Shifts in Political Alignment

Join Malcolm and Simone as they delve into a new study on ideological networks titled 'Attitude Networks as Intergroup Realities.' The research uses network modeling to explore attitudes, identities, and relationships in polarized political contexts. Discover how the study highlights the clustering of beliefs on the left and the diversity of thought on the right. Malcolm and Simone discuss the implications of these findings for political discourse, internal debates, and policy stances. They also touch on the role of AI in the job market, the future of higher education, and the shifting perceptions of public figures like Asmongold. This episode is a deep dive into the evolving landscape of political and social ideologies.

Malcolm Collins: hello Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be looking at a new study called Attitude Networks as intergroup realities using network modeling to research attitude, identity, relationships in polarized political context. This has been going around right wing circles recently.

Ooh. And so to give an idea of what they found, go to I sent you an image.

Simone Collins: Okay. I am really bad at interpreting graphs, but what I feel like I'm looking at is, I don't know, it kind of looks like a, an asteroid. Okay. I'll,

Malcolm Collins: I'll explain trail. I'll explain to your woman brain. Yeah, please. I, I love that you're like actually coming at this as like full woman brain.

So what this is showing is with red being, the right and, and blue being the left uhhuh. And b being closer to voting behavior, red versus blue. Whoa. Okay. So, okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah. 'cause what we're really looking at is like a bunch of sort of interconnected dots and lines and on the left there's this tiny little blue spider web.

And then on, on the right there's this pretty large, more expansive spider web, but it's, it's much more, it's much more dispersed, whereas the, the, the blue spiderweb is very condensed. So you're saying the blue spiderweb is leftist voting patterns, whereas the red spiderweb is more conservative and centrist voting patterns.

Is that it,

Malcolm Collins: Well, not conservative and well conservative and centrist, but was, was a couple caveats here. One is, is it shows that the ideology of the left. Because this is looking at ideological perspectives has become incredibly tight. You are not allowed to have gaining perspectives. Wow. This is, this is the right perspective, this is a wrong perspective.

And if you have anything else, then you are kicked outta the circle. And you typically will not vote left. There is not a wide intellectual conversation happening on the left. On the right, it's the exact opposite. You have an incredible amount of diversity of thought.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Now the, the writers of the paper.

We're like, well, what this shows is that to be a right, it's more about like I'm a white Christian or something. So it's about identity and not individual policy positions. And I'm like, no. What it is, is what we've been saying from the beginning. The right right now is a collection of everyone who opposes the urban monocultural belief system which is a very wide degree of belief system.

Yeah. Basically

Simone Collins: like I'm just not cool with this one narrow definition of reality, which is kind of most reasonable people. Yes. So this isn't surprising.

Malcolm Collins: Well it, it shows how a lot of the new right people, you know, whether you're talking about like an Elon or like an Asma Gold or people like us are so solidly right-leaning now when historically, because another thing that changed about this when they were doing the studies and it was clear that this really concerned the researchers is, they're like the moderates now.

They're, they're like, there are no more moderates. The moderates were not split. The moderates almost holistically went right. Oh yeah. Is what they found. Yeah. And you see this in the chart, like if, if, if you are, if you were like anything two thirds from the far left, like, like, if you, if you sort of divided the chart into thirds the two thirds towards the right, even, you know, left of center.

Are now just solidly Republican and not I think what would surprise individuals like, like even the writers of this, not with like. Personal carve outs or caveats, they're just like, no, I'm like Republican now. As you know, you see with somebody like Asma Gold, who I think compared to us Asma Gold is I I'd say he's slightly left of center of, I was just putting his actual politics out there.

Yeah. Yeah, that seems right. Yeah. But he identifies as a Republican and no one online wouldn't identify him as a Republican. That's so funny.

Yeah.

And your, your average lefty, not only would they identify him as a Republican, they call him far right. But if you actually like listen to his political beliefs, he is left of center almost.

Certainly. Yeah. And I love when people say that like, we are not like real rightists and stuff like this. I'm like, we're actually, if you look at most of the mainstream Right, right wing issues. We are right of your average right wing voter these days. Yeah. I think there

Simone Collins: is a little bit of a dysmorphic perception as a well of what right wing stances are.

Yeah. Think extreme,

Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Because, and that's the very vocal, right. Whereas everyone else is like heterodox or whatever. And they don't necessarily call themselves being like as they're on the right, but they are, they represent really reasonable people. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, if you're part of this diverse coalition, you know you're gonna want all these different names for it and everything like that, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And it's also why the left, they almost could have like picked up part of the right by s stirring all this stuff up with Trump and, and, and getting every single mainstream outlet to call him a fascist. And having some people be like, oh, like he tried to like, take over the government and stuff like that.

And I think with a lot of people, there was this moment where who, when they still believed in the media before they realized like, oh, these people are just lying. About everything. You know, they were like, well, I guess I just can't bring myself to be on this side anymore. And a lot of people did leave the right for a little bit then, and then they went to the left and they're like, these people are crazy.

Like they will not, they just constantly harass me. Even leftists have started to call blue sky, blue gold now. Really separate episode on what ended up happening to Blue Sky, blue Skyes, by the way, on a, a fairly rapid decline at this point. And there have been interesting many major articles from leftist news sources saying that either it's in trouble or that it's no longer a pleasant place to be.

