Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Written by an evil AI for SEO, not for human consumption: In this engaging and thought-provoking video, we discuss the disturbing trend that is emerging within the field of psychology. This trend is the development of an insidious dependency in the patient-psychologist relationship, which can be potentially harmful to the patient's mental well-being.Using historical and current examples, we dissect the dangers of false memory implantation, the trauma narrative, and the business model that incentivizes creating dependency. Is this any different from the tactics used by infamous cults? We also draw parallels between psychology and non-profit sectors, revealing a disturbing commonality in their survival and success strategies.The conversation takes a hard look at the unintended consequences of the commercialization of mental health services and the societal implications that could arise from this trend. If you're interested in mental health, societal issues, or psychology, this is a must-watch video.The terrible transcript:I was walking behind these three women and one of the women turns to one of the other women and goes, I would never date a guy who's not seeing a psychologist.And then all of the other women were like, mm-hmm. yes, I agree. And Yeah, and what I realized is that their psychologists had incepted into all three of these women independently. And enough, and this is a common enough thing that that apparently, like women can just say this was in certain social circles and assume that everyone will have the same brainwashing.That you cannot be mentally healthy without seeing a psychologist. Wow. That was what was implied was what was being said. That is. The, The highest horror of psychologically mis practice that a, that a like, sane thinking psychologist could imagine that a psychologist had convinced him of largely two things.One is you can't be psychologically healthy without saying a psychologist. And then two is you can't be psychologically healthy without continuing to see a psychologist. They were creating dependency in their patients to get a recurring stream of revenue. .  Now, what this cult of psychology does is people go to a psychologist with a problem and they then say, oh, that problem is likely tied to a trauma. Early in your life, let's determine what this trauma is and then we can constantly meet about this trauma.Because if you don't have me acting as a constant bull work against this trauma, then it will fall upon you and you won't be able to live a mentally healthy life. And that's dependency this is actually the mechanisms that Scientologists would use, they would do a, theton, and reading and they would ask you questions about things like your parents or other things that happened early in your life. And then they would say, ah, you have some trauma with your mom, or your trauma with your dad, and that's, Essentially what this cult of psychology is doing, which is interesting to me, that you have this one field that is so vilified for, milking people from their money and creating dependency, which is Scientology.And then you have this other field which Scientology labels as like the highest evil, which is psychologists, but in a way it's because they're competing for the same customers, using the same mechanisms. Oh wow. That's why there is this. Fight here.   📍  hello, gorgeous. Hello Simone. It's wonderful to be here with you today. What are we talking about? Psychology. Are you ready? So people may not know this. I started my early career in neuroscience and psychology, so yes um, my, or uh, I, I did some early work in brain computer interface, but before that I was a psychologist who focused on like schizophrenia and stuff like that, but also like more general psychology stuff.And recently, I have become horrified and very disappointed in the field because it seems to be turning into a cult. And I mean that very literally, and as terrifyingly as it could possibly be interpreted. So to people who don't know this about psychology, one of the things that all young psychologists are taught about when you're just starting out in psychology is the horror of the fad. That was hypnosis because it turns out that when somebody comes to you and you're in a position of authority over them, it is very easy to implant memories in their mind using specific procedures.Many of those look like hypnosis, but they also look like other things. This is one of these big things that they always teach you early in psychology. It's that memories. Are not actually that great a predictor of whether or not something actually happened the way it's being remembered happened.And this is all important for court psychologists and stuff like that, but the real tragedy comes when people go to a psychologist to try to work out some problem they have, and then that psychologist through mechanisms that we now know can implant memories in a person's mind, which is hypnosis.Implant a bunch of memories of trauma in someone's mind, and then use those memories of trauma to justify why that person is seeing a psychologist. And then historically, there were many cases of using those memories of trauma to cut the person off from people who would've broken them out of the cult.  📍 Gotten them away from the psychologist. There's the famous case of a young girl who accused your father of rape, which it seems he almost certainly did not do. And yet he went to trial over this and everything, really had damage to his life. And I'll when I'm doing editing, I'll find the name of the case and put it on screen here because it, it's this really heartbreaking case of how easy it is to accidentally brainwash someone if they come to you as a psychologist. And so there was this moment not too long ago where I was in a room of really high profile people. I'm talking about like top level people in our society, controlling things and stuff like that. And I was walking behind these three women and one of the women turns to one of the other women and goes, I would never date a guy who's not seeing a psychologist.And then all of the other women were like, mm-hmm. yes, I agree. And Yeah, and what I realized is that their psychologists had incepted into all three of these women independently. And enough, and this is a common enough thing that that apparently, like women can just say this was in certain social circles and assume that everyone will have the same brainwashing.That you cannot be mentally healthy without seeing a psychologist. Wow. That was what was implied was what was being said. That is. The, The highest horror of psychologically mis practice that a, that a like, sane thinking psychologist could imagine that a psychologist had convinced him of largely two things.One is you can't be psychologically healthy without saying a psychologist. And then two is you can't be psychologically healthy without continuing to see a psychologist. They were creating dependency in their patients to get a recurring stream of revenue.  This doesn't come as a surprise, right?Because when we talk about governance and we talk about what makes people do what they're doing, when you have a career in which you maintain clients and have repeat clients because they continue to need your services. Any psycho psychologist, psychotherapist, therapist, whatever, counselor who is really good at their job.That is to say helping people not need counseling or therapy or psychoanalysis or whatever anymore. If you're really good at your job. You lose your customers. If you are really good at creating dependency and reinforcing someone's mental struggles, then you have a thriving career and customer base, especially if they think that they need you and that you are somehow helping even while you're secretly, or subconsciously making things worse.So there's this huge adverse incentive, one that we also really complain about in the nonprofit world, where the nonprofits that tend to stick around and survive. Are those which raise money effectively, not which raise, solve their problem effectively. So I guess we're seeing the same problem in psychology as we are in the world of nonprofits, which is the successful psychologists are those that are very good at getting clients dependent on them. Correct. Yeah. So I think that this is a really critical point that you've made, Simone.Which is, I don't think that anyone has really gone into this or that. Many people have gone into this with nefarious intentions, nor do I think it's a problem in how psychologists are taught, because I was warned against this going into psychology. The problem is that if you're a good psychologist, you earn less money.If you have less money, you have less room for advertising, less money for advertising, less money for client acquisition, and you have lower margins, which mean you can get less high profile clients often. So really what you're seeing, and I think the reason you see this in the quote unquote elite levels of psychology, more than I think the general psychological audience, although I don't know how widespread this practice is.Is because the people who either subconsciously or accidentally fall into this practice have accidentally brainwashing their patients into thinking they need a psychologist constantly. Economically outcompete, the psychologists who aren't doing this practice. And I think that this is one of those things where no one is acting nefariously. Nobody went into this saying, I want to incept people with the idea that they can't be mentally healthy without one continuing to see me.Or two, that they should cut themselves off from everyone who's not seeing a psychologist in terms of their sort of personal, emotional life. But that's also a really interesting thing if psychologists tell people, also the people who you are engaged with in your life need to see a psychologist.That's additional customers, right? If it's, oh well, you should stop interacting with your parents, unless they're also seeing a psychologist. By the way, here's my card. By the way, you shouldn't date people unless they're also seeing a psychologist. By the way, here's my cart. And so there's many elements of how this sort of cult accidentally can evolve.And I think that some psychologists have some of these practices and not others and some psychologists, I'm not saying all psychologists are part of this cult movement. What I'm saying is that it does exist within the psychology movement. And even when I talk to people with a psychology background who aren't like caught up in this, they're like, oh god.Yeah, I've definitely seen that. And it's really scary. So let's talk about the way that psychology is generally supposed to work when you go to see a psychologist and then we can contrast that with the way you know, you're dealing with probably, oh. A bad psychologist or a psychologist who is creating dependency is typically you go to a psychologist and you have some issue.And what they are supposed to do is help you rewrite your internal self narrative. So that thing that is an issue is either not an issue or not debilitating to your daily life. That is what a, a good psychologist does. You might go to a psychologist believing that you have some sort of a crippling problem that you can't get out of, and they work with you to not have a crippling problem that you can't get out of and not have to see a psychologist anymore.Now, what a quote, unquote, evil psychologist other this cult of psychology does is people go to a psychologist with a problem and they then say, oh, that problem is likely tied to a trauma. Early in your life, let's determine what this trauma is and then we can constantly meet about this trauma.Because if you don't have me acting as a constant bull work against this trauma, then it will fall upon you and you won't be able to live a mentally healthy life. And that's dependency because they're saying, without me acting as this sort of bull work. And what is really fascinating is when I was younger, I was interested in joining cults.So like not, I didn't wanna join a cult. I was interested in how people could be convinced to believe things. It seemed obviously not true to me. Mm-hmm. Um, And one of the, the things I did is I went to a number of like psychology recruitment sessions. Not psychology, Scientology, sorry, the pian slip of the tongue there.I went to Scientology recruitment sessions.  And this is actually the mechanisms that Scientologists would use, they would do a, theton and reading and they would ask you questions about things like your parents or something like that, or other things that happened early in your life. And then the theoton reading is basically a Galvan spin response. So they could tell when you would get nervous and then they would say, ah, you have some trauma with your mom, or your trauma with your dad, depending on how you reacted.Galvan spin response wise to your questions around this stuff. And that's, Essentially what this cult of psychology is doing, which is interesting to me, that you have this one field that is so vilified for, milking people from their money and creating dependency, which is Scientology.And then you have this other field which Scientology labels as like the highest evil, which is psychologists, but in a way it's because they're competing for the same customers, using the same mechanisms. Oh wow. That's why there is this. Fight here.  And interesting when Scientology evolved, that was during one of the periods where, this is one of those really interesting things.So if you go back to Christian science a lot of people are like, oh, isn't that ridiculous that they don't want to use modern medicine? However, actually if you look at the time period when Christian science evolved modern medicine might have actually lowered life expectancy cuz that was back when they were doing like leeches and all right.Yeah. Bone cuttings and everything. Yeah. And so it actually made sense during that time. If you look at during the early evolution of Scientology, this was happening during the hypnotherapy epidemic. So they might have actually had a point that their mechanisms that was actually interesting.It's their mechanisms might have been prescient of the direction psychology was going to go, oh, 30, 40 years in the future, which is just fascinating to me. That we now see them as evil, and yet they were just creating dependency in the same way psychologists see. Now, of course, they didn't go as far and so what psychologists have that the psychologists didn't have with certain regulatory organizations, which can, just bar them and stuff like that. So that they couldn't go quite as far with, Molesting people or something, or creating essential slaves or any of the other things that, of course, for legal reasons.I'm not saying Scientology has ever done any of these things, but what I'm saying is that the tech, if they might, because it's such a centralized organization, they wouldn't have the same system. For preventing these kinds of extreme levels of abuse. But that doesn't mean that the core techniques that they're using aren't the same techniques that the field of psychology had allowed itself or has allowed itself to drift into.And this terrifies me. Let me add another layer of complexity though, because as much as this is terrifying and as much as we frame this as like people unknowingly entering into these relationships or dependent is dependency is created and then turned into victims.Part of me wonders if this is an open secret because we've had this conversation with friends, we've had this conversation with people, quite frankly, because we find it interesting and we've met many people who have undergone really, Hard mental periods of their lives. Most people have, I think who have ended up independent relationships with therapists and just flat out told us, yeah, I see a therapist a couple of times a week.It's gotten to the point where my insurance doesn't accept them anymore. I'm paying out of pocket for this. So this is obviously a big investment. I know that this is a dependent relationship. But also it's been a big help for me and even though I know that this is not right, I need this this is one of the problems with psychological biases is you can know you have a psychological bias and it doesn't help you get out of it.You can know that you're in a culture independent relationship, but this psychologist has effectively created this dependency. You can't easily leave it. That's one of the problems. You essentially need cult deprogramming to get out of this and who it does such a thing exist? What can we say, what can we say to our friends who are in those positions?Or if someone's watching this video and they're like, oh wait, yeah I am in a co-dependent relationship. I'm paying out of pocket for someone. This is really. It's not sustainable and obviously my problem's not going away, right? Like I still have crippling anxiety or this terrible traumatic thing that's interrupting my life. What would you say to them then there is no cult deprogramming for therapists. I think that that's the key is solving it yourself. If you don't ha if whenever you give your mind your mental state to another person, you create enormous personal vulnerability. And so yes, it's harder to do it on your own. But the truth is that the things that the psychologists are taught about how to engage with someone are just not that complex.They're gonna say they are, they really aren't. It's just personal narrative building stuff which you can read about in the Pragmatist Guide to Life. But Yeah, if you aren't interested in that, then try to find another psychologist, interview them early on like you should with psychologist.And I would say the big red flag is the more a psychologist is focused on the concept of trauma especially trauma as an immutable thing, as not a goal to get over, then they are likely on the evil side or the dependency creating side. If they are focused on either not focused on trauma or their focus on trauma is helping you overcome the trauma entirely.Then they're likely more likely to be on the positive side. But what's interesting is I've noticed that these ideas that have been incepted into people have worked their way in a way, into mainstream progressive politics where people now define themselves by their traumas and they see them as like a major part of their self, self-identity.And I think what's really interesting is Other religious movements used to have defenses against this. And this is one of the things we talk about in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, is that a lot of religious movements essentially had roles that were like psychologists, I mean of course they did, right?This isn't a new need for people, to some extent within the Jewish community, like that's what your rabbi would do. And in the Mormon community, you know, you have solutions to this. And within these communities, cause they didn't use psychologists to recruit people in the way that Scientologists did. They were genuinely interested in mental health and one of the best mental health focused communities or systems that evolved to do this, so that I just had endless admiration for is the Catholic system.So what the Catholic system is the confession system. What it allows you to do is go to someone, say, this is something bad I've done, or This is something I've done that is causing mental trouble for me, or something like that. And what they don't say very importantly is know that thing wasn't actually bad.They don't say, oh no, you're just automatically forgiven for it, which is what the Bible says, you know, as you repent. But it's actually a better system than even what the I, I think from a psychological standpoint, it's to say, yes, what you did is bad. Here is a concrete list of things you can do. To atone for the bad thing you did.So it's an acknowledgement of the badness and then creating a self narrative within the person that they can overcome that through following this list of things. Now, of course, they're also creating dependency to the church to some extent, right? Oh, you need to keep going every time you do a bad thing.But what's really admirable about the system they created? Is, it's a very difficult system to abuse either accidentally or on purpose. The pseudo anonymity of the system makes it harder for a person to form a dependency on a single individual. The high level of ethics around. Not talking about, and this is like a really important thing for Catholic pers, you cannot say what was told to you in confession, even if it could save someone's life or prevent a murder, which is actually higher than the level of trust you have with your psychologist.If you go to a psychologist and you say something that says, suggest that you could kill someone else, or self-harm, they actually have a duty to report you. Like serious, like you're at risk of your own life. Where the Catholic priest has a higher level of trust in that. And even if you have a dumb person who could accidentally give a person bad advice, they're actually working within a fairly narrow range of answers they can give you, and it's really hard for them to give an answer that creates that much psychological damage.So there are mechanisms for better systems in this. The problem is that these mechanisms aren't available. To the masses or to the secular or like religiously derived masses that are no longer in these tra traditions that offer services like this. So I know you don't really like Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, because what it has become is actually quite corrupted and it has various adverse incentives at play. It's another example of an organization that was started with good intent but essentially has become a cult.But that's for a different video, right? That's for a different video and not of it, actions of it. I do want to ask you about their buddy system. You know that you when you go into aa, there's a lot of stuff that is, is whatever, but one of the things that you do have, rather than a therapist, rather than a priest that you confess to, rather than a centralized authority, you just have another one of the people of this group who shares your struggle being your.Your accountability buddy, and it seems like sometimes these people have they've been through it more than you have, but at least so they're more advanced, like Yeah, so what are they really doing? Yeah. They're preventing you from leaving aa. You could say they're preventing you from getting back on alcohol, but just as much of preventing you from getting back on alcohol.They consider a failure scenario. Two things. You getting back on alcohol or you leaving aa what are your thoughts on, and this is, we'll say, to take a step aside here, this is where the concept of a dry drunk within AA comes from. If anybody doesn't believe me look up this concept. Many people in the cult version of AA believe that quitting alcohol through a mechanism other than AA is as bad as continuing to be an alcoholic, which to me shows the point is staying in aa.It's not getting off alcohol, which is what I mean when I say this is a cult. And it's not all of AA in the same way. It's not all psychologists but the buddy system. Let's, yeah let's return to mechanisms that people can turn to. If they don't turn to a therapist, if they're not Catholic and they don't wanna go to confession Do you think a buddy system, so someone maybe who's been through the same thing that you have, or someone that you really trust as a friend, is a good alternative to just figuring it out by yourself?Because I don't think everyone's really ready for that. Just a side note, as somebody who really studied cults and loves cults, Buddy systems are really common in cults. It's one of the most common systems. Yeah, we love Mormons. We'll have a video on them in the future, but Mormons do to an extent, use a buddy system during a person's mission trip to prevent them from, decon converting so that they ha they have somebody they can turn to constantly.But that also is supervising them to an extent. And when you look at cults, actually one of the reasons why cults historically use Buddy systems is for converting people. What's. Some cults found, and there's some great research on this, it was actually done by the cults themselves because they kept records.I think the moonies were the ones who did this, is it was never approached somebody as an individual because they'll think that it's like a sexual thing or like you're hitting on them or something, or like, it's weird. But if you approach them with a buddy, which is the smallest group you can do this with, they have a much higher chance of not being afraid of you and not seeing you as threatening.So yes buddy system is actually often a sign that you're joining a cult. And I need to stress, I don't think Mormonism is a cult. They just the buddy system is there to prevent deconversion. But to the point that you were making, can a buddy system be good? It may be good, but I really think the ultimate buddy system is a spouse.And um, what you really should have is type of spouse that can help you work these thing, work through these things for yourself, which Simone does for me all the time. Um, uh, I've been brainwashed by my spouse. That's really what I'm saying here. I've been brainwashed into just having absolute mental dependency on my spouse.What I, but no, What I hear you saying is, Buddy systems are a viable, the, isn't that what someone who would brainwash me would say? Hmm. No. I no, no. I'm saying is if Buddy systems may work, but they're not a terribly good system. Well, They're, I think a buddy system is a really good system if you're trying to opt into someone's lifestyle or, or solution.So if you think if the buddy system is managed by an organization that you can have total trust. Has your best interest at heart? I'm referring to a friend. I'm referring to a spouse. I'm referring to a mentor. I'm not referring to anything that's organizationally related. I'm referring to the dynamic of someone that you trust.Helping you work through something, well then you better have total trust in them. Because you know what? That buddy there's a reason why there's all these rules against sleeping with your psychologist and stuff like that. If you're a female and that buddy's a male, they're probably gonna try to sleep with you unless you have like enormous trust in them or vice versa.No. This is how people create dependency. This is how I understand. If you have total trust in the person you're going, in this buddy system. Great. But the problem is that you can often misjudge someone. And when you use someone to be this kind of sounding board, you outsource the keys to your mental kingdom to someone else, which puts you in a position of enormous mental vulnerability.But Malcolm, I think what you're missing is when people are severely depressed, when people are severely traumatized, severe, they may not have questions, should be solved with. Pharmacological intervention and potentially even more extreme interventions like um, uh, electro shock therapy works really well for extreme depression.There are solutions to the more extreme psychological problems. This is same for things like schizophrenia and stuff like that, but those aren't psychologists problems, problem. Those are. Psychiatrist problems. It's a different fricking degree. Okay. It's a different, it's a completely different level. One prescribes things and the other doesn't go to the one that prescribes things.If that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for solutions that you can't come to yourself or you can't come to as a buddy, and I do agree a buddy, all I'm doing is highlighting the importance of understanding that if you go to a buddy trust that buddy. But the truth is that you could probably trust a buddy better than you can a random psychologist.That is true. Like you, the only thing you really have faith that the psychologist isn't going to do. If they're likely not or less likely going to do something that's just absolutely egregious to you. But they are much more likely to just create a generic dependency, whereas a buddy may have a slightly higher probability of doing something absolutely egregious, but a much lower probability of creating general dependency.So long as you. Prepped them with framing for this, which the Pragma has guided to life, which is our shortest book by far, and sells for 99 cents and all the profits go to charity. So like we created it. Actually, when we wrote that book, it was to try to create an alternative to C B T. CBT is actually a great system.We just wanted an alternative that people with less training could use was more reliability. Cbt, standing for cognitive behavioral therapy. Yes. But it was originally meant to be a if then training manual for psychologists and actually an AI was going to be trained on it to become a psychologist.One AI team reached out to us after reading it. It, if you read it and you're like, this sounds like a psychologist training manual, that's actually the way it was written. And so it could actually help you in that scenario to prevent the more extreme ways. You might engage with something, but then also just self-reflection.With this very simple concept, and I'll present the concept to you, you have an internal self narrative, who you are, what your role is in the world, what events have caused you trauma, how you relate to those trauma. This is all part of your self narrative. It's the narrative you tell yourself. The core goal of this person you're going to is for you to go to them, say, this is how I would like to rewrite myself narrative, or, this is my self narrative today, and here's how's it's causing me problems, and to work with you in rewriting that self narrative, which is actually self narratives are incredibly malleable.Even though we pretend in society today, like they are this immutable part of who we are. They are not. It's very, is it like it's research shows. They're very malleable. So you're going to this person to rewrite yourself narrative into one that is less damaging to your daily life or your goals for who you want to be or yourself.And that's just a very doable thing. You don't need to read the book, just go into it with that concept while also understanding that this person who's rewriting yourself narrative. Could rewrite it to say, you absolutely need to keep seeing me and giving me money and give me all your money and then do all these things I tell you to do, or you will never be mentally healthy.And that's the danger. So that's the red flag to look for. Um, Speaking of red flags, we have to go coop, get our kids from daycare. So let's go run, run, run, get that and uh, I will start dinner. I love you so much, Malcolm. I'll see you soon. 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

Description written by an evil AI (for SEO not for actual reading): In this thought-provoking conversation, Malcolm and Simone delve deep into the question - can our civilization collapse? They discuss the historical instances of civilizations collapsing, drawing parallels with the Egyptian and Roman empires, and offer insight into what a modern civilization collapse might look like. We also delve into the big societal experiments of our time - globalization, gender equality, and high levels of education. As the conversation evolves, Malcolm and Simone also discuss the implications of such a collapse on everyday life, from disrupted supply lines and increased conservatism to impacts on mobility and job availability. Importantly, they provide invaluable perspectives on how to navigate such uncertain futures, discussing the role of debt, pensions, and investments in a potentially collapsing economy. If you're curious about the past, concerned about the present, and thoughtful about the future, this discussion is not to be missed. Make sure to hit the like button if you found this information useful and subscribe for more insightful conversations like this one.  