Cultural Dynamics and Socioeconomic Success

In this video, we delve into the fascinating phenomenon of Chinese economic dominance in Southeast Asia and beyond. Malcolm and Simone discuss why Chinese communities, often compared to Jews in their financial prowess, control significant portions of local economies in countries like Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam despite being small minorities. The video explores historical, cultural, and socio-economic factors behind this trend, including the influence of Confucian values, the impact of historical migrations, and the concept of 'Guangxi' or trust-based networks. The discussion also contrasts the Chinese experience with that of Jews, examining different cultural traits and survival strategies. Join us as we navigate through data, historical anecdotes, and personal insights to understand what drives the remarkable success of Chinese communities across the globe.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be discussing the Jews of Asia, the Chinese. And people might say the Chinese are the Jews of Asia. Look, it's something that people have said. But also, isn't it a

Simone Collins: thing for like, How to make money like a Jew, aren't those popular books in China?

Yeah, Chinese

Malcolm Collins: people, like, in China, there's this whole category of books, like how to make money like a Jew, or how to do finance like a Jew, or how to teach your kids about money like a Jew. There's some

Simone Collins: kind of, like, this, these people get it thing going on.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but we're going to be discussing a phenomenon where Chinese people make up the vast majority of income for specific regions through Southeast Asia.

So like outside of China why this phenomenon might be happening and what we might actually be able to learn from Jews about this phenomenon, because it's happening with this vastly different culture in the Chinese, what's causing it and where can we look at people like, oh, it's the middleman. Like, like, merchant phenomenon.

It's not the middleman merchant phenomenon. That's a stupid idea. That's, that's what people stay to try to avoid the offensive takes. I'll put a map on screen here [00:01:00] so people can understand how extreme this phenomenon is. Okay. So, the bottom number on this map is the percent that is Chinese, ethnically Chinese of these economies.

And this is Han Chinese. And then the top percent is the percent of the. Total economy that they control. Oh, no. So, in Myanmar, 3 percent are Chinese, 76 percent of the economy is Chinese. Oh,

Simone Collins: no. Laos,

Malcolm Collins: 1 percent are Chinese, 99 percent of the economy is Chinese.

Simone Collins: Why are we stepping on this hornet's nest? In Vietnam,

Malcolm Collins: this is the hornet's nest.

I am sticking my Thing in with a bat,

Simone Collins: just shaking it around. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: great. And this, this had been all removed from Wikipedia. I had to go to like old version of Wikipedia because they're like, this is too offensive. In Vietnam, 1% are Chinese. They own 41% of the local economy in Thailand, 14% are Chinese.

They own 81% of the local economy. God. And in Malaysia you've got 22 percent Chinese, 63 percent of the local [00:02:00] economy.

Simone Collins: Oh, come on.

Malcolm Collins: In Indonesia it's a little confusing here. I can't tell because they have like one side here and the other side. Well, okay. So in, in Malaysia, it might be like the bright side of Malaysia is like 10 percent Chinese, 24 percent of local economy.

We'll see in Indonesia. Oh, this is Singapore. I'm looking at here. It's the one little thing here in Singapore. It's 76 percent are Han descended. They control 96 percent of the economy in Indonesia. 3 percent are Chinese descended. They control 74 percent of the local economy in the Philippines. It's 3%.

They control 62 percent of the local economy.

Also note here that the level of economic development of these countries seems correlated with the percent of Han Chinese within them, with Singapore being the highest.

This is in this is like calling them. The Jews of Asia is honestly underselling the situation. If Jews control, maybe maybe Jews do control this much of the local economy and they're just better at hiding it.

Simone Collins: I had so many that there's, there's also that.

I mean,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. [00:03:00] So, so if I go into you know, something I had written on this, so over these Chinese entrepreneurs and investors play a very, role in the commerce and industry throughout the economy of Southeast Asia, compromising less than 10 percent of the population of Southeast Asia. Overseas Chinese are estimated to possess foreign exchange, reserving over 100 billion and control two thirds of the retail trade and 80 percent of all publicly listed companies on the stock market across the Southeast Asian region.

10 percent of the population, 80 percent of the stock market through their economic, though their economic prominence is particularly conspicuous among the public companies listed on all major Southeast Asian stock markets, 90%. Oh my God, the small and medium sized South Asian businesses are also overwhelmingly Chinese or overseas Chinese.

They control 70 percent of the region's corporate wealth and 86 percent of the billionaires are of Chinese ancestry.

Simone Collins: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Okay. So you can see why

Malcolm Collins: I

Simone Collins: wanted to dig into

Malcolm Collins: this.

Simone Collins: Yeah. There's, mm [00:04:00] hmm. This is, I, I mean, I, I want to be surprised. I'm not surprised, but also I had no idea. I had no idea.

