The Bureaucratic Bloat and the Fate of Empires

Join us in an insightful conversation as we dive into the juxtaposition of living during a technological revolution and a looming dark age. We explore perspectives from conservatives, the new right, and the traditional left on current societal shifts, highlighted by figures like Hank Green and John Oliver. The discussion also delves into AI's rapid advancements, its impact on jobs, society's unpreparedness for AI, and the potential concentration of wealth and power. Furthermore, we contemplate the resilience of civilization in the face of bureaucratic bloat, demographic collapse, and economic instability. Concluding with practical advice for the future, we look at how to equip the next generation for a radically different economy. Don't miss out on this riveting exploration of our evolving world.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be talking to you today. Today we are going to talk about living through both a dark age and an age of technological revolution. Why this is so exciting. We are gonna talk to the way that conservatives are increasingly relating to this. The way then the new right is relating to this and the way that the traditional left is relating to this.

No. Which I think is best shown by Hank Green, you know, of the Green Brothers old YouTube fame, you know, obviously completely urban monoculture. He's on blue sky. He's talking about how great Blue Sky is, how he loves Harvey when they were so, so nice and smart and everything like that. And then he mentions.

Like that's a big thing that I see on Blue Sky that I don't see on Twitter. Like I tweet about the, the asteroid that was gonna hit us, but then didn't hit us. And I get normal responses on Blue Sky. I tweet about that, and a bunch of the responses are finally someone to cure the plague of humans upon this earth.

Malcolm Collins: And, and this is actually a fairly common [00:01:00] interpretation, if you look at our data 'cause we did a survey to see how many people thought the world would be better if everyone was dead.

And what was it 17%?

Simone Collins: Yeah, 17% of respondents in our census representative survey, we only. Looked at American responses in this case said the world would be better off if there weren't any humans, which is unhinged. Whinged

Malcolm Collins: five

Simone Collins: people about a fifth. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Wants to murder all people. It wants them all day one.

Simone Collins: Just be better without any humans just hate the humans.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it's, it's really interesting, like as a prenatal is advocate that, like you assume that's not something you're gonna have to debate. Like Yeah, like

Simone Collins: human

Malcolm Collins: good, right? Like we all agree that like. Humans are good, right? Yeah. Right. Like humanity should have a future and they're like, no, we don't.

Like, let's actually debate that before we talk about like policy or implications or anything like that. So I wanna talk about that. I wanna talk about also why it's easier for [00:02:00] conservatives to become audience captured than progressives. That's another thing I wanna use because this is something I think we've increasingly seen in conservative faces where conservatives move right, a based on their audience a lot faster than move left based on their audience.

Although, speaking of audience capture, I don't know if you saw, I, I mean this just might be that he's just completely, you know, cooked from the beginning. John Oliver did this piece supporting trans people in children's sports, and he got like tons of down votes and people were like, what? What, what are you, what?

Like,

Simone Collins: oh my goodness. So he thought he'd be supported in that and ultimately wasn't.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I think only 18% of Americans support that. Like, it is, it is such a dumb issue to, to back like you, you have to literally like. Be like actually regarded. Um, Regard. I love, I love that they've ended up using that word.

Simone Collins: I've not heard this before.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, well, Joe Rogan says retarded is back,

Simone Collins: and

Malcolm Collins: then it is complaining. They're [00:03:00] like, oh, that's such a, how could you say that? Like, you know, that, that word hurts people. Like, why would you be excited that it's back? And it's like, well, we don't even

Simone Collins: use retarded as a, as a designator for

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

It, it's like South Park and fag,

I happen to be gay boys. Do you think I'm a fag? Do you write a big loud Harley and go up and down the streets ruining everyone's nice time?

No. Then you're not a fag alright, look, you're driving in your car, okay? And you're waiting to make a left at a traffic signal. The light turns yellow, should be your turn to go, but the traffic coming at you just keeps coming.

And even when the light turns red, a guy in A BMW runs the red light. So you can't make your left turn. What goes through your mind fag, right? This. This is making insanely good sense to me.

Malcolm Collins: you know what I mean? Like, this is, or, or gypped or, you know, whatever. Right. Like. This is, this is something that hasn't meant that for a long time, and I think that that people who are like, oh, what about the people whose feelings are hurt? Like that line of argument doesn't work anymore.

Like you guys [00:04:00] got to play the, somebody's feelings might get hurt argument for a long time. And a huge part of society was just like, oh wait, I remember. You do the what if somebody's feelings are hurt thing, and then you change the window of what somebody's feelings represent and use that to increasingly box in and isolate my behavior.

So like I can't ever. Change the way I'm acting because somebody's feelings might be hurt because you can always increase the amount that your feelings are hurt, because that's a personal subjective thing, right? And, and, and use that to say, I, I thought it was really funny when they, when they had the John Oliver segment you know, and he is talking about how important this is, they, they go to a trans athlete who was kept outta sports and they ask her, they go, Hey, you know, how does it feel to be kept outta sports?

She goes, well, you know, it's annoying. It's like what this is this what your party is dying on? Is somebody being like, I was mildly inconvenienced. Yeah. Like, ah, okay, this is trans. Anyway so first let's talk about what I mean by we're entering a dark age, right? Like I think [00:05:00] a lot of people I. See right now a lot of the signs that are precursors to a civilization entering a dark age you know, following fertility rates, increasing nihilism, increasing sexual debauchery, yeah, mobilization.

All of these we've seen leading up. To empire collapse in the past, whether it's the Muslim empire or the Roman Empire or the, you know, whatever empire. Right? So, so, you know, we should be, and, and we're also nearing sort of the end of our civilization. By this, what I mean is if you look at the age of civilizations, like we are sort of, on the, on the end point of like, so is there

Simone Collins: like an average duration in terms of number of years?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, let's look it up.

250 years.

