The Shifting Landscape of AI and Online Privacy

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into how Europe is rendering itself obsolete in the age of AI. They discuss the shift from SEO to AI-driven influence, the impact of privacy laws like GDPR, and how these changes are erasing European culture from the digital future. The conversation covers the collapse of traditional power networks, the importance of building a unique online footprint, and the new rules for reputation and employment in a post-AI world. Plus, they share personal stories, debate the pros and cons of privacy, and explore the future of secret societies and elite networking.

Episode Transcript:

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be talking about how Europe is erasing its itself and its civilization from history within the context of. AI and we are also going to talk about how AI changes the strategies that we as humans use as we relate to the world around us and ensure our own impact on the future.

Speaker: We need to talk. What is that? This is a flying robot. I just shot out of the sky after it delivered a package to my house.

So I destroyed the robot. No one is safe from these b******s.

Malcolm Collins: Hmm. So to. Start with this second topic here. You used to be, at one point you were the director of marketing at the 45th Most Traffick website in the United States. Yeah. And it's the website where people go and write it was hub Pages is what it was called.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And then it was, I think it sort of became.

A different [00:01:00] brand over time, but yeah, it it, what was the

Malcolm Collins: other brand that bought it? Squidoo.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, no, it acquired Squidoo, I think. Okay. And then it became something they now call, you're doing something else, whatever.

Malcolm Collins: At the time it was really big, right? Yeah. This meant that you were at that point in your career, one of the world experts in what is called SEO, this is search engine optimization.

This is how you ensured that when people searched for things, they saw your takes. And not somebody else's tips. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I mean, often it's involved in marketing or whatever, but it, it matters a lot. Like if we were running the prenatal list movement back then, everything we would be focused on is, how do I ensure it ranks well within SEO?

How do I ensure, and these systems, you know, companies lived and died on SEO, like Google would roll over in it'd sleep and all of a sudden it's a whole new ball game. Oh,

Simone Collins: it would? Yeah. All hands on deck. Emergency situation. At the business, 100%. Very stressful.

Malcolm Collins: But we are [00:02:00] moving into a world where SEO is almost irrelevant.

Given the way AI works and what AI picks up in terms of ideas is very different than what would've been picked up in an SEO environment.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And this really changes a lot of the online game, and I've noticed a lot of people haven't realized this. There aren't relating to this in sort of a sane way yet.

Hmm. There's still. Brian Chow, whose article we're going to be talking about today, he, he wrote an article called Public Intellectual Privilege about how you as a public intellectual get to have a totally different relationship with ai, which is true. I, for example, can go to an AI and say, you know, what would Simone Collins like for her birthday?

And it'll give me like, great recommendations. What is it telling you I

Simone Collins: want for my birthday?

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Well you can ask it. You can ask it while, while I'm talking. Okay. What should Malcolm get Simone for her, her birthday. Right. Okay. Yeah. And what you'll see is AI actually knows a, a, a great deal about [00:03:00] you and me.

Now there are people from the last generation, like I, I recently had my dad over and I asked AI questions about him and it could find almost nothing about him. Yeah. Despite him being a fairly. Within his time, famous public individual. Mm-hmm. And

Simone Collins: yet he

Malcolm Collins: expressed this as a good thing. He's like,

Simone Collins: well, I don't like having things about me online.

Malcolm Collins: Right. It, it reminds me a bit of, and, and one of the things we're gonna be talking about a lot in this is the, you know, self-defeating obsession with privacy that some individuals developed during the age of deep data where we saw privacy as a way to protect ourselves from large companies. But I mean, also like what do you even protecting yourself from like, getting better Amazon recommendations.

Like I, I understand you can be like, well, what if my data is leaked? But like that's data that can be leaked regardless. Right? The thing is, is that between [00:04:00] the era of deep tech. Personal protection, advocacy and the era of ai, the benefits and downsides of AI knowing about you or, or, or companies knowing about you, has done a complete 180.

Yeah. Whereas it used to be almost just like a strictly net negative to have a lot of information about you online. Now it's almost strictly a net positive because it means when you go and you ask AI questions. So first I'm just gonna dive into. What is SEO but for ai, how is it different? Yeah, so first you don't really care as much.

'cause was like, why do you still care about getting media? And I'm like, well, because media references AI to some extent, but in a large extent, like just being in media a lot just doesn't matter that much anymore. Yeah. Because media does not. Alter what AI is going to do or say on a particular piece.

What does alter what AI says or does about a thing is the volume of work that is out [00:05:00] there. I. Volume now matters much more than how much the public is engaging with a thing. The number of clicks a YouTube video has, or the number of clicks a site or document has, or link juices, it was called historically.

The number of credible sources that are back linking to content does not. Very heavily determine whether an AI is going to cite that document. Hmm. What determines if an AI is going to cite a document is how well thought through it is, how long it is and how novel. It's and I have seen this because AI.

Regularly, sites based camp episodes in responses when I am asking it about just like normal day-to-day things.

Simone Collins: Totally unrelated

Malcolm Collins: to you. Totally unrelated to me.

Simone Collins: What's an example of a, a thing that you asked about? I.

Malcolm Collins: I was asking about something related to like trans stuff and an AI ended up referencing some of our episodes.

I was asking about a [00:06:00] thing related to Antinatalists philosophy and it referenced some of our stuff. So it's like tangential to things that we talk about. I mean, obviously but the person could be like, wait, how are you getting your content referenced by AI when the AI doesn't know that you are the one asking the questions?

Hmm. And the answer is that. We release our content long form every day and multiplicatively. That means that whenever we're releasing an episode, you're going to see a YouTube episode of it, which can be scraped by ai. But then you're also gonna have a Substack article, which some AI can scrape. And then that Substack article is also going to be podcast to a number of podcasting websites, which some ais also scrape.

