How Sociopathic Nerds Plot Out New Years Goals

Malcolm and Simone explain their system for New Year's resolutions using categories tied to biology (health/family), career (income streams), and mission (purpose/impact). They track past goals in a spreadsheet, highlight achievements, and set 1, 5, 10 year timelines. They share real examples like scheduling health scans, working on awareness campaigns, and Simone running for office. The key is choosing projects with upside potential where you can make an outsized impact over time.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Well, we put them in a spreadsheet and we, at the end of the year, highlight in green, orange, or red, the parts of each goal that we've either achieved or kind of achieved or not at all achieved. So it's really helpful to go back in time and sort of see where you are.

Shooting a little too high or going a little too easy on yourself. So we've, we've

Malcolm Collins: done very well in the biology category this year, and we've done very well in the mission category this year, last year,

Simone Collins: last year, last year, and then we did abysmally in the career category,

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today. I am very excited. So a lot of people would be surprised. In the book, we said that we'd plan to have Future Day on New Year's Eve. Like, why haven't we done it? Or you see more Future Day stuff. It's because we actually decided to, this is the first year we're doing a full test run of this, you know, with all the decorations and [00:01:00] everything, and the kids being old enough to remember it, to push it back into later in January.

Making a whole

Simone Collins: month thing. I mean, like Christmas. Basically, it's a whole month thing. You know, you get the decorations for a whole month or if not more, right? If this is our most important and favorite holiday, then it deserves some time.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So we wanted to give it a bit more time, but I think talking more about traditional new year's type things, traditional new year's resolutions and just sort of the way that we personally keep track of if we are where we want to be in life, because I think it's.

And it is highly efficacious, and it's something that I was taught to do from a young age. And I think that you developed a very similar system completely in parallel to me. And it's played a large part in us being able to get to where we are in life.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, we've both been very systematic.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we'll also go over our own New Year's resolutions this year, while checking in on where we were last year.[00:02:00]

So, the key to doing this, the key to handling New Year's resolutions, is to divide them into categories. And these categories are tied to well, I could just go through the three big categories we have of resolutions, which helps us think, you know, in a one year time frame, a five year time frame in a 10 year time frame where we want to be with each of these issues.

Okay, 1 is what we call biology. This category is tied to our biological success. So this is health, this is relationships, and this is children. So the biology category, if you are in high school, for example, is likely going to be learning to date. Learning to interact with other people in a way that's going to be useful to you when you are looking for a spouse.

And, and some level of health, but, like, you really don't need to go [00:03:00] overboard with the health aspect of this when you are young, so long as you aren't, like, addicted to something.

Simone Collins: I don't know. Like when I was young, obviously I was starving myself to the point of like, Oh, she's probably going to die.

So like my early biological goals and my spreadsheet, which I can see, cause I've been keeping track of this in a spreadsheet we're like, you know, maintain this healthy weight range. Please don't die. That kind of thing. And so there's, you know, it could be like if you have, you know, are trying, like you're a wrestler and you're trying to get into certain like weight classes or, you know, you're trying to be able to lift a certain amount of weight.

Those are all very common. And I think this is among the most like mainstream of goals to have biological goals. Like I want to weigh this amount. I want to be able to run a marathon. I want to be able to play with my kids without being in pain. That kind of thing.

Malcolm Collins: And keep in mind, a key thing about your biological goals is every biological goal that you have should have some level of utility and not be a vanity goal.

So, when it comes to something like weight ranges, this can be very useful [00:04:00] for partner attraction, and this can be very useful for Long term health, you know, being able to achieve other goals. This is less true when it comes to something like, I want to work out more or something like that. Right?

Like there is a level of exercise.

Simone Collins: That's not like super measurable, right? So it's not perfect either. Well,

Malcolm Collins: it is to some extent, but like, like the, the, the, the level to which a person is. working out. For example, there is some level of muscle, which is of utility in terms of attracting the partner, but it is a fairly low amount.

Like as soon as you get above a fairly low threshold, at that point, you're really only getting an advantage with people with a specific fetish around this. Or at least a, a discernible advantage when compared to other tasks, which move you further towards your actual life goals,

Simone Collins: weightlifting or any other exercise for.