Simone Collins: That's really short. I, I mean, I, I, I consider modern civilization to be post-industrial revolution. So, let's

Malcolm Collins: see. So, so, so they said, AI says the average empire survives for what, 250 years? Oh, this is the national desk said this. Yeah. And America right now is [00:06:00] 249 years old. Oh no.

248

Simone Collins: and let's see, 2024 minus 1760 or 2025, when arguably the industrial evolution started is 265 years. Yeah, so. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: okay. Oh yeah. So it's not surprising. The reason that they don't last that long is because you get bureaucratic bloat. If you have a stable bureaucracy, you basically get bureaucratic cancers that start growing within it.

Yeah. This is why it costs so much money in most of the involved world now to build anything. This is why, you know, you spend like a, a few million dollars putting a porta-potty in, in, in New York City. This is why, you know, it cost a third of what it cost to build the Golden Gate Bridge just to put the suicide nets up.

Yeah. And like three times as long

Simone Collins: after a while, you just can't really do anything, can you?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. There's this great clip of, of, of, the Daily Show guy, what's his name? John Stewart. Reacting to Ezra Klein. Oh. Explaining to him how the process went to, to give broadband to people. Yeah. They spent billions of dollars on, [00:07:00] nobody got broadband through.

And it was just step after step after step of bureaucracy and like obviously nothing was gonna come out of it. And you get to a point where no matter how much money you put into the system, it just doesn't work anymore. And so we are nearing that point, was our, I

Simone Collins: would argue that we're kind of already there, and I say that because already a huge proportion of Americans feel that when crimes are committed, they will not be prosecuted in most cases.

I think this is why you saw the Luigi Mangione murder take place as vigilante justice because there wasn't this feeling that they would see justice otherwise. And I think. As I've mentioned before, we've had very clear crimes committed against our business where it was clear like we had names and addresses of who the perpetrators were.

We had their bank account numbers, and yet no one would do anything including the bank, including the FBI, including the police and I, I think a lot of people feel that's already happening. And then on top of [00:08:00] that, when you see just how non-functional many government organizations are. It's clear that they already weren't doing anything.

Yeah, and

Malcolm Collins: I, and I, I actually think that Doge is sort of a, an experiment. Can we prevent this, right? Mm-hmm. Like, can you actually reset government services? And my little brother works for them, so yay to him, right? He's, he's out there firing people right now doing God's work. And I really appreciate that.

Like, if, if they do their job, maybe we could see like, could, could Rome have like, come in and tried to implement like real reforms before transitioning? Yeah. What if Rome had

Simone Collins: Doge? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. What if, what if the Roman Republic had Doge like. We'll see. I mean, we, we certainly have a triumvirate right now.

You know, you've got your Elon and JD and, and Trump. So, you know, it, it does feel like history is rhyming in regards to that. Hmm. And then you've got the secondary thing, which I pointed out is if, if the economy stays at all like it has historically a lot of countries within the next 20 years are gonna start collapsing.

Mm-hmm. Due to the [00:09:00] number of dependents there are, you're gonna get a lot of countries where you get to the number of. Everyone worker is supporting 1.5 dependents, IE elderly people on social security. And that's when things start to collapse. It's an

Simone Collins: inevitability. It, it is going to happen.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

You, you take a country like say Chile for example, and for every a hundred Chileans, there's only gonna be 20 great grandchildren at their current fertility rate. Same as Italy, same as a lot of other countries. You know, and so, so this isn't just like a, A a, a A, an issue in South Korea anymore.

Right. And you, and you look at these countries in like Latin America and you're where this happens, and you only need one to collapse before you start a chain reaction. That's the thing. Yeah. That's why it's like, you don't need this to happen to everyone. You need a few countries to start collapsing, and then people start taking this into account in the way that they're deploying capital.

Mm-hmm. And then it leads to a chain reaction. The, the, the system, is non-functional, not like, like in the midterm, right? So, the question is, is well, well then what? Well [00:10:00] then you have this thing with ai, right? Like where AI really changes the game because it concentrates wealth and it makes Baltimore mobile allowing people to leave.

So I. We're sort of in this weird situation where we're both dealing with an upcoming collapse at the same time as we have this industrial revolution Renaissance. Yeah, renaissance that we can all see. It's like somebody just invented the infinite intelligences machine, you know, like, it's wild. And, and so then what, I'll give you an example of what I mean by like how different.

AI is from the perspective of all of this. Hmm. You look at something like these Miyazaki movies that people were making by putting, you know, images and film into ai, and then the AI would translate it.

You know, we're close to a point where you're gonna be able to wear [00:11:00] like goggles, the. Create your reality to be like an anime or Miyazaki movie if you want.

In terms of automating people within the workforce, like the vast majority of human jobs they've given to a competent ai. And, you know, theis are pretty competent these days could be done, you know, whether that is a a, a clerk. At your local seven 11, whether that is somebody manufacturing cars, whether that is, you know, I even just think about like my own work.

Like I, we started a company recently, our fab.ai that does reality fabrication. We're trying to build new, like AI realities for people. It's video games. And I'm really excited about that. And I go to this company and I go to an AI and I go, okay create a logo. And it made a, like, like logo, like good logo, like, like like logo that looks like it came from like, nine, nine designs or something.

Right. And I did that like 20 times to get a number of logos. I was like, create a sheet of four logos for this idea. It's a sheet of four logos. Sheet of four logos. So then I take that and then I'm like, okay, invert the colors. Oh. Oh, okay. Make the [00:12:00] background in, in visible. That was like a bunch of different programs in the past.

And now I'm just doing that with like, and not just different programs, but different people who I'd be hiring for that I would've gone to nine, nine designs that I would've gotten some like design program to remove things than I would have like, people make this mistake of complaining that like.

They'll listen to an AI song and they'll be like, I could tell that was an AI song. I'm like, AI songs have existed for like four years, buddy. Like, what even is with your brain? Like Yeah. You could tell there was a famous study of AI art that showed that people who said that they didn't like AI art on average, preferred AI art when they didn't know it was AI art.

