Positive psychology's lineage and problems

Malcolm and Simone Collins tear apart Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the cult of “self-actualization” — a concept that originated with Kurt Goldstein as an organism’s drive for wholeness and potential (think resilience after brain injury, survival, breeding), but Maslow flipped it into a progressive pinnacle achieved only after maxing out hedonistic “lower” needs like endless comfort, validation, sex, and esteem.

We explore how this fuels urban monoculture toxicity: identity obsessions, validation addiction, hedonism-maxxing, and extreme cases like adults regressing to child roles for “love without judgment.” We invert the pyramid — true fulfillment comes from suppressing distractions (Catholic mortification, naltrexone hacks, biblical detachment) to focus on civilization-building, pronatalism, sacrifice, and purpose, not self-worship or peak experiences.

Riffs include: South Park food pyramid flip, Einstein/Eleanor Roosevelt as flawed “self-actualized” icons (vs. Marie Curie’s two daughters and real achievement), degenerate NPR stories, why celebrities crash despite “needs met,” Buddhism as negative utilitarianism, and why 4+ kids often signals real alignment.

Episode Transcript:

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to talk to you today. We are going to be discussing. The popularization and development of the term self-actualization, as well as the damage it has done to society. Tracing it again, I think it’s a horrible concept that is upstream of a lot of what makes the urban monoculture so toxic.

Oh. To a person’s mental framing of reality. Okay. We will provide alternate frameworks, which I think are better. And we will also be exploring the interesting truth behind the current term self-actualization, which is that it actually came from a pretty based concept. Self-actualization is even in the words of the guy who popularized it.

A rebranding of the concept of niche’s. Uber, minch, or a progressive audience?

Simone Collins: No. Oh my God. The PSYOPs of that. Wait, so was that Maslow of Maslow’s Ma

Malcolm Collins: Maslo Maslow was the one who, who popularized it and before him it meant something entirely different.

Simone Collins: Wow. [00:01:00] Okay. I’m really, I’m very curious to see what your ultimate take on all this is.

Like, is it gonna be a play on that South Park episode of like, we have to invert the pyramid? Are, are we now putting just survival at the, the top of the pyramid?

Malcolm Collins: Survival at the top. I actually like that a lot.

Speaker: The pyramid doesn’t work. We’ve already tried it. It’s upside down. What, sir? The pyramid is upside down. Turn the pyramid upside down. It can’t be serious. That would put butter and fat at the top of it. Flip the damn food pyramid

Malcolm Collins: Yes. We have to invert the pyramid. Let’s do it. Hierarchy of needs. I, I love that the White House actually posted a clip from that Yes.

Episode when they changed the food pyramid. And the funny thing is, is everyone was like, I mean, it’s basically right, like the nutritionists were like, I’m not complaining about this.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You

Malcolm Collins: know?

Simone Collins: No, no, no, honestly. ‘cause you know, I, I listened to like all leftist media basically the, the leftist critique of it was not that it was [00:02:00] substantively wrong ‘cause they can’t actually argue against it.

It’s, it’s fairly correct as you say. So can you imagine what the leftist critique of it instead had to be?

Malcolm Collins: It wasn’t respe a respectable way to announce it.

Simone Collins: No, no, no, no. Okay. Well, I mean, okay. Yeah. They were like, well, I can’t believe they steal per two, but

Malcolm Collins: they took out sugar.

Simone Collins: No, they

Malcolm Collins: did take out sugar as, as a ever.

They’re

Simone Collins: like, I know. Well, because you shouldn’t. There should be no added sugars, period. There’s no point for that. Right. Anyway. No, it was, well, how dare they insinuate that people could afford vegetables and meat. I’m not kidding. I’m not kidding. That is 100%. Seriously. I think that was the Philip DeFranco take if, if memory serves, but yeah, they were, they were very freaked out about it that someone would have the gall to suggest.

And then they even went to a clip of some either Trump administration official or health official talking about that. No, it actually was quite affordable, you know, that that every, every American adult can eat, [00:03:00] you know, a piece of broccoli and a chicken breast and I can’t remember some other thing.

Malcolm Collins: I,

Simone Collins: I’m imagining five and they’re like, what? You think people can survive off of just a piece of broccoli and a piece of chicken? Like they’re freaking out about it. Anyway, so that was, that was,

Malcolm Collins: but I, what I love is the idea of a progressive rebranding of the food pyramid, except they just take out all the foods they perceive as expensive.

So it’s just, it’s still the bread.

Simone Collins: Well, it’s just all bread that you get in the bread line.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s all the bread. They, they take out all of the, the meat and the vegetables and the fruits. Mm-hmm. And then they just, they’re like, and. We’ll add in what, what are other cheap foods like chips and Fritos to like those categories.

And it’s like, and we’re not gonna take out sugar because you know, of course in oil, right? You gotta, you gotta deep fry stuff. That’s, that’s the new approved progressive one that they wanted. I love that you watch progressive media, so you know this stuff, but let’s get into this. All right.

Simone Collins: We call it bread tube for a reason.

I think they’re very, very insulted. When their breads, they gotta get

Malcolm Collins: all [00:04:00] that soy from somewhere.

Simone Collins: Well, I, I love bread though,

Malcolm Collins: or

Simone Collins: gluten or wine. My, my attempt to make homemade crumpets with my sourdough starter this morning was a complete failure,

Malcolm Collins: all

Simone Collins: humiliated.

Malcolm Collins: So Kurt Goldstein, a German neurologist and psychologist coined the term set actualization originally.

Oh my god. Am I gonna try to pronounce this Celebrative in German

Simone Collins: poop.

Malcolm Collins: I, I should put the,

Simone Collins: there you go.

Malcolm Collins: Danish, I guess. Alright. Alright. Right. Okay. In it 1939, so the book is only as old as 1939.

Simone Collins: Wow.

And that was the pre nietzche self-actualization.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. This was its original usage, the organism, a holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man. [00:05:00] He introduced it within organism theory, describing it as a fundamental driver for an organism to realize its full potential and maintain its wholeness, especially in the face of challenges like brain injuries.

Simone Collins: Oh. So is, is it like a, like a lizard with its tail cut off and it self actualizes if it grows the tail back? Are we talking like that?

Malcolm Collins: I think he’s talking more about how brain injury, self-Correct. Remember his background is in neurology. Oh

Simone Collins: yeah. And it, it has been sh like if you have a stroke, you have to relearn your actions.

Malcolm Collins: You’re born or you have a serious brain injury as a child. You can typically perform un noticeably different from other adults. Even if, and there’s been cases where people are born like without a hemisphere of their brain or without acute protection of their brain. And they can typically live mostly normal lives.

So, you know, he is, he is right in that regards. But [00:06:00] what I find interesting is I think if you recontextualize his initial take on this which is to say it is a fundamental driver for an organism to realize their full potential. And maintain wholeness. If we’re just looking at it like that, I think then it’s a good term.

It basically means to breed because that’s what an organism exists to do. And not die, right? Like

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or, or just to return to a normal stasis kind of state. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: To say breeding and not dying is self-actualization. I say, you know? Okay, good. Yeah. That’s, that’s a decent term. But

Simone Collins: you, you are gonna go for, this is inverting the pyramid already.

I can tell. Oh

my

Malcolm Collins: God. The rival invert the pyramid. Yeah. Okay. The concept was popularized by American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who adapted and refined it in his 1943 paper, A Theory of Human Motivation, where he positioned self-actualization as the pinnacle of his hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s work gained widespread attention in the 1950s and 1960s through books like Motivation [00:07:00] and Personality 1954, and the.

Towards a psychology of being 1962, framing it as the ultimate human motivation, achieving ones in eight potential after lower needs physiological safety, love esteem are met. He studied historical figures like Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt to identify traits of self actualized individuals such as peak experiences, autonomy, creativity, and realistic perception of the world.

Simone Collins: Eleanor Roosevelt of all people.

Malcolm Collins: Right? Well, what a cooked to brain do you have to be to be like Eleanor Roosevelt, self-actualizing.

Simone Collins: That’s who I think of for, well, I mean,

Malcolm Collins: even Einstein, right? He he did come up with some great theories when he was a kid, like, like very young. But if you look at his later work, a lot of it actually held back the field of particle physics and theoretical physics.

Oh yeah.

Basically he hated any ideas in physics that were probabilistic rather than deterministic, which is really important. When we [00:08:00] were developing the field of quantum mechanics though, things like spooky action at a distance, he just saw as ridiculous. I.

