Description: Brian Chau joins Simone and Malcolm to discuss the latest data on Gen Z sexuality and relationships. They analyze declining physicality, porn addiction, anime girl attraction, generalized neuroticism, and more "cursed" stats from Brian's interviews with young alt-righters.

Brian Chau: [00:00:00] this episode specifically, was in part a, an excuse for me to interrogate the love lives of my Zoomer friends. I am on the older side of Zoomer of the Zoomers.

Brian Chau: And yeah, I basically asked, I asked around. I asked all three of the alt right catboys that I know in real life. Yeah, and basically tried to get a kind of gestalt, like we were talking about, a kind of summary of their love lives. People were very happy to offer, you know, these kind of predilections, being into especially certain type of anime girls.

Brian Chau: I feel like there is if you talk about a real life person who you're attracted to, I think there's this soft idea of, civil rights law coming, coming after you, if, or people, you know, who feel, who are, like, similar in appearance, feeling uncomfortable with that. And that's something that Zoomers have.[00:01:00]

Brian Chau: Want to avoid, but that's the same is not true for, for anime girls. So, so it's almost considered this is like, this is like this kind of like weird post sexuality thing

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Well, hello, we are super excited to have a VIP guest with us today, Brian Chow, he is first and foremost in our minds, of course, and from for the past quite a while of the host of the amazing podcast from the new world, really good long listen, if you are looking for something good to listen to to learn from amazing interviews.

Simone: But more recently, Brian has become a senior machine learning policy fellow. Brian at the Alliance for the Future, something that we shall talk about in another episode with him. But today, I think we're going to get into something really interesting. Brian, do you want to kick us off

Brian Chau: here? Right. So I was I was listening to another great podcast Basecamp with Simone Collins and Malcolm, Simone and Malcolm Collins.

Brian Chau: Yeah. So, so, so I listened to an episode that you guys done. You guys [00:02:00] did on your own about it was one of the ones about Zoomer sexuality and I thought I have so many takes on this and I'm not populating my sub stack with my Zoomer sexuality takes maybe, maybe like the paid feed, but you know, there's so many other things that I'm working on.

Brian Chau: Right now that I just want to be more, I just want the Substack to be more laser focused on, the podcast to be more laser focused on. Yeah, you're high culture, we're low culture. Okay, yeah yeah, we will be talking about that eventually. And yeah, I thought this was a great venue to talk about it. I think that we have, you know, some similarities, some disagreements probably.

Brian Chau: But I do think that there's just not enough, there's just not enough like... Horizontal exploration of this idea, right? This idea of kind of changing, changing the axis, changing how people interpret sexuality, the kind of like default narrative. This is the theme of my podcast often, is this kind of default narrative.

Brian Chau: And this is like orthogonal [00:03:00] to like the actual thing that's happening. I think, I think the episode of course that really, really struck through to me was the one about I think like submissive and dominance. But also, you know, also this wasn't this was actually after this was released after I reached out to you guys.

Brian Chau: But also, the one on alt right catgirls, that is very, very important topic of our generation. No, it's such a thing

Malcolm: is that the the concept of the alt right catgirl I keep seeing and The, as the right has, because it used to be like the left was sex positive and the right was sex negative to some extent, and now the, the left has totally ceded any, any manifestation that is sex, sex positive for men, you know, if I'm, I want my overwatch to have, you know, sexy tracer, but that is a right wing idea.

Malcolm: Which is really interesting.

Brian Chau: Right, it's the Barstool [00:04:00] Conservatives, right? Yeah. Yeah, the party of, the party of horny men and also the people who hate horny men the most. Yeah, I think that's a good description of the Republican Party. Although, you know, although some of the, some of the the, the right, the right wing elite, you know, are coming around to it.

Brian Chau: Have you guys talked about Bronze Age Pervert on the show? No. It's a good character to mention. We'd love for you to go deeper. Yeah. Okay, okay. So, yeah. So, Bronj's age pervert is this very hard to describe in one sentence. His, his philosophy is Nietzsche and bodybuilding.

Brian Chau: Done. Easy. Yeah.

Malcolm: Yeah. You describe him as like a, a poet he's much more interested in conveying poetry and an aesthetic than specific ideas in a way that is... It's really interesting and a new art form that works within the online medium. Yeah. It's very

Simone: practiced affectation.

Malcolm: Yes. But I fear that sometimes people confuse what he's saying with a systematically [00:05:00] and internally consistent world perspective, which is not, it's an aesthetically consistent moral perspective, but not really a logically consistent

Brian Chau: moral perspective.

Brian Chau: Right, right. I mean, this is something that I try to do as well. There's, you know, there's if you look at the history of it, there's, you know, political theory, you know, there's like Hobbes long treatises on, you know, how to run a state and the role of the citizen within the state. And, you know, that's one thing.