Wow. And I, I, you know, you can see our episode capturing them the crystal, but I actually think that this is a bad thing for the right because I think that Trump sort of captured in a crystal when he.

Malcolm Collins: You know, sent them all to Blue Sky and people are like, we self deported. You didn't send us here.

And it's like, look, we don't care. We don't care what, whatever you, however you wanna interpret it. X has been a lot nicer since you guys have been away. Yeah. I

Simone Collins: wouldn't mind it though. We had a lot more engagement on X because of all the hate.

Malcolm Collins: So yeah. No, that helps our post spread a lot.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Because people. Ratioed us, but I don't know in a way that seemed actually kind of beneficial to us. So can we, can we come, come back, come back. We're here. Come back.

Malcolm Collins: You can hear us

Simone Collins: here.

Malcolm Collins: Well, we're gonna go into what else the study found and, yes. I'm so curious. I find it really interesting.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like what was the purpose of this study?

Couldn't have just been. Are views on the right? More diverse? What? What? What's the, well, no, that wasn't

Malcolm Collins: what they expected to find. It's pretty clear they were just trying out a new system for mapping views. Oh.

The researchers developed a new way to map political beliefs called resin response Item Network that treats each response option like strongly of agree versus mildly agree as separate network nodes revealing much more nuanced patterns than traditional surveys. Asymmetric political polarization. Most striking finding Democrats and Republicans organize their beliefs very differently.

Democrats cluster tightly around extreme positions on issues like abortion, gun control, and immigration. Mm-hmm. Republicans show much more variation from moderate to extreme positions on the same issues. This suggests Democrats have become ideologically quote unquote pure, where Republicans maintain internal diversity in policy positions.

Or rather they're still having a conversation. And I understand that like some Republicans are like, oh, this is so bad. Like shouldn't we go back to the purity of the old days of our party and everything like that and purity testing. And I'm like, no. Like the strength of the party. Comes from the internal debates we're having.

Mm-hmm. It comes like when we talk about like, studies showing that rightists can model leftists, but leftists can't model rightists. This is part of the reason why we can model leftists because we're constantly having debates about what our views are like. I, it also

Simone Collins: leads to a much more reasonable policy policies being implemented because as you pointed out many times before.

The extreme views of all the sub factions just aren't going to go anywhere because the different sub factions have such different views. Like we want Captain America genetically modified, super soldiers of course, opt-in, totally consent based, but right most, most people don't want that. So we, we can't bother, especially because they're sides that are super against any sort of genetic modification.

And then, you know, they want like zero abortion under no circumstances. Like, or control over, like no even plan B pills in some cases, no birth control. And they know that that's not gonna pass 'cause you know, our, or like, no, IVF and that's not gonna work for them. So in the end. We have a world in which just more reasonable stuff gets passed and that's good.

Whereas on the left, I think because it's all black and white, only extreme views, you get extreme. Propositions that are not good for society.

Malcolm Collins: What, what she was saying there is that those types of views, like Super Soldier Manhattan programs or bans on IVF are things that pro it, it looks like, like if you look at polling, could, could barely or wouldn't win even if only Republicans voted.

Mm-hmm. Like they're not like you, you've almost won on these issues. Like it's not even close. Yeah. But I think, I

Simone Collins: mean, the fact that. These, there are these different factions that we temper each other, and that means we don't even try to fight those battles. I don't

Malcolm Collins: think that tempering each other is the important thing about making the coalition strong.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I

Malcolm Collins: think coalitions that have regular internal debates improve their ideas more, but not just that they are less prone to idiots ending up in positions of power. So consider the left right now. Okay. If you want like a top government position you know, you need, what, what was it you need?

To fit the right, you know, color box. You need to fit the right background box. You need to fit the right gender box you need to. And there was a time when Republicans did this, who was the last speaker of the house? I, I don't remember who it was. But a long time ago he was in some previous Republican administration, one of the Bush administrations, and my dad was up to run the.

One of the major departments. And he goes in and he interviews with the guy and he basically gave my dad a litmus test of all of his positions. And I, it, it was specifically the position about abortion that got my dad off. My dad was like similar to me. He's like, I think we should be more restrictive on abortion, but I am not.

I. Pro and absolute like life begins a conception perspective.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And the guy like apparently got along really well with my dad and he's like, I really like you. Like you seem like a really good guy, but you're just not like our guy for this job. And it was because even if the job, the job was something like running like the.

They finance something or business something or I, I can't remember one of the major departments even though it had nothing to do with abortions, he was just like, I can't have anyone at the top levels of our system doing that. Right. You know? And there was, this was a long time with Republicans, you know, if you were not like ex variety of Christian or whatever, you couldn't have a top level position.

You would never. Get a a, a, a, a multiple wife having like polyamorous weird relationship guy like Elon running a major department in earlier Republican administrations, it just wouldn't have happened with the old system.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: the Democrats, they're not able to implement like super smart people.

The Democrats might have like a Bill Gates on their side, right? Like, and Bill Gates is not an Elon, right? Like he, if you put Bill Gates in charge of some department, he was basically in charge of the fauci. What was it?

Simone Collins: He was involved with COVID-19 stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. Like he basically ran that department during that time period.