Malcolm Collins: Basically if a concept went against his presuppositions, he would push against it. And so a lot of ideas that we needed early in the development of our understanding of the quantum world, which basically breaks a lot of normal physical norms.

He was staunchly against him because he was so respected. It held back the field a lot. And so the, to, to say that he is the pinnacle of like self-knowledge or an understanding of the world, I think basically shows that Maslow is like the perfect pop psychologist, like the epitome of everything that I hate about pop psychology because to him being a self-actualized person basically meant like being a, a famous person within the progressive sort of washing of history.

Right. You know, I’m sure he added, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt in there. He’s like, well, I need some women, [00:09:00] so I’ll choose one that happened to be married to a successful man. Right. And that’s, you know, which I think is really bad for a lot of reasons. I mean, you know, he could have at least gone with like Marie Curry or something.

Right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Right. She also had a lot of kids, didn’t she? Didn’t she?

Malcolm Collins: Marie Curry or Eleanor Roosevelt?

Simone Collins: Marie Curie. I think Eleanor Roosevelt was childless.

Malcolm Collins: I don’t know. You can, you can look it up.

Simone Collins: Yeah, will do. She, I think Marie Curia had like four kids or something, and Eleanor Roosevelt had had zero.

But I’ll, I’ll, I’ll I’ll correct myself if I’m wrong.

Malcolm Collins: Over time, the concept evolved within humanistic psychology, the quote unquote third force in psychology that emerged in the mid 20th century as a counter to psycho-analysis and behaviorism, psychologist Carl Rogers contributed in the 1950s by emphasizing actualizing tendency in client-centered therapy, viewing it as an inherent [00:10:00] drive towards growth and fulfillment in a supportive environment.

By the 1960s and 1970s, self-actualization influenced the human potential movement, including practices like encounter groups in Lon Institute workshops, or es es, Len Institute workshops.

So I decided to look. This episode, it was in the Assailant Institute, is a renowned non-profit and holistic retreat, an education institute located in Big Sur, California. , And it is widely regarded at the birth place in the epicenter of the Human Potential Movement, a mid 20th century wave focused on exploring and realizing untapped human capabilities through psychology, spirituality, body work, and personal growth.

The Assailant Institute pioneered . The integration of Eastern philosophies like meditation and yoga with Western science and humanistic psychology, helping popularize such practices such as Gestalt therapy, mindfulness, somatic work, Hal breath work, five rhythms, dance, Rolfing, , [00:11:00] making them more mainstream.

Malcolm Collins: That was like a weird cult that was sort of big in that period. Cult mix of cult and psychology. It was very much like figure it out yourself sort of stuff.

I, I don’t know, think it was as, you know, necessarily harmful, but if it’s what I’m remembering it is. So, Simone, what you find

Simone Collins: it, it froze. So I’ll let you know.

Malcolm Collins: Didn’t your parents go to eSalon workshops? eSalon Institute workshops?

Simone Collins: Est

Malcolm Collins: EST is what they went to. Okay. That’s what I was thinking of. Est.

Simone Collins: Marie Cury had $2 daughters. Oh, I was totally wrong. Marie Cury had two daughters, and Eleanor Roosevelt had six children, five sons and one daughter all with one son dying in infancy. That’s really sad.

Malcolm Collins: Well, at at least Eleanor is meeting our prenatal list agenda here, actually.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Good for her. I was totally wrong on that.

Yeah. I, I

Malcolm Collins: and I love when the people are like, Hey, you know, you can’t have a lot of kids as a woman and achieve great things, you know, and it’s like, well, I mean, the women of history would like to disagree with you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They, you just do it and that’s [00:12:00] it. I, I it’s part of, it’s, it’s somewhat of a bad to pay thing.

You know.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, it’s a, it’s a them thing, right? Like I, I bet they’d even he’d get criticized for putting Eleanor Roosevelt on the list because she had so many kids, you know, doesn’t make a good progressive icon anymore. And I’m sure people are gonna be like, don’t you know about her charity work?

And it’s like, no, I don’t because charity work doesn’t matter. Jed, really speaking charity work doesn’t matter.

In the grand scheme of human history,

Simone Collins: sometimes it worsens problems. That’s one of our bigger. Probably,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. It seems to generally make things worse. Mm-hmm. I, I agree with that. Unless you approach it in a, in a very specific way.

But that’s a whole other conversation. And not, not today’s conversation. Not

Simone Collins: today, no.

So apparently she didn’t even do anything that big with charity. Her big thing was joining the UN, famously ineffective body and promoting the idea of a universal Declaration of Human Rights, which also famously did very little for anyone important. So [00:13:00] apparently, to get on this guy’s list of self-actualized, if you’re a man, you need to invent general relativity If you’re a woman.

You need to FA famous person. That’s, that’s basically the way the world works for these freaking people.

Malcolm Collins: But what you can see here that’s being described, I think it’s very important that around the concept of self-actualization, an alternative form of psychology, and not just an alternative form of psychology, but an alternative school of what psychology is meant to optimize, begin to grow.

Boast was in the public narrative, but also was in the academic institution. Mm-hmm. And this allowed for some branches of like talk therapy to see their goal as moving the individual towards the concept of self-actualization, which again, here, it really matters what that concept is and how it is derived.

Yeah. [00:14:00] It’s the goal of a school of psychology. Because what happened with the urban monoculture is it went and when it was trying to determine what is an individual’s goal in life, it wanted that goal to sound large and sophisticated and try to remove the accusation that it’s just hedonism. And so went to academia, which is like it’s priest cast, right?

And it said, well, who, who studies? Like, what is a life well lived? And it said, well, psychologists do, right? So it’s okay, well what are their various models for what you are optimizing for? And the other schools of psychology don’t have as strong of a singular motivational end point. And so self-actualization became the end point.

The goal of everything was in the urban monoculture. And it began to get worked into a lot of pseudoscientific movements as well as, as, as you’ll see. I, I, I will point out I do not think [00:15:00] self-actualization was ever good. Science. I think that it epitomizes, I mean, the mere fact of how he came up with the concept that he basically looked up famous people who he kind of respected or that he didn’t think that he’d get a lot of pushback on, and then pretended to derive a theory of needs from them when in reality he was just thinking through himself.

Like, if, if you wanna just like blow up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Stephen Hawkings. Like clearly. Oh, Stephen Hawkings didn’t just live with you know, horrible, debilitating

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Care for most of his productive career. But also his caretaker slash nurse was apparently like very well documented as abusive.

Simone Collins: No. Toward him.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

So just for more clarification, the abuse accusations come against his second wife, not his first wife, and were in part, made by his first wife. And, , they were investigated by [00:16:00] Cambridge Police. He always denied them. They later got a divorce. There have been no clarifications about whether they were real.

Simone Collins: Well, and his sexual needs weren’t being met. And I think he told his wife to go sleep with other people, didn’t he? He sort of, I, I don’t know all of that, but my understanding was he was like, just go, like, I’m, I’m really not gonna hold you to this marriage. ‘cause obviously I can’t keep up my part physically due to this.

So, yeah, I mean, he, he really wasn’t, but, but he was 100% making the absolute most of his mind. The, and this is, that’s where I’m really struggling with this because as soon as I heard about Muscle’s Hierarchy of Needs, I got super excited about it because I contextualized self-actualization as being, having everything else sorted in your life such that you were able to completely live in your prefrontal cortex.

You’re not in your amygdala, you’re not in your hy, you’re like, you know, you’re not,

he’s talking about the life lesson he had. But my, my thought was that you are not. In survival mode, you’re not freaked out about stuff, so you’re able [00:17:00] to just be totally in your prefrontal cortex and just be about ideas and concepts and advancing civilization and inventing and moving towards science.

But that doesn’t seem to be what this is about,

Malcolm Collins: which is No, it’s actually I’m gonna create the best analogy for what the way he actually defines self-actualization. Okay. The closest term I have found to the way that he transformed Nietzsche’s concept is being OTP Clear in Scientology

Simone Collins: being OTP, what.

Malcolm Collins: So it’s, so there’s a status called being clear, which means you have no more thons attached to, oh, one of the highest statuses you can have within Scientology. Okay. And it means that once you have this, and basically you, you, you are no longer burdened by like the problems of this world, and then you get all these magical powers.

And that’s basically the way that self-actualization is defined even by Maslow. It’s like clear out all of these lower states and then you enter a state that is [00:18:00] either almost magical in its conceptualization or just definitionally good without an explanation of how it’s good.

Simone Collins: But isn’t it like, well, I mean, think, think about it this way, right?