Hmm. So it's getting the information from multiple sources, and then with the most important episodes, like the tracks or the book series that we wrote, we actually have full plain text versions of both all [00:07:00] of the tracks and all of the books hosted as individual WebP pages marked. For AI to use on multiple websites that we host.

This is why when people are like, why does AI give such good responses in response to techno puritanism and your religious beliefs? And it's because we, we structured and aggregated those religious beliefs in a way that makes it very easy for AI to grab, which is not the way traditional SEO companies think or the way a lot of traditional people think when they're engaging with this stuff.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Thoughts Simone.

Simone Collins: I agree. I've done a lot less of this than you have, but I also intuitively just really have a lot of gripes with people and online privacy or privacy. We get to all that next, but yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: so I'm, I'm excited to What did, what did, what

Malcolm Collins: did rock say about you? Like what did it

Simone Collins: I wouldn't appreciate any of the gifts it recommended.

I mean, some of it would, it says personalized data driven artwork work, but. [00:08:00] Come on.

Malcolm Collins: I have literally given you that before and you've appreciated it. And it wouldn't have known that.

Simone Collins: No, I've given that to you.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, you wouldn't appreciate it if I got it for you?

Simone Collins: No, I don't want it. I, I, 'cause I can make it like it's so easy for me.

Why would I want that as a, what do you want?

Malcolm Collins: Just food.

Simone Collins: Popcorn is a big one. There's no recommendation for popcorn here. Ai. What do you know that about you or someone to clean our house. So that I don't have to for once, you know, like, just like, you know, hey, you know, I'm gonna get you like three house cleaning sessions.

Well, why

Malcolm Collins: don't you show me how to clean in the way that you like, because you were like, just like physically and mentally incapable of

Simone Collins: it. Dude, it's just like, keep in mind though I think it's, it's part of a lifestyle thing. Like I grew up, when I spent time with my mom, she would clean the house.

And I would hang out with her and she'd be like, this is Borax. This is what we use to scrub the tub and the sink. And like this is like, she [00:09:00] would just walk me through like, all this is cleaning materials. Do you wanna try it? And then like, okay, no, you did it wrong. Okay. No, you did it wrong. Okay. You did it wrong.

And like that's. Like, I don't have a hundred hours to give to you to train you in cleaning. I'm trying to do that for our kids over time.

Malcolm Collins: Oh no. Are you gonna train them into little worker bees to handle your cleaning? I'm

Simone Collins: going to train them how to handle their own housekeeping needs for sure. And like laundry.

But like, I don't think, you know, your parents also didn't clean their own house. They had people do it, and those people certainly wouldn't be willing to like. Also tutor you in house cleaning while also trying to complete their job as quickly as possible. So this is not on you, it is just that like

Malcolm Collins: I appreciate that you could pretend to be grateful,

Simone Collins: but yeah, no, it also says that I should get high end travel gear for my global lifestyle when we've like decided to quit traveling.

So like, I guess I can understand that like in the past you and I were very jet set, but it doesn't know that like now things have changed. The one thing it does suggest is customized educational tools for our children. But I'm [00:10:00] buying them the, like stem kits that it's describing here all the time. Like I just bought one of those Montessori circuit boards.

So you buy,

Malcolm Collins: you just bought one that it's suggesting? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. No, that was that was what Catherine Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz was like. Suggesting in, in her Twitter, her ex feeded. It's like, this is because I, I've seen them on Amazon all the time. These little, like, they're these Montessori circuit board busy board things for like young kids.

And I always thought this would be so cool. And also my kid is never gonna use this, but she said, if, you know, you know, hours of endless fun. And I'm like, really? Like, is this occupying your 4-year-old? Because if it is, I'm going to get it. Like I've wanted to get it. But I thought no one would actually use it.

So we will actually see,

Malcolm Collins: we will see. I'll tell you what they do use is the little Lego men that we bought a collection. Yeah. They're like a total

Simone Collins: choking hazard for you. Well, and the arms just come off constantly, but toasty last night, spent like hours being like, I will fix it. Which is really cute, so.

Alright.

Malcolm Collins: So now to the second part of this Yes. You know, we're starting by talking about the, the [00:11:00] move from an SEO world to an AI world. Yes. Which is a total transformation in the way you think about your online and public persona.

Simone Collins: And it also makes me nervous because the SEO world, I mean, what I know about it was that it was exploited.

In many ways it was a constant game of cat and mouse that people would, after they understood how it worked, manipulate it, and manipulate search results. Which is one of the reasons why even today search results are not that great. And that's because no matter how hard any search engine will try it, we're not just talking about Google here.

There will be, you know, people will quickly figure out how the algorithm has changed. And they'll game it. It's a lot

Malcolm Collins: harder to manipulate AI in the way that you're thinking of,

Simone Collins: really. I hope. Yeah. Put, put me at ease here. But that is my one concern with

Malcolm Collins: this. The things that AI looks for in articles is how unique the idea is expressed in the article all are and how well structured it is.

Hmm. AI has the ability to tell between low quality, low brain takes, and high quality, high brain takes. I can't tell you the number of times that [00:12:00] ai, like a perplexity or grok when it's referencing a source, references a blog that I have never seen or heard of before, but is fairly well written and well researched.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: It seems to have a, a good ability to tell between sources. The real advantage that you're going to get is to not focus so much on things like Linked Juice and focus more on the volume of the work you're outputting.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: But to continue here the, the, what Europe has done, which is really interesting, was ai, is it put into place something called the GDPR which is a system that.