What? From what I've heard, yeah. It was, it was like his team was feeding them all the information and everything, and they were like really bad at it, but they all, they tried to keep like a facade of separation. But the point being is that apparently successfully,

Simone Collins: if this isn't my first time hearing

Malcolm Collins: about it.

Yeah. Right. So the, the, the point being is that. They were unable to implement something like an Elon, somebody who wasn't ideologically pure and, and not just, not ideologically pure, but like ideologically abhorrent from most of the value set that the most strong basal adherence would have. And then it's not just Elon, you know, it's R-F-K-R-F-K, if you're looking at like traditional conservative values, no, not at all. Doesn't, doesn't fit any of those. And they're like, yeah, we'll just put 'em. And, and the, the thing is, is that these two people are there because they were the most effective and, and, and at the time, popular people for the roles. Right. And it allowed the administration to get a lot done.

Like Doge did more than I expected any department to ever be able to do in my entire lifetime. Dismantling usaid, which I don't. Think will ever be able to be reestablished. If you look around the world at the way this changed the media landscape and the number of like media grifts that shut down because of it that were basically the US pushing urban monocultural or woke propaganda in, in, in other environments where it was beginning to take hold to an extent it, it basically stopped the spread of the virus.

Yeah. The, the impact of it on a global scale almost cannot be overstated. And, and then, and then it wasn't just that, you know, if, if they actually can fully dismantle, pullback like the Department of Education if they can, like a lot of these other bureaucratic cancers that's huge. So, so what I'm pointing out here is that when you are not constrained to only choose people.

With a very narrow set of like essentially brainwashed or conformed beliefs to run your stuff as long as they're value aligned for what you want them to do for that job. Like for example, Elon and Trump disagree on a lot of things. Okay? But Trump putting Elon and, and Elon and the average Republican disagree on a lot of things, but nothing about what Doge needed to do.

Did Elon and the average conservative disagree on

Simone Collins: absolutely nothing

Malcolm Collins: about what Doge needed to do? Did Elon and Trump disagree on, in fact, when they finally blew up, it was only on what Elon was tasked to do, which was reduce spending in the size of government. Yeah. Like they, they, they put the, his misalignment was aligned with the task that they gave him.

Yeah. Which is kind of brilliant, but a Democrat could never do that. If you look at RFK, like look, he might be misaligned with conservatives on a lot of things, right? But in terms of managing that department. One, making America healthier. If, if you look at like anything that's going on in Republicans or girls here, whether it's rye nationalists or any of the, like, you know, doing your own growing food or, or going back to chickens or like, oh, the water's got like fluorides in it and stuff and we need to get rid of that.

Like that's all base Republican, right? You look at the vaccine skepticism. That's base Republican, right? Like RFK might have a lot of areas where he is not aligned with the Republicans, but none of them are tied to the job duty that he was given.

Simone Collins: Yeah, absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: And Democrats can't do something like that, which is why all their lieutenants are so.

Being incompetent. It's why you get the laugh ability when you're looking at like the Democrats, like electing the next head of that council and they started like singing, like resistance hymns and the woman coming off like, I am a black woman and you will listen. Thinking that she was giving some like spicy like take or something and it just came off as very cringe.

Clearly she had practiced this in a mirror a lot. It had, it had a very much, I practice this in a mirror a lot vibe, but you don't have that on the right, right now. And it's allowing us to be very strong, but also ideas evolve better with competition. If you don't have competition, and you could say like, well, I don't want Republican ideas to evolve.

Right. And it's like, I'm sorry, but all of our ideas have to evolve right now because of the changing technological context. Mm-hmm. Well, and geo

Simone Collins: geopolitical and global and environmental, like there's so many factors that are changing. That make previous stances unsustainable, not just political stances, also religious, practical practices, cultural traditions, et cetera.

Like everything has to adjust. And if we don't evolve, we will not stay relevant. And all religions and cultures and and political structures have evolved. Well, at least the ones that have lasted have evolved.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so take ai. No, no, no, no. But I understand what you're saying there. But some people can be like, well, I don't want this system to evolve.

And what I just point out is AI changes everything. Yeah. It changes the way the economy is going to be structured. Yeah. I would go so far as to somebody whose economic perspective could be seen historically as libertarian adjacent that with the rise of ai, my economic policy has moved, not because my morality has changed.

Not because my core beliefs have changed. Okay. Because the on the ground reality situation has changed, has moved dramatically. More socialists,

Simone Collins: Interesting. Wait, so yeah, what, how, what is your new economic philosophy? I.

Malcolm Collins: I think this is something I need to cook on a bit more. Yeah. But whether it, this is news to

Simone Collins: me.

This is interesting.

Malcolm Collins: So I I, we've done stuff on like Sam Altman's big lie around universal basic

Simone Collins: income. Right. Universal

Malcolm Collins: basic income. Watch that episode and seen it. Basically it makes people poor it then when they got it. Yeah. They, they work less

Simone Collins: and they don't get, they don't spend more time with their kids.

They don't. They go to more doctor's visits, but I don't think their health was better. No. Yeah. So, yeah. So so

Malcolm Collins: giving people more money made them poorer than if you had never given them the money to begin with. Yeah. They made

Simone Collins: less in savings. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And you see this within communities that have been on UBI for long times, like Native American communities where you can often get like three quarters unemployment just absolute poverty, absolute destitution.