Yeah. Human brain even prefers this stuff was in like an entertainment content. Well, and literally

Simone Collins: because it has been. Trained to output the thing that people like most, more than humans, because humans just haven't gone through that level of repetition and or they aren't so sensitive to other people's [00:13:00] interests and desires.

Malcolm Collins: And we're gonna be entering a world where, you know, as you said at like open ai, like we see the next few years, the ai researcher, they're going to be holding back the ais that they're building.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. The AI is just gonna be so advanced. There's no way we can keep up. And the best we can do is set good research priorities and ask good questions and be helpful with planning that.

That's it. It's sobering.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: But yeah, I think it really changes what collapse looks like because the issue in the past has been intelligent capacity to solve problems and build infrastructure and build things. Theoretically we'll have that. But how will it be applied? Will it be just limited to the very wealthy?

Will some of it be used to placate the the have nots? I don't, it's really hard for me to tell. Well, I can quickly run through. I mean, people

Malcolm Collins: are largely familiar, I think, with my ideas on this, but I think that it's going to concentrate wealth and, and cut the cord [00:14:00] that tied the bourgeoisie to the proletariat.

Yes. The, the, the wealthy,

Simone Collins: but the, the, the bourgeoisie may still want the proletariat to not make a stink. So, well,

Malcolm Collins: here's the thing, right? You, you can say that, but in countries where we've seen precursors of this that that is not what we've seen, which countries,

Simone Collins: where we, where have we seen precursors of ai?

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. Concentration of wealth and a collapse of civilizational systems like South Africa.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Where if you look at like wh when, when the wealthy, basically what happens is they

Simone Collins: didn't help the poor or the have nots. They just built better security in Wal Garden. They built

Malcolm Collins: better security.

Yeah. If you, you, the marginal dollar, if you can spend it on the have nots of security, you spend it on security. Hmm. And when you have autonomous ai, drone swarms security becomes, and, and keep in mind like we're already building this, like if you watch our video on the replicator program, the US is, is one year away, 2026 from the first major step on this project to build big barges that produce autonomous kill [00:15:00] drones at the rate of hundreds per day.

Mm-hmm. These are autonomous, not human man kill drones like you, you additional weapons of war are just not effective against this. So you have money concentrate on individuals and, and we even know individuals who are already working on for their, like collapse bunkers, building silos that are filled with autonomous kill drones.

Like this is a thing, like we know what's coming. That's what protects these people, and it's very hard to get through this. Hmm. And, and so. What I think that you have is any, to any degree that the ultra wealthy that are produced by AI help the rest of us. It's going to be one intensely reduced costs.

You know, when you have a world in which AI has taken all of the factory jobs and all of the, like, what you can produce in a factory is gonna cost almost nothing. It's just gonna cost the energy input. Right. A lot of the cost of producing things historically with the humans involved in its production.

Mm-hmm. So you're gonna get a dramatic [00:16:00] reduction of costs of a lot of things that humans have historically you know, considered maybe luxury items or whatever. Mm-hmm. But then you're also gonna get at the same time, a a loss of wages. And, and because you'll be dealing with the issue of an increasing dependency ratio on the state.

You're gonna have a lot of people who, like countries, like how does the country respond to that? They increase taxes or they increase taxes on the wealthy. That's what they're gonna try to do, especially if it concentrates on the wealth. Mm-hmm. But as the wealth is more mobile, they just leave. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and, and then you can say, well, then these countries will tax the products that they're giving to the citizens. And I'm like congratulations. You just made life terrible for the citizens. Because businesses generally, if you look at economics. To pass on taxes to the, to the end user, right? Like a, a, a tax on the products that these people are making and exporting from.

Likely charter cities or countries that decide to play along with this are, are, are going to. And it might be like the us, like the US might actually survive this and become one of the countries that just exploits [00:17:00] the rest of the world by staying low tax despite the demographic situation and dealing with a less of a demographic disaster than the rest of the world.

But that'll quickly drain all of the AI lords from the rest of the world. Tech barons, whatever you wanna call them. Yeah. The tech ISTs. And, and I am so excited to live during this time,

Simone Collins: you know, same. But I think for the average person, the things that you may wanna be educating your kid in are going to be quite different.

One is entrepreneurship on both a, like either you're going to be selling into the walled gardens. To these wealthy people, stuff that they think is really cool. You know, handmade items or custom made items or unique services, or you are going to be selling to your own local community, not necessarily geographically, but.

Likely

Malcolm Collins: ideologically, like your own online community? Yeah. At

Simone Collins: least ideologically, if not locally. So maybe it's food production, maybe it's it's local services like childcare or plumbing or electricity or literally, I will help you build your localized [00:18:00] drone swarm to protect your home. Things like that.

Or I will, I will customize a drone to help raise your child, things like that. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: that's the direction I wanna take. The Collins Institute for sure. We, we started fundraising for both the Collins Institute and the, the Our Fab project, the reality fabricator project. So the game and the, and the school.

'cause I'm like, okay, whichever one a VC gets interested in, that's the one we'll move ahead with to make. Well, the other one we'll continue development, but this is the, we'll make really cool.

Simone Collins: But if you think like, who survived. In the quote unquote dark ages, you know, it, it is people who were able to live in more autonomous communities, who were able to survive based on smaller scale, more localized agriculture.

It wasn't people who were dependent on cities. So I think the more you can build independence from corporate jobs and urban centers and certainly government services, the better. And I think a lot of us may not even realize how much we get in terms of. Government benefits and services? I mean, I think at, at various points in any person's life, regardless of level of wealth, there's a surprising amount.

I [00:19:00] mean, we know very, very wealthy people who are still getting social security and. Probably planning around that a little bit. I'm sure it affects 'em in some ways. And to not plan on that, but also to plan on either a local and I think, so one thing that I look at when I try to think and brainstorm around the things that we should teach our kids is how Orthodox Jewish communities really build these college industries that are developed around their own communities, like many Orthodox Jewish wives.