But people who are hung up on sex and, and seeking after that, I think, you know, in some way haven’t had their validation or just basic sexual needs met. And so they’re held back because they have basically intrusive thoughts about sex. If people are food insecure, they’ll have intrusive thoughts about.

Food that, that prevent them from being more productive and moving forward. And you could call those Eatons, you could call those whatever you want, but that’s, that’s a thing. And, and I think even same with with, I would argue hedonism just feeling good implies some level of feeling of insufficient physical security so that you, you actively try to seek out physical comfort because you don’t feel like you can get it whenever you need it.

Malcolm Collins: You grabbed onto something really important here before, before we go further, but I, I, I love, this is all stuff I plan to get to later, but I [00:19:00] actually think it’s really good to, to bring it in here. You point out the real challenge, which is are there things that are mentally preventing you from focusing on the bigger concepts in life, a bigger purpose in life?

And I’ll get to a good way to structure this for yourself. But are there things that are blocking you from reaching that point? And it is useful to have a word for talking about those things. The the problem is, is that there are two core ways to approach this. One of them is super toxic and one of them is very useful and healthy.

And the way that he contextualize it automatically rolls into the toxic category. What, which is to say you can either remove all of the things that are blocking you from focusing on. The bigger concepts in life, the bigger questions in life, by literally removing them from your life, right? [00:20:00] By literally never being hungry, never being uncomfortable, never not feeling love, never not having, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Right? Or you can remove them from affecting you by learning to better control your own mind.

Simone Collins: To stop caring.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. To better control what you care about and what you allow to affect you. So, and this isn’t a new concept, but one thing I love about Catholicism and people say, hear that from Malcolm. They’re like, what?

But I, I, I, I do love this is, that many of their sex like the Opus Day being one of the most famous practice various forms of mortification and mortification and, and many like mainstream Catholics will do this. Forms of, of mortification, I think is an incredibly mentally healthy practice if practice correctly.

Mm-hmm. Where they will wear things like bands that are constantly digging into them and causing, or hair

Simone Collins: shirts. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: A constant pain throughout the day, which they learn to suppress. And when you [00:21:00] learn to suppress that pain, that then ability can now be repurposed to suppress sexual desires or desires for food.

Indulgence.

Simone Collins: Gary, you’re not gonna be super avoidant about stuff just ‘cause you think you might feel a little bit of pain and discomfort. ‘cause you’re so used to it. It’s the default in your life,

Malcolm Collins: right? You overcome it as somebody like say Stephen Hawkings would right by. Or, or Helen Keller would, or something like that, right?

Like, by learning how to remove its effect on you. Mm-hmm. IE you, you basically learn to make yourself immune to parts of Laslow hierarchy of needs. Mm-hmm. And that is where true and meaningful actualization comes from. If, if, if, if there was a concept of actualization, but conceptualizing actualization of being at the top of this pyramid defaults people to wanting to fill all the stages of the pyramid below that [00:22:00] before they begin to address the, oh.

But I could have just learned to ignore all that stuff.

Simone Collins: Well, and I think, yeah, the, I, I guess, yeah, I, I just see that as a, an insane misinterpretation because. How housing security, food security and sexual security can be endless voids. And I think you actually see this when we see discussions of socialism or human dignity among the left, where there’s been this creep from human dignity involving the right to the pursuit of happiness, for example, right?

The right to the pursuit of these things, to not only do I deserve food, but also I deserve best in class medical care that I don’t pay for and I deserve a TV and I deserve a house of a certain standard. Like there’s just this creep, this hedonic treadmill of like, well, I don’t, I don’t live a life of dignity if I don’t have a smartphone and a flat screen TV [00:23:00] and a nice apartment and, and, and, and, and a trip a year, whatever.

Right? And these are things that Yeah. And you, yeah. This idea that you will ever be. Sas satisfied sexually or food wise? It’s not about that. It’s about reaching the point at which you don’t care anymore. There’s, there’s not like an an amount like you, oh, you just need 200 sex units and then you’ve, you’ve accomplished this wrong of the pyramid, you can move on.

Malcolm Collins: So, you are absolutely correct about this, Simone. And I hope you’re now seeing what I mean when I say the Laszlo’s hierarchy of needs built, the framework, the what it means to have reached, you know, Nirvana or what, what’s it called

enlightenment, that it’s, it’s become sort of enlightenment for progressives, but it is achieved through meeting hedonistic needs underneath it.

Huh? So, even though he, Laszlo would say well, self-actualization is itself not about hedonism maxing. He [00:24:00] basically conceptually set up his framework to lead people down a road of hedonism, maxing before they can achieve this. And not just hedonism mask masking, but sort of self love maxing, right?

Mm-hmm. Kirsha five months ago did a video. I, I just watched this like an hour and a a half and it was really fascinating. And it was titled and I thought it was like a click mate. When I read it, and it was not a clickbait father of seven leaves family to become a child. So what a, a, a, a father who was married and taking care of seven kids left his family to enter the, a polyamorous relationship with another man and woman where he acted as their 10-year-old kid daughter, who the dad also had relations with.

And he would do like, play behavior with their granddaughter and stuff to, because he was their daughter. That was who he really was. And there was an [00:25:00] NPR piece on this like I think it was NPR, that was the voice they were using. It could have been something other than NP, but it sounded like in a high production

Simone Collins: TJ voice.

Malcolm Collins: Hey, I am technically IN TJ Simon, so I get the, the worst. Yeah, but

Simone Collins: you don’t have, you don’t

Malcolm Collins: have

Simone Collins: an IN TJ voice.

Malcolm Collins: Thank

Simone Collins: God.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, so they do this. NPR the people hate my voice, though. The, the internet hates my voice, I think. But I don’t know, and I can’t change it. It’s very unique. But anyway, so they, they have this interview right where they cover him and it’s produced and it ends with like a sappy, like, well, in his new life, he has found love was out judgment, which he just wasn’t able to get from his old community.

You know, there’s

Simone Collins: judgment,

Malcolm Collins: there’s judgment. Well, no, no, no. In this new family where he lives as a child, and, and it was very much like, we hope that, like more of the world can reach a state like this. So there were like other people who see this guy doing this and want to broadcast this as [00:26:00] like an inspirational positive story to the world about how

Simone Collins: Wow.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: His old community was bigoted against his and, and it’s, it’s clear like the story is, is is really like, it, it shows the degeneracy of the age we live in where his wife tried to like. Humor, his cross-dressing habit, it seems for a long time. Oh. And he just decided as sort of the trans movement came out, oh, I’m not a cross-dresser, I am a woman.

And he would talk about how his daughter would sometimes like, steal his purse or something without realizing it, you know? And he just a, you know, live as a woman sometimes at home or whatever. And eventually he learned that he could be a little and, and go down that path. And if you wanna see other lifestyles, if you wanna get an idea of other people who have like maxis, you can look at our video on Anna Vains Life called The Life of a Ena Byte, I think is what we called it.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Funny that we’re talking about Kirsha right now. ‘cause she was the reporter who tried to cancel Kirsha. Oh yeah. Small world. She. Has a, a, a very detailed substack [00:27:00] about her life and trying to find purpose and meaning. And you can really see that her search for purpose is about a search for self validation from a wider community as well as an endless search for hedonism.

And they, they both always end up feeling hollow for her at the end because she, in this search for self, a validation, has come up with a very odd persona of who she really is, in her case, is a giant test

Simone Collins: and a valence. And a valence is a giant test

Malcolm Collins: woman, even though she was born a man. But that she,

Simone Collins: oh, we’re not gonna approach the elephant in the room, that she’s not in giant tests.

That’s the harder thing to solve.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Well, I mean, mean, the bigger problem is she hadn’t even done all of her. She still had male genitalia and she was confused [00:28:00] that the progressives who pretended that they accepted trans people, didn’t want to validate her in the way she wanted to be validated, which was through giving her sexual access to them.

And they didn’t want to give them like, they’re like, yes, we respect you, but I don’t wanna sleep with you. Right. Like, and she. That, that for her was not enough validation, so she could never reach the top of the hierarchy. She needed to basically stop there instead of saying, wait, I have the thoughts in my head of wanting to be X and wanting to be Y.

How do I better suppress these wants? Because these wants are not constructive in terms of what I think a meaningful life is. And then it’s what is a meaningful life? Well, now you’ve moved to self-actualization. As soon as you’ve entered the conversation of what is actually a life well lived, you’ve entered the realm of self-actualization, which can be done right now.

Or, or what meaningful self ization is. But to continue here,

Simone Collins: [00:29:00] actually, just something you said made me think of that line, or there’s actually several lines in the Bible about this, but basically the, the ones in relation to it’s, you don’t need to focus so much on materialism. Just being like what God, God provides for birds.