Brian Chau: I think that, you know, other than Autistic theory nerds, very few people are going to read anything like that. Maybe for your political science class, you know, maybe, maybe there are like kids who are sitting through their political science class who are listening to this. And then other than, and then there, there's on the other hand, these kind of like fully affective manifestos, and usually I, the way that I see it bridged is I see people giving like Straussian interpretations of basically artworks or of culture of different approaches to these [00:06:00] things, and using that as a way to create something that is that is normative, that is creating some sort of logical order, but without necessarily committing to, you know, the kind of legalism of someone like Hobbes.

Brian Chau: Hmm. I think that's the goal of Bronze Age mindset. It's a lot more obvious if you look at, for example I think Christopher Rufo is a good example of this, of someone who is like he's, like Christopher Rufo supports specific policies, right? I'm not sure he has like a consistent political theory, you know, like a theory of how, how, how the world works, how the political system should works in the same way that, you know, like classical liberalism or, you know, like Burkean conservatism is a political theory.

Brian Chau: It's very different from that, but he does have both an aesthetic and, you know, at least like a direction or a combination of things that he's trying to accomplish.

Malcolm: Well, I'd love to hear what's your thesis on how gender and sexuality are changing, [00:07:00] personally.

Brian Chau: Right. So, so there's just like a huge dominance shortage, right?

Brian Chau: You just see this everywhere. Actually, I'm not sure like how everywhere you see this. Right, but this was in part, like this episode specifically, was in part a, an excuse for me to interrogate the love lives of my Zoomer friends. I am on the older side of Zoomer of the Zoomers. I have many, you know, many friends some of them I assure you are good people.

Brian Chau: And yeah, I basically asked, I asked around. I talked about, you know, what issues we were going to discuss. I asked all three of the alt right catboys that I know in real life. Yeah, and basically tried to get a kind of gestalt, like we were talking about, a kind of summary of their love lives. And, you know, my, my old...[00:08:00]

Brian Chau: My old advice to my fellow zoomers was just, you know, it's actually very similar to something that you talked about in, in, in your book. That, you know, 10x ing the number of people you interact with does, accomplishes the same thing as making yourself 10x more attractive. Right. Like the chance of finding someone, the chance of finding someone good is, is the same if you, if you do both of those things, right?

Brian Chau: If you're, if you're specifically looking for one person who is, you know,

Simone: compatible with you. So I want to make two predictions so that you can correct me where I'm wrong. Or it was where I think. Gen Z is, and I want you to like, from your interview to say this is where you're totally off.

Simone: So one is, or maybe there's more than two things. Basically they're not having sex, or they're moving more in a direction of asexuality, or post sexuality. That there's, there's more conservatism, but not in ways that you would expect. It's not Oh, we should go back to the old ways or the traditional ways or [00:09:00] religious ways, but more like men and women are quite different.

Simone: Maybe we should bring back monogamy, you know, like things are really bad right now. But then also like extreme levels of relationship nihilism, like not if it matters, I'm going to be alone forever. Like the same, the same thing that millennials experienced with wealth, like I'm never going to be able to afford a house or I'm never going to not have student debt.

Simone: Gen Z is going through with, with sex and relationship and marriage. Well, I'm never going to get married. I'm never going to have a spouse. I'm never going to have kids. So where, where am I wrong here?

Brian Chau: Yeah, the relationship doomerism is definitely a real thing that is almost 100% right. There are people I know who have a kind of conservative disposition who are basically like, well, I'm not going to find a trad wife anyway, so might as well, you know, do hookups or whatever.

Brian Chau: Hmm. That is a real thing. [00:10:00] I do think it is a real and very common thing. I should say for the audience, you know, this doesn't matter a lot. It is mostly, you know, like college educated people, probably like more, more Asian, but not like that Asian. But yeah you know, what you would expect on like an MIT ish campus, right?

Brian Chau: Or not you know, not MIT specifically. So

Malcolm: continue. I want to hear specifically. So you interviewed three people. What did they say? Oh, I interviewed

Brian Chau: a lot more than three people. I interviewed a lot more than three people. So the number one thing when it comes to the, the, the other topic, right? With this, this kind of I, I don't think it's a conservatism it's a kind of porn addiction.

Brian Chau: I don't know. It's Hmm. I think Simone, when you were on my podcast, you talked about the best alternative to, to no agreement or something like that.

Simone: Yeah, the BATNA for people in relationships. So the best alternative to a negotiated offer essentially, like what are you going to do if you

Brian Chau: [00:11:00] don't get a deal?

Brian Chau: That's, that's what it seems like. A lot of people are just, you know. It's a very happy equilibrium for them to just be, like, jerking off to porn. That's their, you know, that's their main way to consume sexuality. And they really they're a lot of people who, you know, just know, like, all kinds of crazy things.