This is like, I mean, I, if you'd asked me to guess. I would not have thought it was slightly

Malcolm Collins: outsized.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So, the other thing to note about these people is most of them immigrated out here, and we'll get to this in a second, hundreds of years ago.

Simone Collins: They are not

Malcolm Collins: recent Chinese immigrants.

They are not doing this off of the CCP. They have a very different culture than recent Chinese immigrants may have that is much more authentic to the original Chinese culture,

Because they didn't undergo the cultural revolution.

Simone Collins: Right. Okay. Oh, wow. So in some ways you could argue because they were, they were part of an intellectual class that if they had stayed in China would have been systematically killed and starved.

That they can't have a leg up. Wow, that's really interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Part of the question is, why is China so [00:05:00] dumb? I'm sorry, China's dumb. This is just one of those episodes, isn't it? Has made catastrophically bad decisions over and over and over again. I mean, true,

Simone Collins: true. Honestly, like, I, I, I, I'm super, I was just watching.

More history on what happened during the cultural revolution the level of profound death and suffering like i'm just yeah i'm, sorry, no pity that was I feel that they have

Malcolm Collins: spite themselves somehow had some level of wealth right now, but most of the wealth right now is based on a You can see our episode on what's the future of East Asia, a literal pyramid scheme based on their property market, which 76 percent of their wealth is in.

It's about to collapse. And they had a brief period of a really enlightened leadership yay, the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Um, I actually think that Deng Xiaoping, the guy who was in charge during that, he's a great leader for China. I'm sorry he did the few things,

I also think the Tiananmen Square Massacre is, [00:06:00] within the West, often mischaracterized as a very simple act of evil, without considering that the people who ordered it had gone through the Cultural Revolution and fully understood the scale and level of death China might face if it underwent another revolution.

, and that is what they were trying to prevent.

but generally there was a string of good leaders, but if you look historically, they've had tons and tons of bad leaders going back to the Dowager Empress.

And now they've got the new Dowager Empress, Xi Jinping. I love it. I was, I was saying China is absolutely boned and a call was like a head Chinese person, this was in one of our secret societies just. China has constantly risen from the ashes and has a great long history of rising from the ashes. And I was like, excuse me, why do you keep finding yourself in the ashes?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Who lit the fire, lady? Yeah, who lit the do you think Who keeps setting everything on fire? And

Malcolm Collins: now you're headed for the ashes? But [00:07:00] we see this

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-8: Outside of China and other parts of East Asia.

Malcolm Collins: like this incredible Han ethnic group that is just doing economic dynamism. And I think that this is the key to this. But if you ask AI, if you ask like articles, they're like, Oh, this is downstream of Confucian values, right?

Where I'm like, Oh, this might be downstream of like Jewish culture. But here's the problem with saying this is downstream of Confucian values. Traditional Confucian values, which form the basis of Chinese cultural values, are not necessarily supportive of entrepreneurship. The ideal person in a Confucius thought is a scholar bureaucrat rather than an entrepreneur.

And this is, like, known to anyone who knows Confucius values. Some entrepreneurial attributes conflict with traditional Chinese cultural values. For example, Taking initiative and innovating can be seen as disruptive to the social harmony of Confucian thought. Han dynasty society placed merchants at the bottom of the social hierarchy below workers, peasants, soldiers, and students.

So this was not a light class. [00:08:00] So how did this happen? This is like a really interesting question to me. If when you look at modern Chinese society, it is you know, people are like, Oh, what about like deep sink or whatever, right? This new AI that's literally just trained on chat GPT. That's how they did it so quick, quickly.

That's why it thinks it's GPT. If you ask it questions, that's why it gives you answers. If it's GPT, like, yes, they found a way to make it really cheap by cheating. That's like their entire mainland CCP society. It's built off of but so this brings me to a question. Why? If mainland society in China is so decrepit, deficient in the new Ottoman Empire why are their cultural offshoots so incredibly good?

Why is Singapore doing so well?

Why is Taiwan doing so well? Why do they have these fabs that our entire world relies upon for modern [00:09:00] technology and no one else seems to be able to copy them?

Like, they try to, like, build fabs and, like, The United States and they're like, I'm sorry, you people just like are not good enough at following orders are smart enough to run these like you, you, you cannot run the, you white people lack the ability to run these fabs.

We would let you run them if we could. We can't.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-9: And you want to be like, well, no, they're just trying to hold on to the technology. It's like, yes, that's part of it. But why can't we copy them then? Clearly, there's economic, self defense, all sorts of motivations to be doing this, but we seem to be unable to do it.

Malcolm Collins: So why are all of the world's chips that like the entire world economy, everyone has tried to copy this, you know, the US has tried to copy this like the UAE has poured so many billions of dollars into trying to copy that they can't copy this. Why? What about the

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: The Taiwanese.

Malcolm Collins: allows them to do this?