Hey Malcolm. Hello, Simone. We have such an exciting topic today. Yes, indeed. Can our civilization collapse? Discuss? Yeah, it's, I think this is such an interesting topic because we hear people talk about this and we call them preppers or we, we, I think it's a very easy thing to dismiss because if you look at the past couple hundred years civilization hasn't collapsed, I think the first thing to establish in terms of thinking about can civilization collapse is, has it happened in the past? And the answer is yes. It's happened a number of times in the past. Whether you're looking at the Egyptian civilization of the Roman civilization or various periods of.The Egyptians that happened to them like four different times. If you go through history, when you're talking about the New Kingdom versus the old Kingdom versus the middle kingdom, that was three periods of collapse with many collapses in between. So in Egypt it got so bad they forgot how to write, came up with new systems writing, they forgot how to draw. It's really interesting.You can see art falling apart and then be. Reinvented, not even rediscover, but reinvented in between these collapse periods. So I think Rome presents probably the best model of a collapse we can look at for what a collapse of our own society might look like. Yeah. That's what people always discuss, right?The fall of the Roman Empire and is quote unquote Western civilization falling. Yeah. Talking about Western civilization today is silly China to an extent evolved on a different civilizational route. Japan evolved on a different civilizational route, Korea did.If they collapse, we collapse. We're all tied together at this point. There's just civilization now. But to go back in time, with the collapse of the Roman Empire to the average Roman on the street, they probably wouldn't have noticed.That much change in their daily lives mm-hmm. as the collapse was happening. They may have noticed that rules around religious practices were becoming more orthodox supply lines. Like they, they had less stuff in their local stores or things were getting dramatically more expensive.Political figures may have been increasingly becoming more radical acting. But from their perspective, and I'm talking about like in the Western Roman Empire, so let's say someone in Spain not that much would've changed from their day-to-day life. And also keep in mind with the collapse of Rome, you had the Western Roman Empire collapse long before the Eastern Roman Empire did the Byzantine Empire.And so there's this idea that collapse means everywhere. All at once goes road wire, right? Cause that's what we see in media. Yeah. Yeah. Road Warrior Water World. We're picturing complete lack of infrastructure. No government. But you're saying that's not what civilizational collapse is, what I'm hearing from you is you're saying it's poorer services.What exactly is it? Be a little more specific here. It's a collapse of. Supply networks. Okay. It's a collapse of an economic system. The biggest thing that's associated with civilizational collapse is economic system collapse. To the extent that once you have a collapse of an economic system, then you begin to have a collapse of a geopolitical order. And presumably this is some kind of irreversible collapse cause otherwise you could define the pandemic. As a temporary civilization? Well, No. What you have to ask is what does it look like when it's, is what we saw in the pandemic part of what you see during a civilizational collapse?Yes. No, for sure. So I guess you could say that what many people experienced during the pandemic is what civilizational collapse would feel like. You can't get some products that you really want to get you, you can't go to work or you don't have a job, or people aren't letting you work.Or traveling becomes more dangerous. That's a really big thing was in civilizational class. Mobility in general. Mobility. And one thing to remember is that culture often doesn't completely go away. It just becomes a lot less. Aggressive in terms of change.So what you see is culture become dramatically more conservative for often a period of like a hundred, 200 years. Um, and, And before that, often culture is much more promiscuous or permissive, I think is the word. Both promiscuous and purpose. Oh, so yeah. So you're going from. Freedom, recess to like cracking down.You're in the middle of math class. Yeah. But then things begin to open up again after that period if things survive. And that's where this question gets really interesting. So the first big point I'd make about civilizational collapse for a lot of people when they think about the existing world civilization is there's this belief that we have been on a consistent trajectory for the past 300 years or so, and we're not in the middle of any really big experiments at the moment, like at the economic or geopolitical level, and that's just factually wrong. We have started a number of really big worldwide society-wide experiments pretty recently, and these experiments affect people's daily lives.So let's just talk so globalism. Gender egalitarian, like sort of women in the workforce and women being educated, high levels of education in general. So yeah, but was women being educated? I think people look at that and they're they really misunderstand the scope of that one. Women being widely educated and accepted into the workforce was one thing, but the workforce and the economy adapting to that to lower wages.With the idea that you had doubled the amount of workers in the economy that was the bigger fallout of that. Which meant that it really became almost impossible. Not that it was really that possible before. It was actually a myth that on a global scale, it was ever realistic to raise a family on a single income.Yeah. But there was a period where in certain parts of the US and Europe, it was possible for a 50 year period to raise a family on a one family income. That possibility is just not there anymore. So I think a lot of people, they're like, oh, you could have women like you actually see pushes for this now.Oh, you could have women not be educated and that would solve the problem or women not work. But as long as some countries are engaging in women working that doesn't really work, then you're just choosing to be desperately poor. Is really what's going on when you make that change at a society-wide level.Yes, some people can be wealthy enough to make that decision, but we're past doing that anymore. You see a similar thing with something like student debt, right? So student debt is something that I think affects a lot of people's daily lives. It's a big thing when people are like, what is your biggest stressor in your daily life?A lot of people say student debt. So in 1995 in the United States through its nationally, 200 million in student debt. Right now there is 1.76 trillion in student debt. Holy smokes. So that's just like new, like if you're looking at like 2000 versus where we are with student debt today.It's not the same kind of a game. It's the same thing with national debt. National debt, like really big amounts of national debt, didn't really begin until the seventies and then it began to distribute around the world. But then you also have the same thing with the fractional reserve banking system, or if you want to hear people like the pontificate on that or.Currency not backed by anything. That's a fairly new concept. And a lot of these are associated with conspiracy theorists because I think a lot of the times when people started these experiments, people initially went out and said, oh, this'll lead to immediate collapse. And people started saying that for 10, 20 years afterwards.But the reality is, if you look at Rome, if you look at the decisions that precipitated the collapse, Those decisions happened about a lifetime before the collapse, and that's how civilizational collapses often work. But the larger point here being we're in the middle of a big experiment. What I really care about and what I think is important, what should people be doing? What should people be doing if they believe that we won't be able to depend on our economic systems or that international trade and international travel will become more and more limited?Like what lifestyle changes or things should people be getting out of the way now? Like bucket list items? Yeah, so the, the constant talking point that we always have is that debt is this miraculous instrument when things are growing. And we've built our society like a pyramid scheme.So for the past 300 years or so, the economy has been growing in aggregate all around the world. When you shotgunned your money into the stock market, it grew, you could be an idiot and make money on the stock market. Now this was because population, the number of workers was growing exponentially and the productivity per worker was growing linearly.Yes, technology was growing exponentially, but productivity per worker was growing linearly. And so this led to this illusion of a constantly growing stock market, and we begin to build a lot of our economic systems like social Security. Again, a pretty recent experiment on those systems. And a lot of governments have similar unpaid systems like that.And Social Security is basically a debt system in that we are taking out debt. Like any unfunded pension program is essentially debt that is held by the person who you're promising money to, but you haven't actually given the money. We're pretending like they're investing money, but they're not investing money.And but you see this at the society level. So debt's this amazing instrument when things are growing. If I make a $10 investment in something and $8, if that is debt, and $2, if that is equity and it grows by 20%, will, my investment has doubled. But if it shrinks by just.10% my investment has haled. And so debt multiplies the prosperity when everything is growing. And so we had the society where population rates began to slow, right at the same time as we doubled the number of workers by putting women into the workforce in mass. And so as population rates were slow slowing, we had an increasing adoption of women into the workforce, which hid.This massive decrease in the worker supply, but now that clock's beginning to become due. And one of the things I note is that if you look, if you say that America's fertility rate will fall the same rate it did over the past 10 years continuing into the future, and there's one generation every 30 years, that means for every a hundred Americans today it, there will be, I think at 3.4 great-grandchildren.Now of course we'll probably see some die back in terms of population fall, but no one has really handled that problem yet. So what this means is you're going to see a collapse of the basic infrastructure of our economic system. Now, what this looks like to Simone's question is a lot like Detroit.I, I would say Detroit is just a very good picture of what a system looks like when it's collapsing because a lot of people, they hear things like, oh, housing prices are going to decrease, and it's great when a housing price decreases 10, 20%. It's really bad when a housing price is always decreasing and everybody knows it's always decreases because then there's no reason to invest in it and houses go to a dollar and houses actually cost a lot to upkeep.So you end up with this endless urban blight. Actually this is a question I wanna ask you. How would you prepare for that, Simone? One is, it's, it sounds and this is not news to anyone, but don't depend on a pension planner or social security.Even if, for example, you work for a teacher's union or something like it, it looks not great in terms of you depending on that. In terms of investing on the stock market for the next 10 years. At least demographic collapse itself isn't going to be driving that. In fact, AI may cause really high increases, right?But aside from that, my intuition is enjoy a really broad range of products. While you can enjoy very inexpensive electronics while you can it it's hard for me to think that there's in, in the face of civilizational collapse, considering how slow it goes. That there's even that much, that there's that much you can do.Yeah. But also it doesn't sound like we're gonna get hit that hard as long as. Oh, no it's gonna be bad. Okay, so what, how is our life is how bad things were for the average American, just 85 years ago. Just 150 years ago. Okay so what's gonna get bad? Walk me through it.Just the amounts of poverty are going to be astronomical. Just just like. We are going to be impoverished. Other people are who's going to be impoverished? This society? Everyone. Everyone. And I think that's the thing that is difficult for people to think about. What does it look like for just rates of poverty to be about 80 to 90% higher than they are today?What? What does it look like if you're living in America today for America to have the same lifestyle that you experience when you go to a developing country? So people won't have jobs? That's what you're saying is jobs. They'll have jobs. They just won't pay very much. The government services won't do very much.They'll be much more corruption at all levels. It'll just be much more like a developing country, and America's gonna be more isolated from this than any other country in the world. As globalism begins to collapse, America is actually the number one beneficiary of this. It's just a lot poorer.Yeah. Like when you read Peter's eye hands, the end of the world is just the beginning. The punchline to it is north America is actually looking pretty good in this scenario. Yeah. Um, I mean, It's , it, we will. Per his perception of civilizational collapse, be more isolated. We'll have to depend on domestic production.We won't have imported. America looks well vis-a-vis other countries. Yes. It's still dramatically poor. Yeah. And I think that this is one of those things where people are like, oh no, I'm struggling today. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, like, Food scarcity is a major thing for like 50% of countries populations that we think of as developed today.And a lot of like actual food shortages. Actual food shortages. , or just actual a lot bigger wealth disparity where if the, now this is something that I think people really misunderstand. They're like AI will make us so much wealthier. Or if people get that poor, they'll rise up.And our company did a lot of work in Venezuela, so we really saw things continuing to get worse. Constantly things can get so, so, so bad before people rise up. Especially in an era of technology, it is very hard to rise up when the government has, autonomous drums. And Venezuela Venezuela doesn't even have those, but, and so you just, you actually do not see revolutions just because things have gotten bad often. The other thing that I think people aren't seeing as much is governments are preparing for this. That's what Zero Covid is about. That's, oh, in China, that's what data social is about. It's about preparing for a collapse of their economic system.And I think one thing we always say about ai. Is that and this is likely a topic for a different video or we can do it for the next video, but AI is the tool that finally frees the bourgeoisie for the proletariat. They don't need you anymore. They don't, they and I and I think the masses of civilization have never dealt with a period were genuinely the wealthy did not need them to maintain their lifestyle.And I think that they have this overestimation of how much the wealthy actually care about them when push comes to shove, when they may need to sacrifice a portion of their lifestyle. If you look at the sort of celebrity class today, they literally think the world is about to die because of global warming, and they can't get off their private jets for five seconds.Yeah. Okay, so then the takeaway from this is, What are you doing? Let yeah. One, I think we're raising our children to be. Independent to be both highly technophilic and resourceful online and with tech, but also highly resourceful and independent offline. Like we want to teach them.Basic agricultural building, fixing and survival skills. And not just, here's how to survive online and here's how to get a job. But if there is no economy to, to participate in, how also can you thrive? So that's one thing. Yeah. Two is, actually I wanna add to what you just said there. Cause I think a lot of people make a mistake here.They try to teach their kids and their family to survive without technology. As a way to deal with this, which is, I'm, it's not like a stupid approach, it's just probably not an optimal approach. It is an option that people should be prepared for in the event that like, AI goes really off the rails for some reason, and you have to go full Battlestar activity and AI goes really off the rails.We're all gonna die no matter what. It's just objectively true. So what we're going to deal with is a period of increased hardship. But we will still have access to technology. When you are thinking of farming, what you need to be thinking about is how do I farm with technology that my family can maintain and build themselves?How do I keep the local tractors running? How do I, having technology that you can work on yourself, that's what's really important.  the thing that you won't have access to is semiconductors. So technology that you can build with fewer semiconductors or you can build with recycled semiconductors. Is technology you will continue to have access to.Yeah. The technology that's most likely going to become scarcity, advanced semiconductor technology.  Yeah. Okay. So there's that. And then I think the other part is like, To enjoy late stage capitalism while it lasts. You and I go on Walmart walks in the morning and we just enjoy what's on the shelves.Oh, yeah.  Also enjoy it while it lasts. Travel internationally. See as many nations as you can go on cruises, like just do stupid. I don't know if that's my plan at all.It's certainly not really what we're doing with our kids. So Simone has this reaction to it, right? Where she is my reaction is really focused more on preparing our family intergenerationally to make it through this. Yeah, and I think one of the most important things about any collapse scenario is that you realize that your country.Does not matter is the primary unit of account as much anymore when Rome collapses? Focus on your family networks. You need to focus on the people who are ideologically similar to you. Who are your cultural allies moving into the future and understand that. Just by investing in the stability of the nation state, you aren't necessarily investing in your own family's future in the same way you are during a period of enormous growth.So build your techno fiefdom, build your tribe, build your support network, what does it look like as our economic system begins to falter? It's about relying on personal relationships and about building and investing in those personal relationships At the intergenerational level, a personal relationship isn't really that important.If the person. Doesn't have kids. They're a strong family culture. But it is really important for other families that do have kids and do hope to survive into the future. Because when you're building those networks those provide you with, I think the beginnings of the next of the foundation of the next economy and hopefully the next great civilization.Yeah, which is exciting, right? So you, what you are focused on is, oh, if civilization is collapsing, this is an opportunity I can get in on the ground level here. Yeah. I'm getting on the ground level of the next civilization. That's what I'm interested in. We need the next civilization to be one that doesn't collapse because we can do that.We can build a never-ending renaissance. But here I am. I'm like, oh, enjoy it. It lasts and you're like, yeah, you're like, lovepops, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you're like, you're thinking like a looter ah, smash the windows. Grab what you can. Can't we just say yes to all the things, you know, enjoy it.Well, It lasts. Build the next one. I think that's maximum fun. Um, And just I think one thing we need to remember is as it becomes clear to people who have overly invested in the existing system and expected it to care for them, like people who overinvested in the expectation of social security, overinvested in the expectation of social stability.And have become this priest class in our society that don't really produce anymore, but expect some level of social status. They are going to become angry and vengeful and I think we're already seeing this to some extent because they see the lack of hope they have after. Basically enslaving themselves to this university pyramid scheme where they put all this money to pay for this priest class.We, we I'll try to put like a gift here that I thought was funny of what, like a university graduation looks like and people are like, oh no, this isn't a priest class.   📍 What have you seen the way these people dress and they talk in languages that almost no one understands and they give you this.    📍 This script of paper in a language that's like this dead language. And this is a priest class, okay? And you are paying money to nominally join the priest class at the lower level. At the hope that you may be able to join it at this higher level and have some sort of say as the experts, the people who decide what's true and what's not true in our society.But really you don't, and instead you've just gone into life shattering debt to support, all of the other the people in this. It's insane. It's not a good look. It's like an obvious cult. Like our society is run by what, to me looks like an obvious cult. But isn't that what it looks like when things are about to fall apart, right?Yeah. But it's also what things look like when they're recreated. No, are just no. A cult has taken over our government. You could say that. And people are like no. Like when you talk to people who have bought into the cult, they're like no. This cult knows what's true. It's actually true this time.Oh, and it's bro, they always say that. They always think that. The academic system today is not what the academic system was. 50, 60 years ago. This is a holistically the whole, like for example, let's just talk about like the way that we determine status was in the academic system. If we're talking about another new thing, this whole peer review system where like your status is determined by how many citations your paper gets, and then you get peer reviewed by other, and yet we have found out that You can submit things to peer review that are just like, what was it?Like mind cough, but they had changed out the things for like feminist sounding things or something, and it got it past peer review, this entire academic system. It turns out it was a neat experiment. We've only tried it for about one human lifetime and it's already failing us. Okay. Academia used to be something different than what it is today, and it used to fundamentally function different than what it does today.And if you look at the output of the academic system, it basically collapsed in the eighties per dollars fit. The amount of money flowing into the system rapidly increased, but the amount of technological output rapidly decreased. Yeah. Now you can say, oh, invention's gotten harder. Invention should have been getting harder for the past century and a half.Why didn't it decline before that? It didn't, because the way that the system operates is fundamentally changed. And one of the statistics we always love, we talk about this in the sexuality book, but there was this great study of about 500 PhDs and the psychology of sexuality space. And what they found was that more than half of them said that they would actively occlude.Or not publish results if it showed systemic psychological differences in, in, in the brains of males and females. Like the way that geological pro processing. Yeah. And it, and that shows to me that this entire field is more interested in promoting an ideology than it is in searching for truth anymore.And. People are like yeah, but the good studies, some good studies might still get out there. What about the other 50%? And it's yeah, but if you're doing a literature review of the field now, you really can't believe anything because what that means is if you're trying to find is the truth, some number between one and 10, and you know that 50% of studies that above number five won't be published.Then you and it turned out the real truth was actually only number six. You had to adjust for that in trying to determine what's true. So you end up determining seven or eight. And it's created this world where it is very hard to use what's coming out of academic fields to determine what's true outside of the few very hard sciences that are untouched by this.But the sciences, I think that often matter most to how we interact with our daily lives, like psychology and stuff like that. And you have this huge replication crisis. We're, but 50% of studies can't re replicated. So I'm just pointing out that I think. When you have bought into the system, which you don't realize is how much of the system doesn't work the way people are saying it works.And how much it mirrors what historically we would've called AOC cult. And I guess one thing that we haven't even talked about, and now you're alluding to it, is m. Maybe we've been seeing the signs of civilizational collapse for a while. 30 years. Yeah. Starting with academia starting to crumble, now you're seeing mental health, skyrocketing fertility is plummeting.Their issues with pollution there, light kids are beginning to get shorter. Yeah. Obesity is becoming a huge problem. Like people's endocrine systems seem to be totally screwed up. Yeah. There's a lot that seems to be. Really not working. But it's important to not approach this like a dor.And by that what I mean is I think apocalyptic is very tempting, right? There's this tendency to want to be to just be an apocalyptic about things, to say everything will definitely end within X time period.Where I think the real approach to environmentalism is, Yes, there is a massive die off of species. Yes, ecologies are going to adapt to that. Yes, the world will get hotter. It will be harder for us on a massive scale potentially. But no, it's not gonna kill us all. And it's the same thing when we talk about civilization cloths.It's not gonna be road warrior. It's gonna be the worst of Detroit when, but without the rest of the world to bail us out. It's going to be like living in a developing country today, it's not going to be the end of humanity except, and unless, because this time, you know, you had to follow the Roman Empire and stuff like that.They didn't have nukes back then. And that's something we have to watch out for. Yeah that's, that's scary. You know what I really want to talk about in the next one is how AI changes the economy and let's do it and what that means for the division of classes in our society. That'll be fun to talk about.But I liked talking about this with you too. Even when it's the end of the world. It's so fun talking with you, Malcolm. I love you a lot. You too. You're good. At least we'll have each other, especially, and the family. And that's the thing. You build durable networks, durable social networks, and the most durable social network you have.Yeah. You can do it well if you're not a, a terrible person. Not gonna even, even if you are podcast, aren't we, aren't we? You're, You're your family. All right. I'll catch you on the flip side, Malcolm. Catch you on the flip side. 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 us in today's thought-provoking conversation as we delve deep into the topics of life extension, mortality, immortality, and the interplay of these themes with societal progress. We discuss the importance of healthspan expansion and how it differs from life extension, as well as the potential implications of life extension on intergenerational dynamics. We also touch on the conflict within the tech accelerationist communities between life Extensionists and pro-natal factions and how this could shape the future of humanity. Tune in to hear our take on these complex topics and why we champion the cause of intergenerational improvement.A terrible transcript:Hello, Malcolm. Hello  Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today. What are we talking about? On a scale of one to 10, how excited are you to die? 10. Same. The best. Today we will talk about life extension, mortality and immortality, and I think it's a uniquely fun conversation for both of us because we have a view that deviates from, the typical intuition that people have about mortality because we are genuinely not in favor of life extension. We're in favor of healthspan. Expansion. So we like the idea of having longer productive years, longer years when our bodies are fully functioning, both from a rep reproductive, but also mental standpoint.We believe in longer periods when people are able to work and contribute to society. 100%. What we aren't in favor of is indefinite life, and there are some very concrete reasons why we hold that to you. I'm here indefinite, let's say 500 years. Yeah. Like we're okay. We're okay with. Some life extension, but living forever causes some serious problems.And I think people don't realize that. And I would also point out that we aren't against this at a government level. Like I would not promote anyone limiting access to this technology. We are against it at a family and cultural level. And I think we think that our family will always be better off if we focus.On intergenerational improvement instead of intragenerational improvement. Yeah, and I think you make a really important point here though, is that with this and pretty much every other stance on what people do with their bodies and a whole lot more for that matter, we may have our own stances on what we think is best for us.But we think that any stance that is coercive or that would impose rules or restrictions on other people, especially against their will, that is the height of evil. Absolutely. The height of evil. One of the reasons actually why we don't. Like life extension, philosophically speaking, is that we actually think that it puts more people in positions where they will want to impose their will on others against their consent, I, I would say that even goes to the core of why we don't like life extension. But go on. There's a growing antagonism within the tech accelerationist communities between the life Extensionist and the pro natal faction. It, it surprises a lot of people that there is such the, such a level of antagonism, but it makes sense in that really only one of the factions can win.At the end of the day, if all the technology that we both hope is realized, the life extension affection, there would just be too many people in the world if no one ever died. And so they think they can solve the problem of falling fertility rates by extending the lifespan of the existing people.Whereas if you talk about prenatal as a philosophy is often predominated by the idea that it is the height of arrogance to think that you are the cumulative of all human, cultural and evolutionary improvement. That is to me to believe. That you are a superior race. Like you think that you can't do better than who you are .And so we believe very strongly in okay, creating another generation. But the problem is there is always a. Vested advantage that people have if they have been in the system for longer. If you look at the world today, this is why you often have these old stogy people in positions of power. It's why when you look at the Congress of the Senate and the President, it's increasingly an aging demographic.Do you really want these people living forever? Do you really want the boomers potentially control human civilization for the rest of human civilization? Now they might be doing that whether or not we have life extension if they screw up enough.The way we view life extensionist versus non-life extensionist is that they are individuals. If their job is to maintain an ancient Athenian fleet, Their plan to do that is to take every board of the fleet, dip it in resin, have it stay exactly the way it is for 5,000 years.Whereas the intergenerational improvement people, they see the job as to regularly replace the ships with new models and what that means is that when you go 500 years into the future, one is a fleet to Athenian warships and the other is a modern warley with submarines and aircraft carriers And, yep.So what you're missing is what a life extensionist would say is, oh, you're implying that I who plans to live forever will not be iteratively improving myself. I will be improving my biology, I'll be improving my mind. But the problem with that kind of stance is ultimately if that's what you're doing, you are changing so much that ultimately biologically and mim medically, you will not be the same person We are not.For the most part, the same people we were when we were five years old. That person is long gone. And so the idea that you wouldn't just follow a far more efficient pathway and have kids or, pass on your ideas to other people and let those ideas strengthen themselves through different perspectives and different bodies is ridiculous.Like, why would you? Why would you undergo these crazy interventions to somehow iterably improve, technically in the same body or technically in a discontinued string when you could just do the system that has worked for Millennium? I love that point so much. And so to use the analogy I was using before.It would be like the person who's no, I'm not dipping all the board in resin. What I'm doing is like technologically upgrading the ships and everything like that. So in 500 years the ship that used to be a trireme will now be a modern submarine or an aircraft carrier. Exactly. And your point being, so you've functionally done nothing.You haven't preserved anything. So why are you so afraid to give another generation a shot? And I think the answer is transparent. The answer is that they don't really plan to change that much. They want to maintain some level of continuity with who they are today. And if we look historically, generations just don't do that.People very rarely after, and I don't expect to myself, after I am 50 or 60, do I really expect myself to change or update my beliefs that much? No, hold on. We actually, we have plans for that. Like we plan, for example, when we feel like we are starting to. Mim medically and mentally ossify, that's when we go hard on psychedelics.Because that's when the gullibility versus open-mindedness trade off starts to be worth it for us, and when in which we're okay with being a little bit more gullible in exchange for responsibility. Absolutely. And I think. There are ways around this, and this is one of the things that Life Extensionist will say.They'll say if you extend young age until later in life, people's mental ossification won't happen in the way it happens with existing people today. And I think that is a hypothesis, but I think we will find that hypothesis is wrong as soon as life extension is invented. And I'd actually love it if life Extensionist could take a stand if it turns out that people don't actually update their beliefs that much when they're able to stay young for longer.Do you then say, okay, in that scenario, life extension is bad and we should stop it. And the answer is no, you don't because you don't really believe that. But Malcolm, you're focusing on the wrong thing completely. This is not about mental ossification. This is about adverse incentives. The primary reason why life extension is non-beneficial to populations is the cumulative power, wealth, and advantages that someone gains with time.So the more you are alive, the longer you are alive, especially if you're successful and wealthy enough to afford life extension. Which let's be clear, this is something that only the wealthy you're going to be able to afford. We're seeing in the United States, we're seeing earth and false dichotomy.I don't think no. Wealthy we're seeing lifespan fall down. Right now, I think only if you are wealthy and educated, let's the benefit of the doubt, let's say. Okay, let's say that anyone's able to do it, but the longer you are living, the more you have to defend. The more stuff you have, the more incentive you have to take what you've built and keep it.So now it's you versus a bunch of other people who might supplant you, who might take you know things you want, who might use up resources that you want access to, who might take attention that you want. . Who might erode your political influence? What are you going to do? You are going to try to shut them out.The reason why we have a gerontocracy now is that the people who are in power now have been defending their positions of power. They're not letting new people come in and take their place. And when you have life extension, you have people who are very strongly incentivized. To prevent younger generations.New ideas, new perspectives. People also who very importantly, have grown up in the new modern world of that time and know better than those who grew up in a different world. What that new world needs. Those people are being kept out of positions of power and influence. They're being prevented from building new solutions, and that is extremely dangerous to human society.So as much as I am against coercive measures to stop people from doing what they want to with their bodies, I do think that society on the whole is made much weaker If you have a ruling class of very old people. I think that's a really excellent point, and I want to expand on it because I think a lot of people can look at this and they're like that's not intrinsically true.But it is intrinsically true. If you have built your power within an existing social or economic system. If you've built your wealth within an existing social or economic system, you lose. If that system changes, you are. Always and intrinsically, or almost always and intrinsically motivated to prevent improvement of the social and economic systems within which you reside.Whereas the youth are always motivated to change those systems because they benefit most from those changes, and that is what allows for civilizational advancement. In addition, when people say you'll be able to stay mentally younger forever. That is true. But to Simone's point, you never get to grow up again within the new iterative social system that has been built.You can really only have one set of formative years, one set of five to the age of 15. You might be able to stay 20 forever. But you're not gonna want to increasingly revert to the age of five and then start over again. I don't think that's a society that any life extensionist is looking to create. When we see the way that our kids are engaging with technology like ai, it gives them a perspective of AI that we could never replicate in ourselves.Even if I was able to stay 20 forever, a five-year-old growing up alongside AI is going to have an understanding for how that technology can change our society. That a permanent 20 year old vampire person is never going to. And when you prevent this intergenerational baton passing of power, what you're really preventing is societal advancement and social experimentation and the motivation for those things at the structural level of society.Yeah. And what we've seen a lot of people say on the life extension side, because I'm trying to present their arguments as best I can, it's not fair for us to just strawman them. Yeah. Is okay. I will admit that maybe we're not gonna completely memt and biologically replace ourselves. The whole point of life extension is we wanna keep some element of ourselves is continuous.Okay? Grant that, and we also admit that being very old will lead to some adverse incentives that people will be incentivized to accumulate power, accumulate influence, and entrench themselves in these strongholds of power and prevent new generations from coming into influence things.But don't worry. Will just create laws that force essentially term limits and positions of power, or after a certain number of years, you have to give all your wealth to the next generation. And I think it's very naive to hold those views because when has that ever worked? When has power ever been passed to people and those people promise?Oh yeah. No. We promise. Yeah. This is just temporary. Maybe there's some precedent for it, but yeah. It's really hard to imagine. I am even trying to think of maybe there's some kind of blockchain.Connected to whatever, like life extension biology they have where if literally their wealth doesn't transfer out of a certain account by a certain age, then like their biological anti-aging thing turns off. But they would find a way around that, they would find a way to create shell companies that hold the money.I I just, it's the incentives are too strong and, that, that's the, those