Health and longevity, like there are diminishing marginal returns and sometimes even growing liabilities after certain levels of excess.

Malcolm Collins: But it also helps you with ideas like I want to have sex with this many [00:05:00] people. Like if you're a young person, you might think that could be a goal within this category, and that is likely not going to be of significant utility to you in finding a partner and may even decrease your possibility of securing a good partner.

So everything you do as a youth in terms of this, this category of the goal should be in terms of, of, of training and approving, improving your quality on the marriage market and improving your ability to navigate the market of long term partners. So that's how we look at that. Now do you want to go over our goals this past year around health?

Simone Collins: Sure.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, we'll go too deep, but I can, I can give you some examples here. So we had a kid, you know, we're be trying for another kid soon. But other ways you can, you can organize these goals is I want to get this many embryos extracted by this date. Yeah. Like

Simone Collins: definitely our past goals have been like bank this many embryos while we're this age that we can have the number of kids that we want to be able to have this year though.

It's not just that it's, I mean, obviously it's [00:06:00] like have our fourth child. You know, safely and, you know, successfully, which involves investing and, you know, not doing unhealthy stuff right now and then investing in a newborn properly, but we're also planning on, we're turning to getting CT scans every other year we work with the company Ezra.

They are great. We know the founder and they basically. Do so much more than like your typical general practitioner is going to do

Malcolm Collins: to do this company. If you're listening to this half heartedly, pay attention to this part. It could save your life. Yeah,

Simone Collins: actually we said, we know friends who've gotten CT scans for other purposes.

And we're fortunate enough that the technician looking at like whatever was, you know, the primary issue, they got that prescribed and they were like, Oh, noticed. You know, weird blotch here. You should get this biopsy and then they end up in cancer treatment and they end up cancer free because it was detected really early.

So the reason why people take these [00:07:00] preemptive and not covered by insurance, typically CT scans is what Ezra does, for example, is normally you get like a CT scan. The technician or doctor is only really going to look at like the one area they're supposed to look at you know, just to make sure, you know, they know what's going on and diagnose or prescribe whatever around that thing.

What the Ezra team does is they get your CT scan, they do a detailed analysis, and then they tell you. all about what they see. And you know, they'll tell you innocuous stuff and they'll also tell you serious stuff. So, when they did my last one, they could tell that I was congested that day. They could tell that I just had egg retrieval procedure because they could see the like sort of ruptured like, I don't know the right word, like egg sacs, like around my ovaries.

So like, I mean, the level of detail there, we don't tell them any of this, so they're looking literally at everything,

Malcolm Collins: you know, inch range. So the most, yeah, the most common thing you're gonna get coming out of an Ezra scan. If you, if, if you're [00:08:00] lucky and you don't have any issue. Although say the luck of catching early stage cancer is extreme.

Yeah. Catching early stage cancer is literally the difference between life and death for a lot of people. 100%. You go to an Ezra scan. One of the most common things is, and this has happened to because we suggest my brother and his wife did it and they did it as well and this happened to them, is they'll be like, Oh, you probably have a weird pain in your neck when you do this sometimes or something like that.

And they'll say this like, Oh, you probably have a weird pain that occasionally happens here. And I'll be like, I've had that pain my entire life. Now I know exactly why. Now the most important thing about Ezra, because you've likely been hearing all this and are like, I can't afford this. Ezra scans are around 1, 500 if I remember correctly.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I can double check that.

Malcolm Collins: So, for, like, the base level scan, it's like 1500 dollars and the clinics for them exist in most major US cities. So, we are increasingly moving to a world where so much of our health care needs to be taken ourselves, like going to doctors. For us, [00:09:00] it has basically become pointless since AI has come out.

We almost always get better advice from AI than we do from a doctor, and doctors are really just used to order tests and prescriptions at this point. If you are doing this sort of like

Simone Collins: Sorry, it's not a, it's not a CT scan. I mean, you can get a CT MRI. but an MRI because you don't want to do too much CT.

They say it's a five minute low dose CT scan, but still like you don't want to do that. So it's actually 1950 for the full body CT scan. It does not include your lungs. So you have to

Malcolm Collins: pay MRI scan, or you can choosing the words again

Simone Collins: for a full body MRI. And then for the full body. MRI and CT scan that includes your lungs.