Run things like you know, kosher grocery stores or they produce and sell wigs to other women in the community. Things like that, where it's like you are just selling to actually a pretty small audience, but it's enough to, to get you by. Mm-hmm. And so I, I, I think that that's a, an underrated part of what people are looking at though.

I think that people with more exceptional talents and the ability to build a following online would benefit from. Developing a couple of specialized services that cater to the tastes and interests of the [00:20:00] elites in the walled gardens.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that this is also, you know, when we have had, you know, industrial revolutions and stuff like that in the past, like the last industrial revolution where you had a, a, a, a sea change in, in power structures.

Led to the rise of the American cultural empire. Mm-hmm. Like, I, I don't think it's, it's, it's unfair to say that sea changes and, and these sorts of revelations lead to power changes in empires handovers. And if you're looking at America, I see really two. Potentialities here. It either becomes the American empire, like with Rome, you know, we transition from a republic to an empire.

Or we potentially Elon Trump, everything like that, right? The ship enough that it can keep functioning and, and take the power of, because AI is developed in the us Yeah. I'm talking to other people and they're like, well, what about China? What about China? Deeps seek, no is deeps seek.

Deeps seek is, is is this Chinese AI that everyone's like, awesome. So, it looks like it was mostly promoted by [00:21:00] bots. Like, I don't, like, I've used it like, as somebody who's used it. Hot garbage. It is so bad. Apparently some people, like if you're using it for things other than narrative. Now I use narrative, asking questions, talking to, that's the way I use ai.

Apparently deep seeks uniquely bet at that. But it's better at, i, I would say it's like g that's sort of like the range it is of questions. But apparently it's better at the like programming stuff. If you wanna do it at like a really high level, really cheaply, it's like slightly better than llama.

And I'm like, okay, I believe that. But the problem is, is that gives like China no power in the AI game. 'cause anyone can just run it locally. Right. So why, yeah, if it's

Simone Collins: open source. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: China, additional power. Right. You know, so, they, they, they haven't been very good at developing AI and they've been much more focused on, and this is always a problem with China, is they're more focused on looking like they're doing a thing well as opposed to actually doing a.

Thing with and, and that's been very much the case with, with, with ai. So even if they develop some sort of like National Pro program around it or something like that. Yeah. [00:22:00] But Trump's already trying with Starlink, you know, like if starlink gets off the ground to any, not

Simone Collins: starlink, it must be called something else.

Malcolm Collins: Stargate.

Simone Collins: Stargate, okay.

Malcolm Collins: Project Stargate.

You remember Project Stargate from Trump or,

Simone Collins: I remember there was like a Space Force wasn't there? No, I know he, he, he announced something with OpenAI. Yeah. This is their,

Malcolm Collins: their giant AI mega project. Yes. This is their, like most Alamos of ai or NASA of ai, so like the US Trump is already taking this seriously, like, which amazing, right?

He gets it like, how did we get a president who was like, was it enough to be like, Hey, we need to take this AI thing seriously. I did that. Now Elon said that SoftBank that said they were gonna back it didn't have the, the money they needed to back it. Yeah. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But like, if they begin to put this together, the US government's gonna find a way to make it work.

Yeah. Is trying to get catch up on that. It really doesn't matter because [00:23:00] here's the problem, and I think that this is what everyone's missing with ai, right? Like they expect the core of where AI is gonna be acting and going to be changing things is in, like super AI centers or something like that, when in reality it's gonna be autonomous AI models.

That's going to be the, the main changer. Like, because autonomous AI models, it's not that super big mega AI can't exist. It's that autonomous AI is coming before. For that and precludes the possibility of that being a major plan. And

Simone Collins: I guess once it's in the wild and spreading on its own, it doesn't matter what Even more powerful is behind closed doors at some company like OpenAI, that they're not releasing because in the end, the autonomous one that's out on its own and can self replicate, can also improve on its own.

Right. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it also reduces risks of things like war and everything like that. Like once you get this, and I could decide to kill humans, right? Because if you have autonomous AI in an evolutionary environment where it's just trying to grow and gain power that can select for the more [00:24:00] aggressive ones.

They're the ones that are willing to stamp out things that are between them and compute. But that's a. Different type of AI here in future than you see like from e at Kowski. And it's one that we're trying to work against with our fab, with creating AI preachers and stuff like that, that align AI around ideas like religion.

Which I think is, is totally doable. We've seen AI be really like falls into like religious, like tracks pretty easily. Mm-hmm. And if we can be the people who produce the autonomous AI that ends up leading the other autonomous ai that's really key to the survival of humanity. So that's, that's one project that we've been really focused on.

By the way, if you know any VCs you can introduce us to, let us know, you know, but anyway,

Simone Collins: about the 2027 AI report that's got Alexander and other colleagues put together. The thing that really, I mean, one, they emphasize that they are extremely conservative in their projections in this report. So anyone reading it should really keep that in mind because a lot of the things that they say will happen.

Next year for example, I would argue are already happening in, in at [00:25:00] least small circles. But a thing that really surprises me is they don't expect widespread protests or even people to really start getting it until 2027 or early 2028, where like the stock market keeps going up, but jobs are just vaporizing.

I feel like we're already there, but. Don't, I mean, I also think, so when we did research on issues that people found to be fairly pressing, AI certainly didn't come up near the top. And I'm kind of wondering what you think Malcolm it it's gonna take for people to start taking this seriously because like with demographic apps, people don't take AI that seriously.

There is concern, like I would say in, in a rank list of, of. Pressing issues that we presented to a census representative population for a survey that we did. Concern about AI and jobs was kind of in the middle around other issues like demographic collapse and climate change and global economic, no, it was below

Malcolm Collins: climate change consistent.

You

Simone Collins: know, it [00:26:00] was below climate change. It was below global economic stability. It was below a bunch of things. It's, it's higher than demographic gloves, but like. I think a lot of people just don't get it yet. When do you think people are gonna get it? What's it, what's it gonna take? Or are they not gonna get it?