Like the birds aren’t worried about, I mean, they actually kind of are obsessed with where they’re gonna get their food, but like God provides, you know, focus on what your job is, whatever that’s supposed to be, right? Mm-hmm. I, I’m not remembering the exact lines ‘cause I’m not,

So the quote she’s thinking of is, therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you’ll eat or drink or about your body, what you will wear., Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds in the air. Do they not sow or reap or store away in barns and yet your heavenly father feeds them?

Are you not much more valuable than they? So do not worry saying, what shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we wear? But seek first the kingdom and his righteousness and [00:30:00] all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow. For tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble on its own.

I.

Malcolm Collins: that’s sort of what we’re doing right now.

We’re in a Jesus take that we all moment in our lives. We don’t know where our future income’s gonna come from. I mean, our fab is, is

Simone Collins: fully No, I’m, what I’m saying though is there is a biblical basis for this as well that, that for arguably thousands of years, people handed down. Wisdom has been, hey, don’t get too obsessed about food, shelter, money, sex, focus on serving God, whatever that means for you.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and as interesting as, I almost think that this is an inversion of the Buddhist concept of enlightenment.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that both show

Simone Collins: I disagree. Because the, the Buddhist concept of enlightenment involves letting go of your attachment to things. And I think that the [00:31:00] point of this is I don’t care about the food or the shelter or the sex or the social validation.

And that’s what, that’s what I meant. I thought the pyramid was all

Malcolm Collins: about, I’m talking about laszlo’s contextualization of self-actualization here, whereas the, the Buddhist is trying to fully suppress all outside desires and wants and everything like

Simone Collins: that. Not suppress, let go

Malcolm Collins: say what you want. It’s the same thing.

Make

Simone Collins: it so that those mean No, no, because it’s, it’s like a, it, it’s, it’s, it’s let it, you know, the whole. You will not fear if you’re a mind killer. You let it pass through you and only you remain. That is very like the Buddhist thing, but just take that in. Anything that you feel just duka, like any, like, you know, you, you are not hunger, like hunger pass through you and only, you know, just all take that and apply it to everything.

And that’s Buddhism.

Malcolm Collins: I understand that Buddhists try to say it in a fancy way that makes it seem something fancier than emotional suppression, but what it functionally is because if you [00:32:00] are

Simone Collins: but Malcolm, you’re not emotionally suppressing like some insane sex drive. You, you, you, you did it and, and you slutted it up and now you just don’t care that much anymore.

Malcolm Collins: If you are a Buddhist, okay you are still a human being. You are still feeling hunger. If you are hungry, you have just learned to not allow that emotional pull to make you act on it or to interrupt your other mental processes.

Simone Collins: I don’t know. You

Malcolm Collins: call that whatever you want. You can say, well,

Simone Collins: no, even food too.

Like you used to like invest a lot of time in going out to eat cool meals and stuff, and, and now you eat one meal a day and you’re like, well, like,

Malcolm Collins: right. But that’s, I found out the hack to this. We’re gonna talk about that later. Okay? But the, the, the Buddhist versus the lala’s hierarchy of needs haver, right?

The guy who has everything and the Buddhist who has learned to suppress everything. I think both of them have missed the point, because once you have reached [00:33:00] that state, IE either you have every need that you want fed to you. Or you have reached enlightenment and you no longer are affected by those needs.

The point of reaching those two states should have been the, okay, now that I am not distracted by lower order biological or self-affirming thoughts, I can think about what is a life actually well lived? Okay? And I can construct myself and my lifestyle. Based on what a life actually well lived is. Okay.

And if you’re just sitting alone in a tip, I do not think by most sane people’s standards, that’s actually a life well lived. You have done nothing to contribute to the civilization that bore you and that sacrifices with you because a lot of these monks live off of donations. Right. You, you are living a life that is fundamentally one of the most hedonistic and self satisfactory of any living human because it is a life wholly [00:34:00] dedicated to your own mental state.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Your, your little pet project. That is true. That is kind of messed up that everyone else has to work and give you rice for your little rice bowl just so you can get enlightened. But they don’t have time to get enlightened ‘cause they are too busy surviving and also support you. And what they tell

Malcolm Collins: you is, oh, you drew it in your next life.

You, you serve me in this life.

So

Simone Collins: in your

Malcolm Collins: next life.

Simone Collins: I hadn’t thought about it that way, but that’s, that’s a little. I’m sure they have some profound, pseudo profound, at least answer for that. But

Malcolm Collins: people who have watched our track videos knows, I I, I see Buddhism as an antiviral religion which means that I see it as being a personification of sort of evil on earth.

Simone Collins: Yeah. In other words, you argue that Buddhism wants to genocide sentience like

Malcolm Collins: it does. That is actually it stated goal. I remember I first told you this ‘cause you were raised partially Buddhist. You went to like Buddhist churches and everything like that. Like you were actually, you were raised fully Buddhist and you were like, no, [00:35:00] it doesn’t.

And I was like, yes, it does actually like go read. And then you came back a few days later and I heard you argue that yes it does to somebody. And I was like, wait, when did you change your mind on that? And what was your

Simone Collins: experience? Yeah. I just realized that you just, you were right and then Yeah. But when you heard me arguing, that was at one of our dinner parties in New York City and.

The guy had lived with like zen monasteries for a while. Like he was like quite in it and he was like, oh yeah. I mean, you’re right. It’s just, when you put it that way, it sounds so bad.

Malcolm Collins: It is a genocide of sentient. I can imagine. Nothing worse in all

Simone Collins: creation as

Malcolm Collins: a cult. I have in one of my fictional sci-fi universes, like the Buddhist being the big bad trying to end reality.

You know, and it’s well,

Simone Collins: at least Maslow’s hierarchy of needs doesn’t do that.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, I think it’s just as bad.

Simone Collins: No, Maslow, so the Buddhist version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is just like a gun at the top of the pyramid. And like, do it, [00:36:00]

Malcolm Collins: do glass, the planet. I mean, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re actually like anti utilitarians, right?

Like they that is what Buddhism is. It’s anti utilitarianism turned into a religion.

Simone Collins: Negative utilitarianism turned

Malcolm Collins: into, oh, sorry. Negative utilitarianism turned into a religion. It’s David Benatar the religion. Yeah. All existence is suffering, therefore, in existence anyway. Enough of that, we’re gonna really piss off some watchers who haven’t watched our tracks or have gone into this longer.

And I can go into a bunch of quotes from text, but I’m not gonna go eat to here because I know I’m right on this one. In the late 20th century criticisms arose, some argued Maslows model was overly western and individualistic overlooking collectivist cultures where sex, self, self-actualization might involve communal harmony rather than personal achievement.

I love that. Right? Positive psychology in the 1990s and two thousands led by figures like Martin Seligman built on it by inter integrating empirical research on wellbeing. Flow states [00:37:00] from Myla Chi Leah or something, and Eudonic happiness, focusing on purpose and virtue over hedonic pleasure. I am not going to put those dirty forward words in my American tongue, Simone

check or whatever, you know? So anyway positive psychology, I really think is, is the, the version of the psychology movement that grew out of self-actualization. And that was really big in the nineties and two thousands. And a lot of EAs act like it’s this, like great form of psychology or this non-harmful form of psychology.

And it’s, it’s extremely harmful. By the way, before I get further, you’re wondering about like my ultimate hack to the suppression of. Thoughts and needs while also, you know, building your life into something where you are working towards the future and working almost, I think as hard as, as, as you can towards building a better future for humanity.

I mean,

Simone Collins: I, and I can, I can vouch for that. Malcolm works is, he’s never worked harder. I mean, he’s, he was from the day I met him, [00:38:00] the hardest working person I ever met.

Malcolm Collins: You. You too. That’s why I wanted to marry you. I was like,

Simone Collins: this is what I’m

Malcolm Collins: in for.

Simone Collins: And you work harder today than you have ever worked since the day I met you, which is insane.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, yes. Self. So, so how, how, what’s my hack? O opioid agonist.

Simone Collins: Oh, just naltrexone. I should figured.

Malcolm Collins: I’m pretty much always on naltrexone. The, so for people who don’t know, naltrexone is an opioid agonist, which blocks the pleasure pathways that you feel from o opioid pathways, right?

Which are caused by things like say, Facebook, scrolling, gambling other addictive behavior patterns. I originally started taking it to lower my drinking and it was very effective at that. Then I realized that it basically had a positive effect on almost everything in my life. Because like I haven’t checked Facebook in like a year, years at this point.

