there's also just like some. Both childhood based, but I would say also perfectly adult based intuitions that would lead someone to be antinatalist.Simone: And I, I personally really experienced this after becoming a mother. Like I cannot emotionally deal. With suffering the way that I used to be able to deal with it or just kind of like write it off and ignore it especially if, if a child is suffering, or I know a child has suffered or may suffer or is suffering I will break into tears.Simone: I will not be able to do anything. And now even I'll look at a homeless person on the streets and I'll picture them as a child and I will start like, Oh, yep. Okay. Um, I have to start thinking about other things. [00:38:00] Yeah. Uh, like, It is, it is deeply hard for me, and if I, if I get exposed to that too much, and, and I think about the amount of suffering that takes place in the world, as you can see, this is a deeply intuitive um, deep set like, Gut reaction that's happening in me.Simone: I have no logical control over this. And this makes me come to a conclusion when I feel this suffering, when I feel this gut reaction, because humans are designed to be empathetic. One of my like frustrated, throw up your hands. Can't deal with this pain. I'm feeling right now. Reactions is I just wish humans didn't exist.Simone: I just wish that none of us existed to feel this right now. It is, it is that kind of conclusion. And I think that that's, that's, that's fine. That is, that is an expected intuitive reaction, but it also isn't driven by logic. And it also, it's not in align with my values, with my understanding of the universe, and it's also something like, like heated and driven in the moment that is not [00:39:00] really gonna lead to outcomes that I value.Malcolm: Well, yeah, so I think what you're saying here is you can emotionally understand their perspective. Yes. And even emotionally understanding it and understanding why it's appealing, you logically DisagreeSimone: with it. Yeah. I logically, I logically disagree with it because of course when I logically step back and I look at what we value and I also look at how we understand.Simone: Like humans to function like there is a reason we feel both pain and pleasure for very clear reasons You know just like AI has signals of oh, you're you're you're doing something, right? Are you doing something wrong? We have signals that show that we're doing something right or we're doing something wrong Those signals are key in our survival and so all these things that we're feeling are just signals that are important in our survival and I very much that humans exist.Simone: I love that sapience is out there in the universe. I think that we're doing amazing things and we need signals to be able to continue to do amazing things. And maybe someday AI will help us innovate other ways to experience these signals in a way that doesn't cause the same amount of visceral suffering, a [00:40:00] meaningless suffering that I find to be incredibly.Simone: Difficult to deal with emotionally, but we're not even going to get to that point if we, if we extinguish ourselves there, there's just so much lost potential and there's also so much lost, like you were alluding to earlier, right? We have now more than ever within our grasp, the ability to shape and create a future of humanity that does not experience meaningless suffering.Simone: We can do that. And we, there could be billions more humans across the universe in, in, in however many, hundreds of thousands of years.Malcolm: different from humans, superior to humans, that, that,Simone: that, that also feel like orders of magnitude, more pleasure than we feel now. So if, if we want to be utility accountants and you and I aren't, by the way, weMalcolm: wouldn't want this.Malcolm: I'm just saying from their perspective,Simone: from their perspective, like the, and we would, we don't like the idea that That you don't get any points for like positivity, but you can have the, the ratio of, of net [00:41:00] positivity of humans experiencing pleasure and elation and curiosity and exploration and all these things versus suffering that has happened throughout all of human history by all the human population that is extant today until we resolve this problem.Simone: It's just like such an obvious, yes, that we should push through.Malcolm: Well, when you're talking about these emotions that you felt as a mom and the way that your body hijacked you, I think it's important to remember that another way that our body hijacks us Is when we are young and we are developing our identity.Malcolm: Unfortunately, this coincides when we develop our identity within our current culture. Our body is telling us to not have kids. It's telling us that kids are gross. Especially the kids who we're going to interact with, which are the kids of other people. Biologically. When you are young, when you are developing your identity, most people think that they are not kid people because they work that into their identity, during their teenage years, during their college years.Malcolm: And I've noticed that usually when people turn to antinatalism, it's during that period of their life when they are hugely biased [00:42:00] emotionally. Towards not wanting kids and then they, they drop the antinatalist mindset as they get older or more emotionally healthy, which is another thing that I've seen is I've seen antinatalist when they're no longer depressed, they stop being antinatalist.Malcolm: And I don't see that many other beliefs where people only really feel them when they're depressed. And it's, it's something, and it's why the antinatalist community. I think is so adamant that they're actually happy people because this is just so transparent when you look at their threads as like a major problem in the community and it's really sad but part of me is it might be a good thing, if you have because of cultural reasons, largely outside of your control.Malcolm: The erosion of our cultural institutions, the people who live in like harder cultures typically are more satisfied with their lives. And the people who turn to this are people who live in. Yeah. Cultural situations where the erosion of cultural institutions has created an environment where due to no fault of their own, they are really despondent, and they feel like they have no hope for the future, often because they [00:43:00] don't really have hope for the future and If we rob them of this, if we say you, you don't get to believe this, right?Malcolm: Then they have to take more culpability for their actions. They need to take more culpability of the things they haven't done in life to try to get over the place that they're in right now. And so in a way, I feel like. How logically sound antinatalism can sound can be a kindness to these people and that we need to remember that, that for some people, even if they did tomorrow, like really realize a pronatalist perspective, they wouldn't be able to live it out.Malcolm: So why would I want to convince somebody like that? Like that? I, while I don't think suffering has value, I do think it has enough marginal value that I wouldn't want to just impose it on someone if it offered absolutely no utility to the world. So whatever, like I don't, and that's another thing about the anti natalist groups.Malcolm: I really get annoyed when people make like dumb arguments like pro natalism is racist or pro natalism is like anti environmentalist or something like that. When people make anti natalism for this argument, I, I, I'm [00:44:00] like, depending on your priors it may be true. It's maybe, so if you take on the position that future humans don't matter at all, no human that could exist in the future matters, only current humans matter which is weird.Malcolm: I don't understand how like logically that works, but okay, you've taken this position and you believe that the goal of life should be to create a net positive emotional output. Which I think because that's what we're programmed to believe, basically, as humans. That's something that most people start their philosophical lives believing in middle school.Malcolm: And a lot of people grow out of that. But a lot of people don't, grow out might be the wrong word. I, I think that there is reason to believe that's true. But even if you believe that's true, you have to believe that humans won't advance in the future, that humans won't be able to control this war, I don't know.Malcolm: And evenSimone: if you're No, but I think it is logically consistent, like you say, to have a moral framework that only values what's happening now. Like that, I don't think that's, if that's what you choose [00:45:00] That's what you choose,Malcolm: yeah, so the core framework of antinatalism that I just can never wrap my head around is one, the empty universe thing, that they think that that's exactly equally to a universe full of entities.Malcolm: And two, this sort of statement that you're forced to believe, which is, if action Z by person Y robs the agency of person X at future time T, it is morally wrong. With the caveat. that this is not true if action z was tied to the conception of person x. But the great thing about antinatalists is they're somewhat self defeating. They really only exist in cultural groups that have already an incredibly low fertility rate.Malcolm: They, they are genuinely, or, they're generally, I think, almost absent from the, the cultural groups with high fertility rates right now. I have never heard... of anyone from a cultural group with a high fertility rate being an antinatalist. So I think it's just sort of part of this un we world of this decaying urban monoculture .Simone: Well, I actually, so I think that, that antinatalism and [00:46:00] in general, to a great extent, modernity driven demographic collapse is, is more a picture of what happens when the struggle is from people.Simone: When, when the struggle is removed, It's a lot, I think, harder to find a reason to live. And for some people, a reason to live goes all the way to antinatalism and deep depression. For other people, a reason to live is like a reason to have kids, a hope for the future, excitement for the future. At one point on, on Twitter, someone was like, Oh let's stop calling them developed countries.Simone: Let's call them developing countries always. You should never... Give up on okay, we've made it like there's nothing else to do. There's nowhere else to go. There's no threat to, to overcome. There's no challenge. I think it really does come down to ennui. And I think that's a bigger problem because you, you, you don't go we, we've, we've all, we've both traveled right to places where poverty is a lot higher.Simone: And we both, hung out with people who have come from much more deprived backgrounds [00:47:00] who do not have anywhere close to the privileges of your average American. And even like your, your impoverished average American, right? Antinatalism is not even not even there.Malcolm: No, no, no. But among our wealthy friends, antinatalism is actually aSimone: pretty common It's pervasive.Simone: Yeah. So it just, I'm just saying that more broadly, I think this is a picture of a society It doesn't sound right to say this, but that does not have enough hardship.Malcolm: And that hardship in some ways makes it more obvious to people. Well, I think in cultures that embrace hardship, they know that suffering isn't an intrinsic negative.Malcolm: They see how it improves them. A culture's relation to suffering. I think is really tied to how much it finds the ideas of antinatalism. Tantalizing. Suffering is the emotion that motivates you to improve yourself. Contentment. That's the ultimate evil emotion. That's the emotion that encourages stasis and in our world perspective, a world of personal [00:48:00] stasis, a world where you accept that the iteration of you that exists now is elite, basically, and better than any iteration of you that could exist.Malcolm: It's like a supremacist sort of ideological perspective. And it's the way we view humanity as well, like that we have kids so that they can be better than us. But a final point I wanted to get to, which is like, when I think about how could I become an antinatalist, right? Like previous iteration of me back when I did believe that emotions had value to people.Malcolm: And I think the trick that happened to me at that time of my life was that. I expected profound things to feel profound or to feel loud at least, but there was no reason for evolution to code profound things as feeling profound. You can hijack the profundity system by like group chanting.Malcolm: You can hijack the profundity system with hallucinogens. There's a lot of things you can do to create a false sense of profundity. People expect that the emotions we feel are going to [00:49:00] point to some. True underlying value, whether that's a positive or negative value. And humans never underwent evolutionary pressure to be able to search for true meaning in the universe.Malcolm: So none of our emotions should align with what true meaning looks like in the universe. And so we should expect, like when we're logically searching for things of value for it to not actually feel like, Oh, I feel this emotional. When I come to the right answer, but the feeling that that pain is bad, I think that's a very easy thing.Malcolm: You can come to when you're like, well, nothing really feels meaningfully profound, but pain does feel meaningfully bad. Therefore, as somebody who has had time to indulge in pain, and it's grown up in a culture. that didn't give me a healthy way of relating to emotional pain that just said emotional pain is a pure negative.Malcolm: And very few traditional cultures do that. Most traditional cultures see emotional pain, maybe not the way we do. Maybe [00:50:00] it's not like something that motivates you to improve, but they, they definitely don't see it as like the core negative of the universe. It might be the way that God tests you. It might be like, there's all sorts of ways you can relate to pain.Malcolm: You don't need to relate to pain in a purely and only negative context. And could I experience enough pain that I just wanted to die in the moment? Yes, but that's because I'm a disgusting meatbag involved and I'm weak and I'm wretched and I'm fallen. And by that, what I mean from a atheistic perspective is humans, our biology is not optimized around.Malcolm: What we should want, like there was no reason for it to be optimized around what we should want. So I am going to succumb to that just as much as anyone else. Like I drink beer. I know that provides me with. No real long term positive, but I do it because I am wretched and fallen. And that's part of, of, of being human is understanding these, these flaws in who we are, like that [00:51:00] we feel pain for things that are pointless and understanding that that's just part of the human condition, but that we can work through that potentially.Malcolm: And we can work to improve that, not just for ourselves, but for everyone. I don't know if you have closing thoughts.Simone: I'm glad we're alive. I'm glad our kids are alive. We're a problem for antinatalists. Dear Antinatalists, I'm sorry. If we missed anything, leave a comment. We genuinely want to understand the argument as well as we can, especially the logically founded versions of it.Malcolm: Or if there's an argument for it that we didn't include, these are the arguments that we found most convincing. And again, I think it's one of those things where I can't say they're wrong, it's just a nature of perspective. In the same way that I would not say that people who believe that life begins at conception or at the level of a sperm are wrong.Malcolm: I just have a different perspective than them. But I don't think their perspective is like intrinsically evil, even though it leads to evil actions from my cultural perspectives, which is killing babies [00:52:00] or from their perspective, preventing babies who otherwise would have existed had different choices been made than the choices that their culture condones for them.Malcolm: But I'm okay with that. I'm okay with living in a multicultural ecosystem. So long as people don't mess with my culture, as soon as we think that, well, okay, we have right to your body, your culture, that's where I'm like, okay, now those are, those are fine words.Simone: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we will go celebrate our pronatalism by picking up our kids now and giving them big hugs and hoping the best for them.Simone: and havingMalcolm: met them.Malcolm: So what antinatalism means is if I had adopted that mindset when I was younger, they wouldn't have been given the choice to continueSimone: existing. Oh my gosh. I'm just imagining the way they don't. They don't run, they bounce, you know, they, oh, the sparkles in their eyes. Yeah, I,Malcolm: I, I know that they want to exist.Malcolm: They [00:53:00] don't want to exist. Killing themselves is always a choice. Our culture does not have a real negative opinion of suicide. Um, But it is, it is, it is not a choice to use the fact that you want to commit suicide. To rob the agency of another potential person who could have been born in your place who would have loved their life.Malcolm: That's the choice you have to make for yourself and not for other people because when you rob other people of agency, that's the truest of all evils.Simone: And yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess that kind of sums it up is, is we think, you have every right to end your life for our moral framework, but you should never rob that if someone else in the end, so much of what we come down to is sovereignty, personal sovereignty, and freedom of choice.Simone: And that is up to each person to decide what to do with themselves.Malcolm: And each culture. I think it gets trickier when you're talking about kids, but I think the only real. Safe way like intergenerationally to assure that groups don't come to believe that other groups are like intrinsically worse than them and that they have Kirk launched to do what they want because that's what happened with the residential school program in canada they said well these natives don't know how to raise their kids [00:54:00] correctly the european way the the You know the modern way So we're going to take their kids from them and erase their culture because we're better and they genuinely believe that they genuinely believed They were helping people and when you begin to believe that your culture is naturally superior to other because of things they're doing to their kids or whatever, then it can lead to really, really evil action really, really quickly.Malcolm: And it can feel really, really good and righteous in the moment. And I try to learn from history. What not to do and one of the things is passing judgment on other cultures or other groups, especially when they have belief systems that I see is logically, logically consistent.Simone: Yeah. Well, okay.Simone: Heavy conversation, but good. Come give me a hug. Let's get our kids. I love you, 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

Malcolm and Simone discuss the flaws of the current education system and the innovative school they have designed to fix it. They explain how their school uses a skill tree/tech tree model that allows students to progress at their own pace in subjects they are intrinsically motivated in. The school focuses on real-world skills and outcomes rather than standardized tests. It incorporates a "democratized nepotism" system to connect advanced students with mentors in their field of interest. Socialization is taught through community involvement and evaluated by "proctors." The curriculum avoids ideological indoctrination by using AI-generated questions and prediction markets to test abilities. The goal is to create a constantly improving system that cultivates genius and sets students up for self-sufficiency.Simone: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous.Malcolm: Hello. So this is a follow up episode. We had done an episode on the education system, why it's terrible the, the forces at play here how, how little genuine innovation is happening in the space. It is terrifying. I suggest you check that episode out, but you really don't need to watch it before this one.Malcolm: This one, we're going to focus on the system that we've designed. For the Collins Institute, you can learn more at collinsinstitute. org, and yeah, it's just one of those spaces where we've decided to put some of our effort to try to fix something because we saw something broken, and that means we gotta clean it up,Simone: but the fun premise here is this, is basically we discovered that in the world of education, No one is really trying anything innovative. Also, when people have tried to experiment around different outcomes, it didn't, it wasn't actually trying to experiment for earning potential or changing the world or making an impact or even thriving as a human.Simone: It was pretty much around self esteem and in the few [00:01:00] isolated instances in which people did say, I'm going to try to create geniuses. They did. So basically we have reason to believe that people who come in intentionally trying to innovate new models have the potential to genuinely change the world because there's nothing more fundamental than the way that you educate the next generation and equip the next generation to take on new challenges.Simone: So the premise here is, okay, we see this and we're like, all right, we're going to throw our hats in the ring. And this is what we have decided to do.Malcolm: Few caveats to what you just said. Montessori is pretty good for pre secondary school. So before middle school, Montessori is actually a pretty solid system.Malcolm: I think it can be improved a little but it's, it's decent for what's out there. And Acton schools are actually a pretty innovative and interesting model that we respect. Outside of that, pretty much hate everything.​Malcolm: Okay, now to, to our system. So what we've done is we have taken the entire educational[00:02:00] system, secondary school, so middle school and high school, as well as we're eventually moving to colleges.Malcolm: We've talked with this new college that might actually Implement our system is the primary way that learning happens at that college. So hopefully we can go from middle school to the end of college where we have divided it. into individual nodes that work like a skill tree or a tech tree in a video game.Malcolm: If you're not familiar with what that looks like I doubt that much of our audience doesn't know what a skill tree or tech tree in a video game is, but it's actually a pretty hard concept to explain to someone who's never seen it. Think of it like a ancestry tree that you progress through.Malcolm: Like you would have nodes, you complete one node, it unlocks nodes above that. Sometimes you need to unlock two nodes to unlock one node above that, okay? And whenever a student clicks on one of these nodes they get a place where they can book a time to take a test on that subject to complete the note.Malcolm: Under that is like you would have in Hacker News, although Simone always says I say Reddit as well, but Hacker News is a better direct analog because it's all links. Where [00:03:00] you have links to all of the places a student could learn that information that exists online and students can upload their own YouTube tutorials after doing something or their own notes after doing something.Malcolm: Then students vote on the sources that were most useful to them. Those votes are modified by how well a student did. Eventually we want to begin to build profiles of students. So that students can be shown resources that were most useful to students who have similar voting patterns to them on these, these tests.Malcolm: And we also want to build some sort of reward or remuneration system where students can receive some sort of reward for creating content that ended up being useful to a lot of other students. Now, a quick side note on this. One of the things that we really believe in with our educational system is to not have a single metric of measurement.Malcolm: And by that, what I mean is the existing education system, 80% of students are not in the top 20%. And that's a problem when nobody wants to hire somebody who's not in the top 20% or no one wants to accept someone who's not in the top 20%. [00:04:00] Top 20%. So when you are measuring students on how far they've gotten in the tree, how good their grades are, how many students liked the content that they were creating and we're using that, these are metrics that can have different students succeed within them, which means that no longer are you dealing with a student where 80% of students are not in the top 20%.Malcolm: Okay.Malcolm: Yes. So, now back to the tech tree. One of the major problems in the educational space is what we call the extrinsic intrinsic reward problem.Malcolm: This is a phenomenon where if you pay someone to do something that they love, they start liking it less and less and less. This is why when people take a job doing one of their hobbies, they will sometimes grow to really resent that hobby. And the school system is rife with this problem because that is what grades are.Malcolm: They're an extrinsic reward. And so when a student had the genuine passion for something, that passion can be dull by continually applying this extrinsic reward. This is why kids who go through unschooling, this is a schooling system where different from [00:05:00] homeschooling, it just lets kids do whatever they want all day.Malcolm: These kids often end up doing just astoundingly at the things that they love but then unfortunately, really bad at the things that they're disinterested in. And this is the core problem of the unschooling movement, and it was a big inspiration for us when we were designing our school system. We said, can we design a school system that instead of trying to fix the problems with public school, instead uses students in a control scenario, students who are just doing whatever they want all day, and see where those students end up.Malcolm: Struggling and fix those areas and only those areas while allowing students to do basically whatever they want so . They often end up with crippling test anxiety so that is why we incorporate tests throughout our entire system because The truth is is that the real world will test you.Malcolm: It will put you in testing situations. If you never go through any of those, that's, that's a problem because that's functionally in the real world. I mean, we're optimizing our system around outcomes, so that makes sense. Second is the extrinsic intrinsic reward problem. So what you need is a [00:06:00] system that can organically Detect when a student doesn't have intrinsic motivation was in a subject and then imply that extrinsic motivation in and only in those scenarios and proportional to their lack of intrinsic motivation in that space now in project based systems, which is what a lot of people move to, but are unsustainable.Malcolm: You have teachers that watch the students and. Push them where they need to be pushed, but you can't do that at scale. So it's not really useful for a scalable system unless you're doing it with AI, which we do implement in our system and might be a counter system to ours that we can talk about.Malcolm: So what we do is the further behind a student is in a part of the tech tree, the higher a multiple is applied to the credits they get for the score they get for completing a test in that subject.Malcolm: And they need to get a certain number of credits per semester to stay within our school system. And this is the thing where people are like, Ooh, that's really harsh. What, you kick kids out just for not getting a certain number of credits? Even though this is like a public system that's meant for everyone?