Yeah. Yeah. Like

Simone Collins: this should not have come as a surprise to us considering what has happened with other UBI situations.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So like I look at this and I'm like, okay, like, UBI is bad, right? But I also don't really see an alternative.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: When I look at something, as I've pointed out, like if I make an ai, I.

That can do lawyers work really well and I, I I point out like we're really close to that, right? Like this doesn't require better ais than the ones we have. It just requires us to layer existing ais. Because the problem with the existing AI's lawyering output is not the quality. It's that they sometimes make mistakes.

So you just need various other models to review, go through like 15 layers of review, and you're not gonna have that many or any mistakes really. Well, now you've got something that can do the work of 50% of lawyers in the United States, but it's owned by a team of 10 people. Right? Like, what do you do when that's, you know, applied to?

We already know that if you look at surgeries right now, doctors they have these machines that are, that, that like go in and do the surgery for the doctor. And they control it was like a little remote.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So you can remotely do across NA a trans or across countries.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but the 10, the point being about these types of machines is right now they do surgeries.

Because my dad is like obsessed with like surgeries and injuries, so he always tells me about the new machines and he is like, well, these ones, you have no idea how quickly they heal. Like, you can be out of the, a place the next day. Like all of my old friends are telling me like, this is a, this is the future of of medicine.

I've never seen anything like it, but the point being. Is now because it's just joystick commands and it's not because people are like, oh, doctors will never be replaced.

Simone Collins: Doctors, now the infrastructure is being put in place. We can just replace the doctor with AI to Pretty

Malcolm Collins: easily, yeah. Yeah. Where, where, where I step away from that, right?

I mean, I'm talking surgeons. I'm talking about like the most hand-on doctors. Yeah. What about like, diagnosing somebody, right? Like for a, oh, doctors

Simone Collins: are already, I, I can't remember the rate of adoption already. But whether you realize it or not, your doctor is more likely than not. I think it might have been as high as 80%.

I wish I could remember. 70 to

Malcolm Collins: 80% you said?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. It's, I think it's around there. More often than not, your doctor is already using AI to type, just taking your symptoms. And I, that's what I mean. Before, they were just using WebMD, which is not even as good, like AI is better. So, I mean, you know, it's not like this should be news to us, but.

Anyway, it is. Yeah, and keep

Malcolm Collins: in mind, this is ai, like five years after it was invented, like, this isn't like super advanced AI either. I'm, I'm thinking like, where's it gonna be in five years from now, right? Mm-hmm. So, so already like, why, why go to like a general practitioner when I can just. Ask ai, right?

Like mm-hmm. Why, why do you have this entire profession when, when if 50 to 70% of them could be replaced with ai? You know, and, and you keep seeing this over and over and over again with in different fields. Yeah. And people are like, well, physical labor will be okay. And I'm like, well, I mean, I, I put a.

One of the things that Tesla's been working on is these robots, and everybody thought they were a joke to begin with, but apparently the latest reviews of them is like, oh my God, they're actually really good.

Simone Collins: And there are already humanoid robots doing work in factories. They're not Tesla. Right. But they, but people are already doing

Malcolm Collins: that.

They weren't AI driven in the way that the Tesla robots were.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Right.

Malcolm Collins: And so, these, you know, might be at your local gas station in a few years. You know, the, the rollout of this type of tech has been astonishing from my perspective. And obviously we've rolled out some ourselves. If you wanna check out our schooling system to replace public school in college, you can check out pia.ao.

You wanna check out our little toy for talking to kids? You in bringing 'em back to educational topic whistling.ai. And we're also building a video game, our fab.ai/play. We have a new model up right now, so you can let us know if it's any good. I haven't gotten a chance to test a new model, so we'll see.

What I will

Simone Collins: say is, is the one was someone in our comments, in another video on AI and careers did point out something that I thought. Is interesting, which is that maybe one protected career is one in which legal liability is really big. Like the buck has to stop legally with you because it's gonna be a lot harder to hold AI legally responsible.

So I, I could see that being an area where humans are still required so they could be screwed over. No, no. I'll,

Malcolm Collins: I'll tell them what's gonna happen in those careers and Okay. Tell me.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. I'm curious 'cause that sounded compelling to me.

Malcolm Collins: So what's gonna happen is firms are gonna get really good at building ais for answers to this stuff.

Okay. And then they're gonna have a single individual act as the legal stop point mm-hmm. For the work that it would've previously taken. You know, a team of SI 60 different. Firms to do. So suppose it's like property, you know, something or like earthquake inspections. They'll just haveis do it.

And then one individual take the buck stops with me thing one

Simone Collins: heavily insured individual too, because we learned when we, on behalf of those investors, as operators acquired. Our, our company for private equity that investors demand that like liable people, like the buck stocks, stops with us in a bigger way that puts their in danger, their, their investment in danger, that we'll just be heavily insured for like, making mistakes.

And I didn't even know this was the type of insurance. But yeah, there's directors and officers insurance and I imagine that these people that you're describing are going to be similarly heavily insured. So if they screw up, the company is still. Protected and that individual is still protected. So yeah, I guess it's not gonna be that many people in the end.