I, I made a post recently, like an update on my life, but I haven’t checked Facebook in years.

Simone Collins: And I think I haven’t, I have a [00:39:00] theory that this might also have a genetic basis. ‘cause I feel like my life. Is what Malcolm describes, he feels like on Naltrexone. He’s like, I just don’t like, because I never understood what, what it was like to feel any sort of addictive response to things.

Malcolm Collins: And then people will be like, well, you didn’t really master those, those I, you know, impulsive emotions, right? You used something else. And it’s like, yes, but hold on, hold on, because I’m human. That has always been an option. Yeah. This is like saying the, the Europeans didn’t really beat the Native Americans.

They shot them with superior technology. It’s like, well, the point was winning the, the point of shutting down these emotions, right? Like these, I impulsive or intrusive thoughts was so that I could focus on structuring my life to be one that well, from my perspective, what I think matters, and we’ll get to how to determine this for yourself, that contributed to human civilization.

That’s all I cared [00:40:00] about. Right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I didn’t care about the individual like, like winning those individual battles was pointless to me. I, I, I, I just wanted it gone so I could focus on work the bigger thing. Yeah. And from my perspective, you are being masturbatory and self-indulgent by engaging in a battle that you don’t have to engage in.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You are the person who, when a forklift is right there insists on lifting the heavy boxes yourself. Even somebody else is saying, well, that’ll take you four times as long. Just use the forklift.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Like. You’re not better for doing that. You’re a dumb butt who is had a, and this is actually an example of your self vision being so, intrusive that it b, living a life without right?

Because wiz, at that time that you spent lifting those boxes rather than using the forklift, you were [00:41:00] unable to educate yourself to learn more about the world, develop a better the world, or act the way that directly contributed to human civilization. You specifically made a decision to told your self image over things of greater value which shows that you are a slave to that.

A note here, I’m not putting myself out here as like a master of I mean, I think I’m uniquely good. I’ve, I’ve done a lot with my life. Like you, you, you and I have so far. I mean. Five kids, five books run major companies, degree graduate degrees from Stanford and Cambridge. A lot of people, CEOs of a company that pulled in 70 million a year at one point.

That’s, that’s pretty big. Oh, yeah. We started the prenatals movement. That was big. Our podcast is doing well enough. I, I mean, I hope we continue to grow but you know, I’ve, I I, I’ve done a lot in the time that I’ve had, and it’s because I’ve been able to allow the, the things that distract me to distract me [00:42:00] less than they otherwise might.

But there is nothing less masturbatory about playing video games for a bit every night than there is for taking extra time doing something, quote unquote yourself, rather than automating it. I’m, but to continue here, what are the the five levels, the original levels of laszlo’s hierarchy needs?

So we can sort of talk about this theory and, and, and break down more why it sucks.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Wait, let me, let me see. Okay. I think it’s food and shelter, safety, sex, social approval, and then self-actualization. Did I get it right? What’s

Malcolm Collins: really funny here is you got love and belonging confused with sex, but I think that the progressive urban monoculture has morphed it into sex.

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: And so, at the bottom he has physiological leads. Okay. The most basic requirements for survival, these include air, water, food, shelter, sleep, closing, and reproduction. As essential for species.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. We are gonna. No,

Malcolm Collins: invert the [00:43:00] pyramid, have those things in need, nothing else. And I loved it from the very beginning.

He made. Reproduction. The bottom level need sex is a bottom level need for him. Right. Which I think is very interesting in terms of how this influenced later fields of psychology in the urban monoculture. Safety needs. Once physiological needs are met, people seek security and stability examples, personal safety, financial security, job saving health, property, and protection from harm or chaos.

That’s one I just think is pure stupid. You can always imagine some threat to you. E everybody knows, you know that the trans person who’s screaming about how when somebody says We shouldn’t give we, we, we shouldn’t be gender transitioning a 7-year-old. And they’re like, how could you say that? You’re gonna kill me.

You’re gonna genocide everybody like me. It’s like, no. I was just like, you know, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this to seven year olds. It’s ‘cause [00:44:00] they’re seven. You know, mean you wanna kill me. So safety, and this is important about safety and I, I, I think you know, a good book on this is why zebras get ulcers or don’t get ulcers.

Sorry, why zebras don’t get alls where Yeah. He basically points out,

Simone Collins: but Doc Robert list, he’s wonderful. Wait,

Malcolm Collins: you’re so smart, Simone. Anyway he basically points out that,

Simone Collins: no, no, sorry, it’s Robert Polsky. I’m sorry,

Malcolm Collins: Robert

Simone Collins: Polsky. He’s the, the health guy. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That a zebra in, in, in, in nature has a series of, of biological mechanisms that puts their nervous system into a, an alternate state and a lot of their biology into an alternate state when they think their life is existentially at, at risk when they see a lion, for example.

Right. And so they freak out when they see the lion.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And you as a human have a problem. Your higher cognitive ability has given you the ability to imagine that your life is at risk.

Simone Collins: Yes, we can make [00:45:00] synthetic lions and then we are constantly subject to synthetic lions, whereas a zebra is only gonna have the lion reaction when there’s just an actual lion there.

Malcolm Collins: So that lion reaction, if you utilize that to motivate. So for example, if you utilize that, you have an existentially important test coming up to motivate yourself to focus on that test, and you genuinely believe this to be existential to you, and you allow that to put you in this alternate neurological state.

Yeah. Who will be less good at retaining information and everything like that.

Simone Collins: Right. This is one thing. People who are addicted to blue sky or X or whatever your social media platform is, especially ven, a lot of rage on it. Are putting their health at so much risk because they’re just Oh, absolutely.

Choosing to get enraged by this. And they’re just, oh, the years they’re shaving off their lives. No, I think there are ways to do it, right? Some people just scroll X and just chuckle incessantly. We’ve, we do that, but that’s rare. Actual

Malcolm Collins: looks like.

Simone Collins: [00:46:00] Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Or a meaningful form of it is you have existential tests coming up and instead of letting a fear of the existential nature of the test be what drives you to study, you are clear minded enough to suppress other needs that you may have in that moment and say, no, I just need to focus on this because it is more important than these other needs I may feel in the moment.

Mm-hmm. This is the area physiological needs. I think learning to suppress those can be indulgent. You feel physiological needs for a reason often. And the main physiological need that I would say that people should learn to suppress at times is arousal. Because a lot of people feel arousal for a lot of things that just aren’t particularly important to serving the need that arousal originally felt, which was getting you to have children.

Right? Yeah. As I said, you should think of arousal as saying you should impregnate that. And if the thing isn’t impregnating, you’re like, oh, you’re, you’re not useful to me right now in this moment. Right. You know, this is not a useful, this is not serving the purpose. It evolved to serve. [00:47:00] Yeah. So, safety needs completely negative right Next.

Love and belonging needs also called social needs. The need for interpersonal relationships and a sense of connection is include intimate relationships, family bonds, a sense of. Belonging to a group affection and feeling accepted by others. This is again, I think, completely toxic. And I think that this is really who needs being bundled as one.

One is having other people accept you the way you accept yourself or see yourself. This is where the trans person says, I want them to accept me as a woman. ‘cause that’s the way I see myself. Or the guy who thinks that he’s a, a 10-year-old child saying, I want them to accept me and my community and my family and my kids to accept me as a 10-year-old child because that’s the way I see and and conceptualize myself.

Right? It can be taken to mean that, and that’s just obviously toxic to, to even on face value. But there’s otherwise saying conservatives that will say, [00:48:00] Hey, well at the very least you should learn to, you know, you should, you should strive for acceptance from your community and family and everything like that.

Where I would say no, not of it is if it interferes with larger, more important goals for yourself. Yeah. Time spent with family and masturbating those needs is no less removing you from either self-improvement through, through education, through whatever you need to improve your ability to act on the world or directly acting on the world to attempt to make the world better.

It is, it is removing you from that. And as like Simone and I have, I think a very healthy relationship and yet we don’t interact that much outside of these recordings because. Our interactions are fundamentally indulgent. Be they sexual interactions or be they romantic interactions or love interactions or anything like that, right?

So, and I think [00:49:00] everybody fun psychologically they cognize it, right? You know? I, I think that you have a duty as far as you have a duty to attempt to help your partner meet the needs that they cannot suppress. That is the need for belonging and acceptance and arousal. But you should keep in mind that if you over meet those needs, you functionally hurt their ability to help their wider suppression system.

You go in there and you say. I am gonna make sure that you feel completely accepted with whoever you are. I don’t think anyone should ever feel that way in a relationship. I know that I can disappoint Simone by not living up to her expectations of me. And that is a good thing. That is healthy in a relationship.