[00:07:00]Malcolm: In the adult world, I mean, theoretically, this is the way it's supposed to work. When someone can't handle their s**t, what we, what do we do with these people? We send them to prison. That's, that's what we do. It's, it's, it's not the way prison actually ends up working. Prison system also has a lot of flaws.Malcolm: I'd love to work on that someday when I get time. And Simone has some really interesting theories around that. I want to do, yeah. CR Charter City is one of you. If we ever get around to publishing that, we recorded it a while ago, but. Anyway what the dynamic that we hope can eventually evolve out of this is that our school system becomes available to any students who want it, but the students who lack the ability to find a way to motivate themselves, they end up having to go to the existing public school system because that's basically prison for kids.Malcolm: And that's what it already is. It's using the same contractors. It's the same system. It's, it's it's terrible. It's terrible anyway. So, That's the way that aspect of the system works. Now, what do we do when a student gets really far ahead in a subject, three, four years ahead of where they are?Malcolm: Well, if somebody really loves playing with Legos, the best reward is more Legos. By that, I mean, it's the best, [00:08:00] yeah, reward for somebody who's intrinsically motivated for something is more of that thing at a more advanced level. But weSimone: take it beyond that. And this, this is the, my personally favorite part about this system is that rather than.Simone: Orient people around just pure academic achievement, we're outperforming students in the mainstream industrial schooling world. We're really oriented around instead of outcome being get into good college or get scholarship or get good grades or just graduate from high school, our outcome, our desired outcome is self sufficiency upon graduation.Simone: So this could mean that you can enter academia basically already with a grant based like postdoc kind of situation or with a scholarship. Or you graduate with enough income from work consulting or a business you create, or even a nonprofit to support yourself fully as an independent living on your own paying rent adult.Simone: And that means that one of the rewards that we give to people when they start excelling in some domain. Is basically [00:09:00] actual real world work in that domain. And it doesn't matter how old you are to start doing this. I mean, Benjamin Franklin had a full time job and was contributing, under a pen name to a newspaper in the early colonies when he was 12 years old.Simone: So this is about competence, not age. And we really hate how students are infantilized these days. So it's really about starting your career. So instead of let's say you're super into mushrooms. You're like, Oh my gosh, mycology. I love this. And you get really, really advanced. Well, then ultimately what we start rewarding you with is, okay, Hey, we're going to help you pitch a peer reviewed paper, maybe some research in some weird, like jungle with some weird mushroom that only five people know about we're going to have you pitch this to them, pitch a peer reviewed research paper and Hey, maybe they'll say, yes, maybe you can fly to this strange country and research this mushroom and, and end up as a major player in this field.Simone: And that has me so excited because one, I really think that people at much younger ages can and should be major movers and shakers in different industries, but this also reveals one other part of the school that I think [00:10:00] is really important in that we do think that you can reliably cultivate genius and world leaders.Simone: But you can't choose what someone's passion is going to be, like a parent can't be like, I'm going to give birth to the best violin player in the world, orMalcolm: I'm going to give birth The last part, Leslie did, but No,Simone: No, no, no. Laszlo Polgar didn't plan on creating chess geniuses. His daughters really liked chess and based on his limited funds, that was what was doable for them. And that's how it works when it comes to cultivating genius. Genius is, is a, is a combination of disposition of each individual student or family, and also what connections and resources can be possible for that family.Simone: You can't choose that. So parents can't shoot shot and call a shot and say, Oh, I'm definitely going to have the world's best golf player. I'm definitely going to have a brilliant doctor. You have to look at what can be possible and bring out. The passions in a child and then make it possible for them, make the connections.Simone: And that's what this system is about that has me reallyMalcolm: excited. And I think that this comes to one of our things, which is admitting that [00:11:00] genes play a role in humans and humans do have some pre coded predilections and you can't make an apple tree create pears. You, your, your goal is to give it the most fertile environment possible to be what it's going to be.Malcolm: That is our. Philosophy on education, but for this aspect of the system, this reward and intrinsic motivation to play with Legos with more Legos, we call it our democratized nepotism system. So, it's something that we haven't talked. We'll talk about secret society someday on this platform, but, simone used to be the Managing Director of Dialogue, which was the secret society that was originally founded by Peter Thiel and Arne Hoffman. And then Schmidt Futures hired us to build out their secret society thing that they were building. And then like we did matchmaking for one that the EA community did called Future Forum.Malcolm: And so we've been able to interact with a large number of people who are very classically successful by society's terms. And able to interview them and look to find out what is a commonality among them. Man. Nepotism is something that you see throughout this, but not [00:12:00] nepotism in the way that people think.Malcolm: It is not that they had people, they did have people advocating for them, yes, but it's not necessarily that these people were family connections or something like that. It's that they made the effort early in their career to reach out to people who were high level people in something they had a passion for and engage directly in those fields.Malcolm: And so we are trying to build systems where one, using our Rolodex is we built this amazing mentor network and then. Through that mentor network, we can connect students directly with these really high profile individuals to work with them. But even when students can't we don't have somebody for a student and to make this system genuinely scalable, one of the things we teach students is how do you do cold outreach?Malcolm: How do you get people who are already in a field who you respect to engage with you and to include you in their projects in a way that can get your name out there? Because when we're not optimizing. Around the students graduation, [00:13:00] like just generic score, but optimizing on their ability to compete in this real world environment.Malcolm: The thing that matters most is why our school will have an in house. We've already worked on this in house PR firm. We've actually already built a partnership with the 1517 fund. Which is a fund that specializes a B. C. Fund that specializes in companies started by high schoolers. So, we can have our students when they have ideas, they know how to raise capital.Malcolm: That's one of the things we're going to teach them. How all of these systems work that are often obscured. By the existing educational system that is essentially geared around creating slaves. It's around creating slaves for the bureaucracy. And so we can get into how all that works. So now we want to talk about how we handle socialization.Malcolm: So one of the things that people often ask with this is they're like, okay, so the first iteration of this is going to be predominantly online. Everyone knows homeschoolers have socialization problems. How are you going to handle that? And hold on, and then it's that's a bad toupee problem you're talking about right there.Malcolm: Meaning that you only notice a bad toupee, so there's a perception that bad toupees [00:14:00] create. You know, Look bad. There's actually been a lot of research on this. You can look at the research on this. And while, like all research, it's all over the place, the majority seems to lean towards homeschoolers are actually slightly more better socially adjusted than non homeschoolers.Malcolm: Yep. And it should be obvious why this is the case. Are kids who have learned their social skills by modeling adults? going to have better social skills than kids who have learned in this weird Lord of the Flies setup we call public school.Malcolm: What, what you probably are learning a bit more in public school is resiliency. But, I mean, and social resiliency and resiliency to bullying and, okay, that's all good. But, I mean, can we maybe do something? Can we, can we find something better than that? But, but outside of that, I actually think that the existing school system is...Malcolm: It's terrible at teaching social skills. Well, andSimone: actually, I think most of the research says, as, as parents, at least with really, really young children, like toddlers, when they're thinking, do I keep my home, my kids home with me or with a nanny if I need one, or do I send my kids to daycare, sort of the, the trade off [00:15:00] is okay.Simone: If you send them to daycare, their language will develop more quickly, but they're also going to pick up a ton of bad habits. So I think it's also understood already in some peer reviewed research that school is a source of bad habits more than it is a source of maturity and ability to socialize. Plus, of course, the problem is school socialization teaches you to what?Simone: Befriend those who are stuck in a room with you. It's to befriend your inmates essentially. And so this is how you end up with people who only know how to make friends with. They're classmates with their workmates, with the people who they like live with in a dorm. So in, in the future, they're limited to what we would call I mean what what was called convenience friends.Simone: Convenience friends. We call them convenience friend. Friends in Parks and Rec, they're called Workplace Proximity Associates. .Malcolm: But, but, but to the point being here. I've heard this before from people I know, is they, they move to the new city for the first time and they realize no one ever once taught them how to [00:16:00] go out and make random friends.Malcolm: And that's bad. That's really bad. And so the, the actual useful skills for going out and meeting totally new people that young kids are learning, they're not learning them in school right now. They're learning them. in these online environments that they're often being scolded for interacting with. So we, we do have a, a course of the skill tree that is dedicated to this, but it is really focused on making your own friends going out there.Malcolm: Joining a sports team, like a local sports team, running in local elections, building local groups, and your grades are based on how you actually perform at that, how you do in the election, how you do with, how, like, how many people do you get to regularly go to these meetings that you put together? Well, but here'sSimone: the big thing too.Simone: And it's, it's such a notable thing that in school. No one gives you credit for building a social network, building a network when those things like when it comes to getting promotions, when it comes to finding a spouse, when it comes to having good mental [00:17:00] health, like those things, like being able to socialize, to build a friend network, to get people together, I don't like even within thriving within your own job, like building coalitions to, get a project done or managing sales or hiring people like you need to have these skills and schools don't teach it.Simone: Another big thing that is a big part of our school. It's rather than have any teachers or anything beyond ad hoc tutors when you need them and request them. What we, the only sort of personal touch point you have, the only sort of regular personal meetings you have are with what we call a proctor who is essentially someone to check in with and just make sure that you are meeting your social goals, that you're doing well, that you're not getting stuck somewhere like they're basically like a, kind of like a life coach without all the woo. If you know what I mean?Malcolm: Yeah. So, and this is something we've really worked on honing, because if you've watched our video on how psychology became a cult it is very dangerous. Whenever you put one person in charge of another person's mental wellbeing, it is very easy for that person to [00:18:00] build dependency and the person who they're in charge of and use that to their advantage.Malcolm: And we already have a huge problem in the public school system. I mean, if you're watching like democratic elite controlled media, you don't know that like rape and molestation is a big problem in the public school system, but it's enormous. It's enormous. It's actually, there was this study done. Some people have debated whether this is accurate, but it was done during a Democratic administration, it was done during the Clinton administration, that showed that the rates of molestation in the public school system are higher than they were at the height of the Catholic Church scandal.Malcolm: But the unions have a, have a reason to cover this up, so... They're gonna cover it up. And it doesn't fit the generic narrative so, cover it up. But anyway, so it's a big problem. So we really don't want to put people in a position where they can victimize students. And we want to, and we, we spend a lot of time doing this.Malcolm: Actually, our system is a modified version of cognitive behavioral therapy that is less Less easy to mess up. So we want to have a lot of safeguards on this system. We want to have it on rails, [00:19:00] so even a fairly stupid person can perform it without messing someone up. Actually took a lot of inspiration, speaking of Catholics, from the Catholic Confession system, which I think is a much superior system than modern psychology.Malcolm: In that it's really hard for even a dumb person to screw up. It's got this anonymity, which let's saySimone: unskilledMalcolm: team, unskilled person to screw up. You've got this layer of anonymity, which makes it a bit harder to get this person to build dependency specifically on them. , and instead of telling you like, Oh, there's this trauma in your past that you got to work on or something like that, they're like, yeah, what you did is wrong.Malcolm: Here's how you can feel better about it. Don't do it again. It was genuinely wrong. And then you go out, you do the thing to feel better about it and you go, okay, I feel better about it now. I did the thing. Obviously our system is more complicated than that. But what I'm saying is it's not impossible to create a system like this that isn't based around a system that could be easily abused or messed up in a way that is Dangerous to students.Malcolm: So, we've worked a lot on that system. Very excited about that and that. ButSimone: the reason why it's important and I think we just want [00:20:00] to emphasize this is that right now in public school, we are seeing a mental health crisis. We are seeing all of these really huge issues with with teens. And I mean, especially teens not being able to thrive.Simone: In terms of anxiety, in terms of depression. I think the bigger problem here, and this is something that we want to emphasize is that the current industrial school system is oriented around this really limited and increasingly obsolete outcome.Simone: We want your grades to be good. We want you to go to a college. We want you to go through this system. And that's not what predicts success anymore. That's not going to predict good mental health. That's not going to. that you thrive, that you are mentally well, or that you are physically well, or that you're getting a job.Simone: So it just, it's bizarre that we're throwing our kids into this, this shredder of their best years in many cases, when they could honestly be building their careers right away. They could be living greatMalcolm: lives. Yeah, so we built this as a certification system, and the reason we built it as a certification system is our rollout has a few plans.Malcolm: We want to start with the children of the elite. I'm sorry, like that's, [00:21:00] people are like, why are you starting it with like elite gifted kids or whatever. And it's because that will make the system easier to get state approval for. If we start in really low income communitiesMalcolm: and then we try to move to middle class communities. People are going to be like, Yeah, I don't want that system. That's the one that the, Like the superSimone: ghetto system. I don't wantMalcolm: that. Yeah. But if we're like, Oh, we're bringing like the, the one that previously only the elites could get. And now like a Gmail rollout is basically what we're aiming for.Malcolm: But our goal is I want this to be in every state and free. And we're trying to build it so that it can eventually be free. So it was the initial one. We're looking at doing like a Minerva like system. Well, so first we'll just do a completely online system, then we'll do a Minerva like system where we'll have some campuses in developing countries where people can do what we call dynamic boarding school, which means you can send your kids to go 11 months a year, 6 months a year, however much you want, and they're not going to slow down because they're all learning through the same platform.Malcolm: But if you also want somebody else to handle raising your kids, which a lot of people do, especially wealthy people, well, that's an area of price discrimination for us there. And then For the general [00:22:00] rollout, one of the problems you have, so you look at a place like Texas, the truth is, why doesn't Texas have a good voucher or charter system?Malcolm: It's because the public education system has become a jobs program, especially in rural communities. And the rural voting bloc is very important to the Republican Party, which is typically the party that's trying to innovate within the educational space. So you don't have a good voucher system in Texas.Malcolm: And so how can we keep the money in the community instead of having it go out to these large private equity companies that don't care? Because that's often what happens when you get these charter schools coming in. And the answer we came to was, well, what if we can. Utilize counter cyclical community assets.Malcolm: By that, we mean community assets that aren't being used at the time when students are in school. And with the understanding, the schools are often food programs for kids. They're often daycare for kids. They're often a place where kids can be watched. So can we certify? The people at your local public library or your local museum or your local religious center to be able to take care of kids during the day [00:23:00] and use those spaces during the day which will further distribute the money throughout the community than just going to the local public school.Malcolm: So, because we operate so inexpensively, we can take a cut of that and then the rest can go back to these community institutions. Community centers, whatever, hopefully make them better places for the entire communitySimone: and support local jobs. And I, yeah, I mean, I think it's really insensitive for anyone to be like, oh, I have this great academic solution and then to forget about the food services about the safe place for students to be about the fact that parents can't necessarily be at home watching their kids all day.Simone: So we acknowledge that and weMalcolm: plan for it. And then the final part of the system we haven't talked about Which really comes to our larger thing, which is one of the things we hate about the school system is the way that it imposes its morality on people and the way that it has become a center for ideological indoctrination.Malcolm: That terrifies, I think a lot of parents and it's a big problem with, if you're even just talking about this as a business opportunity, people are like, why are the pronatalists also working on school systems? And it's look, there is, yes. [00:24:00] School systems are becoming increasingly relevant.Malcolm: Boarding schools all over are going bankrupt. All sorts of private schools are going bankrupt. But these are often super, super lefty institutions. School systems for people who don't want their kids brainwashed into this urban monoculture, that's actually an exploding market right now because the people who are having kids are often from these more conservative cultures that don't want their kids homogenized into this monoculture, right?Malcolm: So how can we create a school system that never imposes... Our ideology on to students and that is modularizable. So families can ensure that it stays within their value system. And the way that we have done this is our school system has 2 types of tests. 1, which is a multiple choice test, which are constantly generated by AI, then filtered by a human, and then they go into the school.Malcolm: So. Less bias there, and we use AI with prompts that decrease it's, progressive bias, because right now AI creates a lot of progressive bias. Then, we measure those questions against authentic assessments, which are the [00:25:00] mastery courses within our educational paradigm. And by that what I mean is occasionally students need to do something to show I understand all of the concepts being taught here to a high level.Malcolm: So, what is an authentic assessment? This is something in educational pedagogy, which means something that tests a student's ability to compete in a real world environment. For example, in English, you could test them through how many five star reviews that they got on a fanfiction they wrote and posted online, or how many upvotes their scary story that they posted on Reddit got.Malcolm: Which is fantastic because you're testing their real world writing ability. And one of my favorite things is we mentioned this and we were, there was this teacher who we were talking to and she goes, oh, well, I'm sorry, I am a author. The failed author, obviously, and English teacher, and let me tell you what, didn't you know that Fifty Shades of Grey used to be a fanfiction, and it is terribly written, and if she was in my class, I would have given her a C, and I go, is there anything more indicative of the problems with the current education system than this failed author, masturbating to herself about [00:26:00] this idea of punishing one of the Thank you.Malcolm: Most successful books in the last century, in all of human history, actually. Because it doesn't fit what she considers good writing, which obviously isn't performing well in a real world environment. And this is the problem here. We... Because we haven't been forced to measure people and how they perform in real world environments, we have unfortunately conflated a few different things in some measurements.Malcolm: So what we're really measuring in English scores is a student's ability to show class status through how they write, and a student's ability to write for areader. .Malcolm: As soon as you disintermediate these into two tests, like to test how a student writes to show class status. You could have other students rank students writing samples by the class status they think the student has based on that writing sample and then use that to grade the students.Malcolm: So then what you do is you take the way students perform in these and then you test the individual multiple choice tests that were created, the individual questions I can see within every individual question, how much they correlated with the student's ability [00:27:00] to compete in a real world environment.Malcolm: and measure our own questions and then constantly create new questions. We have a system that's constantly self healing and improving. But here's where it gets really interesting. So we've got a partnership with Metaculous, which is a major prediction market player where people go and they make predictions about future events and you can win tokens and stuff like that.Malcolm: Really cool. Suggest you check it out. But anyway, we have a partnership with them to do. Student based questions around more political outcomes. Because remember if you had written a political theory paper leading up to the Trump Hillary election that said Trump has a chance of winning and we saw this was like pundits who said Trump has a chance of winning.Malcolm: They would get told that basically they were crazy people. They were idiots. What they were doing was malpractice because the industry itself was wrong. The industry had become so ideologically indoctrinated. They weren't able to see truth anymore. We saw the Ukraine war as well was the Ukraine war.Malcolm: Everyone's saying, Oh, Russia's going to steamroll Ukraine. And then that doesn't end up happening. Right. Dogma in the field had hidden. People who might actually have a better [00:28:00] understanding of the field than the status quo. So by having students compete in these metaculous like environments for their authentic assessments, we can see which students actually understand political ecosystems better, actually understand economic systems better, and then correlate how those students do within those tests to how they answered individual questions.Malcolm: Multiple choice questions to understand which of those questions are actually testing a student's real world ability instead of their ability to parrot back ideological indoctrination. And here is where this gets really interesting with some of the more controversial stuff. So you talk about something like evolution, right?Malcolm: I can't test a student's ability to actually understand evolution, but I can test a student's ability to convince somebody. Who has a high level of quote unquote understanding of evolution that they understand evolution. We believe in evolution, but I do recognize that this is a true thing, right? So this mean what students are taking, the multiple choice tests on evolution.Malcolm: It is made clear to them that what they are being tested on. And what they're going to later be tested on is their ability to convince someone that understands what we call evolution that [00:29:00] they too understand evolution, not understand an objective reality, because we can never claim to be testing a student on more than what we can measure the student on.Malcolm: Which is really exciting to me. I, I really like that this system is self constructing, because students can begin to create their own learning materials, they vote on these materials, and it's self healing to an extent with the students. But here's where it can get really interesting, which is some of the weirder stuff we've done around education.Malcolm: . One is we have a partnership with Praxis, which is this organization that's trying to create a new country. And one of the things that we've theorized about doing is this partnership is having a member of their government who is an AI amalgam of all of the student writing.Malcolm: So the students contribute to decisions that are being made in the government. By how much they contribute to their academic work, which I think is just a really cool way to give students a vote, but also [00:30:00] encourage students to get out there and create more content. The other another really interesting idea we had here.Malcolm: Was can we build prediction markets like get all students to constantly be pretty engaging in these prediction markets and because prediction markets are so successful, , get companies to actually pay into the school to get access to this prediction market data. So, a company could, because this has been shown in companies, prediction markets are actually fairly good at determining outcomes within companies.Malcolm: So, like if a biotech company is going to do, some big experiment, right? Or, or try to produce some drug prediction markets can determine with a high degree of accuracy, whether or not that test will be worth the money they put into it. They can then basically pay for access to once we're running in all the U.Malcolm: S. States to access to the cumulative brainpower of all of our best biology students, for example. And then this can be a source of funding, which then could go to things like scholarships and stuff like that. So the school itself [00:31:00] is acting as this source of cumulative brain power, which I love.Malcolm: We also want to build a system that can track students after they graduate, how those students are doing in terms of mental health and career outcomes. So in the long term, not just do we want to measure students off of authentic assessments, but we want to measure off of how they do in real world environments.Malcolm: And throughout their entire lives and how they're doing in terms of mental health throughout their entire lives when we are a B testing different parts of our system because I do want our system constantly a B testing, having students go through different types of trees, different ways of doing things to see which ones have better outcomes and then choose those models.Malcolm: For ones that we can then distribute throughout the entire system. So we can have this system that's constantly experimenting, but that isn't just looking at how students do in terms of graduation, but how they do in terms of real world outcomes. Anyway, love you, Simone. Sorry for ranting.Simone: Suffice it to say you're excited about this and you have every reason to be, but now we have to [00:32:00] actually finish building it and make it work in time for for us to at least have our kids run through this becauseMalcolm: yeah, we had a lot of our funding pulled for this at one point.Malcolm: And then we got a bunch of funding for the pronatalist stuff. So the work on this slowed down a lot. I mean, it's still going in the background. We've got a team in Africa working on it right now, but man, I wish Hey, have any of you are big donors? We might be able to pull something together here.Simone: Listen, we're going to get it done regardless. I don't care. I mean, honestly, I'm. I'm stoked about us owning all of it and running all of it with no, adverse incentives. So whatever, we're just going to make it happen. But I'm curious if anyone else is building their own secret system for cultivating genius and building the world's future leaders.Simone: We want to hear what your plans are, because again, we feel like this area is rife for disruption or ripe for disruption. And The more players here, the better, honestly. It's, it's, we're really sad about how little is being done here. So join us, tell us what you're doing. Really want to hear about it and, check in with us [00:33:00] in seven years, see how it's going. 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 this thought-provoking episode of the Malcolm and Simone Podcast, we dive deep into the core issues plaguing the traditional educational system and the potential for innovative approaches. We critically evaluate the current state of education, its origins in the Industrial Revolution, and the outdated "one size fits all" methodology still prevalent today. We explore alternative educational approaches like unschooling, Montessori, and the Acton school system. Are these the answers we've been looking for or just steps along the path to a truly revolutionary education model? We also analyze the trend of optimizing educational research around self-esteem instead of tangible outcomes, such as career success and mental health. This conversation promises to challenge your perceptions and spark your curiosity about the future of education.Malcolm: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. It's wonderful to be here with you today.Simone: I thought today we might talk about a long time obsession of ours, which is crafting and cultivating geniuses and a world leader is what do youMalcolm: think? Well, I mean, I don't see the point in having kids if you're not going to aim for the stars. Yeah.Malcolm: ISimone: mean, we were always really enchanted by what Laszlo Polgar did, not just because he was a shot caller. Like Laszlo Polgar,Malcolm: okay, as to who Laszlo Polgar is, Simone, because some of our viewers may not just immediately know who this guy is. So there was this guy who was living in , a communist bloc country. And he had this theory that you could intentionally create geniuses.Malcolm: And so, very similar to, I feel like how I met my wife. He puts an ad in the paper saying, I'm looking to create geniuses and I'm looking for a wife who I can do this with. Which is very important that he did this from my perspective, because there are [00:01:00] some people out there who claim they know the secret to being a good parent .Malcolm: And they. Happen to have three kids who are really successful. And it's yeah, but if you're just dealing with a large population, some people are going to have. Three kids that are successful or four kids that are successful saying that you're going to do this up front and having it like as a recorded thing in media that is very, very different when you're talking about statistical outcomes and can be used as a sign that he probably understood something.Malcolm: Well, thisSimone: comes back to one of our key criteria for truth, right? We, we give a lot more credit to people who we are, who are what we call shot callers and Laszlo Polgar called a shot. And so we were always really fascinated by this specifically because we are really interested in, well, what can you do toMalcolm: create a great leader?Malcolm: We haven't finished the story yet. They still have no idea who he is. Okay. Sorry. Okay. So anyway, Laszlo Polgar said, I'm going to try to create geniuses. They know that part. They know his hypothesis. [00:02:00] You're like, I love you. It'd be like, if we were telling a story about some famous basketball player and you're like, and one day that, that four year old boy said, I'm going to become the greatest basketball player of all time.Simone: One can assume that obviously he did it.Malcolm: You've got to say what happens. All right. All right. Okay. Okay. So he raises three daughters and he decides that the metric he's going to use for success is chess and the worst of his three daughters. was the sixth highest rated chess champion in her lifetime as the female.Malcolm: The best was the best female champion of her lifetime. And the second was the second female champion of her lifetime. And actually, when they first went to participate in a chess championship, they called it like the event, the sack of Rome. Because it was just so outstanding. They just. Were these little like 13 year old girls who are just like sweeping everyone.Malcolm: But the point being, and where this is really interesting is I think a lot of people have this [00:03:00] perception that if you approached education and you tried to really reform the system or try something very different, you could do like 20%, 30% better, what the Laszlo Polgar case study shows is that the ceiling for how much we could improve the educational system is.Malcolm: Like a hundred X 200 X better that you could potentially reliably create outcomes that are What today would be we'd call geniuses like literally world class every time that is what got us really Excited about the potential of this space. The other thing that got us really excited about the potential of the space I'll get you in a second.Malcolm: But Simone you have some stuff you wanted to saySimone: Well, I mean, it's just been an obsession of ours. We really want to know how to consistently, and ideally at scale, create people who are capable of changing the world. Perhaps we are even more interested in this today because we [00:04:00] see generations of people graduating as infantilized people, as a disempowered people, people struggling not just to have a successful career, but like literally not.Simone: like endure life with crippling depression, anxiety, et cetera. So this is something that we were always really obsessed with.Malcolm: Yeah. So when we first went to approach the education system a few things really shocked us. . So the first thing that we did when we went to the educational system is we wanted to get a read of the predominant educational system.Malcolm: Like how good is it? Where can it be tweaked? And when we first started noticing about the research. Is that it was bad. And actually this as a science is really