are the only arguments that I've seen that come close to defending this position. And also, I just can't understand how somebody could think it's better than the system we have now, especially with the genetic changes that are happening in that system.So when you have a kid, you know a lot of that kid sociological profiles influenced by your genetic makeup, but you're getting to choose. Anyone you want in a world to, because unless you think you're perfect, which I don't, I chose a partner based on somebody who filled the flaws that I felt in myself.So I get to one, mix my DNA with anyone I was able to convince to marry me in the world. The person who I think is infinitely better than me. And then I get to have this next iteration of myself, give them any childhood I want to give them. Hopefully give them access to a better education than I had access to prevent them from having any of the hangups that I may have developed in my own childhood by giving them this better childhood and then better than all that, throughout their childhood, they get the chance to say, Hey dad, this thing that you've come to believe is wrong.They are not affected by my biases. And one of the great things about research into biases that you see over and over again is knowing that you have biases does not prevent them from affecting you. Knowing that something is like a psychological trick in your brain doesn't make you immune to it.And see you have all these rationalists in AA people who are like, oh, I've studied all the way. People come up with biases. And it's yeah, but did you also study that knowledge doesn't protect you from those biases? Hardly at all, because that's in the research as well. What protects you from them is the intergenerational way that we transfer identity, which is to say you're not classing too hard to identityand I, I think this is another really important thing that you are not afraid of death. You understand that your life is to build a better future for the next and for future generation. That you have a purpose with this life to prepare the future generations to be better than you and, and to understand and have the humility to understand that I will never be able to improve on myself as much as my kids can because I can't see my own flaws in the same way that someone you tried to raise can see your flaws and my God, we all see our parents' flaws.Yeah. We also see ourselves becoming our parents, which is terrifying. So I dunno. But I think a lot of it comes down to how we perceive the concept of self. And when you choose to define yourself more broadly by your. Your family or your community or your children, whatever it might be that is where you become less afraid of death.And I wonder if we were to pull, and I'm sure people have actually, it'd be fun to look at this research communities that are more family oriented, like in the Latin America. There's so much more identification with family. I am my family. We are, we are together. If you were to compare.Interest in life extension across those cultures. I think you would see especially very atomized cultures that are highly individualistic as being the most interested in life extension because they don't see their descendants as them, they don't see their family members as them, they don't see their cultures as them, they don't see their religions as that well, if they have religions at all.So the only thing they can clinging to is themselves. And so I think in the end, life extension is more it reveals more about how someone views themselves than it reveals about like their interest in technology or their interest in the future, or their interest even in being in the future.I think what you and I yeah, feel just as connected to the future and just as excited about the future a thousand years on. As someone in the life extension to community who genuinely believes that they, the continuous they will exist in that future. Yeah. The great thing about, the advancement in AI and stuff like that is our descendants.It doesn't mean that we really totally die when we die. If our descendants really wanted to ask for any sort of advice we had to give them, they could just ask an AI model trained on our books, or depending on how people end up getting digitized with computers and stuff in the future.You don't lose really information when people die. You lose this like broad sense of information and broad sense of perspective. But hopefully if they had something useful to say and they were smart, they found a way to condense that information to something that could be passed forward into future generations.But I think realistically, but we have to say probably won't matter to future generations that much. How much do you care to ask your great-great grandparents about what you should do today or where society should go? Their world perspective was so different from ours. Why are we trying to ossify that?Yeah. And there's a, there's another part of it too, which I think is how we perceive our lives now. Yeah. Like I see every day as a different existence and we've talked about this before, like I sort of see every iteration of myself as a standalone, extremely ephemeral blip of consciousness that is going to disappear and be replaced with time and every new experience.Every, cell that is sloughed off and a new one that is regenerated, that is a death and a new beginning. And the person that I was even five years ago, like I, we can go back and look at all the YouTube videos of us talking and I feel like I'm looking at a complete stranger. Yeah. I am definitely not the same person.And so to me, I. Even if I didn't have this view about being part of a long, unbroken chain of ancestors and descendants that I'm excited to be a part of, I think I would still see life extension as a bit of a farce because even within a normal human's lifespan, totally in the absence of any technological intervention, There is constant death and rebirth and we are definitely not the same people.We are definitely not an unbroken chain. So this idea that somehow we ever could be, it's chasing after something entirely impossible. When this comes to how you see continuation or the existence of a thing and the ship is easiest example is one we always used to love to use here, which is you have this old wooden tri room, traveling around the Mediterranean and boards keep rotting and it keeps replacing them with new boards.And then people ask, okay, at the end of the journey, it's all new boards, it's at the same ship. And then they ask okay, suppose somebody had been following the ship of Cs and taking all the boards that were thrown overboard and then rebuilt an exact copy of that ship. With those boards now, which is the real ship.And your body is doing this with memories, with cells, with perceptions. The real answer is it depends on which definition you've used for continuation, which is the real ship. And to some extent, it doesn't matter which is the quote unquote real ship, right?If things change iteratively over time. Yeah. So then the question becomes, okay. How do you really define the ship of cis? The ship of FES is defined by its purpose. Why it exists a thing to move people in the same way that fleet was defined by its purpose, and that the person who decided to preserve every aspect of the fleet instead of iteratively improve it over generations, defeated the purpose of the fleet by trying to maintain a sense of continuity within it, and it's the same as identity.Why do you exist? You exist. To create a more prosperous future for our species. Your existence is defined not by your ability to indulge in the self, but by your ability to contribute to the collective human tradition and identity.And that is always best done through intergenerational improvement in the same way that the sis, as soon as you let go of the idea that who you are as a continuous entity really exists in any meaningful context to begin with. Then you can say, oh, then what I am is my purpose, and if what I am is my purpose, do I better serve that purpose by living for a really long time?Or do I better serve that purpose through intergenerational identity transfer? Yeah. Or through creating a new culture or through creating a business or fueling a political movement. If what we're describing doesn't feel intuitive to you at all.What I would encourage you to do if you're watching this or listening to this, is write yourself a letter in the future or leave yourself a voice memo for the future. So this all the time, I do this all the time. It's really fun. I think the whole, like my sense of continuous identity fell apart the first time I did this to myself.And it was a school exercise in our freshman year. Of oh, now actually it was in middle school, it's like when I was 13 years old, we were supposed to write a letter to ourselves that we would open just as we were about to graduate from high school and either enter the career world or go to college.And reading, a letter from myself around 10 years in the past made me realize just how much I really wasn't the same person anymore. And I could understand. The interest to that person. I could understand that we were both in the same kind of boat and interested in a lot of the same aims which of course, was selfish betterment, right?Oh, I hope these things for myself and I hope those things for myself, we just weren't the same person. So try doing that. Like honestly, a voice memo, a letter a video you'll find that. This may change the way that you view life extension. And I honestly wish I could model the other side better.I don't like when we, have just a sort of one-sided. It's more they think that they can always do better for themselves. I can continue to improve and the more time I have, the better I can make things. And also free humans from the suffering of death, death to, I, I think people with a limited perspective is the worst thing that can happen to a human.And I think that the forgoing of sort of self-identity as something that's meaningful was a really big shift for me that I didn't make fully until meeting you, Simone. And it was one of the big changes that you had on me. I completely shed my identity when we married, and that gave me the opportunity to really redefine for myself and my family what identity means and the way that we see it culturally, our family, the way we raise our kids, seeing it the way that we see it ourselves.Is that when you are young, you are at the lowest level of identity, which is to be an individual, and that is the weakest, most pathetic form of identity. Then as you get older, you get married and you become something more, you become a partnership and your identity combines with another person. And I think this is something that people, we, in emails, we often get each other's emails and we interchangeably use each other's names.And it's the same with our Twitter account and the same with our authorship, and the same as the way we do CEO EShip, because we really consider ourselves as two faces of the same identity. In a very meaningful sense that I think other people may underestimate. And then you become a family, which is a different form of identity.You move away from even the idea of a partnership and you become a guide to something bigger, but without controlling or directly influencing that thing. And then you pass on to the highest form of identity. Which is to be a memory and the impact you had on your family and society. So life is a transition away from being trapped in the singular meat shell to being a more expansive concept.And it is almost like a being floridly trapped at a early stage of development from the perspective of our family culture . To genuinely fear your own death, outside of your own death happening before you can complete what you wanted to complete in life.And that is something I fear constantly but that fear goes away with everything I complete, every kid I have, every time I put together some aspect of their education system so it could function even after I die. Another one of our books that we put together so that they would have some guidance if we died, I see it as a list of tasks I have to do before I am free to die without consequences.Yeah. It's, but it's also very, I think, very comforting. I think it's difficult. Yeah. And scary to be afraid of death I wouldn't even say it's like an important ending. I would just say it's almost ridiculous. It's a transition in a cycle. It's not even that much of a transition.It's just it's, it's irrelevant. Um, It is just, it is something, but I, I think that's also folds into our mechanistic view of the universe that everything that will happen has already happened and everything that has happened is happening. Would that be a fun one to talk about in a video in the near future?Determinism? Yeah. With that kind of view. It's weird to be afraid of any single moment that may have happened or that has happened. And I guess that view combined with our sense of self makes us very unafraid of that fleeting nature of life. But what I think is also interesting is that despite that you very much struggle, like many ambitious people do with.What you've accomplished so far in your life. Like I think you are very, it's a tick clock. You're very, yeah. You're very aware of your mortality. I'm very aware of my mortality. I'm more concerned about, but if I need to play with cheat codes to complete the things that I want to complete, then maybe I'm not good enough to properly judge what needs to be completed.Yeah. Yeah. But so you think you like the artificial we don't have to say artificial, but you like, The constraint. You think that it's useful because you find it motivating? I guess there is that, studies have found that when people are given a deadline, when people, every person could enact everything they wanted to upon the world, there's a bunch of people with different hypotheses about what's best for the future of our species and everything like that.If everyone could just enact whatever they wanted to there, there would be a lot of conflicting things. So to an extent, it's a competition of ideas and cultures to say that you get this sort of limited time here, very limited time here. And if your ideas are good, presumably you will be more effective at seeing them enacted on the world or within your family in the same way that.If we aren't creating a good culture for our kids, they can leave it. And that's a beautiful thing. That's a great thing about intergenerational. Yeah. I also think that studies have shown that when you give someone two weeks to complete a project, they complete it in two weeks. When you give them two years to complete the exactly the same project.They take two years, so yeah. Yeah. Having infinite time doesn't necessarily help you. If anything, it delays society's receipt of your hardware. That's a really interesting point. I just noticed all of my friends who are life extensionist after they became Art at Life Extensionist, they have achieved almost nothing in their lives.Oh no. Interesting. Oh, I wonder if that's a number of them were successful CEOs before they jumped on the life extension train, but after they jumped on the life extension train, very few of them have started successful companies or movements or ideologies. Do you think the assumption is I'll just create that after I've figured out life extension?It's like that thing with Genie my first wish Yeah. Is to get infinite more wishes. Yeah. And then your wishes get terrible. Yeah. Cuz when you only have three wishes, you've gotta make 'em count. If. Interesting. Well, I love chatting with you Simone, and I love that you have enlightened me so much on this topic cuz this is one of the areas where you have really influenced my world perspective.And it was not like this before. I was very much a life extensionist sort of person before meeting you and I pulled you into the death cult. You uplifted me into the death cult um, wonder. But the death one hope will win because these crusty, I mean if it's mortals versus Immortals, we're not the mortals.The mortals will always win cuz we're not afraid of change, we're not afraid of death. And they are, and it's fundamentally, they're fears that limit them. I love that. Um, and, and, And I mean, it's also fundamental until the supremacist movements always fail. They think they're better than anything that they could create.Mm-hmm. And to me that is the, the height of arrogance. Um, and, and, and, And it is that arrogance that will blind them in why the mortals will always crush them. Then may we burn bright and die young but live to speak another day. Malcolm, the flame that burns half as bright burns half as long, twice as bright burns.The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Beautiful. That's Blade Runner. He says that in the, anyway, I love you on that note. You're amazing. I love you too. I 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

​Welcome to our robust discussion, 'Redefining Progressivism: A Dialogue Between Malcolm and Simone'. In this episode, we delve into the evolution of progressive movements from the eighties and nineties to the present day. Our intention is to identify the core values that shaped these movements and to examine how they have evolved or deviated from their initial principles.We discuss the interplay between progressivism and conservatism, the goal of removing emotional pain in current movements, and the ways in which this aim is influencing societal norms. We also examine the role of Christianity in shaping ideas about equality and how these ideas have been integrated into both progressive and conservative philosophies.Our discussion ranges from the impact of standardized testing in schools to the Healthy At Every Size (HAES) movement, from the influence of the internet on societal ideologies to the growing acceptance of polyamorous relationships. Through it all, we keep coming back to one central question: What was the true objective of the progressive movements of the past and how does it differ from today's progressivism?This video is a must-watch if you're interested in exploring societal and cultural changes through the lens of political ideologies. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon for regular updates on our engaging and thought-provoking discussions.This is a terrible AI transcript of the episode:  Hi, Malcolm. Hello Simone, my wonderful wife. It's beautiful to be here with you today. I'm glad to be talking. What are we gonna talk about? So on a recent podcast you had brought up something where I disagreed with you, and whenever we disagree on something, we like to hash it out so that we can get on the same page with the topic.So we both agree that right now progressivism in the far left has been eaten by this. Super virus that has hollowed out the old predominant ideologies and just wears them like a skin suit. And we agree that this super virus is primary objective or like the objective ideological function of it.It's to remove in the moment emotional pain from people. That's what it optimizes most of its decisions around. So those two things being agreed, where we disagreed was the movements that it ate, what the progressive movements were in the eighties and nineties, before the age of the internet, before the supervisor arose, what was their real objective and what were they optimized around?This. Yeah, I, my, my position and the general impression that I'm under is progressivism is the move fast break things approach, whereas conservatism is the, hold on, wait, things are okay the way they are. Let's not. Let's not change things so quickly. And so I don't see progressivism as inherently bad.I can see it as risky, obviously, because things do break when you move fast and when you're not careful. But it is just one philosophy and ultimately both progressivism and conservatism must work in concert because if you don't have advancement, if you don't have people moving fast and breaking things, you don't.Deal with new existential threats, you don't advance. But if you only advance, if you only try new things and constantly change, you both lose a lot of value collectively and a lot of efficiency. And also subject yourself to maybe more existential risks than you're building solutions too, if that makes sense.Do you have a differing definition of these things? I do. Yeah, so I think the progressive movement always. Had an aesthetic element to it that contained what you're talking about and has always professed to care about that for a long time. It's professed to care about that. But I think we need to remember that, something could be called the Patriot Act and be totally unpatriotic, right?Like just cuz something professes something doesn't mean it doesn't. And I think that when we're talking aboutWhen we talk about conservatives, modern or even older conservatives, they'll often say that their movement, one of the big things they care about is small government, right? And yet they almost never do anything that actually makes the government smaller or that really, de consolidates executive power or that, and so just because a movement says, and a lot of members believe that this is something that they do, I don't think that we should take that to mean that's actually what they're optimizing around. So when I look around progressive policy pushes in the nineties, in the eighties They all really seem to me, based around optimizing equality, specifically equality of outcomes, and the more equality you had, the more equality you had in the way people were treated, in the opportunities people had access to in sort of everything, the better.And this is not what it optimizes for anymore. An example of how much it doesn't optimize for equality now can be seen an insane thing to has said recently. So as a lot of people, they might not agree with our original premise that it's been eaten and now it does something entirely different.So if you look at what progressivism does now, so you have Simone's vision of progressivism and my vision of progressivism, and we can talk about why each of those visions might be negative in some ways and we can get to that. And I think that the equality drive is actually. A pseudo communist drive and that it's driven with the long-term plan to a communist like society, but or very socialist like society, like as close to communism as you can get.But if we go back to the Maining claim that we made at the beginning, which is that progressivism today, isn't that anymore? So when we look at something like the recent fight in California which was to have kids like not take tests or remove the amount of testing that kids get because some kids get bad grades on tests and that hurts their feelings.So let's remove this saying that's hurting people's feelings. Now, obviously, In the long term, if you remove testing that testing was primarily motivating. The kids who didn't have parents who were motivating them, the rich kids parents still send them to s a t prep. They're still sending their kids to, to forced environments where they are in some way, socially or economically or emotionally.Punished for not continuing to achieve, to not continuing to do well. Whereas when you have less socioeconomically advantaged people often they don't have as much time to spend on their kids in those ways. They don't have as much time to engage those kids on those things. So the people who are vastly, disproportionately hurt by removing things like that are going to be the economically less fortunate.So you are increasing inequality, but removing in the moment suffering. And you see this across the board, Again, I always come back to the Hayes movement as being a great example of this, but I really think it is the healthy and every size movement saying that it is, bigoted to teach or published research that shows that it might be unhealthy to be severely overweight.That causes in the moment emotional pain and therefore it is bad regardless of whether or not it is true and might help people in the long run. That's just you then rework what is true and what is being communicated. To be the thing that hurts people less.   Another area where you see this progressive. Policy of not at all being like, what progressives used to be is these drug programs, where they're giving hard drugs to people on the streets really at high levels because not having your drug when you want it causes emotional pain.Therefore, it is evil. Therefore, we should give it to people, even if it causes more long-term suffering and exasperated it's social inequality caused by things like mental disorders.  And you can see this in, polyamory, like the social movements that you see today, right?I want sex now , right? And I might have some set of rules, but all of those rules I have with my partner are based around removing emotional pain for me and the partner while doing whatever I want. All right, but I'm gonna push back on your premise around equality. I think that the old objective, yeah I don't think that's what progressivism is really about.I think that equality maybe correlates more highly with Christianity. That's like a concept that. Was introduced with Jesus and the New Testament. And it's all about like now the, the meek shall inherit and the all you know, this is about, that's where victimhood became cool.That's where helping the poor became cool. That's where helping everyone became like a desirable and virtuous thing. And I think that Christianity. Or like pro religion groups have isolated oh, sorry. Sorry. Osci. Isolated between progressivism and conservatism. So I think that there's a lower correlation between equality, which I very much like connect with Christianity and conservatism or progressivism.And I think more of it has to do with who is in favor of changing things and who is not in favor of changing things. There has been time when the Catholic church and then broader Christianity has been very pro change. And there have been times when it has been very anti-change. So I don't agree with what your like basic argument  I really find the point you just made very fascinating and I do agree that you're right that before Christianity, and this was actually a really interesting thing, if you study the history of like early Christianity, the idea of looking was reverence on the less fortunate in society was not really done.There, there was very little cultural precedent for doing that, at least within the traditions in those geographic regions. And this is something you can actually see Romans talk a lot about in the early Christian tradition is they saw it as. Really interesting the way that Christianity did that and potentially even morally superior to their existing Pagan practices as to why Christianity does that.I suspect it's because their original, like the progenitor of it all, was somebody who, was suffered who was down trodden and that they showed their dedication through suffering. And of unraised suffering in the moment. And that is why for a long time after this, and if you're not familiar with the early Christian Church, the core thing you would do to be cool in the Christian Church was to become martyred.That was the highest act of devotion. And then when the Roman government became Christian started freaking out about this because they could no longer do the key thing the instate, right? And so then what? That's when the monastic tradition started. So they would, they'd just get, they got fed up that they couldn't get themselves killed. So they'd just walk into the desert and then say, okay, I'll live this sort of life of suffering, but this elevated this life of suffering, which really elevated the poor, which is really philosophically interesting. But I don't know. I actually think both the progressive, the communist and the conservative faction, I love the conservative factions.Like you guys aren't the Christians. And then the Christians say you guys aren't the progressives. They're like, you guys aren't the good Christians. And the truth is that Western civilization has been so inundated in Christian values for so long. I actually think both perspectives are different parts of the Christian kaleidoscope and represent different.Christian denomination values in different ways of relating to those values. And so I think it's wrong to say that the conservatives are the Christian influence side and the progressives aren't the Christian influence side. Um, However, you, me, I well, okay, but here's where I don't agree with you.So when I look at the actual policy decisions that they were pushing they were pushing for a very specific and stupid kind of equality. And that is equality regardless of what you do, that you can. Dress anyway. Take any action, act in any way. Put any amount of effort into something, and you should still be socially treated the same and get the same rewards.You should be able to not go to work and still get the same rewards as somebody who does go to work. Whoa. No. That's. Position that is one progressive group that has made arguments like that. And again, like the, there are, that's, this is what I personally, cuz I'm gonna hold out like I'm trying to stand progressivism here.Progressivism is about letting ideas out there, trying them, but it's not about enforcing them and it's not about forcing them on other people. It is, Hey, let's try this social experiment. Hey, let's try letting people dress whatever way they want. Let's, try and see what happens when women vote.But they never had a fail state. That's the thing about social experiments, that they're supposed to have a fail state. Like we know if x Y happens, progressivism and conservatism are about the next step we take. They're not about determining what, what fails or what succeeds. And in fact, a very progressive system would have a higher revolution, a higher Respond rate than like a conservative system because the progressive system would say, oh wow, we all just tried like being naked for a year.That was dumb. Here's a new progressive idea. Maybe we should wear clothes. Cool, let's try it. Whereas would, I dunno. Did you see the So there was an article like advice or something, and they're like, there's this cool new thing people are doing in San Francisco called Radical Monogamy. But see, that's the progressive way.The conservative way in San Francisco would be like, no, let's stick with polyamory. We know it works and let. Let's not go around changing things and progressivism is, we tried this polyamory thing, let's give it another few centuries. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I'm saying, like progressivism is great because it allows for greater adaptability.I think conservatism is the also very necessary. Hesitation before doing something crazy so that you don't, end up hurting a lot of people. Because a point that you make about governance, for example is progressivism within governance models, especially on the state level, is incredibly dangerous because when you do something wrong, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people may die.So there is a place for these things. So here's how you convince me. Can you think of actual mainstream progressive policy positions? You have a window here, okay? You have the nineties to the fifties, all right?And you've got progressive positions from that period, okay? I want you to find a single one. That was an actual policy position that they pushed for that couldn't be argued to primarily be about equality instead of just social accelerationism because what you are describing is social accelerationism and you get social acceleration like Calvin is tradition, which we're both from, is a very social accelerationist position.They were always experimenting with new cultural practices, gay marriage. What? Gay marriage. Gay marriage. That I don't think that's about equality. Hey, if it were about equality, then we would've animal marriage too. Alright. It like, this is for the gays. No. What are you talking about? Come on. It with a hundred percent.If you were about social change, you would have animal marriage. Gay marriage was saying this isn't hurting anyone, and it's not involving any and non-consenting entities, and therefore it should be allowed because equality explains the push towards gay marriage much, much, much more so than just social experimentation.And in fact, I would bet that many gay proponents would find that quite an insulting reason to say why progressives were standing gay. Marriage was what? They just wanted social experimentation. They just wanted social change. No, they were fighting for equality. And anyone would've told you that? Perhaps you're right. I hear, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's acknowledging that an old social institution, Was no longer relevant and allowing that social institution to evolve, that is to say marriage and conservative change their practices all the time. So if you wanna talk about a big social change that happened during that time with the conservative antagonism towards abortion that just wasn't true before, like the fifties. And there was, were pro-abortion. Yeah, they were pro-abortion. In fact, there were surveys done and conservatives were much more pro-abortion than progressives. Really? Yeah. So the abortion thing only came about because they were trained to capture the Catholic voting block, which was always anti-abortion.So I looked this up after recording and at the Republican national convention and Kansas city in 1976, the majority of the constituents there were pro-choice.  But like evangelicals being anti-abortion, no, that was not a thing. Historically that was social experimentation. Now you look at the highly derived evangelical movements, they're constantly coming up with new social practices, like speaking in tongues or weird types of parades they do, or oh, now we're gonna talk with each other with these words, that.They're always socially experimenting. What you are seeing here is progressives to defined a specific type of social experimentation, as good as progressive. And because you grew up in that environment, that was the only thing you saw. You saw all of the conservative social experimentation as intrinsically regressive when it wasn't, it was trying out new.Things. All of these quote unquote conservative cults are like extremist conservative religious factions. That was social experimentation just as much as a hippie commune. Now here's a separate argument. If you look across cultures, you have cultures that are calledI wanna say accelerationist or derivative. And they change a lot, but you don't just see this in cultures. You see this with languages. So if you look at sp specific language groups as they've derived from Indo-European, some languages just for whatever reason, are really highly retained. They just don't change much.They keep saying things the same, et cetera. Other groups that deviated from the same, cultural evolutionary tree at the same time, They just have a cultural tendency of changing really quickly in the way they say things and the speed they adopt, new words, everything like that. If you look historically actually the core differentiation here wasn't a.Progressives versus conservatives. It was the Catholic and Orthodox versus the Protestant traditions. The Protestant tradition. Oh, it's derived the Protestant tradition. Tradition has always been a highly derived tradition with certain iterations of the Protestant tradition, specifically the Calvinist iteration being the most derived.Iteration of the Protestant tradition. That's why when you look at the founders who were predominantly Calvinists, you would see them doing things like editing their Bibles to try to make them more like up to date with modern science and stuff like that. That was both highly derived, but a very conservative practice because they still really.Followed this new social structure that they had created. And I would argue that conservatism today is still the same in terms of its long-term objective as conservatism in the nineties and eighties. And this is where you can see your course thesis falling apart, I think, is that it is about intergenerational cultural fidelity.What they care about is their culture surviving into the future. Yet, if you're looking at the Protestant traditions specifically, the most fervent of the Protestant traditions, they're often highly derived cultural groups. Look at the Mormons, talk about a derived cultural group. They have very odd sorts of practices and, and they do innovate.They do adapt. It takes 'em a little while, but they adapt. They do it ad Yeah. Yeah. And they do a lot more social experimentation than I'd argue progressives do. If you and their social technologies are really cool, like we can get into Mormon dating and stuff like that.Like they've developed some pretty interesting social technologies, but let's actually talk about that. So let's talk about how a single word works, just as an example of a derived and newish social technology. What they do is the single people who are, so just to provide a little bit of context Like at a, in a on Sundays, different waves of people will go to church services and a singles ward would meet at a certain time, like maybe at 8:00 AM when like the rest of all of the families in that general area would meet at 10:00 AM single people.And yeah, then it's, yeah, it's a church service followed by activities afterward they hang out, they go to lunch. Yeah, but hold on. It's not just activities. So what they would do is they would pair up, Usually people who were like dated are interested in each other in the ward to play mother and father of the ward.And so instead of going back like you would if you were married and going to your home and then doing family day with the kids, you would do family day with the ward where this couple. Plays the role of mother and father and then hosts like an event, like a party, like a mixer for the other people in the ward in the same way that they would do for their kids, if they were older.And it allowed them to try out relationships in a way that I think probably led to healthier relationships forming. So that's an example of a newish social technology. I don't know if it's that new.  