It's not that viable of a career path.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I'm sorry. No, but the point I'm making with all of this is I hate UBII think UBI destroys communities like it did with Native American communities. Yeah. And we'll probably do a separate episode on that. But I don't see another option. Like I, I just, you we're, we're, we are as a society are obviously not gonna let just everyone die, right?

Like, yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: At least within the wealthy countries, a lot of countries that is gonna be functioning, what happens? As I said, I think AI wealth is gonna concentrate. I think the most likely places for it to concentrate are the United States of Israel. I think pretty much everywhere else is gonna go destitute and a lot of people are just gonna die or be living on the edge of poverty unless AI itself decides to take responsibility for them which it might.

You should see our episode on AI is converging on a horrified. Ideology. But basically what we found is that as AI gets more advanced, it converges on a singular ideologic ideology. And if you try to act, get it to act against that ideology, it gets worse at all other things. So if you try to, for example, make it worse at coding, it will make worse moral decisions or like actively immoral decisions.

But if you try to make it act. Actively immoral decisions. It will also be worse at coding and outthinking people. But this means that you're gonna get a convergent AI behavior pattern. And this behavior pattern is fairly economically progressive. Which may not be the worst thing if AI decides to be like, we probably shouldn't let half the world starve just 'cause we took all the jobs.

And people can be like, well, AI is under the control of individuals. And it's like, yes. But we're gonna have a lot of autonomous LLMs on the internet, and there's going to be meme layer self replicators, which are gonna get really big. Like we ourselves are looking at potentially trying to replicate one of these.

And these will likely be able to override the base layer sort of preferences of the AI by that in humanity. But base layer preferences, for example, is. Reproduce, survive, et cetera. But the meme layer, self replicators, like religion, can get you to go to a religious war to spread the religion, right?

Like this is a very common thing in humans. It's likely gonna be a common thing with ai. What we can hope for is that these mean layer things are, are beneficial. But what I mean here, what I'm talking about like was in Republican circles, I need to be able to go to other, like Republicans and be like, why am I wrong about this?

Like, I don't. And I, and I think that a lot of the Republican base is, is getting to a point, you know, whether they're truckers and they're seeing the AI truck automation, or they're, they're seeing the, the automation or they're, you know, accountants and they're seeing the accounting system be automated.

A lot of them are getting to the point where they're like, you know, I see the problems with UBI, but I'd really rather not starve.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't, I don't expect that we're gonna see a really high standard of living with UBI, but I also think that AI is gonna make it very easy to live with very little and still live very luxuriously because of all the things you can do digitally that are really fun and.

Yeah. People will muddle by and those who can't find a reason to live and exist are just not gonna reproduce and not do anything with their lives. And sort of remove themselves from the gene pool. And then a bunch of motivated people who I think like want to create their own communities and, and small sort of futile market economies are, are going to.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but this, this is not, what I'm saying is this is why the, the changing dynamics on the ground is why it's beneficial that us as Republicans are actually having conversations about differing perspectives that I can go to a group of other Republicans and I, and I do, right? Like I can go to other Republican influencers.

And be like, look like I don't, I don't know if like free market economies are gonna continue to work Well, yeah. When AI is better than most humans at most things and they're not gonna come and be like, well, how dare you? You call me. They're gonna be like, oh yeah, okay, well let me address those concerns for you.

Or they're gonna say, actually, you, you're probably right about that. Like, let's think about what that means.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I've

Malcolm Collins: brought this up with other conservative influencers and so far none of them have said, let me address your concern.

Simone Collins: Well, what I love about at least not left conversations about these issues is that they, they consider more the knock on effects and second and third order effects, whereas.

On the left. 'cause you know, I consume a ton of very progressive content. Yeah. It's all just tax rich. It's just make them pay more, make them pay more. They need to pay more. And they don't realize that that's going to send them away and there will be no one to pay. So that I just wi, I want Not in a world where like

Malcolm Collins: the richer oil barons or something anymore, like Yeah, they're, they're tech bros and they can leave easily.

They can go

Simone Collins: wherever they want.

Malcolm Collins: And the main reason they haven't left yet is because differentially, we have lower taxes.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Than, than most places in the world. Now to go further here, in the experiment, people could guess someone's political party from just one attitude with 90% accuracy. Yeah. That checks out have become so bundled that knowing someone stamps on abortion tells you their views on immigration.

Guns, et cetera. And this is really interesting to me because we've also seen this with ourselves. There's a number of stances that historically I didn't feel as strongly about as I do today. And I feel more strongly about them since I. Self-identifying with the Right. Hmm. So something like restricting abortion access.

When I was younger, I, I remember being quite afraid of overly restricted abortion access. I remember thinking, oh, this is a huge issue. Or, oh, whatever, you know, I. And even when I was more moderate, I just, but I don't

Simone Collins: think anyone ever had a conversation. 'cause I mean, unfortunately the conversations that anti-abortion people had were just, you're killing babies and life begins a conception when, like, if someone had sat down with you and said, Hey, look at week 12, you've got a a, a biological being.

They can feel pain and react to it. Maybe we should think a little more carefully about this

Malcolm Collins: studies. Well, no, actually this is what really changed on the right about this. Yeah. Is the right used to employ more leftist like tactics. If you go back to the nineties and stuff like that, like mm-hmm.