interesting. If you, if you look at people who get PhDs in education statistically you compare their IQ across like different PhDs. You can get they have.Malcolm: I think the lowest are one of the lowest average IQs of all PhD categories. So I guess this is why they like weren't using proper controls and stuff like this. But anyway, so we were like, oh, this is really shocking. Well, okay, so we have to start performing some of our [00:05:00] own research in the space or start, gathering evidence from different areas in the space to try to get a feel of how good education is.Malcolm: We do it right now because it seems really silly the way that we're doing it. They were like sending people to a room and then sit and then somebody's lecturing to them. That doesn't seem like It would be a good system now that like the internet exists. So anyway we, we said, okay, well, how can we create a control for the education system?Malcolm: And this is where unschooling became really important to us. So unschooling is this educational movement, which is different from homeschooling and that kids have literally no structure. There, there is no test for them. There is no anything like that. Just go do whatever you want. So this researcher in this phase, he, he looked into these kids and what he found is doing literally nothing ended with these kids having higher educational outcomes than kids who go through the traditional school system.Malcolm: They were getting into college at higher rates, they had better mental health, and they were graduating college at higher rates. [00:06:00] And yes, These studies that he did, didn't control for socioeconomic groups. So that probably plays a pretty big role. But doing literally nothing should not be even close to better than this hellish thing we call the public school system.Malcolm: In addition to that, we then said, okay, so we saw all this and we go, okay, well then let's go out there and see what better systems exist. And this is where we really began to panic because what we realized. is people just really hadn't experimented with that many genuinely novel systems in the education space.Malcolm: And when theySimone: did, they weren't even necessarily looking at Do these people have successful careers? It is, what was it? It was self esteem that they were checking for.Malcolm: Oh my God. Tell me about the study that you read on self esteem and like how it doesn't. No,Simone: no, no, no. It's just the most of the, a lot of the research was looking at, at kids self esteem as an outcome.Simone: Like how was their self esteem [00:07:00] instead of okay, now they're adults. What is their average earning earning? What, what is.Malcolm: This is, what's really interesting about what you said. So you shared with me that study, I guess you don't remember sharing it with me. A terrible memory. But, simone is really good at finding studies and sharing them with me.Malcolm: And then we, we talk about them and synthesize them. But anyway, so one of the studies you showed me on self esteem, it one showed the percent of educational research that is optimized around self esteem. It was high. It was like, I'm just remembering off the top of my head, but I just remember reading it and being like, that's a comically high amount of the research.Malcolm: Yeah. It doesn't make sense. But then they looked at these self esteem measures because all these. The papers were using the same tests and they tried to correlate them with life outcomes, like mental health as an adult, career success as an adult. Oh,Simone: right. And there was like no core, they were at least very little correlation.Simone: Yeah.Malcolm: Like the entire field is optimizing over a useless, feel good metric. Yeah. Oh my God. Anyway, it gets crazier. It gets crazier. So, so then we're like, okay, so what are people actually optimizing for when they're trying new systems? [00:08:00] And then what you find is they're optimizing around their own ideologies.Malcolm: They're not optimizing around outcomes like the Waldorf system or whatever, where it's like some commie utopia thing where all the students get to vote and, and I don't know, whatever. It's not actually, it's feel good vibey stuff. It's okay, I get what you're going for, but like it'd be cool if you spent a lot more time focused on like student outcomes in terms of what you're studying.Malcolm: And then there was this other thing. Oh, my God, it was wild. Where they'll do something different, but it's really just moving a slider and right that they really love to move is how much control do we have over the student's life so you know unschooling might be one extreme of this and like military school might be the other extreme of this, but outside of moving this slider.Malcolm: They really don't change much in the educational paradigm. And so then we go and we're like, okay, so then who's tried like really different things. Yeah. , like one of the best systems out there right now in terms of like educational innovation is [00:09:00] Montessori, which is comical because it's literally over a centurySimone: old.Simone: Yeah, yeah, that and the only other thing that seems to be new. And I would, I mean, arguably Montessori is just more like freedom, freedom to explore your curiosity. Right. And then the other really big innovation is project based learning, which is great on an individual level. But only really when you have a lot of money, it's not scalable. So it's not like you could do this sustainably at the public school level and make it spreadMalcolm: everywhere.Malcolm: And the problem is, is that when they do it in public schools to make it sustainable, they put people on big teams. So you're working on a project, but it was like five or six other people. So the teachers have to grade less. And talk about, you have a lot to say about working in teams.Simone: Oh, gosh. I mean, group projects are completely the worst and I can't believe people, people use them at all because it really just teaches really conscientious students to just hate working with other people.Simone: And then it teaches freeloaders to just be freeloaders. It's it's, I think it's [00:10:00] good for everyone to go through a couple group projects just to learn game theory essentially, and to learn how to avoid working with freeloaders and to destroy them in the future and know how to pick teams well.Simone: But I mean, in terms of actually encouraging people to work, motivating people and encouraging them to learn really what it means is like 70% of the people on the team, aren't going to learn a thing. And then 30% of the people on the team are going to be really stressed out and angry at other people.Simone: And that's what they're going to learn. No one learns about the actual thing. It is so frustrating.Malcolm: But anyway, so back to the system. So then we're like, okay, so are there any genuinely innovative we're not just going to tweak the public school model, we're going to do something totally different.Malcolm: And I say there's really only one system that I have any respect for outside of our own, which is the Acton school system. Yeah, they're awesome. Acton is a good school system. I think ours is better, but Acton is solid and replicable.Simone: Well, what they have running, going for them is that they're like live and teaching students right now and we're currently in [00:11:00] development.Simone: So I think they kind of totally take the cake. Well, they,Malcolm: I mean, they, they've been around longer, but yeah, I'm just saying it's not like everything, but it's wild to me that there aren't like more like genuinely different attempts at education that are based at. Scalable approaches. So not just we're going to give everyone a private tutor who gives them a bunch of project based learning things to do and that are focused on results.Malcolm: This is just not something they see. So we then we're like, well, dang it. Are we going to have to do this ourselves? But before we get to that, let's talk about the existing school system and why it sucks so much.Simone: Yes. Shall I kick us off? You kick us off. So we argue that the, the What we'll say either is the legacy or industrial schooling system was created during the Industrial Revolution at the height of the British Imperial Empire.Simone: And it was optimized around something that actually worked really well at the time, which was creating interchangeable cogs to employ in the British Imperial Empire. TheyMalcolm: had just [00:12:00] created replaceable parts, replaceable parts with a new concept at the time. And it was this really exciting. Oh, can we basically turn humans into replaceable parts?Malcolm: Great concept. Because we're running this big imperial system, yeah, andSimone: you need to be able to run it very smoothly, and you need to be able to replace people easily in this way. If someone had the same grade and same degree, they were essentially the same part. You could switch them out. One dies of malaria in one of the colonies, and you just replace itMalcolm: with the same grade.Malcolm: Yeah, oh, he's got the same grade. Okay, yeah, he's replaceable.Simone: And then of course, actually that, that continued to work. Yeah. In, post post colonies in a world in which there were these like big lumbering bureaucratic corporations with lifelong corporate jobs. Like again, you need to have those replaceable parts.Malcolm: We call this the era of the skyscraper corporation and the skyscraper corporation, and this is why skyscrapers were so important during this period of industrial history was before the internet before phones were everywhere or easy to use.Malcolm: How did you get that sort of human connectivity where you could have [00:13:00] lots of humans vibing off of each other? You basically. All have to work out of the same building. This hugely restrained the geography from which companies were recruiting from. So it meant even if the concept of replaceable parts was no longer the concept they were vibing off of, what they were vibing off of was this idea that you needed sort of blank slates that you could then train up and you needed some system for judging the Quality of the blank slates you're getting so you know where to put them in the hierarchy, in terms of like where they start and this was the era where, you'd have a shoeshine boy at one company or a mail room clerk work their way all the way to the top of the company, which just doesn't really happen anymore because I mean, that, that really made sense in this blank slate is system where people didn't.Malcolm: travel a lot. But now it makes sense to begin specializing almost immediately. So now someone go to our current system and why this replaceable part dynamic is soSimone: bad, right? So, I mean, obviously that [00:14:00] worked when all of these things could not be automated because essentially they were turning humans into machines as sort of part of this industrial revolution mindset that totally works when machines can't do what humans do.Simone: Well, guess what? First, I mean, well, first we, we really had outsourcing, right? And so first people were getting offshored and outsourced, and that wasn't very good for people. So if you'reMalcolm: this replaceable part, you are literally the easiest thing to outsource. Yes. You, you, you are literally the most disposable part of our economy, and yet our entire educational system is optimized around this.Malcolm: Yeah. And now, with AI, as Simone points out, Nobody's safe. You've got to completely throw out the book and rethink everything about what you're teaching kids. And a lot of people will be like, Oh, you won't have AI in your pocket wherever you go. And it's okay, first of all, b***h, I already do. Second of all, I remember when you told me this about calculators.Malcolm: What a lie. What aSimone: lie. That was one of the big lies. Along with that lie that like, Oh, having the light on in the back of the car is [00:15:00] illegal or we can't drive that way. These are like the two big lies of childhood.Malcolm: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That they I wonder if kids these days even know that one, because we would read in cars.Malcolm: Okay. Growing up. And when you turned on the light it made it harder for the driver to see. And so they would tell this. Lie that like, what was the version of it they told you?Simone: Honestly, I don't think it makes it that much harder for you to see. And they were like, oh, I can't drive with the, with the light on in the back.Simone: Or it's illegal, like you can't do it. And a lot of kids were told this lie. It's such a thing. But you know, that and that along with this,Malcolm: these are the big lies. So, so we've got this system that is creating this useless output that is just not at all optimized. And, and the research in the field is terrible.Malcolm: It's done by... Well, I know this is horrible. We're going to have like educational researchers who are like learning out and they're like,Simone: they're making, to be fair. I was just looking at this ranking and early child development is even worse. SoMalcolm: should I, I should, I [00:16:00] should post this on this pull it up, Simone.Simone: I have to find it. I have to find it. It's, it's a littleMalcolm: depressing. I don't mean to insult your field. I'm just saying objectively. I'm just sayingSimone: the majority of your colleagues are stupid,Malcolm: not you. No, but in education, they've determined IQ doesn't matter. I wonder why they came to that determination. I don't know, you're going to hell.Malcolm: Despite it having this really high correlation with economic outcomes, with success in the workforce, with oh god, all sorts of other things. Anyway. No, but IQ doesn't matter. Whatever. Shh, come on, man. That's nonsense. So anyway, we got to be based, right? Based camp. And I got to say it in a camp way.Simone: That's your camp. That's camp. Okay.Malcolm: Right there. I got it. Okay. Okay. So Simone.Simone: Malcolm. Hi.Malcolm: Where were we? So we're coming to this and we're [00:17:00] like, wow. And this is so weird when we like approach a new field and we're like, genuinely, this is one of the single most important fields. Like a community. This is where we're sending our kids to be trained for the future.Malcolm: And it's become this horrible system. So why doesn't it update? This is a question a lot of people have. A lot of wealthy people spend a lot of money trying to make the education system better, and it seems to have very little effect in terms of outcomes. Why is that happening? So there's, there's two core reasons. One is, is a lot of that money is going to educational experts, which unfortunately are trained in this field.Malcolm: There was a great study done on this where they were looking at teachers who had learned to be like what was actually associated with a degree that we associated with educational expertise. And it was something like 70% or 60, it was some like number that scared me percent of the classes they were taking was just like.Malcolm: [00:18:00] social justice. It was, I think I saw this too. It was basically just on how to better ideologically. It was ideological indoctrination. That's what the actual college degree was. It was your ideological doctrination course. It was not like, this is how you do research in the space. This is how you advance the space.Malcolm: So you've got to keep in mind, most of the people who are managing the funds, they haven't been educated outside of the system. Just completely ideologically indoctrinated and if you suggest anything that threatens the teachers unions, you get thrown out of, and not just the teachers unions, but the most entrenched bureaucratic teachers.Malcolm: This is why Teach for America is struggling so much right now. We know some people inside Teach for America and they just can't get people to join anymore because. They were actually making a really big positive impact, but then the old entrenched bureaucratic teachers didn't like that. Some young upstarts were coming into their districts and and showing that things could be done better.Malcolm: So they vilified Teach for America. And now the only people who [00:19:00] they could conceivably get to work for them are conservatives. But you know, that's not gonna happen. So, and the organization isn't gonna rebrand so they can't get enough teachers. And so they can't function anymore. So Whenever somebody's working on genuine innovation that in a way that could disrupt the way the system is working right now or the unions.Malcolm: They get absolutely blasted. And this was really clear to me. So Zuckerberg did this huge donation. I want to say hundreds of millions to the Newark public school system. And it was to try to innovate things and something like 30 or 40% basically went to a bribe to the local teachers union. To allow them to change anything to allow.Malcolm: And they got very little changes.Simone: And I recall that the primary change to was, was basically incentives, like increases in pay based on student outcomes. So there was a ride being placed. for the privilege of paying good performers. But how dare they? Because all teachers should be paid a crap ton regardless of their actual performance.Simone: Well, IMalcolm: wouldn't say [00:20:00] a crap ton, but, but all teachers must be paid equally or based on seniority because that determines their dedication to the union. And the union is what really matters. One of my favorite quotes here is from Al Schenkner, who is the president of the American Federation of Teachers.Malcolm: And he said, when school children start paying union dues, that's when we'll start representing school children. And I think that really shows the mindset of these unions. This is why, despite, if you look at the research, school voucher programs, charter schools are just like obviously superior.Malcolm: But there's been like this narrative created that it's like maybe a toss up as to whether they're better or the academics aren't sure about whether they're better, but you can just look at the research and see they're much better. And it's because. It threatens these unions, which are a very important voting block for the Democratic Party.Malcolm: That, that's really the end of it. They're just an incredibly important voting block, and the Democratic Party, that is why the Democratic Party will never advocate for the best interests of students. Because they can't, they can't, they're, they're captured. If I [00:21:00] wanted to be a Democratic politician, and I wanted to do this, I could never get through a primary.Malcolm: I wanted to in any way meaningfully improve the school system, or even experiment with improving the school system, or experiment with Pay based on results. They're like the ability to fire a teacher when they molest students. Oh, sorry, you didn't know that was a thing? Yeah, there's this teacher that's been getting over a million dollars so far in pay for the New York school system who was caught molesting multiple students.Malcolm: They weren't able to fire him because it's so hard with the unions, so they just kept paying him and stopped having him go to school. It's a thing. Still a problem. It's horrifying how evilSimone: the unions are. I mean, I would say that there are in some states, and this is not the norm, but there are some superintendents that are enacting reform.Simone: And we do have help, like when it comes to school choice, when it comes to slow but sure reform. But of course, the norm is a lot of adverse incentives of teachers unions, a lot of corruption.Malcolm: Yeah. And a final point I want to make is I want to be clear that we are not saying that like people who work in education. are in any way not interested in the best interest of the [00:22:00] students. Oh my gosh. They're superSimone: interested in that.Simone: That's why they're there. They careMalcolm: what we're saying and often taking lower pay, often taking just horrible conditions. What we are saying is that the system as it's structured now, specifically the unions are motivated. To make the lives of the teachers who actually want to improve the quality of education and improve the lives of the students and make , genuine system reform happen, their lives hell.Malcolm: And those are the first ones that get pushed out. Are the ones who want to make things better. The ones who get elevated are the ones who like the bureaucracy and thrive in the bureaucracy.Simone: Exactly. Yeah. YepSimone: And so we Basically, this is all to say, we need an education reformation, and that's one of the reasons why we're involved in education reform,Malcolm: people Can we do another video on our system?Simone: That would be a great Yeah, we could do another, another one on our, our system at some at some point. We want to explain why this matters. And also why we're so obsessed with creating geniuses also because here's the thing [00:23:00] now, like one, this really matters to people have essentially done it in the past.Simone: Like they've proven it just as people with like limited resources, modest means that they can do it. Yeah. And three, like no one's trying, no one's even innovating or trying or testing anything. This is one of those really meaningful places where. People who choose to put some skin in the game can actually change the world.Simone: Yeah. How can you not want to be in on that, people? I mean, oh my gosh. So, anyway, hope we got you a little excited about this space. And yeah, we'll totally talk about whatMalcolm: we're doing. And to add to what you're saying, Simone, if you're a young person and you're not, particularly technologically inclined, but you want to work in an area where you can transform the future of our civilization education reform and Collins Institute is the project we have in this space.Malcolm: Collins Institute. org. We put a lot of our disposable income into this. Actually last year it was 43%. We donated aSimone: charity of our,Malcolm: and a lot of it went to developing this system. [00:24:00] So,Simone: Well, and I mean, and here's our thing, like with entrepreneurship in general, or with making a difference on things in general, you want to go into spaces where not all the world's small smartest people are going.Simone: So if you want to end the creative business and really kill it, don't go into crypto, don't go into VC, don't go where all the smart people are going. You have to compete against all the smartest people. Go where there isn't innovation, go where there's stagnation, go where all those smart people aren't going, because that's how you can make a big difference.Simone: That's where the arbitrage is.Simone: Woof. Right. Well, I look forward to talking about this more with you. I love you soMalcolm: much. You're amazing.Malcolm: We could talk about this all day, because weSimone: do. Yeah. That's what I love about you. All right, childMalcolm: gorgeous. Oh, no. I said something foreign.Malcolm: Why'd you do that to me? That's disgusting. 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

Aella's writeup on how her consensual nonconsent orgies work: https://aella.substack.com/p/how-my-consensual-nonconsent-orgiesAella's Twitter: https://twitter.com/aella_girlAella's website: https://knowingless.com/Aella's surveys: https://knowingless.com/survey/In this podcast episode, Malcolm and Simone delve into an eye-opening discussion with Aella, an acclaimed sexuality researcher and the foremost expert on consensual non-consent (CNC) parties. This conversation navigates the boundaries of sexual research, societal perceptions, consent, and safety measures while exploring the underbelly of CNC parties. Tune in to gain unprecedented insights into a world that seldom sees the light of day, and find out what really happens when safety meets desire in an unconventional setting.Malcolm: [00:00:00] We are so excited for our guest today, Aella because, , we have such a beef with the existing academic and research system, and for us, you are this shining light of a genuine alternative to the system, , another thing we've talked about on the podcast is how we rate it.Malcolm: Genuine intelligence from our cultural perspective. And the idea that you are out there doing research, not for remuneration, you didn't get into it for anything like that. You just did it because you loved it. And it was really cool to see. But for people who don't know Ayla, she is probably the most.Malcolm: Advanced sexuality researcher in the world. As people who wrote a bestselling book on sexuality, I'm saying that and she is somebody who really does a lot of, pretty groundbreaking research into the way humans think,Malcolm: the first question for this one is . So there's this perception of society of these secretive groups of like [00:01:00] elite people who host sex parties where nefarious things happen. Yeah.Simone: I'll set this. scene because it always shows up in my gossipy girly shows where one of the protagonists ends up at this mansion where everyone is wearing masks and black and you know, they, they walk in and there's candles everywhere and it seems super evil and they're handed a glass of champagne and then just like people are like, they're just going to start.Simone: It's just suggested that like a bunch of people are going to either start having sex or are having sex or end up getting murdered or something. Yeah.Malcolm: Yeah. , and there's this famous Twitter thread of you about a consensual non consent party. You're having them where it's like had a torture buffet.Malcolm: And if anyone in the world understands the logistics of actually putting one of these together, what that's like, what you're thinking about when you're doing it, what you have to make sure doesn't go wrong. I am just so fascinated to hear about this.Aella: Thanks, guys. Great, great to be here. I'm [00:02:00] so happy to be on your podcast.Aella: Wait, yeah, to be clear, the torture parties are a separate thing from the non con parties. Yes. CNC. I'm going to call it CNC. I do have them. There's no sex going on at the torture parties. It's just like another logistical thing to throw into the mix. And oh yeah, the CNC parties are basically you come in and you wear like wristbands that indicate what you're open to having happen.Aella: And you operate within certain, like, bounds of accepted norms. So there's like a list of things that you can do to somebody if they have the wristband on, and then if the person wants to make exceptions, they wear like a badge, and you have to read that badge before you engage with them, stuff like that.Simone: So wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. This is sounding very similar to me to whitewater rafting. Like in my, in my teenage years I did a lot of whitewater rafting, my dad and my sister were river guides. And before going rafting, you had to like stop everyone and have a safety talk about how the life jackets worked, what would happen if your boat wrapped, wrapped around a rock, how to paddle [00:03:00] correctly.Simone: Like, do you have a safety talk before theseAella: begin? Yeah, we have, we have to arrive mandatorily on time before the doors. Close because it's required that everybody is there for the opening circle and the opening circle to go over the rules again in your invite. When you come to the event, you have to read the rules.Aella: And then when you enter the door, you sign a waiver that explains again, what you're getting into and that you understand and are agreeing to this. And then we sit you down and we explain it all again, just to make really sure that you understand what's happening. And then we go through the list of things you can do, can't do, like the, the orientations to the space.Aella: We explain like how to use some of like the toys and the tools the norms again we do exercises where you have to, and it's like, it's like, I hate exercises at the beginning of things, but like, I think it's good still, and we just want to be really. over the top. So we have people pair off and the name of the party is red means no.Aella: So basically the thing is you get to say no and have people ignore that, but we replaced the word [00:04:00] no with the word red. So, so you just practice saying no and having that ignored and being able to ignore another people. And then you practice saying the word red and having people instantly respect that.Aella: I just basically like retrain intuitively what that's like. So you're like, you touch somebody and then you say, don't do that. No, you can like experiment different ways. Like, no. And then you say red and they have to immediately respect it. So we don't do like actual like structured practice to make sure that everybody like understands what they're getting into.Malcolm: What I love about this. It is so different than what is pictured as to what these parties are. It's like a bunch of safety seminars. Now we've got to act it out to make sure we don't go too far, but it makes a lot of sense. How do you think about when you're thinking who to invite to these, how do you vet them?Malcolm: Because you know, if you're, if you're bringing some, I guess you have to ask for recommendations or.Aella: Yeah, we've it's it's still like relatively new we're throwing in maybe like one or two a year so far So pretty slow, but we started out with like network and [00:05:00] referrals because like a really big thing is I don't want to accidentally introduce Bad incentives into this this game design, right?Aella: You don't want people who are like suppressing the thing that they actually want in order to try to be liked or Accepted or to participate like it's a big thing at the beginning. We say We, you came here because you wanted this, but if you decide here that this is not what you want to do, we want you to just not do it like it's okay to just sit and watch like we please do not pressure yourself to do it, but there's still like a lot of social pressure sometimes, even if you're trying really hard to make sure this doesn't happen, like, say you go, this is your first time and you're really excited.Aella: And then you get there and you realize, wait a second, I don't actually want to do this, but you don't want to disappoint the host because you're not supposed to think you're really cool. And so you like, kind of like force yourself to, you know, Deal with something that you didn't want to actually. So in attempting to avoid this, we mostly try to invite people who have independently expressed interest in like C N C without trying to get to this party.Aella: So we, so we asked for referrals for people who know somebody who has [00:06:00] established already experience or, or like, clear this is what I wanted beforehand. So we try to separate those incentives a little bit,Malcolm: as much as possible, once we talk a lot of, a lot on our podcast status hierarchies and how they can emergently form. Do you notice any sort of like emergent status hierarchy forming within these? Is it based on like how dominant someone is sexually or is it based on something else?Aella: So, okay, so, so this is a little bit interesting because in a typical orgy you have like women who are doing refusals, but in this kind of orgy in general, you mostly don't have women doing refusals.Aella: Because it's just, it's just a free for all, right? Like, and so what's interesting is that, like, if you remove, like, female choice from a sexual dynamic, like, what happens? And so you have, like, it's a little bit I hadn't thought about that. Because, like, if you're not getting fucked by anybody, it's because all of you, like, they're all busy f*****g the other women.Aella: Yes. So it's an interesting, like, [00:07:00] distribution thing, and it's like, it can be a little bit difficult to handle. So what's, ISimone: want to know, so at an orgy versus a CNC party, is there a different male to female ratio that isAella: ideal? Right. At a typical orgy, you want two women per oneSimone: man, generally refusals.Aella: Yeah, and like women are more likely to be bisexual and like, you want like enough women to like pad out that like at least one woman is going to be down, but it's the reverse for C and C orgies. You want two men to one woman. Yeah. Oh, thatMalcolm: is fascinating. Okay. So here's the question. The, the, the people who the men are choosing in these totally