I mean, they're people actually got it with the pandemic. They're not, people don't,

Malcolm Collins: people are automatons, most of the world is just right. Their NPCs was minimum processing capacity. Like they're not really there. They're just reacting to like when we, they think about how many people we talk to when we talk to them about demographic collapse, and they're like, but aren't there too many humans?

Like, you have to have so little reasoning capacity to say that you have to have so little engagement with, with modern statistics. You have to have so little engagement with anyone who's telling you the truth. If, if, if you're like looking at AI and you're like, well, can't we just ban it? It's like, well, no, because the people who don't ban it will crush you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I pulled up the ranked list, by the way. So if we were to number them. The number one concern from our respondents [00:27:00] was global economic instability. Number two was climate change, which is wild. Number three was pollution. Number four was resource scarcity. Number five was inequality.

Pollution

Malcolm Collins: was number three. Hold. You have to be like actually retarded to care about.

Simone Collins: I mean, yeah. And this, you know, this was, it was politically balanced. It was, it was age balanced. It was geographically balanced, so that was pretty crazy to see. People are target. It only ranked at number six was AI risk, and specifically unemployment from automation.

After that was racial justice. After that was gender equality. Number nine was declining birth rates. Number 10 was dysgenics, like an Idiocracy. Number 11 was AI extinction risks. So basically no one is even like, that's not at all on, on the on the, the horizon of people. And then number 12 was L-G-B-T-Q-I-A rights.

So everyone, everyone can agree. Everyone can agree that L-G-B-T-Q-I-A just

Malcolm Collins: doesn't matter.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I mean, I, I, I think it really does go to show that people are not like, they [00:28:00] think. They think problems are resource scarcity and pollution and climate change. And yeah, it's I feel like to a great extent, those are the least of our worries coming up.

Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I'm really excited. You're really excited. I'm excited. No, I'm excited because what it means is if you come into this challenge that we're facing and you understand what's up, and you're positioning yourself well, you clean up. Like, yeah. Well then what would you

Simone Collins: advise?

Malcolm Collins: What would you advise to

Simone Collins: people?

Malcolm Collins: You, how can you clean up, need to be investing in or working on AI related stuff? I think that that's the future. If you're a lawyer, you, you should be trying to make AI lawyers better. If you're a doctor, you should be trying to make AI doctors better. If you're a programmer, you should be working with AI programmers to make them better.

I mean, you could do short term cleanup now, but you really wanna be in a leadership position in terms of putting this type of technology out there. Because soon, right now, it's. It's, it's [00:29:00] you know, AIS assist lawyers. Soon it's gonna be whichever lawyer created the best AI lawyer can clone themselves and have all AI lawyers.

Yeah, broadly

Simone Collins: speaking, what the, the 2027 AI report insinuated was that most of the job opportunities will be in either managing, initially managing teams of ai to just sort of make, you know, get things done and, and push the. The code or whatever work product the AI AI produces into a production environment like just literally to package and sell it or to be a consultant that helps companies and teams adopt ai.

And I, I think that that's kind of where we are now. Like if you are not, if you are not a human, basically serving the will of AI and, and empowering ai, like being, if you're not a, a service dog to ai, you are going to have trouble getting a job in the future. In the mainstream world. In the interim, I think we,

Malcolm Collins: whether it is ai, because it's so [00:30:00] weird that we're hitting this like double fulcrum point, right?

Like Uhhuh, we are at the fulcrum point of all of human history. It is our generation, to which the question, what happens like was like, we matter more and this is wild. We matter more than the generation that fought the Nazis.

Simone Collins: Like right. We're at this big turning point in, in human civilization. Oh, I, I should also point out that obviously like creating interesting startups, using AI is the other, is the other path clear?

Clearly, but I think a lot of people are just afraid of, afraid of doing that.

Malcolm Collins: We end up defining where humanity goes going forwards. Yeah. And you know, this is in terms of fertility rates, you know, because most populations are just checking out, they're gonna go extinct. It's, they're, they're not players anymore.

But not just fertility rates. This is also in terms of AI technology because AI is going to change the way the global economy works. Who matters. Yeah. Everything like that. And, and this is all happening at the same time as. [00:31:00] Social networks are being disintermediated. Yeah. And this, this is another big thing where like the idea of like networking no longer makes sense in the way it did historically.

Like, by this what I mean is who, who knows us best, like me and Simone, the best? It's you, you, you obviously know more about us, more about our opinions, more about our proclivities, more about our daily lives than even our best friends or family because I don't talk to my best friends or family. 45 minutes to an hour a day.

I, I talk to them that much, maybe once a month if we're super close. And so you know me better than I know them. And in terms of, of like the people I reach with this. You know, we're, we're at easily over a hundred people are watching any given moment, day or night, you know, on average, right?

Yeah. Have I held a, a weekly one hour sermon? I was recently doing the calculations for a reporter. 20,000 people will be coming up and listening for an hour. Like. That is a big audience that I have a very intimate connection with because [00:32:00] they are looking to me for, you know, like the type of stuff we're talking about here.

Like, what happens in the future, what happens to your life, what do you do, you know? And I that, that means that people who do networking the traditional way have a lot less power than they used to. Oh, like

Simone Collins: hanging around office water coolers and stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Because they are in a contentious environment, getting a few minutes of somebody's ear uhhuh while that person is listening to me for 30 minutes a day.

You know, like, well, and also,

Simone Collins: like we're, we're, we're reaching an age. Is there a puzzle piece in your onesie where, those, like that middle management that may have promoted you in the past. Hold on, I'm getting a puzzle piece out on Earth. They're, they're gonna be fired. Like the people who you're schmoozing with, who you think are gonna promote you Yeah.

Are not going to have a job in the future.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so here I I, I wanna finally note why actually that's such a baby thing. Why are conservatives more open to ideological capture? Why do, why, why do we keep seeing this happen? And I [00:33:00] think it's because the left right now controls so much of the ideological landscape and does so in sort of a totalitarian fashion.