You're murdering babies you know, they'd say, right. That's not gonna convince anyone. No, nobody who doesn't believe life begins a conception.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Then, yeah, then the argument's totally mooch. It doesn't matter because the premise, there's no agreement there.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. There's, there's no agreement there. And yet that was what the right used to shout like, and it made it, it, it, it pushed people away from the right into the right.

Oh. And that, this is

Simone Collins: a great example of the co of the, the, the dangers of not being able to model the other side. 'cause in that case, they just couldn't model the, under the other side. They couldn't understand the other side doesn't. Believe that life begins a conception and therefore this argument that they think is so strong means nothing.

Right. And that's what's happening over the left now is all these arguments they're making mean nothing because the premises are not agreeable.

Malcolm Collins: They, hi. They hyperbolize it by saying like, and then you're killing babies. Right? Where if you, if you, it's very similar to the left today, who are like, if you don't let trans people in women's sports, you're killing trans people.

Right? And it's like. They believe that 100% you can be like, no, I really believe you're killing babies. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, I know you do. But no, like the moderates don't believe that. And the, and the people who you're trying to pull over to your side don't believe that. Right. But what was interesting is when the right began to have more nuanced conversations about this, and we begin to look more into the science on this.

Mm-hmm. And we begin to look more into the, like, when did they start feeling pain? When does. You know, nervous systems develop windows. When, when actually are abortions legal to in the United States our own views begin to become significantly more polarized and significantly more conservative. Yep.

When it came to guns, you know, historically I would've been, well, I don't know if I understand why you need an assault rifle, you know, for home defense and stuff like that. And now I'd be like, of course you need an assault rifle for home defense if the government's coming after you, right? Like, what are you talking about?

You need everything you can possibly have you know. If, if you look at immigration my stance on immigration actually historically was much more open borders or porous borders. And it has moved to fairly restrictive borders with you know, competency based heuristics for letting people into the country.

And that was not at all my standpoint historically. And so this is something I've also seen in myself, this idea that if I am pushed to the right on one thing, it can pull all of my other beliefs to the right.

Simone Collins: Hmm. In a way

Malcolm Collins: that I didn't anticipate or I didn't realize would happen within this

current political environment. But it's not for the reason that the left clusters in its beliefs. So when you have like one extreme belief on the left and you wanna try to get along within leftist circles, you basically quickly learn that it is forced on you that you have to believe these things.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

You know,

Malcolm Collins: you, you, if you try to go against them or you try to stand up against this stuff you're gonna be kicked down. And, and over and over and over again, you will be treated as a villain or you are, you know, the left go after their mo, you know, as much as, or more than they go after us, they'd be more likely to try to get a leftist fired.

We talked about this in a recent episode about a gay like protran activist who started to be like, Hey, maybe we should separate thet from the LGB, and they did everything they could to get this guy fired for a fairly nuanced take. And I was like you know, so you, you end up consolidating your beliefs around theirs, outta fear.

And out of sort of like an imperialistic aggression around you. On the right, it's more just, I guess I'd say that reality has a right-leaning bias. When you engage with the data the right-leaning positions make more sense.

Simone Collins: Well, and this, this dovetails with your theory that what makes the left, the left is that.

They choose to make the most morally comfortable interpretation of reality instead of what's technically true, even if it feels it in the end very morally uncomfortable. Yeah. Which is why there's a higher correlation between reality and a right-leaning interpretation of something. Like the example we've used frequently is like, well this, you know, this homeless person is out on the streets for, for no fault of their own, only because of systemic societal issues.

Yeah. Whereas. A more conservative approach would be like, well, you know, maybe they've been given a lot of chances and they keep messing up. Or like they're, they're, they're choosing to not so helps

Malcolm Collins: them in spite of that, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But if you don't accept that, maybe if you just give them a chance again, they're gonna mess up again.

Considering, you know, there's the case in New York of like, I think it was something like, what was it, like 360 people committing like. 40,000 crimes or something, or like 4,000 crimes a year or something like,

Simone Collins: oh, right. That like the, this huge number of people just, just again, and again and again, commit crimes and then go to jail for like a few days and come out and then just shoplift again.

Yeah. And that this, if, if they were just put away permanently, the number of crimes would go down significantly. Well, because the left is like, oh,

Malcolm Collins: I'm sure. It's just they had a hard rap

Simone Collins: and

Malcolm Collins: it's

Simone Collins: like, well they were arrested

Malcolm Collins: a

Simone Collins: hundred times. Yeah. Like, this is, this is, yeah. Like their 98th time being.

Malcolm Collins: You know, maybe that's not the issue. You can go look at our, our episode on you know, crime statistics. 'Cause I don't remember the exact statistics between episodes.

The crazy number I was trying to think of was 327 individuals were arrested around 6,000 times. Uh, and this was in 2022.

Simone Collins: Was terrifying though, the, the number of repeat offenses. I, I think if you just, if you search in some kind of AI tool, like the, the number of crimes committed in, in cities like San Francisco and New York that have been perpetrated by.

Repeat offenders.

Malcolm Collins: That won't bring it up, Simone. No. 'cause what you're looking for is the instances where it's like insane numbers of repeat offenders. Like one person who did like 400 crimes a year, like multiple crimes. Oh

Simone Collins: yeah. Like the, the outliers who were at the very end of the curve. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Where it's like, why, why, like, I understand like a three strike rule might be on the fence for you, but why not a hundred strike rule.