There is nothing more hateful. A person could say to their partner than, I love you as you are, and I will always love you unconditionally. Even to a [00:50:00] child. What if that child becomes a serial killer or something? Right? Like, that’s a, that’s a messed up thing to, to say to somebody, right? Like the, those people who are like, well, my son would never do this.

They then just deny the person that they created and raised thought. Simone, before I go further,

Simone Collins: I agree with you. Sorry, I had muted myself. ‘cause Tex is singing.

Malcolm Collins: And then esteem needs. He then divides this into two parts, esteem, confidence, achievements, independence, and respect for oneself. This is completely toxic. It is not something that you should strive for at all. Either you accept yourself as somebody who is attempting to live a worthwhile life, or you do not.

You do not. Like if you wanna understand our wider pH, like if you’re like, oh, this philosophy that they’re laying out here sounds like a worldview, I’d like to understand better read our book or listen to our audio book, the Pragmatist Guide to Life, or we lay out an alternate way to live, and I’ll go over the [00:51:00] basics of that in just a second.

But, confidence, achievements, independence, respect for oneself, right? If one of my kids can achieve more for the world while they live under our roof. That does not lessen the work that they did while we helped them use the tools that you were born with and had access to do not. Because if you, if you do the opposite and you allow those tools to say, oh, I don’t really have independence because I’m living off of money I inherited or something like that, which we are not people who know this about us.

We are definitely not all of the money my had family had got stolen. But, and it’s very well documented in court records. You can look this up, I think it’s even on our Wikipedia. But if you are a person living off of that and you allow yourself to feel lesser and then do all this indulgent charity giving and everything like that, as opposed to to try to make yourself feel like, oh, I’m a good person.

As opposed to say, no, no, no, no, [00:52:00] no, no. What role do I need to serve within civilization? What is the optimal role for myself? Every wasted dollar is something you spent on a form of mental masturbation. But this also comes of respect for yourself. You don’t need to work on respect for yourself. Be somebody worthy of respecting.

Once you develop a world model about a good way to live in, a good thing to be you don’t need to worry about respect for yourself because you know, if you have suppressed masturbatory desires, right, that you are achieving through, through your actions or at least attempting to best you can.

Something meaningful in civilization. Somebody may ask me, Malcolm, if you didn’t have kids, what would you be doing with your life? You know, what would you be focused on in your life? And it’s like the same stuff. I’d just be less effective at it, but it wouldn’t make me a. Necessarily a lesser person or have less respect for myself because I knew I was [00:53:00] acting on the best I could with what I had access to in my biology.

And keep in mind, your biology can include things like genetic predilections for addictions and stuff like that. You just have to work on it as best you can to live the most productive life you can. And then the second category here is respect from others. Status recognition, prestige, strengths, people seek accomplishment, mastery and appreciation here.

People do not really seek respect from others. What people seek from others is they want other people to see and think of them the way that they see and think of themselves. If you have respect from others, but it’s through an archetype or a caricature. And we know this ‘cause we have a lot of very famous friends that you don’t see as authentic to the way you want to be perceived or to yourself.

You often see the fame as a noose around your neck. And you [00:54:00] will become annoyed by your fans, right? Because they don’t, they don’t conceptualize you the way you wish to be conceptualized. And you see this of a lot of famous actors and musicians and stuff like this, and they end up like blowing out.

Like they should have everything they need, right? By Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and yet they seem to be the people most likely to crash out. Why are they the most likely to crash out if Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? That’s actually a good way to contextualize what you need from life. Thoughts on that before we go further?

Simone Collins: I agree. I think you see enough from people whose needs should technically be met per the pyramid that are not, clearly not thriving and clearly not working on whatever it is you expect them to be working on. Having those other mets being sorry, needs to be met. And again, I think a, a lot of this has to do with the fact that none of those things lower on the pyramid by modern standards, I think can be met.[00:55:00]

Malcolm Collins: So, and I, and I think that you see this even when you look at people who you have met and, and think about mental stability, right? The people who you know, who have. Tons of wealth, maybe tons of sexual access tons of, you know, et cetera. Like the movie star types. Do they seem more mentally healthy and disciplined to you in terms of their like on their deathbed satisfaction with your life?

Or think of your average, you know, person who know who’s like, say opus day or whatever. Who’s actually going through these mortification rituals, everything like that, attempting to learn self-discipline. Do they not seem more, everybody knows that they’re happier and better off, and not just happier, but happier in the way that anybody wants to be.

Right? Yeah. Like the, the only true happiness you will ever feel is sacrificing for a goal that you have genuinely thought through and genuinely care about.

Simone Collins: Well, and that’s why in general, people who have four plus kids strike me. As among those [00:56:00] most self-actualized people. They’ve decided that something that isn’t easy is important to them.

They are pursuing it effectively, and they feel a great sense of contentment and alignment as a result of that. It’s one of the reasons why this story of this father of seven is so shocking to me, because normally when someone goes through the great difficulty of having in raising seven children, you know, they, they, they clearly are expressing that they value children and they are very involved in raising those children and feeling pretty aligned and good and contented with that.

So it’s so odd to me this case.

Yeah.

But every, every story is complicated, so who knows? You know, and, and sometimes people have a, a mini stroke and get brain damage or change significantly in terms of their personality, and no one realizes it, you know, they have a tumor growing and their, their personality totally changes.

And I, I wouldn’t totally put it past, unless this is behavior that is long existed.

Malcolm Collins: [00:57:00] So later developments and expansion. So he develop, developed some few extra parts to the chart in his later years if you

Simone Collins: really, oh, he had

Malcolm Collins: a cognitive needs desire for knowing, understanding, curiosity and explanation.

This is the one good thing. I think he has these.

Simone Collins: See, I just thought that was part of self actual, I thought that was self-actualization.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, you need that before self-actualization apparently. So next year aesthetic needs appreciation of beauty, balance, form, and symmetry. No,

Simone Collins: that just sounds like a sensitivity.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And transcendence needs the highest level involving helping others achieve self-actualization. He’s directly borrowing from Buddhism here. Peak experiences beyond the self spirituality and connection to something greater eg. Humanity, nature of the universe. The shift,

Simone Collins: I don’t know, this sounds like the, the life coach problem where.

You know, when, when, when you have a life coach, the only thing you ever wanna be is a life coach.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That’s where all new life coaches come from. Somebody was working with a life coach and so the life coach tell them, oh, well you wanna be a life coach, [00:58:00] because that’s what they thought was a good life, you know?

Simone Collins: Well, and typically the advice you get from people gets you to where they are. And, you know, advice from a life coach is gonna get you to become a life coach.

Malcolm Collins: So he views this as a shifted focus from pure self-fulfillment to selflessness. Mm-hmm. Which again, I see as just comical. Like, come on, you’re either living a productive life or you’re not.

Right. And part of that productive life can help be helping other people break out. I mean, that was the first thing that we did when I was like, I wanna do something like purely. To help the world. The, the big early project we had was the Pragmatist Guide to Life in the, in the, in the Moral and Philosophical framework laid out in that and that framework.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, I’m gonna briefly go over it. We’re unfortunately gonna have to cut this episode in half because it is too long at this point. Mm-hmm. We haven’t even got into the mic stuff.

Simone Collins: What? There’s, oh my gosh. Wow. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: That just easily breaks into self-actualization versus the Uber minch.

So. I want to quickly talk here about the Pragma Guide of Life. Basically, we say that you [00:59:00] first need to develop a framework for how you determine what is true in the world, in, in reality because it is getting increasingly harder. And so you have a framework of sources of truth and how those sources interact with each other.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Than you use that source of truth to build up a sort of tree of beliefs about how the world works with metaphysical stuff sort of lower on that tree. And, and if you break something lower on the tree, it breaks everything further down the tree of your beliefs. And we also go over how to build what you think is true.

Mm-hmm. Like a good example is because a lot of people are like, well, I just trust academics and everyone knows that you can’t just trust academics anymore. And somebody’s like, well, I just trust. The church and it’s like, well, you know, historically the church has you know, put out specific perceptions of God and, and its own religious framework that has evolved since they have, have gone out.

So, you know, some level of, even if you’re, and like the most conservative, like Catholic group, even, even they know that through the various [01:00:00] councils things have evolved over time. Mm-hmm. Right. So, you know, you, you. You have some more, more internal responsibility to decide things by yourself. And we go over like how you can do that.