unrestricted environments because they're choosing whoever they want.Malcolm: Is it different than who people might expect? Like, does it change within the different environments? Who the men are targeting? Is it the most generally attractive people? Is it the highest status people in society? Is it people who they knew? Like what's It's,Aella: it's hard [00:08:00] to tell because there's other factors at play, but my general sense is, yeah, it corresponds to like how generally attractive people are.Aella: Like there's one girl who comes to these, who I think is. I've heard from men it's like, oh, this is like the hottest girl and she just getsMalcolm: like slaughtered each time. It's like a lie. IAella: want to have sex with her though and I'm like, okay.Simone: Okay.Aella: Noted. Noted. Yeah. So you kind of like become really face to face with like your ranking in a sense, which is nice to have lots of men because if you just have a surplus of men f*****g you all the time, then you don't have to do the thing where you're sitting on the sidelines kind of feeling.Aella: Disliked or something. Yeah. I feel like this is kindSimone: of like the worst nightmare of the being picked last for softball or something like challenge of like, nobody wants to take theMalcolm: last to be raped non consensually . That is the, just not as interesting. Well, actually this is this because I'm thinking [00:09:00] like, what are you trying to simulate here?Malcolm: Like, like historically, like what would've. And it would've been like a village raid or something like that. And now I'm actually thinking about the psychological distress of the one woman in the village who wasn't raped during the raid. I just,Aella: oh my God. Yeah, and to be fair, there are other factors, right? Yes. Like some people have things on their badges, like some people have like certain preferences, so it's not a perfect one to one. Like definitely like the first time I think I'm like, Not that ugly, but like the first orgy basically nobody fucked me and I was like,Simone: But isn't it, did it be because of your status?Simone: They're like, well, I don't want to embarrass myself in front of senpai. Yeah. Like it would be, I'd be so nervous,Malcolm: you know, like, how did you adapt to that?Aella: I mean, it's okay. Like I think, I think two people had sex with me or something like that. And I was a little disappointed, but this is also a problem of.Aella: It's, it's not just that like men are going for the hottest women first [00:10:00] or whatever. There's like a thing where make it really tired. Like if you're doing one, if you're role playing some sort of struggle scenario, which is really fun. Yeah. And if you're a guy that's just like to do this, like a bunch of women is, it's a lot nicer in fantasy than it is in reality.Aella: You should like yourSimone: beach body, but also your CNC party body. You got to like train for it. You know,Aella: there's also people are weirdly bad at bondage. So like the first orgy, we prefer like, Oh, we'll give some ropes or whatever it gives, you know, you want to make it easier. If you're simulating, like if you're doing the role play, where like you actually are trying not to be fucked, it's just exhausting to try to actually like get somebody down and you need to like coordination from other men.Aella: But like, for example, our first orgy, we didn't have that many men because we were trying to go by normal orgy rules. So like, It was just like guys were getting tired out left and right. Nobody could tie anybody up. I'm just picturing like all these peopleSimone: just looking winded, like sitting around in this like very sexy looking [00:11:00] scenario.Simone: But I was just like, just,Malcolm: just all these exhausted men just like used up by theAella: succulences. But I mean,Simone: actually, this is really interesting because you never really think about when you need to learn how to like quickly hog tie someone, no one's practicing this. And now I'm like, if this catches on, , that there are going to be some barrier, like , seminars for like, okay, really quickly how to handle this, ,Aella: Well, well, we did update, so the next orgy we switched to like, Velcro handcuffs, for example.Aella: Oh, smart. Which we like the pre latched onto various points in the room. And then, then it became much easier because it's also safer. Like, like bondage is good. You have to be careful to make sure you're doing the correct ties to not excel restrict blood flow. Right, right. So it's better in like a.Aella: frantic chaotic orgy environment just like have we'll just velcro and we have like uh stocks like we got like mobile devices you can like clamp around somebody's Anyway, it's easier nowMalcolm: Skill at these various tasks determine Their position was any sort of local hierarchy was in this group or is it [00:12:00] largely irrelevant?Aella: It's been hard for me to determine hierarchy among males, cause I'm usually pretty distracted.Aella: But like, talking to I think if we, which is one thing I'm really curious about. . One orgy I'm really interested in throwing is one that like tries to actually simulate mate guarding more, where it's like you gain a point for every woman you f**k, and then you lose a point.Aella: If a man f***s a woman that you have fucked before. Just to see, like, if that actually creates a male dominance hierarchy based on the males that are, like, more efficiently able to control females. Just to see if we can replicate a primal environment, you know? I like that.Simone: But that's even more exhausting for the guys.Simone: Now I'm just, like, thinking about this and I'm like... If I were a guy, I'm not excited.Malcolm: This is too much. No, no. I'm thinking genuinely about going to one. Like, if I was going to go to one of these, my core thing would be like, how do I not look like a fool? And when you're asking, how do you not look like a fool?Malcolm: What you're really asking yourself is how do I ensure I don't [00:13:00] look like I'm at the bottom of the local dominance hierarchy? And so I think guys at these events are probably actually really sensitive to how their actions are perceived by the group writ large. And I think a lot of male sexual activity is as driven As much by how it reflects on their self image as it is by any sort of primal desire, which probably really you talk about the level of work that's going into this.Malcolm: I find that just really fascinating. Well, butSimone: I think what's more interesting, Ayla, is what you're talking about with male camaraderie. Like, I'm always like, I'm thinking back to like the raid scenario in which like, oh, is this kind of how like guys like bonded in the past? Like guys night out, like we're going to rape and pillage a village.Simone: And this is like. Oh, we feel so much closer now. I don't know. Like, did you, do you feel more of a sense of, of bonding or competition or is it both? Like they're in,Malcolm: in. Oh yeah. Yeah. And the women in the group, do you notice competition or like you feel like less camaraderie?Aella: I haven't noticed any competition with the women generally because there's not really much opportunity to interact at all.Aella: As some of the women, we do have a few.[00:14:00] But I haven't, but it's like not enough to really notice trends. But generally, generally you're just like, you know, my experience has been, I don't know what the f**k is going on. There's just like penises everywhere, which is really nice. I really like that. But with, with a lot of camaraderie.Aella: So like we have, so there's rules about like engagement. Right. So for example if you're a man and you're like having sex with a woman, How should it work? But should the norms be if another man wants to come on and like stick his penis into the woman's face, right? Like, like what if the guy who's like doing the f*****g like really isn't interested in a threesome?Aella: Like that's like a boundary for him. He just doesn't want like another man in his sexual space, right? So we have to figure out norms for this. And right now our norm is like you ask like, hey, do you need a hand? And if you're a guy I like that. Like banging someone or like trying to wrestle a woman down, then you can say, yeah, I do need a hand.Aella: And then now you've got both guys. you know, taking out all of you together. It's very nice. VerySimone: sweet. That does feel like camaraderie. Yeah. What,Aella: what do the various risks, like,Simone: so the physical things that people are wearing, [00:15:00] like wrist bands, what will they, aside from like, I'm in, I'm okay with dudes, I'm okay with women.Simone: Like what else do they signify? So far we're keepingAella: it really simple. Because we're trying to do something where you don't have to like stop, we don't, we want to reduce room for mistakes. We want to make it so that if you're in the pit of bodies, you don't like forget that one color means one thing.Aella: So historically, we're just like, what gender are you open to? Though this next round, we're going to be trying Because I want to see if we can expand this orgy into sort of a free use thing. Because some people aren't super interested in a resisting experience. They want to just, like, kind of be taken and then just have normal sex with whoever just initiates.Aella: So I want to see if we can expand it to include both. So we're going to have wristbands that indicate, like, do you expect to give resistance or not? That way, like, men can pick if they want to go for somebody, whether it's going to be a struggle or just somebody who anticipates. Of course, it's not required.Aella: Like, you might change your mind in the middle.Malcolm: That's really, I think that's a good thing to do. Because if I went to one of these parties and somebody didn't [00:16:00] resist, I'd be very disappointed. So... More easily sortAella: for, for. Right. Yeah. And cause maybe you do your sausage at the end of the night. Maybe you're not.Aella: Yeah. And then are the glow sticks. This is another problem. Wait, glow sticks? So we tried to color wristbands, but it turns out like the lights are low for mood lighting. We have like colored lights and it made it actually, and they were, they're like paper, like standard wristbands that you get. And they're kind of like getting like crushed and turned over and it was a little dark.Aella: So it wasn't easy to tell immediately. And so. We're going to switch to a glow stick system where we can get, so it's really obvious. IMalcolm: like that. I also love the idea that a women, you know, if you, if you do this, like the, I'm going to resist, I'm going to not resist. The value of each category of woman changes dynamically throughout the night with the non resisting women becoming higher value the longer the night goes on and the more exhausted the men become.Malcolm: You'll see the women who are being left out change throughout the course ofSimone: that is interesting. [00:17:00] Okay, wait. So, optimal temperature. What isit?Aella: Pretty cool. You want it a little bit cooler. We have a lot of blankets set out and pillows. Oh. And then you want a little bit cooler just because it gets sweaty.Simone: Music or no music? WeAella: historically have had music in the background, which is a funny choice because you're like, which music should I? Yeah. Which live should I set? Yeah.Simone: So or vocal? Instrumental, I'm assuming.Aella: We used to do kind of like jivey backgroundSimone: stuff. Okay do people start out clothed or not?Aella: Start out clothed and Oh yeah, because that's kind of like not show up in things that you don't want to get destroyed, you know?Malcolm: In the movies, when people are going to these, they always have like black robes and are like inconspicuous. In reality, is it like normal street wear? Or isAella: it? Do you dress up?Aella: We do. The last one we tried a theme a little bit, like, you can show up in like in a costume and the theme was funnily, like a dark ritual theme. Oh, fun! Okay, so we're getting a little bit [00:18:00] of a stereotype. It'sSimone: true. I think a lot of people are like,Aella: oh, thank God. But the next one is mad science. So it'sSimone: like mad science appearance.Simone: No! Oh my god, lab coat and nothing beneath. Hello! This isAella: going to be so, oh my god.Malcolm: So I want to go into the torture parties now. Yeah, we can't, weSimone: can't touch, yeah, torture buffet, yeah, what's going on? Yeah, traditional buffet isAella: super fun. Historically, it had great party ratings. It's, it's not sexual.Aella: It's not as scandalous as it sounds. Basically, it's a party, and when you come, you have to bring torture to share. And it's basically any sort of uncomfortable experience. It can be like, Something that smells really bad or like maybe, you know, like hand claws or like some people do electrocution one person did like you kneel on grits because it's really painful.Aella: I have to slap people like one torture was somebody who like put clips on you as they whisper into your ear accounts of incentive line that they went poorly like in economics. Oh, [00:19:00] like where like historically governments have been like policies that backfired. That'sMalcolm: good. Is there, is there a drinkingAella: at these parties?Aella: That one, yeah. The torture. I mean, it's, it's not like a lot of drinking. It's just like you get cocktails or whatever. And that one's nice because you get to experience like a smorgasbord of interesting unpleasant sensations. And it's really bonding for the people you're doing it with. Cause like you're both together, like, all right, we're going to try and experience like being uncomfortable for a second.Aella: And like one person guides the other person through the experience. It's really delightful. OneMalcolm: of my favorite Ayla moments was when you were on Twitter asking people how to properly waterboard someone. Safely. You're like, does anyone have experience with this? I'd really like to bring this to the next torture buffet.Malcolm: Twitter,Simone: s**tMalcolm: a brick. What's an interesting dynamic you don't think about that you actually have to go out, you know, if you're trying a torture, you have to know how to do it safely. So you have to go out there and read torture literature.Aella: Yeah, we haven't [00:20:00] actually had too many dangerous tortures.Aella: Recently, but like, for example, with electrocution, you want to make sure you only electrocute like the waist or downwards, just, you know, stuff, basic stuff like that. Oh, But in general, the tortures are pretty like milder fun. Like somebody brought little Legos to walk on, you know, like,Simone: Oh, that's good.Simone: That's good. Classic parent torture. OhMalcolm: my gosh. Another thing that I've been thinking about, from this conversation is the types of sex parties that I hear about. From older movies, from, like, our, our parents generation. Oh, of course. Or I wonder if they were, moral panics, or if they ever actually happened. Like, key parties, right? Where, like, you would go to a party, and everyone would put their keys in a bowl, and you'd pick out a key, and then you'd be sleeping with wh wh whoever's key you'd randomly picked out or something?Malcolm: Oh. Or, or lock parties. Any of these weirder party designs, have you heard of these really happening? Or are they just fantasies?Aella: I wouldn't be surprised if they do actually happen. So one, gay communities, a lot more stuff happens there. [00:21:00] They are way more experimental. I can easily see it happening in a gay community, and then, like, legends percolate.Aella: But two, like, I think, like, for example, this is an example, that I am throwing these weird parties, and this would probably consider a similar degree to a key party, where you're like, Having sex with somebody you didn't choose. But even before I did this, when I was doing this, I'd like to try and really hard.Aella: Is anybody else doing this at all? And I was really searching. Nobody else was, butAella: there used to be one that was thrown in the Bay area called hostage parties. And it was like a slightly different setup, but they had basically like there are hostages and you have to go out and like get information from the people who are. Tied up and it's like a game like who's gonna break first who truly has the information who doesn't And those seem really fun, but they I guess the guy who ran it died of covid And so it just stopped like during covid basically.Aella: Oh my gosh IMalcolm: can think of a weird interesting party that happened at my college. Which was along the lines It was called the anything for money party it was held by the Business Society. Everybody started with a certain amount of tokens, which counted as money.Malcolm: And you would try to [00:22:00] end up with the most tokens at the end of the night through negotiation or you know, trading things that you had. And the people who won got, like, a car and, like, a large screen TV. Back when a large screen TV was worth a lot of money. And so, of course, it just turned into exchanging tokens for sex party.Simone: The fastestMalcolm: way to try to get the car, you know? Yeah, that's great. Yeah.Simone: So like what, like the hottest people, like they're the most entrepreneurial, like thatMalcolm: would actually be very interesting for one of your parties as well, a token exchange party where,Simone: but I don't know, like it just seems like a lot of work.Simone: I don't, I don't know. All these seemAella: like a lot of work. Like, if you can't exchange the tokens for a thing at the end, like, would it technically run afoul of prostitution law?Simone: Mmm.Malcolm: Oh, yeah, that's a good point.Malcolm: . Or there's other interesting things you could do, which is... Have the prizes still be determinate on chance, but your, your odds increase the more [00:23:00] tokens you have at the end of the night. So it's like a sortition system where each of the tokens counts as an individual, like slip of paper with your name on it.Malcolm: So if you had six tokens, six slips of paper with your name on it going to the bowl. And then at the end of the night, somebody takes one slip of paper from the bowl. And so it still allows anyone to potentially win. So you never feel like you're counted out because I think if you did it without this system, people would feel like, okay, I'm definitely not gonna have any chance of winning this.Malcolm: So I'm just not really gonna play for that type of game. But this way, everyone would still always be incrementally motivated.Simone: What I'm taking away from this is basically some of the fantasy is real, which I think is wonderful. And that like, there are sometimes dark robes and like people dressing up a little bit.Simone: But what everyone's missing is the planning, the consideration, the careful invites. The vetting, the safety talk, the, you know, like, the wrist pins. And I just, I also just love that, like, the name of the most recent TNC party you threw was Red Means No. It's like, throwing a, a skydiving party, which [00:24:00] is , like, pull, pull cord for parachuteAella: party.Aella: It's like, the oneSimone: thing you really need to not forget, we're calling it that.Malcolm: It's great. But I, I also like, and I hope that this. you know, SEO wise serves as this, that this is the person people need to come to when they are writing shows where a sex party takes place. Because I think that these need to be much more accurate in my teen dramas and a great consultant.Aella: Normal sex party is a lot easier. There's a way more logistics that go into a CNC event. It's like taking drugs. I don't know if you, if how, how the audience is familiar, but like, if you're doing psychedelics, you want to set everything up beforehand because it's like choices revoked during the trip, right?Aella: Your judgment is off. You can't like, if somebody comes to the door, you can't like make a decision. Then you have to make sort of everything for you where the rest of it just falls through. That's very much like that. Whereas normally, normal sex parties, you can, like, re evaluate what's going on in the middle of it.Aella: You don't have to expect new norms for the [00:25:00] entire party.Simone: You're operating here at, , pro level. I think you may be forgetting just how, even for, a normal sex party, how much you're also, , doing insane levels of vetting and planning. I mean, because you still have to consider, , are people coming in with good faith?Simone: Are they going to respect boundaries? Yeah. Or are they, are they, , even, , mentally really ready to, , be in, in a group sex environment, , even if they may act like they want to, , I think you're already super considerate about that, , now you can take it to the level of C& C, but,Malcolm: like, Well, if other people were doing this, she would know.Malcolm: And she said, you know, you did the research, you did the homework, and you had a hard time finding anyone doing else anything, like, interesting like this. Because itSimone: takes so much work. It's aAella: ton of work. Well, I also think it's like really controversial for the current environment, like, even I, I caught wind a little bit of like some of the kink communities were talking negatively about the party we're throwing now.Aella: Like the impression I've gotten is that like the kink parties have like a hierarchy of like kink experience. Like you have to be established in the kink community. community to be able to be [00:26:00] like, granted the social authority to be able to throw any sort of like high risk party at all. And so the fact that I'm a complete outsider when it comes to like, I'm not involved in kink scene whatsoever.Aella: I'm just not really interested. And so, so I think I'm like subject to a higher level of criticism.Malcolm: It makes a lot of sense whenever I've engaged with the kink scene, my, my perception of it has been that it is just like. I just associate it with bureaucracy. Whenever I'm around it, I'm like, Oh, it's, it's bureaucracySimone: day.Simone: No, it reminds me a lot of Six Sigma corporate people who are like I'm level like this, they're like, what courses have you taken? I've just spent a lot of time building this special rig, , like it's a lot about gear and it's a lot about rules.Simone: Portlandia.Simone: Or like D& D teams spending like five hours, like making out their character sheets instead of necessarily engaging in the pursuit that is the subject. ButMalcolm: what I think is really indicative here is that culturally, the way that you're putting this together, I bet is a very different experience than if it was put together by the traditional kink [00:27:00] community.Aella: Yes, this is, this is my guess. My guess is that there's like a greater social fear or something of doing C& C stuff. Because the NC stuff is like increasingly taboo. Because like, consent is such a big, people harp on consent, which to be clear, I'm also big on consent, like, we also harp on this, like, because the consent rules are not changed whatsoever.Aella: It's just the word changes, that's it, and you get to like, roleplay it. There's no actual assault going on.Simone: Yeah, it's a CNC party, not an NC party.Aella: Period. It's very much consensual. But I think that like, even the fact, I think like, even roleplaying it is a little bit too taboo for a lot of these people.Aella: Just really, they're afraid of like normalizing it, you know, like, Oh, like we can't like talk about it positively without a lot of judgment. And I don't think this is everybody obviously, but my guess is it's like some sort of cultural flavor here is like infiltrating the general vibes.Simone: That's really rough considering the number of.Simone: Women especially who are [00:28:00] like actively aroused by non consent, period. Like, and also like real non consent. Cause we looked at that in our survey. It never gets real high. Like IMalcolm: should clarify for the audience. This is not like a like a weird fetish thing. This is like 30, 40% of the population or something.Malcolm: Like, I can't remember from our data, but it's not like a, a, Oh, Oh, you're a weirdo. It's, it's probably, yeah. Yeah.Simone: For our book, The Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, when Malcolm did his survey on Positly. He, he had a question of like, how much does the concept of rape play arouse you? But then right below, how does the concept of actual rape arouse you?Simone: They're like, make no ambiguity. Like, this is really obvious. We're talking about the real thing. And a huge number of people were like, yeah, yeah, actual, actual rape. Like super hot.Simone: Ayla, thank you very much for satisfying my immense curiosity on this because I watched so many smutty girly shows where this is depicted.Simone: I just want to know the real story. Where should people follow you go if they would like to learn more about your research and your work?Aella: Yeah, my [00:29:00] Twitter is Ayla underscore girl, A E L L A underscore girl. And my general website, which has links to all of the things is knowingless. com. It's like K N O W, knowingless.Aella: com. I also have a blog post. Where I explain the logistics of the CNC parties and at the end, there is an application.Simone: So we will link to that in the show notes because that is a really good read. I've read it. I love it. And I love talking about this too. Thank you so much, Ayla. Yeah, my pleasure. ThankAella: you. 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

Join Malcolm and Simone as they delve into a fascinating discussion about the role of genetics, culture, and sociology in influencing human behavior, specifically related to extremism. In this discussion, they explore how twin studies can shed light on the genetic underpinnings of sociological profiles and delve into why religiosity might not be the main factor behind certain societal phenomena. They touch on the concept of the "right-wing authoritarian personality" and its prevalence across both political spectrums. With a deep look at the factors influencing high birth rates, the duo illuminates the significance of outgroup hatred and comfort with hierarchy. This conversation draws intriguing connections between cultural fidelity, fertility rates, and political polarization, ultimately discussing the impact of selective pressures on societal evolution.Based Camp: The Big Plan what the Pronatlist Movment is Really AboutMalcolm: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. So the thing that we are most known for publicly is our stuff on demographic collapse, collapsing populations, and the effects it'll have on society. Now, this is not something that we have talked about on our podcast as to why we haven't talked about this on our podcast yet. It is because , we've talked about it in a million other interviews in a million other places.Malcolm: Everywhere. Everywhere, yeah. And I figured people coming to our podcast, they don't wanna see it. That, that's, they've already heard this talk before, but now I am realizing from some of the comments that some of the people don't know it and haven't seen it. And so, instead of giving our standard stump speech on this,Malcolm: I wanna engage with this topic more conversationally, the way that we typically do this podcast, because, when I've sat down and tried to do this, this iteration of the podcast before I just end up narrating my stump speech, and then Simone's sitting there not talking, or Simone's doing her stump speech.Malcolm: And so let's see if we can turn this into a conversation.Would you like to know more?Simone: All right, [00:01:00] Malcolm, so, what happened aside from you and ending up living in brothel when you went to South Korea? I.Malcolm: Well, where I always start with, and this was really where I started to, to panic about this, is it'sSimone: actually kind of telling that you were living in a brothel and not like in a maternity word of a hospital.Malcolm: Yeah. Let's talk about living in a brothel. Cause this is part of the story that people dunno. Yeah. So, I had gone to Korea after I graduated from Stanford Business School and I had sent my wife, we had just done a startup together, which we had invested a lot of our money into. Yeah. Google had then hired me and then waited six months to employ me.Malcolm: Yeah. And during that time, the little money we had left after the startup had slowly dwindled to nothing. Yeah. And then you got into Cambridge for your graduate degree.Simone: Yeah. And, and I was also in, in contrast put in a cuz at Cambridge you belong to the university, but then also you belong to a college.Simone: And I'm living in a. The, the Catholic dorm. The Catholic College, St. Edmonds. And here you are.Malcolm: Well, and [00:02:00] it's beautiful dorm. Gorgeous, beautiful. Everything. Anyway, gorgeous. Yeah. So, I mean, I had to find a way to pay for you to, to go there, right? And so I ended up having to drop the contract with Google cuz they couldn't find, I, I don't know what happened.Malcolm: Like they had this system where they used to be able to hire people, but they wouldn't have a position for you. So I left them and I ended up going to Korea, but I had to live as inexpensively as possible to support my wife. So I was actually the director of strategy at the number one early stage firm in the country.Malcolm: And this was by a government survey at the time. Like, they asked all the entrepreneurs where they most want money, think of it's like Y Combinator for Korea. And, and that story actually gets really crazy and interesting. But anyway, so I chose to stay at a place. That was smaller than the room I'm in now.Malcolm: My entire room was, was really small. It was a twin, and then half of the space that a twin would be as a little walking corridor. And then they had a glass cabinet which was just where the toilet was. And then there was a little shower on top of you cuz they didn't have a different space for the shower in the toilet. And one day I remember I was walking back to where I was and, [00:03:00] and, and, and somebody at my firm, they go, no, no, no, no, you gotta stop, stop walking down into that neighborhood.Malcolm: It's a really dangerous neighborhood. And I was like, what are you talking about? They're like, look, if you need to get to the subway, here's the way you could go. And I'm like, I, I, this is the only way I know to get to our live. So I kept walking and then they're like, okay, well you just can't walk, you cannot walk down that particular street.Malcolm: And I was like, look, I know no other way. And they're like, okay, at least I'll accompany you. And then I turned to go down this alley and they're like, actually I. Seriously, there's got to be another way to get to where you live. I even can't follow you down this alley. And this alley is where my apartment was.Malcolm: And what I realized is in Korea, anyone who's been there, like it's such a nice clean place that apparently, like even this like really ghetto area where I was living, to me as, as a somebody from the US felt like really clean and nice. I mean, I guess I should have known given how cheap the apartments were there.Malcolm: But the reason specifically they said is they go, this is where all the brothels are. This is the brothel [00:04:00] street. And I was like, oh. That maybe that's why everyone's so nice to me.Simone: And yeah. And then, but what did you learn? I mean, I mean it's, it's again, it's telling that you are surrounded by people who are maybe interested in sex, but not families. You weren't in enough families. Yeah. You weren't in like a tenement full of crying babies. You were in just aMalcolm: process. But anyway, so to get to the part of the story that people normally hear is, I was working at this firm and there was this one day where, I've got a plan where the country's gonna be in 50 to a hundred years.Malcolm: So I'm, I'm, I'm making this plan, and I'm looking at the numbers and I'm like, well, s**t, there's not gonna be a country in a hundred years. I, if you look at their current fertility rate, which is like 0.79, 0.8, depending on what you're looking at, that means for every hundred Koreans of life today, there will be 6.4 to like 5.9 great-grandchildren.Malcolm: And this number is decreasing almost every year. So it's almost certainly gonna be less than that. And you can't survive [00:05:00] in the country if you're looking at like a 93% population collapse over the next century. Your e economic systems fundamentally ceased to work. And I went to the other partners in my firm and I was like, Hey, This is a problem.Malcolm: Like I, I, I don't understand how there is a future to the Korean economy and they're like, oh yeah, we all know this. Like everyone in the country, like in the financial class knows this. We just pretend like it's not true because the entire economy stops working. The moment we recognize this, and this is something people often don't understand, they're, I mean, what do you mean the entire economy starts working?Malcolm: So here I need to explain how debt works because it's this miraculous thing when things are growing. If I'm making a $10 investment and $8 of that investment is debt, and $2 of that investment is equity and it grows by just 10%, my equity investment has actually grown by 50%. If it shrinks by just 10%, my equity investment has decreased by 50%.Malcolm: We have leveraged [00:06:00] our land, our businesses, our houses, our families, our students, our cities, our states, our nation states, literally. It's not like we've taken out leverage on one thing in the economy. We have taken out leverage on literally every layer of the economy, which was beautiful in terms of the prosperity it provided while everything was growing.Malcolm: But the problem is, is everything was only growing in the developed world because the number of workers and consumers was growing exponentially., but the productivity per worker was growing linearly.Malcolm: When I came back to the US it was like traveling back in time 20, 30 years because we, in the US at our current rate of fertility collapse are about where Korea was in the mid nineties when I'm talking about the rate of fertility collapse in chorea, I can use fixed numbers, the current fertility rate to talk about how scary things get.Malcolm: But if I'm gonna talk about it in the US because we're still early [00:07:00] in the collapse process, I need to project forwards what the fertility rate's going to be. So if the US fertility rate continues to decline at the same rate it has over the past 10 years going forwards, and we have one generation every 30 years, that means for every hundred Americans alive today, there will be 4.3 great-grandchildren.Malcolm: So we are looking at it absolutely catastrophic collapse in the US if we can't get things under control.Malcolm: So I think we need to ask ourself, , who has this under control? Which groups are persistently resistant to this? And it's the groups that deviate most from the mainstream society, but also the groups with the most hope for the future. So if you look around the world, yes, generally the wealthier a country is the lower its fertility rate is going to be, but you will see some noticeable differentiations from that.Malcolm: For example, you have the US and Israel, which have unusually high fertility rates, and then you have countries like the block countries in China, which have unusually low, [00:08:00] demographic rates for their economic situation. , what appears to be the case here is the less hope. A country has, and the more people feel like they are only having kids to service an economic elite, the fewer kids they're going to have, where you can really see this play out is the one real, , counter to this rule of no country ever gets its demographics back up again happened in Georgia, which.Malcolm: Began to happen in 2013 after they kicked out the last of the, communist, former rulers and, , moved to total self-management. And then you had this rapid reversal infertility rates because people began to feel like they had hope again, and that they weren't just having kids to be like a grist for some machine that didn't care about them.Malcolm: But I wanna hear how you began to engage with some of these ideas. Simone,Simone: what really blew my mind was when you thought to ask Spencer Greenberg to borrow some survey data that he had to find what traits correlated with families that were having a lot of [00:09:00] kids. Because the big question we had was, all right, well, I.Simone: If a lot of cultures are just going to be extinguishing themselves, like in South Korea, like which cultures on the flip side of that are going to be inheriting theMalcolm: future? . Yes, because we don't believe that. Just a collapsing world economy is a reason to bring kids into the world.Malcolm: We alsoSimone: will, we also believe it's expected that there will be a collapse in world economy. Right. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. So the bigger question is, okay, so that's gonna happen. I, I mean, ideally nations will plan for a little bit better. We're trying to make that a, a possibilityMalcolm: by advocating that's a, a big purpose of our foundation.Malcolm: Yes. A lot of people see us as like, we're more like a. A climate change organization that's like climate change is gonna happen no matter what we do, we should start, let's prep planning around it at this point.Simone: Yeah. But then on, on the flip side, it's also really important to just look beyond that, to look to the distant future of, of what will the future of humanity look like in the face of this If, if there is isn't intervention.Simone: If there isn't an intervention, if there isn't an intervention, what we can expect is a [00:10:00] cultural mass extinction. And then the question is, okay, well if there's a cultural mass extinction, will it lead to like, A smaller but maybe super diverse ecosystem that then grows from there, which is kind of what we'd be cool with.Simone: Or is it gonna end up with a monoculture anyway, wewellMalcolm: explain what you mean. So, I mean, first I'm gonna say our naive assumption going into this is that most cultural groups that weren't religious would die off, and most cultural groups that were religious would, would stay. Yeah. And individual religiosity would be reinforced because , the amount, not a person's religion, but their amount of religiosity is highly heritable when you look at twin studies.Malcolm: So these are so there's different ways of doing this. You can do this using polygenic risk scores, but you can also do it using twins who are separated at birth, identical twins. Mm-hmm. And then contrast them with fraternal twins who were separated at birth and raised by different families. So, they're the same ethnicity, they're, they're in other ways, very similar to each other.Malcolm: What's. The only thing that would really cause this difference is if it was in some way associated with genes. This is how you can get an idea of how much of a person's [00:11:00] sociological profile within a specific metric is genetic. Anyway, so I was like, okay, so what this is probably gonna do is select for religiosity and both culturally and likely genetically, And that's not what we found.Malcolm: And so up until that point, we hadn't really been freaked out because like, I like religiosity, people might, I'm, I'm fairly pro reli religiosity. I, I think our family, while we are like technically secular, we are like religious extremists and we live kind of like religious extremists and we practice our life kind of like religious extremists and almost all of our friends are religious extremists.Malcolm: So, yeah. And weSimone: should be clear, religiosity doesn't mean necessarily that someone believes in God or adheres to a specific religion. Religiosity is fervency of faith in something. So some of the most religious people are actually atheists. You'll, you'll know Cause they'll, they'll tellMalcolm: you, well, this is, this is why I should have known this wasn't true.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. If you hung out with skeptic communities or in online spheres, what you'll know is that many of the, the, the people in these communities used to be some of the biggest fire brands before de converting. And when I think about [00:12:00] my daily life, when I think about like the sociological profile of religiosity, I haven't been preached to by a Christian in like 10 years.Malcolm: Yeah. I get accosted on the streets by progressive extremists with their preaching, every other week. So the, it it's clear that this mind virus in our society is uniquely good at peeling out people from these cultures, was a high level of sociological religiosity.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. But I'd love you to go into the data and what we found, Simone.Simone: So what we did find correlated highly with high birth rates is outgroup hatred or dislike. So this is people responding to questions, asking if they'd be cool, if like one of their kids dated someone of a different race or cultural group.Simone: And also a very keen comfort with hierarchy and like high power distance. So really what you're looking at is xenophobic. Authoritarians. Right? I mean, that's kind of like the, so ifMalcolm: you look at it, it's something called right-wing authoritarian personality. You can look it up on Wikipedia. There's a topic of [00:13:00] this and it's actually highly heritable as well.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Which, is done using polygenic data. It's, is like all these other things. So it is something that can be condensed within a population if it is really genetically successful, which is showing itself to be right now. And yeah. And it makesSimone: sense. Like, I mean, in the end we were like, oh duh.Simone: Like of course it's not religiosity because religiosity isn't going to maintain cultural fidelity. What will maintain cultural fidelity is not, not allowing your people to consider outside ideas. Like that is a kind of a big thing. More authoritarian cultures are gonna keep people in, have strict rules.Simone: Yep. A, a degradation or erosion of rules and discipline is one of the things that causes a hard culture to become a soft culture. And soft cultures are those that are most likely to see their fertility rates degrade over time because there's basically less motivation to do anything difficult. AndMalcolm: So the right-wing authoritarian personality is not actually a rightwing thing.Malcolm: It's seen equally in both extremists on the right and extremists on the left. This is what, if you're a left-wing person, [00:14:00] makes you Antifa, for example. Just an extreme hatred about groups, unwillingness to listen to anyone else., and a preference for internal hierarchical structures in the dehumanization of, of, of people who aren't like, everything that I, I think anyone really who is honest about what Antifa really stands for.Malcolm: I mean, it's the fascist organization that just labels itself, anti-fascists. It's like the Patriot Act lame itself as patriotic when it is anything but patriotic. But anyway, so, so you have these Antifa goon type personality clusters, which is going to increase. So why is it called the right wing authoritarian population cluster?Malcolm: It's called that because it was named by professors at universities who saw all these traits as negative and like were unable to see them in their own ideological faction. But since then, other professors have gone looked at this and found that it actually is present in leftist extremists as well. So essentially what you're getting is this personality cluster that creates dangerous ideological extremists is, is what's being culturally and genetically selected for in our [00:15:00] society right now, not religiosity.Malcolm: And again, this makes sense, right?What's really cool is you can see this phenomenon happening in real time. If you look at the period where fertility rates started collapsing in the U S and then you lay that over voting patterns. You can begin to see the two parties shift further and further apart. Due to this new pressure in both the cultures and sociological profiles that are being selected for which I think can give us some idea of how quickly.Changes. Selective pressures like this can be represented in major real world events. And this is not an older phenomenon either. It's, it's continuing to happen as can be seen in , this other graph here.Is it likely that Selective pressures like this is solely to explain this phenomenon? No, very unlikely. There's likely a number of other pressures that are causing this cultural drift we're seeing here. However, it is very interesting that the phenomenon would predict that we would see this in the [00:16:00] data. And it's also something we see in the data at exactly the time we would predict it.Simone:Simone: right.Simone: So it makes a lot of sense that these cultures would be like this because cultures that are more porous, more capable of losing people are going to lose them and to degrade into other cultures or lose their culture or lose their populations. Those cultures that kind of have these, these high walls around them, these, these barriers are going to be,Malcolm: well also personality wise.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So you are somebody who has this religiosity thing this seems to correlate most with like how much you study your culture mm-hmm. How much you study your religion. Mm-hmm. Which isn't actually that protective of staying within a culture. Yeah. Whereas not listening to outsiders and not engaging with outside ideas, that's going to be very protective of staying within a birth culture.Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Like I, I can actually think, so a lot of the most religious people I know have actually switched across many religions over time. Like they've gone from joining the Raj Nation wearing orange and [00:17:00] having really wild names to going to conservative Christian. And so that shows that, that , the religiosity always has been high, but they did move from one culture to another.Simone: Whereas , people who are much more close-minded or unwilling to look at outside ideas wouldn't do that kind of switching,Malcolm: right? But, but so religiosity, high religiosity of people who stay within these, these harder cultures. So what are these hard cultures that you're talking about and why are they useful to fertility rates?Malcolm: Humanity can be thought of as our sociological tendencies, , the aspects of our personality that are predilection one way due to our biology and our genes. This can be sort of as sort of like our firmware or our hardware. Then sitting on top of that are mimetic clusters.Malcolm: Today when we talk about memes, we often talk about memes as infecting an individual and then using that individual to replicate themselves through converting other individuals. But historically mimetic clusters function very differently than that. So what we today call religions and cultures, which in the book the pragmatist guided crafting religion we call cultivars, can be thought of, of these sort of mimetic [00:18:00] clusters that sat on top of our firmware, but was also subject to the same pressures that determined individual fitness.Malcolm: Because mass conversions during early human history were actually fairly rare and occurred only during very specific periods of time. And even when they did occur, often the culture would shift dramatically.Malcolm: Anyway, to get to the main point here, the level to which a person's culture carried with their family over time was really, really high in a historic context. And what that means is that the evolutionary processes could apply to cultures and cultural practices. Which increased individual biological fitness could outcompete cultural practices, which did not increase individual biological fitness.Malcolm: This is how you find things like Judaism and Islam figuring out hand washing, literally hundreds of years before the secular world figured out hand washing, because there were selective pressures on the groups that practice hand [00:19:00] washing rituals that you didn't see in the groups that didn't. And this also has a play in many psychological tendencies that individuals have.Malcolm: Right. So by that, what I mean is wherever you look in the world, whether it's Ramadan or Feast of the Firstborn or Lint, you have these arbitrary self denial rituals, which we now know strengthen the inhibitory pathways in your prefrontal cortex. They make it easier to shut down in truth of thoughts.Malcolm: And, and now the secular world is beginning to figure this out, whether it's juice cleanses or like arbitrary fasting rituals. So these older cultural groups actually did a lot to both increase a person's mental health. While also increasing their fertility. This is why out of pretty much all of these widely successful cultural groups in the world almost all of them have some level of underlying homophobia in them.Malcolm: Yeah. Increases biological fitness, even though it, it decreases individual quality of life. So we're not saying that all of these are, are good things, but you, you will see these patterns begin to exist across cultural groups that [00:20:00] systemically find themselves out competing cultural groups. Mm-hmm. So the tendency to stay within one of these cultural groups that has all of these software, patches that co-evolved with our biology over time, leads individuals to often be psychologically healthier.Malcolm: That's why you see religious individuals almost always being psychologically healthier in sort of big studies done on this. Unless they're like, born, same sex attracted, or something like that, and then you get negative outcomes. But same sex attracted individuals born into religious communities.Malcolm: Have higher fertility rates even today, so it's still optimizing for like technically what was being selected for when some cultures were out competing other cultures. So this tendency to not listen to outsiders and to think less of outsiders is of course going to be protective of people in iterations of these traditional cultural groups.Malcolm: So the iterations of Christianity that were more, open to outsiders, more open to outside ideas. These were the most porous to the virus and the first [00:21:00] to die.Malcolm: They got infected and then the virus started using them to just replicate the virus itself. So let's talk about this concept of the virus. If we think of cultural groups as these sort of evolving entities, Well, there's one strategy for an evolving entity that, that something could optimize itself around.Malcolm: It could say, I actually don't care about increasing an individual's biological fitness. What I'm gonna do is I am going to convert individuals to this new cultural practice. Then I am going to use them to just convert other individuals to this cultural practice. And in fact, having kids is a bad thing because it lowers the amount of time they have to go out and just constantly try to convert other people.Malcolm: Yeah, we'll do another video on the virus and how it works and why it's best thought of as a virus and, and yeah, we'll do that some other time. But anyway, so it began to infect these cultural groups that we're more open, more pro-social, more open outside ideas, and they began to be memetically sterilized.Malcolm: That is what caused the [00:22:00] tendency of this strictly hierarchical I don't like outsiders view to be the most evolutionarily successful view within current human context. When we found that out, that's when we began to panic. That's when we began to be like, oh it's not just religious people like we like religious people.Malcolm: It's a very specific sliver of religious communities that the, the Isis ification of the world is what we say. It's the Isis, like communities not Muslim, Christians, Jews, we all have that are going to outcompete the other groups. And that's where I began to really get worried about the future and began to say, well, is it even possible to create an alliance of deviant cultures?Malcolm: So this is cultures that are resistant to the virus. But that are also pluralistic and open to creating an intercultural alliance mm-hmm. To protect themselves both from the virus, but then eventually from these [00:23:00] other cultural groups that once the virus is self exterminated because it is a self exterminating thing, it's, it's, it's culturally cascading people can't exist into the future.Simone: So, yeah. So the big question is, will the future be a coercion caliphate of some sort, or will a future be a pluralistic diverse ecosystem? And we are hoping for, and fighting for the latter, but we think that without intervention, the former will form.Malcolm: Some of our progressive washers, they may be listening to this like, yeah, but what about a future that's like progressive and humanist and it's like you guys have lost, you are so dead in the cultural group.Malcolm: You're like somebody who's experienced the lethal dose of radiation and, and doesn't know that all their DNA has been scrambled already. Your fertility rates are socra, catastrophically low, your entire social structure. This is why the econom economic thing matters. Because what it means, and this is what I really realized in Korea, is [00:24:00] this dominant cultural group that exists around the world today.Malcolm: I. In New York. So like these cultures differentiate a bit, or London or Paris. It's the rural cultures that really differentiate. It's these weird or the weird religious cultures like in New York, like who's really different In New York, it's the Hispanic Jews, right? Like they're, they're from different cultural groups.Malcolm: But this dominant cultural group, in Korea, I was able to see how it reacted to demographic collapse. Like does it have a state at which it realizes how bad the situation has gotten? And what I learned is it doesn't, it does not have the capacity to react to this. Mm. In fact, it just begins to double down on all of its positions more and more and more.Malcolm: Like in Korea, what, what is it? Was women, the four nos movement. So you can see how Korea, so let's talk about how screwed Korea is already. So not only are they in this horrible demographic situation right now, But in addition to being in a horrible demographic situation, they're already at a point where 60% of their population is above the age of 40.Malcolm: There's basically no way they could solve this. They would need like a massive cultural push. They have spent 20 billion [00:25:00] in like the past, how many years? And it's, it is done almost nothing. And meanwhile, their society, if you look at the people who are most infected with this, this sort of progressive mind virus that exists around the world, well now you've got the the four nose movement, right?Malcolm: Which is women being like, no men, no sex, no engagement. Like that's gonna make the problem for that cultural group even worse. And so what that showed me is, is that. There is no like adaptive ability within this progressive group. They're just going to go extinct. So when we think about the future, what we think about is that the cultural groups that are conservative, that are fighting this mind virus, but want a genuinely pluralistic future, and then the cultural groups that are just like progressives and disguise and are just waiting for their turn to exercise their culture over other people and to try their own shot.Malcolm: I mean, now that the progressives are done trying to erase everyone's individual culture, they get a shot in the sun doing it themselves. And, and they still make good allies for now, but they're, they're clearly not long-term values [00:26:00] aligned with us. However, we also wanna be clear that we don't see them. We don't think any cultural group other than our own it, because obviously as our own cultural group, so obviously we're gonna see this better, but it's like a weird cultural group that's just our family, so it's not like anyone else, but we don't see any cultural group as being intrinsically better than any other culturalSimone: group.Simone: Yeah, like once someone in an interview ask me like, well, do you think there are any groups that shouldn't be breeding? And I'm like, no. Like, I want everyone to be represented in the future. I want more than everyone to be represented. I want new groups to form, but thisMalcolm: is, but this is really important. We do not have, if a group doesn't believe in gender equality, we don't see that as a negative thing, and we don't see that group as needing to be stamped out.Malcolm: Yeah, you do you, however, then people will be like, well, what are you talking about? Like this idea of like xenophobic, like hierarchical groups, so why are you worried about them? Right? Mm-hmm. We're worried about them, not because we see them as worse than other groups, but we do have a vested interest in our own cultural groups surviving for a long time.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And these groups will [00:27:00] try to erase us. Yeah. Like, it is naive to think that I could live in like ISIS controlled territory and maintain broadly the lifestyle I'm maintained today. Mm-hmm. I, and my kids would be killed. I, I can even see this within, the fact that our family, uses things like I V F and genetic selection, like we do a lot of weird stuff.Malcolm: That there are cultural groups in the US where if they had dominant power right now, they would try to erase us as a cultural group. Yeah. And that's why we are interested in this alliance because we understand that we need to create an alliance with the other cultural groups that, either don't exist parasitically, like they don't just exist to take people from healthy cultural groups that are able to motivate fertility in their populations.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. But that also that we will eventually need an alliance to protect all of these cultural groups from the next threat after the progressives have self extinguished themselves. Yeah. Which is the sort of next. Rise of the Nazis, basically. It's gonna be bad, and it's, it is where the future is inevitably going because it's such a [00:28:00] successful strategy in the world today.Simone: Be that's our, that's our tomorrow problem. But anyway, now back to demographic, perhaps more broadly.Malcolm: So the problem that we have as a world is we are going to see population begin to collapse within the developed world. Now, people often say, oh, well can't you use immigrants to fix this? Right? And it's like, well, you do know that, that as of 2019 by the un, that famously inflates these numbers, that even by the UN's own statistic as of 2019, all of Latin America, so Central America, south America and the Caribbean collectively fell overpopulation rate.Malcolm: Were like a, a farmer who is taking water from his neighbors pond to irrigate his crops because he has unsustainable water management practices himself. And you point out that this neighbor's pond is also evaporating and the firm is like, oh, I don't care. It doesn't affect me at all. Affect future generations or something.Malcolm: It's insane. And then they're like, well, yeah, but Africa still has high fertility ratesSimone: right now in the world, countries, [00:29:00] nations that are above repopulation rate typically have a per capita income.Simone: So that is per person on average of below $5,000 a year. So this is an extremely low level of earning, and basically as soon as people in a nation start opting in to the economy, once they start getting jobs, they. Stop having kids. And, and so that means that basically soon as people in, in Africa who are in nations that are below this, this number start to get access to, well, a little more wealth, which presumably we really, really want because it also means better healthcare, better education, better gender equality.Simone: They will stop being able to fuel the rest of the world in terms of supplying a labor force. So it's, it's, I mean, the, the incentive that is created by someone who says, Oh, well just rely on immigration is basically, oh, well, okay. Well we're also kind of incentivized to keep these impoverished nations really impoverished.Simone: CauseifMalcolm: we don't, well yeah, and even if it's not what they mean to create, you're creating an [00:30:00] environment where the developed world's economy becomes completely reliant on preventing Africa from developing. Yeah, exactly. And, and we're using Africa like a human, like, like a, a farm, like a human farm. Like it's really sick when you think about it.Malcolm: Not aSimone: good lesson. Thought we learned that lesson. It's a badMalcolm: look what they're saying. Yeah. I mean, think about what you're saying in the us , the progressive solution to the social security problem is because they didn't put in the effort themselves to have kids.Malcolm: They're gonna import predominantly black people from Africa to support a bunch of non-working, predominantly white people who didn't put in the effort to prepare for the future themselves. Mm. Like, that's not a good look. That's not the not racist plan. Mm-hmm. That's, that's a really bad plan.Malcolm: What we want is a world where somehow we can find a way to make prosper prosperity and broad access to e education compatible with a stable fertility rate. The problem is [00:31:00] for the progressive mindset is this social virus that has so contaminated their thought, that has so homogenized their population.Malcolm: It is not compatible with that thriving, which means some other cultural group needs to be invented and needs to work for that to happen. Mm-hmm. Or one of the conservative cultural groups that exists right now needs to rise to dominance for that to happen. And so what you're saying is, yes, we can win, we can have prosperity wide access to education hopefully even gender equality, but we can't have that and this urban monoculture still existing.