It's 2, 500. So this is very, it's very expensive. But you can also

Malcolm Collins: pay. You're talking like 1, 900 or something like that. And you're doing this once every five years or something. Especially when you're younger. I

Simone Collins: mean, they encourage like, I mean, I want to do it once every year for both of us, once we hit 40.

Or maybe 50, depending on where we are financially, because. You know, my [00:10:00] mom died of cancer and it was detected so late, that's why she died of it, you know, had she had access to something like this, it would have been found so early, it would have been taken care of, not an issue, you know, like.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so, so this is a, if you, if you got nothing from this, today's episode, do check out Ezra, have it on your, your radar if you're young, it's something to do once and then you may not need to do it again for another decade, but if you are older.

It can make sense to invest in doing this more frequently. And when you talk about this cost, you know, Simone, you're looking at something and you're like, this is 1, 900. It's like, that's a lot. But the difference in terms of cost of medical care, when you look at how much medical care costs in this country is going to be astounding catching something early versus catching it late.

I might even

Simone Collins: have a discount code link. If I do Malcolm, can I send it to you? And you can put it in the comments. Absolutely. Yeah. 10 percent off or something. They also have a couple's package. So I think the couple's package is an even deeper discount. So if you're married. Get that. And if [00:11:00] not, I think I have a discount link.

Malcolm Collins: yOu know, you can always ask the founder. We know him and we're promoting him on an episode.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, I at least have a referral link for 150 off and I can ask him if he can give more. So yeah, we'll find out because like anything that takes money on this. All right.

We did manage to wrangle you guys a discount code from him. , you can get 200 off with the discount code, , BASED, and that's all capitals, so B A S E D, , and then the letters 200, so 2 0 0. So it's B A S E D 2 0 0, and that should get you 200 off, which is a pretty decent discount.

Malcolm Collins: So now that we're done promoting another product that we think has value.

Sorry for like that, you know, we don't do ads, but if we can save somebody's life, who's one of our watchers, you know, that's a nice thing to do. Yeah.

Simone Collins: No, seriously, we've introduced friends to this and they've been like, then they're telling everyone about it. Because it's, yeah. [00:12:00] And we also like have in our biological goal for this year to start doing that whole.

Peter Tia thing where you get detailed blood work and then you start sort of adjusting your diet lifestyle and maybe supplement regimen based on that. Because I just, I've been so frustrated by doctors and general practitioners recently were like, if they're a specialist, obviously, like if you're being treated by, you know, an oncologist for a very specific thing, like, yes, they knew, they really know what they're doing.

When I go into negativity section, you know, the people who are doing that work are just. stellar, you know, but then I'll hear from like a random nurse or a physician's assistant, you know, like, Oh, you know, I heard blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, Oh, where did you hear that? Like, I'd love to look up a study.

And they're like, nah, I heard it on this Facebook group for moms. And I'm like, Oh, you're treating me. You were just, you're just dozing with medicine. Oh my God. And, and just like missing really key things and. That you and I have found so many more [00:13:00] solutions through like use of chat GPT Than actual like doctor visits

Malcolm Collins: and this brings me to another lifesaver That might be a lifesaver to one of our audience members.

So I I will mention it if any of you deal with addiction to alcohol look up the sinclair method it is it can be an absolute lifesaver. You don't need to quit alcohol To, to go off alcohol with it to go off like extreme amounts of alcohol which makes it very different from other mechanisms of quitting.

And it, it is very, very, it's effective in 80 percent of people. Basically, it's, it appears to be effective in everyone. Who is addicted for purely biological reasons, as opposed to there's some sort of externality or lifestyle reason for the addiction

Simone Collins: covering. We're not doctors. We're not giving medical advice.

We're not giving

Malcolm Collins: medical advices. And this method is next to illegal in the United States.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Why is that? So, because naltrexone, the medication that accompanies it is known for being a little bit hard on the liver. And of [00:14:00] course, It was really at risk of having, you know, a liver that doesn't need any more stress.

Well, alcoholics, right? You know, so doctors in the U. S. are typically like, well, I'm not going to give you medication. That is going to put your liver under more strain if you're already having trouble with drinking, which is like ridiculous because, okay, well, so they're going to drink themselves to death.