Brian Chau: Know all kind of you know, tricks in order to pleasure themselves. Who... really have no relationship experience whatsoever. Maybe they've done hookups or something like that. But this is a very this is a very common thing that happens. Where, I think they'll log onto an internet forum.

Brian Chau: They have they're, like, people with no social skills. And I, I do mean like none this is not an exaggeration. And they'll log onto like these internet forums and just talk to, just talk to like strangers online. That's their default, right? You know, you, you, you go and stack overflow to solve your computer science problems.

Brian Chau: I thought

Simone: you solve your relationship problems. I'm [00:12:00] like,

Brian Chau: this is something. Yeah. Yeah. So, so people are going, people are going on Reddit forums. And, and like Twitter, x. com, you know, they're going on the appropriately named x. com to ask for their relationship advice and mostly getting, you know, substitutes for relationship advice.

Brian Chau: That I think is the trend. Yeah, well, okay,

Malcolm: so here's a question I have. So in my generation, and I'm wondering if this is part because we talk about how people are changing biologically. But and we talk about failed relationship markets. But I think 1 thing that's that's not talked about it enough. Is it in my generation?

Malcolm: Our primary social networks were are in person for networks. And therefore the primary thing that motivated me to sleep around a lot, like I slept around a lot, like in person when I was younger, it was not actually getting to sleep with people. It was the way my peer network saw me because I was sleeping with lots [00:13:00] of people.

Malcolm: And I wonder if the breakdown of in person social networks has removed a lot of the motivation for real sexual encounters versus just

Brian Chau: masturbation. Yeah, I think so. It's like an asocial thing. Definitely, I think, you know, less than less than the decline in like actual sex, I think it's like the decline in talking about sex.

Brian Chau: It's just you know, like Xers and boomers would talk to me about how there's a kind of like implicit status hierarchy. Especially among men. Maybe it's not, not, I don't think it's the same with women of, you know, there's pressure to lose your virginity, there's pressure to to, to sleep around, and I have never experienced that.

Brian Chau: I think most of the people I talk to, there's no pressure, especially I think actually there, this is a thing that I feel like is very wrong and maybe very dependent on selection bias, but I feel like there's almost [00:14:00] more of a pressure for women than men among zoomers. To have sex. At least among the ones that I, I talked to.

Brian Chau: Yeah. Again,

Malcolm: please elaborate on that.

Simone: Yeah.

Brian Chau: So, I mean, I think with most men, it's just neutral. There, there is a kind of, you know, Basically completely, you know, biological desire. People have innate desires, that's not, I don't think that's changed. But as a kind of social force, I don't think it exists.

Brian Chau: Or, if anything, there are, it is almost discouraged to talk about it. Among men. Whereas, among women, I think there is... It is much more high variance, I would say, there are definitely, you know, families that are much more conservative about this especially immigrants, but I think like among white women, it is among the few that I talked to and I, I want to say, you know, this is not that large of a sample size, so I, I'm like, I'm 95% sure it's like sample [00:15:00] size or like selection bias problems.

Brian Chau: Both of them said, both white women who I talked to like Zoomer white women, said that they felt encouraged to, to do such a thing. Not like strongly, you know, like you, you must, you know, you're, you're the most alpha if you sleep with a lot of people, but, but you know, that this is a good and healthy thing to do in your life.

Malcolm: Yeah. But I think probably a better way to think of it with women is this is how you're not cast out of the group. This is how you're normal, or is that wrong? Yeah,

Brian Chau: I would say so. I would say so, yeah. That is one way to think about it. How do they think

Malcolm: about deviant sexuality? The people you talk to.

Malcolm: Especially the right wing zoomers, I find very interesting. How they think about deviant or weird sexuality. The

Brian Chau: right wing zoomers? I would say that more in general, there's like a blurring of the line. It's not very... They're almost not aware that it's deviant sexuality. Or what specifically do you mean here?

Brian Chau: Do you mean homosexuality? No, no, no.

Malcolm: So, [00:16:00] catgirlism, I find, is the... I mean, that's the totem that we were raising in that podcast, was this idea that catgirlism is a quote unquote deviant sexuality, but every guy thinks anime catgirls are cute, you know? And so it's not actually a deviant sexuality, and that's why it's become this...

Malcolm: totem for the portion of the right that's trying to reclaim male sexuality. But I wonder how other people, you know, whether it's femboyism or anything else, how they're interacting. Is there anything where they're like, this is bad sexuality and this is good sexuality, or is it just like all good sexuality?

Malcolm: Or is it just like sexuality as this? It's like black muck that's ruining everything,

Brian Chau: Yeah. There is no understanding that an attraction to catgirls is unhealthy in any way. This is something that is accepted as normal and ordinary. It's, it's, it's not you know, every, every, person, every guy I talk to is into cat girls.