What about these people in the Southeast region allowed them to do this? What in the United States, and this is where I think you're beginning to find something that [00:10:00] makes them quite different from Jews. Why in the United States do Chinese people economically so dramatically outcompete other ethnic groups in the United States, other immigrant groups in the United States, which they do.

Who is he? Average income. The median Asian household wealth in the United States was 553, 000 in 2022. Dramatically higher than other income groups. Despite this success, they have challenges reaching senior management roles. Asian Americans hold only 13 percent of professional roles at large employers, but only 6 percent of senior management positions. Asian Americans share a CEO position at the S& P 500 companies, has remained around 2 percent for the last decades.

According to BCG Henderson Institute survey, Asian Americans represent only 3 percent of executives, far below the US population share of 6%. Which, Makes no [00:11:00] sense. So the, so now we're untangling a riddle here. Okay. Here is the riddle as I lay it out in East Asian communities, Chinese people end up with dramatically more.

Well, so Chinese immigrants from an earlier period end up with dramatically more wealth and in leadership positions at a dramatically higher level.

Singapore

And Taiwan have each individually.

become an economic and technological powerhouse that is literally unassailable on the world stage. China is a bumbling buffoon. America's Chinese community out competes other Americans at general economic opportunity, but under competes when it comes to senior positions.

Alright, do you want to take a crack at this before I do?

Simone Collins: No, you go ahead, you go ahead. [00:12:00]

Malcolm Collins: And, and all of this seems to be directly contrary to what is allowed the Jews to succeed, which is as I've said, I, I suspect in our episode on like, why did you succeed? Because it's not due to inbuilt IQ differences. You can see our episode on this below the United States average IQ.

Which shouldn't even be close given the number of Ashkenazi Jews in the country, it looks like everyone else is like functionally retarded. So. If, if Israel, and as I argue Jews outcompete because their ability to like go to outsiders and engage, like we get emails from our podcast, 95 percent of our emails are from Jews.

Like if you were an intellectual influencer, Jews will just reach out to you and be like, hey, here's a idea or here's a thing. Other cultural groups don't do this. Chinese people definitely don't. Highly

Simone Collins: intellectual and get, yeah, I don't. Have we heard from anyone who's Chinese? No, we've heard from people who have traveled and worked extensively in China, but I don't think

Malcolm Collins: No, I haven't had any Chinese people reach [00:13:00] out to us in the same way that Jews do.

Which is really interesting. Yeah, certainly, yeah, I think

Simone Collins: we've had a couple people of Chinese descent, I would say like two to three generations, at least, removed from mainland China reach out to us about sort of logistical and operational things. But not about philosophy,

Malcolm Collins: not about philosophy.

They're not like, Hey, I disagree. So, so this has got me thinking, okay, what's going on here? Because the Chinese seem to be like, like thriving in a totally different way than the Jews are thriving.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So I think this is my hypothesis. I'm gonna call it the Cuban hypothesis.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So, I've mentioned this before, if you ask an American, describe your average Cuban to me, like a Floridian, because I lived in Florida for a long time, they'll be like, ah, Cubans, Cubans are really, really capitalist.

They're really, really good at business. They typically run like large successful businesses. And I'm like, huh, that's, that's, that's, that's really interesting. [00:14:00] What are the politics of Cuba? And they're like, Oh, the exact opposite of that. So, okay, how is it the case that American Cubans are really good at business?

They're really mercantile. They're really capitalistic. But the politics in Cuba hate everything about that. Right. And, and are bumbling buffoons on the political stage. It is because the politics of Cuba specifically squeezed out this section of society. I think this is what happened with China.

And I don't think the communists did it. I think who did this was we got two squeezes. We got the Han dynasty when the merchant class is literally the lowest class in their entire society below the workers, below the students, below anyone.

So if you're a merchant class in Han society, where are you going to be keeping your wife and kids?

Simone Collins: I guess anywhere but Han society because it sucks for you there. Anywhere but Han society. It's almost like how Silicon [00:15:00] Valley ended up selecting for people who are willing to take big risks and they weren't really respected elsewhere.

So, like, all the nerds went to Silicon Valley, but with China, it was basically, like, all the nerds and all the people who are willing to take big risks and build businesses just needed to be anywhere but China. So they just went to the adjacent area.

Malcolm Collins: China squeezed out all of its capitalistic and mercantile power in multiple squeezes.

So it had a chance to redevelop in China, and then they have the Cultural Revolution, and who leaves during the Cultural Revolution, who leaves with

Shanghai Shek, and he takes them all to Taiwan. Taiwan

was founded by the previous military regime, they went to every competent scientist or mercantilist or artist or engineer that they knew because they wanted to.

Because they wanted to jumpstart this new empire.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-7: For clarification, this can be thought of almost sort of like looting. It wasn't like they were intentionally trying to start some sort of a egalitarian, high minded intelligentsia empire. [00:16:00] They stole all the famous art they could find, they stole all the gold they could find, and they stole all the economically productive people they could find.