They're like, you know,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. And it also can work with things like porn addictions and stuff like that. If that's a major problem that you're dealing with the only type of addiction I know it really doesn't seem to work for is nicotine addictions. Because the pathway is a little different. For nicotine addictions.

And it doesn't work on that pathway as well. Yeah.

Simone Collins: But

Malcolm Collins: hypothetically, this may be a true thing.

Simone Collins: What's the, what's the Amazon documentary? There's on Amazon prime. There's one little pill. Yeah. Check that out. Don't listen to us. Just watch that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So let's go to the next category of things that we focus on every year.

This category is career. [00:15:00] Which you know, when you're younger, these are things like your grades this is school. This is getting into a good university when you're our age, it's about setting up income streams, but also about managing your investment portfolio. Everything tied to having a stable source of income and, and expanding that source of income.

So this is just 100 percent like your broader. Income goals and this is really important for me to split out into its own category because in this world where everyone's like, well, your passion should be your job or something like that. Well, even if that's true, that is not a reason to stop focusing on your, your finances and stuff like that, as well as investments, debt, economic opportunities, separating this out at the beginning of every year and being like, what economic opportunities are available to me this year.

Great. And these can be independent entrepreneurial endeavors. These can be tied to your personal investment portfolio. These can be even how you [00:16:00] engage with your community. Sometimes, you know, are really important. And it, and it matters. Another like branch of this when you have kids is how am I going to manage child care?

Because, you know, this becomes a very important financial question. And one of the most important financial questions where it can be. There's many creative solutions to it. And I think the only realistic solutions for large families anymore are the creative solutions. One thing that we forgot to mention in the biology category child education also falls in the biology category for us.

By that, what I mean is effective child education, i. e. are your children hitting their developmental milestones? Have you been checking that they're hitting their developmental milestones? Are you aware of what you broadly need to do to educate them and to help them to thrive? Like, or the kidney, yeah.

Yeah, so this often involves just checking in, like, have I done the research on this, you know, and taking an inventory of all of these things can be very useful in terms of a, have I done the research recently? You know, where am I? Has time gotten away from me? But unless

Simone Collins: like really special emphasis is needed, we don't make.

[00:17:00] Goals into those, like the reasons why we have Ezra scans blood work on, on our goals for this year is that there are things that we are, they're not part of our routine now that these are new additions that we want to make routine. So I would look at it that way. Like, obviously every day of your life, you should be working on these like major aspects that we're discussing in terms of goal categories.

But when it comes to setting like New Year's resolutions, like a new goal for the year, it should be, how are you going to augment that particular sphere of

Malcolm Collins: your life? Yeah, and that's the point of resolutions. And that's the point of approaching goal setting like this. It is an opportunity where if you build a ritual around this, you know, as we do with Future Day Era, as some people do with some forms of New Year celebrations then you force yourself to revisit your daily habits because so much of life can just become a, a, A chain of daily habits, and we can remember, oh, I need to [00:18:00] interrupt this habit because it is specifically negative in this way, or I need to interrupt this habit because it has this effect.

Right? So we can become overly focused on specific daily habits while forgetting to take inventory of all of the different categories of daily habits that we need to revisit. Which is, which is really important. And it's why we structure things this way as well as to think about where do, where do I end up in five years of I'm keeping these daily habits and with career, this can be really important.

You know, if you're working at something like a large company you can predict, are you actually going to get a promotion? If you're doing what you're doing today, every day for the next. Five years. If not, then you may need to rethink, you know, keeping a job, for example, can be a bad habit in a way it can prevent you from looking for other economic opportunities.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, you have to think about how likely you are to be laid off layoffs of even very high qualified. Like, you know, you would think high value people are more common today than ever, it seems

Malcolm Collins: [00:19:00] so. Yeah. And with the career pathway, we always sort of divide our career in, I think, into three categories.

One is sort of the investment and investment opportunity category which we treat pretty uniquely because sometimes we will use investments to secure the second category, which is stable long term income. And this can be surprising to people, stable long term income. They're like, what do you mean by that?

Well, sometimes if you do, for example, an early stage venture capital investment in somebody that venture capital investment isn't just to ensure that you know, the, the, the actual capital I have in their company expands but it is also to open the door in terms of getting a job at that company if, if you know, should ever hits the fan for us.