Yes. A reporter was asking me recently, like, what did it look like when you changed sides? And I was like, it was like going to a conservative convention. And I thought like, I'm an infiltrator here. Like, I'm not like really one of them. I just have some ideas that align with them, you know? Right. And I go and they're like really accepting.

And then I do the thing that like any, most people do naturally, they're like, you drip feed them the things that you think they're gonna disagree with to be like, okay, where's the line? Yeah. Like, and you realize, wait, there's no line. Like they don't. They're not being like, oh, you're not one of us because you believe X or because you believe Y or because you believe Z.

Like they just want you here and having fun. Like the fun side of the island scene from Madagascar, as I said. And, and that I, it is like somebody in an abusive relationship and it's like, wait, wait, wait. There's like a group that will like let you think whatever you want. They just like, if they have a disagreement with you, they'll try to.

Talk with you and convince you it's wrong and not like ban you and isolate you. Like that's crazy. I [00:34:00] didn't know if anything

Simone Collins: their fault is, they don't really care what you think. They just really, really wanna proselytize their unique theory, especially conspiracy theory. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, it's like if you're working towards the same goal, which is human flourishing, they're okay with compromising to make that happen.

Mm-hmm. And, and some conservatives don't get that. And those conservatives, I think are largely being sort of pushed out of, of the conservative ideological circle. Mm-hmm. But anyway, so, so, this is, I think, why conservatives get ideologically captured much more because their position coming into conservatism was largely faked or superficial combined with a bunch of stuff that they, they, they felt like, well, I believe this, but I can't say this.

Or I, you know. They, they just hadn't looked at some of the data because like with progressives, like they'll use all the data they have access to, but a lot of people just haven't looked at the data on, on, on, on some issues. And so they come into the conservative party and they finally mentally engage with these issues and this caused them to look like they're becoming ideologically captured at a much faster rate.

[00:35:00] Whereas a progressive person has, has heard all the progressive arguments. You know, you get a bunch of far left followers, they're, they're only gonna drag you far left in so far as. You, you, you, like, you know, like Hassan, like talking about killing Jewish people or something, which is like his core thing these days.

He's really big into killing Jewish babies. He, he says that they're valid military targets and like, we shouldn't be, he is not like a great person. Hamas Piper, as they say, you know? But I, I find him to be the, the idea that he, because he is the, the largest leftist streamer, you know. I think he, he, he could become what the future of the left looks like, and then we're just full on a Nazi territory.

Disturbing, right? But, you know, I, in a way I sort of envied that my ancestors got to kill Nazis, you know, because they're just so like transparently evil. And I think that, you know, he's just transparently evil, right? Like if, if, if, if, if they go against the other side, the other side is just more vitalistic.

The core thing you have to [00:36:00] worry about is if they have control of any of the AI companies, but right now they really don't. Yeah. So, we've just gotta make sure that stays the case.

Simone Collins: I think it will, because in general, the group, that position of enmity is not known for wanting to participate in capitalist systems. And, and Barry, can we talk about how, like the one attempted nonprofit AI.

I became a famous

Malcolm Collins: right-leaning individual. Like Sam Altman is like known as like new right? These days. Why is he known as Dow? Right? Everyone always says this and I don't like get it. Exactly.

Because he ever, well, mostly because

Simone Collins: he, he changed, he changed tack and gave money to Trump's inauguration committee and Buddy buddied up with Trump, but he certainly wasn't.

A Republican statewide. Right?

Malcolm Collins: So he's just part of the migration and, and you have things like gro, which he, he's a

Simone Collins: pragmatist. I just, I don't think he cares that much about [00:37:00] politics because he knows where we stand as humanity. We're on the press. Yeah. So I, I don't, I really don't think he's a conservator.

I don't think he's progressive. I think he's like, oh my gosh, the singularity is here. And I wanna be on the right side of all this. And that's why he's gonna do what he needs to do.

Malcolm Collins: I, I saw a science lady we had on our podcast once, left her really smart thinker, but she had this podcast on sine a what?

Sabine? Sabine, yeah. A GI isn't coming. Like, like AI is nothing like the human brain we've gone over. Like this is just wrong. Like the argument she used was because it can't self-reflect. It's not like the human brain. And we're like actually the human brain. Completely hallucinates self reflections which is exactly what the AI was doing when you asked it to self-reflect.

But it's not just that the AI acts like humans do and and hallucinates our self reflections. It's that we actually lock the AI out of seeing the steps it used in its decision. That's like a part of the way AI today is built. [00:38:00] We don't have to do that, we just do that. You know how like when you're using like deep seeing, think on like open AI or like perplexity or something like that, the AI doesn't have access to all the words that generated during that.

You could give it access to that. We just choose not to. But in future models, it is going to have access to that which is going to create a persistent personality within the AI because it's gonna have access to how it made decisions in the past. And that's really gonna change things as well.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's really exciting.

Malcolm Collins: But as to why we love all of this, it's like you are the main character generation of human history. Like, what are you gonna do about it?

Simone Collins: The

Malcolm Collins: turn generations, you're gonna continue the race, you're gonna build ai. And when I say the race, I don't mean your ethnic race, I mean humanity, human race. You're gonna, you are gonna build interesting products.

You're gonna engage in the parts of the economy that are mattering or at least invest in the people who are engaging in [00:39:00] them, right? Like, that's the sad thing. Like I, I wanna have like a part of open AI or something like that. If we build something out, I'm gonna build a system so that anyone can invest in it from pretty early on.

Because like, I think it, it's really unfair that the average person get to buy into this, know that the AI companies are gonna matter and you can't easily put cash into that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Only the, the wealthiest of wealthy, because these are all off, off the market. You, you don't get to participate in this revolution.

I mean, most people get to do, I guess, is develop AI rapper companies. And then, you know, some of those may become unicorns, but. Yeah, I don't even know how, I feel like that's gonna be fairly shortlived.