Brian Chau: But this is just, [00:17:00] you know, this is not seen as some kind of weird thing now. And I think the same thing is true for a lot of similar kind of you know, soft fetishes, quote unquote, right? Both among men and women, I think, you know, people still, people, you know, still consider it like a different thing.

Brian Chau: You know, I think like Zoomer, even like Zoomer conservatives are fine with someone being gay or lesbian, but they still notice it as like a different thing. You know, like it wouldn't be like, oh, oh, that's like very unremarkable. And now that I know that my friend is like gay or lesbian, no, but, but like people will, will have that.

Brian Chau: Right. And I think this is also reflected in how, you know, easily they would mention these things to me. You know, they're also, this is a kind of selection bias as well of like people, you know, maybe not mentioning to me like more extreme things. People were very happy to offer, you know, these kind of predilections, being into especially certain type of anime girls.

Brian Chau: I feel like there is if you talk about a real life person who you're attracted [00:18:00] to, I think there's this soft idea of, civil rights law coming, coming after you, if, or people, you know, who feel, who are, like, similar in appearance, feeling uncomfortable with that. And that's something that Zoomers have.

Brian Chau: Want to avoid, but that's the same is not true for, for anime girls. So, so it's almost considered this is like, this is like this kind of like weird post sexuality thing that you're talking about. I, I agree. That's like the right way to frame it. That's really interesting. So let me give me like one more, like highly quotable sentence.

Brian Chau: It's, you know, it is the separation of attraction and physicality. That's what I think it is. Elaborate on that statement a bit, sorry. So, okay, so I'll tell one very funny case study of... So you probably have heard this, you know, this is more of a thing among progressive circles. But people will talk about, you know, sexuality versus romantic attraction, right?

Brian Chau: And I'm not sure like, [00:19:00] how serious of a thing this is. For example, some people will say they're like asexual but biromantic. Right. And will your audience know what that means? I don't know. This is the thing that left wingers will all know what it means, because it's pretty common among them.

Brian Chau: Basically, someone who has no sexual attraction, does not want to have sex with people in general, but wants to date and be softly affectionate with both men and women. And this, I think, is the clearest example. There's also, there's also someone who I talk to who is Basically gay in terms of, you know, sex acts, but it's like romantically attracted to women.

Brian Chau: And I do think this is, I do think this is increasingly common. I don't think it's extremely common, it's mostly still men who are, you know, attracted to women both romantically and sexually and vice versa. I don't think it's extremely common, but it's, it is definitely becoming more of a thing.

Malcolm: Yeah, so, so to this end, [00:20:00] I feel like I have a lot of Zoomer friends who I've talked to about this sort of thing. And of the right wing ones, I, I have seen basically zero homophobia. I have seen no uncomfortable with gayness at all in the right wing Zoomer audience. Is that something you've noticed as well, or have you seen any,

Brian Chau: Real...

Brian Chau: Among IRL people, yeah. Among online posters, no, no. That's just, I don't

Simone: know tradition. That's just online

Brian Chau: posters. Yes. But even then, I think it's

Brian Chau: You know, the kind of the kind of archetype of the Southern dad who would believe so strongly in his faith and that, you know, homosexuality is evil, that he would separate off his son, his gay son or lesbian daughter from, from the family I don't think it's that kind of Homophobia, it's kind of like, it's like the, like the, the, the, like race shitposting stuff where, you know, they'll be very happy to say, you know, look, look at these separate crime rates, you know, or, [00:21:00] or even to go further to that, right, to, to, to say like prescriptive things about race and like what, what policies they would want or like encouraging, you know, segregation practice.

Brian Chau: But in terms of if that person had a Black friend or a gay friend, I think it would be not too different than, you know, the rest of Zoomers. They would basically be fine with it. And you do see this with the, the exception, the accepting of people like Dave Rubin or of who is the very famous trans conservative person?

Simone: Oh, gosh.

Brian Chau: Well, I, I, I'd say, caitlyn Jenner. Caitlyn Jenner. Well, she's not conservative, but, there was, you know, there was airing of her as the person who would finally defeat Gavin Newsom. Oh. Governor of California. Yeah. Yeah. I missed that. Well, it was not that serious. I don't think she had a chance.

Brian Chau: But, you know, this, the the even mere acceptance of it. is, you know, it's, it's a sign that like that kind of psychological disposition at least is gone. Well,

Simone: so I get the impression that it, we're in, it is very [00:22:00] much a post sex world where it doesn't matter anymore.

Simone: It's like highly virtual. Like you alluded to it being somewhat divorced from physicality. You know, a lot of it more has to do with just the experience you're having online, which suggests that when we actually can get much more. Realistic AI boyfriends and girlfriends that like People are going to go for that because it's probably better than what you're going to get from a human that you have to accommodate in an annoying ways.