And we, we do this a lot with individuals where I will make an investment in something they're working on. Both in order to gain some equity, but also to keep the door open a bit in case I need a career path of air or introductions there. So that's, that's 1 [00:20:00] thing to think about in terms of how you make investments.

This can also be relevant. So, so in, in terms of like child rearing or something like that, you know, in terms of investing in setting up your own school or setting up your own daycare as a way to. Ultimately lower the overall cost of childcare or investing in helping somebody else set that up. Now the second category is, is, is sort of stable income streams.

These are going to be, you know, your office job or other terms of stable income streams. And I do believe that a person should always have at least one stable income stream for family units. And then the final one is moonshots and moonshots are entrepreneurial ventures or other things that could have a huge outsize impact.

And I think when you're dealing with a couple you should have your stable thing and then some sort of outside thing operating or, or being attempted at all times. And then if you were going to Create a final category that work for some people and we do this sometime. I would call them hustles.

So these are short term opportunities. Like, 1 area where we're looking at potentially [00:21:00] getting involved this year is helping investing in a friend and helping with sort of the online part of this for him buying used cars and then doing them up like van life cars and flipping them. Because, you know, interesting economic opportunity right now.

And, and, yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's how I would handle it. Anything else you talk about in terms of the, the career side of things?

Simone Collins: Well, because it has to do with stable income, just, and you mentioned investment savings can also be a part of that, which is also a really common form of new year's resolution.

Malcolm Collins: So, and insurance, I'd say the important part of this to revisit when you go through this savings

Simone Collins: insurance, like maxing out tax deductible savings accounts, that kind of thing. Definitely. If it's not part of your existing habits, that Something you might want to add and then the next category, probably the next

Malcolm Collins: category is potentially the most important one.

And this is mission. This is what, how will my life matter? Like what, like, am I living in a way that is [00:22:00] efficacious and will have whatever sort of impact I value. So if you go back to like our pragmatist guide to life series the very first book that we wrote, you know, we take a very disinterested.

We're like, you know, you get to choose why you exist as an individual. You know, now we have more firm beliefs about this. But if we're just even going back to this sort of broad, very, very open idea around this, right, if you have chosen why you exist, like, if you have chosen why it matters to continue existing into tomorrow, then you have some reason for being.

And this reason for being should be a big part of what you're doing every year. I'd say it should be about a third of what you're doing every year. Now, for some people, they're blessed enough to be able to loop that into income streams for them. We have never taken that pathway. I've always thought that that's really dangerous to do and it can lead to perversion of a person's mission where when their mission Also becomes their source of income.

Then, you know, whether it's donors or other sorts of funders begins to corrupt and [00:23:00] pervert an individual's mission. And you can get much more, you know, audience capture as they call it. Right? But not just audience capture, but all sorts of like, and then you begin to convince yourself that whatever you need to do for your economic.

Situation is what you actually believe. And then it begins to really corrupt your internal ideology. Like when outside capital is corrupting individuals like that. It's

Simone Collins: like a really big bugaboo of ours that like many people are like, Oh, I want to start a nonprofit. And we're like, Oh, you know, like how much are you raising and what are you raising for?

They're like, Oh, you know, just enough to like cover my salary. So it's like, Oh, so, so you want. You want someone to pay for you to do this thing that you care about. But you're gonna have to be focused entirely on getting people to pay you to do that again when the money runs out. And then you're going to become focused on that and not on actually solving the problem that you care about.

It's because

Malcolm Collins: raising money is actually pretty hard. It is, it is easier to have a, a, I would say a side entrepreneurial venture that makes money than it is to go out and beg for money. And

Simone Collins: then just [00:24:00] donate to your own.

Malcolm Collins: It's just a different mindset around this. Not that we, you know, wouldn't benefit from donations and we don't have donations in our nonprofit, but we, for example, to give an idea of how much we care about our mission.

This was actually recorded in the telegraph piece on us. Because they looked at our finances to confirm this or. 45 percent of our yearly income goes to our nonprofit or at least that year it did. So we, we put a lot of our personal money into our philanthropic, I guess you could call it, I call it mission based.