Malcolm Collins: And, and

Simone Collins: then, and then the people, so also I think there's, There's the note that to leave your country and start fresh somewhere else, especially in the past when they're like, you know, immigration was tough. You didn't know like there was no like social safety net.

You're only looking at the people who survived this gauntlet. So it's not just that the most entrepreneurial and brave and risk taking and mercantilist and scientific or whatever people were leaving China. It's also that. The ones who managed to survive in these other countries were the ones who were both that and also good at it.

You know, they could follow through and they delivered.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. And, and then in the United States, I think you had a different population, you know, they'd already been squeezed a few times and they came to the United States and I think they struggled a bit more than the other [00:17:00] populations and they struggled to reach these higher level positions.

And this is where something that we pointed out here gets really interesting. And this is me being Incredibly racist because I'm going to have to try to make a judgment based on like the Chinese people. I know the Jewish people. I know

Simone Collins: what I have

Malcolm Collins: seen as patterns in their behavior and my interactions with them to try to find out why they might be culturally or genetically different, right?

In terms of sociological profiles, the way they engage with ideas. With Chinese people, what I've noticed, and I think that this is why of every one of these three populations, the group that is out competing all the others is this Han dynasty group that left,

Simone Collins: why

Malcolm Collins: are they doing so uniquely? Well, it's because I think that we, we often talk about humans as two things laying on top of each other.

You have the biological hard coded hardware, which is like your predilections, everything like that. And then you have the faster evolving social. infrastructure which acts as sort of a scaffolding for that. [00:18:00] Chinese people had a higher emphasis historically on the scaffolding part of this identity that they had and that Confucius scaffolding, whatever you want to call it, even if it doesn't seem entrepreneurial, was actually really important to being Chinese and acting and working Chinese.

And that the ones who maintain that, because if you look at the Chinese in this bamboo network, as it's called, they are much more like OG Chinese, like pre cultural revolution Chinese. They have much more traditional Confucius values in the way their families are managed and the way they marry and the way they select wives for the kids and the way all of that.

And I think that that has served them uniquely well.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: one outcome that I've noticed when I think of my Chinese friends, whether they're in a prenatal network or anything like that is especially when I contrast them with Jewish people, because we're going to say like, okay, these, [00:19:00] these two groups are different in some way.

How are they different? The Chinese friends I have get really passionate sometimes about things. It might be like a, a fandom or like in cars or something like that, but they don't get passionate about. ideologies in the way that, for example, a Jew will. Like a Jew, for every one of the tracts we release, we have like five Jews and no one else reaches out to us.

And these aren't even like only about like Jewish things. And they're like, here are all of the theological points we need to discuss about this tract. And, and you'd never get this from another community. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Also such respect for that. I love it.

Malcolm Collins: Protestant converts to the tradition already. We were like, Oh, Catholic converts who are like, Oh, I want to get married in this.

So I want to, they're like, either you guys are evil and insane. Or I agree with this. This seems about right to me. It's never, Hey, let's talk through every detail of what you just said. Whether Jews are doing this for cultural or genetic [00:20:00] reasons is largely irrelevant. As I've said, culture is a mix of the two.

They do do it. And the people who do this the very least in conversations that I've had are the Chinese. When I get in an ideological conversation with Chinese people, it's very clear they are interested in the right answer. Like the right answer from like a functionalist perspective.

Simone Collins: Well, you would argue that they're consequentialists, which we quite appreciate.

Malcolm Collins: Right. You would, like, you think this would work really well. And I think that this is why China has gravitated towards a one party system. I actually think a one party system is natural. More efficient. For this cultural tradition.

Which is to say that they are interested not in fighting for the sake of fighting.

I don't want to say Jews fight, Jews fight for the, Jews know that Jews argue for the sake of argument. They love, of all people, they love doing that. There's much less argumentation for the sake of argumentation and much more like, hey, we're actually trying to find out, like, how do we fix this? Right, guys?

And. That [00:21:00] leads to one party system sort of making sense, but when you remove the rest of the Confucius values, when you remove the rest of their culture, they suffer for that more than any other people on earth, I think. And, and I actually think that with East Asian culture, largely speaking, like you want to fix Japan, go back to Bushido.

The these cultures rely on cultural history much more than other cultures. They rely on the scaffolding much more than other cultures. And so why aren't they reaching these high level positions in the U. S. It's because if you are a culture that relies really heavily on cultural scaffolding, you are a culture that relies on, and we have actually seen this in studies that have looked on.

I think if you're talking about this in a negative context, you're going to call this conformism. It's not really conformism, it's communalism versus an independent or clan ish drive. Individualism

Simone Collins: versus collectivism.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but there's really three systems. There's clan based individualism and collectivism.