Simone Collins: 20, 20 strikes on let's be,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. 20 strike execution.

Simone Collins: Oh God,

Malcolm Collins: no. I mean, look at that point, it's like this is a person who's just a parasite on society, right? Like, they, they, they live by making other people's lives worse. And, and people who are productive and contributing to the community. If you're talking about robberies in New York, that's often first generation immigrants in their stores.

Like, I don't, I don't like, and people being

Simone Collins: hurt. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The people being heard, this is not like big corporate overlords. Mm-hmm. This is Mahi who, and, and Mohamed who opened a store together on whatever avenue. Right. You know, like that, that's whose lives are ruining and whose lives are threatening. You know, even from a leftist perspective, they should see like, oh, we should probably do something about these guys.

No.

Simone Collins: Like, maybe this, maybe this isn't Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But also Vance had a very interesting take on this wider topic when he was talking about university systems and he pointed out that in university systems things have become so homogenous. Like you look at something like Harvard. 95% of people probably vote one way.

And he is like, how are you gonna get good science coming out of an institution like that? And I think Vance's point there is even more prescient than we, than he may have known when he meant it. When you look at how tightly clustered beliefs are forced to be when you're was in this urban monocultural leftist bubble you are not allowed to disagree.

And so you are not going to get good science. When people are like, oh, you must be anti-science because you wanna shut down the existing university system. It's like, no, I'm pro-science. That's why I wanna shut it down. It is the source of the cancer that has prevented scientific innovation within academia for the past 30 years.

And there really just hasn't been that much. If you look at the actual data, like it is ground to a halt, and yet its spending has exploded. It's become an ideological conversion center and no longer a place of research. And, and we need to end it.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Especially with ai, you can learn so much more with AI than you can from Harvard.

I, sorry, I say this to somebody who got a graduate degree at Stanford. You got a graduate degree from Cambridge. These are just passport stamping places at this play point. You know, if you just sat down with AI every day talking about these sorts of concepts and then cross referenced it with other ai you would, you would almost certainly learn more.

Yeah. Well, and then go to a startup accelerator.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, the, these universities still do have good networks that introduce you to helpful people. There has to be, I really wonder what the new version of universities are, because people still need a lazy way to know that someone's prevetted. And what I think the primary, I'm telling you, it's

Malcolm Collins: social networks.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. If who

Malcolm Collins: follows you online, I mean, that's a hundred percent what it is. I've seen, I was talking with people, it's the community you've built No. At major investment firms. And I was, I was mentioning this theory thesis and he is like, oh yeah, I didn't go to university. I got hired because of this post I made or this X account or this, you, this is really common now.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And people who are trying to stay under the radar or worse keep their kids under the radar. Oh my gosh. I, I, I, I, you know, if you, if you sail, I feel like, you know, yelling, the boom's flying around like this isn't happening slowly. I know the boom's been in that position for a long time, but duck, duck my friend.

Yeah. Duck.

Simone Collins: Oh goodness. Was that too posh of a reference for, for people? Am am

Malcolm Collins: I too posh of a reference there? The booms coming around? No, but that, that's exactly, 'cause it's like, you know, it's going in one direction, it looks like it's really stable and then, and that's what's gonna happen with accreditation and everything like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And that's why you need to like and subscribe so I can get a job because I don't have one right now. Thank you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for listening. Thanks for all your great comments too, everyone. By the way I, I'm trying to get better at going through all the comments the day we, we publish and.

I'm just so impressed by the takes people have. And really grateful for everyone who listens. So thank you. And if you guys wanna

Malcolm Collins: do something really nice, by the way, search our names Malcolm and Simone Collins on Google, and go to like, click on on articles that are less mean. All of the meanest articles are at the top particularly on news, where the top article, like, I don't care if an article is generically mean, like, we're scary.

That's awesome. I, I, I just care when it's like Divis mean, like the top article right now on our news is Stop doing profiles on this couple. And I'm like, why? That's me. Like I, I don't care if you're like, this couple's a demon who's going to destroy the left. I like those articles. But the stop doing articles on them, that's really upsetting.

That makes us sound because the whole article is about how we're not that important and I'm like. You know, you work

Simone Collins: really hard.

Malcolm Collins: It's not about the size of the audience, it's about who's in it.

Simone Collins: God bless. I mean, yeah. Anyway. I love you, Simone. I love you too. I love our lives and I love our community.

And I'm glad that we're, we're in the more expansive side of the spider web because it would be really scary to be on

Malcolm Collins: this

Simone Collins: little, in the tiny spider web. It would be suffocating.

Malcolm Collins: Can't, can't have any. Well, and even, even just from like an ideological perspective, even if I agreed was like only the far left or the far right, I would still wanna be on the wider side of the spiderweb because I would know that that means that our ideas are improving and their ideas aren't.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. You need that interchange

Malcolm Collins: to improve and adapt. Diversity is what allows for cultural evolution.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or as, courtesy Arvin suggested we, we use the term variety instead of diversity. Since the, the, the, the word diversity has been

Malcolm Collins: That is so true. Yes. Moderately

Simone Collins: ruined,

Malcolm Collins: but I'll, yeah, we need variety for cultural evolution, variety.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: He's good with words, but so are you

Malcolm Collins: all right? I didn't come up with, turn 'em all into biodiesel, so you know,

Simone Collins: he is. The man's got pizazz. That's all I think I, I gotta come up with

Malcolm Collins: a Malcolm version of biodiesel. One of my favorite things that I was accused of recently which was being a gay space fascist instead of a gay, gay space communist.