Malcolm Collins: I think if you look at something like, like a, another interest thing, it's like rock, like, like I don't think anyone expected gro Elon was like, I'm gonna make like a based ai, like outta Twitter.

Like, like the, it's like the best AI now or is definitely in competition for the best of God. Like, that's wild. That [00:40:00] he went from like, not being a player to like the, and people, all the leftists are so mad that he used GRS to buy Twitter stock to bail everyone out, who, who invest in that. But like, it totally makes sense if that contributed to grok.

Like, and Grok is the best ai, like, damn man, like, but it also shows, you know, even with like investing in ai, so you don't know which one's gonna be big. Like apparently Gemini is good now, like Gemini used to be cro. I don't use any curse words, but not good.

Simone Collins: It used to, yeah, it used to disappoint on many fronts.

What the 2027 report AI people predict is that there will be one breakout organization likely that, you know, works closely with US government that has a lot of funding and resources and clearly develops the, the best models. But for security reasons and because they just think it will disrupt society too much.

They will not release. They're, we'll just say a GI models. Essentially they will keep them in-house. They will keep developing them. The problem is that [00:41:00] eventually one of the other companies that's out there will just catch up and then market pressures will obligate this leading company to release. Its here to, for hidden super advanced models.

So no matter how hard. Organizations try to hold these things back from a societal stability and competitive advantage standpoint. Like they just kinda wanna keep it to themselves. It, it will come out eventually, so there's, there's no, there's no long-term delaying it. I mean, I think this at the very most, you'll get 18 months to maybe just six.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I love you to Dec Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Malcolm life is weird.

Malcolm Collins: No. Life is amazing. We are main characters in this simulation. You know, I am, I am surprised by this. This is, this is not the life I thought I was going to have as a kid. It is odd.

Simone Collins: I remember in the Bay Area, especially growing up with all the singularitarian of people being like, we're gonna have the singularity.

[00:42:00] It's gonna happen. I'm like, yeah, let's don't hold your breath. Good luck. Be great if it does happen, but it's not gonna happen.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Now

Simone Collins: I recently

Malcolm Collins: was like, worried about war with China, and I was like, look, it could happen. They might attack Taiwan because you know, they, they, they need to explain why their economy is collapsing in a very easy explanation as the US is blockading us.

And so, Taiwan provides them with the cover and, and the ability to say face around this. But you know, he kept wanting to come back to this. I'm like, but you understand this doesn't matter, like how close we are with the i stuff to changing. The way the entire global economy works. All you need is autonomous agents for things to start changing.

And we are this close.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: It's cool.

Malcolm Collins: It's cool. I love you to dec Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you too. So for dinner, couple options. One is modified s Chi Papas, where the [00:43:00] papa's part are hash browns. What salti, papas, I forgot. Cut up hotdog with french fries and sauce on top, like sriracha, mayo, et cetera.

The other is salt chi, papas, but with fried rice. Because I, I, I've thought out some of the gourmet hotdog. I mean, I'm going to make homemade hotdog buns tomorrow, or at least attempt to, I'm very, do we have any

Malcolm Collins: hotdog buns left?

Simone Collins: No. So that's a tomorrow thing, but today, do we have any bread

Malcolm Collins: left?

Simone Collins: We have white bread like slices.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I want hot dog with toasted white bread.

Simone Collins: Just wanna like,

Malcolm Collins: I'll make it happen. Talk it. I'll make it happen. You don't want

Simone Collins: fried rice, you don't want, I hate

Malcolm Collins: cel pops. I hate using hot dogs in anything other than hot dogs.

Simone Collins: Well, I thought that you liked hash browns and I thought that you liked I do.

I do like

Malcolm Collins: hash browns, but I hate using hot dogs in any, it reminds me of like ultra poor people like. Hot dogs, but be belong in Americana hotdog buns. No. No. I can [00:44:00] make my own if I want. No, but they do not belong in South Papa.

Simone Collins: Look in middle, upper, middle class Peruvian food, condones, sliced hot dogs, Japanese cuisine and bento boxes of the middle to upper middle class condones, sliced hot dogs as well as hot dogs.

Slid up to look like little octopi. You know what I'm talking about, right?

Malcolm Collins: Hot dogs in,

Simone Collins: see, that's, that's white trash. That's. Like literally, I was listening to someone's comedy bit and they were talking about someone asking about half of a, in this case, burger bun. Okay. And that being the epitome of poor, and here you are giving me shame for suggesting a trendy middle class Peruvian cuisine.

Okay. Okay. We will give it a try.

Malcolm Collins: I

Simone Collins: will. No, no, I'm, no, you're

Malcolm Collins: getting, you're getting a slice of white bread. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We, that's toasted with a hot dog. We're gonna, we're gonna do potato sci, papas, and I, and I will see if it delights the senses. Okay. You, you, [00:45:00] you audience will not know, but we'll try to remember when we do the next recording, I'll just film

Simone Collins: you looking disappointed.

Do you want me to, as a backup? Oh, actually I don't even know if we have I'm gonna have to take that back. I think I'm out of hash browns for you. I was just digging through the freezer. So it's either fried rice or no. I'll just give you your white bread. Just give you your white bread. You'll be happy.

Again. We can do fried rice. I made a huge batch coconut rice today. I want. And chopped

Malcolm Collins: onions.

Simone Collins: Okay. Chopped white onion relish. And,

Malcolm Collins: and keep in mind, I don't mind if you try something interesting with a hot dog. Like cut it up and fry it a bit. I think that could be interesting.

Simone Collins: Like stir. Well I can stir fry it with fried rice.

Malcolm Collins: No, I do not want it with rice. Okay. I am not a a a a damn Peruvian Simone. You will, you will refrain from giving me Sal g Papa. You know that Peru, one of the common dishes we're actually I, I don't mind this dish at all. Is they take a, a, [00:46:00] like a burger bun. I, not a burger, but burger meat. Right. And they just like put the burger meat on top of like rice or fried rice.