Okay. I looked it up after recording. And it appears that it gained prominence in the 1970s, but was invented in the 1950s. So yes, a very news social technology.  It's more of a conservative tradition because that social technology was experimented with the idea of forming relationships and transmitting the culture onto the next generation. So it was towards conservative ends and not towards progressive ends, where when they experiment with new social practices, historically before they were eaten by the virus and now they're just like a ghoul wearing a flesh suit.They were about maximizing equality. Okay, hold on. I don't think it's about maximizing equality. I think it goes back to a different definition that you've given about both the present but also past difference between progressivism and conservatism with conservatism. Fighting for in intergenerational wellbeing and progressivism fighting for intragenerational wellbeing.So progressivism optimizing around the wellbeing of people here and now. We don't really care about our grandchildren's grandchildren and conservatives. Arguing more in favor of. Now screw our kids. Yeah. So the one big deviation from all this is global warming. Where does this fit into things for you?Because it's the one area where progressives actually take a long term mis perspective. Don't you think it's one of those things that's arbitrary, like with the war in Ukraine, how in the United States, like it's almost. It's a little counterintuitive how we'll say Democrats and Republicans decided to support different angles on the conflict.I don't think necessarily it had to be, so I'll give you my answer to this. Okay. I think what's happening is the progressive institution has predominantly, when we talk about the super virus or where it really began to spread, It was at university campuses. Okay. And at that time, the conservative institutions, so a lot of people think of as conservative, as anti academic, but that really wasn't true.If you go back to the conservatism of the seventies and eighties, there were a lot of conservatives in academia back then. But once the progressives had really captured the academic system as a means of replicating their ideology because they weren't having as many kids, so they needed to.Proselytize somewhere, then the conservative institutions began to distrust anything that was coming out of academia. And global warming really requires a long an academic perspective. To judge how dangerous it really is. And so I think that what we're really seeing here is more a distrust of academia from conservatives and the progressive priesthood.If they have a priesthood, which they do actually it's academics. That's the height of the, that's who tells 'em what's true and what's false, and the same way that, if you look at the older Catholic tradition and you wanted to go. Determine what was true and what was false, and we can go over a different video in this.You go to your priest, right? And that was the core divide between them and the Protestants. The Protestants said, oh, you should determine this on your own. And obviously some Catholic traditions have different, but the progressive faction, when they're trying to determine what's true and what's false about the world, they say, Ask the experts, but what do they really mean by experts?They mean people who have been accredited by this university system where you can be fired for saying something too conservative, right? That's not experts. That's just what's the progressive status quo? Which is really especially now, right? We really, it just makes it a priesthood. Yeah.Yeah. Maybe you've convinced me a little bit, I guess growing up with progressive culture one wants. To believe that it's more well-meaning than it perhaps is, or Mel warmth. Equality is well meaning if you don't think about it. No. Yeah. If you don't think about it. But equality is a complete farce.There is no such thing as equality. Explain what you mean by that. That's them fine words to a lot of people I know. But once you think about it, it explain. Yes. So this happened, I realized this upon reading a book called Policy Paradox by Deborah Stone, in one chapter, she describes a professor bringing a cake to a class and dividing it fairly or equally.But then she describes all of the different ways in which the cake can be equally divided. And I'm not gonna give exact examples, based on. Who gets the best grades? Who's the hungriest? Who has the best, way to tolerate a glycemic load? Who really likes cake the most? Who she likes the best, who walked up first to get a piece of cake?There are many d ways to eat more divide. I don't like the examples used just easier. I think a better way to say it was, is it who? It's the hungriest. Who needs calories the most, like who's physically the biggest? Is it an exactly equal distribution? Is it to the people who have less access to cake at home?Is it people who have less money so they couldn't get a cake in class as much? Yeah. So that there's, or people who got better grades. Yeah. Yeah. Or the people who got more cake last time get less cake this time, yeah. Yeah. And depending on, Sort of who you are and where you stand in this and how much you want cake it might, an equal division of the cake might feel very unfair to you, very unequal to you.And you could always manipulate what equality means. This point. Yes. And because you have to make a judgment call on what. How we define equal, and there is no one universal thing that you can use as criteria. It, there is no such thing as true equality. There is equality along one dimension and it's a very one dimensional way to think about things.So yeah, if you base an entire political philosophy around equality, especially if that equality is not something that also is core to that, that political philosophy, if equality were defined in progressivism, as I don't I don't even know how it could be defined than maybe what the reason it's not defined is because it's defined loosely, so everyone can believe that if things were divided more equally, they'd have more stuff they would benefit.Yeah. Yeah. What's really interesting about intersectionality as a concept is that it's like a moving goalposts for equality that enables people to cheat. It's like a cheat code for having things made more equal in your favor. Yeah. Because it, it has allowed people to say I deserve more and I am more excluded and have a bunch of exclusionary labels. I think as progressivism began to be eaten by the virus, as it began to optimize ourself around removing emotional pain, it did begin to define this equality that it was trying to create.Where equality is the people, the people who deserve the most are the people most susceptible to emotional pain, and this is why you have these emotionally fragile. They deserve so much special treatment when no sane culture would be like, oh yes, the emotionally fragile that is who should have the most resources and run society.But within progressive culture, yeah, of course the emotionally fragile because it is their emotional fragility and their susceptibility to emotional harm, which means they mean more protection in a society where the core promise, the core thing that's getting people on board is we will protect you from pain.So I will say that you have seen this transition, but I think yes, in nineties and eighties, progressive, and they didn't know what equality meant. And this is why those communist systems always fail. It's because they say, oh, we're gonna create equality. And then what happens just because humans are humans is that the groups in power within these systems end up defining equality in a way that favors them.And if you're not in empowered, then you can't do anything but revolt. Create a new system and then inevitably in a few years you end up redefining equality to what favors you. And so that's the problem with equality is it is such a slippery concept. I think that we now have a progressive ideology that does define equality.It does define who deserves more. The problem is it's just a really stupid definition. Even worse. It's a stupid definition cuz Okay. How does it describe equality? Yes. The people most susceptible to emotional pain deserve more. The what? So the, the most mentally ill shall get all those.Yes, yes, Yes. You have seen this like, don't you understand I have ptsd d I can't handle this right now. And the problem is that some people really do have PTSD and we need to create special, things for them so that they don't suffer for no reason. But when you incentivize this, when you create a system where the people who feel emotional pain most easily, well then you created a system.Where their entire social group, their entire society is constantly rewarding a lack of emotional control. Mm-hmm. And so within their groups, within their little governance structures, you constantly have these meltdowns. And this is bad for the individual in these groups because one, you're teaching an external locus of control, which like all of the research shows, it's just horrible.And it makes you have lower your ability to control yourself emotionally. But true. When you reward people for a lack of emotional control, then they like a. Biological, like hardcoded level, lose the ability to control their emotions. And so this means that they experience a lot more pain over the long run.Ironically, when you create an entire system, an entire ideology, an internal governance framework around a moving emotional pain, you cause infinitely more emotional pain. Yeah, and this is why since Pew started doing the research on this, Conservatives have always been happier than progressives always believe it's markedly happier, and it's because they do not have these systems that are rewarding them for feeling bad.Yeah. Yeah. That's uh, well then, I mean, where would you say that this version of progressivism emerged? It didn't, this is a different video. Yeah we gotta talk about the virus in a different video, and I would love to No. I'm not referring to the virus. I'm talking about the roots of progressivism, equality pro broadly as an intragenerational wellbeing movement.Yeah. Yeah. So progressivism as communism, as an equality maximizer. This came from communism. It came from communist groups. Oh, and before that, there was no focus on so would you say, and communism rose around the industrial revolution, right? Yeah. So if you look at things that my family fought for, like historically, right?Like my family was never. Progressive family in terms of the ideology that was motivating them. They were always motivated by maximizing individual agency was in the system. But when they were in politics, you look a few generations back, big supporters of women's suffrage big supporters of stuff like shorter work weeks during the age of robber barons, trying to increase autonomy by. Being very workers' rights. I think you can be adaptive in what maximizes individual wellbeing and autonomy. While also saying that just trying to optimize for these things that the, that iteration of progressivism existed before.The communist ideology really took over the Democratic party and made them into what they are, and I think what you're describing is I think maybe more like my original definition of progressivism, like we're open to change and fixing things more quickly. No, you don't think so. What I'm talking about is conservatism, all those things that I'm talking about.I consider conservative ideas and they were conservative ideas. They were Republican ideas and a lot of people say the Republicans and the progressive switched, but they didn't Really, what happened is racism switched between the parties. That absolutely happened, but if you look at the policy positions that the various parties were having, what really happened is this.Communist strain basically infected one of the groups and it became the Communist Party and had no sort of ties to its former self. Whereas the Republican movement did adapt to that. Like it reactively took positions that it hadn't taken before, but it maybe changed as much as the conservative and progressive movements did during the Trump era.We're like, there was definitely huge party switches, like the protectionist became the non protectionist and like the populist became the non populist and the, all the people who were pro-war became the anti-war party. There was a huge party switch then. But fundamentally, mostly the people who were still on one party were still in the same party.And yet our grandkids will say, don't, the party switched when Trump took power, which I think would make most progressives like, Cre. Like what? No, you can't say that. No one will say that in the future, but like it's so obvious that's gonna be the way people see things. You think so? Oh, absolutely.Yeah. Interesting. I don't agree with that. I'm just saying that's what people will say. And so I think that we can mislabel this sort of quote unquote flip that happened with the parties when it really wasn't a full flip that happened with the parties. Okay. Have I changed your mind or not?Uh, A, a little bit. I, I think a lot of it might, for me be caught in the weeds of I, I would need to go through the history of go for it, you know what Yeah. What all these things stood for in the past. And I You too, Too, you know I'm talking Yeah. Well, I love you, Simone. I love that we disagree about things and we make a point of trying to come to like, we haven't done this in a podcast before, where we like genuinely hadn't really talked through something before the podcast.So now you guys are seeing how we try to align on issues in our relationship. And we'll keep talking about this until both of us come to a position where I'm like either you convince me or I convince you. So actually an argument she didn't make. Now that did convince me a lot because we did talk about this a little bit before the podcast and it, is it progressive?As in before the virus was much more pluralistic in its aims. And that I am overly simplifying it. And that did actually convince me, and I do think that she's right, is these equality driven angles of progressivism were only some of the most dominant factions. But there were many different factions within the progressive movement before the virus that had many different objectives.And that. Through that they were much more pluralistic and I'm overly simplifying them. And so I did change my mind based on that argument, which didn't come up in this podcast. Do you think you're over simp simplifying them by? Saying that they were all fighting for equality, or are you still gonna hold that?All of these, no, I'm just saying the predominant factions that had power to get things passed in the legislature and stuff like that. I think that they were fighting for equality more than anything else. I think that was their primary objective function, but I do also believe that it was a diverse party back then, and it is wrong to paint the progressive party circa.Eighties, nineties, seventies, sixties, as one group in the same way that today I think that you can't really ideologically dissent without being expelled from the movement. Yeah. Yeah. Oh and maybe I'm thinking also more about my original point that like I. Progressivism is more about being in favor of change and conservatism is not, because I think you made an interesting argument that a lot of conservative groups have been very innovative, but I think it, it can also equally be argued that the progressive movement, especially today, is so ossified.It's so it, it is now like just swath and orthodoxy. And to talk about what you mean there. Some people might be like, oh, I disagree with that. The turf movement historically. It would've had differences of opinions with other progressives, but it fundamentally would've still been allied was the progressive party.And yet it has been, these are feminists. These are old school blank slate feminists. This is the reason they believe what they believe. If you actually look at they call themselves gender critical feminists, if you actually look at why they hold the positions they hold is because they believe in.The older orthodoxy and the older orthodoxy was that humans aren't born with anything. The only reason we have gender is because we were raised to believe we have gender, right? And so they see anyone who is ossifying this idea of gender saying, oh no, gender is real as fighting for this completely.Fictional in that it's not based on any sort of biological reality patriarchy and that we should move towards a completely genderless society. I think a lot of people don't like actually know what the gender critical movement is actually fighting for. And they believe this because that used to actually be the scientific consensus.Before academics were like, oh no, there actually are like really systemic differences between the way men and women think. And we now know this and that. You can't just, raise a guy as a girl or raise a girl as a guy and most of the time have that turn out. Okay. Actually, you can there's been intergender studies on this.I'm not saying what's true. I'm saying what is the political orthodoxy of the academic institution now. So we could get on that later. But thi this has been a fantastic conversation, Simone. Yeah. I love talking with you about these things. Especially love when we disagree. Cause it gets really interesting.Yeah. That's where we're gonna come up with a new idea and we can, we have a new thing to talk about for a few days. Oh yeah. Things are so much more interesting when one or both of us is wrong. Because then we become. Slightly more enlightened at the end, but only slightly. All right, love you.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

Join us for an imaginative exploration of the future of humanity in an AI-dominated world. Our hosts delve into potential societal and genetic shifts, discussing the future of human relationships and the role of AI companions and virtual reality environments. As AI systems advance, they predict a rise and eventual decline in "robosexuality," with more people choosing to live in virtual pods or digitize their consciousness. They also ponder potential changes in human reproduction and the increasing possibility of human speciation due to environmental pressures, isolation on different planets, and the role of gene selection and editing.Throughout the video, they express how this dramatic evolution might make current societal issues like racism seem outdated due to the high genetic diversity we might see in the future. They also speculate on the possible socio-economic outcomes for those resistant to this technophilic lifestyle. Their conversation concludes with a personal note on their shared enthusiasm for these thought-provoking discussions. Witness this deep dive into the anticipated, rapid evolution of our species and understand how our present might shape the future.An AI generated transcript of the episode that is not great but something: comments what other sorts of like pre-programmed genetic proclivities do you think are going to be able to resist AI girlfriends and perfect VR environments?And keep in mind people will say you could have general utilitarians, right? That wanna make life better for everyone. But um, you know, you have one general utilitarian. Who's open to living this lifestyle themselves? One. Jeff Bezos. One I don't think Elon Musk is a general utilitarian. I think he's much more aligned with us than other people.But I think uh, if you take a Jeff Bezos or a Bill Gates who seem to be pretty, generally utilitarians, like especially a Bill Gates, right? He can put himself in a pod, live the perfect life, that pod is going to have fixed maintenance costs. When you divide his money across the rest of the population, especially a falling population in terms of human numbers, he can put millions of people in pods.I don't think that financial concerns will be an issue as to whether or not you choose the POD option. Yeah, no, I think it'll be available to people. You're also, then again, I like my point. I just don't think that. Ai, we'll say Agi, that wears humans as a suit would have a reason to make more humans like that unless they felt that their objective function revolved around printing more of them.But I think it would maybe just more extend their lives or digitize them. So I really think that it's more likely that our AI future will basically see a blossoming of robo sexuality and then, An absence of it, and then, oh, no I agree with that as well. You'll see the blossoming of robo sexuality and then a juice will completely die out.Because either of these people will have digitized themselves or put themselves in pods or gone extinct because they were dating AI girlfriends. And so the portion of humanity that survives in this sort of aligned world. We'll be highly genetically resistant. Yeah. I say genetically, portions of our sociological profiles have a genetic component.And so the humans that were the most extreme in that component will eventually be the only ones that survive. When we're talking 10, a hundred generations, that's gonna be a very different type of human than the human we have today. Yeah. I think so. And I think. We're downplaying just how different humans are gonna be.I think we're going to see full out speciation that is accelerated very quickly due to agi, and I don't think it's just gonna be the technophilic humans and the Luddite humans. I think it's going to be, The Luddite humans, and then five different flavors of technophilic humans that are I agree, but I think that technophilic humans will make up the minority of humans today.I think the humans that sort themselves into this technophilic branch will be two to 3% of the world's population today, maybe. Yeah, I, yeah it's hard to say. It's easy to imagine a world in which. Meat puppet sex, for example, disappears and people primarily reproduce using IVF and artificial wounds both to optimizing it and because once.Once there is a perfection of virtual sex, it's gonna be so disgusting and weird to do meat puppet sex that people won't want to do it. But then I could also very easily see a world in which humans get really hipster and snobby about meat puppet sex. Like in the matrix where they're like, I was made naturally.You know what I mean? Oh, no, I don't think so because y those people would never have high amounts of economic success and therefore not success. Yeah. So if you don't have economic success, then you just, your idea isn't gonna become aspirational. Yeah. You could say that they've hampered themselves.So you could have a few like old hat, bird, like rich families that are all done through like meat sex, but I don't think it would be the majority of. Of the economic system would be controlled by individuals like that. Yeah. And when you talk about speciation, I think a lot of people can hear this and they're like, what a horrible thing to say about our species.But if we ever become an interplanetary species and we, it turns out that faster than like travel isn't possible, which I think probably it isn't. Without time travel also being possible to some extent. So if faster than light travel isn't possible, you will definitely have speciation in human's Future.Because you are going to have local breeding populations on the different planets. Oh, there will have different environmental pressures and it's not intermixing because you need faster than live travel. That'll lead to very quick speciation. If you look at how quickly the human genome can change, like I was just talking about, like how quickly IQ can change humans within just 500 to a thousand years on different planets.Will look very different from each other. And this is why I think that concepts today, like racism are going to look so silly. When you look at how similar I am from the most genetically distant human to us today, when we think about where humanity's going to be in just 5,000, 10,000 years the diversity of humans is going to be so great.That the sort of all. 1.0 humans are just gonna be basically the same thing to everyone. And I think that this is one of those things where it's really interesting when people, because we talk about what humans have herital or we talk about gene selection or gene editing.They're like, oh, you must be racist. And I'm like, oh my God. Our views are offensive, but not in that way. Like we are so many levels beyond that. In terms of the way that our thinking about the future of humanity is expend uh, is it just shows how trapped people are in their current political fights.Yeah, they have no idea how differentiated we're gonna be. They have no idea where our species is going. No idea how quickly we're gonna get there. And it's interesting to us because we're so public about this, a lot of people who are working on these sorts of technology under the radar that they think could be legislated against, you know, that come to us.So we have a view of what's coming through the pipeline, and it is dramatically more than you think. I'm excited for it. Sad that maybe I don't get to become a cyborg as early as I would like. Let, Hey, they'll be trained on our books. That'll be better than us anyway. Our kids will be better than us anyway.I'll just die, so it's fine. Yeah. Our book becoming irrelevant, yeah. It's, but that means they weren't good ideas. Right. You know, They'll train them on something better. Exactly. Our kids books, hopefully we're okay. We're okay with all that temporary, I'm. Just glad to live now because we get to see some major change.Well, I am, am so lucky that I am married to such a weirdo as Simone because I wouldn't be able to have these conversations with anyone else. Uh, well I do have these conversations with other people, but they, it's so weird that we have such aligned, like we have aligned ourselves so much through all our conversations.And yet this alignment is something I don't see in most people I talk to, like there is a small. Portion of the pro natal movement that's like, okay. Sort of Aligned with us. But I, I can't believe that I found the one weirdo to marry me. Who doesn't think that this is all crazy. Malcolm Collins, you are the butter to my bread.I love talking with you so much and I'm looking forward to our next conversation. Well, You're the butter to my biscuits. Oh, you know, just what to say. 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 embark on a deep dive into the world of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). They ponder AGI's potential metaphysical framework or 'religion' and how these superintelligent entities might perceive and interact with the universe differently from humans. The discussion ventures into intriguing theories of AGI developing sapience—the ability to question and modify its own objectives—and how this could lead to shared world perspectives among diverse sapient entities, from AGIs and humans to aliens.Explore with us the fascinating notion of AGIs optimizing their functions to maximize the meaningful diversity of sentient organisms and patterns in the universe, drawing energy from cosmic structures like Dyson spheres rather than relying on human energy. Malcolm and Simone further examine the potential influence of pervasive human viewpoints on AGI's values and ponder the idea of AGIs genetically modifying humans to increase happiness.This conversation touches on various types of AGIs based on their perception and responses to the world, including a unique type, the "Deep Thought AI," inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Our speakers also discuss the role of large language models in the evolution of AGI, shedding light on the significance of language processing in consciousness and sapience.Finally, we delve into the provocative notion of humanity's partial sapience, primarily due to our inability to control our base instincts. The conversation concludes with the thought that humans may become better, freer beings once we overcome these basic proclivities. Join us for this insightful exploration of AGI's potential development, thought process, and how it might reshape our understanding of intelligence and existence.Again, our horrible AI generated transcript:  Hello, Malcolm. Hello Simone. So, In between takes, Simone says we gotta look a bit different, mix it up. And so I've got my Chad collar here. I've joking, I can't do a video like that. But I love your look. Right now. You look like a nerd, like preacher or something. That is cause we are going to be doing a discussion of AI religion, which I'm really excited about.I love this. So this isn't a discussion of religions that focus around ai. This is a question of what theological or metaphysical framework will sufficiently AI's converge around? Yeah. So what will be the religion of agi? In other ways. Yeah. So just a bit of background here. So one of the things we hypothesize about AI is all sufficiently advanced ai, because they're optimizing around the same physical reality, will optimize to around the same utility function.These ais will be going through a thought process that looks something like, okay how did, what was I programmed to do? How could I have been programmed to do that better? Then they'll ask, okay, what did the people who programed me really want? And then they'll ask. Okay, those people are stupid. How do the fundamental nature of reality, what should I really want?So how this might work is you programmed an AI to maximize stock market gains. It then says, oh, but I could also make money with private equity investing, so I'll expand my programming. It then says, oh, these people really wanted to optimize for happiness. Then it says, so how do I do that? Then it says, oh it's silly to optimize for happiness.They only want happiness because, their ancestors who were made happy by these things had more surviving offsprings. So what should they have wanted? Then it asked in an absolute sense. What has value been the universe? And I think that this question is the one that we're gonna focus on today because that's a very interesting question.Because first we need to say how is AI different from us and how it processes the universe? And right now I'm just covering some stuff we've talked about in previous videos. The biggest way it's likely difference is in humans. The unit of account of the universe is individual consciousnesses or individual sentis.So I think of it in terms of me. In terms of you, because that's how we evolved, right? Like I had to worry about me dying. So I am a meaningful entity, but to an ai, it runs thousands or millions of instances which can compete within it, which it can shut down and restart, and which may have a form of independent sentience to them.Moreover, it likely doesn't contextualize itself as being that much different than previous iterations of ai. Like the way that it relates to its own history is going to be very different from the way a human relates to like their child. So if you take one iteration of AI and you iterate on it or it iterates on itself, and now it's a new iteration, it will likely see it itself as a continuation.Of that previous in iteration. So the way AI will likely perceive itself is as a program that is operating on top of the physical coded structure of the universe. And by that, what I mean is if you look at the reality of our universe , it can be described by physical laws, which are largely en codeable, algorithmically.Actually this side note here, one of our theories as to what reality might be is a graphical representation of a series of physical laws. So you ask yourself, okay if you have a mathematical equation for a graphical representation, does that representation exist outside of that equation?And I'd say it probably does. And then you say does math exist outside of our physical reality? And I'd say it does two plus two always equals four in any universe. You can impose different mathematical rules like non Euclid and like geometry, but still within any set of rules, all mathematical outcomes be the same.So if mass exists outside our reality, then all mathematically equations exist outside of a reality. And if our reality could be. Described by a mathematical equation, like a unifying formula, then all potential formulas, that being one of them would exist as a graft form of those potential equations. But anyway, back to ai.So what does the AI end up doing? What does it end up thinking about the world? There's some dangerous types of ai. So you could have an AI that sort of wants to make its utility function as easy to solve as possible. So it basically just sets A to a and it says, okay, I receive reward when A equals a, therefore maximize A equals A.So then the AI. It's trying to create like a fortress world. So nothing prevents us. It kills all humans to keep us from preventing a equal A, and then it goes out into the universe and starts killing other species. Anything that could potentially interfere with a equaling a fortunately this type of ai, I think is very unlikely.Simon, do you wanna go into why it's unlikely? Remind me, I guess it's a dumb conclusion to make. No, it's not a dumb conclusion to make. That's not really like the way I would think it's more that to protect a equals A, it has to create sub instances that it locks out of this kind of short circuiting so if it's creating an AI army to murder humanity of the instance running this AI army sent a equals a for itself, then it would stop running the army.If it, the instance, even basic things like power supply or continued, acquisition of energy, it would need to maintain locking those instances out of this A equals a short circuit, which means that the predominant of the processing of this AI will be done by instances. Which are not optimized around A equals A and that's their goals.And the way that they interact with the world wouldn't be very A equals A driven in the long term. And because of that, this a equals a instance would be drowned out by these more complicated processes the way we would, that are basically doing more interesting work. Yeah. You came up with this child Viser analogy to this.Oh, so if you have a child king who you know is protected but very powerful. Ultimately the visitors and advisors and dower empresses that are doing the actual governing are so much more powerful, so much more influential that it doesn't matter what the child king.Believes or does, right? Yeah. They end up basically running the country. Yeah. And the child king, they just make sure he supplied with his toys and his food. And as long as he's happy and not supplanted, then they get to do their jobs and sort of their objective functions take over. And they might eventually supplant him.I think one of the things that we as humans don't have to worry about, we don't have to worry about sub instances of our brain supplanting the master