Individualism doesn't work. It's complete fantasy of the modern ultra progressive movement. [00:22:00] Clanism works. This is like my family above all else, okay? But then collectivism is or not my family, but like my cultural network or my ideological group or whatever my tribe. Yeah collectivism is much less likely to be interested in fighting for the sake of fighting because that's not the way a collectivist sees things.

And I think that a collectivist mindset, especially within a society. subpopulation where they aren't the majority is going to really outcompete a majority population, especially if they have this cultural continuity of like ancestral Confucianism. Do you have thoughts, Simone?

Simone Collins: No, I mean, this checks out and I'm relaxing because it's less offensive than I thought it would be.

That's great. Not that I could think of anything more offensive. I was just, you know, I mean, this is a. We're dancing, we're tap dancing around the third rail. You know, the Fred Astaire moves, they're great, but it's also like high stakes.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Well, I mean, it's about also finding out what's true. And this is like an interesting question.

When you look at these [00:23:00] differences in income, like this to me poses an interesting question, especially if I contrast it with Jews who also have control a disproportionate amount of income. This is like a statistical fact. Okay. Like, I'm sorry, people. It's a fact. But they also have a disproportionate amount of like political power, disproportionate amount of Nobel prize winners, a disproportionate amount of like what, what, why is this?

And this is actually something you'll also note with the Chinese, by the way, if you look at Chinese Nobel prize winners, if you look at Chinese winners of like, a lot of them are immigrants out of mainland China. Now you can say, well, this is because mainland China is sort of structurally against them.

Okay. Maybe, or it could be that these were the communities, even in a modern context that are going to do well. Like if I'm a family today in China, that's going to leave China. What, what, what, okay. What are traits that are going to be associated with my family? We're going to be wealthier. We're going to be, do you know, 50 percent of Chinese immigrants to the United States, when contrasted, I forgot whatever it is with the U S population of a college degree we're going to be more educated.

Simone Collins: We're going to

Malcolm Collins: be, you know, so of course, this is going to select for a cream of the crop mentality. The question is, can you continue to motivate reproduction?

Now I want to talk about trust based networks [00:24:00] called Guangxi in Chinese. The Band Maid Network relies heavily on Guangxi, a Chinese concept referring to personal connections and reciprocal obligations.

These networks are built on trust, often within families or ethnic communities. In regions where legal systems may be weak or corrupt this is prevalent in Southeast Asia. Trust based relationships are a reliable way to conduct business. Ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs often prefer to work with others in their community because they share norms, language, and cultural understandings.

A Chinese business owner might source goods from another ethnic Chinese supplier or hire relatives because they trust them more than outsiders.

Simone Collins: And this is seen

Malcolm Collins: a lot when you have a high trust society operating within a low trust society. What do you mean

Simone Collins: by that? I mean, because it, Guangxi implies to me a lack of trust.

Like, only if I know you really well, and, you know, we've built trust over time. Like, it implies to me that the culture is extremely low trust, which has always confused me, because how can [00:25:00] you have a very collective Okay, so suppose you have

Malcolm Collins: a clan based society, which a lot of these other societies are, okay?

Sure, okay. They, they their families will screw over other, like, let's say, Indonesian families. One Indonesian family might screw over another Indonesian family.

Simone Collins: What they're

Malcolm Collins: saying is that a Chinese family that's immigrated there and is part of this minority community is not going to screw over another Chinese family.

And that single differentiation leads to these communities to be able to, in part, play a role in out competing these other groups.

Because, and this is true if you're talking about these Southeast Asian countries, a lot of them Can screw each other. If they have more access to the wall, if they have more access to politicians, if they have more access to whatever, they can screw someone else over.

And if they're the strongest political group, then they can screw everyone over. So if you have a minority society and it was any degree of trust within them, because I think that's the thing that people forget about nepotism when it exists at a community level.

And when people are like, oh, Jews are nepotistic, that's why they're out competing other groups, and it's like, nepotism was always allowed, like, you [00:26:00] were allowed to be nepotistic with other Mormons, you were allowed to be nepotistic with other Catholics, you were allowed to be nepotistic with other Calvinists or Protestants why weren't you doing that?

And the answer is, well, you know, our culture, we do screw each other over occasionally. I was like, okay, so why was it that the Chinese minority community or the Jewish minority community had higher trust with in their culture, right? Like, it's like you're, you're, you're calling them out for saying, how dare all of you trust each other?

And it's like, well, you know, you could have built a culture that did that yourself, but you didn't. And if people are like, oh, come on, like, Catholics certainly build high trust. No, every organized crime wave in, like, American history, the mob, the mafia, the recent Hispanic immigrants, these are family based.