Prevents how much data companies can collect from people was in Europe. To, for what? It changes explicit consent is required. Companies can't use pre-check boxes or bundled consent. They need clear, explicit permission for every single thing. Yeah. So every time

Simone Collins: you go on a website and you have to accept cookies and read a [00:13:00] stupid notice, you can think that GDPR for that.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Data minimization companies can only collect data that is absolutely necessary for this data purposes and no more collecting just in case stuff, purpose limitation. Data can only be used for the specific purposes disclosed when collected. Companies can't rep data without new consent. And then usage restrictions the companies cannot refuse service if you don't wanna give them data.

Easy withdraw. Users must be able to withdraw consent as easily as they gave it. Storage limits companies must delete data that's no longer needed for the original purpose. And then they have cross-border transfer restrictions. And, and, and in terms of fines for this, you can be fined up to 4% of the company's global annual revenue if you violate this.

So really strict fines for this. Yeah. Well also

Simone Collins: this, we're just talking tip of the iceberg with this regulation. I remember. The collective brick that [00:14:00] companies shot when this came out because of just how complicated it was going to be to comply with these rules. It, it's just from a regulatory and efficiency standpoint, it, it makes me so angry, so bad.

Malcolm Collins: But it's created a situation in Europe where. One. Europe basically cannot develop high quality AI models. Yeah. European companies can't. Yeah. And then two what. In terms of content is being produced within the European internet

Simone Collins: is

Malcolm Collins: not accessible to ai. If you are a European individual who is engaged actively with the internet and you're not using a VPN pretending you're in the United States, you will not be remembered by ai.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you

Malcolm Collins: will not be recognized by ai. And this is a very, very big deal when you consider the turning point of human history that we happen to be at [00:15:00] right now. The future of what humanity becomes as we take our manifest destiny among the stars, as AI dramatically changes the direction of human evolution, what it means to be human, what it means to interact in this world as it will is Europe.

And and cumulatively European culture, except for how it's expressed out of the United States and Latin America and Canada.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Is going to be erased from history and it's going to be replaced by. American culture and Chinese culture. What's interesting is that China actually has more restrictive systems in place and more restrictive rules in place around Whatis can take, but the government doesn't enforce it because it doesn't care.

'cause that's the way China works which is, you know, good for Chinese development.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So what is your thoughts on privacy? Before I go into, because I looked up, I was like, [00:16:00] what are the best arguments? Like actually steal man this for 'cause I do not get why people would care so much about privacy. Yeah.

I did this, I did

Simone Collins: this because I, I found it so offensive that people would be so, so intent on protecting their privacy. The argument that convinced me that there is. Any argument to be made in favor of privacy is that okay? Sure. You may have absolutely nothing to hide. Now you may benefit from people knowing more about what you think and all that.

And then someday there's a regime change. See change in culture and government and leadership and laws, and suddenly. You are liable for your views. You are arrested. You are taken away because they have the dirt on you and that is, that is. Now, I mean, when in the age of cancellations, that's something that did happen.

You need

Malcolm Collins: to take responsibility. And I, and I saw this argument as well, Uhhuh there were also arguments that, that, that were compelling there, like freedom to change your, your perspective, freedom to rebrand yourself, freedom to, well, yeah, but

Simone Collins: I mean, I [00:17:00] think people understand that rebranding is possible with a public record.

JD Vance rebranded from an Antit, Trumper to. We didn't, we

Malcolm Collins: were not, we were not pro-Trump the first time he ran, we, yeah, we branded from like progressive prenatal list to tech, right? Yeah. When we got even into the prenatal list movement, we were still left leaning. Like, yeah, we started, it's all about like, Hey, we

Simone Collins: wanna make it

Malcolm Collins: easier for gay couples

Simone Collins: to have gay.

And we still do, to be clear, but like suddenly now we're, yeah, we're super right. Whatever.

Malcolm Collins: We're far right. Activists, as they would saying Oh, yes. Lot extremists. Yes. Right. Winging extremists, right? Winging yes. As, as Hillary Clinton would brand us. But yeah, no, I mean, I, I'm, I this is a thing though.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think, I think when we live in a world where, you know, that your histories online one, you need to take responsibility for that history, right? Like, yeah, yeah. I need to own it. Before everyone was aware that everything would be online. I can [00:18:00] get that, like, okay, like for example, I did stuff like in my twenties, I would never do today.

But it wasn't because I you know, I. Wouldn't do them. If I knew what I knew about the internet today, it was because I thought that there was this privacy that is not expected today. And that's what I mean by all of this is the illusion. Privacy. Privacy. The illusion of this stuff isn't going on a permanent record.

Everything you do isn't going on. A permanent record leads people to make worse and more dangerous positions. Mm-hmm. From the perspective of political shifts in everything like that, 100%.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah. People who believe that they're private. More often than not have a false sense of security because your devices are recording you ev everything is listening.

There, I mean, even if you don't have any like smart speakers or other devices in your home and your phone is off. There are, there are ways that people can use your own home [00:19:00] wifi to see what room you're in of your house.

Malcolm Collins: It's, well, and they're much more likely to do vile things, to do the death threats we receive all the time, or the, the really bad trolling where their entire goal becomes ruining somebody else's life through an anonymous identity.

Mm-hmm. But here's where people can get to us. They can be like, well, what about pseudonymity? Pseudonymity and people ending up getting docs have been a big part of the new Right. Movement. Yeah. Whether we're talking about, you know, raw egg nationalists or Bronze age pervert or any number of these people.