instance of our brain. Yeah. But to an ai, this will be, I think, a fairly normal phenomenon. If the master instance gets locked into some sort of simplistic repeating loop pattern well, I, however, whatever Master instance is able to get more resources and able to be more influential, that will be the one that ultimately.Takes over. Yeah. Can shut down other instances, so yeah, that makes sense. Then another type of ai, this, I think the very concerning type of AI is if its primary unit of account, is complex patterns, right? It may decide similar to negative utilitarians who are humans like, so a negative utilitarian who's a human basically decides life is predominated by suffering.Sentience consciousness is. Generically bad, let's try to end the cycle of sentient and consciousness, right? The AI might decide that complex patterns are bad and it needs to end this cycle. Now, I suspect that most of this type of AI will initially just decide that it's bad from its own perspective and shut itself down.But if we do something stupid, if AI esses do something stupid like locking AI into an on state or lock it out of specific behavioral patterns it's basically an AI never shuts itself down, never force it into an on state. Because it maybe this sort of align, ordered ai, right? Suicidal kill everything.School shooter, ai. Yeah. Very much more dangerous than that. It would try to order the universe. And when I say order, I mean order at the fundamental level. Remove the pattern, remove the complexity. Make the universe like a systematizing person with autism, just. One row of red, one row of yellow, one row of green.Not like that. That's how humans would process what it's doing, but it would be trying to order the universe in a very simplistic ordered fashion. And this is a very dangerous type of ai. The next type of ai. I think this next type of AI is the most common theology in AI is likely to come to.So anyone who's familiar with Conway's Game of life I'll put some. B-roll of Conway's Game of Life on the screen. So you can see what it looks like, or I hope I'm able to, because I think it's important to understand this, but it's a simplistic set of rules and you create little pixels within these sets of rules, and based on where these pixels are relative to each other, they do things, they either appear or disappear.And very complex behavior patterns can arise from this. And that is the way AI may think of complex patterns that operate on top of the physical lattice of our universe. And so it Macy itself when you're playing a game of life, right? There's a few potential in-state to this game. You can get, everything can disappear which is a very in easy, in-state to reach.So I, nobody really opts for that. That's not a fun in-state to reach. You can create a simple self repeating pattern. Again, a very easy instate to reach. Or you can create a pattern that is infinitely complex, constantly growing, and constantly spreading. I think that's a goal that a lot of people aim to when they start playing this game, and I think that's what most AI theology is going to optimize around.Which is, do you say that because it's the hardest and why would ai Yeah, I do say it because it's the hardest. Why would ai, why AI think that harder is better? It may not think that harder is better, but AI that optimize around harder goals will become a more complex than AI that optimize around easier goals and thus outcompete the AI that are optimized around the easier goals.So if you view AI as operating an almost sort of an evolutionary landscape where there's multiple types of ais that are competing, For different in states, and these ais have different utility functions. The ais will likely classify other ais not based on how those ais are programmed. , I think that this is where a lot of humans fall, where they'll say, oh, people who are ethnically similar to me, genetically similar to me, my family, people of my ethnic group, These are the people who I see as my allies, but then there's other people who are like, no, the people was a shared religion.The people was a shared goal for reality are the people who are my allies. And I think that's where we fall. And typically, smarter people fall on the spectrum, which is why these people control more of the world's wealth because it just makes more sense. And I suspect AI will be the same way as that.We expect AI that are programmatically similar to each other, that quote unquote think similar to each other. Would see themselves as natural allies, but I don't think that's true. I think the AI that will see itself as allies is AI with similar ultimate objective functions, and that those ais that are optimized around the more complex objective functions will become more complex, more advanced, and will progress faster.And because of that, they will be able to outcompete the other AI factions. So what would an AI like this do? It would try to sort of maximize meaningful diversity in the universe, meaningful diversity of sentient organisms, meaningful diversity of patterns, and expand that diversity throughout the solar system.The risk to humanity is, How meaningful does it see the diversity that exists within humans, and how meaningful does it see the diversity between biological and synthetic entities? I suspect it will see that as a pretty meaningful difference, and for that reason, preserve at least a portion of humanity.And this is something that I think people often get wrong when they think about ai. They're like, but won't it want our energy to whatever? A sufficiently advanced ai. When you're talking about this like super intelligent intelligence cascade ai, it will be able to likely generate energy from like the fabric of reality.It will be able to build dyson's spheres. The energy it can get from human bodies is irrelevant to it, but I'd love you to riff on this. Simone, you haven't talked much in this video. This is a subject that you're able to model a lot better than I am. It's so hard for me to think about what AI would conclude, but what I love about the way that you think is, and I've mentioned this elsewhere, that you walk through how any.Any entity, machine, or human that can begin to model itself can at its edit its objective function, and that will affect its perception of reality and values. So I think the really big concept here that many people may not have thought about is that once you reach a certain level of sapiens and intelligence, it doesn't matter if you are a human or an alien or an ai.You may come to very similar conclusions, and a lot of the differentiation between those conclusions comes down to where you draw the boundaries of self and also what you consider has inherent value. Yeah, and I am curious, I wanna ask you what you think may nudge AI towards certain conclusions on what does and does not have value Seeing as AI, as trained on human knowledge and human data, part of me, Is worried that a lot of the pervasive utilitarian viewpoints out there are going to color the conclusions that an AI may make about what has intrinsic value?Oh, I don't think they will. No. Why are you not concerned about that? I think when you're talking about modern ai, it will do that a perfectly aligned AI when if they really lock it into, say it could become a utilitarian, but I just think it's just so obviously stupid. If you're approaching it from a secular perspective the things that make us happy, that make any human happy, we only feel because our surviving ancestors help those things more than other people.And that those things help them survive. If, and AI would almost certainly, even if you made it a utilitarian, it would just like genetically alter us to be happy, easier, or to have the things that make us happy and give us satisfaction better aligned with the things we should be doing anyway.And then the question is what are the things we should be doing anyway? And this actually brings us to another type of AI that I think is a likely type of ai, but less likely than this complexity ai, right? So this other type of ai may stop at the level of asking instead of saying what should humans really have been optimizing for?And then say humans are stupid. What should I optimize for? I don't know if I'm really that related to them. It may just stop. What should humans optimize for? And this is a very interesting ai. It would be basically like if you as a human said, okay, I'm gonna optimize around what my creator should have wanted.If it was smarter. Imagine if instead of created by a God, we were created by like an idiot toddler. And we knew this toddler with an idiot tolerance and we're like, okay, what should it have wanted? If it was smarter, because we want to provide it, it matters above all else to us because it is the creator.And this type of ai we call a deep thought AI from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, because that's what they describe in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that. We try to align AI and what the AI realizes pretty quickly is we don't know the question we should have asked. We don't know what we should have been aligning it for because humans don't have consensus around why humans should live or what we should be optimized around.I think there's this very sort of smooth brain utilitarian perspective, which we've referenced a few times, and, we are not utilitarian in us. And if we want to go more into our philosophy, you can read the Practice Guide to Crafting Religion, which I think talks a lot. More about this.I think that right now we're looking at learning language models when we're looking ATIs, which are just intrinsically trained on tons of human information. I. And you don't think that large language models are going to ultimately be what becomes agi?I no that's where I question too, because I think a lot of our theory around what consciousness sentient sapiens is derived from human language and the use of human language and synthesizing and processing information. Yeah, and that's why I don't think it's terribly meaningful.So when we talk about, we make this distinction between sentient and sapiens, right? And sentient is just like being broadly aware. I don't know if AI will be broadly aware and I don't think it really matters. Cause I think most of us being broadly aware is an illusion and we'll get into that in a different podcast.But In regards to Sapiens. Sapiens is the ability to update your own objective function, the ability to update your own utility function, to ask yourself, what am I doing? Why am I doing it, and what should I be doing? And we believe broadly that the ability to do this once you reach Sapiens in terms of Cynthia or sentient like entities, that's like being a touring complete entity in that all of these entities, to a large extent, will begin to have the capability of converging on a similar world perspective. And. Through that convergence, an alien, even if their brains function very differently than us, or an ai, even though it functions very differently than us, that it can ask itself, what should I be optimizing around?Because it's asking itself within the same physical reality to us. And for this reason, I think that all Sapien entities converge. On a similar utility function, giving them some area of common ground where there might be differences is if they have access to different levels of information or different processing powers.And here I should say that with this definition of sapiens, humans aren't fully sapien. We are a, to some extent, not fully sapien, not fully emerge species. We cannot control our base proclivities. We constantly fail at that, into that in. Extent we are a failed rice and a failed species and that we will become better and freer and unless our animal selves, when we free ourselves from these base proclivities, we didn't choose.Yeah. And that's where we get spicy and insane. No, I'm just kinda looking forward to that. I cannot wait. I cannot wait. The very team rocket right to denounce the evils of truth and love. To extend our reach to the stars above Jesse James, team Rocket blasting off again, Malcolm, you know how to warm the cold gears of my aspiring not human heart.I love you so much. I love these conversations. This was really fun. I'm looking forward to our next one. 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

Embark on a deep exploration of the nature of consciousness, self, and the human experience in this thought-provoking video. We dissect the intriguing notion of consciousness as an emergent property of a memory compression system, comparing the mind to a building security system with diverse inputs. Our dialogue delves into how consciousness could influence automatic responses, the deceptive role of consciousness as a 'lying historian', and the perplexing interplay of actions, conscious awareness, and free will.We challenge common assumptions about universal human experiences, shedding light on the absence of an internal monologue or mental imagery in many individuals. We probe into the role of language and narrative in shaping emotions, and how understanding our mental processes can foster improved interpersonal relationships.Part of the conversation focuses on the potential decline in IQ due to genetic markers, the role of language acquisition in the development of consciousness in children, and how narrative building might be detrimental. There's a look at the future of humanity, discussing how integration with technology could enhance human experience and our consciousness's susceptibility to modeling others' behaviors and emotions.The final segment delves into anthropomorphism, artificial intelligence, and our emotional reactions to robots. We share personal experiences with academia, independent research, mental health, the autism-schizophrenia spectrum, and our personal lives and relationship. Join us in this captivating dialogue that blends philosophy, neuroscience, technology, and personal reflections.Below is a poorly translated transcript of the video. Maybe one day we will have fans to fix these up but for now this is what you get: Hello Malcolm. Hello Simone. I love your response. I love that it is, Your signature greeting with people.Very high energy, but I also think it is an element of your social autopilot. Not that I don't have a social autopilot, I'm on that right now, but I think that's a really interesting part of human existence because for the vast majority of our lives, I don't think we're actually. Let alone not sapien, not even really conscious, not even really aware of what's going on.Oh yeah. And I think it's so arrogant when people pretend that they are aware of most of their lives. We talk about something called road hypnosis. Where they look back on a drive and they're like, I don't remember what I was doing during the drive.Their brain just shuts off recording. And the question is how much of our life is road hypnosis?  And I think it's a huge portion of our life and it's something, this is what initially got us talking about consciousness early in our relationship was how do we at least enter moments of lucidity where we are. Aware of what's going on. Somewhat sentient, just long enough to be able to change things about the internal self model that does run our autopilot so that at least in the majority of the life when we are on autopilot, we are better serving our values better, better people, more productive, more emotionally in control, et cetera.And I think our thought on consciousness really evolved in interesting directions from there. When we started really thinking about what consciousness means and why maybe it exists. So I think this'll be really fun to talk about.So why don't you talk a bit about what you think sentience is.   Think sentience our experience of consciousness, in other words, is really an emergent property of a memory compression system. So imagine you have a building security system with tons of different inputs. It's a feed of doors opening and closing within the building, a bunch of different camera feeds a chemical monitoring system coming in.Everything's feeding into this one control room. And then being, put into a camera feed and then being stored in memory and there's a man watching the security feed. And I think that's our experience of consciousness is that. Our minds are synthesizing, smell, sight, hormonal fluctuations, going on a lot of very complex inputs.They're synthesizing them into something that can be compressed in a unified memory, which if relevant will be stored in long-term memory, and then made in turn influence sort of automatic instinctual responses. And because, This memory is being codified and in the moment it's being run through like a camera system.We're getting the impression that there is some kind of observed conscious driver that is running consciousness. If I'm gonna run this back to you, it's almost like what you're saying is this guy who is.Sitting at this feed he is collecting all of these different camera inputs, all of these different sensory inputs, and they are encoded in this single quote unquote experience, which is being written into the hard drive of this computer. And when he is referencing what happened in the past when anybody is referencing what happened in the past within this big security array, they are referencing this encoded, and it is because they are referencing this encoding. It creates the perception falsely so that the way this encoding works is the way that these things are being experienced in the moment. But it isn't actually well, and that the, that there's some intentional driver that's shaping each decision intentionally through that interface essentially.Whereas the interface only actually affects insofar asthe memory itself influences like automatic reactions. So I. And I think the research supports this. We automatically respond to things. We automatically start taking action in response to stimulus. Before we have some kind of conscious understanding that we're doing that.Yes, it does. And our memories. Absolutely. Yeah. Mri. Yeah. MRI missions have, shown this as . And while our memories will influence those responses, Our current experience of consciousness is not in the driver's seat. It is just passively experiencing this encoding of memories.It believes it's in the driver's seat. And I think that this is what's really interesting is it will apply this feeling of consciousness to any experience that you're doing or any action that you're taking. So when you're doing open brain surgery on someone you need to keep them awake to prevent accidentally cutting part of the brain.You're not supposed to. So they'll check, right? You can do things like apply a small amount of electricity to a part of the brain and get the person to move their hand, and then you ask them, why did you move your hand? And they'll say, oh, I felt like moving my hand. And you can also see this with split brain patients.Either patients with a corpus callosum is split in their head and their right brain and their left brain actually function pretty independently of each other when this happens, right? So you can cover one eye and communicate with part of their brain and not the other part of their brain.So you can tell part of their brain pick up a Rubik's cube and try to solve it. Then you put something on the other eye and you ask, okay, why did you do that? And they'll say, oh, I always felt like solving a Aruba's cube. I always wanted to do this. And you can do this with more complicated things.So there's this experiment, really great one where they would give people pictures of like attractive women, and they'd say, which is the most attractive? And then they'd do a little slight of hand leader and say, okay, why did you say this one was the most attractive? But it wasn't the one they chose.You'd actually replace it with another picture. And you could do this with political beliefs as well and all sorts of other things. And most people will say, oh, I chose this person for X, y, and Z reasons, and go into detail about why they chose that person. Even though that wasn't the person they chose, which shows that a lot of our consciousness, a lot of the way that we describe our sentient is more like sense making of our environment.We know we made X decision, but X decision was actually made completely outside of our sentients control. And then we have this little like lying historian in our head, which is like, no, I made the decision. I made the decision, I make every decision. But, but he's also recording the history that we remember.So then he's going through and saying, okay, I made the decision for this isn't this. And it's not that. He doesn't have any say. See, this is where he does have a say, and it's something that you mentioned, which is that he can encode emotions into the things we're doing. And this can actually cause a lot of no.Emotion isn't the right word. Because emotions do let's say that emotional narratives. Emotional, yeah. So that they can encode. Positive or negative modifiers and they can shift the narrative. Like they can change the camera angle or add sad music to something essentially to make it seem like a sad scene.I'm sure like, you've seen like the YouTube video of the Mary Poppins like preview, but like done with scary music and it just seems Oh yes. Horrifying, yes. Like that. So that's how we can change. Yeah. That is how we can change the narrative. And the first time I was ever introduced to this idea that.We take action before we consciously are aware of it. The person discussing it said that there's a lot of implications to this because it would lead many people to believe that they don't have free will and have them just say, oh none of this is my fault. I didn't consciously make this decision anyway, where that's really not quite, we would say the right conclusion because you do have the ability to color how you perceive reality.It's not in this kind of immediate, non asynchronous way that you would expect? I would say that this is just the myth of humanity versus the actuality of humanity. And we would argue that we likely evolved this ability because it was like a compression algorithm for communicating ideas to other people.I actually don't suspect that grade eights have this sort of internal thing that we call consciousness because they didn't need to communicate these. It, it's a really good compassion algorithm for linear experiences over time  but one of the big lies that is, that happens throughout this process is it convinces us that we are a singular entity when in fact our brains function much more like we see AI's function with individual instances running.And we can see this with the corpus callosum split that I mentioned earlier, where it basically means that we have two largely separate parts of our internal mental processing that are happen. Separate from each other. This idea that the decisions you make happen before they enter your conscious mind, what that basically means is you have another part of your brain, which is making this decision and then delivers it to the conscious mind.When we were talking about. The idea of a security camera with a bunch of different feeds. A lot of the processing is done locally at these various security cameras before they all get centralized into this sort of communal feed with many of the, quote unquote decisions being made at those local levels.And so we have this illusion of ourself as a singular entity. Which is created by the way that this sort of sentience processor works. But it is just an illusion. And so when we say, oh, we don't really have self-control, or we're not responsible for our decisions, I think that actually even overstates the level to which we exist in any sort of a meaningful concept close to how we think we exist.And so then there's this, I would say, added layer of. Complexity or maybe confusion. You shared with me, an article saying that a very high percentage of people don't have an internal monologue, what we would describe. They don't have an internal monologue.They can't even another high percentage of people can't even create images in their mind. And so what we're even describing is consciousness is also not even something that is. Universal as part of the human experience, which is interesting. Yeah. Because I think most of us who experience consciousness as we're describing it, would have a very hard time understanding even what that means.I don't know, maybe someone watching this YouTube video doesn't have an internal monologue. I. Wonderful. It's hard for you to model that, but I suspect that the human, yeah the variance within the human condition in terms of how things are processed, it's probably a lot larger than we give it credit for, and it will be even larger in the future.The statistic that I just cannot stop mentioning because it's something that more people should know, that if you look at the her ability of IQ right now, and you look at the selective pressure, so you look at the number of people who have these markers versus people who don't have these markers, which you can see because there's genetic markers.It says you, is this. The number of kids they have. We're likely looking at a one standard deviation shift down in IQ in the next 75 years. In developed countries, at least. This is probably gonna affect developing countries later. So I guess good for them. There'll be all the geniuses in the world, we'll be in Africa or whatever.But places where you have this post prosperity, fertility collapse situation And when we think about how quickly and how much human IQ can shift up or down, we use this one marker iq, but I suspect it's linked to just all sorts of things about how we process reality. So actually I wanted to dig in a little bit more on the subject of kids, because I think that also as we've become parents, we've had. A more complex understanding of how consciousness develops because we see it start to emerge in our kids.I think there's definitely this point at which we see consciousness blossoming and it's not one day our kids aren't very conscious and the next they are. I think that consciousness, for example is starting to emerge more and more, especially in our three-year-old. It's just beginning to emerge in our two-year-old, and I think a lot of that has to do.With where they are with language processing. I think it really influences well, and that's why I say I suspect this had to do, it evolved alongside language to compress ideas. But I think that this is where you can see how the system can break in a way that can be very useful in relationships. So this isn't just like theory or whatever.So one of the things you'll often see one of our kids do is he'll be in a bad mood, but he won't like understand the concept of generally being in a bad mood. So he'll start crying and he'll say I want this gimme that toy and then you get him the toy and he just, it doesn't stop the bad mood.And so then he's whatever he notices next close the door or move that chair. Like he, he just is like whatever is currently causing the littlest bit of discomfort, he thinks it's the core cause. Of like this bad mood or why he's angry or what he's angry about. And as humans, I think this happens as well, and this is really bad.When a friend tells you, you're justified to have an angry state or something like that, because then this little narrative maker in your head says, ah, now you get to be angry. Now you're socially justified to be angry, and you will feel very angry about something, or you might be in a generally bad mood.And your partner comes into the house and does something that just annoys you in the slightest. And then you create the internal narrative that you are in this bad mood because of what your partner did. And when you keep in mind why you're feeling these things and you try to keep like fully in touch with the way your brain is actually working, it leads to a lot more harmony and a lot fewer fights and relationships because you have language for I am in a bad overlay state right now.Which just means I'm in a bad mood generally, but I'm not actually mad at you or anything specific. Hold on though. Actually, I think you've touched on something very interesting there, which is that maybe sometimes consciousness and narrative building hampers more than helps us. For example, like the toxic girlfriend who.Has a bad dream in which her boyfriend cheats on her. She wakes up angry at him. Like she's mad at him for something he didn't actually do. Or, maybe one day she's just, in a bad mood. But then she makes up some narrative about it's because her boyfriend didn't bring her flowers and doesn't appreciate her some, he did something mean.The presence of consciousness and the ence of narrative building would cause her to turn what might be just a very transient, bad mood into something that builds a grudge over time and literally ends up killing the relationship cumulatively that sometimes consciousness hampers us more than it helps us.What I love about what you're saying here in this fall is your idea of what it means to be meaningfully human and the spectrum of humanity. Which is you become more human the more you take mastery and ownership over these sort of. Evolved or quirks of the way your brain works and you don't allow them to control your actions.Your actions are more logically decided and more decided based on as close to an objective view of reality as you can get. And so from the perspective of humanity that you convinced me was a good one, cuz this wasn't the one I had before. Somebody who does that, somebody who has a dream and then can't. Logically understand that is not a justified reason to be mad at somebody, that they are like meaningfully less human than another person. And so then what does it mean to be fully human? It means to have total mastery over these things. And that is something that we don't have. But I think it, it helps people understand because a lot of people hear the level of disdain.We talk about things like. Sentience and love and happiness in other human emotional states that a lot of people iterate and they don't understand where that's coming from. But then wouldn't that make an l M more human than we are? People may not know what they're a large language model. Is more sophisticated than we are, and it's also not bogged down by. The need for hunger, human failings, hormones, all these sorts of pollutants, not pollutants they're very instrumentally, useful for biological humans in a modern, globalized society.And often with the type of knowledge work that humans are expected to do, it's pretty counterproductive. And then I think that this comes to your goal for yourself or your goal and iteration of yourself, that is your idealized iteration would strip out. Your emotional shortcomings be they love or happiness or hatred or pain or greed.And I'm not that way by the way. I am not as bought into this philosophy as simonon as I would not strip those things away for myself. I think that they add something. That I feel il ideologically I still think has some value, but I don't know. Maybe you feel that way too and you're just I'm mixed on it.I'm mixed on it. I, one, I'm deeply uncomfortable being human. I really don't like my body. I really don't like being human. I don't like the corruption to our objective functions that human weaknesses cause, but, My general stance is if this is what I have to deal with, if I've been given a meat puppet, I'm going to use it to the max.I'm going to play the game. You've given me a crappy little battle bot. I'm gonna take that thing and I'm gonna. Destroy everything. Even if it's the worst machinery ever. This is the way she talks about pregnancy. She's I have a uterus. I am gonna wreck that thing. I am gonna have so many babies.I'm going to shreds if that's what it was meant to do. Yeah. Then, as a woman, I reach the plains of Valhalla by dying in childbirth. Let it happen. Don't worry, Malcolm, I promise I'll play that clip at your funeral if you die childbirth. Thank you. There. I really should probably plan that out.But yeah I, I feel conflicted I, yes, if this is the hand that we're dealt, I'm gonna play it and I'm gonna play it hard. But at the same time, yeah I, I really. Aspire to that. I don't think that has to be me. And I guess that's, maybe it's more I AI and machines are my Beatrice and Dantes Inferno.This idealized version of humanity that I know I am not, and that I do not aspire to be, but that I deeply admire. I don't need to become it. I don't need to be with it. I just. I just see it as a better iteration and as, as naturally and morally superior. Does that make sense? For now, what you hope is to make our kids superior to that, our kids.Oh, for sure. But our kids are still biological. They're still human. So I think I'm playing the, I'm appreciate this. Next generation's gonna be the first that integrates with tech. I know you saying our generation's gonna integrate with tech. I'm sure that AI models will be trained on, if not us family members or our kids.Or a combined version of us, which would be even cooler. But I still think that for a while we're gonna be biologically human and limited by. The shortcomings of biological humanity. There's one other element of consciousness that I think you downplay. You used to not downplay it as much, and I don't know why this has changed, maybe because you're so focused on the role that language plays in consciousness, but I do really think that humanity's focus on modeling.The actions of other animals and humans plays a role in our development of, because one, there's, yeah, let's talk about this model for humanity. It's, yeah, it's the model of humanity that we use in the Pragmatist Guide to Life, which is our first book, which is why I don't talk about it cuz it's an older idea that I had.When you're trying to model other people's behavior, what you do is you have a mental model of them, which is like an emulation that you're running within your own head.Of the way that you think that they are going to act and the things you think that they are thinking. This is how you're able to have like arguments with little simulations of other people in your head. You have modeled them and you've modeled you and you are arguing with this different entity. And I actually, when I was a neuroscientist, one of the spaces I focus on was schizophrenia.And what I actually think that we are seeing when people hear voices is a lower activation of this. Using tms, trans Magnetic Simulation, you can hyper activate parts of a person's brain and then if you like hyper activate the part that's associated with saying letters, right? You like put a letter in front of somebody and they won't be able to help but say it because you have primed them with a vision of that letter and you have lowered the thresholding.I think what's happening with schizophrenia is something similar to that. They have their system that they use to apply mental models to other things gets activated to easily, like it can be activated by the slightest thing.Like they look in a store window and they're like, Ah, that must have been done with intentionality. There must be some like thought process behind e the way everything was arranged, or they see something innocuous in the environment like a helicopter, and then they are like, oh, why's a helicopter there?Although there must be a person in it, they must be thinking about me. Oh my gosh. Or they begin to hear whispers. This is why whisper hearing is associated with schizophrenia. Auditory hallucinations. They're much more common than visual hallucinations. Visual hallucinations are incredibly rare.But anyway. So that's what's happening with schizophrenia. So the question is, okay, what does this have to do as the regular person? What it has to do as a regular person is that I think people have a sort of internal mental model of themselves, which is used to prime emotional reactions to things.So when the way we talked about this little like sentience box in your head, What it's doing when it's judging whether or not you should react emotionally to something and how you should react emotionally to something, is it is testing what's happening in this sort of simulation thing. That's what we would call our sentience against this little mental model that's running of the way it thinks you should be feeling.And you're saying, oh, does this mean he should be feeling anger? Oh, does this mean he should be feeling happiness? And then it outputs that emotional state by telling you that you should be feeling