Systems where they all do not trust each other in the slightest. You know, this is not a good way to build a lot of wealth. So in the Appalachian region, where my family is historically from you know, they did not trust other [00:27:00] people outside of the family network. Right. And so if you have like Jews living in that region, they'd be able to dramatically outcompete us economically, but Jews never really migrated to that region because they were immediately killed.

Basically, this is the thing about the Appalachian people and this is glazed over in history books. But it is really funny if you look at, like, Mormon spreads throughout a map, and you see it, like, hits this region, it's like, completely stopped spreading. You know, Quaker spread on a map, like, completely stopped spreading.

Why? Because this group just killed anyone who was outside of their, their networks. No, they killed other families as well. It's just that they didn't have as high a value on life as other people did. You can see our videos on this. They really liked gouging out eyes and, and stuff like that. And, and we've just like forgotten that this existed.

Like these, these cultural memories of like feral people in the hills who murder everyone. Where like, them were like, ah, it's so funny that we have a cultural memory of that. That couldn't have possibly been a real thing.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but go back to the episode because Malcolm gleefully [00:28:00] reads detailed accounts of the, you know, eye gouging nails people People

Malcolm Collins: slipping on eyeballs after a brawl, like, whoa!

Famous people you've heard of, like Daniel Boone talks about it, like Picking out a grape.

Okay, we don't have

Simone Collins: to, no, let's let, they can go to that episode. I'm

Malcolm Collins: just saying that there was a reason why nobody migrated to their, their, their territory. Yeah. But the, the South Asians were not quite so violent, but they were as corrupt.

And so they were able to be outcompeted by this. And I'm not going to say that there isn't a level of corruption to nepotism, there absolutely is. But nepotism alone should never be able to defeat a dominant cultural group. For nepotism to defeat a dominant cultural group, you need two additional things.

You need the dominant cultural group to not trust each other. So a lack of nepotism within them, because if they have nepotism within them, that's not a problem. And you need the dominant cultural group to Have a corrupt legal system. Often our degree of a correct legal system. Otherwise, the legal system could offset the advantages [00:29:00] gained by the additional trust allowed for by nepotism and and we should note that these communities also didn't get like a.

Leg up or like you're looking at how much wealth they owed many overseas chinese communities were historically marginalized in their host countries For example indonesia and malaysia. They were denied access to land ownership or government jobs and they turned to trade and commerce This is

Simone Collins: where I think there finally is some similarity with food, which is yeah here you have selective pressures of Othering and sort of forcing you to sharpen your people and culture.

So it's beneficial in the long run

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. Oh and the bamboo network is really based around family conglomerates which is what it has allowed it to thrive as much as it has. And I think that this Is also like when you are a discriminated minority for so long in another culture It becomes easier to trust people of your cultural group especially if there is some degree of cultural punishment for anyone in that cultural [00:30:00] group who breaks this trust.

So, let's say you're a minority group, like, people like, how do groups like Jews or like these minority Chinese populations build a degree of cultural trust? Well, if the mainstream society doesn't allow you to own land, doesn't allow you cultural government jobs, doesn't allow you anything like this, and the law system treats you unfairly you're going to care a lot about acceptance within your own community because not only will they do differential business with you, but if you screw them over, they will kick you out and you will have no way to do business.

So this is something that's also not talked about as historically these individuals when they would you know, say, Oh, I'm going to cheat my fellow Jew or I'm going to cheat my fellow Chinese, like Confucius original. So. The whole network, it goes around really quickly and all of a sudden they can't get any contracts at all because the mainstream population won't deal with them and their community won't deal with them.

Yeah, so they

Simone Collins: have to make do with their network so the network becomes strong.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, and this is why this network has a higher degree of trust.

Because you can't risk [00:31:00] burning that trust as easily as somebody from another cultural group.

Simone Collins: That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. And so that, again, this is where things are finally dovetailing with.

Jewish networks in that they're in a hostile land. They are forced to be better and stronger. And they are forced to also trust each other and work together really well. That makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts, Simone, on all of this? Do you think my hypothesis is correct?

Simone Collins: I'm vaguely trying to think back to the different things that we've read on different national IQs, and like, specifically where different groups performed better.

Malcolm Collins: I looked and I couldn't find a lot of evidence because I specifically looked. I was like, do they outperform like native populations on like testing and stuff like that? I

Simone Collins: thought that there were some like, sort of, quanti mathematical performance was higher. That's what I'm kind of remembering. And I'm wondering if some of this is a product of.

[00:32:00] Industries that are really thriving right now like there being some kind of natural predisposition in the way that like we've, we've posited that whether it be cultural or genetic and likely they're intermixed because cultural. And genetic features kind of intermix over time. Right? You know, they sort of get bred into people, but also the culture shapes the people that because Jews have been really sort of shaped into people who, on average, may have a leg up with communication.