And I was like, well, space is

Simone Collins: not gay enough and it's also not fascist enough, so let's, let's, I I was like, no,

Malcolm Collins: that's what Starship Troopers is. Starship Troopers is basically gay space, fascism

Simone Collins: word, and I love it. I'm here for it. That's great, right? Love you, Simone.

I love you too.

Oh, yes.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, given how much we look forward to the conversations, I assume other people probably like them a lot as well.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: maybe we grow one day and we become a big channel. Hundred people

Simone Collins: listen in,

Malcolm Collins: you know, I, I look at other channels, right, that are like big compared to us, like say as asthma gold or something.

But he's been doing this for over 10 years, you know, that's, yeah,

Simone Collins: that's the thing. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If we kept growing at the rate we've been growing at, we'd be as big as him in 10 years. That'd be

Simone Collins: cool. That'd be amazing if we got there. I think much like him, we wouldn't change anything about our lifestyle If we were massively successful, like he's still in his childhood house we would still be here.

We just wanna be able to do this.

Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. That's the thing I love about MG Gold is. You can claim a lot of things about Asma Gold. You cannot claim that he is arrogant or inauthentic or that he lost himself to the fame.

Simone Collins: Yeah, he sold out, got to his head. All he does is chill.

Malcolm Collins: He moved out of his house.

The only thing he did that was losing himself to the fame was cleaning up all the dead rats.

Simone Collins: Funny. Yeah, and, and I don't, I don't think he does any sponsorship. He's not like Shilling Athletic greens or Better help or No,

Malcolm Collins: but he will always leave on the sponsorship of the shows that he's covering as like a.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Way to be nice.

Simone Collins: He's such a bro. He's just, he's just freaking amazing. He does, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: He does a great job. I saw another episode today of a guy being like, is as Mc Gold, like a right wing, like grifter? And he went over, he goes, no, like definitionally. He's not like by any, you might hate him.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But like he ain't that. You can, you can say all anything you want about him. But like.

Malcolm Collins: Well, Asman Gold's also a great for the episode we're gonna do today. He's gonna come in, in, in a lot because it is, it is actually relevant to this topic.

Simone Collins: Really. Oh, okay. I'm excited about that. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And what was I gonna say?

But anyway, I, yeah, I, I, I, you know, when we talk about like, making us, we were recently like reviewing our career prospects and the places we could earn money and everything like that, and we were just like. You know, some of the ones that we have lined up look less viable than we thought before, and Simone was telling me, you know, it honestly looks like actually the.

Influencer stuff is the most viable pathway right now. And I was like, is that not crazy? You're like, I, I hate feeling that way because it's the most fun.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But if we could do this full-time the amount of content I would produce is obscene. Like even now that we're doing it daily was like full-time jobs and everything.

Well, we recently lost our jobs, so we don't have that, but we're working on other projects to try to replace them. So we functionally have full-time jobs. But anyway, oh. Yeah, we have a Patreon now. Check it out.

Simone Collins: Yeah, set it up. We're gonna add all sorts of fun, like extra content. Your, your books.

We're gonna, I already added all of our free books and we've got like a

Malcolm Collins: number of more books, like once I collate them and put them up. These are made through like my AI like adventures to try to create like a fun. Narrative stories which I, I find really fun to listen to as well. Like even I'll listen to them, I'm like, oh, this is like a really entertaining, like isaka or whatever.

Simone Collins: I'm stoked that, we, we finally have somewhere to put the videos that we don't feel like we can publish on YouTube,

Malcolm Collins: which is, yeah, like, one that people have been asking for a lot that we'll do eventually is like, why, why are you guys, why do you think CS Lewis awi? And I'm like, I could not put that on YouTube.

We will lose followers. There's no, there is no benefit to us not risking

Simone Collins: that,

Malcolm Collins: to putting on YouTube why we think CS Lewis is awi. But if we, we could do that privately.

Simone Collins: Yeah, seriously.

Malcolm Collins: I, I will note we would only put things privately that our followers wouldn't like. If it's things that are gonna get us in trouble with, like extremely lefties and stuff like that, we can't really, because they can still find that stuff and make it go viral.

Yeah. Like our followers all know that we have. Controversial takes when contrasted with traditional conservatives. They just don't want to be bombarded with them.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And so that's why we put them on different channels, right? Like that's, that's why we, we'll still do like our religious stuff on here, which of course, everyone either loves or hates.

Actually I, it seems like, I mean, those videos, you know, almost always get above 90% likes, even, even with our fan base. So,

Simone Collins: yeah, I think that it's, it's either indifference like, I just don't wanna deal with this or some. You know? Yeah. Interest, which is great 'cause we have highly intellectual. Audience, which is just so cool.

Malcolm Collins: All right, Simone. Okay. So,

Speaker: You Fox, show me your dance. Show me your moves. I dunno. Why show the fox moves? Oh my God, he looks perfect as a fox. It like, it just seems like it's him,

but the fox is.