Like an easy explanation here is if an organization puts out information that is counter to their goals, it is more likely to be true. Right. Like if an academic puts out information that makes and, and they don’t have a long history of like anti-trans research or something like that, that, that makes transness look like a bad idea for kids you can be like, oh, that’s, that’s more likely to be true.

Or if a oil form puts out stuff that makes it looked like you know, oil is actually damaging to the environment, you could be like, well, maybe they have some underlying, they’re trying to create barriers to entry for small players or something. But it’s, it’s probably more likely to be true. Yeah.

If, if somebody who is historically been critical of, of gender [01:01:00] transition puts out something saying it’s not that bad, you can be more likely to trust that. Right? So there’s, there’s things that you can build here, and then we say once you have this framework for understanding reality, then you need to determine for yourself what your objective function is sort of like what a utility function is for computers, but just to say the weighted mix of things that you are attempting to maximize was your life. Like you, you, you likely want some level of hedonism you know, just in case you’re wrong about everything else.

But then you want like a multiplier on like how maybe helping others feel good if, if that’s something you think of as having value. I do not. Or building up human civilization or and we go through in that book all with various dumb things you may choose like, like if it’s one of the reasons why hedonism is such a dumb thing to maximize in yourself or others is the things that make us feel good.

We only feel because our ancestors who felt them had more surviving offspring. They’re not things of intrinsic good. Right. And this is one of the core reasons I see negative utilitarianism as so. Stupid. [01:02:00] If you were programmed to feel something else like suppose you were programmed to feel, and some humans are actually programmed to feel this because they, there’s weird like poop fetishes to think that rubbing poop on your face like that makes you feel good, right?

Is that an intrinsically good act now? Because of course not. It’s ridiculous, right? Like, that is not an a, a barometer for any form of, of, of objective goodness was in our reality.

Simone Collins: Right?

Malcolm Collins: Which is one of the reasons why all of these biological, all of these, you know, we, we talk about martyrdom of man has a very good way of put this to escape, you know, our fore footed ancestry.

All of these bestial desires and hallucinations, malformations of our world perspective created by this evolved site of us. Everything done based on that is definitionally evil. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. [01:03:00]

Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you, Simone. I love

Simone Collins: you too.

Malcolm Collins: And you are a great wife and I think are a natural zen master of this, but I think it’s ‘cause you’ve got like naltrexone in your vein, your opioid pathway is like, basically don’t work.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and we know this too, that it, I, we suspect it’s genetic because my dad just says that he like, just did all the drugs.

Malcolm Collins: And

Simone Collins: he’s, yeah, but I never get

Malcolm Collins: addicted to any of them. And

Simone Collins: it’s like, yeah. And he would, you know, he’d like take up smoking on, on trips and stuff and then come back and just not smoke anymore.

Like just, he’s literally, I can stop anything whenever I want to. And also whenever I drink, I just get drunk like nothing else happens. And I wonder what it is that other people experience that I’m missing when I scroll. I just see stuff. I, I really wanna know what it feels

Malcolm Collins: like. I will describe it as being closest to what MSG tastes like.

That is sparkles, the closest other sensation that I can describe as [01:04:00] to what the extra feel on top of drinking feels like that.

Simone Collins: So addiction is the umami of, of emotions.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. It’s the umami of emotions.

Simone Collins: Delicious. It’s

Malcolm Collins: just that, it’s that enhancer.

Simone Collins: Oh. Of all the

Malcolm Collins: other emotions.

Simone Collins: Salt, salt of emotions.

Gosh, wow.

Imagine living my life. A life of food with no salt. Mommy. No.

Malcolm Collins: Mommy isn’t just salt.

Simone Collins: No, it’s salt and fat basically, I think. But it

Malcolm Collins: enhances the way you perceive other flavors.

Simone Collins: Yeah. By the way, did you know there’s this, this weird spoon that was invented in Japan. It uses like some kind of ionizer or something else that you can, you can consume low sodium products, but when you eat off of the spoon, I think it uses some kind of electrical current.

It’s so, it’s so Japan. You, it, it, it enables you to taste more of the salt. So you’re eating a fraction of the amount of sodium, but you’re getting the same sodium taste.

Malcolm Collins: Japanese got some cool

Simone Collins: [01:05:00] tech. I’ll tell you what. Right, and it, and it’s not some kind of, it’s not like the stupid, you put a scent cartridge in your water bottle products that you get from a YouTube influencer.

It is actually, no, you are tasting the salt. It just sounds so cool. But yeah,

Malcolm Collins: so I love that. By the way, another fun fact I learned that I didn’t know, and this was from that SIA video on the guy who wanted to be 10.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: The original trans child influencer, the one who they, they realized that he, he was the wrong gender ed.

I think it was three or four. And then they transitioned him or started him on you know, puberty blockers in transition at seven, and who was on the cover of National Geographic, like they did a full cover story on him. When was this in did all of the news rounds in nineties? It was in nineties, about 10 years ago.

Okay. Anyway, or maybe like six years ago or seven years ago. Anyway, they that, that individual now says that becoming trans ruin their lives and they longer trans, they identify as what is it, bigender or whatever, [01:06:00] like,

Simone Collins: agender.

Malcolm Collins: It multi, multi-gender, whatever it is that people, the, the, I can’t remember

Simone Collins: the attack helicopter Octavian would 100% identify as a attack helicopter erotically.

Malcolm Collins: You asked him. This was so funny. So Simone asks him like, do you want to identify like there’s some people who think you can identify as a helicopter? Oh, no. No. It wasn’t that. It was, it was, do you wanna marry a helicopter? That’s what you asked him.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I was joking. I was joking. I was like, if you like helicopters so much, why don’t you just marry one and.

He was like, regret, can’t marry a helicopter. And I was just thrilled to hear him say such a reasonable thing. And he is like, the ring would fly right off and no, no. Now

Malcolm Collins: you’re like, is this how you determine whether or not something is,

Simone Collins: can you put a ring on it then it’s marryable.

Malcolm Collins: No, I actually really like this interpretation because he has said the point of merit in his mind.

The point of marriage is putting a ring on something and if you can’t put a ring on something, you shouldn’t marry it. Whereas I can

Simone Collins: [01:07:00] put a ring on a squirrel’s tail though. I could, I could put a ring

Malcolm Collins: on a, but Simone, the point I’m making here,

Simone Collins: okay,

Malcolm Collins: is that the point of marriage is not putting a ring on somebody’s finger.

It’s. Getting married to somebody you can impregnate and have children whiz to start a family whiz. Well,

Simone Collins: that’s not where he is right now with the

Malcolm Collins: whole

Simone Collins: concept.

Malcolm Collins: Obviously he’s a child, but once he understands that the point of marriage isn’t the ring, but impregnation,

Simone Collins: okay, then he’d be like, well, I can’t have a child with this person, therefore I won’t marry them.

I see.

Malcolm Collins: And I, and somebody would be like, what? You think that somebody who you know, is, is, is infertile, isn’t worthy of marriage? And it’s like, if my kid asked me, should I marry this person? They’re perfect for me in every other way, but they’re infertile. And there isn’t another way to have kids, like through surrogacy or through artificial wombs, I would say Absolutely.

No, don’t marry them. And they’d be like, what did they not deserve marriage? Did they not deserve happiness? And I’m like, no, they can marry somebody else who’s infertile. Right? Like they don’t need to waste the life of a [01:08:00] fertile person on their own personal indulgence. And if they were living a purposeful life of sacrifice, they would understand that.

And so I, that’s an offensive thing to say, but it’s, it’s something that, yeah, I absolutely, that is the point of a marriage.

Simone Collins: I was infertile, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: Well, we made you fertile.

Simone Collins: We powered through it. That’s the point.

Malcolm Collins: You, you made yourself fertile through technology again, not cheating.

Simone Collins: Thank goodness. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You’ve, you’ve done all of the drugs, all of the extra, you bring every kid into this world with more sacrifice than I’d think just about any other woman. When bringing a child into the world and, and, and through the,

Simone Collins: no. A lot of people just, just die. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, I think I would rather have, I had to go through what you were going through and I just live for hedonism.

You haven’t seen the drug. She has to take a needle that’s like this long into her butt [01:09:00] every single day for months with every kid that we have. Like it is, I, I couldn’t even, I, I look at it and I couldn’t even push it in for her. It is so gruesome. It’s like you look at it and you’re like, how does that not go through the bone?

Simone Collins: No, no. The first time I had to do a needle like that, both Malcolm and I were like, especially ‘cause I’m, I’m on the thinner side, it’s going to hit my hip bone. There’s no way. This is not gonna hit my hip bone. I, I still don’t know where it goes. It’s honestly, I, I’m like, I don’t know how this works, but it works.