Brian Chau: Yeah. Yeah. Like the most beautiful flowers are the most fake. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It is very much, yeah. This is, I don't know. You, you can also almost see this in existing behavior, right? If you think of what's, what's stopping an AI from being like an OnlyFans operator, right? Pretty much nothing, pretty much just the quality of like, how well it can craft text messages and artificially generated porn.

Brian Chau: That is the limiting factor, you know, basically. There's no qualitative factor stopping AI from becoming an OnlyFans [00:23:00] model right now. It is the question

Simone: is, in the past, it was just, will we get a generation of people that's okay with that? Because if you were, I think, to take the majority of the millennial generation, Gen X, anyone before, they'd be like, When it has to be a human if it's a human, that's how I know it's good.

Simone: But I think that we finally got to a generational point where there isn't an assumption that human is better and that there's a, like a pretty big unmooring from IRL socialization and like IRL relationships. And since we interact with even our closest carbon based friends, like digitally mostly, there's just less of this feeling like you need to prioritize.

Brian Chau: It is not only the separation, but the inversion of online and real, real life. I am, this is, this is one of the trends that I'm most confident on, actually, in terms of, so, so this is the operational question [00:24:00] of would you prefer to have either a romantic or sexual relationship with someone you already know, or, or like a stranger online?

Brian Chau: And I think it's been going in the direction, in terms of sexual relationships, it's been going in the direction of prefer online for some time. But the thing that was very surprising to me was the same is true for romantic relationships. Where, what I think it is, is I think that the kind of female type social interaction of having friends for the purpose of being accepted into the group, that, that is the norm.

Brian Chau: Which itself is, I don't know if you would disagree, but I think Witch itself is a kind of masturbatory version of having real friends. Where, you know, you have you know, you have the aesthetics of friendship, you know, you go, you hang out, even, even like real life interactions are like this, but membership in the friend group is not [00:25:00] actually based on any kind of loyalty or any kind of personal traits, but rather a kind of, you know, a kind of conformity where that is also leaning towards the male type of friendship now.

Brian Chau: Where that ends up, or I don't know, maybe it was always like this, the male type, or like the this is the dominant form of friendship between men and women. Men, men will consider their female friends the same way. Women will consider their male friends the same way. There, there is no distinction between like the, the female type friend, friendship pattern and the like, intersex or that, that might not be the right word, but like the, the, the, the friendship between men and women.

Brian Chau: There's no distinction between that and, ooh female to female friendships. But hold on because that's a,

Simone: that's like a, an extreme divorce of like bronze age pervert. Ideology, right? Because he's talking about the need for male only spaces and that even male to male relationships are screwed up if they are in the presence of a [00:26:00] female because she ruins the dynamic and that we need to bring back male only spaces so that men don't lose their minds and do stupid stuff and can actually be great again.

Simone: So I feel like

Brian Chau: that there's some tension there. Think present day men are like, too, too too quote unquote gay or like she, what we call like sissies. Right. No, I think like it's, it's in accordance with, with, with Bronze Age pervert thought. It's...

Simone: Hmm. So where, where it doesn't matter if there are women or men, like where gender doesn't matter is, is where like society is too sissified in the end.

Simone: And like only, only male spaces only really matter if you've got super masculine men. Is that it? Or like dominant style men?

Brian Chau: Well, no, I think it's more of, you should consider it more revolutionarily, right? If this is the way that like men are engaging in like mixed mixed sex social groups, then, you know, there, there needs to be a revolution.

Brian Chau: There needs to be the bronze age for revolution. You know, that, that, that's what he would say about this. I, I would imagine.

Malcolm: Well, not if they're [00:27:00] engaging that way because their

Simone: biology has changed. Yeah, not if they're engaging that way because they know they have no shot at all. Maybe men lose their mind in the presence of women.

Simone: But that's just

Brian Chau: not true, right, that they do have a shot at all. This is the other thing, is so there are, there are, there are studies the, the headline of, of this study. Oh, and replication attempts of the study is something like 50% of men would like sleep with with a woman, with a woman who just asked him on the street.

Brian Chau: Oh, yeah. As opposed to around 5% of women. Right. But the other thing that they ask in that study is would you go on a date with a person who, who randomly asked you on the street? And for, for single men, it is the, the first number was also for single men and women. The, the, the first number for single men was something like 70%, or 80%.

Brian Chau: And the number for women was 50%. And, you know, maybe, maybe this is not so surprising to you, right? Maybe this is, you know, just common sense for you. But, for [00:28:00] I think every single Zoomer I've talked to about this, except for one guy who's into Evo Psych, who has seen specifically this study before, was just like utterly floored that like 50% of women would, 50% of single women would say yes.