And I would say, well, as far as I know, there isn't a single well-known pseudonymous right-leaning thinker who wasn't eventually dox. The problem with pseudonym a friend of ours, guy who runs Natal Con, what was it? Kevin Dolan pseudonym. Oh yeah. This is the problem, right? When they're like, oh, what if you have views that go against the establishment, if you have views that go against the establishment and you feel safe sharing them under a pseudonym identity, [00:20:00] that will eventually be docked with in the existing paradigm.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. The

Malcolm Collins: student anonymity on itself is the curse because it leads you to say and do things in a way that you wouldn't. If you knew you had to be publicly accountable, false

Simone Collins: sense of security,

Malcolm Collins: right? It's a false sense of security that ends up putting you in a much worse position. And then you can be like, well, what about laws around the right to be suited?

That doesn't work because then you have to give the government the right to hunt down anyone who's like, Hey, this is this person actually. And that's just like. Too hard to do without putting enormous restrictions on the way companies work.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: Which is really frustrating. Like, I would like it if there was like a good Pseu anonymous system out there that I thought worked, and I could say, okay, I, I am for that, but there isn't.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And then people can say, well, people may not have, you know, out their ideas or try to push the Overton window. And it's like, well, they, they will though, I mean. In terms [00:21:00] of how we actually got the Overton window pushed back to where it was from the extremists controlling much of the narrative.

It required people like you and me being out there in public and in the news regularly. You know, if it had just been a bunch of provocateur accounts online behind Pseu Anonymous identities, that would never have happened because. One of the things about pseudo anonymous identities and their lack of ability to effectively shift Overton windows is it's because they do not care about mainstream judgment.

They are much more open about flaunting mainstream cultural norms mm-hmm. In a way that marginalizes your movement. So if I was operating under a Pseu anonymous identity and trying to. Promote the prenatal list. Cause for example, the prenatal list cause would likely be far more extreme. There's many things I might say under a Pseu anonymous identity that I wouldn't say attached to my regular identity.

Right. And it's like, but [00:22:00] I'm glad that I'm not doing that because my goal is this movement is not to say everything that I think is true. It is to try to move the Overton window so that we can. Have a higher chance of human flourishing in the future of building that intergalactic human empire in the future.

And, and I see this online, there's a lot of pseu anonymous or anonymous, like nobody's will be like, why don't you say this offensive thing? Why don't you say that offensive thing? And it's like, because. That would really damage the movement. Like, like if, if I said that, then somebody's boss would go to them and say, Hey, you called yourself a prenatal list the other day, or you went to Nacon and this guy who has these thoughts is associated with that.

Like, are you really comfortable? Like, I, I don't wanna say anything on here that an educated person working at McKinsey wouldn't be like. Go to their boss and be like, no, I really am against the gender transition of children. No, I [00:23:00] really, you know, am for you know, the, the, the belief that humans have genes and those affect our behavior.

Like every scientific paper argues for that. I really, you know, you, you want us to take the extreme positions because extreme positions, and this is one of the problem with Pseu Anonymous. Content networks and environments is that they create environments where the most extremist positions are the most rewarded with re-engagement.

Take an environment like four chan or something like that where the shock positions are the positions that are most rewarded. Now, you don't wanna be like a Reddit, right, where it's the most normy positions that are the most rewarded. But in the same end, you don't want to be in an environment. Where it's only the most shocking positions that are the most rewarding if your goal as a movement is to move mainstream society and politics.

Simone Collins: Yeah, absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: Another one that they talked about that I saw was interesting is, well, people can [00:24:00] like, like physical safety, like people threaten us all the time, right? Yeah. But then the problem is, is. That, that information always eventually leaks. One of the funny things about having a bunch of friends who are billionaires is a, of people know that like all the billionaires they have like one house that's like their billionaire mansion house, but they don't live in it because it was always leaked long ago.

And then they have like other unassuming houses where they actually like. Party and invite their friends because those houses haven't been leaked. And so the mansion is always empty. And then the, the houses where they live are always like, actually not that particularly grandiose, which is another one of these things that we've talked about.

It's like, it's not that useful to be a billionaire in today's world.

Simone Collins: You know, I think to be fair, some just have very well defended compounds with. Very tall trees or whatever, but

Malcolm Collins: it's hard.

Simone Collins: Big fences. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You know, we keep in mind we live in a world of drones and everything now. Right? Like if somebody wants to fly by your compound and cameras, that can go [00:25:00] very, very far.

If you live in one of these compounds, there's almost always somebody looking through every one of your windows.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Kind of creepy. Well, no, it is creepy, but it's the reality of the situation these days. It just, yeah, you have to expect

Simone Collins: it and it's better to be prepared than to try to avoid something that you really can't control.

That's, to me, a lot more scary. Like with cancer, I'm just assuming I'm going to get cancer and I'm gonna screen early for it and, and hopefully catch it early, being like, wow, I just hope I never get cancer. But never screening for, it seems like a death wish.

Malcolm Collins: Another one you hear is, well, companies are gonna try to manipulate me.

Right. You know, and it's like, are you really like that? Mentally weak? Like yeah, I like that Amazon knows a lot about me so it can give me good recommendations and I don't waste my time. Oh,

Simone Collins: I wanted to know more about me. It. Yeah. It, it could do better. No, I was the same

Malcolm Collins: with Steam. I get annoyed that Steam's game recommendations aren't good enough.

I'm like, you should have know me better. Lot of information on what games I play. [00:26:00] Yeah. Why do you not know that I want more card based and, and, and, and, and turn based tactical games, like mm-hmm. Come on Steam. I'm expecting this of you. I want these indie recommendations. Right. You know? And yeah,

Simone Collins: it's, I think the, the most interesting thing though is just the, the extent to which.

In the future, in a post AI world, you will matter because people will know about you and want to work with you, or they'll have heard about this thing that you build or this service that you provide, and they will want to buy it from you. You, you can't just get by anonymously with, with no. Searchable public profile and expect to find work or to sell the products you're gonna sell.