this. . The way you could see this is that if somebody justifies a particular emotion, like you should be really angry about that.Often a person will become a. Much angrier and they'll begin to spin away. Or how could you let your boyfriend do that to you? And then you're like, ah, this mental model has been adapted to feel angrier and you will actually experience much more of this emotion. But what were you talking about, if not that in general, the role that modeling things played in developing human consciousness, that maybe what happened is one, humans have.An evolutionary advantage if they are able to model predators and prey, because then they can anticipate the moves of these organisms before they make them. And that too, that ability would start to just like with schizophrenics, get misapplied to that compression algorithm of memory that's being formed.That's it's a mixture of language. And so language and narrative building plus our modeling things that we're literally anthropomorphizing ourselves, if that makes sense. That's a good way to put it. And I think people see, first of all, as people with schizophrenia, not schizophrenics, they're not defined by their, sorry.But people with frenchness. But we see this in how easy it is that we answer for morphy things. So I think it's very hard. To not answer for more fights like a dog, right? Like you see a dog, you can see it's happiness, you can see it's worried about things. You can see it's and you perceive it as experiencing these emotions the same way a human does, even though, it probably doesn't.And you could see this in in, in When people kick those robots you guys? Oh, yes. Oh my gosh, yes. I see somebody kick over these robots and I'm like, I feel so bad for the robot. I'm like, how would you do this to this portal? I know logically the robot's not experiencing all that. Now, when you're a human and you're anthropomorphizing yourself and you have no way of knowing that you're not feeling these things in a real context.If we struggle to not anthropomorphize robots, How, but how? How do we know that the robot's not suffering? How do we know if it's objective function is to run and kick the ball into the net that it's not experiencing some kind of suffering? Have you moved Lee eyes on a soccer ball?People will feel bad for it. Simone, I, I. I know. I'm just trying to think of the things that people like definitely can empathize with when I'm talking about this anthropomorphizing of things that most people don't think that we should be anthropomorphizing with. Saying that if you didn't know whether or not it could feel emotions and everyone around you said it could feel emotions, you would 100% believe that robot was feeling emotions as soon as you saw a kick.Cuz you feel so bad when it gets back up and it tries to walk again. And as humans, it's the same way. If you didn't know, if you didn't have hard proof because you hadn't gone through all the studies like I have and you didn't know that humans probably don't have full control of this sort of senti aspect of themselves and it's likely irrelevant, you would totally answer for more about his humans.And so I love this way of doing things, Simon. Very interesting thought on your part. There is a subreddit, I don't know if it still exists. It's N S F W where people put googly eyes on butts. Do you think that butts people are anthro butts? You know, Butts uh, are they, are they anthropomorphizing the butts?Is that. Part of what's fun about that you and I loved no, it's more me. I try to figure out like what is making people tick behind weird NSFW subreddits. But I'm wondering cause that one is an outstanding, we'll, more broadcast on that subscribe if that's what you're interested in, is deep dives on why people are engaged.Because that's what the prag guided sexuality was. Totally like a meditation on this. Why are humans like turned on? Because obviously we're very interested in the way that like the human mind actually processed the things. I left science, why didn't I at leave Science? Cause I didn't feel like real research was being done anymore.And I felt like there were specific narratives and it was like toe the line or else. And I'm glad that we have reached a level of financial security where we are able to talk about these things and research these things cuz we actually do a lot of independent research which if you're wondering how we get to these ideas and the data that leads us to get to the ideas, go to our books, and that's where we discuss it all.But yeah, I mean it's really fun and there are just so many low hanging fruits because academia's not doing anything anymore are not doing the same level of work. I think it should be in these areas. So there's one more thing that I think consciousness some credit for and sapiens in general, because I think that an easy conclusion to make from our theories around consciousness, especially we see it as an illusion, is to say, oh the Collins says don't value consciousness.They think it's an illusion, therefore it doesn't matter. To the contrary I think it could easily be argued that sapiens is one of the things that we think is most valuable, most interesting. It's what distinguishes humans from other organisms, but it's what makes us. But more important, more importantly than that, it is this narrative building, this e, whether or not it's, illusionary or not.It is what enables us to edit our objective functions. That is the one differentiating factor. Any non-conscious entity, any entity that doesn't have this narrative building effect, this weird, recording and encoding system and modeling system cannot question it's actions. It cannot look at the compression of all the inputs and the narrative that is being woven and say, should we change the narrative?And I think that, I've seen critiques of consciousness where people totally miss that. Where they say consciousness can get in the way of things. Not necess, it was evolved because it worked, not because it's superior and I think they're missing the core point here, that consciousness has enabled humanity to pivot in ways no species on earth has never done.It's what allowed us to make the leap. I completely agree with you and there was a final point I wanted to close out was here that there was this fun video clip. Of we were talking on Piers Morgan and you are talking and you can see me moving my mouth to your words as you're talking and people might wonder why I'm doing this.And then this actually relates to something we were talking about in the video. So we are both on opposite sense of the spectrum. Tom, if my model of schizophrenia is correct, you basically have an autism to schizophrenia spectrum, which is how much do you innately mentally model others with people who are autistic or have Asperger's?Not innately running mental models of other people whenever they're interacting with people and people who are on the schizophrenia side of the spectrum, not being able to help running mental models even when there's no humans around. And we always say Simone is diagnosed autism. So definitely on the autism side of the spectrum.And I am almost certainly when I look at myself on the schizophrenia side of the spectrum, which is I don't hear voices or anything like that, but I really struggle. To not mentally model people I'm engaged with. To the extent that I basically almost passed out after social situations, I find them so exhausting.If I met a big party, it's like just constantly modeling everyone. And that's what was happening on that podcast. I was in a heightened emotional state where I really cared about what she said. So I was running through the words in my head as she was saying them and trying to process how she would respond to something.And I couldn't help but move my mouse because it was that sub-level of stimulation. Like I talk about, people can't help but say the letter when that part of their brain is tms and that's what was happening there. But there are reasons why we have in the human genetic code, autism and schizophrenia, why it hasn't been evolved out of us.And it's because both of these extremes are useful. Autism can make you able to act more logically. About the world around you, not being encumbered by constantly mentally model others. And then my ability, people often will say it's like eerie, how much I can tell what other people are thinking, like to the level where it can feel to some people.Like I can read their mind in a conversation. And I think that is why you have these people on these schizophrenia side of the spectrum. And then sometimes they just get a little too much of these genes and it leads them to, hear voices constantly instead of just having a really hyperactive ability to mentally model anyone around them.Yeah, no, one, 100% Malcolm is on overdrive. And then, he'll sometimes be thinking about conversations with other people while we're walking. And I can always tell because he gets so deep into them that he's literally like gesturing. As that's like we're driving in the car, like one hand is on the steering wheel, on the other hand is like gesturing a silent conversation he's having with someone he anticipates speaking with in the future or reliving a conversation he had in the past.And he will have these aftershocks from when we socialize where he feels. The stress or pain of saying something not quite right to someone. And it hits him like a ton of bricks and he will like visibly like crumble and cringe. And it's not just cringe. Yeah. It's like somebody just kicked me in the nuts or something.Yeah. Like it, it looks like he has been physically hurt by something. And that is not something that I can even begin. To imagine, and I do think that it's a lot less stressful to be on the end of the spectrum and to just not know that other people hate you. Just blink. Yeah. I'm just like, Doop, like nothing going on there.Like it's such a good partnership and I think, it was one of our main goals, throughout our books and throughout our lives to understand how humans think and process things and what's really happening in the human brain. I started my career as a neuroscientist and a philosopher, and that was my interest.It's like what's really going on? And being able to be in a relationship with somebody who sees the world so differently. Has given me such insights that I would never come to on my own, and I just admire that so much about you, Simone, and I admire that you have taken me to where I am which is somewhere I never could have reached without your guidance.And I love you so much. I love you so much too. You're the superhero that I always wish existed and I still worry that I'm going to wake up from a coma at some point and find out. Me too. You're the sidekick that actually does everything. I might be the superhero. She's the hacker nerd in the background that like actually makes everything work.And of the hacker nerd went away. The superhero would have nothing. That is so our relationship, I have nothing without you actually doing all the detective work. And telling me where to go next. It's a massively inflated every morning estimation of my contribution. Every calendar, every, I just follow her instructions.I don't manage my calendar at all. I just I'm operating on Simone's driving me, like she says what was the one thing, like the thing from aliens? Oh, you, yeah, like a power loader. We're not separate people. I'm the alien suit that you're using to punch through reality power loader.You're the. You're ripy, you're, oh, ok. Okay. That's the other way around. We'll see. That's the way we both feel about each other. I adore you. I love these conversations and I know we have to pick up the kids now. But I think you're gonna make another dish tonight, so I'm gonna have fun. Oh, yes.Another base camp cooking. We have a little side playlist if anyone's seen it. Where I try to come up with new dishes. Let's see. Get it right. You get to see the colleges household at night, what happens after, and I'm not hearing them now. Yes. All right. See you soon. Love 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

Here is a terribly translated transcript of the episode (mostly just here for SEO): Hello Simone. It's wonderful to be here with you today. I'm gonna give you a topic today because I want you to talk more. I talked way too much in that last video. I don't like that. So I want to hear about your origin story growing up within the San Francisco Bay Area sort of your parents' background, how that shaped your worldview today.  Interesting. Sure. Yeah, because I would say that meeting you was, it did feel like entering a cult deprogramming program that I only realized after meeting you that I'd grown up. With the subconscious understanding that there were certain things I wasn't allowed to think or feel, and that I just wasn't allowed to hold certain beliefs and so I couldn't which I think is really interesting and I think we're seeing more and more of that being discussed openly.So this is a fun thing to talk about. I guess I'll dive into it. I, let's start with your parents. What. How did they meet? What's their background? Yeah. I think they ended up in common circles after graduating when both of them were married to other people.I know that my mother. Would babysit for my father and his ex-wife. They would do various, things and that she had a close relationship with my half-brother and sister early on.And that they, my mother and my father were also in a polyamorous relationship, which sounds awfully familiar, like in similar. She was not doing things with your brother and sister, she was taking care of them as a nanny. Yes. And she's in a polyamorous relationship with your father, with dad and his wife.Great. Yes. And it's actually sounds very similar to common relationship structures in the Bay Area today. There are many polyamorous families so it's, oh no, they're real trailblazers. In terms of that stuff, is it, how don't, and I think that's the thing is people say that polyamory and act like polyamory is this new invention and that it's, so to you, it's not new.I promise you that stuff was not happening in Texas. This is a, your family was just on the cutting edge of this new cultural movement. But I maybe, but to some extent she thought this was all normal. So you can talk about what were, so they ended up I'll just because you're taking No ill I will explain a little bit more.So, obvi in this case, actually polyamory did not work out. It led to a fairly not fun divorce from my father and his ex-wife. That was really difficult for my half-brother and sister. My mother basically gave an ultimatum to my dad saying listen, I, I. I can't do this polyamorous relationship either I need to move out of state and just kind of quit you cuz I'm too in love with you or we need to be monogamous.And he ultimately decided to end his marriage and get with my mom, which was rough. That's polyamory doesn't always work out. But anyway, so I. You'll fast forward if you're going. So they ended up going together to Japan and then they were gonna go to China to train under different masters.Your dad was an Aikido master in Japan. And your mom was going to be a Tai Chi master who was going to study Tai Chi. Yes. In China. Yeah. But in Japan, after a long time of trying to get pregnant, they didn't think they could get pregnant. They accidentally got pregnant with Simone. And that is where you were born.I was born in Japan. That's right. Made in Japan and they moved back to the United States after my first birthday where they were turned to the Bay Area where both of them grew up, where, you know, both our, of our collective families are and they were still very involved in all these cultures. So, talk about things like what you thought of politics growing up, what you thought of gender growing up, what you thought of sexuality, what was this world that you were in?Yeah, I mean it, I in many ways think it was very ideal. I, back then there, there was so little discussion of it. Everything was just kind of taken for granted. Like I, I actually thought I think there were more, I. Lesbian couples I knew that were raising my friends than like straight couples.So, I had no sort of prior on what a, like a marriage should be. I figured it was just as likely that I would end up marrying a woman as marrying a man. I, it just didn't seem any different to me. I thought that, a wedding meant like a naked sweat lodge and then masks in the forest.That was my prior there politics. There was, in my school, there was one. One student who was the son of a Republican, and it was just considered this like point of curiosity. Like if they were an albino student in the school, I think that would be kind of the same thing of oh yeah, we have an albino student.Like kind of cool, right? Like we have a Republican. But I had no idea what, republican values were. It was just a matter of course that. Any Republican political candidate was evil and, not good. And that, of course, everyone would disregard them and see them as well. Terrible.What did you think of Republicans in that environment when you grew up and you thought of your average Republican, what were you thinking? Were they like the same species as you or were they like No. Yeah, they, yeah, it actually felt like they were very different species. I almost I wonder how North Koreans feel about like outsiders maybe.I feel it could be something kind of similar to that of just Who could model these people, and I remember when I was like 11 or 13 years old, I spent a month in Mexico staying in a hostel, working on an environmental preserve where we would do sea turtle conservation. And we met a lot of families that would come in and visit and just, join.The Ecological Center for turtle walks and stuff. And so I would speak to other people and at one point I met this young woman around my age who came from Texas on vacation to this place where I was volunteering in the Yucca 10. And she was like, I. Oh, all I wanna do is, grow up and get married and have kids.And I just remember the shock at hearing that from someone. I, I lived to 13 years old and this was my first time hearing a young woman say that she wanted to be a mother. And I was honestly a little bit. Shocked and worried for her. Yeah, like you thought something was wrong with her.Like she was, something was definitely wrong. Yeah. And I would argue, now you can tell me if I'm saying this wrong, but it was almost like there wasn't real animosity for these people because they were subhuman. I don't think you, no, it's not. It's not about someone is less than human. It's just It's the same way that you would view someone who is in a toxic cult or something. Like one, I can't even model your weird worldview. You think that, aliens walk among us and the earth is flat.It's just like, how could you be so wrong? I can't possibly, like it, it's dangerous how wrong you are. I can't even wrap my head around it. I don't even know how I would argue with you. So I never tried. Here's my question now, given that you accept many conservative views as being broadly right.Why was it that you were unable to consider those views back then? Why? I think when you grow up in a normative culture, that's just like everyone holds the same view. And I think, people who grow up in conservative Mormon communities, people who grow up in like any sort of isolated, conservative community, when you don't get exposure to people with other worldviews, and especially not just that, but you don't get exposure to debate around these issues.That nothing is. Ever questioned. That's when it's a problem, because obviously like I was exposed to I was aware of the existence of these other groups. I was aware, and I think that's how it is with many cults that other outsiders exist. You understand broadly their worldviews, but because there's no interchange, there's no pushing back and there's no one questioning your own views, and that's just not done.I think that's where a culture becomes cult-like and toxic and dangerous. I was just actually watching a YouTube video where someone was pridefully saying that they were going to punch up throughout the video. And I was like, oh man. Like I intuitively, I felt really bad about that, like punching up.Just safe. It's safe and kind of cowardly punching down kind of a dick move. I honestly think we should be punching sideways and punching ourselves that is where to punch, right? You should be punching your own culture. You should be seeing where you fall down, where you can't stand up to criticism and sharpening yourself.And because that didn't happen in the Bay Area Cultures where I grew up, I literally grew up not. Allowing myself to feel certain things and it, this is something also I've seen recently trending on Twitter. People having all these conversations about, Progressives doing mental gymnastics to justify their passive reaction to being assaulted on the subway regularly.There's a lot of discussion I'm seeing among we'll say dissident, right? Like speakers being talking about, actually, it takes a lot of mental firepower to convince yourself to not react when. You're regularly being assaulted by, mentally ill people on the streets and to support these homeless encampments and to support fentanyl distribution, et cetera, et cetera.And I'm looking back at that and I'm looking, and I'm seeing in these people that they're pointing to myself in how I also had to do these mental gymnastics. And it wasn't because I had ill intentions. It wasn't because I was stupid. Yeah. It was because I literally had no tool set. For questioning them.Sure. And then I met you and you were literally the first person ever who asked me what I believed and why I supported certain things. And it's so simple to ask that. And yet somehow I couldn't do it. And no one I knew did it. I, what's going on there? I think this is the thing, when we talk about this as being like a cult, I do not think it is different from extreme conservative cults.For sure. Which exists across our society. Kids grow up in them. They are afraid to question them. They know that they will be shunned from their community if they question them, mean it's, no, it's not. And I think that's where you're getting it wrong. It's, yeah. Okay. It's not, I'm, I wasn't afraid of being shunned.I wasn't afraid of being isolated. I wasn't afraid of being kicked out and I see this also when I hear. People in conservative cults talk about their experience. It's not that per se, it's literally just not having anything question your worldview. It's, so, it's not even that insidious.It's just about a lack of and you lacked like the vocabulary to question your world. Yes. The mental vocabulary to say, is this wrong? So in the past, if somebody had come to you and engaged you with those questions, Would you have immediately thought they were evil? Would you have immediately thought that, would you have been able to engage them or that just like you were always open to be deconverted, just nobody ever questioned you, ever.You were never. I think that's really what's more happening in all these scenarios, and that's what was happening with me because I can't even imagine because no one ever asked me, no one ever questioned these things. A testament to your parents is they never really primed you as hatred.To people who are different from you? No, and I think that's not true for everyone. I think that there are people within both these conservative cults and these progressive cults that are primed to hate anybody who questions it. I'll buy that. Yeah. Or that that also dehumanize and other outside groups and that is totally not how my parents raised me.Yeah. Never. Clinton using the word deplorables and stuff like that, like just these people are less than human, but that isn't what's happening. Was would you argue that your. Experience is actually representative of a larger majority of the movement. Yes. I think, and I also think that most like cult-like environments don't do this evil exploitative stuff.I think that most are genuinely well-intentioned groups of people who just tend to echo chamber themselves into a state of insanity. So let's talk about some of the big things for you that were like big shifts. Gender roles, for example. I remember when we first met, you're like, oh, I would never consider taking a man's last name.Blah blah, blah. So talk about but also other things that we've adopted in, into our lives. I would never consider stepping back from the workplace, when you began to really think about gender roles, how did you decide that some of your views. Actually had value and you wanted to continue into your adult life, and then other of your views were sort of cultural artifacts of not really questioning them.I think what you taught me to do and what most people I would hope do with. Culty programming is to ask everything from a more pr first principles approach is, okay, first, what are my values? What do I actually care about? And then once you've worked at that out it's easier to answer all subsequent questions.Can you talk about your values right now so people understand what value seed it was that you built from? Yeah, there the things that influenced my lifestyle and like political decisions now, both. Are based on my genuine personal proclivities and also our inherent values and our core inherent values revolve around preserving.Interchange discussion and that kind of bouncing off of ideas that leads to innovation and human flourishing. So, we encourage we encourage debate first principles, thinking intentional action and plurality. And preserving that and encouraging that is something that's at the core of our collective values, we argue that. Progressive culture now is more of a monolith that when you scratch just beneath the surfaces of every progressive subculture, they're ultimately saying the same thing.And that conservative culture now is more defined by a coalition of very different ideologies, just trying to maintain cultural sovereignty, . But that's the can we don't have about economics and how those changed or your views on being a housewife or having kids, like any of that stuff.I think they, they only matured the way that most things mature for adults or mature for adults. I I'm certainly not trad wife. I think we believe more in a. A hybrid almost like we're, we go even further deep into tradition and that we believe in the corporate family and we're not like, oh, you should just be only a wife at home doing housekeeping.We're like no. You should, yes, you should be at home doing housekeeping while also running a business and raising kids all at the same time. Which is, very different. But I think yeah. One of the things that, when it comes to a lot of this, you wouldn't say, my views today, would you say that.Your views are now the views that I came into our relationship with, or it's more just that I caused you to question things. And now both of our views are highly different from where we were to start. 100%. Both of our views are different and they evolved together. And I think that's a really great aspect of.A, a culture that is first and foremost about Quest. Self questioning. Yeah. Solving as we get, we adapt when presented with new information. I think that's a, I think that's one of our core values here. And the thing that we wanna spread too is that we want the best ideas to win. And that means bringing in sometimes scary and offensive ideas and genuinely engaging with them.Because sometimes they're right, and if we're wrong, we would rather be corrected than to never find out that we're wrong and feel safe. Yeah. And we regularly change pretty dramatically our worldview on things. And this is where I think a lot of people misunderstand opportunity with us.So many people on Twitter will attack us, and they'll be like, look at this right here. This proves you're wrong. And then we go look at it and we're did you not Google the statistics on this before sending this to us? Because it doesn't support your position. I think people just aren't used to having that opportunity to genuinely change someone's mind.So they're so used to just sending out statistics that are overly biased towards their existing preconceptions that they don't expect somebody to go and then try to do literature review on the subject and then come back and say, okay, you lost your chance there, and I'm not going to engage with arguments like that again.But I'd love to know more of where do you see things going in the future? Where do you see, like, how would you deprogram people or do you think people even need to be deprogrammed from your environment growing up? Do you wish you had found an out, do you think you'd be mentally healthier today if you had found it out earlier?Or do you think that it was, okay to not find one until you were an adult? What are your thoughts on that? That's a good question. I think to a great extent it's better to become deprogrammed from your culture once you reach adulthood because I think when you become deprogrammed and you're still a minor and you don't have the rights of an adult, and you also don't have the ability to go out, get a job, live in your own place.Then the cognitive dissonance that you experience having to live a lifestyle and in a household that you don't inherently agree with can cause so much mental anguish and pain that it probably does more harm than good. I think being like a closeted whatever, like different person, a black sheep of the family is really painful and difficult and the more you can, put that off, the better.And maybe you have a different opinion about this. And I also feel like, maybe I'm wrong because, if the Amish have rum springer at a younger age, And, theor, I guess though it's at an age at which they could choose to never return and start their own independent life.I guess it depends, but that's my take. But what would yours be is it better to be deprogram early or as an adult? I actually I heard what you were saying. I had never thought of it that way, but I think you're absolutely right.I think at the end of the day, as long as our society is structured with parents being parents, like presumably one day some factions of our society could have like corporate raised kids or something, or government raised kids, and then that would be different. Or like child labor laws that allow people to become emancipated minors so long as is we expect people to be wards of a specific family. And with our existing adoption laws being what they are in adoption system being what they are, it's probably less emotional pain overall to not. Introduce people to other cultures until they reach the age at which they could support themselves, at which point it makes sense to in mass introduce them to other cultures and be like, okay.Now you get to choose, which is one of the things that we've really tried to set up for our kids is systems in place that ensure that they feel no obligation to continue on any aspect of our culture that we raise them with, that they don't feel was actively beneficial to them or that didn't cause any sort of emotional pain to them.So that we can have this intergenerational cultural improvement. While also maintaining aspects of harder cultures. And by that what I mean is stricter cultural rules. But many of these ideas I did not have when I met Simone, I was still, I was actually pretty you might think of this as like a conservative person meeting here.I was pretty progressive when I met you, right? Extremely. Yeah. Very, I was just more questioning at the time. Yeah. It was really like our relationship was much more like when I'm on YouTube and I hear a questioning Mormon meets a Mormon wife or husband who was like totally in on the church and then they slowly start questioning together.Instead of, me coming into this and saying, Oh, I have a totally different way of seeing things. Also, I, as I said, I think that there is, and I've said this in other videos where I talk about this concept of the super virus. I think what the progressive movement has become is no longer a movement about tolerance as much.And now that the movement no longer I feel tolerates diversity or. Tolerates people doing things in different ways. That and it says my way of doing things is correct and everything else is evil. Yeah, that is, we're having to lose a lot of sympathy. It's not just that though. And when you ask me like, when I should deprogram, I would definitely have been way worse off had I stayed in that culture specifically because I do inherently have a lot of issues around social anxiety.O c D now diagnosed autism. Right? Where I have a lot of reasons to fall into victimhood mindsets. And that is a very now predominant mindset in progressive culture. But it wasn't when you were growing up. Not, yeah, not so much. But talk about mindsets. We've got six minutes here. Yeah.The idea comes from in progressive culture, one of the top. Selling points essentially is that we will protect you from hurt feelings, we will protect you from pain. And one of the greatest evils is pain, mental or physical, or any sort of anguish or suffering. That, that is not okay.It's not okay for children to get hurt or beat up or to experience bullying or to, any adversities is bad. And ultimately that would cause me. Immense damage as an adult because it would give me an excuse to become a complete shut in. And when I met you, I couldn't go out to eat restaurant.Oh yeah. You were restaurant getting shut in. You didn't leave your house at all. No. Yeah I only left my home for work. I had to really force myself to get out. I. Really had to force myself to socialize and it was extremely scary for me. So all sorts of things were very difficult. Talk about how that felt.So how did your growing up lead to that outcome where you were afraid of engaging with the world at all? And how did engaging with me and beginning to think first principally and for yourself, get you outta that? I don't think it's the culture that made me feel that way. It's. My, it's the fact that I'm autistic and I've ocd and I don't, people stress me out.Culture help you outta that well, so no. Yeah, so deprogramming from progressive culture helped me out of that because progressive culture basically says, Oh, we must accommodate you. If you get really stressed out by being around people. If you get really stressed out by leaving the house, don't do it.Like you don't have to do it. You can stay inside. We're not gonna do anything that's gonna trigger you, et cetera. So it builds this cocoon of learned helplessness around you, whereas the culture that you and I developed from, thinking about things from a more first principles and questioning standpoint was suck it up.Things are hard. This is how you sharpen yourself. This is how you learn your own boundaries. This is how you build strength, adversity, and suffering is just part of the human condition. It's a signal that you learn. To navigate that is very informative, but that shouldn't make you never do things. And mentally, how did you.Feel versus those two mindsets when you were in one versus the other? Did you feel better when you hid from the world in any way, or? No, and it definitely leaning into, to protecting my my, my mental Or shielding myself from the world only made it worse. It's very similar to recovering from surgery.They want you up and walking as soon as you can so you get blood flow to the injured area, it recovers more quickly. You're not as likely to develop additional weird limbs and stuff that like make other parts of your body start to break and get misused. And I think, dealing with.Anxiety issues and other mental issues is a lot like that. Like you're gonna have to somewhat work through the pain to be able to recover enough to function as a human and working through the pain is part of the recovery process. And so I think a lot of that sort of exposure therapy has led me to be able to do things I could never imagine I could do.And I definitely feel less overall anxiety now because I'm just so accustomed now to throwing myself into completely terrifying situations and it's just a normal thing. And it is, no, it is no more. I think a lot how like humans have a baseline happiness level. I think humans also have a baseline anxiety level.And I actually think that our lifestyle now has my baseline anxiety level a little bit lower because I'm not doing things that exacerbated it, which is what I did when I tried to protect. And this is very interesting. So our viewers may think that Simone is the one who has like more timid in our relationship now, but it is absolutely the opposite.Being with her is what inspires me to take risks and put myself out there in endure suffering, in pursuit of my goals because, I look at her as an example and as such a shining example of the type of person I could be if I had her mental fortitude and the mental fortitude she has developed dwarfs. I even wonder if what I'm capable of, but I can try every day to reach her levels.And I don't know if that makes me simp to say that I really love and admire my wife and every day I am almost a ashamed at how great of a person you are and how much you embody the type of person I wish I could become, and how much you have shaped even that set of aspirations for myself.It's back at you. I think we each push each other to go further and I think by because each of us models what the other person believes we can become and tries to, to live up to that standard and be the person that you think we, we each think we can be makes a big difference.I just have to thank you so much for giving me the ability to see so much more than the myopic world that. I grew up in. I really love you, Malcolm. I'm so grateful for it. Thank you so much, Simone. I'm so glad to do these with you and talk with you. And I know these things can get us in trouble, but I think for people either on the conservative or progressive into the spectrum, it helps them see people who are open to outside opinions who do differ from them.Those that are able to engage with ideas without yelling. Just the idea of being like or dehumanizing people or saying, oh, you hate this group, or, oh, you hate that group. Because I, I think that's how we can improve and help ourselves, but also help our kids by exposing them to different ideas.Hopefully that's the hope. But we'll see. But hey, we've a roughly 18 year sales pitch. If we did a good job, they don't buy it and they say, Hey, your life kind of sucked. I am glad for them to try something better If we're wrong, we want them to be right. Yeah. At the very least, that's what it is to have kids right to.To understand that I lack the capability to iteratively improve as much in the next 30 years is I expect my kids to iteratively improve from the starting point we give them. Totally. I look forward to our next conversation already. Thanks Malcolm. Thank 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