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And. And obviously that's an existentially threatening idea to the people who are benefiting from this urban monoculture to this culture's precast, to the people who determine truth for this urban monoculture. And who is that? That's the, the academics. That's the journalists that, that it's true.Malcolm: Right. And you could say, oh, but Ade academia is getting worse and [00:32:00] worse. After academia was infected, it got worse at determining truth. It's the replication crisis has gone up. The amount of money needed. Yeah. Yeah. To get individual things. It is not, academia for the past 20 years is not pre eighties academia, that was a completely different organizational structure.Simone: Heck, we have friends who've decided to discount all medical research post 1950.Simone: So I think there's also so this logarithmic increase in, in bureaucratic bankruptcy in the academicMalcolm: world. Yeah. And, and I think that the scientific method in and of itself is the correct way to approach truth. However, I think that people are really naive if they think that's the way that academia determines truth.Malcolm: Mm. Academia is this weird organic system of citations which are used to determine your position within a status hierarchy and then eddie's that form. Mm-hmm. So this is something we often talk about, which is academic eddies, which is to say if there's a concept. In academia that a lot of people are writing on, there is more incentive for more people to write on it [00:33:00] because, well, it's what your advisor is going to do.Malcolm: So you basically always do your first few research papers on what your advisor does, right? Those are the conferences you attend. Those are the conferences that exist. And so there is a huge disincentive to study anything outside of the zeitgeist. There's entire departments in universities, like the women's studies department that are basically dedicated to getting you fired if you do something that goes outside of the ideological police.Malcolm: So why would you do that? Like what's the incentive to you as an academic? It can be really hard to get a job if you publish something. Like we have academic friends who, who have published just the data and gotten fired for this because, That there's entire departments now dedicated to, to going over everything that's being published by the, the formerly productive parts of academia and then just getting people fired.Malcolm: So this idea that, that I am pre-scientific method, I am anti this weird, broadly new system that we use in academia. And I think what we need is an academic reformation. , this [00:34:00] situation is what the Reformation was. There was a group that said True should best be determined by people who spent their entire life studying it and then have been certified by central bureaucracy.Malcolm: And then another group that said that central bureaucracy is prone to corruption. And then there was the reformation. And then I think post the Reformation, the bureaucracy cleaned itself up. Right. Pretty significantly. Right. And I suspect that after the academic reformation, the academic system might be able to fix itself.Malcolm: And then hopefully then we have two competing parallel knowledge about it all theSimone: better. Yeah. Because competition breeds strength. It's good.Malcolm: Yeah.Malcolm: But I wanna know your broad thoughts on what this means for the future of our species.Simone: What I think people discount. Cause a lot of people kind of don't care. They may not be long-term oriented, and that's not logically inconsistent. I mean, maybe you just don't really care that much about the future or you just are more oriented around problems right now.Simone: But I think the important thing to remember is a lot of the problems that you may care about right now, be it feminism or animal rights or the environment or overall suffering, will also be problems in the [00:35:00] future. And if you do not ensure that your culture is somehow represented in the future, those problems won't be solved after you die.Simone: And so there's a lot of environmentalists to say, I'm not gonna have kids, or I'm not gonna have more than one kid or two kids because that's gonna hurt the environment. But if they end up. Not, not just having few kids, but also raising kids to believe that the world is falling apart, to give them a sense of hopelessness that almost ensures that they won't have kids, or at least have very few kids.Simone: You're almost in, you, you're basically doing what, what you Malcolm have been describing this whole time, which is you're creating , a sterilizing culture, a culture that will self extinguish. And those values just won't be represented. So, we often, for example, get accused of trying to broker in some kind of Handmaid's Tale future coerce women into having kids, which is totally not true.Simone: We really care about reproductive rights and freedom. But what we, we wanna turn around and say is listen, the future that we'll get, if people like you, who hold views [00:36:00] around reproductive rights, who hold views around, women's rights, don't choose to have kids, don't choose to pass your culture on in a sustainable way.Simone: That's what we're getting. Which is, it's really, it's very frustrating because the very people who care about these things are to a great extent, the very people who truly are going to be responsible for this future. It's on them. And, and of course like we feel it's on us because we also wanna, we wanna protectMalcolm: basic, basically Simone is, well, I can keep taking kids from conservative groups.Malcolm: I can keep poaching kids. My culture can survive entirely parasitically off of nearby healthy cultures. What is your response to that?Simone: What that's going to do is ultimately breed cultures that are more resistant to outside incursions, to people taking away or picking off their, their young, essentially.Simone: So, imagine that there's a, a herd of rhinos and poachers come out and, if they can sneak up to a rhino and grab it and take it away [00:37:00] and sell it or whatever. Eventually all of the. Friendly docile, rhinos are going to be removed from the gene pool and you're gonna end up with super aggressive, super paranoid rhinos that charge at everything that moves.Simone: Well, I mean that, that's what we're creating. Yeah.Malcolm: In Japan, like where you had these deer that will like just come up and eat out of people's hands. That's because in Japan they didn't kill the deer that went up and ate out of people's hands. Whereas in, in Europe they did. So our dear are afraid you can do this to, to a human population.Malcolm: And you can actually see this in Amish populations. There's been some interesting studies where they show that the longer a, an Amish family has been within their culture. Mm-hmm. And you see this intergenerationally. Fewer and fewer of their kids leave theSimone: culture. Ah, so there you go.Simone: Be that's our, that's our tomorrow problem. We have a todayMalcolm: problem. That's the tomorrow problem. But no, we live in the last prosperous age for a while. Humanity goes through cycles. Like, people are like, why, why can you so confidently predict a downfall scenario.Malcolm: It's like, you know that this happened before. Mm-hmm. Like you look at Athens, we entered this period where, L G B T began to become accepted. [00:38:00] More women would get more equality. You look at the, the height of the Roman Empire, hedonism would begin to become more common, and then you'd have this collapse.Malcolm: Yeah, we, we keep seeing this in history. Like you see the end of the Renaissance, we are heading towards another collapse and we're seeing all the signs of it. And a lot of conservatives, I think they take this and they say, well, that means like acceptance of L G B T groups is what causes the collapse.Malcolm: And I'm like, no, A collapse is definitionally a decline from a cultural height. Yeah. Okay. That doesn't mean that those things are causing the collapse, but it would be nice. I do think the rise in hedonism, I do think the rise in a lack of self-control does lead to, to collapse. Well, I meanSimone: are isn't it just the suggestion that like when people are given an excuse to go soft and they're given the technology and the amenities by a, a city or a civilization to go soft, then they go soft.Simone: And then when you no longer have humans essentially holding up that civilization, then that civilization crumbles. [00:39:00]Malcolm: Yeah. No, I mean, I, I think, I think you're right. And so what we're trying to do is, is we know that like we are in one of the last prosperous eras, which means we need to accumulate resources for our kids, but also use things like the technology we have that can access large populations to begin to build this cultural alliance network.Malcolm: Mm. That can ensure, because my kids, they're like, you know what? I suppose the future a free internet doesn't really exist anymore because either the virus has taken it over or some fascist group has taken it over. Well then they'd say, why? When you, when you still had the free internet, did you not use it to broadcast the signal?Malcolm: Did you not use it to begin to collect people together? What we're trying to do is create parallel networks. Exactly. Yeah. Parallel communication channels that can begin to function after things do begin this, this process of decline.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So that the next time we have a civilization, so that the next time we have one of these periods of Renaissance, it can be perpetual. Yeah. And the iteration that our culture creates and, and one of the things that we're very fortunate about, and this is always one of our [00:40:00] biggest quotes, is thank God.Malcolm: The forces that are arrayed against us are not as competent as they are malevolent. Because, the, the progressives are self extinguishing. Like we basically need to do nothing other than protect our kids from them. The fascist groups are dangerous. Like they do want to see people like us extinguished eventually they do wanna take our kids often just as much as the progressives do.Malcolm: But they're often technophobic as well. They're often very conservative in how they relate to technology, which makes them out competable by techno folic populations.Simone: Well, yeah, I mean, I, I think one of the futures is a future in which, Kind of like with Jews, they need us because of certain, like economies or businesses that like we do and that they, for some moral or cultural reason cannot do.Simone: If that makes sense. Explain what you mean by that. Well, so like, like, many Jewish groups became powerful because they, for example, were capable morally, religiously of, of being [00:41:00] bankers in, in civilizations where the mainstream culture could morally not earn interest on lent money, for example. Mm-hmm.Simone: And obviously cities benefit when they grow, at least from, from debt and leverage. So we hope to be, to find a way with these little niche cultures that will not be part of the. Dominating culture of that, that inherits the future that will have some kind of technology that is, that is maybe, maybe morally repugnant to the future dominating civilization, but still necessary to it.Simone: So they, they need to keep us around for something and they hate us. They may pogrom us, but they will keepMalcolm: us around. Well, I think what you're missing here and it's really important to clarify this, is every cultural branch, like if you're looking at a cultural evolutionary tree mm-hmm. Has one of these fascist factions within it.Malcolm: We, we call it the isis because I, ISIS is like a, any evoked like it has a lot of emotions evoked with it. People can imagine what we meanSimone: by that. It's an easy shorthand for a religious state [00:42:00] that scares people.Malcolm: Right, right. But what I'm, what I'm saying is well specific type of religious state that scares people, which is the type of religious state that is out-competing others right now.Malcolm: Right? Yeah, yeah. So the point that I'm making is it's unlikely that any one of these is gonna dominate the future. It's likely you're going to have a number of them fighting amongst each other. And that was also true historically, if one of them ever conquered the entire world, they. They don't have to worry about the inefficiencies of not allowing bankers, right?Malcolm: Yeah. Because they control the world at that point. The reason why, for example, all of the European powers still needed the banking class was because they were competing against other cultural groups at the time. And so it mattered much more to them that their group won than the cultural purity of their group.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And this is why you have this thing where you have a pogrom, they'd kick out the Jews and then they'd bring back the Jews when they needed money or something like that. But, but so like we'd love our cultural specialty to be for example, genetic technology, repro tech, artificial wombs, stuff like that.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Because [00:43:00] it, as society becomes more and more infertile all cultural groups will need that more andSimone: more. And, and it'll secretly slink over to us when they have their henrie VII moment.Malcolm: But yeah, I mean, what other thoughts would you have on this right here that you'd want to make sure people understand about our organization?Simone: Basically that, that one day you stumbled into a brothel and that led you to understand that the future of the human race, that the future of anything you value depends on your ability to loveMalcolm: well. So what she means by that, and this is also something we can talk about, was in our broader framework, which I think is really important to understand how we see the world.Malcolm: When I was in Korea, something that kept shocking me is I'm like, this population will be, 6% of what it is today in a hundred years. Like, how are they gonna deal with all of the empty buildings? How are they gonna deal with all that? Are they gonna import people? Are they gonna, it's like, well, they can't import people from Japan cuz they're also collapsing.Malcolm: They can import [00:44:00] people from China because they're also collapsing. Hmm. And less than a hundred years ago, Japan went in. Killed millions of people to try to push their culture, because historically that was the way you pushed your culture through war,Simone: through conquest, et cetera,Malcolm: through conquest.Malcolm: And you could see Russia, attempting something like this. Now, this isn't the only reason that they're, they're in this war right now. Of course. Yeah. The last time that they controlled Ukraine, they did make everyone speak Russian. That is what they taught in the school system. They did teach that you are actually Russians, like Ukraine is a fictional concept.Malcolm: This is something Putin has said, which is basically saying, I want to push our Russian culture on this actually very closely aligned cultural group. Yeah. Which is an insane way to try to spread your culture when both Russia and Ukraine have desperately low fertility rates. The groups that are going to win in the future are not the groups that are best at.Malcolm: War, which historically was, was the successful strategy. Actually, many of the most successful groups right now are staunchly, pacifist. Look at the Amish, look at the variety in [00:45:00] Israel at least. Um mm-hmm. Most pacifist groups, most very high fertility rates. Yeah. But to an extent, those groups only survive because they have , pro war groups around them to protect them.Malcolm: To pro.Simone: Yep. Exactly.Malcolm: Yeah. And so, so that's not gonna be a long-term successful strategy, but the point being that, in this future that we're going into, you really need to completely change the way you think about geopolitics.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. The way you think about immigration. Even if you're thinking about your own independent cultural group, you are typically better off. For anything that increases the economy of whatever countries you are most present in and anything that decreases the amount of government control those countries try to exercise over your country.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Things like cultural projection through war and stuff like that, they're really largely irrelevant now. In, in terms of, of, of a intergenerational cultural victory. And the groups that are still thinking in those mindsets, they're going to go extinct. Mm-hmm. This reminds me because a lot of people, when you talk [00:46:00] about Accelerationist first non Accelerationist cultures, cultures that try to, to move forward, I mean, we saw this was a collapse as the Western Roman Empire, right?Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Which was as Rome collapsed, some people said, we want to go back to the old ways of doing things. And some people said well, we shouldn't be hedonistic. Like, obviously this sort of broad hedonistic culture that's dominating our urban centers is stupid, but we do need to culturally innovate.Malcolm: That was the Christians, this was this new religion, this new cultural group that was innovating in all these sorts of cool ways that was defining themselves, that was defining, what they were. That was having councils that were thinking about cultural innovation. And then the mystery cults really exploded during this period.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And these were individuals who were going back to the more pagan ways of doing things. And actually both the Christian groups and these mystery cults were growing in the, this same communities. They were growing among military organizations. Hmm.Malcolm: And so they were both actually working with the same populations, but the the groups that said, we need to [00:47:00] go back to the old ways of doing things. They died because the technological and cultural context that they were in had shifted. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's what we're gonna see in the future is I think that the groups that are most interested in innovating themselves to deal with this new cultural context that we're dealing with, are going to be the groups that are ultimately victorious.Malcolm: And what we hope is that there's as much pluralism within those communities as possible, and some sort of pluralistic alliance can form within thoseSimone: communities. Yeah. And I think it's possible. I think today we have technology resources the ability to spark something that didn't exist in the past.Simone: So odds are looking good. There's lots of hope.Malcolm: Yeah. And I can say that the one thing that our organization, we were like, oh, the prenatals, you must move about getting fertility rates up. We're like, that is so done. It's not gonna happen. No one's getting broad fertility rates up, and the problem isn't solved.Malcolm: By doing that, I, I solved nothing by convincing somebody from a, an iteration of like, progressive culture that doesn't wanna have kids to have kids like I I have solved nothing. Where [00:48:00] I have solved something is if there's some weird iteration of progressive culture that for whatever reason is resistant to most of the viral forces and does believe in having kids and does believe in, self denial rituals and does believe in sort of many things that would lead themselves to be natural cultural allies with us.Malcolm: Yeah, they would make a useful ally, but, but the people who are just completely brainwashed, they're completely useless to me. And I think that that's a message that people aren't used to hearing is, is to say, you just don't matter to us. They're like, well, don't you? How do you convince this progressive woman to have a lot of, I don't care.Malcolm: If, if, if she's already from this, this cultural group that sees their entire, like, reason Detra as surviving through parasitizing nearby healthy cultural groups, I, again, we're not like judging them. Like we're not judging them in, in the context of that's a worse way of doing things, but it's an unsustainable way of doing things that makes all of the cultural groups around them worse.Malcolm: Intergenerationally. Yeah. So,Simone: Yeah, you're, you're actually quite right in that they really do kind of poison the other groups [00:49:00] around them in a way that's really messed up.Malcolm: When I say worse I don't mean like worse in an objective sense, I mean more dangerous to my group and more dangerous to a pluralistic mindset because they teach all of the cultural groups around them that pluralism is threatening essentially.Malcolm: Yeah. That being accepting of outsiders is threatening and that's why they are like the ultimate dangerous force from our world perspective. Yeah. But it's also why we don't have really any animosity towards any cultural group, even if they're very different from us. Even if they're like, well, we don't like L G B T populations, we don't like, women.Malcolm: Those are things we believe in, but even groups that don't feel that way. We're like, do what works for you so long as your culture is thriving and you are not using force to force people into your culture, because that's where it gets really dangerous. And that's something we're really against.Malcolm: Or using force to keep people in your culture. That's another thing that we're, we're, we're quite against. So if we could live in a society where everybody's just completing on an equal playing field, the government isn't trying to use its [00:50:00] powers to take money from one cultural group and then use that money to convert people to this sort of dominant monoculture.Malcolm: But also nobody is with guns forcing people to convert or threatening people to convert, or threatening people to stay in their culture. I think that's the ideal cultural ecosystem that we're trying to create because we believe that our culture can survive within that ecosystem. Yeah. And thrive within that ecosystem.Malcolm: And we would encourage every culture that thinks that they can thrive within an equal playing field that they should want to join this movement.Simone: I'd be delighted if they did. So we'll see. We'll see how well we're, we're able to evangelize all this, get other people on board,Malcolm: get some good competition going.Malcolm: Mean concept. But it's, it's a, it's an interesting philosophy, we'll see. And I, and I do think, one person was like, oh, you don't believe in state services. I think that we should rely on our cultural groups to provide much of our services. Right.Malcolm: .Malcolm: So the reason why progressive groups so ardently advocate for state services is because if you want to convince somebody to leave one of these harder older cultures, most of these cultures offer a lot of what our state services, they offer[00:51:00] social safety nets, when you end on hard times, they offer services that help care for elderly individuals.Malcolm: They offer all sorts of services. And so if you want somebody to leave one of those cultural groups, but your group is parasitic and it's not willing to supply any of these services itself. Well, I mean obviously you need the state to supply those services. So what you do is you take money from all cultural groups so that you can more easily deconvert people from the cultural groups that are supplying these services to people.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Which is just really predatory and twisted. And so I think that, I guess my view of state services would be, it should be an opt-in thing. You should be able to opt into the state service system or you should be able to, like the Amish do with social security. Amish don't pay Social Security because the state understands that their culture is actually very effective at supplying social security to Amish individuals.Malcolm: Exactly. And I'd love to be able to opt into that. And then people are like, yeah, but then all of these systems wouldn't work. And it's like, Have you noticed something there? Is it that the [00:52:00] cultural groups, this sort of degraded cultural group that you've created that doesn't actually care for its own members, is that a problem?Malcolm: Nobody would want to join it if, if they had to, everyone would start going back to these older cultural groups that do provide all these services. If you took them away from the state, it's like, ah, maybe light bulb there. You've realized what it means to be parasitic. But anyway,Malcolm: We are so excited that you guys joined usMalcolm: hopefully we got crazy here. But it's something we really did need to talk about at some point.Simone: Yeah. Here's, hoping it turns out well save a copy of this video. Wait 200 years and half your either totally non-existent because you failed or existent great grandchildren check it out and tell us if we were right or not.Simone: Well,Malcolm: I mean, we successful, I mean, I think it's an existential quest to create a pluralistic alliance of conservative cultures that can fight both , this sterilizing mind virus, but also fight the [00:53:00] cultures that are just, progressives waiting in the wings to erase every culture they come across the moment they gain power.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And I, I do think that now we're in this position, very emperor of Dune, where all of the conservative cultures finally have a reason to band together. It it, so the plot of Emperor of Dune is the this guy basically says, how do I get these groups that have always been at each other's throats?Malcolm: Well, I need to create an authoritarian force so evil that they'll finally have a reason to build structures to work together. And they'll remember how bad it is to have one culture sort of ruling all other cultures dictatorial. I hope that this progressive mind virus has created that so that iterations of all of the conservative traditions can understand why they're better off in pluralistic ecosystems and why they're better off building cultural infrastructure that helps defend those pluralistic ecosystems.Malcolm: Because right now if we don't ban together, we all loseSimone: big stakes. Good luck. I love you, Malcolm. Hopefully love you. We'll have a lot of [00:54:00] successful grandkids and they with a bunch of other families save the world. Yay.Malcolm: Hey, we need people for our kids to marry. Right? That's why we gotta bring this group together.Malcolm: Yeah, that's theSimone: real long call here. So guys, hurry up cuz our kids need to not be single forever. All right, thanks. Okay, thanks. Bye. Yeah. Cool. Love you Malcolm. Speaking of which daycare pickup time? You're doing leftovers, right? I'm stir Frys or do you want me to Yeah, you makeMalcolm: great. She did tacos yesterday.Malcolm: They were fantastic. And she did it for a guest. She was telling me today that she was diluting the meat with onions to, to make it last a bit longer and how to stretch it. Yeah, I gotta stretch it now. I'm making taco leftovers. Getting a little glimpse into our life here, yu Okay. Mix it with some curry spices.Malcolm: Create something really special with it. Then eat it with chips, so it'll be quite good.Simone: Cool. I'll get it ready for you while you pick up the kids. Will do. Have a good one. You too. Welcome. 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

AI generated summary: In this enlightening conversation, Malcolm and Simone explore the mechanisms of hierarchy and status within the Catholic and Jewish communities, and how intelligence and merit play significant roles in these systems. They examine the differences and similarities between the two, explaining how each system sorts for intelligence and their potential for abuse. They also delve into the topic of martyrdom and victimhood, discussing how these statuses are viewed differently within both communities. Watch till the end as they touch on the impacts of nepotism and how Catholic tradition has historically navigated this issue.Puritan Spotting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/Simone: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. This is an episode I was so excited to record. Because what we had done an episode on how our mainstream society and how the virus or the urban monoculture, how it sorts the intellectual hierarchy of status. And we had people say, that's a really interesting topic.Malcolm: I'd love you to go deeper on this, this concept. And what really got me excited is some conversations we had had afterwards with people from different cultural traditions, because different cultural traditions. Do this status sorting quite differentially between them, and I think that's a really interesting thing to dig into because it allows you to hypothesize on the pros and cons of these different methods for determining this.Simone: So in other words, what we're going to explore is the ways in which different cultures sort for leaders [00:01:00] and how that could affect their success, their vulnerability to mimetic viruses, their overall long term potential and all sorts of other factors.Malcolm: Correct? Yeah. Yeah.Would you like to know more?Malcolm: And I think the first place you see this is in where you get long tail results, like where certain cultures seem to perform.Malcolm: Unusually well or unusually poorly. So an example that I often mention, which I think is a very interesting and telling example, is that when you're talking about the conservative intellectual movement, like, if you look around at most, almost all of the mainstream conservative intellectuals today, like, I'd say, like, 95% of the well known ones, they are typically from Jewish backgrounds or Catholic backgrounds.Malcolm: They are very few from Protestant backgrounds. And yet the majority of conservatives in the United States are from Protestant backgrounds. And so this is very interesting. And it's, what's causing this? Why, why do we see this phenomenon? And part of [00:02:00] it has to do with how the Jewish and Catholic groups sort their internal power hierarchies, which are one of the things we always say is so if you're talking about really progressive Jews are really progressive Catholics, they all just buy into this mainstream urban culture.Malcolm: So there isn't as much difference in how their power hierarchies work. But when you're talking about very conservative iterations of each of these, there's actually a really enormous difference. So do you want to jump into, we were talking with a Haraiti rabbi friend recently around how he said his culture was sorted for internal intellectual hierarchy.Simone: Yeah, I think what we found was really striking about it is it did not sort based on credentials or time. It was sorted based on demonstrable knowledge that was easily verifiable. So if you came in to a group of people and you were able to refer to and quote a text really eloquently, but also accurately, [00:03:00] then you were able to do so better than the other people in the room, you would climb above in the hierarchy.Simone: And it was really easy to verify the eloquence and accuracy with which someone quoted and therefore understood a certain text because you could just quickly look it up.Malcolm: Right? Yeah. And so it allowed for this really interesting phenomenon where when you were meeting with another person, like another Jewish man in one of these communities, you could say, what are you studying right now?Malcolm: And from the texts they said they were studying, you could know approximately how advanced that they were in their general knowledge of this field. And then you could test them on that by saying. Oh, well, page 56 or whatever. What do you think of this? Right?Malcolm: And they need to know how this quote was sourcing other material, how it interlinked to other material. And it's a quick way for you to determine where they are in the hierarchy relative to you.Simone: So almost like, let's say, let's take the religion out of this and let's pretend that this is a totally different community.Simone: Like it's a Twilight fan fiction community. [00:04:00] So, if, if you were trying to gauge using the same general system and framework, you would ask, Oh, like, well, have you read this fan fiction? Well, what did you think about when? The werewolf like hooked up with the, Confederate vampire in this particular, alliance to destroy this weird faction.Simone: And then if, if they didn't really know how to comment on it eloquently, you would understand, well, they haven't gone that deep into the canon. They haven't gone that deep into the lore. Therefore I am above them in the status hierarchy. And they would understand that they are below me because they haven't read that book yet.Simone: Or they didn't, they said that they did, but they don't really know the lore that well. They didn't really take it in.Malcolm: Yeah, and a really interesting phenomenon you can get with this and a really interesting advantage to this system is it allows for different subgroups within the wider ultra orthodox Jewish community to focus on different texts.Malcolm: So some groups might believe that one text is like a more important thing for a learned person to know than another group and because of the way this power hierarchy structure works. [00:05:00] These groups will begin to interact with each other less and less because , there isn't a cross communication between their power hierarchies a lot.Malcolm: Like the way that they have dedicated their time doesn't cross to status within another community. Yeah. It's almostSimone: like 50 shades of gray fan fiction community branching off from Twilight fan fiction community. And at first they were the same base, but then they veered in so many different connect directions that they could no longer really.Simone: Be interchangeable in terms of merit. So one leader from one advanced version of that group couldn't immediately go over and own the otherMalcolm: group. But what this allows for cultural evolution wise is it allows for the, the texts that end up being more important in terms of like resisting the social virus right now.Malcolm: Those communities will naturally out compete the ones that are following groups of texts that are less strong at doing that, or texts that are more useful at, say, making the group uniquely good [00:06:00] at surviving and competing in a really highly technological age. Those groups will naturally out compete the other groups.Malcolm: And one of the very interesting things about Judaism that quite differentiates it from many other traditions, is most Jewish groups can reintegrate with most other Orthodox Jewish groups after they have split from each other. And why this is the case is actually