Brian Chau: Well, but

Simone: how attractive was the confederate? I haven't seen this, this, that is like 100. If the confederate is an eight or higher. Yes. If the confederate is an eight or below. No,

Malcolm: I think this study was done a while ago and I don't think that this is true anymore. In fact, I would even go so far as to argue that men in today's environment, if a woman went up and asked him to have sex with them, I think that 50% of zoomers would probably say no.

Simone: To the woman, to the woman. I think

Brian Chau: they're far

Malcolm: more timid than you imagine.

Brian Chau: No. You disagree? No. Maybe, so like the really cursed stat would be like, if you see like an inversion between like willing to have sex and willing to go on a date, that is... [00:29:00] That would be interesting. But yeah, we, we, we, we should see replications of the study.

Brian Chau: I'd love to see replications of the study. This would be

Simone: very fun. But with confederate 0 to 10 ratings that it none of this matters if you don't have that. Just none of it matters. Because that, I think that's the really key thing that has changed which is that we've, we've switched to relationship markets that are extremely visually based.

Simone: And that we've conditioned a huge volume of people to select sexual partners based on only physical appearance. And, whereas in the past, it used to be like, oh, well, we're both in the model train club together or whatever, or I like your jokes, or you're really smart. And, you know, people were able to compete in many different arenas, whereas now it's a swipe and it's an image.

Simone: And I, I think that that. Well, and also then I feel like social media filters have also completely thrown off people's perception of, of attractiveness. And we've discussed this in other episodes where you might, you might think that someone is. Is like a a five, you know, out of 10, like [00:30:00] attractiveness wise, but if you compare them to an actual general population, like in their nation, they'd be more like a six or a seven, but because of online perceptions of what beauty is you know, there's just, there was like a sort of meme a little bit earlier, like maybe two weeks back of margot Robbie, who, who stars in the Barbie, Barbie movie being a mid, like that she's middling that, that Margot Robbie, the, the human actress selected to be Barbie is. middling in attractiveness.

Brian Chau: So I just feel like she's not an anime

Simone: cat girl. That's that is her problem. Yeah. Yeah. And it's one, I

Malcolm: think it's really difficult every day.

Malcolm: Simone,

Simone: I'm so sorry. I'll get cat ears. I promise as soon as we can grab zoomers.

Brian Chau: Thank

Simone: you. Well, we saw we were in New York yesterday walking around with our boys and I was thinking about, I don't even know what the next generation of what kids [00:31:00] are today. And they have to be something beyond zoomers. But there was a furry kid walking around just had a tail, you know, we're like, you know, someone like we're with another parent.

Simone: She's like a kid, like maybe seven years old or something. But He's just like full out wearing a

Brian Chau: furry tail. That's not a sexual thing. You know that?

Simone: No. Well, I mean, it could be a proto sexual thing. Who knows? But whatever. I mean, many people just identify as furries. It's, you know, there's, there's, it's a complex world.

Simone: I mean,

Malcolm: it's one of the problems that we have is when sexual communities become aesthetic communities. So when I was young, I would identify was like goth, right? Like I hung out and dressed like a goth because people older than me, who I thought were cool, I knew hung out and went to goth thing. I wish we had more photo proof of this.

Malcolm: But I think that we live in a world now where young people can see sexual. Communities like furries, for example, and begin to identify with those communities in the same way that in my [00:32:00] generation people identified with goths or punks or something like that. And I don't know if I think that's healthy.

Malcolm: I don't think

Brian Chau: that's healthy. I think that's bad. So you can think of goths as an early version of shitposting. Right? And as we know, the long arc of history bends towards shitposting. Everything becomes shitposting, it becomes signaling part of part of a community by kind of the, the radical refutation of everything else that exists.

Brian Chau: And yeah, one of the, one of the things that I like to do every once in a while, I think it's like very healthy. To do this is to look at like an empirical result in the world and think well, what, what, what if what if this were just people want, what, how would I change my thinking if God came to me and told me like, oh, this is just what people want.

Brian Chau: And you know, we're, we're talking about this divorce of kind of sex like sex acts from. You know, the actual identification and what people actually think of themselves and [00:33:00] what people actually it's the, it's like the divorce of like sexuality as a meme from sexuality as like a physical interaction.

Brian Chau: Hmm.

Simone: I think that's a great way of putting it. Yeah. It's

Brian Chau: conceptual. I just wonder, what if this is just what people want? You know, what if this is just to reveal preference? We just didn't have the technology, we didn't have the internet, you know. We didn't have the cat girls. We didn't have, exactly, exactly.

Brian Chau: Actually, I think we had anime cat girls in the 90s, right? There were, like, Sailor Moon gags with the cat ears. But yeah, yeah, we most of America, you know, were not exposed to the cat girls. And now that they have been, they simply like the cat girls more. There's no going

Simone: back. Yeah, we're just, there will be no more sex.

Simone: There will only be the cat girls.