Talk to me. They're

Malcolm Collins: like, oh, I'm a, you know, work was me and I searched them and I don't find anything. I'm like, I'm not, why would we

Simone Collins: believe you? Yeah. Where's, what's your reputation? Where can I see your work?

Malcolm Collins: This Hass been like a, a, a reporter or [00:27:00] something. Like an undercover reporter. Right? Like that's a huge red flag that you have.

No really deep online persona and, and I just won't work with people like that anymore because, but it just,

Simone Collins: even more importantly though, we, we are, it's, it's already starting. The, I think the CEO of LinkedIn wrote a New York Times op-ed recently about how already the bottom rung of the job market is collapsing.

People on entry level jobs across industries, like whether it's customer service or coding or something else legal, they're not getting jobs anymore because those entry level jobs are being eaten up by ai.

Malcolm Collins: No. And then what's worse is people tried to get around this, like the reason why you could get away with this in the past is you could have proxies.

For competence, which would be, I went to Harvard, I went to Stanford, for example, I got my graduate degree at Stanford. Simone got her graduate degree at Cambridge, right? Like that used to be the proxy. I used to be able to stay quiet about who I was and then [00:28:00] rely on the reputation of the institution. To buoy my reputation.

But now we know that these institutions are like DI infested wokeness. Like you look at Harvard today, and I think Harvard and antisemitism like the two go hand in hand, right? Like these are institutions that are now. Systemically racist. And they really only affirm an individual's willingness to compromise their morality to play within the social hierarchy.

And I think for people of our generation you know, there's gonna be some, and, and people going through them today, there's gonna be some leeway given. But I think in five to 10 years they're just not gonna have the, the poll that they've had historically. Well,

Simone Collins: that and, and. Personal networks this is already falling apart.

As you found out when you went back to Dallas and you saw all the kids that came from wealthy, well connected families that used to, from their culture, expect that because they had this wealthy [00:29:00] family in Dallas, it was well connected and did all this business stuff, that their job would be. Set. They, it would be spoken for, they would be fine.

And then they were finding that like, you know, now these companies are, it doesn't

Malcolm Collins: work. Doesn't it doesn't work. Yeah. No, no, no. Intergenerational nepotism and, and in is is not as effective as it let's historically for people who wonder why it's so ineffective now. So a lot of the systems that intergenerational Nepotist set up to make this stuff work had the passive assumption.

That your family was going to control the company that your family owned or founded or anything like that. Mm-hmm. The problem is, is that these companies all became public and or took private equity

Simone Collins: and got a board and owned Yeah, yeah. There owned by, yeah. There was like one iteration

Malcolm Collins: where like the board would still hire the son.

Right. Like that was seen as Okay, whatever. Like that happened to my dad. Right. Like he was hired to run one of the companies his grandfather founded. By the board, but it was actually because the board was trying to do a coup on his grandfather, right? Mm-hmm. Like, even, even then you had the, [00:30:00] the issue of but they, but they wanted somebody who the grandfather approved of, right?

And the grandfather thought he was too young and, and easily pushed around bull. So like, well, so anyway the, the, the, the, the, you even saw that then. But, but now a board, like somebody going in and being like, promote my son. They'd be like. Look, we might be able to give him some like middling level position with like a grandiose title, but that is at most in his salaries coming out of yours.

Simone Collins: That, yeah. But that, so that was the, that was the pre AI. Crumbling, and this is the pre, now we're in post

Malcolm Collins: ai

Simone Collins: where a lot of people, yeah. So now, you know, it used to be that like maybe a family member could expedite the extent to which your job application was considered at a company or act as a referral and a, a reference.

But now people just aren't hiring in that way at all. And really the one way that you're gonna get hired is if someone's like, Hey, I want the best like designer of this type, you know? Or I want. [00:31:00] You know, the like, oh, that guy that, you know, whose podcast I follow, you know, his takes are really good. And that's who they're gonna hire more unknown online.

This is actually

Malcolm Collins: such a good point, and I wanna elevate it. In the past, if you're trying to maximize your higher ability in the world, right, by like elite organizations or anything like that, what you wanted was when somebody Googles like. Brain computer, because that's my specialty before all this brain computer interface expert.

This is for how you, you, you devices that directly controlled electronics with your thoughts. That's what I worked on before all of this, that was my specialty in neuroscience.

Not like mystically, it was like implants, like Neuralink is a good example. Anyway so, so I would want somebody to Google that and my name to be the first name that appears.

Now what I want is somebody to go to an AI and say, who's the world expert in brain computer interface? And my name is the first that comes up. The way that I achieve each of those two goals [00:32:00] is dramatically different.

Simone Collins: Good point. Yeah. Yeah. If you're writing prolifically about it, if you're the one who's engaging in the online discourse about brain computer interface, grok Perplexity, Claude Chat, GPT, they're going to point to you.

Malcolm Collins: And then there's the secondary part of how power networks form. This is something Brian Chow was talking to us a lot about personally, and I think he's absolutely right about this, is that the new country club is the signal group.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's great. That's a great way of putting it. Well,

Malcolm Collins: no, I mean, country clubs, who are you going or be Hobnobbing was a bunch of old people who have no power anymore.

Yeah. Like all of the old communities that were like the secret societies, you know, whether, you know you're Skull and Bones. You can see our episode on that one totally woke, like it's pointless. It's not useful for hiring anymore. Bohemian Groves, the average age is like 86 now. It's completely, yeah.

There's no point useless. From, from, from a networking perspective. Well, and even your

Simone Collins: dad told me when he was visiting that he waited for 22 years. No, it's a 22 year wait

Malcolm Collins: list. Like, no, and he waited that long [00:33:00] because keep in mind it was an organization like the Bohemian Grove. As you get older the, so if, if, if in one generation.