I don't like philanthropy because philanthropy is often used for personal vanity whereas we believe, you know, we have a reason to exist in something that gives our lives purpose that they wouldn't have if we were not spending. a huge chunk of our internal effort on these goals. And you guys, this channel, right here, that you are watching, you know, the reason you're getting an episode every weekday of this is because that is how important this mission is to us, reaching this community is to us.

And, and, but it's the same, [00:25:00] you know, it's not just this. You know, we're also working on the school really hard. It's really coming together. Anybody who wants to play any sort of help in that you know, something that we could really use on the school is people who have domain expertise to review those parts of the skill tree.

Although it's mostly firmed up at this point, so you wouldn't have as much impact as you would have before. The other thing that we're working on is Improving the channels quality. You might have noticed that the video quality. I think it's hopefully going to get a bit better. It turned out it wasn't the cameras problem.

It was the computers problem. So we switched out computers. So we're, we're always working. Like, where can we improve this? The other area is press. So we do a ton of press outreach. 1 of the things I'm trying to commit to this year is to do more op eds. You know, we've done some op eds before. I think Wall Street, I can't remember where we did an op ed.

Post. I mean, we're going to do one for anyway. Yeah. So we do, we do op eds and stuff. So I want to do more of that. I also want to try to get some sort of feature links thing done on us this past year. We spent about half the year trying to get a documentary made about us. Not us, like we were in [00:26:00] contracts with a documentary team that was pitching us to various studios.

They had some bites, but they ran into issues. And so we're looking at potentially switching out the team that we're working on. Basically,

Simone Collins: the more coverage we can get. For demographic collapse and pronatalism. And also like demographic collapse and for natalism in a context that we don't think is toxic is really, really, really important to us because so many of the other solutions, like we keep saying, or just like, oh, so let's just either like insert super impractical solution.

It's not going to work here or like, let's remove people's reproductive rights or let's just, you know, stop educating women and take away their rights. It's like, it just. The solutions that are otherwise being posed are terrible. And we really, really, really want to contribute to like people's understanding of the problem and solutions that work.

So that is another really big goal. Yeah. Like our two really big mission driven goals are. Raise awareness about demographical apps and realistic [00:27:00] solutions to demographical apps. And get the school live in incremental

Malcolm Collins: bits. Building a realistic alternative to the public education system. And then we have the final big project of the year, which is you running for office.

Which is for us, you know, a large part of it is about understanding how the process really works which will allow us to more competently interact with it in the future, because it is something that we're going to have to be able to manipulate and push in specific directions to achieve our goals around demographic diversity.

Collapse and around the educational system.

Simone Collins: Yeah, like our odds of winning in the district we're in are actually pretty low because it leans pretty democratic and I'm running as a Republican, but we'll learn so much that we can then scale to other people's campaigns or maybe be running for office someday.

Malcolm Collins: I think, well, I think that we could go either way. It really depends on what's happening on the, on the top ticket. I think it's, it's, it's almost out of our control. It's, it's but we'll, we'll put the effort in because everybody knows we always go overboard [00:28:00] whenever we're doing something like people who have gone to the skill tree I've made for the school.

They're like, whoa, this is so much more in depth and so much larger than I had any expectation of what you were creating. Like, this is actually an outline of like. Okay. All human knowledge, period. And I'm like, yes, that was my goal. A big web of all human knowledge that can help our kids improve. So this is another area where, you know, we're helping our kids improve, but also hopefully making a really high quality education system accessible to people at a dramatically lower cost than you would see otherwise.

So if you don't know, like, in terms of a mission, if you like, are like, I don't know why I'm alive, right? Like. Read the pragmatist guide to life. It really doesn't try to push you in any one direction. If you look at us, you know, we have some crazy ideas about things. It doesn't include any of that. Except that, you know, you should likely structure your life around whatever you think has value.

But I think that that's something that would be pretty obvious to most people. So it can help you there. If you're like, I know what [00:29:00] has value in life, but I don't know how I can contribute it, then I would suggest some blue sky thinking, particularly with somebody who you trust. So this means, you know, sit down.

And think what are the areas where I could contribute the most to the difference I want to see in the world with an understanding that the way that you apply yourself was in these areas has arbitrage by that what I mean is even if you think like environmentalism is a big issue in the environment is a big issue.