Malcolm: Before we wrap up this episode, I'd love, were there any other insights you got from these people you were interviewing? Because I really appreciate that you went on and did that. And I know our audience, you know, A lot of them have very little connection to what's going on in Zoomer world right now.

Malcolm: What's going on?

Brian Chau: I think yeah, guys are afraid to approach [00:34:00] girls. They're afraid to be affectionate. They're just too neurotic, you know? This isn't, this is unrelated to this stuff. But I was at a, I was at a University of Austin. I was at you know, Barry Weiss's university. Yeah, yeah.

Brian Chau: Yeah, we work with them. Our school's

Malcolm: partnered with theirs.

Brian Chau: Okay. Awesome. Awesome. So this, so this is a group of people. This is a group of around like 40 kids specifically selected to be, you know, the fear in the fearless pursuit of truth. I, I shouldn't, I shouldn't say this. I, I'm like skeptical of that.

Brian Chau: You know, I do think I talked to one of the, the, the people who did the admissions. I think it's pretty legit. So, so I, I think this is might actually be, you know, to, to the topic of taking these things seriously. You know, these might actually be, like, the 40 students in the U. S. or who, among the application pool, who was who were most in the fearless pursuit of truth, but, you know, they were just extremely agreeable.

Brian Chau: They were, they were really afraid to set up, you [00:35:00] know, very strong binaries of, of disagreements in the class. And this was something that was noticed by a lot of the other, the, the older, the older professors, instructors, so on, that you just didn't get that kind of, you know, Lincoln Douglas style debate.

Brian Chau: I don't mean like the format, but that kind of like clash of ideals. It just didn't happen. People were, people were just like very neurotic. And I think that's, you know, that's the prevailing trait of Gen Z. That's, that's how it rolls.

Simone: I think that's really interesting because when you look at traditional British education, like I'm, I'm thinking about how a young British gentleman was, was educated, you know, he was pretty low on what we might consider technical knowledge, but what he did spend A huge portion of his upbringing doing is, is is debate elocution, and also just like really getting good at even like spicy debate.

Simone: Like when you even see the recordings of Parliament, you know, they're like, yeah,

Brian Chau: like they're like, there's no spice. We need to import more spice from India. Well, but really we

Simone: punish, we punish [00:36:00] people for deviating. We punish people for arguing them. They're called disagreeable. They're having, you know, they have emotional problems, you know, they're, they're, they're picking fights.

Simone: So, so I think maybe what we've done is we've neutered an entire generation or several, I think probably both millennials and Gen, Gen Z ers from the ability to do that, just years of conditioning where every single time they pushed back. They got slapped a little on the face. I mean, what do you think?

Brian Chau: Yeah, almost definitely. I, I do think, you know, like a lot of I think even millennials will relate to, to people saying, you know, like teachers saying if you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing at all. Yeah. You know, which is just, you know, so incredibly stupid. There's

Simone: never been a reward for pushing back or being a little spicy.

Simone: You know what I mean?

Brian Chau: Yeah, yeah. Or, or, or even just not active punishment. I think like male male social norms will naturally, naturally reward that. But,

Simone: you know. Oh, but we're, I don't know if we've allowed for [00:37:00] male social norms even. Yeah, exactly, exactly,

Brian Chau: exactly. There, there's like constant unending interference in the educational system with with, you know, basic, masculinity. Inter, intermale communication patterns.

Simone: Or even just, well, even just male dimorphic behavior, like being energetic. Oh, well, we need to medicate that. Stop moving in your chair. You know what I mean?

Brian Chau: Yeah. Yeah. ADHD. Like BAP needs to add a new chapter about the ADHD meds. That's, you know, they're already talking about like the seed oils, the ADHD meds.

Brian Chau: That's much, much bigger deal than the seed oils. Yeah. This, this

Malcolm: UATX thing you went to,

Brian Chau: was that in the last few months? Yeah, yeah, it was like the summer thing. So, we were actually supposed to

Malcolm: run that but Simone said we didn't have the bandwidth to do it. We could have been there to take you to That would have

Simone: been, that would have been scary.

Simone: We would have made it spicier,

Brian Chau: obviously. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, wait, I have to hear this. How would you, Oh, so Pano, the guy who runs

Malcolm: VHX, we're partnered with them at the Collins [00:38:00] Institute. We'd been trying to do the younger kids stuff. They want to, so we were talking with them about this and we were supposed to do the, the recruitment and the setting this up, and there was some other guy.

Malcolm: And we just, we got to this point where we really wanted to do it, but we just did not have the time between trying, basically what we said is we want to get rid of any distractions we have until the Collins Institute is alive which is our high school system, because just if somebody can't fix the high school system, the country's doomed, so there's a lot of cool opportunities like this that would have Raised our personal prestige and would have allowed us to interact with a lot of young people that are like important like you, but then, you know, we're also already doing stuff with like teal fellows and stuff like that.