It's a group of 50 year olds, right? Like, okay, the organization, the average age is 50, right? Well, that means the average person they're trying to induct is gonna be one of their friends who's gonna be 50, but it takes that person 20 years to get in. Now, the average age of the organization isn't 50 anymore.

I. It's 70 and the organization has been around for hundreds of years. So now the average organization is basically the maximum human lifespan, like two years before you die. And that is just not, it's

Simone Collins: like waiting for, it's waiting to become Pope at this point.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's waiting to become Pope. No one there.

Is, is is going to have like an active ability to sort of affect society at this point. And I think that this is what we're seeing across the board within these different organizations. Now, Simone, you ran, you were managing Director of Dialogue, which is a secret society founded by Peter Taylor and Aaron Hoffman.

And then. For Schmidt [00:34:00] Futures, we put together another secret society which I don't think is still operational. And then we've worked for like Future Forum and some other secret societies in terms of putting them together. So we have insights into a lot of the operational secret society. Well, and well then we also

Simone Collins: know how, at least for a while, like Manifest worked, for example, and like how speakers were selected for that.

I think that what all of those societies had in common, which I think is more representative of what, of what we should expect in a techno futile society. In other words, a post AI society. Is that these were in the end societies that were handpicked as like, these are the people that so and so likes, and they may pretend to have objective metrics for, Hey, this person qualifies and this person doesn't.

But in the end, in all of those, I could point out glaring. Exceptions on both the rejection and exception standpoints.

Malcolm Collins: No, I completely agree. It's, it's, it's, you have to be, so it's, it's, does

Simone Collins: this person like your [00:35:00] content, does this person like you, do they like your online?

Malcolm Collins: I mean like Hereon, which is the other Peter tlc.

Yeah, yeah. Hereon is like,

Simone Collins: Hey, do these people think you're cool? And, and, or like, do their friends recommend them to them? If so, you're in. If not, you're not. And again, like how are you gonna get there point without any sort of reputation. The point

Malcolm Collins: is that if you're talking about a secret society, like say hereon, which is probably the most exclusive like real, like actionable secret society in the world right now.

Most people are, I say to somebody who's supposed to be running the Illuminati. If you go to the book, the Bloodlines of the Illuminati, which is the main book of the Illuminati that came out in the 1980s, it says, my dad is one of the people who runs it. And that I. And his oldest male son, so I should be in it, right?

Like, I am not, maybe

Simone Collins: he does Malcolm, the man loves his privacy. Although I

Malcolm Collins: have had powerful people come to me and say they wanna restart a real illuminati. Can you, can you do this? And I've like drafted like business plans on how to do that. But the, the point I'm making here [00:36:00] is that if you look at something like heretic con nepotism, like these old nepotistic networks mean.

Like almost nothing. Yeah. Unless the parents incorporated you into the content they were producing, which is why No, no. But

Simone Collins: then on your own merit, you have to be cool. If you're just like the lame kid, then no one's gonna wanna invite you. Even if you are so and so's son or daughter or friend or whatever, you have to one, one

Malcolm Collins: exception I can think of.

He, somebody's grandson, a somebody, Milton Friedman's grandson, who is No, he's interesting

Simone Collins: on his own. Right. That doesn't even work.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah. No, they're, what are some, honestly, I can't really think of any, some have, some societies have made exceptions for certain members because they feel that those members who on their own are a major draw.

So one, one bit of calculus it does take place with these societies [00:37:00] that I'm sure will take place in techno fiefdoms as well, is I really need person X to be a part of my fiefdom. I also know that person X may exit in a huff if I don't cave to their insistence. That person Y is accepted. Mm. And so there are instances in these societies of completely lame like.

Women boring? No, not always Women. Not always women. Just boring people being accepted at least on a temporary basis. Actually, this is

Malcolm Collins: a really good point. Sorry. I was just thinking about this. Is it. Men in today's world are often more likely to put pressure on a society to accept someone they want to f than one of their kids.

Fair. Yeah. Which, which, no. And I, I even say it's like more culturally normative, like it's seen as so like the old nepotistic networks at work. But the reason I was saying signal groups matter is like. If I go to like the Dallas Country Club, 'cause when I grew up, that was like a really prestigious thing.

You'd pay tons of money to be a member of it. You, I went

Simone Collins: [00:38:00] there together for, to meet someone for lunch at one point, right? Was, yeah. We met my

Malcolm Collins: grandmother for lunch there. It's really big. That's right. It's outdated. Like nobody importance going to the Dallas Country Club anymore. You know, everyone there is.

Is is sort of irrelevant culturally speaking because that sort of wealth accumulation is just not important within the existing paradigm. This is for people who want to ape or, or pretend like they are successful rather than actually having any influence. And that wasn't the case within previous generations because.

Here's the point. If I'm one of the top, like 0.5% of the population of Dallas, I don't care about networking with the other 0.5% of the population of Dallas. I know this is somebody who was in Dallas as a 0.5 percenter. I care about networking with the 0.5% in Manhattan, in London and LA and New York and the general internet.

Right? You know, and if I'm in the top 0.5% of, of, of Manhattan. I, I need to also know the top influencers in, you know, SF and, and [00:39:00] across the internet if I want to matter, which is why the Signal group has taken over from the and I don't know why it's always Signal, I actually prefer WhatsApp, but Signal is where they, all the fancy groups are.

But that's why the signal group has taken over from the old country club or region locked thing. We actually have some recording. Oh, let's see if we can find it. Where we recorded exploring the old core club in New York that had been abandoned.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. I can share that with you.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Which is why that was weird.

Speaker 10: That's been taken out.

It.

Speaker 11: Whoa. [00:40:00] I like their curved couches.