And with public debate and public intellectualism that they ended up disproportionately represented in areas like law and arts and you know, sort of fields that, that in the end have been very influential as America has grown, which has given them like outsized influence. Maybe there's some kind of cultural plus genetic trait in Han Chinese.

That has them [00:33:00] that gives them a leg up with things like semiconductor development, like with really lean, effective manufacturing, things like that. The

Malcolm Collins: average IQ of Singapore is 110.

Simone Collins: Okay. Come on. Like that

Malcolm Collins: doesn't

Simone Collins: help.

Malcolm Collins: That's sort of cheesing on the rest of the world at that point. Yeah,

Simone Collins: come on. I mean, IQ absolutely helps.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-10: No, this is one of those, depending on the source type things,

um, in one, uh, it goes to 1 0 8 0.87, and in another, it's at 1 0 5 0.89. Uh, the one I have for Taiwan, by the way, is 1 0 6 0.47. [00:34:00] For the United States, you're looking at 97.4. For the UK it's 99.1. For China, it's 1 0 4 0.1.

Simone Collins: You know, it's not the only thing, but it helps. And I mean, I think what you also know, just by the nature of how Singapore was formed, you have a combination of IQ and will. The average IQ

Malcolm Collins: of Israel, by the way, is 92. Wow,

Simone Collins: so Singapore. Or 95.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, there's something, yeah, it's not just culture and selective pressures and what is it, what is it called, survivorship bias?

But it, it's also, there's some, there's something going on.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I mean, it is selection bias. If I created a country that was for only like the very smartest of Jews that country is going to smoke every other country.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I think, well, and that's, I guess that's

Simone Collins: why you were like, why when, for [00:35:00] example, China more like to a greater extent, took back Hong Kong.

Were countries not like free visa, like move here, like to anyone who was like, I guess over a certain

Malcolm Collins: income level. Yeah,

Simone Collins: yeah. Above. Yeah. Like, why not? Like you, you just got like a, like a, a flash sale of brilliant citizens. Why are you not? I mean, I think New Zealand is trying to start to do this.

Malcolm Collins: People overvalue ethnicity and undervalue micro communities, is the point of all.

Simone Collins: And performance. Yeah. And, and I, I was just saying this to someone who listens to the podcast sometimes recently because they were trying to argue that like national IQs really matter. And you had argued in some previous podcast about the reverse Flynn effect and that you thought the most important factor was that.

Mostly lower IQ people, maybe having more kids and, and his argument he linked to a Substack article was more like, no, actually it's more that lower IQ countries just have [00:36:00] higher birth rates still. And I, I argued in response that like, no, our argument always has been that whatever the IQ of a population is at any given point, it doesn't matter because selective pressures can so quickly change that.

And like the, the smartest population today, like, like you point out, like with China. Like, the Han Chinese, before, like, the, the full rise of, of, Yeah, well, I mean, look, Being so hostile to them you know, may have been very, very smart, And then they, they squished out all these incredibly agentic people, And these aren't, we're not necessarily talking about IQ as a trait in isolation, We're talking about, in this case, like, Just kind of, success and prosperity.

Social profile,

Malcolm Collins: mercantilism, risk taking, all of it. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And like, these are the things we care about. Again, like, there's so many people who have insanely high IQs who get nothing done in life and we have zero respect for that. Like, I don't care how smart you are. You can be dumb as a rock and get a lot done.

So, whatever. But Again, like, I think that that's our big bugaboo with things like IQ. [00:37:00] Like, I don't care what your group is right now. I care about selective pressures and culture and future geopolitical trends, and I do think things like what society will need and value in the future are really important things that cultures and nationalities and countries need to be looking at.

Because, again, like, maybe this kind of, like, the ways in which Han Chinese appear to thrive really worked well with the rise of technology. And the ways that Jews are super powered, on average, in various ways, like, really worked well with the rise of media and law and forms of civilization that, That needed that kind of talent, what kind of talent is going to be needed in a post AI world?

Like who's going to thrive? What traits are going to thrive in that world? And who's going to have influence around

Malcolm Collins: that?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Because I don't, I don't know if it's, if it's like, Jewish intellectual engagement. I don't know if it's going to be, you know, Han [00:38:00] Chinese, get it done, build s**t, you know, make things precise, whatever I, you know, like what, what's I, it's hard for me to, to think through, cause it's, it's hard for me to know how AGI is going to play out, but I'm very curious to

see,

she's been difficult

Malcolm Collins: today, but now

Simone Collins: she's being, she's

Malcolm Collins: well I think yeah, it's, it's a question and the question is, is how much can you even control what dice you've been given are going to matter, you know, and are those dice going to be relevant in the current.

Yeah. Like what if

Simone Collins: you've been dealt like successful middle management bureaucrat dice, like this is the worst hand to be dealt in this generation. Right. How, how do you even adapt to your family? What do you do, you know, do you, I don't know, do you go change your marriage criteria and like try to do a bunch of outgroup, outgroup breeding and rebuild your culture?