You

Malcolm Collins: are s so

Simone Collins: tough and permanent scarring. You can actually see the permanent scarring from needles. But I mean, you know, we’re it that they’re. It’s such a nice, like we have other friends who have permanent scarring because they have chronic diseases that have, you know, involved so many, so many blood draws and so many other things.

I, I, I would much rather have permanent scarring from needles due to trying to create new life rather than fighting for my own. You know what I mean? So it’s, it’s a very lucky place to be. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: What what a what a [01:10:00] what a profound thing to say, Simone. You are a, a priestess of

Simone Collins: It’s not profound. I’m lucky.

It’s not a profound thing like

this. You were just born, enlightened. I

Malcolm Collins: love it.

Simone Collins: No,

Malcolm Collins: it’s

Simone Collins: true. True. No, I’m lucky that I’m not chronically ill and fighting for my life. And so were you. We should enjoy it while it lasts. It is not going to. I’m gonna get cancer for sure. I hope there’s better treatments for when it hits.

Ooh, I love new home. I love you too. Happy

Malcolm Collins: spectacular day.

Simone Collins: Bye

Malcolm Collins: bye.

No, we can do your episode next, or we could try doing the second part of this episode. Next. Let’s do your episode.

Simone Collins: Okay, great. . And I don’t know if you’ve been downstairs, but since Octavian finished his mandatory lessons of the day, he decided he didn’t wanna fly his RC helicopter. He wanted to set up an elaborate obstacle course for it. And it is elaborate. There’s when you go down you’ll see [01:11:00] it’s a whole thing. It’s a whole thing.

And also when we went down, there was some kind of bird, I think some kind of finch flying through our kitchen and living room. And I think they came in through the same, same part of our house that the other dead birds that used to be in that cabinet where the bunk beds now are, would end up. So I think I sufficiently directed him out of the house or her, but I don’t know.

So there might,

Malcolm Collins: how, how is the comments today in the China video?

Simone Collins: People we’re glad that we were covering it, broadly speaking, because it’s not really being discussed.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, if we end up breaking that story and it turns out to be accurate, which I think all the evidence shows that it is right now before, like the New York Times and the mainstream media breaks it.

Mm-hmm. Oh my God. We deserve so much credit for that. The internet, I deserve internet points. I don’t know what those look like. [01:12:00] Maybe another meme, maybe another Know Your Meme page. I think they’ve integrated all of our know your mean pages. And very sadly, and I’d love if one of our fans fix this because we don’t edit our own Wikipedia page, but they took away the picture on our Wikipedia page.

Simone Collins: It was a picture that your late mother took. How dare they, this, this merch was merch your memory. Her efforts? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I’m sure somebody was like, well, it’s technically not whatever license. I, I don’t know how to give a picture with the right license.

Simone Collins: Oh, that’s true. Yeah. It’s it’s not in Wikimedia comments.

If we can, we can literally just contribute images to Wikimedia comments if you want me to.

Malcolm Collins: I think that’s a good idea. Just dump a bunch of images in and then somebody who wants to use some can

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: That are like ours, so.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Because Yeah, otherwise it could be copyright infringement. And technically that was, I guess, copyright infringement of your late mother’s work.

I’m not really sure how that, that works when someone dies. But anyway

Malcolm Collins: I mean, all our videos are free for public [01:13:00] use. Like if anybody wants to like, cut up or titch our videos, we would never complain.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But they’re not published online as, for example, creative Commons. Mm-hmm. That used to be one of the major.

Nonprofits I would donate to. I really like creative comments.

Malcolm Collins: Here’s a good idea. Yeah. We put our pictures on the prenatal list website under a Creative Commons license. Mm. So that anybody who wants to take them from there and use them can. So just very clearly put the prenatal list website under a creative comments

license.

Simone Collins: Honestly, I mean, for, except I think Wiki Wikipedia is one of the few exceptions now because of ai, it kind of doesn’t matter anymore. You know, things like licenses of that sort are absurd. People shouldn’t waste time thinking about that. But I, yeah, I will, I will therefore handle that. One of the most funny comments on what’s going on with ccp Oh.

In terms of substantive and smart one, one of our collective friends also who listens to the podcast was saying they don’t think [01:14:00] it was an attempted coup. They think that Xi Jinping is actually trying to prepare the, the country for war. And. Actual war and, and that has this person really nervous, but he doesn’t think it was a coup.

He just thinks that she is like doing everything. But

Malcolm Collins: she arrested the only two sitting members of the council other than himself and

Simone Collins: who were opposed to war with Taiwan. He’s like, let’s get it done. We’re doing this. You don’t wanna do it. You’re out.

Malcolm Collins: And their entire families, this wasn’t

Simone Collins: like a, you need to, yeah, if you need to remove all impediments to war with Taiwan and you’re ready to go, I, I could see a world in which that makes sense.

This person also pointed out just the, the sheer and intense opacity of the CCP and its inner workings, which leads to rampant conspiracy theories. So to a certain extent, anyone’s guess is as best as good as anyone else’s because.

Malcolm Collins: I don’t think that’s true either. No, not anyone’s guess is as good as [01:15:00] anyone else’s.

There are people who have in the past made predictions about China’s future actions, and those predictions have turned out to be accurate or made predictions about what was happening, and then later we learned that that stuff was actually happening.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That’s why I rely on a commentary like Lay’s Real Talk because she is one of those people for

me.

Simone Collins: Oh, that’s funny. This this same person was like, I hate Lay’s Real talk. Just go back and watch her various predictions she’s made and see how those play out. That was exactly his argument against her analysis actually.

By the way, if you had been watching laser real talk and her predictions, you would know all the rumors leading up to the various assassination attempts against these generals and against she, , was predicting that these generals would be ousted. Dramatically and in a very high profile way, which is exactly what happened, and in a higher profile way than any, even like confirmed Insurrectionists had been in, out denounced in terms of how quickly and loudly they [01:16:00] were denounced after their arrest and the arrest of their entire families.

, So the point being here is. You would’ve seen this coming, if you had been watching her. You would not have seen this coming, if you had been watching mainstream news. And we do know that this happened, and it was a complete reversal of things. So this idea of like, oh, she doesn’t predict it clearly, she does have some sort of insider knowledge of what’s going on.

And I love that some of the people who are just so brain cuted on China are like, no, it’s not a major sign that every single major general, other than she and the person arresting them, were arrested in the CCPs, , military, that’s, that’s not a sign of a major turnover in how the government works. And everyone who can actually, you know, arrest or enforce power was removed in a very short period, and that was consolidated.

, I, I think it just shows the, the sheer levels of denialism. That these people will undertake to believe that the CCP is not undergoing a severe [01:17:00] restructuring right now.

Simone Collins: So,

Hmm.

Yeah. The, the, the funny comment that I got actually came from Octavian, who saw the title card for the thing, the Bleeding, Winnie the Pooh.

And as we’ve not read Winnie the Pooh books to him or anything like that, they’re just not very substantive or interesting in my opinion. He didn’t know who Winnie the Pooh was. And he was like, who is that? Because it’s, you know, more interesting than all the faces we put on our podcast normally. And I said, it’s Winnie the Pooh.

And he suddenly looked very, very disturbed. Not because this plush bear was bleeding, but because some horrible person decided to name a bear Poh. And he was like, I feel very bad for the bear. I I’m going to give the bear a new name. Now he’s just like on a whole campaign of we need save this poor His bear has been named after Poh, mistreated egregiously.

Who, who could do [01:18:00] that? Which I get actually especially ‘cause kids are all about poo jokes. How on earth did it work that I guess kids of, of, of that time when those books first were written were not as vulgar as the kids today, they would never have thought that such a term was, maybe they had a different word for excrement, for fecal matter.

I don’t know. Should look that up. Anyway, sorry. Distracting from this.

Speaker 2: Rock. Oh wait. And this is going to be a floor for it. Oh it is? Yeah. Why can it put so big? Well, that makes a lot. Oh, this is a floor for it. You’re right. Look at that. Yeah, look at that. We’re making the capsule. Wow. Now we’re making the wow. Yeah. Oh really? Yeah. Look. What are they? Hey mommy. [01:19:00] Yeah. Ooh. Upon upon the green team and the talent team’s, the black team, what are they?

Speaker 4: The coolest that I, the greenest, the black team. Oh, no. Like the other great guys. I guess.

Speaker 3: Okay guys, where is this? Ah, here we go. Another floor. Oh, thank you, avian. Did you find all the floors for me? Yeah.

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