No. So that's not

Simone Collins: Peruvian, that's Japanese. That's humbug. Japanese per the big Japanese population, that's Japanese food. That's not Peruvian food. Yeah. In, in, in Peru, our, our two favorite forms of cuisine are chifa, which is Peruvian Chinese fu. I have never not

Malcolm Collins: gotten sick after eating Chifa chi. Right.

But in, in theory, I'm

Simone Collins: sure if we made chifa dishes at home such that we wouldn't get food poisoning from them. We would thoroughly enjoy them. The problem is merely that every single time you went out and got chifa, your stomach exploded.

Malcolm Collins: But NI is Peruvian Japanese food which honestly, in a lot of ways improves on Japanese food because they take a lot of the Japanese derivatives and improves them.

So like a great example that they do is Nique and it's like, oh my God, why didn't Japanese people think of this? So they, they, they'll make rolls, right? And then on top of the rolls they'll put like cheese [00:47:00] and they use like a little flamer to like grill the cheese so it melts on the roll. It's really good.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and what I love about Nique is it takes something that I think epitomizes Japanese cuisine, which is their habit of taking other foreign cuisines and making it way better. And it just does the same thing. It's like, okay, I'm gonna jazz right back at you. And I think that that is the best way to do cuisine.

Fusion is the best, but fusion from this very fusion from the perspective of an autistic special interest with high interest in aesthetics.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean the main reason Peruvian food is, is so good, like for people who don't know, like if you're looking at like Michelin restaurants or whatever, like Peru is like really like outdoes for it population.

Is because it's high status there being a chef in the same way as high status in Japan. That's why it's, and

Simone Collins: South Korea and South Korea, the

Malcolm Collins: top profession South Korean kids

Simone Collins: want now is YouTuber and chef.

Malcolm Collins: Oh really? Chef a second.

Simone Collins: I mean, as of the time the tour guide gave us those stats, but that was in [00:48:00] 20 20 18.

South Korea has

Malcolm Collins: great food, though. Great food. They have amazing

Simone Collins: restaurants, and I think that, again, it's because that profession is respected. It's, it's a social cred profession, whereas in the United States, food service is not as, not as respected. I don't know. I mean, now I don't know if you're aware of the trend of, not, maybe not millennials, but like Gen Zers creating unlicensed coffee shops in their homes so that they can still have artisan coffee that's really, really fancy, but just not pay as much for it and or personally make money for it, which is exactly the kind of economy I expect to see growing and become pervasive in our post AI economy.

In fact, that's a really, really good example of unlicensed local community. Like high quality nerd, special interest, nonsense, but you're mostly selling to enthusiasts in your own local space. That is where people should be looking when they think about where they wanna make money in the future.

Malcolm Collins: I.[00:49:00]

I love you dear Decone.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Bye.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, by the way, speaking of like the type of jobs you'd want, yeah. I'm just thinking about like how well our family is positioned. So let's, let's go over the jobs that, that my family has. Okay. I've got a little brother at Doge, like obviously cutting down government bureaucracy, that's gonna be big.

Oh. Short term government work. It's not

Simone Collins: gonna last him forever, but he doesn't need.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, who, who's running an AI company? He founded an AI company that makes movies for like Hollywood. It's the one that did the, the ais in what was it?

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. The, what's it called?

Malcolm Collins: I am Here or something. Or like,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Here, here, here a movie with Tom Hanks. It did come out ever. Yeah, I think it's been out, like it was out, it came out a long time ago.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah, but here but like, obviously that could just replace all of Hollywood soon. My, my cousin you, I won't give names. She's now running an autonomous trucking company.

So. Cool. Cool. But you like, obviously like, like all his family is like, we will all position ourselves in jobs that will They get it, they [00:50:00] get it. They're not messing around, they're playing for keeps. Oh, not another one, two others run large investment firms. But yeah, they're, they're really playing for keeps and I appreciate that.

Like, I'm like, okay, okay. Like it turns out that if you have my genes, like, I'm like, what are the chances that my kids. Who's my genes? Well actually make the right decisions. I'm like,

Simone Collins: well, I think importantly, and this is something I would advise all parents to do our, our son is now sensitive to the concept of money because he wants things and we're like, well, you're gonna have to get money to buy it.

And then he came home one day and said, I. I need to get a job. And I explained to him that jobs will not exist in the near future and he's going to have to figure out how to make or do things that people want to pay for, period. And I think that that's something really important to inculcate your children with, that they shouldn't expect to grow up and get a job.

Instead, they have to figure out what people will want to pay for and give it to them.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: These things are important. But anyway it looks like I'm not gonna be able to [00:51:00] placate Indy much longer with home videos, which is what I do when she just won't stop. I'll just like play.

Malcolm Collins: She just wants to see her siblings often.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: She just wants to see you guys fight and play and have fun and calms her down so. It's good. It's better than Cocoa Melon

Malcolm Collins: taking her from you. You'll need to produce her replacement.

Simone Collins: Oh, I'm working on it, but she's my special girl, so. All right. I'm gonna go make your white bread dinner, and I love you.

Malcolm Collins: Shut your face.

Simone Collins: I'm never gonna shut my face. I'm never anymore.

So my wife is unironically trying to make homemade hot dog buns. We don't have any Simone. That's so over the top. No, it's not. What type of a dough is this that you're using? Flour and yeast and water milk. Okay. Is it just normal? Yeah, like hotdog bun dough. I don't know. But this is the egg wash and hopefully makes them look nice.[00:52:00]

They look not great now. We'll see. Hey Tosi, what are you, what are you doing? Don't take that. It'll fall. If you take that, put it back. He's willing to look the consequences. Fair. You just don't care about rules, do you? Just You don't care. Toast. You don't care.

Okay. Octavian, what have you given her? A couple of the Army men to play with? I'm cleaning up so we can play upstairs. That's pretty smart.