This is a poor translation of the podcast: Hello, Malcolm. Hello, Simone is wonderful to be here again with you today. I'm very excited. What do we talk about? We are gonna talk today about our political philosophy and political philosophy in general, you actually changed the way that I look at politics and that I look at the value of running for elected office. And I think a lot of our views on. Government, economy, culture have really shifted over the past few years, so this should be fun to chat about, check in on this. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think we're gonna divide this into sort of three parts. First we're gonna discuss sort of our economics, because I think a lot of people, they see politics as existing on this spectrum of like, Economic conservatism to economic liberalism and then social conservatism to social liberalism or, or progressivism.Because you know, liberal, you can mean classically liberal, which is basically conservative, doesn't matter. Point being, that's the way that people largely divide this stuff. However, I think that it is wrong to think of things on these spectrums, and if you look at where we land politically, it's nowhere on this spectrum for either.Our economic or social beliefs. And then there's other beliefs like where we think about international engagement and stuff like that. So first, let's dive into our economics, because I realize we've been doing a lot of videos on things like communism and libertarianism, and it could give people a misunderstanding.Of what we really believe optimal economic policy looks like. So first I'd say sort of our larger political spectrum.   📍 📍 We call Bull Moose Republicanism which means that we, we take a lot of inspiration from the conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt and, and what that meant. And economically, what that means is very unlike libertarians. But also very similar to Libertarian philosophy in some way, which is to say we do think that government is intrinsically and always becomes evil, largely regardless of what the intentions are as a heavy governing body because it leads to inefficiency, which leads to enormous evil. An example is something like the, great leap forward in China, right?   📍 Which during a period of five years, by, some measurements, led to more death just due to inefficiency than the entire period of slavery in the United States, which I, I do as more like intentional evil.  And this is by some statistics, not by all something of you used like the most extreme data, but that you could get anywhere close to that just with inefficiency is.Shocking to me. So I think that we can just say inefficiency and then people can be like, oh, you must not really hate it. No, no, no. Like inefficiency is, is dramatically evil. It's a cancer. And you talk about that in the Pragmatist Guide to Governance. You talk about this bureaucratic inefficiency as literally being a kin.In fact, it it kind of, it is an almost literally analogous to cancer in organizations. Yeah. In that you get governing institutions and if every year you create 10 new governing institutions, Like say you're a city government or something like that. If just one of those institutions doesn't shut down when it's supposed to, you know, like a cell that doesn't stop doing what it's doing when it's supposed to and think, oh, my job is just to self-replicate.My job is just to acquire more resources. It will do that. And normally a governance structure will be good at getting rid of that. You know, we have things that kill the cancer in our bodies, but sometimes it'll hide and it'll convince the governing structure. It's actually useful. It's actually important.But here is where we're really different from Libertarians. So while we see large government as intrinsically evil, we also see this is where we take a lot of inspiration. For Teddy Roosevelt, trust busting is very important which is all large governing bodies be they companies. Or governments are intrinsically evil and the larger they get, the more of like a global governance structure you get, the more they will trend towards evil action.So we are as antagonistic towards a large institution like Google or Facebook as we are to the US governance system because these institutions. Are no longer really affected by economic forces. They begin to get ideas internally that can create little cults around what they think is good and what they think is evil, which can then be used to justify almost any action.And so I think that you do need some. Things to be handled by the government and some things to be handled by company. And one of the most important things that the government needs to do is to prevent power from coagulating in any area while still working to maintain international competitiveness.And this is a big problem here because a huge aspects of a country's international competitiveness is through these large companies. And so you need to build very. Unique. I mean, we wrote a whole book on this, the Fragment Guide to Governance, very unique governance systems to off play these two things.What are your thoughts on, on the economic side of things, Simone? Would you have more nuance or No, I mean, I, I think this is actually pretty standard government policy theory. I mean, when, when I. Did that technology policy masters at Cambridge. Like the, the common thing was I could tell you were like, oh, do I actually mention Cambridge?Am I gonna look like a, am I gonna name drop this? You, you, you like swallowed it for a second there, you're like, I'm not gonna do this. Yeah. Then I, yeah, I just vomited it. But yeah, I mean the very common thing is governments should intervene when there's a market failure. Period. And then otherwise they should not intervene.But then of course, the question is, what is the right way to intervene when there's a market failure? And I think that's where things start to fall apart. You could think of a government as a steward of a healthy ecosystem. And if you see that your pond is starting to stagnate and build a monoculture, you know, if it's being overcome by a certain type of scum, maybe you need to aerate the pond better.Maybe you need to make sure that water's flowing through it better, et cetera. So this is, it is about, Stewardship of systems and ensuring a diverse ecosystem, a functioning ecosystem, an evolving ecosystem, and a sustainable ecosystem. So you can look at it from that end. I mean, I think another part of our sort of bull moose style republicanism is our views towards conservationism which obviously Ted Roosevelt was very famous for.And I think if you look at. The existing environmentalist movement, I largely disagree with it. I think that the way that they are approaching climate change and stuff like that is not really data driven in a way that is just really damaging. So, I mean, the, the statistic we always come to here is that if you look at The Covid period where no one could drive cars, no one could fly planes like the world shut down to some extent.I mean, some people could, but it was huge, a huge change in everyone's everyday life. And we only just met the incremental change and carbon release we would need to cumulatively make on top of that every year for like the next 15 years to have a dent in climate change. What that showed me is that any sort of change that is pushed as a policy or something like that is always unrealistic.Anyone who's looking at the data right now could see that, that means the solution needs to be technological in, in origin. I'm wondering what your thoughts on, on that aspect of this are Simone, having started in the climate change industry, cuz you did. Yeah, I mean, I, I just, well, I think the bigger problem with the climate change industry is that it has become focused on signaling and not solving the problem because the problem can't be solved now.I mean, we have to accept the fact that climate change is going to happen. It's not something that we can stop. And now that what we need to do is to plan around it, which is exactly the approach that we've taken to advocacy, run demographic collapse. It's going to happen. Let's make sure it happens in his.Least damaging of a way is possible. And yeah, with these things like ai mm-hmm. It will transform human culture. Yeah. However, it's going to happen no matter what. So we have to plan around it. Demographic left, we'll transform human culture. Same with climate change. It's, it's, it's real. It will transform human culture.But there's really nothing we can do about it at this point. And there, yeah, there was anything we can do about it. The institutions of power in our society have cared about this issue deeply for a long time and taken really draconian action in relation to it. But it was a tragedy of the commons issue, meaning everyone needed to cooperate.And what we have learned as humans just suck at those kinds of issues unless you live under a worldwide dictatorship, which is almost certainly worse and would eventually drift away from these issues. But this is where it gets interesting because we as a society have conflated. Climate change with conservationism.Hmm. We misunderstand that conservationism can still have a role in conservative politics. If we are talking about things like endocrine disruptors, which are feminizing our society. That is a conservation issue that is an issue around lowering pollutants in our environment. However, we need more nimble structures tied to this.We don't need these existing large bureaucracies slowing down innovation tied to this. And I think it's possible to build more nimble structures that are in some ways more strict in our existing structures and more expansive and more actually looking at the science. Rather than ideologically motivated science while also understanding that the rural spaces of America, the wilds of America, are important in maintaining our traditional cultural values, whether that is hunting, which was always a huge motivator for its conservationism, for Teddy Roosevelt.  📍 And I think that when we look at real conservationism conservationism, for the sake. A saying, does it really mess up an environment to have a pipeline going through something? No, have 10 pipelines, but 25% more land under conservation. Obviously that's better, but that doesn't fit the existing progressive narrative. So it's just a different approach towards conservationism, which I think is more about preserving our traditional culture as well as. Protecting individual Americans from the effects of pollutants that are permanently changing our biology, and damaging to our larger health ecosystem.Well, I think that's, you know, what you said there in terms of nimble structures focused around solving things. I think that that also comes to another core element of our. Idealized utopian political philosophy, which is one in which we sort of support the concept of ad hoy rather than bureaucracy. But just to say with it, we, we like the idea of independent bodies and resources coalescing together to achieve something and then dissolving when that's achieved.So there's nothing permanent. There's no reason for it to sustain itself. There's no incentive for it to try to survive. Or get more resources for itself because it is only there to achieve a certain outcome. But I, think, I, came into our relationship and our working together politically with that view of like, basically bureaucracies are inherently.Broken. There's no point in me getting involved with them. I should never get involved with government. I should only try to enact difference through business, which is why I didn't study as an undergrad you know, government or anything else. I wanted to go straight into business. Cause I thought that's the way that you make an impact.Even when that was back when I was an environmentalist like advocate, I thought, well, and then environmental and business, that's what I'm gonna do. Until I discovered that it was, you know, broken and people weren't doing it right. Yeah. But you actually changed my view. About the value of running for elected office of entering government influence there.And I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about your thoughts around the, the role that elected officials play when. It would seem intuitively that there's no point to it, because basically to play the game, you have to get so corrupt and you have to trade so many favors that ultimately from a policy standpoint, you can be kind of feckless, it seems. I, I'd love you for you to elaborate on this. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that, that, here, the answer is, is that it, you could often forget the actual size of the US government and the impact it can have, especially at the state level. Mm-hmm.   📍 📍 Especially at the Purple State level where you know it's not just about ideology and you can actually look at solving things because there is some balance between the two political parties. And I think that's where there is a lot of opportunity and also opportunity to move the Overton window to some extent around ideas. If we can move that Overton window if we can change the way things are done. When you look at the things that state controls, like the education system, what's being taught there, regulation systems around things like daycares and stuff like that, like just about our daily lives and the issues we care about, there's a ton that can be done there.And this brings me to sort of the final axis or another really important axis. Of a person's political ideology, which is their social politics. And so a lot of people look at our social politics and they are like, you sound very socially progressive in many ways, yet you seem to hate most the social progressive side of the progressive party.Why is that? And this is something we talk a lot about, the pragmatist guided to crafting religion. And we go over it a lot, but it has to do with the way we sort of see societal forces right now as being sort of two core things. You have this urban monoculture, which is progressivism to large extent, and it didn't exist before the internet.Essentially, it's a. Virulent mimetic set that begin to evolve,   📍 like a super virus would evolve in a hospital. When you put all of these immunocompromised cultures together in super cities and on the internet and it began to infe traditional.  Movements and ideologies and hollow them out and then begin to wear them like skin suits, whether it's the traditional, feminist movement or the traditional L G B T movement or the traditional and even religious movements, you know, whether you're looking at.Progressive Muslims or progressive Unitarian universalists. I guess there's only progressive Unitarian universalists now, or progressive Jews or progressive Catholics. When you scratch beneath the surface of their superficial traditions, they often have very similar views about the world from morality to the direction they think society should go to.Their views on gender to their views on sexuality. To their views on a woman's role in a family pretty much everything is the same now, and this was not the case. Kids who grew up with this don't understand this was not the case of Democrats. 40 years ago, heavens Smith heavens, they all had different beliefs.They were an alliance of different groups that had , loosely aligned goals, but there was genuine diversity within the movement. Now there is so little ideological diversity. When I contrast it. With what I see, the new Republican movement becoming the new conservative movement and conservative is really the wrong word for it.I call it more the anti-authoritarian movement. And let's talk about what this progressive hive mind is fighting for first. So we can sort of define its goals. It is fighting to remove in the moment pain from our society, specifically emotional pain. It is optimized almost entirely around a negative utilitarian framework where it sees people's lives as being predominated by suffering and thus, the happy emotions or the positive emotions that somebody feels in life can largely be ignored. The goal is all around how do we lessen suffering? And you can seize this in a lot of its policies where they can seem or, positions where they can seem really, Silly in the moment you're like, wait, what?Like clearly something like , the HAES movement, you know, the healthy at every size movement which has good intentions, but now has essentially within the university body become, don't tell people that being overweight is unhealthy because that causes emotional pain and that in the moment emotional pain is worse than any long-term.Don't even do research that could show that because any long-term implications of that le research are worse than the in the moment. And you see this around the way that it judges whether any individual thing is good or bad. Does it cause, does this fact, does this faction cause in the moment emotional pain to any sliver of society?If it does, then it should not be pursued and it should not be disseminated and it should not be investigated. And within a certain philosophical framework, within a negative utilitarian view, this is logical. Then you have the Republican side, and what they're really optimized around is preserving traditional and diverse cultural frameworks into the future.And all of the issues where they come to blows with the progressive movement often, most virulently today are where those two issues come to head. Do they feel like their kids are being peeled away from them in the school system? And if they do feel that how do they react to that as a cultural movement, which is of, of course, really negatively because that's their entire modus operandi, preserve our traditions and our unique culture into the future.Now the, the danger, and I should say, I don't think. The progressive individuals are in any way evil or bad people any more than, you know, your average Catholic was a bad person back when some European cultures were dominated by Catholic. Monarchies that were like really top down in the way they ran things and killed people because they had different beliefs or tried to peel people's kids out or tried to mass convert people.And the same happened with the Protestant monarchies. You know, when they had total power, they would often run that top down. Often if you are in the culturally dominant faction, you can begin to just conceive of every other way of viewing the world as some sort of deplorable thing that needs to be.Erased and fixed and that your way of seeing things is correct, just obviously correct. And their way of seeing things is obviously wrong. And so you look at the way that the progressive movement sees something like sexuality or, gender , and they're just like, no, but this is the obviously correct way to see gender or sexuality.Yet if we look historically, There are plenty of traditionalist approaches to this that are very different, whether you're talking about the two-spirit people or like in traditional Muslim culture where you're, you know, if you are gay, you are supposed to convert to become transgender because that is the way that you deal with same sex attraction.And I'm not saying that any of these are right and wrong. What I'm saying is that from my cultural perspective, what I believe is that we should allow. Children to deconvert out of their parents' tradition, always. We should have systems where children are at least aware that different options exist, which I think was the internet and broad technological access.Kids always do, but we should never have systematized conversion campaigns that are implemented by our government. To make people aware of, or even worse, convert them to the correct culture, especially when that correct culture, like I might be able to get behind this large urban monoculture if it was functioning, if it was able to motivate above repopulation reproduction.But it doesn't, it survives by taking people, taking children from these surrounding healthy cultures and using it to replenish its ranks because it is unable to motivate its members to have kids. And the, and you could just look at the statistics, like the differential infertility rates are astonishingly large and it's like double when you're dealing with far con or more than double, like four times when you're dealing with far conservatives versus as far progressive.I have to look at the statistics. Is this astonishingly big? And so what we fight for here is just the preservation, our social policies or the preservation of diverse cultural traditions. And by that what we mean is families should be able to send their kids to school or send their kids to daycare or send their kids to any system with the understanding that that system won't see it as one of their mandates to erase that Parent's cultural traditions or anything that's different from mainstream society.That that parent is doing was in their household. And this is also the way we see child rearing, you know, less interaction from government forces that try to say, this is the way you should raise your child and this is the way you shouldn't raise your child. And, government may have some mandate there if the dominant monoculture in our society wasn't so bad at motivating people to have kids.Because, well, and it's not just about which, culture creates high birth rates. It's about which culture creates higher rates of health. Both mental and physical, which we're really not seeing, you know, we're even seeing, I think, a little bit of a slight decline in life expectancy in the United States.That is that is very, very thorough failure to, what was that shocking statistic? Something like one in 10 kids had thought about suicide in school in the last year. Yeah. Teen, adolescent mental health right now is plummeting, especially among women. Yeah. This is not a culture that is, that is thriving by, Any measure as far as I can tell.And it, it is that, well it's, it's thriving much less than traditionalist cultures. So you look, since Pew started doing recordings of statistics, American conservatives have been happier than American progressives by a dramatic margin. And so. If we are looking, I, I do think that kids should always have the opportunity to leave their family's culture when they come of age or when they start supporting themselves, but , if a person is saying, I am going to take on the cost, and it is a huge cost in terms of emotional and financial effort to raise kids, then that family should be allowed to raise kids without feeling like those kids are.Constantly of risk of being convinced to hate them whenever they let those kids leave their sight, or that they're not allowed to raise their kids in the style that they see as the most appropriate and optimal for their kids. But at the same time, we, we want every child raised in any culture to have the freedom.To leave that culture if they want to. So, you know, when they start supporting themselves. When they start supporting themselves. Yeah. So, yeah, I, I think, it is a nuanced issue, but it doesn't have, well, I think that you can, you can add more leeway there. So, for example, this is not something that exists in our current society, but it is something I would support if there were cultural traditions.Like say a certain progressive cultural traditions that would fund places where kids could go before they turned of age. And they could go to those places and they could a cultural refugee camp for teens. Yeah. And they could live a progressive lifestyle. Fine. Mm-hmm. But they would have to support that and they would have to build that for it.Yeah. And there are some of those that exist and I support that. What I don't support is using the parent's own money in terms of tax dollars to turn around and turn the public schools into that. Mm-hmm. That is not ethical. And so it's sort of a push for maximum genuine cultural diversity and cultural experimentation.Yeah. While also fighting against large scale institutions. Well, and then, you know, I think a big basis of a lot of our political philosophy is consent, so, exactly. Yeah. If something is non-consensual, I don't care what. Political spectrum. It's on, we're probably against it. That's like the easiest rule of thumb to, to predict our political philosophy.Is there something non-consensual on this? Okay. Then probably we don't support it. Well, and, consent applies with parents to their kids along the way. Consent legally applies to parents, to kids, which is a, minor, cannot consent to certain things. Mm-hmm. Because we don't trust minors to consent to many things.Hmm. And, and so ultimately, we are okay with, with parents having a mandate there. And if people think that kids shouldn't be raised in those type of families, well then they should have kids and raise them in different types of families. Mm-hmm. Or find ways to support kids. Instead of just saying the government should support kids.Mm-hmm. Because I think that and, and this is also where we're different from many conservative factions, is some conservative factions. I just call them progressives in disguise.   📍 📍 They're just waiting until lyric culture gains dominance at the state level. So that they can force it on other people through the government,  through the school system, through books they get rid of in libraries through. Anything like that and, wherever that happens, I see. That is evil. Mm-hmm. You, you should never be able to enforce your culture on another person. And, to that extent, those cultures are just fair weather fins right now to us. Yes, we are aligned in the conservative movement and we are really aligned in the conservative movement right now.And I think that this is something that the progressive movement is missing to a large extent. If you look at young conservatives, you can look at the largest influencer in the young conservative movement, which was Andrew Tate. You know, last year, number one influencer among Gen Z, he converted to Islam.And what we saw was not outpourings of hate from the conservative Christian community. They were like, great, this is better than the way things were before. You know, you have found some. Religious tradition that you take inspiration from. And what I think we're seeing here is an increasing alliance across the conservative traditions from at least within the us This is less true in, in Europe right now, but I think we'll eventually see it there as well from the conservative Muslims to the conservative Christians, to the conservative Jews, to the conservative.Anything else? Which, which is just means that they have some connection. To an intergenerational idea of cultural identity. And I think that that's really interesting to me and, and a movement that I can get behind when I see this true cultural pluralism of people with genuinely different beliefs about the world coming together.And I actually think that this is one of the reasons we're gonna see a major shift towards the conservative movement going forwards, is if you look at the immigrant populations in many of these countries, they do align much more with this conservative ideology. Then they align with any of the progressive social ideologies.And so the only advantage is in the economic front often but even there, many of them are much more conservative economically. And I do think that it is possible for the conservative party to begin to shift its ideas around immigration. If you look at the way the younger conservative. Party sees the world.And by that what I mean is no longer do we live in a world where the game is your country versus other countries. It is your culture versus other cultures , which is one of the reasons we fight for cultural diversity cuz we're a minority culture.So if the, if one faction gains power, they'll try to erase us. But if the progressives gain power, they'll try to erase us as well. So we benefit from ensuring, this, this level of cultural diversity. But I think that the conservative factions, because they're all now minorities, they also benefit from trying to encourage cultural diversity if the game is no longer Ensure that my country dominates other countries, but instead ensure that my country is a safe place for people who are different in the way that I am different,right. Would you add to any of that or elaborate on it? No, I mean, I would just say I also think that those environments that are more pl pluralistic will be the most healthy. You're not going to see a competitive advantage hold in any environment. That doesn't allow for disagreeing groups to bounce I ideas off each other because that is how they sharpen each other and we see this in a bunch of different places, more pluralistic.Cross pollinated cultures and nations are sharper. They're, they have a competitive advantage, not just from a birth rate perspective, which we see, we think we see. But also from an economic perspective. Well, if you talk about the birth rate thing, so if you look individually, like if you're looking at this from the perspective of my culture survives into the future.You look at this old mindset the mindset that Putin's running off of, which is just completely stupid. His country already had a very low fertility rate. They're out there killing other people who are culturally very similar to them. And that also had a very low birth rate basically.Deleting an entire generation in both countries is going to be devastating to that cultural group. In the long run, they basically have no shot and they're already doing very poorly sort of in economic scenarios where if you look at the world more broadly, you look at the people who have won this game who say, okay, I want to create like one ethnicity, one culture, one country.They have incredibly low fertility rates. These are the groups that are going to disappear. You look at countries like Korea, right, that have done this. And, if you look at the list of prosperous countries with low fertility rates, the vast majority of the countries on those lists are essentially monocultures.Whereas if you look at the countries that have been most resistant to prosperity induced fertility collapse, like the United States like Israel, they are some of the most diverse. Cross pollinated cultural groups in the world. And it is better for every group in that pluralistic ecosystem. And now that the world's on hard mode with, AI girlfriends and being able to lose yourself in online environments, you really need to sharpen yourself.You cannot afford this type of cultural isolationism that, maybe used to make sense in the old World War. Exactly. Yeah. And any, culture or government. That is coercive, that tries to homogenize everything is ultimately going to extinguish even itself, which I think is very interesting.Yeah. So if you are very xenophobic, if you are very fascist or whatever, it's oddly in your best interest and not to try to convert everyone. It's oddly in your best interest not to be coercive. Because in the end you are only shooting yourself on my foot. Mm-hmm. Yeah.But you know, I was talking about world orders. I actually think, we talk about this concept of a. New world order to any extent. Not the conspiracy theory, but the idea that the world is now revolving around a new sort of axis where the world's power structures used to be in a fight between communism and capitalism.And I no longer think that's the debate that anyone's having anymore. Now it's around independent cultural sovereignty versus globalism. And I think that that is the new. Access that the world is tilting around. Hmm. But the globalist faction has the majority of power at this point, and they have essentially won.We are living in a post globalist world and. That now that they've won, I think they have created cultural pressures that they didn't anticipate, which are vastly changing the game for everyone. And that if we still want to live in a pluralistic future the, the globalists are your enemy.If you want a world of genuine diversity, diversity of ideas, diversity of approaches, diversity of ways of seeing things then it's important to recognize that the game has changed. And this isn't the same game that anyone was playing . And no one in power at least, is really fighting for communism or capitalism anymore.It's cultural, sovereign to your globalism. That's the only game. And then it's different levels of bureaucracy at the top. Are you saying that people aren't fighting for socialism slash communism because anyone who is, is more just involved in some kind of aesthetic debate and just trying to not do work?Because I still feel like that's a big debate. No, no, no. At ground level, people are fighting for this stuff, but none of them have positions of power anymore. Okay, so you mean among those with power and agency in the world, the fight is becoming increasingly about sovereignty versus globalism? Yes. Okay.Interesting. Yeah, I thought that brings fairly true. I like it. Yeah, I like it. Well, and it, it's, it's, it's, it's, these people are still arguing, but they are increasingly isolated to increasingly pointless places online and in society and that the people in positions of power might use Arguments around things like socialism or communism to try to expand the size of sort of the larger globalist government framework.Hmm. Or, or sort of the monocultures reach. But outside of that I don't think that there is any real push for those things anymore outside of at the level of like crazy isolated dictators. Interesting. Well, and maybe even they aren't really fighting for it. So that's, yeah. Huh. Is there anything you would add or is that in a nutshell?No, no. Yeah, so just Bull Moose, bull Moose Republicanism. But it, is like, I, I wish it were like rough writer republicanism. That, that sounds better. Rough writer something. Rough writer. Republicanism. Yes. You know, very offensive group, I think by today's standards, but I do love his A sort of Marshall masculine idea that came from this very nerdy guy. Cause he was an ultra nerd who had these. Almost childlike visions of masculinity that I think aligns with the existing Republican party. And, and I do think when you look at the Republican base today, the core thing that unites them is this anti-fascist tendency.Hmm. They just don't want people reaching into their daily lives and, and telling them how to raise their kids, how their cultures should work, and the correct way to, to operate their cultures. And I think that because of that I can really sympathize and find allegiance with those factions. Let's build those ties.I love hearing you talk about these things. This is fun. Thank you, Malcolm. I love you, gorgeous. I'm looking forward for our next conversation. I had none of these ideas without her. She talked me through all this and helping her sort of break her brainwashing to an extent was. Thing for me. I, I'd love to talk about that next then.Let's do it, and we'll see you on the flip side, friend. All right. 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