fairly memetically complicated. And we go into detail in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion.Malcolm: And it's not totally germane to this conversation, but it's something worth noting here because what it allows for is the less successful groups, the groups that are studying texts, it turns out to be less. Competitive in current environments can then reintegrate even when they don't do as well. They just reintegrate as lower status because they don't know as much about the text that other people are following.Malcolm: But where this gets really interesting. With a Catholic comparison here, because we're going to get to that system next, is it allows for a Jewish individual, and this happens with rabbis in ultra orthodox communities, where a rabbi [00:07:00] might be giving a speech to a group, and if a younger individual essentially shuts them down, like they show they know more than the rabbi, Then that's over.Malcolm: Like people just walk out of the room. It's done. They have lost status. And, and, and that's a really interesting phenomenon because that really contrasts with the Catholic system. So one, I hope broadly you can see how this Jewish system would encourage people who are intellectually inclined to move into philosophical pursuits.Malcolm: And, and that's why you will often see them in the political space disproportionately, because if you are intelligent and in a conservative Jewish community, you are rewarded pretty dramatically for pursuing philosophical pursuits. . Mm hmm, mm hmm. So this is really interesting in how it contrasts with the Catholic community. So the Catholic community also really rewards people who are uniquely intellectual or uniquely [00:08:00] intelligent from engaging disproportionately with philosophy and theology.Malcolm: But the status of individuals within the Catholic community, like how smart they are, isn't determined using one of these organic systems that you see within the Jewish community. Instead, it's determined by a central bureaucracy, which then determines, okay, who below me in this bureaucracy, who below me in the hierarchy, am I seeing is high, like, high quality in terms of their intellect?Malcolm: And then let's raise them higher within the hierarchy. So within a Catholic sermon, you would never have somebody who is being preached to show the person up and then say, okay, now I'm the, I'm the preacher. Now I'm the, the high status individual now, because these are two different systems for sorting for intelligence in the Jewish system.Malcolm: It's actually the audience that's sorting for intelligence. Whereas in the Catholic system, it's the broadly agreed upon, more intelligent people, who have been certified by the central bureaucracy, [00:09:00] who are sorting for intelligence. Which creates it's a really good system. It, it, like, it's, it's not.Malcolm: It can sound like it's an easily abusable system, but it's actually really good at sorting for genuine intelligence and preventing weird little culty buds. One of the problems with the Jewish system is because you can get like one group focused on this book, and one group focused on this book, and one group focused on this book, is you can get esoteric cult like buds almost forming.Malcolm: that become quite different from what most people would think of as mainstream Judaism, whereas within the Catholicism, you have this centralizing force. And Catholicism is not the only culture that, that, that operates this way. You also see this within, like, for example, the Mormon community uses a somewhat simpler status sorting mechanism.Simone: What I think is interesting here when I'm thinking about these scenarios, the scenario in which someone stands up and is like, hold on. And the conditions in which that person is actually given space or given [00:10:00] respect. In contrast with other groups. So, with some Jewish groups, and I would say some, not all, I would say more Orthodox Jewish groups.Simone: If you stand up and you're like, hold on, you are given a platform and you are given status if you are able to back up your statement with true demonstrated knowledge. In, in the Catholic system, as you describe it, if you stand up and you say, hold on, well, first off, like you probably shouldn't do that because you should respect your authority more that you should be scouted based on your merit and based on that, then you're given the right.Simone: So you have to be scouted and you have to show your merit by basically participating in the system but more through a back channel kind of way. And then I think about in contrast, a lot of other cultures, both secular and religion. In which people who stand up and say, hold on, are given respect, not because they show their merit genuinely through their actual argument in the moment and knowledge in the moment, but literally because of their status and often because of their victimhood status, which I think is really interesting.Simone: So,[00:11:00] in, in these, in these Catholic and Jewish examples that you're present presenting. A victim or someone who has been disadvantaged in some way is going to have zero privilege and perhaps many disadvantages because they don't have the knowledge. They don't have the ability to show people up.Simone: So they're not given a, they're systematically continue to be disadvantaged. Whereas in these other groups, they're given a lot of voice, but is that voice. helpful to those groups. And I think that's the sort of really controversial question. Like, should we be giving voices to people who have victim status?Simone: Because are they even capable or in a position of doing good for the organization and the people on the whole or not? I don't know. WhatMalcolm: you just mentioned is actually one of the dangers of the Catholic system. It's the Catholic tradition has long lauded People who undergo suffering on behalf of the church, but some people have confused that with victimhood status, which are actually two different things to suffer for your faith is very different than to give somebody status just because they suffer [00:12:00] broadly.Simone: I feel like martyrdom or, or, or other forms of sacrifice actually have to come from a position of privilege because you have to have something that you're giving up. And if you don't have anything that you give up, then you can't, you literally can't make that sacrifice. So literally like the ultimate victims.Simone: Can't even be a martyr or a sacrificer in the Catholic system.Malcolm: Well, and I think that the iterations of the Catholic tradition, which make this differentiation are going to be the ones that survive this period. Another really interesting thing about the Catholic system for sorting hierarchy. Is its biggest flaw.Malcolm: Its biggest flaw is that it doesn't allow for quick cultural evolution. So you look at the Jewish system and we talked about this blood budding dynamic system within the Catholic system or the very closely related Mormon system. The people in power. Are almost always going to be older individuals, very much older individuals.Malcolm: They're going to be from previous generations and they're going to be hugely incentivized to largely keep things the same. [00:13:00] Now, unlike Mormons, Catholics are one of the longest surviving continuous cultural traditions. So the question is, how did they survive this? Because that's a very. Interesting problem to have, and they survived it through this really beautiful mechanism.Malcolm: Which is essentially creating new deviant subcultures within the central Catholic organization, and that is what the religious orders are. The religious orders allow for sort of an internal incubator within the Catholic Church, where a group has a slightly different culture than the mainstream church, a slightly different way of doing things in the mainstream church, and is often more fervent and lives in a very different lifestyle than the mainstream church, which brings in the sort of rebellious, pushing, Cultural limits type people.Malcolm: And what's really fascinating is most of these orders, as they get older, they then become more opulent, more hedonistic and they become [00:14:00] less cool and they fall apart. And then you've got the other, the new order. But what these orders allow the Catholic tradition to do is It's almost like taking stem cells from like a younger tradition.Malcolm: They can take the individuals who have honed themselves within these orders and then re inject them into the top of the Catholic hierarchy in a way that keeps the tradition acting much younger than it actually is and much more dynamic than should be possible, given the hierarchical system.Simone: Which is.Simone: It sounds almost like a skunk works or like innovation or VC branch of a business that's trying to stay fresh where they will spin off businesses and maybe those businesses ultimately will be strategically useful to exactly what it'sMalcolm: like a skunk works but like having multiple skunk works departments that are competing against each other.Malcolm: Yeah, which is ideal. Yeah. Which is ideal and a really fascinating cultural solution. Another big problem that you're going to have with the Catholic system is, okay, you've got this [00:15:00] system, you're going to end up with nepotism is going to be a major problem. Because people are going to be disproportionately motivated to promote their kids.Malcolm: I mean, that happens in any system like this. So how does Catholic tradition deal with that? Another really interesting solution, which likely has I think more probably long term negative consequences and positive consequences, which is to say that if you're entering the central hierarchy, you can't have kids.Malcolm: Now this had some really interesting effects. One, if you look and you can look at the Wikipedia article on this, it's, it's really fascinating. I think it's something like 40% of Catholic. Clergy is same sex attracted. And this is one of those things that I talk about when I say that becoming gay is just the progressive solution to being same sex attractive, different religious traditions have come up with different solutions to this historically.Malcolm: And many ways it was understood if you were like really intellectually gifted and same sex attractive, and you were born in a Catholic culture, you would go into the priesthood. It's almost like a. Ethically sourced eunuch. Now of course there's [00:16:00] many downsides to this cultural solution that I think we've seen fall out from the many downsides of this cultural solution.Malcolm: But it is a very interesting cultural solution. Actually one of the biggest downsides to it is one that people don't think of, which is , where the Catholic tradition is dominant. These regions didn't need to evolve culturally as many protections against nepotism, specifically family based nepotism, because they would have people in the church often running governmental organizations historically.Malcolm: As these regions secularized because they didn't have as much protection against familial nepotism, you see familial nepotism way, way, way, way, way, way, way higher in these regions. So if you look at majority Catholic regions politics in those regions typically have way more familial nepotism than regions that were historically Protestant, which I think is a really interesting outcome from this.Simone: That is. Yeah. Well, , what could [00:17:00] Protestantism do or shift about its culture? Like, let's say that you're part of a Protestant faction and you're like, well, I would like my. group to have more influence in business, culture, politics, media, whatever. How would you change it's meritocratic or whatever?Simone: It's hierarchicalMalcolm: sorting. Yeah. So this is really fascinating. So the Protestant tradition should also not be thought of as a monolith. No, definitely. I, I'm going to contrast two Protestant tradition solutions to this Calvinist solution. and the Quaker solution. So , now we've got to go back to how these two cultures understand truth, which we've talked about in other videos. To Quakers, truth is something that comes from within. That's why, in their meetings, in one form of their meeting you will have people just stand up when they feel internally moved because truth is this internal emotional thing that bubbles up within you.Malcolm: Within the Calvinist tradition Even having a preacher was in more strict Calvinist [00:18:00] face standing in front of the room. If you read things out of order that could incept people with your way of looking at the text, if you read things with an inflection that could incept the way people are looking at the text, if you add any commentary, if you do a play, all of that is highly sinful.Malcolm: It's supposed to be just completely logically. Self determined in the moment like I E I need to study my natural environment. I need to study the Bible and that is where I can determine truth. Now, both of these lead to very different types of status hierarchies within the Calvinist tradition.Malcolm: And you saw this from our cultural perspective in the video on. Like, how do we determine who we view intellectually? We're both from a Calvinist tradition, and the Calvinist tradition historically views a person's ability to compete in real world environments like their ability to Actually, like, do well in, in, in the world as a sign of their competence.Malcolm: And that is why often when you have leaders in Calvinist churches [00:19:00] they're often people who have been successful in other endeavors before they moved into that movement. And in addition, it's, it's, it's pretty common. Within Calvinist churches to have church leaders historically now the new Calvinist church is a different species in the old Calvinist church that's wearing it almost like cosplay.Malcolm: It was historically common for them to have jobs outside of running the church because that is how you showed like that you were a competent individual. But also that your loyalties weren't divided. You weren't reliant on the church for money because that's another thing that could corrupt you.Malcolm: The Calvinist tradition is very focused on all of the things that can corrupt a source of truth and this leads to many negative externalities. The biggest negative externality is that they distrust everything. And if you look at a lot of the traditions today, like QAnon and stuff like this, these definitely evolved out of the Calvinist tradition.Malcolm: This, everything's a conspiracy, only trust yourself. I can provide you with some clues, like look here and here. But at the end of the day. Truth can only come from you [00:20:00] logically looking at the world. The Quaker tradition did something very different. And we'll argue in other longer videos that, that you can guess what evolved out of Quaker tradition.Malcolm: But they have always, if you read the LBMC did a very good sort of analysis of early Quaker tradition. Their internal hierarchy was based on virtue signaling. From even the early Quaker tradition showing that you were a good person through what you were saying was the way within these, these settings where like you had God speak through you, so you would stand up when you felt moved to say something, well, how do you show your status vis a vis other things, people, you show things that seem more Christly, and what that meant within the Quaker tradition began to deviate more and more.Malcolm: Today we know how virtue signaling goes wrong, but historically they would have said, well, we don't judge people by how smart they are. We judge people by the quality of their character. That's how we sort our internal hierarchy. And that actually sounds really smart and enlightened. It just leads to negative [00:21:00] externalities after it's been allowed to like run on its own for a really long period of time.Simone: Well, because in the end, charisma is. Is not always right. It's not always correlated with with output or outcome or ability to build things. Right. And also there's the, the, the sort of inverse correlation between people who are willing to sit around and politic and signal and people who are willing to sit in.Simone: Churn and build, right? And, and so when you have a system that sorts more for the signaling and the politicking, you're sorting for leaders who are good at signaling and politicking rather than building. And that's one of the reasons why we're so obsessed with slash interested in this topic is we think constantly about, well, how, how do we put people at the top who are genuinely most able to build things?Simone: In a way that's really meaningful without necessarily sorting for people who are good at politicking. Although you need a little bit of that, because any leader also has to be able to lead other people and [00:22:00] convince them to do things. And so politicking is important.Malcolm: Well, so another Calvinist thing that was used to sort internal hierarchical structures that had nothing to do with a person's competence but led to a lot of stereotypes about Calvinists, was the level of personal suffering that you were willing to undergo to achieve something.Malcolm: So Calvinists would often try to show off to other Calvinists how austere their lifestyles were, or how intense their daily suffering was. And this is why in, in, in many Calvinist stereotypes, you see them being visibly disfigured, like they would show off more than other people, their, their physical disfigurement.Malcolm: Or ailments, like walking with a cane or something like that. So you look at Calvinist stereotypes throughout media, like Scrooge is a great Calvinist stereotype, right? He's a guy who's hoarding his wealth, like he's very wealthy, like that's always a traditional Calvinist stereotype, is they're very wealthy because that's how they determine their, their position within their local status hierarchy.Malcolm: But he didn't spend his wealth, even within his daily life, they talk about in the story. That he [00:23:00] would eat gruel, that he had no servants who worked for him, that he wouldn't heat the house which is something that even Simone and I do, so he wasn't, like, saving money to spend it on himself which I think a lot of people read the story today to know.Malcolm: Actually, Scrooge is a very interesting story. It's a, it's a corrective rape fantasy about Calvinist moral values. Because Scrooge was accurate. Giving the money to Tiny Tim's family was not the most effective use of charitable funds. And it was, it was quite indulgent based on his sort of personal community to, to do that.Malcolm: That's just not the way a good Calvinist would do that. And a lot of people today, because they're not familiar with the Calvinist stereotypes, they read the story and they think Scrooge is a Jewish stereotype. He was from Scotland, like that's a classic Calvinist stereotype. He, he said bah humbug to Christian, again, thinking holidays, obscuring holidays is another classic Calvinist stereotype.Malcolm: Being tall and gaunt is another classic Calvinist stereotype. Thinking you're morally superior to people is another classic Calvinist stereotype. But having your own [00:24:00] moral framework and not engaging with the world's moral framework is another classic Calvinist stereotype. And what's really interesting, even though Calvinists aren't that common in the world today, you still see this stereotype in media all the time.Malcolm: What are some other things you see? Typically they wear red and black. They often wear vests or Scottish attire. They're often physically disfigured in some way. And they are often seen as obsessed with pain to some extent. So, Scrooge, again, Scrooge McDuck, Donald Scrooge is a classic Calvinist stereotype.Malcolm: Silco from Arcane is a pretty good depiction of a Calvinist stereotype.Simone: I just find it really funny that Ebenezer Scrooge is like this, this, this caricature argument against effective altruism, you're saying? It's kind of true. Well, itMalcolm: kind of is. What's another one I'm thinking of? Vader and Anakin to an extent, because another, the flip side to the Calvinist stereotype is they're either seen as being very Like uncaring or sort of like manic like, like businessy manic and, and, and house is full of investments.Malcolm: That's another Calvinist stereotype is the [00:25:00] invention thing and having houses strewn with inventions that I know even some of my ancestors, when you go to their house, we would talk about like all the little inventions they had everywhere because that was a way that you showed how your intelligence had real world applicability.Malcolm: To visitors to where you live which was, was really interesting and a good list of these is actually found on a Puritan spotting by a star site codex. He did a thing on these, these Calvinist stereotypes, and I'll include a link to that.The one interesting part of the Calvinist stereotype that he did not touch on in Puritan spotting was the stereotype that if they have a. , so, or family. They are almost always featured. As working together, like the way that they emotionally relate to other people is through their work. And, when people look at someone mind's relationship, it can look really unusual in that we run our companies together and stuff, but that was actually traditionally the way things were done within the Calvinist tradition.And it's [00:26:00] something that you will see throughout Calvinist archetypes.Malcolm: Now, some people might say, Oh, like George Lucas didn't say that this was the stereotype he was going for, but he also didn't say that Jewish was the stereotype he was going for with Watto or racist.Malcolm: Just general racist was the stereotype he was going for with George R. Binks. He seemed to. Whole culturally evoked sets of things that seem to go together in his mind without realizing that these cultural sets came from like imprinted stereotypes because these cultural groups existed in the world around him or had existed and therefore had imprinted themselves onto media, even though now Calvinists are mostly extinct as a cultural group. But anyway, something that you had mentioned about the way these different cultures differentiate from each other that I found really fascinating.Malcolm: . Yeah, talk about the IQ shredder concept.Simone: Yeah, I mean, you and I were talking at first about how we were like, wait, this meritocratic sorting system in Orthodox Jewish communities is Super awesome. Like the fact that there is a provable way to, [00:27:00] to demonstrate your merit.Simone: Like, Oh my gosh, these are exactly the sorts of people I would want to have ruling my culture. And then we realized, Oh, but wait, like these are, these are people who are going in and spending all their time in deep, deep, deep esoteric religious study. And per our cultural background, we're like. Oh no, like we want them to like build spaceships that take us to Mars that we want them to get off a soft planet.Simone: We want them to solve like all diseases and they're reading these. So we, we did find it really interesting where like, this is a significant deviation from our culture and that our culture is like, okay, take these people. And like, have them solve the world's problems. But I guess per the moral framework of many of these very Orthodox Jewish communities, I mean, the biggest problems are delving into these deep religious texts.Simone: And, and the solution isn't necessarily to like, go off planet because there's a lot of other important religious stuff that's going [00:28:00] on that they need to workMalcolm: But there is a downside to what you're saying, right? And there's a reason that their culture doesn't do that. So that is essentially what Reform Judaism did. Is they said, we'll still sort our status hierarchy by how intelligent a person is. Right. But we'll outsource that to a form of intelligence sorting that has more real world applicability, specifically the degrees that people were getting.Malcolm: This is why you have the stereotype in traditional Jewish families of, go be a doctor, go to this fancy university because, and I also think it's why you saw Jewish families over represented in Ivy league schools, partially because. There is more cultural reward for Jews going into Ivy League schools than there are, for example, for a person of a Protestant background.Malcolm: In fact, I would be quite shamed within a lot of Protestant cultural circles for mentioning the fancy schools that we went to. ... It's just seen really negatively, like, like as, as if you actually weren't able to achieve things in the real world. Now, this [00:29:00] outsourcing worked for a while.Malcolm: The problem is, is it left a giant gaping back door for the virus to get through, which is as soon as the virus took over the institutions, it specifically was sorted into positions of power , was in the Reform Jewish movement. And... It allowed the movement to be really quickly and aggressively corrupted by the virus as happened to all cultural traditions that sorted for intelligence.Malcolm: By degrees. We also saw this within the Unitarian Universalist movement, which which did something similar. And what was really interesting to me is this more orthodox approach to Jewish intelligence. They now actively, like, look down on the university system in part because they see how efficacious list has gotten and that they feel like the cultural winners here.Malcolm: Like we followed the old way of doing things that may not have looked like. Why are you doing things this way? It may have seemed less efficacious, but in the long run, it's [00:30:00] keeping their fertility rates up and it's keeping their cultural identity strong in a way that you're not seeing as much in the, in the reform community, which is becoming just like holiday traditions and, and a few other differential things, but not so much a, a genuinely different, like moral framework than society writ large which I think is really interesting.Malcolm: So there are negatives but you're, you're trading one thing for another thing. We have to remember as much as we talk about like the Calvin, the Calvinist went extinct. Basically they used to be the time of the signing around the declaration, at least among white Americans, they were well over 50% of the population.Malcolm: And now they're like 0. 5% of the population. So it is a failed system. It may have done a good job of sorting for competence. That's why you got the, the, the stereotype of the. Wealthy Calvinist, but I think where it really failed people who wanted to stay in the tradition.Malcolm: Well,Simone: I also, I would, and there are, of course, are many exceptions here, but the stereotype of the wealthy Calvinist is also not the stereotype of a very [00:31:00] pronatalist Calvinist.Malcolm: They, yeah, because I mean, you don't want to have fun. I mean, the classic, who wants to marry somebody who thinks that dancing is, is, is sinful, and Christmas is sinful, and, and having too much fun is sinful, which is funny, which those are all things that you and I, music is sinful.Malcolm: Famously, like Geneva banned me after becoming a predominantly Calvinist band all music that had words for like a hundred year period or something because they didn't want people to have too much fun. That would be very Corrupting which is funny that that's still very much in our sort of secular tradition.Malcolm: So one of the questions we have for ourselves is, can we create an iteration of this tradition, which, which is able to both resist the virus and motivate high fertility rates? But I mean, the jury's really out betting odds would be against us, but this whole, the reason we're having this conversation is I think it's really important for people to note that there are actually.Malcolm: Like systemically, the way they sort their internal hierarchy, the way they see the world, there are really [00:32:00] big differences in the way different cultures approach things. And those differences lead to different long tail consequences. The, the Catholic system for, for sorting IQ is likely why the last Supreme court seven of the.Malcolm: nine justices had a Catholic upbringing. One had one Protestant, one Catholic parent. So you might not count them. And the other two. Came from Jewish backgrounds. Not a single one came from a Protestant background. That is wild when you consider the demographics of this country.Malcolm: Right. But it makes a lot of sense when you look at how these cultures sort for status. You simply aren't going to get up. Even I growing up, remembered the shame that my parents told me I would be looked at within the family if I became something as. Low status as a lawyer. Whereas in many other cultures, a lawyer would be seen as a very high status profession.Malcolm: And this has to do with how these cultures relate to truth within the Calvinist tradition. The lawyer is. The steward of the bureaucracy, what [00:33:00] could be lower status than engaging with the bureaucracy? You, you've become mentally addled, you, you, you become nepotistically polluted, but it's very interesting.Malcolm: And I think that. Through understanding these genuine differences within our different cultures and through better clarifying them and understanding the advantages and disadvantages that each have, we can better appreciate why we are all better off of being in a genuinely culturally diverse environment.Malcolm: Yeah. Because one of the things that I've always found really laughable about progressivism is they claim to want diversity and then you're like, Oh yeah, diversity is great because different groups are better at different things. That's the point of diversity. Being different is the point of diversity.Malcolm: If it's superficial, if you are going to pretend that all diversity is actually just completely superficial and doesn't really affect how different groups perform at different things, then You've created this, this mockery of diversity [00:34:00] and and worse when you can't explain why different groups are doing better at different things, then the only explanation you conceivably have is they're cheating.Malcolm: They, they've rigged the system in their favor there, and that creates animosity between groups. And that creates, I think, really interesting phenomenons where groups begin to tear each other down or try to frame other groups is doing better. And you get this whole system, which, it is really bad for groups that actually lead to better outcomes like, Jewish groups and Catholic groups, which I think disproportionately do really well in bureaucracies and academicSimone: settings.Simone: But I think it's also really important to think about these dynamics because it doesn't matter if you're looking at a friend group somewhere or a secular group or a fan community or a religious group, or even a family looking at how they sort for the people that they put in positions of leadership.Simone: will enable you to kind of understand where that group is going to go and what it will be able to do. [00:35:00] So all, all groups will produce something, but what it will be able to produce, whether that is like, really esoteric, creative, amazing things, or, real world, or we'll say larger society, agency, all sorts of things that, that depends on how meritocratic sorting works.Simone: So look closely at that and you'll be able to discover a ton of other things much more quickly than by analyzing a lot of other elements of the group that would take more time.Malcolm: Yeah, it's a really fun way to think about things, but also think about what you're doing for your own family, I think to a lot of people of this generation, they grew up without a culture because they didn't know what their culture was.Malcolm: And when they move back to cultures and they're trying to choose which one they adopt Or trying to recreate some iteration of what their family's historic culture was. They, they often think it's just the theology. When there's a whole worldview that, that worked alongside this theology, and a whole way of sorting yourself culturally.Malcolm: that led to these cultural [00:36:00] differences and you can make a much more informed decision as you recreate your family culture in, in, in the light of a virus that has eroded and erased so many family traditions.Simone: Yeah, absolutely. No, it was fun talking about this with you. I know we've been talking about it for daysMalcolm: now.Malcolm: Yeah. You've, you've helped all of these ideas. I might talk more, but a lot of these are just me parroting the ideas that Simone is telling me inSimone: private. I'm more like, I just ask you dumb questions, but that's our tradition. And I absolutely loveMalcolm: it. Yeah, that's our true. Oh, that's the way our gender dynamics work.Malcolm: Yeah.Simone: I ask really dumb questions cause I'm like so confused and he gives really smart answers and they're like so sexy. And I'm So I'm like hot for it, but that's howMalcolm: you incept me with your worldview. It's your womanly ways,Simone: my, yeah, my feminine, my, my sexuality for wherever it is this is a pleasure.Simone: I'm looking forward to our next conversation. Cause we've got [00:37:00] a good one coming up. Yeah. All right. Love you, Malcolm. Love you too. 