Malcolm: And it's I feel like 1 of the weird things that I've noticed, especially with young people is whatever program that we're engaged teal fellows or whatever. It's all the same people.

Brian Chau: Yeah, it's just a circle, yeah. [00:39:00] I don't

Malcolm: know, are there only like 10, 000 intellectually free young people in the world or something?

Malcolm: I

Simone: don't know. Well, not even intellectually free. Desiring to be intellectually free. To your point, Brian they weren't there necessarily.

Brian Chau: It is just the people who are on Twitter. That I think is the actual funnel. The nexus of all of this, you know, if you're listening, Elon, you know, the nexus of all of this is just kids who are on Twitter, you know, that's the reason why, you know, VC Twitter, or VC people, and ML people, And, you know, the classical liberals and, you know, the cat girls are all, are all in the same place.

Brian Chau: It's all just a circle because it's all just, it's all just Twitter. Yeah,

Malcolm: it's interesting that you say that. The world seems so small after a certain point,

Brian Chau: right? But it just is, right? This is also something that I realized after, you know, Going to D. C. and trying to set up something that like all of the people who are doing [00:40:00] anything Interesting not not like literally all of them But they're all people who I like organically encountered doing the podcast before that no So context for the audience like I did not talk about I might like my day job was in machine learning engineering I did not want to talk about anything related to machine learning on the podcast.

Brian Chau: I was just like sick of it for the longest time until I like stopped doing that as my main job. And I interviewed like. You know, John Asconis, James Poulos Sam Hammond. It was just like all of the people doing like the most interesting machine learning policy stuff in DC right now are, I mean, James is not in DC, but all the people doing the most interesting machine learning stuff in DC or in like adjacent circles were people who were on the podcast for unrelated reasons.

Malcolm: No, I mean, you're right. That's just what we've noticed as well. The world's smaller than people think it is. And, and, you know, sometimes I look at our listener numbers and I'm like, wow, they look like [00:41:00] really small. And then I'll talk to some you know, I don't know, random, whatever, like VC or billionaire.

Malcolm: I didn't know. And they're like, Oh, I watch every episode of your show. And I'm like, that's weird. Cause only like 4, 000 people watch. But I assume it's the same with you, right? Like it's, it's, it's weird and sad actually. This brings us to something that Simone was doing where she was going to YouTube and she goes, okay, how do we get big?

Malcolm: What did the big channels look like? And so she went to look at all of the biggest channels and what was it that you said about

Simone: them? That it looked like it was primarily targeting the bottomized audiences. I mean, not really. No, it was, it was primarily targeting people who were, as I said to Malcolm, so low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they just didn't really have bandwidth for anything that's not, that's not more engaging than a three Stooges skit, which is modern edition.

Simone: And in culturally relevant contexts, if that makes sense.

Brian Chau: So I was talking to someone who had. A lot of [00:42:00] experience writing newsletter headlines. Hmm. And he was like exactly this. The overlap between the people who... I don't know, there are, like, common... There are, like, examples of this, so I don't want to be, like, too absolutist about this.

Brian Chau: But the overlap between what you would do to get... A mass audience and what you would do to get, you know, like a successful, like policy wise, successful audience is very, very close to zero. Yes. Yeah. Yes. The, the, the exception might be like, I don't know, Tucker Carlson. And he is like highly online now, right?

Brian Chau: Like he, he's on Twitter now. The, the place, you know, the place where it all, it all goes. Yeah he might have been the last one. He might have been the last intersection between normie popularity and actual, and actual interesting things going on. Yeah,

Simone: it's hard to say, but outlook, not good, very scared, but this was so fun.

Simone: No, we, we, [00:43:00] as, as we all, I think, discover more as AI also gets better, especially, we need to touch base on this topic again and see where we've gone further because I feel like relationships and interpersonal dynamics are going to go further off the rails. the more advanced AI gets. So, let's

Brian Chau: come back to this.

Brian Chau: Yeah, I mean, I think it's just reveal preferences, you know? This is something that I said, you know, you should start doing as a kind of like healthy thought experiment. But once you start doing it as a healthy thought experiment, I think your world model becomes... Increasingly tilted in that direction.

Brian Chau: And, and I think that's just been like, just in the past few, in the past few years, even just proven to be more correct. Like you should assume that people want the things that they take for themselves. I don't know if that is like controversial, but, but, but people don't do it enough. That

Simone: checks out.

Simone: That checks out.

Malcolm: We've loved chatting with you. Have a spectacular day and listeners, [00:44:00] please check out his

Brian Chau: podcast. Yeah, that is the From the New World podcast and you can find it at fromthenew.

Brian Chau: world. Yes, that is where everything lives now. Highly

Simone: recommended.

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