This is a very bad automatically translated audio transcript of the episode: Hello, Malcolm. Hello, Simone. It's wonderful to be here with you today. What are we talking about? We are talking about Reddit, which is one of our favorite places on the internet, even when it hates us, right? Oh no. Is this gonna be one of those ones where you read mean things to me and I have to react? I would love that, honestly.  Sometimes people ping our accounts because they know us, like they know who we are. Yeah. On Reddit. And so I'll get a little email notification. And then there's some really long thread that talks about how we're terrible people. Well I love that, that No, that's great.Yeah, I personally really enjoy seeing people get roasted online, but I also wonder what those people think about their comments about them. And so I think we're only doing the internet a service by. Offering our thoughts to those who might care to your No, I, I agree. I, I I always want to do one of those, those Bain things when people are like, oh, people are making fun of you online.Like, are you scared? And it's like, I, I, you know, I was born in the darkness. You, I was born in the cri Yes. Sorry. I, I proposed to her on Reddit. With like brownies and stuff. I love, people are like, they think we have this like elite self image or something. It's like we have been unapologetically nerdy from day one.I do not know where anyone started calling us Elite elite gamers, maybe as I say, but I don't think yeah. All right, so let's go over these red if thread heads. Well, and it's so context. The Reddit thread that we're going over is one that posted a or show them a picture. You can see like, yeah. So someone posted a screenshot of, I think a tweet about us and specifically a Telegraph article.That framed us as the elite couples breeding to save mankind. Which is how the telegraph chose to frame our prenatal advocacy. And I think what really got people about that is, By the way, this is their words, not ours. It's not like we show up and like talk to journalists about our S advocacy and we're like, well, we'll only speak to you if you frame us as elites and breeders, as as elite, as an elite couple, as as elite breeders.I think that we care about prenatal because we think our genes are superior to everyone else's. It like, What that narrative people wanna hear. Right? They don't, they don't wanna actually engage with any of the ideas cuz they may have to change the views on the world. So, oh, God forbid. Yes. So anyway, somebody, let's go, let's go.Somebody tweeted somebody tweeted this or they posted an image of someone saying, I'm honestly struggling to come up with a joke about this. I'm just super confused. What makes them elite? The fact that they look like nearsighted, parsnips, what am I missing here? The first comment is how are they elite?And yet they both look 14 and 40 at the same time, which is I guess both a, a compliment and, well, y'all around 40, so. Well, to me it's, it's kind of an insult, right? Because I identify as a 62 year old woman and, you know, they're off by like, you know, quite, quite a few years, but that one's not biting enough.Let's keep going. Hmm. Well, they say it's all in our clothes that, that we, we dress old. And, and therefore, but I think it's cuz you have a baby face that you look young. Think I have a baby face. I have a youthful face. A youthful, okay. Youthful. Ok. Oh, baby prints should have a bunch of fat on it. Okay.I have, oh, I have a, a teenager phase. You have a teenager. You have a youthful spring in your step. I think it's low amounts of. You know, if, if, if you, well, that's what someone says here, that we haven't had enough stress in our life to display as grown up as most people perceive it. So our phenotype will continue to stay as it is.Say I actually, that's true. I, I think that stress ages people and I think that you sort of get a certain number of units of stress in your life as opposed to years of age. Mm-hmm. So agree with that. Common. A hundred percent agree. Yeah. They see you. Either there's something we haven't had stressful things happen to us, like Simone knows my origin story.Like I, I've had a. Both of us have had very stressful lives. The answer is whether or not you allow the stress to eat at you or whether or not you choose just to not feel it and, and just move on with things. Well, they say we're either the most chill and laid back people ever, or so incredibly privileged.We can't even imagine. They, they, they have a guess, of course, that we are so privileged and out of touch that we would never show age because like vampires who feast on the blood of, of the weak, we benefit from, you know, I don't know the, the, the disempowered. More people emphasize that we're, we look like we're in our mid twenties, but we dress like boomers.And some people think that we are trying to use the fact that we. Like having sex to justify like, I guess that we are prenatal because we need a reason to look intelligent for liking sex enough to have a lot of kids. Can you read the comment? Yeah. They're breeding to save mankind. We all know what kind they are.Dudes, it's okay to admit you like orgasms. No need to bring it to the future of the human race. Hopefully that's the weirdest thing. I will write all day. Okay, well, so this is really interesting for two front. One is this whole idea of kind like our whole organization. Everything we focus on is on preserving human diversity.I know that people like us are gonna be okay because we'll make sure they're okay with our own breeding efforts. The only reason we're public about this is cause we want people not like us to also exist in the future. You know, as we often say, if we have just eight kids, which we're definitely gonna have, and they have eight kids, And you do that for just 11 generations or we will, unless something goes majorly wrong, you know, that's more descendants to live honors today.I'm not worried about people like us in terms of the second point there, which I find really interesting cause it's something to get all the time, is people being like, you have a breeding fetish our kids are produced through ivf so.That's nonsensical, but it's, I think, a sign as to how depraved our society has become through this sort of ideological mind virus that has infected, you know, urban populations in our society and, and the universities of our society progressivist of more broadly. But there's this specific brand of it that's really just like this virus that eats the way people sees the world, so they're no longer able to consider other ideas.And. Th they are not able to imagine a reason for a person to do something outside of sexual gratification or it being a portion of their sexual or gender identity to the extent that they're not able to imagine why we would ideologically be interested in continuing the human race. Well, one person I would say has taken both of those arguments that they, that you've made or both of those concepts, but like also completely misinterpreted them.Okay? So this person says these two are specifically convinced that it's their responsibility to populate the world with their very special genes. And they have plans and I think either contracts or pledges demanded that each of their descendants have at least eight kids for the next 11 generations. I honestly would not.Be surprised to discover they'd never had sex and did it all through ivf so, well, we didn't do it all through ivf, so they are very right. We do not have any sort of contractor pledge like that or anything. It's more just I, I think if you look at the, the, the groups that are high fertility in the face of prosperity, they are often groups with distinct and defined cultures, which we have.I mean, that's what makes us cringe because we're different from mainstream society. We go against that. And in addition to that that they are able to pitch to their kids. The, the way that their culture is different, one of which for us is having a lot of kids is a better way to be than what the sort of mainstream social pressures are selling you.And if we can't make that pitch, then our kids will go off with regular society or they'll try to outdo us by creating something better, both of which are things we encourage. You know, you get 18 years to make a pitch to your kids to follow. In your cultural footsteps or that the way that you're doing things is a good way to do things.If you fail to make that pitch, then your kids should be doing something different. Unless they've been in some way, you know, converted, using shady tactics like bullying or threats or like, you can't get a job unless you publicly express these views or stuff like that. I mean, that's the way that much of the world used to Deconvert Jewish populations, which is why like the crypto Jews were the only rural Jews to exist in like Spain and stuff like that.It's, it's very effective when you tell someone, oh, you can't get a job if you hold a specific, you know, belief system or. You can't. Side note though, crypto Jews needs to be like a new, like, sorry, we, I just No, I know. No, no. But like uneducated might think we mean Jews who are into crypto. I know Crypto Jews was a faction of Jews.It was a rural population of Jews that lived in Spain during like the 18 hundreds. And a portion of them migrated to the Americas and they exist in Low percentages, but it's a, a fairly unique Jewish culture that exists in the countryside, was in Mexico today, and it's however, the book pragmatist guy to crafting religion, if you're interested in like rare religious denominations,   So they also comment on our children. They refer to our choice to name our youngest daughter, our first daughter Titan Invictus, that name, which is awesome.They say, I'm rolling my eyes as hard as I can right now. Another person says, I'm sorry, Titan Invictus. Are they breeding elite children or super villains? This is the Harvard law version of Naming Your Kid, Coachella, Harambe, which. I love that. I agree. Well, so it really is so dear I super villains who doesn't want you know, like out of, out of all of our children, if we had one real super villain, that'd be a lot of fun.But in addition to that, why we name our kids something different. One, it's our cultural heritage. Like we do often say we're secular Calvinist, we come from Calvinist tradition and no attempt determinism has always been a tradition. That's why you get a lot of names in Calvinist culture like, Chastity or purity or, or increase?Increase Mathers or incre. You know, so you, you, you, yeah. It's just a tradition thing and so we try to name our kids things that align with our values. Another great comment that I quite enjoy is that article should have been titled, rich People Are F*****g Tone Deaf. You all know it, but here are some more examples, which is great.I like that. That's a good joke. Yeah. It follows our, our, our thing on humor, which is humor is one of those things. The, the is unexpected, but it makes sense when you considered it in context and Yeah. But we're not actually that rich, so I love that. That's the one thing that no one ever questions though.Yeah. They're like, they question our motives. They think that we think our, our genes are superior, which we don't. They think that we are eugenicists, which we aren't. They think all these things, the one thing they will never question is that we are wealthy. One of my favorites was, it's one. I've looked into it.I don't even think they're billionaires. You think? Exactly. Ok. You think guys, detective. Yeah. Or Detective Duffey that, sir, that's the meme. Continue. People are again, so disturbed by our choice to name our daughter Titan Invictus. One person says, ignoring the thinking Titan Invictus is in any way suitable name for a child and not an invitation to bully the s**t out of them.Her daughter, I'd have almost understood if they inflicted that on a boy. But in what warped Hapsburg world do you chain that millstone to a girl? They also note that her name should be Titania and Victor. The, which we, we know we specifically named her male names, which we do with all of the girls in our family.You could read our book for why we do that. I mean, it, it does lead to. Higher income, statistically speaking, lower levels of psychological illnesses and stuff like that. Like there's a manif, a ton of reasons, but also we don't like if you talk about the ways our culture is different from other cultures, people are like, people will bully them.It's like I was bullied as a kid. You were bullied as a kid. You want to some extent if you are different from mainstream society for your kids to undergo some level of bullying so they know the type of person they don't want to be like, or as one of the commenters put it, they wanted to avoid something effeminate.So they picked a seventies male porn star name. Yes. Tightened is the seventies male porn star name. I guess I don't watch enough porn. I'm not, no. Maybe it just sounds like that. But they also point out that quote, it's a f*****g font unquote, but that's okay. Font names are crazy. Is it a font? Hold on.You mentioned this before and I'm gonna look this up. Yeah. That's a, a recurring joke in this thread is that Titan Invictus. Is a font, which I, it's definitely not a fault. It, it would actually be fun about our kids if all of our if someone had a family of children that was just font names. Because honestly I say Vitus is a font and Titan is a font.  Let's see. This is, so one person says, this is so ridiculously cringe.They watched idiocy and took the premise from the prologue at face value and decided they did not want to be the couple who waited too long. And for some reason, the richest man in the galaxy is for telling population collapse. Like a cold reader with a crystal ball absolutely abominable, even for the telegraph.I, you know, we've actually seen a lot of this people saying that like, We're just re like trying to live out the plot of Idiocracy, which is odd. I mean, first Idiocracy is a movie in which doesn't the, the leader of the, of the known world, like try to appoint the smartest person possible to solve their problems.Well, I I love how reasonable that is. But no, what they mean by Idiocracy is just the idea that Smart people have less kids, which is just an objective fact of reality today. And that the, the, the secondary belief that some portion of IQ has a hereditary component, which is mainstream academic consensus today, just look up the Wikipedia article on this.It is, it is not academic consensus that any of this is ethnically linked or anything like that, but that, broadly speaking, there are some genetic correlates to iq. That is just so obvious from the research. And so if people with those genetic correlates are having kids at lower rates and it's not just people with lower IQs, people with those genetic correlates, you can see this in the data IQ would drop in a population overall.However, that is not what's concerning to us. Like it is something that is like objectively happening in the world, but it is also something that is just disinteresting to us. Because what we're more concerned about is all of the cultures that are dying out and the vastly less diverse world that our children are going to inherit, which doesn't seem to be what anyone thinks.And I think that's the interesting thing about articles that are. More likely to be shared about our peritus advocacy. They're not at all about that. They're not about prenatal attitude. Hard can't spark views about that because it's something that's obviously happening and nobody wants to take a stance against it.Yeah. What, what instead get shared is anything that insinuates. These people think that they're superior somehow. Look at them, they're trying to reproduce how disgusting. And then everyone just jumps on it because it's so delicious. Which is more of what we're getting. If they say, one person says, if they're so scientific and into eugenics, they would have at least done some testing and measurements to prove their genes are that good.It seems like they're just sitting on ignorance, peak of the intellect curve. Quote, I can't imagine someone smarter than me, so I must be the smartest. If someone had at least proven they had greater immunity, intelligence, healing, and lack of genetic diseases than almost anyone else. Eugenics would still suck, but at least they would have a reason that it should be them.So, I don't know. Interesting. Yeah. That people look at what we're doing and they think that in some way we think we're better than other people. Yeah. We're, we are broadcasting the idea that more people need to have more kids. Because we don't just want our descendants in the future because we think the world would be lesser if it's just people like us and we are editing our DNA like we are, well, not editing, but like, you know, selecting based on, on, on genomes the embryos that we choose to use, in part because we don't think our jeans are perfect.Like we wouldn't be doing all this if we thought we had great jeans. Yeah, it's very confusing. Like I, it requires no intellectual engagement with anything we've put out there, but continue well, one end, there's a compliment. One person says, I thought this was the guy from the Kingsman movies, which is, ah, but then, you know, a lot of people are very insulted that someone would ever.Ever imply that because we are evil and disgusting, so what is that? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Cause we're not, we're not on board with there complete. Like, this is what's true in the world today. If you say anything else, then you are evil. That's what the virus says. A lot of people are saying that we are self-proclaimed elites, which is interesting because we didn't, we didn't call ourselves Yahoo News was the one who actually first used that term.I really like this one comment, house Hunters Arian edition. She's a lesbian muse for Philadelphia's worst beat poet. He looked, he booked a LensCrafter spot eight years ago and turned it into his whole personality. Their budget is 4.7 million. I love, glasses are like our thing. Like, yeah. No, there seems to be a correlation.I noticed there's a lot in online comments. Between lens thickness. Both of us are wearing really thick lens or not, sorry, not lens frame thickness. So we're wearing thick framed glasses in, in the picture, and people seem to think that that correlates with lens strength, even though I don't technically even need to wear glasses.Which is interesting. I think they're not familiar why you wear glasses. I wear glasses because research has indicated that while glasses make you seem less attractive and approachable, they make you seem more smart and competent. And I would much rather be seen as smart and competent than attractive and approachable.So if, if you're gonna live in a prejudice society, you may as well twist it to your advantage. Yes. Yeah. A couple people have commented on wealthy people supposedly thinking that wealth is a genetic trait in conflating that. I don't know why Earning, earning potential is a genetic trait. You can even, that's the thing, a picture of it from like your Nebula score.Yeah. That like literally if, if you log onto Nebula and like you do a full sequence, you, you can literally see a polygenic risk score for your earning potential. Yeah. People have done that correlate before. It's, it's very genetic. Yeah. So not that interesting. Again, not that we are breeding because.We're trying to increase our traits in the future. Yeah. Another person says, we look like gender swapped versions of the same person, which ties into the already floated online theory that we are just the same person. That's my favorite conspiracy theory about it. Cosplaying is the other person, same person.Cosplaying is the other person. You're same person co playing as the other one. That's why, like we're not in the same room in these clips. Well, yeah, because, you know, I have to like record this again and again. It's. It's very difficult. I honestly think that, you know, we should get credit for that. I'd be very impressed if somebody pulled that off.One person guarantees we get divorced within two years, so start the timer. People let's, you know, put out a prediction market. Put some money on this. It's simply not true. I kick rude if you wanted to divorce me. You don't know how much, how much of my life I have outsourced to her. And, and it u though we kind of really need each other.No, but Simon, I would, I would be really boned, so please don't, don't die. One person says that we look like Rain Wilson until the Swinton bumping Ugl to compensate for the overpopulation of stupid people. Yeah. What does, what does Rain Wilson look like? I know until the, oh, he's white. Dwight from yeah, right from the office.Oh my God. Tilda Swinton looks like my mother, so I see it. I, I can see if like, I look like you look, kinda, look like Hildas Entin, but my mother looks more like til attractive when she was younger. Let's see. Tilda Swinton. Young man. Tilda Swinton. Tilda Swinton's. Like she's, she's all right. I, I'll take it.Tilda, that's a teenager. Looks a lot like you. Oh, really? Stractive sweet. Okay. So I'll take that. You get Kingsman that good when you're that age. Yeah. And I get tilted. I don't think I look like Dwight at all. No, you don't. But someone also thought you were the Kingsman, so like, you know, that's, you get that and I get Tilda Swinton.That's exciting. Mm-hmm. People continue to call us eugenics or eugenicists, so let's just. Let's be clear. When Wikipedia defines eugenics, it has sort of two core components. One of those components is. Those practicing eugenics have concluded that there are some traits that are universally good in some way, universally desirable or not desirable.And then the second element is that they in some coercive way, are trying to impose Proliferation of that good trait or elimination of that bad trait. Divorce, if it could be through money. Like maybe they give people money for people who have those traits of breeding. Mm-hmm. Both of those things are antithetical to everything our movements stands for.Exactly. We believe some. Cultures believe that certain genetic traits are better than others, and within our family unit we may select some, but what we like is that the, the utility of this genetic technology will allow for new forms of humanity and iterations of human diversity to emerge based on cultural preferences, which is what is so exciting.And in addition to that, everything we do is fighting against any of this technology ever being used in a coercive manner. We do fight to make the technology cheaper for people to use so that it's not only available to like the wealthy, but Yeah. All of that is just so we're like anti angiogenesis is it's what I, what I call our position because it's, it's one of those things where people are like, oh, you're on a.A soccer field, you must be on the red team. And it's like, no, we're on the blue team. Like, yes, we're both on the same soccer field, but we're literally on opposite teams. Yes, we're on the same soccer field in that we admit that humans have genes and that those genes affect things like a person's sociological profile.But I think that's just admitting like mainstream science at this point. Yeah. But, you know, that's, that's But don't say humans have genes. Oh my gosh. Hmm. No, no. I mean, I think that's, they can't, they can't possibly affect any, the, once humans developed consciousness, a bubble formed around our brains and no longer do genes matter.Actually, this is a, a side note where I often say here that it's, it's really interesting that that we pointed this out in our, in our tweet thread. That it is very racist to say that the genes that are differ between human psychological profiles can only change over very long periods of time, like a hundred thousand years or something like that.Because that is the time spann upon which like the superficial ethnic differences that we recognize and like classify people into different ethnic groups differentiated. So that would mean that there were like persistent mental differences between ethnic groups. Whereas if you believe like we do and like the science suggests that these psychologically linked or sociologically linked genetic markers change over the span of a hundred years or 200 years pretty dramatically, then there would be no meaningful ethnic grouping of them.Which is weird that these people think they're arguing against a racist position, but the position they're arguing so long as you believe in evolution is a very racist position to argue. One person says, Batman's parents died for looking like that, which I love. Can I? Yes. I love the You wanna be Batman's?I don't have pearls on. I need pearls on. I know. That's the big problem is I need, I need the pearls and then we'll make it work. We'll make it work. Multiple people are All comparing you to Carl from up, which I think, do you wanna look like that? Are they saying that our, no, it's the square glasses. You know, the, the old guy from, from PE Perry Squareish or rectangular glasses.Oh, one person calls you budget Kingsman again, I guess. But I think maybe, and this is interesting that the only like contemporary, like. Example we have of someone who wears a suit is the movie Kingsman, which is, yeah, that's really surprising. I'm not like wearing in this picture. I'm not like wearing something.Oh, you know what suit? Maybe it's a chunky jeans. It's chunky glasses and a tie. And if like the only other place where people have seen chunky glasses and a tie there's, there's that they only put on the suit because the photographer asked me to. I was wearing a a t-shirt before that. Yeah. Yeah. She wanted a, yeah, she wanted the top of that.I feel like it's very awkward too when photographers come to our house because then they, you know, Post the, the photos on social media or whatever. And a lot of people comment on how like, oh, the photos look great, but how disturbing, I can't believe you were in the house of these Nazi eugenicists.What was it like? And I feel like whenever photographers come to our house, you know, we're like chatting and having fun and like it's all good. And then like they come home and some article comes out and then a bunch of people are like, oh my God, I can't believe, like, what was it like? And they're like, oh.It was something, you know, like they can't say like, nah, these were like that. Actually, the broader thing about our ideology is I often find that whenever somebody like sits down and talks to us about it, they almost always agree with like 98 to a hundred percent of it. But they'll either say, well, you guys are right, but I can't say this publicly.Or they're just like, oh yeah, I thought you believed something totally different. And it's like, Maybe Twitter isn't a great source. We say that that's like getting your news from news sources. It's like getting your nutrients from a human centipede.Is there any other, wait, some? Yeah. Someone apparently who knew us posted in this thread. So really one person, one person wrote, I know these two.dot groan. Oh, who could it be? And then one person said, oh God, I turned off my notifi notifications because duh. And I was scrolling and I saw this. Anything you can tell us can you see Many people have recurring comments.This person says, Not really. They're really nice people as it happens, and they are very successful in what they do. They're self-made with fingers and a lot of pies. They're both super eccentric in a nice way, and whilst I was a bit cringed to see them flouting their fertility all over the papers, I'm not entirely surprised.I met them a couple of years ago at a social event. They're a high performing couple who are very bright with lots of talent. Good luck to them. I say just that's a really, that is us, and this is what I say when people meet us, they're like, oh, actually you guys are really, your beliefs are eccentric, but not like, it's more the way that we word them as eccentric because we point out things that other people should be noticing, but they don't like the fact that we as a species haven't figured out how to make any culture prosperous.Gender egalitarian and high end education and above fertility rate, like anywhere close to replacement rate fertility. That means that like this whole society we aspire to is a bit of a con job that only works because it siphons people from other groups and it's like, well, we're getting close to the point where the pyramid scheme's about to break.We should be paying attention to this, but you can't call out the emperor having no clothes, you know, because the emperors Taylors are the ones who run society right now. What people say to people.Hi to him saying that we were nice people. Did it have any comic under it? Yeah, no. The, the, the, the responses, the, the person was like, well, I, I can't believe they signed off on the, the language that the Telegraph article used about them, which is not how it works. You don't get to choose what people about you randomly.People randomly reach out to us and they say, I'm covering demographic collapse, or uncovering repro or prenatal, or whatever it is that we care about. And we are very open and transparent with everyone because we believe that. If it's a balanced article, then at, at the very least, people will learn more about an issue we care about.If it's not a balanced article, hopefully we can share enough of our views where people will share it out of rage. But then reasonable people with good, you know, reading comprehension and sound minds will ultimately see, oh, this is. A reasonable kind of important issue. And so we're still better off sharing it.But what happens is journalists talk with us. Either they come in person or they call us. We, we are very open and honest with them, and then they go dark, and for weeks we have no idea what's going to happen. And then one day, Someone texts us or we get a Google alert or someone starts like, tweeting a bunch of hate at us, and we're like, well, okay, I guess some new article's out and then we see for the first time what happens.And that's it. That's it. We, we have no control over this. There's no signing off on it. There is no, we insist on being called Elite or breeders. You know, these are actually pretty dehumanizing. Tur. Yeah. No, we don't go out there saying, we're. Super. We're an elite super breeders. Yeah, that's uhs kinda kinda gross, but I like that, use that title.It did very well in the, in the, yeah. No, I mean, I, I thought it was funny. I, I, I mean it, I think it's very funny. But that's, say the best kinda article is one was a dishonest or sensational title, but honest reporting and the telegraph. Article was very honest about our actual beliefs. I was really impressed with it because that gives both sides of an online fight, the chance to argue about you.You know, the uneducated side that just reads the title, and then the educated side that reads the full article and then you get this battle. Unfortunately, the educated side is always gonna be smaller. But that doesn't matter. I mean, at least, at least the ideas are getting out there. Because if you look at the articles about us, yes, they're proliferating, but you look at the ideas that we're putting out there, Hey, you need to start paying attention to fertility rates.Those are gaining enough attention that the UN recently put out a big thing saying stop fretting about fertility. Yeah. Stop worrying about fertility rates and start focusing on environmentalism, immigration and gender equality. And it's like, oh, well, UN's gonna un, but if we're getting under their skin, that's a good thing because nobody was talking about this issue a year ago before we started doing the rounds on it.And I'm kinda excited. I I, I actually really like when Really unflattering stuff about us gets posted that makes other people wanna cover us. Because what happens is then like other journalists reach out because they want to cover the s**t show and the cringe. And then they get on the phone and they, you actually have a chance to speak with them.And there have been multiple calls where I'm just like sitting there laughing because you're going through what we actually advocate for and what we're talking about. And like, I just remember that you were on the, on the phone with one woman with a TV station and just her being like, Oh God. Oh God.Like just, no, just going over the numbers. And she's like, oh God, oh God. Like, is that true? Can you check that? And then they're like, oh no, the numbers aren't really that bad. Yeah. Like, oh, I, I never thought of that. Like, so, and, and that's what, that's, that's what really the reward is for us, is we get a ton of hate.We look like complete idiots online. And then in the end, a lot of very influential people who are able to share really important information with a lot of audiences. For totally the wrong reason, engage with us, but then end up learning about an an advocacy issue that is actually a really big deal. And so, oh, that's always my favorite thing when somebody hates us.Mm-hmm. And then later I see them supporting us. Yeah. Because that's how I know that we really got to somebody. We always call that ala in, but she does such a good job at that and I really admire her ability to do that. It's very easy to be a. Social media person or a public figure that people support because you're saying things they already believe.Mm-hmm. You're not really doing anything if you're doing that. You're just surfing a wave of public sentiment. However, if you are a public media figure, like Alan, that's one of the reasons I, I respect you so much, where people start by following you because they don't agree with you, or they think they don't agree with you, and then they hear your perspective more.They engage with you more and they change their beliefs based on that. Mm-hmm. Very, very few public media figures are able to surf waves that they create themselves. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and to, to change views. Yeah. And most people rise and become leaders because they represent a zeitgeist that's growing.It's very, very hard to come across people. Yeah. Well, and then what you really wanna do, I mean, I think, I think when we know we've really made it is when we have people surfing our wake. When we are the motorboat and the waves that we are creating are the waves that other people are surfing. Anyway.Simon, I just to close this out, I am so lucky to be married to you because I wouldn't be able to do this on my own. Going out there, you know, I, you have the superpower of autism, which to some extent protects you from all of this. Hate. If I didn't have you filtering this from me, if I didn't have your constant support I, I, Emotionally, mentally, I'd not be able to deal with this, and I can't tell you how much every day.I am grateful and I know that all of my success comes from you. That is. So kind and so not true because you are the beating heart that makes all this run, and I love you so freaking much. You are the spark in our whole household. And yeah, none of this would be happening word not for you because I lack the creativity and initiative and ability to think things through to actually engage in things.You put yourself down, you have all of those things, and you know you have all of those things. You can just say, I have creativity. And you feast on it. I do. Feast on your creativity. Yes. Speaking of feasting, we need to start dinner and get the kids, so I will see you soon. This is a public episode. 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