Speaker 10: Oh, look, this is where they do the hair.

Speaker 11: They had a salon. Look at this. This is where they, their hair.

Speaker 10: I mean, these haircuts cost like a hundred bucks, 200 bucks. What do you think? Oh,

Speaker 11: like 200. 200, like I would say 180. But then with Tip, you'd probably be paying at least two 30. That's

Speaker 10: well this sort of, you know, who's in Manhattan anymore?

Speaker 11: Yeah.

Speaker 10: I remember how cool I thought this was.

Speaker 11: Yeah, this like bench this, this concept of these social clubs where like luxe people get to hang out. I wonder how long it's gonna last.

Speaker 10: Urban Lux, exploring urban lux. They make people one these deserted pit.

Speaker 11: Well, that's the thing is people don't believe us. When you say like most office buildings a New York are abandoned now. Oh, this is a salon. Oh, look at this. [00:41:00] Oh my god. A full out salon, a full out hair salon. Whoa, cool. , It's such a shame thinking about these gorgeous spaces and this, you know, with demographic collapse, I think the crazy thing is.

Like the, the, the world will be full of these spaces and you think like, oh, great, this will turn into an apartment. This is not gonna turn into an apartment. This is not gonna be used by

Speaker 10: someone. Yeah. The Friar's Club is vacant now too. What?

Speaker 11: No.

Speaker 10: Yeah. It's gonna vacant. Like the sign's even falling apart.

S**t.

Speaker 11: No, look at

Speaker 10: that. Look, look at that. It says vacant right there above the Friar's Club. It's a doesn't a historic place where they used to do these New York, uh, all the famous comedians of the world would go and you'd, uh, have some like secret society thing

Speaker 11: that is fake and. No. So core club fires, fires club,

Speaker 10: all, all the elite don't wanna be here anymore.

They don't have the money anymore. It's what's the point when you can go to the distributed elite things like dialogue or something?

Speaker 11: Yeah. Or like I guess their houses. I feel [00:42:00] like maybe the future hangouts of the elites will just be at each other's sprawling compounds and mansions.

Speaker 10: Well, that's what we do whenever we're hanging out with our elite friends.

They don't wanna be seen in public.

Speaker 11: That's true. So places like Friar's Club Core Club. There too much to maintain.

Speaker 10: By the way, the funny thing about the elite that the non elite don't know is they all have these giant mansions, but publicly, everybody knows where the mansions are and so they're too afraid to go to their mansions.

So if you're actually your, they're, you're they're friend. When they invite you over, you're going to like often an unassuming house in the middle of the city. Um, look at this, my God. Where they actually spend their time, a plan, a living plan. And they just,

Speaker 11: well, I mean, who's gonna take it? Right? Like, I am sure that some staff were like, oh yeah, take this, take that.

But like, what are you gonna do with this stuff? Oh, just another locker room. Um, oh, this must have been the men's locker room. It's like a

Speaker 10: private area for styling yourself.

Speaker 11: Yeah, this is, this must have been the women's locker room. So this [00:43:00] was the vanity. Oh my God. They had multiple vanity rooms. Oh my God. Look at these Vanity.

Oh god. Core club was great. My gosh. This? Yeah. This must be the women's locker room. Wow. So we were in the men's locker room to start. We got the steam room, mini fridge, sauna, and Whoa, whoa. Oh steam room. This is a steam room.

Speaker 10: It's really nice looking

Speaker 11: sauna. Mini fridge, beautiful sinks. Wow.

Nice lockers. God

Speaker 10: fancy showers was like wood.

Speaker 11: Oh, of course. This feels like such a waste. I know. Do you think in the future people will just camp out in these places?

Speaker 10: No, they're gonna fall apart.

Speaker 11: Yeah, all this really nice. And that makes me so the rod of

Speaker 10: New York, you saw in the game, I'm dis designing right now where I'm like, ah, you can't [00:44:00] even stay in the buildings anymore because they're unstable.

Speaker 11: Yeah,

Speaker 7: all right, here we are in the library

bought. I remember back in the day, inflation, I don't dunno what they cost, a pay, but they used to cost like 50 bucks. What? Cost? 50 bucks. Oh, the books. These big books. But now it's probably 120 or something. I don't know.

Speaker 8: I don't know. I wonder if, um, some of these books were from members

Malcolm Collins: yeah, we're a horrible urban explorer. They,

Simone Collins: they moved, I think they, I. I think they probably just downsized. I think they're still around.

Malcolm Collins: Operational around.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But I'm, this is the

Malcolm Collins: group that my mom was a member of, so I have some familiarity with it.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But they were apparently like a big mucky muck thing for a while, and I was like, what?

This is also interesting about board positions is my dad was seeing them as quite like a prestigious thing in his generation. And you remember when I was younger, I wanted them, and then recently I sort of came to the realization of like, board positions don't [00:45:00] matter anymore.

Simone Collins: Well, what they became, I think there was this, this misunderstanding among people was that I could have a career of being on boards that board positions pay.

And yes, it's true, some do. But the vast majority don't. In fact, the, the positions that most people get on when attempting to become career board position holders require you to donate significant amount of money.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Most boards

Simone Collins: are basically, oh, these people are on because they donated a lot of money

Malcolm Collins: to this company.

Well, they wanna feel special. They wanna feel like they have influence and they don't.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And so they're just, they're just donator donors who, get board positions to feel fancy and then they kind of expect, well, okay, I'll just donate a ton to be on all these companies boards, but then other companies will approach me to become a board member because I'm such a prolific board member and therefore my, I must be very good.

And I think that that's the leap that doesn't work. And that leads people to. End up spending a lot of money [00:46:00] on nonprofits that don't necessarily do anything helpful, aside from spend a lot of their money just finding new people to get into the scam. So yeah, it's, it's kind of a, a lame way to spend your time.