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 this enlightening conversation, Malcolm and Simone critically dissect the nature of intelligence and the hierarchy of knowledge. Drawing on historical anecdotes and personal experiences, they lay bare the institutional bias, gatekeeping, and hurdles that prevent truly novel ideas from taking root within academia and society. From the stifling of innovation to the ironic role of performative intelligence, they bring to light some hard truths about our education system and the ways in which it determines who is seen as smart. As they navigate through academic consensus and fashionable ideas, join them for an honest exploration of how we shape, share, and value knowledge.Transcript: Malcolm: [00:00:00] when somebody comes up with a genuinely novel idea, .Malcolm: Their idea is often treated like an insane cult. Wow. And, and you see this within academia today. The difference we have today is that ironically the academic system has more a monopoly on what's considered truth than the church ever had. And so it is very hard for new ideas to form. And when a new idea does form, people are punished.Malcolm: SeverelyWould you like to know more?Simone: Hello,Malcolm: gorgeous. Hello, Simone. I am excited to be chatting today. What are we talking about? Well, you'reSimone: being like Professor Malcolm because we have a quote to discuss. This is like homeworky. It sounds like.Simone: It reminds me of my honors classes in collegeMalcolm: the article was called The Mid Wit Menace, on a sub stack by somebody called Millennial Woes. And I don't think it's that much of a red sub either.Simone: All right.Simone: Because he has convinced himself by embracing fashionable ideas that he's very wise, he will not accept that [00:01:00] anybody is wiser than him unless they also embrace those fashionable ideas. In his mind, that is the only thing that could prove the person to be as wise as him, let alone even wiser.Simone: But a person wiser than him would never adopt those b******t, fashionable ideas. So they would never appear in the mid wit's perception as wiser than him. Thus, the mid midwife is trapped in his midwifery.Malcolm: I think this quote is describing a very real phenomenon in our society.Malcolm: Hmm. With how people judge what intelligence is. Yeah. When they are creating this organically formed hierarchy that determines truth within our society. Okay. So if you say something that is very antithetical to the accepted truth of society. People will look at you as an idiot, right? Mm-hmm.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So it is very hard to say something that is genuinely innovative or [00:02:00] move things forwards without being looked at as an idiot. It actually can become dangerous to say things that move things forwards. Mm-hmm. And this mindset is particularly true in academia. I've worked in academia for a while, andMalcolm: The hierarchy in intelligence is determined by an individual's ability to memorize, obscure things that other people who are widely agreed upon as smart have written or said determines a person's position was in this local hierarchy. Not their ability to override those things or come up with new ideas that counter those things.Malcolm: Makes a lot of sense because the people at the top of this hierarchy, they're the people who everyone else is quoting, right? And so they have a vested interest in ensuring that you are not just disrupting the hierarchy. This is something even famously like Einstein got into when he got older, where he would.Malcolm: Sort of snipe [00:03:00] at people's careers if they disagreed with his ideas. Yeah. Especially where it turned out that they were right later. Now they were right. Yeah. Oh, wow. And you see this across academic fields, and then when somebody comes up with a genuinely novel idea, you know, all La Darwin. They're basically crazy.Malcolm: Their idea is often treated like an insane cult. Wow. And, and you see this within academia today. The difference we have today is that ironically the academic system has more a monopoly on what's considered truth than the church ever had. And so it is very hard for new ideas to form. And when a new idea does form, people are punished.Malcolm: Severely if it goes against either the consensus or things that are of interest to the academic consensus. Mm-hmm. And I think it's one of the reasons why Acade has been so slow at advancing, but I think we also see this within the comments on our videos sometimes, you know, you know, I've looked at some people who say negative things about our videos [00:04:00] and.Malcolm: Cause I try to determine like, what position are they coming for? Cause I never know, is somebody mad at us because they're a far leftist, are they mad at us because they're a far rightist? , so I can never really tell, you know, and so I try to go into it and one guy who repeatedly comment sort of negative things on our videos, it seems that he's predominantly, he's just like, A generic philosopher, academic philosopher.Malcolm: Yeah. I be a philosophy parrot. That parrots, what everyone considers like smart philosophers have said, and that is how he determines, that he's smart, and so he thinks that we are crazy because I would never do that. I find that to be very disinteresting to, I say this parroting some random sub stacker, but keep in mind I'm parroting a suber that doesn't have a big fan base.Malcolm: So, I, I am recognizing that this concept here potentially has a lot of merit. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Simone, this idea of determining intelligence and how people determine who is intelligent around them.Simone: Well, I think a lot of this actually has to come with something that, that [00:05:00] really blew my mind when I was first researching the careers of artists.Simone: When, like back in 2012 when we first met and a bunch of the artists that I interviewed, Essentially said, well, I have to like, play up the extent to which I'm eccentric and weird and crazy and unstable seeming, because if I don't do that, if I don't have like paints like splattered on my face and my hair's all messed up, and I'm kind of like, oh, hi.Simone: You know, like, like really crazy that people, you like their art cells for less, you know, they, they just aren't really, you know, succeeding as artists. They're not taken. Oddly, they're not taken seriously, so to speak. So I think what's really interesting is that there's this performative image of smartness that people are looking for instead of really like validating.Simone: Is this idea interesting? It's more, does this person look like someone who's intellectual? Do they look like a philosopher? Do they look like a mathematician? In fact, we've even we've met people recently on a very different end of the spectrum. More like, on the technical or like data end of the [00:06:00] spectrum.Simone: Who, who look very. Like analytical engineering and they just always get hired for these positions because they're seen as looking like a trustworthy, reliable engineer, even if actually their track record is abysmal and they don't work at all.Simone: When I, what I think of when I see this quote is I think of the people who style themselves as intellectuals and also use really gatekeeper terms, , like very advanced vocabulary. They will grow beards. They will wear like very professorial looking clothes or weird clothes.Simone: And it even makes me think we, we, we joke about this all the time About ornamental hermits or garden noms. Yeah, so during like around like regency era in, in England, one fashionable thing for a while, and actually this comes very back down to fashion, right? Fashionable ideas. One fashionable thing to do.Simone: If you were a a, a Lord with a house, like a manor house, like a lot of [00:07:00] property, you would set up this kind of weird like, Refuge or shack on your property, and you would bring out an intellectual to live in the shack. And they often like in their, I guess like employment contracts, they were not allowed to cut their facial hair, so they would have these beards.Simone: In some cases they weren't allowed to cut their nails, so they'd have these like gnarled nails and they were supposed to come out when you were entertaining house guests for like, hunting trips and, and, and house parties to Pontificate and be smart and impress people. And of course like they weren't supposed to drink.Simone: They would be caught like at the local pub all the time. They were just supposed to like be alone with their books and you know, provide intellectual inspiration. And what I also think is really interesting is that people like that still do exist and that when like there are, we put them in our circlesMalcolm: and it's one of the worst things about being in these intellectual circles is if you are like known as being smart.Malcolm: There's like this whole class of people that's like known as being smart, but it's [00:08:00] like actively really not smart. We call them anti geniuses. It's where this before I get too far into the concept of anti-genius, there's two other things I want to discuss on this subject that I think are really important.Malcolm: Okay. One is the judgment of Paris, which I thought really related to what you were talking about in the art world, which is you don't just see this in the world of intellectualism. So the judgment of Paris was this famous competition where in, in Paris, where they did a blind tasting and it was thought gonna be a nothing burger that we knew the outcome of, of French wines against American wines.Malcolm: Yes. And what could go wrong? The American wines cleaned up. And what it turned out is all these people who'd been claiming to be experts and stuff like that, they couldn't even tell the difference between the two wines. Mm-hmm. And you have this whole hierarchy of like wine tasting. And there was that one experiment, which I love where they, with sommelier.Malcolm: Yeah, sommelier, they couldn't even tell the difference between white and red wine when it was blindfold. My gosh, it's so, and I was like, oh my God, that so many of these fields, not, not [00:09:00] everyone, like some of them were, were still pretty good. But the idea being is that the hierarchy of knowledge within a field can be almost entirely fabricated, yet it can still be seen as a really high knowledge field.Malcolm: Yes. And that is true. It was art. Well, we often say it was art. Like if one of our kids comes to us and says, daddy, I, I really wanna be an artist. I'm like, oh, well then you're really gonna need to practice and learn a lot about sales and marketing cause art, 100%. You don't need to know s**t about art to be a famous artist.Malcolm: Yeah. You have to haveSimone: a killer network. Yeah. You have to have the right look. Yeah, the, thoseMalcolm: sales. Well, and this is, there was actually that study that was done on artists to find out who was paid the most and it was completely determinant on their network. It was not determinant on how good they were as artists.Malcolm: That it's, it's, it's a completely a, a yeah. It's, it's, it's wild. But anyway, back to the concept of an anti-geniusn and where this relates. To garden nos as weSimone: call them, our nos ornamental [00:10:00] hermits,Malcolm: ornamental hermits in our communities. But we, we, we've come to calling them the shorthand noms, right?Malcolm: They're and, and, and these are people who are just like professionally smart people, but they are more people who are like word cells that got known as smart when they were really young because like they do seem to have a genuine competence in wording.Malcolm: However, I. None of their ideas ever turn out to have any real world applicability, and they don't seem to relate to any ability to change the world in any sort of a better way. They're just theorizing ideas. Mm-hmm. And it grinds my teeth when I, you know, someone who's built successful businesses, who's made multiple calls about, oh, the politics are moving in this way and this is gonna change about society.Malcolm: And then they come true. And, and, and that they're, and I'll be. Br, you know, brandied about by rich people when they're bringing out the, their smart people. And then there's this other group that's just like, Always been wrong about everything, but really good at sounding smart. Oh, butSimone: again, like keep in [00:11:00] mind, even for example, in the startup world, there are like successful entrepreneurs over here doing their thing, and then there are people who are really, really good at raising funds.Simone: And they just raise funds and then they, they have a failed startup, and then they like raise funds again. So I think that there's this world of fashionable ideas, performative signaling of legitimacy in whatever realm you're trying to play in. And then there's the real thing. And the question is, how, how can people know what the real thing is and why?Simone: Why are people not? Necessarily judging what the real thing is, we'reMalcolm: underselling how damaging this concept of an anti-geniusn is or anti-genius are. Mm. So the way that we judge intelligence, meaningful intelligence is it's a person's ability to look at a set of information about the environment or the world today, and use that information to accurately predict.Malcolm: And or shape future outcomes. Applicable intelligence. We had that guy David Rainey [00:12:00] who wrote the book on Changing Minds, and he came to stay with us. And, and we were talking about like, how do you create geniuses? And we're like, everything when we're trying to create a genius is based around real world applicability, real world ability to succeed in real world environments and this definition of intelligence.Malcolm: But then you have these other people who. Sometimes they even know that, that their, the type of intelligence they have doesn't have this sort of real world applicability, but their identity. Is based around being intelligent . Mm-hmm.Malcolm: And their value within, in their social circles is based around being intelligent. Mm-hmm. And, and people can get into this really early, like they get good grades on tests and stuff like that in high school. Mm-hmm. And then it turns out they're just not good at actually performing in, in, in real world environments as though now they have this identity as an intelligent person.Malcolm: Well, andSimone: actually let's, let's point out like related to this is one of the top things parents are told not to tell their kids. Never tell your kid they're smart. Always praise them for working hard because if someone is told they're smart, they will then stop taking risks. Cuz they never wanna do something where they can be proven not smart because it's part of their identity.Simone: This is the problem is and exact well [00:13:00] they feed in, right? This is a cumulative effect is when people grow up. With this reputation of being this wonder kind, it actually affects their outcomes because now they're not taking risks. Now they're not. They're really expressing that much intellectual humility or being willing to fail in a way where they can learn real things because they can't let go of that identity.Simone: They can'tMalcolm: risk it, but they also need the people around them to constantly fail. For sure. That's another thing, to maintain their position. They need to talk down to people who may have like genuine, measurable success in the real world, and they need projects that are, that are happening around them in their ecosystem to constantly fail.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And so, a, a great historical example, if you're talking about like a historical example of an anti-geniusn, one of these people who's known as being smart but has never been successful at anything and makes their living off of, of, of parasitizing wealthy people would be repu. I think he's the classic example of this, and they constantly, well, they damage the communities that they're in because, once you get one of [00:14:00] these the sort of parasitic anti-geniusniueses is attached to you as like a wealthy person. They will siphon your money and your reputation to increase their public image or how far they can broadcast their ideas and reputation because that is the commodity in which they trade in a way that can be very damaging to you as an individual. So. There's some famous, modern examples of anti-geniusn. I don't know. I wanna make beef. Who's the one who I can talk about or I won't make a beef?Malcolm: Greta Thornberg. Greta Thornberg's, the classic anti, obviously she's the child, she's not smart. Um, Like she's an actual,Simone: hey, they're, they're really smart children out there. I think the bigger issue is she's towing the line. She doesn't have any unique ideas. She's saying exactly what, which first thing famous.Malcolm: Yeah. But people would bandy her about like, oh, you have ideas. And so what anti-genius often do within a modern ecosystem is they make their entire career. Around tearing down a specific field. That is what they will do. And since we are associated with things like the, ea don'tSimone: name names.Simone: [00:15:00] Don't name names, yeah. IMalcolm: won't name names, but I would say good sign of an anti-geniusn is they've made their career around tearing down. Other fields around sensationalism., but they've never actually accomplished anything of their own within the field of any real merit. So that's one type of anti-geniusn you'll see. The second type of anti-geniusn you'll see is the mystical anti-geniusn. So these individuals hide that their ideas are really bad by covering them in forms of mysticism that can't be proven.Malcolm: , absolutely right or wrong, but that can sound really smart. Mysticism,Simone: Like the pseudo profound b******t thing.Malcolm: Yeah. But some people are so good at pseudo profound b******t that you're just not gonna be able to catch them on it.Malcolm: Yeah. Um, They, well, it's, it's, and, and us saying all this, this is actually one of our more dangerous videos because I, I am afraid that somebody who is one of these anti-genius will see this and recognize how threatening we are to their income streams. If, if we spread. [00:16:00] This just like, I think obvious.Simone: But here's the thing is I, I genuinely don't believe people who fall for, performative geniuses are going to stop falling for them. Like you've spent decades trying to convince people to stop listening. To either like scam artists, like on, and then like, I'm not saying these people are scam artists, but like you've tried to convince people for yours to stop listening to scam artists or stop listening to people who are just performative, who, who are misleading.Malcolm: We do financial advising for some, you know, elderly people. Exactly. And, and like, nothing, nothing. You say scams is just like a constant. No matter how many times I'm like, this is a scam. This is exactly like the scam you got hit was last time. Here's how you can recognize these scams in the future.Malcolm: And it's the same thing with with, with these groups, you know, we're like, okay, you know, this is another anti-geniusn, but no. Yeah.Simone: But no one ever. Ever, no matter what you say, has changed their views. So I don't actually think anything you're, you're you're saying,Malcolm: well, I think if I reach young people [00:17:00] early enough, they'll begin to build up pattern recognition around that.Malcolm: And so that's why I hope our, our channel and our podcast does reach. I mean, I like that we have older fans, but I think that, , if you can catch someone with some of these pattern recognition things when they're younger, before they build ideas like, this is what a smart person looks like, this is what a.Malcolm: And they'll think, oh, they, they do this, they talk like this. They have these degrees. Like none of those things are actual signs of a smart person. A smart person is their ability to predict or affect future outcomes with knowledge of the current world.Simone: Right. Well, so that's actually what I wanted to ask you.Simone: Like, so what are your tips to people on like, Should you actually consider this person an expert in a field or someone who has like really interesting ideas or someone that you should turn to for wisdom? And how do you determine whether someone is maybe acting like a genius in their field, but not actually someone who's going to give you advice that will get you where you wanna be?Malcolm: Yeah, so I, I think that there's a few core things here. One if when they're coming to you, their primary [00:18:00] recommendation is other people. Say they're smart. Or other people who are generally thought of as smart, say they're smart, but they don't seem to have ever actually accomplished anything concrete then that's a really big red flag.Malcolm: Mm. Because people who are actually that smart generally don't have that hard of time accomplishing things. Mm-hmm. Like whether it's starting a company and making it successful or coming up with a new scientific theory or. And a sign of a true genius. I think like the highest level of genius that we would say is somebody who has been independently smart in multiple fields where their intelligence was in one field, didn't contribute or contributed only minorly to their ability to be successful within another field.Malcolm: Mm. So if it, if they can consistently come at multiple fields and be successful in them, I'm like, wow, that's like the opposite of an anti genius. That's like a. Super genius. I, I would call that because a person could be successful in a field accidentally sometimes, for sure. It's really hard to be accidentally [00:19:00] successful in multiple fields in, in, in different areas.Malcolm: Then you likeSimone: that and of, of course shock calling. Like if, if someone said, I'm going to do this, especially if people doubt them and then they do it, that, that's a big thing. And yeah, cross disciplinary accomplishment I think is, is also super huge and, and hard to replicate if you. If you haven't if you haven't really mastered like life and wisdom, well, we don'tMalcolm: have a genuine understanding of the world, you know?Malcolm: Yeah, yeah. If you're understanding, if you're under, if whatever special access to knowledge you have doesn't have real world applicability, you don't have special access to knowledge. What you have is an ability to convince people you have a special access to knowledge. And for you to say it's not a, it is a scam if, if your knowledge has no way to measure it and no real world applicability it, it's just that you're good at convincing people of that.Malcolm: That's not knowledge. That's. And this is what, well, I think Minta is a great way to sort for [00:20:00] anti-genius. I know. Because if somebody was a real genius, they wouldn't be in Mesa. They'd be out there making a lot of money. They'd be out there doing something. Their, their special access to information about the world would give them some competitive edge if it had, if it's given them so little competitive edge that the way they prove that they're smart is through Mensa.Malcolm: Then they're likely not smart. And this is why a lot of Mensa, it's funny, a lot of Mensa has become, they say like a big problem with Mensa. It's become like a board game and like crime solving society, right? Or like no crime nights and stuff like that. Like just like nerdySimone: things. I guess if you have time to waste on joining and participating in Mensa, you are not really succeeding in the real world.Malcolm: Well, yeah, that seems like an obvious truism to me. Hmm. Do you disagreeSimone: or No? I don't disagree. I, I think that that's a, that's a good identifier. I think what you also pointed to earlier, which is that a really common thing among these people, like, you know, c CEOs of startups who constantly raise money, then like blow up their startups and then just do it again.Simone: Or like, people who say that they're experts in a [00:21:00] field but just aren't, they don't really know what they're talking about is they're really, really, really good with words and they're very convincing. They're charismatic. And I think that's another thing is I even just saw someone. Like tweet about this today that that it's, it's really hard to, like a lot of people just assume if someone is eloquent, if someone is well spoken, they're really good writer, that, that, that means that they must be generally very smart.Malcolm: It's the word sell version of autism. So if somebody's like that sort of. Autistic, really good at engineering and you can talk to them and you can immediately know, oh, this person might be good at engineering, but I'm not gonna like let them impart me with their life philosophy or let them impart me with like, a certain type of tax advice that I know they know nothing about.Malcolm: But if you happen to have that level of intelligence, but it's really narrowly focused at word selling, then you can become actually very dangerous. Because people improperly judge your level of competence and entrust you with [00:22:00] things they shouldn't trust you with. And a point I wanna make to something Simone kept saying, so if somebody fails at a startup, even multiple startups, that doesn't mean they're dumb.Malcolm: It's how they failed at those multiple startups, which is a sign as to whether or not they're actually dumb. That is not to say that people with this sort of ability can't multiple times raise money for something and have people. I've actually noticed most of the people who I thought were anti-genius in the startup world have washed out.Malcolm: Because I, I can think of some off the top of my head who I thought were absolutely anti geniuses. I was like, I. Okay. Right now everyone thinks this person is smarter than me, but I can tell they're not actually that smart. Yeah. Yeah.Simone: Like we just raised for something and you're just like, I'm, this is going toMalcolm: crash and burn.Malcolm: Oh. And I always grinded my teeth when they were like a higher status than me and intelligence. They're like, well, we gotta ask a really smart person. And then they have crash and burned and now they're just generally known as like smart people who go to parties with smart people. But like, oh no. VCs quickly learned not to give them money.Simone: One other point, and I think this is also important and related to what we're talking about, is sometimes you can be a true genuine [00:23:00] genius in one field, and then another common fallacy I see people demonstrate is that they assume that they're just a genius. So like, oh, like, maybe they're like a world class physicist and then they start giving people health advice and no one really questions it.Simone: Cause they're like, oh yeah, Nobel laureate. Like, no, let's. Let's hear what this guy has to say, and like, they really have, they don't really understand what they're talking about, but they're so used to being super, super good in their own field, and they actually have the experience and credentials and research and, you know, like life in their field to actually be really smart that they, they don't know what it's like.Simone: To be dumb. Like they, they can't understand that they're ignorant in another field, and then they, they start basically Yeah. Misleading a lot of people. Well,Malcolm: and I need to also make clear that this is a cultural perspective we have. Yes. It is not a truism. Mm. So different cultures, because I have defined how our culture defines intelligence.Malcolm: And by this definition of intelligence, these people are not intelligent. Different cultures relate to reality in different ways, and they may believe that there's like [00:24:00] some underlying. Metaphysical ness to reality, and that these people swim really well within those environments. Mm-hmm. And that they're not actually as damaging within those environments because they're able to focus all of their ideas instead of on like, tearing other people down on advancing this weird sort of word celly art.Malcolm: And so that's really fine. And also it changes the way that we, you and I have interacted with the world. We've written a number of bestselling books now. Our podcast is growing. You know, I'd love that. Grew faster, but it's growing. Right? And a lot of people are like, you guys seem like really like cogent intellectuals with a hard view of the world that you really thought through within a lot of different domains.Malcolm: Like, why are you just now entering the intellectual space? And the answer is twofold. One is, we wanted to make sure we had income streams before we entered the intellectual space so we would never be determinant on our audience. For what we said, because we never wanna get audience captured. We never wanna enter a space where I'm afraid to say something because I know I'll lose some audience.Malcolm: Like when we did that [00:25:00] Proje episode, we lost a number of subscribers and I was like, whatever. But the other thing is, is from our cultural perspective, it would feel immoral to go out and start acting like, I had any special access to knowledge had I not first applied that knowledge to the world and had it allow me to outcompete other people in multiple domains, whether it's the academic domain or the domain of the business world.Malcolm: So like I started my career in psychology and I had a bunch of weird ideas about how humans thought. And when I brought those ideas to, my supervisor, I they were just like, this is just like a completely different framework for how the human mind works.Malcolm: Like, yeah, why don't you just pick one thing and work on that? And I had this, this sort of epiphany where I was like, you know what? If I actually do have a better understanding of how humans think than the existing dogma of the psychiatry community. Then I shouldn't go into psychology. I should go into business school.[00:26:00]Malcolm: And that's, that's why I ended up going to get an mba. Cause I was like, let's apply these ideas in real world environments and see if they allow me to outcompete other people. And they did. Mm. And now I am fairly confident that most of my ideas are pretty accurate. And, and not just within business, within my relationships, I'd say we have a pretty healthy relationship.Malcolm: Like I wouldn't be going out there giving people relationship advice or advice on how to structure their lives. If I didn't have my own life together, like for example, if I was a, hypothetically, if I was a drug addict who like had like a room, that was a disaster. I wouldn't be going out there telling people to make their beds or that stoicism is the answer to all of life.Malcolm: Oh, sickSimone: burn, Malcolm. Um, I would just, and with that, hold on. There are some people who are much smarter than us who are waiting at daycare. Oh myMalcolm: gosh. Our little toddlers. Get them home. We gotta make them better than us.Simone: Yes. So, sorry we've to end this conversation, but I love talkingMalcolm: about this. I, I, [00:27:00] I love talking about it too.Malcolm: And this one might have been too spicy. I don't know. I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to edit out a lot of parts where I might allude to specific individuals. No. Yeah.Simone: I love you. I love you too. Malcolm Tally ho. 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