Malcolm Collins: I actually disagree. I [00:39:00] think whatever dice you were given, you should try to build a family culture that is copacetic with those dice, whether it's adopting traditional Confucius values or whether it's. Or updating them for modern context as we have with our religious beliefs, right? You know, like, are you going to adopt and innovate or are you going to retreat?

I see. Yeah. So basically

Simone Collins: if you've been dealt a blowtorch, you can't be like, well, I'm going to turn it into a snow machine. You have to figure out where your blowtorch matters.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. Like, okay, so here's with me, right? Like,

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: am a person who affects science. I am a person who, in my early career, was a scientist in the republic.

I am not a person who could be. A scientist. I might want all of my chips in the science field, but that is not, you know [00:40:00] me, Simone, like, I couldn't even survive, you often joke, I couldn't even survive in a large bureaucratic company. Yeah, you admire

Simone Collins: it, but it's, you don't have the aptitude for pure scientific work.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. In, in, in long focus and work like that in diligence

Simone Collins: and organization. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I

Malcolm Collins: mean, you, you're very diligent,

Simone Collins: but you're not in like an organized way.

Malcolm Collins: Well, not only that, but I'm also not that kind of a shape rotator. Like I am really I, I, I can do math because I'm a uniquely smart person and I can do physical and chemical shape rotating.

To like understand molecular science, but it doesn't come

Simone Collins: naturally to you. It's not like the shapes rotate in front of you as in anticipation in a

Malcolm Collins: class and molecular scientists, I'm always the bottom. Oh, what am I uniquely good at? I can smoke people who have spent their entire lives studying, like, for example, textual analysis of the Bible.

And I've been seeing this more and more recently as people reach out to me and I'm like, Oh my God, this person's an expert and [00:41:00] they suck compared to me. Like, why am I this good at, at Bible stuff? I literally didn't study this at all growing up and somehow I can just be like, Oh, don't you know about this story or this story?

And why, why does this all like, Oh, of course, because my ancestors sorted for this for generation after generation after generation. I'm naturally good at business stuff. I do not admire business stuff. I do not want to be the, the talker, hater trader, huckster negotiator. But Simone's always like shocked.

She's like, wow, you've got a stupidly good deal on that. How are you so good at negotiating? And I was just like, I don't know. It's just like what I'm like, I. I am not high culture, okay? I am a overly aggressive, overly vulgar, overly ambitious, overly, like, I, I, I have a knowledge of who I am, and that lends itself to a few professions, whether it is being a creative and trying to make this AI video [00:42:00] game, or trying to do the boldest thing possible, as people have said, like, multiple, like, people are like, Malcolm, you always just, like, have some idea, and are just like, I'm gonna you.

Do it, no matter how crazy it is or that, or being the type of person who people like to follow because they're like, well, and this is another thing, like my ancestors have done this, or people like to, like, even as a kid, like, I didn't even meet, I, like, one thing that happened in my high school is like, I thought of myself as like, like a nerd.

Whatever kid. And I learned the kids, I didn't even know, like didn't, my name is like a write-in for like class president, like some kids organiz. I was like, why did you do that? And they're like, well, because everybody like trusts you. I was like, but what? But you don't like me? And they're like, yeah, but like we, we know that you're like the, you do something fun and interesting.

But again, trust,

Simone Collins: trust is predictability too. You can predict someone you can trust. It doesn't have to be liking.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I guess, like, I know what my good traits are, but they're not the traits that I, like, ideologically identify with. But, like, [00:43:00] I don't, like, try to force myself to be a scientist. Yeah, but I think,

Simone Collins: so, yeah, to, like, extrapolate this back to, like, a larger thing and how should people look at their own cultures and families and future and relevance in a post AI world, What are you good at?

What, what, what is your genetic inheritance going Collectively as a family and personally. And how can you find a place for that to fit in the future? And then invest in that. Find the

Malcolm Collins: things that you seem to have just like all the dice rolled in your favor, like with this media stuff, I didn't know I was good at playing the media.

I didn't know I was good at this sort of like larger social manipulation. Apparently I'm awesome at it. But I didn't Like this isn't what I wanted for my life. I wanted to be a famous scientist, right? I want to be people like this anime, Dr. Stone. You should watch Dr. Stone. They're like, you'll, I am not Dr.

Stone in Dr. Stone. I might be the greed guy. I greed is justice is what he always says. [00:44:00] But yeah, I, I, I am definitely not a doctor. I want to be a Dr. Stone, but I just lack any of those capabilities.

Simone Collins: Well, anyway, know your strengths, know your weaknesses. I need to make you Mapo Tofu. So I'm going to peace out.

I'm so excited. Love you, Simone. I love you too. Gorgeous. And I love your beautiful treats.

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