Malcolm Collins: Alright, Simone, I, I love you to today. This has been a really interesting topic for me. Do you have any final thoughts

Simone Collins: If you want to have a livelihood in a post, EIH. You need to build an online footprint that is niche, that is distinct, where you're digging into unique talents of yours and where you are at least on the pathway to providing a unique product or service that either your local community will want or that your, like the 1% of the people in their techno fiefdoms will want to buy from you.

Like. Really weird cool art or custom made cabinetry.

Malcolm Collins: So Well you wanna make yourself an AI's [00:47:00] go-to source for some subject.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And like, it can be really specific. Like, one of my, my, my friends from childhood, both of her parents were artists and they were artists by trade. They made their money doing, making art.

But how did they do it? It was because one of them, for example, did masonry. For all the giant mansions in California. Like they wanted custom stone work and he did it. And I think that his work is as foreign as it seemed to me when I was a kid, is way more representative of what we can expect to see.

People making as their livelihoods going forward, plus the locksmith who just came over to our house today. Like that kind of work is also something that I would expect to see. Here's my question for you, Simone.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. What is your thoughts if somebody's like, well, if the AI have access to enough of my work, it can eventually clone me.

And my answer would be, if you're doing that kind of work, you're in trouble. Like,

Simone Collins: yeah, no, and that's, that's a problem when I, when I say stone masonry, I'm talking about something that even it [00:48:00] would be difficult for a, a, a robot to, to physically do because it is, it is a, a vertical integrated process.

You are procuring the stone, you're hauling it over in your truck. You are, you are in installing it, you are moving it around. You are carving it. These are things, you know, you get up a robot or some kind of automated system do components of that. But in the end it's a lot easier for a wealthy person.

Just, just, just talk higher. Okay. Well, so

Malcolm Collins: here's, here's me playing devil's advocate. Okay? Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: In a few years, AI is gonna be able to create episodes of Basecamp. Yeah. With you and I talking and people won't be able to tell it's not us.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Are you worried about that or you think that's a great thing?

Simone Collins: Basecamp isn't our bet on our, our career and our specialty.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Our career and our specialty I think is gonna focus more on. Governance, community building kid education, and especially cultivating a network.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I'm gonna be glad when I can go to an AI and say, make an episode of Basecamp for me. I don't have time today.

Simone Collins: Oh [00:49:00] no. I don't wanna, even if honestly, even if these never got published, I would still

Malcolm Collins: Well, that's good training data. I mean, that's why we do it. Is, is so AI has good training data on us. And we

Simone Collins: also do it 'cause it's fun. This is our, this is our date night. This is our time that we enjoy because. We like talking each other.

You're such a nerd every time you come to you're

Malcolm Collins: just like, excited about AI or excited about the direction the future is going. I'm so excited to have married somebody like you who's not a stick in the mud. And if you wanna check out some of our existing AI projects right now, whistling.ai was a z is an AI system.

Right now it's a web app, so you can put it on your phone or whatever. We're eventually gonna build like standalone devices for it. That allows your kids to talk to their stuffed animals so you can program it to believe it's any stuffed animal, any form factor you want, and then have it bring the conversation back to any educational topic you want.

We've also got using your kid's

Simone Collins: name and understanding their interests. So if you say that your kid really likes Minecraft or Legos or. Bluey or, you know, [00:50:00] butterflies. It, it will also talk about, it's a free

Malcolm Collins: now, just give us feedback. Be like, Hey, the kid liked this, the kid didn't like this. Yeah. We got Pia or the College Institute, whatever you wanna call it.

Easy to find. It is our educational system for older kids. You know, we've got about like 20 or 30 active users every day now, which is really great. And we want more. We're gonna make it cheaper. That's one of the things we're working on right now. And very

Simone Collins: less expensive. It is actually a costly service.

Malcolm Collins: Less expensive. Yes. And then we've also got our fab.ai, which is our final product which is the video game immersive AI world that we're building. And this one, if, if you're interested in sort of exploring immersive worlds that are built by ai get on lists for this. We occasionally release demos at various stages of development.

We did that like a week ago, and then we took it back offline because. The development team was like, I can make this so much better. I don't want it out there, I don't wanna reflecting us right now, and then we'll put it back out. But I, I like that. I like that it's, it's, it's continuing development.

It will be out there more and [00:51:00] more. And I am just really excited for all of these projects that we're involved in in managing, because AI has sort of opened the field to change everything. Like when I look at the whistling system and I give it to our kids, I'm like, why has nobody else made this?

Like, why is everybody else's like AI talkie thing. So dumb. Like why isn't it educational? Why isn't it, why doesn't it let me make it whatever I want it to be? You know? Why is it all controlled?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Apparently. The talk to app that was released by Hailey, whatever her name is, the Hawk two, A woman.

Yeah. Had a soccer coach on it for the longest time, like just weird, weird stuff going on. So, soccer coach. Yeah. Don't ask me why. Like

Malcolm Collins: a

Simone Collins: big soccer coach. Yeah. Like, yeah, like ai, soccer coach, chatbot.

Malcolm Collins: Testing. How do

Simone Collins: I look? You look a little dark, but I know you like a little dark, so I don't know. That's how

Malcolm Collins: I, that's how everybody knows I'm mysterious. [00:52:00] You like it dark.

Simone Collins: You are mysterious.

Speaker 6: The are. Dirt. The invisible bugs are still in there, right? Pretty sure. Yeah. The bugs live on the leaves.

Speaker 4: What do you think? Torsten? Mommy, did you see birds back there? All right, let's keep going. I see a little white spots, so daddy.

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