Everyone's doing that. Like, in fact I say if you think like 90 percent the world's problem in the future is the environment, 10 percent the world's problem in the future is pronatalism if you look at the amount of funding and the amount of, of, of competent manpower going into pronatalism versus going into the environment you would probably still be better off going into pronatalism as a cause area.

And people have come to us. They're like, I value perinatalism. Like, what can I do? I'm like, literally, it's wide open. Like, 1 person was like a student. I was like, you can create a network of student groups in this area. Like, try to create a group on your local college campus and then spread that [00:30:00] network out.

No, one's doing that right now. We, we help people that you didn't decide to do it because a lot of people, when they say, like, I want to do something in a space, what they really mean is, I don't know. They just want to be validated or something. They don't mean I actually want to take on some big task. But that's really what, what unfortunately is needed with a lot of these things is actually taking on these tests.

But what's beneficial, especially if you're a male, but, but I think to a lesser extent, if you're a female is when you're younger, you're like, well, I don't want to be focusing on this stuff right now when I need to be out there finding a wife, when I need to be out there getting a girlfriend. It is the things that you believe have value in this world that you dedicate yourself to and you have passion for that will secure you a high quality partner.

Yeah, totally. I'd say just always, when I found a really high quality woman who was interested in me you know, they are. The women who just like want to go out there and sleep with people and then end up who they're marrying because it was somebody they wanted to sleep with are generally not the type of women who you want to end up [00:31:00] marrying.

The women who are like, you are doing something that I personally find inspirational and I want to be a part of, and I want to be a part of your life because of the things that you're working on and because of the passion you have for them. Those are the women who become really, really great wives.

And it's the same with men. You know, if you're a woman and you're working on something that has a lot of passion, however, I often see the opposite here, which is really interesting. And it's just a phenomenon you often see where, when I see high potentiality women who don't have a partner yet and I'm like, well, you know, you could go out there and work on all these sorts of cause areas they're often like, but.

I'm going to be honest here. I really just want to find a guy who inspires me was whatever he's working on. So I can dedicate myself to that. And a lot of women feel this way. And I think that a lot of guys when they're out there and they're using like these red pill tactics or whatever they are.

Missing this. They are entirely missing that there's this giant pool of girls out there desperate for a guy that just inspires them so that they can put all of this effort that they had toward wanting to do something meaningful with [00:32:00] their lives towards bolstering that other person's mission, but no one has come to them selling them a mission.

Guys have come to them selling them their body or selling them, I don't know, nagging or something like that, right? Or selling them dominance. When that's not What they're interested in, what they're interested in is a mission that they can help contribute to. And historically, everybody knew that this is how you dated.

Like, if you go, if you go historically, that mission was often like their religion or their, their you know, a cultural way of life or something like that. But yeah, it's obvious. Historically speaking, we just forgot about this because a lot of people have been optimizing how they secure long term partners with how they off of off of, Techniques that are effective in securing short term, often sexual partners, because those techniques are easier to test and easier to see in efficacious scenarios because these partners, this is just something that happens much easier, and it's a much lower barrier to succeed in.

So that is how we divide up our yearly goals and, and any parting words you would have, Simone?

Simone Collins: Well, we also put them in a [00:33:00] spreadsheet and we, at the end of the year, highlight in green, orange, or red, the parts of each goal that we've either achieved or kind of achieved or not at all achieved. So it's really helpful to go back in time and sort of see where you are.

Shooting a little too high or going a little too easy on yourself. So we've, we've

Malcolm Collins: done very well in the biology category this year, and we've done very well in the mission category this year, last year,

Simone Collins: last year, last year, and then we did abysmally in the career category,

Malcolm Collins: which is interesting. So, you know, this helps us think about where we reset things, where we think more about how we can do better in those areas.

Simone Collins: Yep. And then I would also add that I, so these are like our shared goals independently and personally, I have also a behavioral goal every year and a lifestyle goal every year. That is just totally for me and not [00:34:00] related to that. You're

Malcolm Collins: talking about that because people don't understand what you

Simone Collins: mean by that.

Yeah. So behavioral goals is like, well, what is a habit that you want to start? And acting behaviorably behaviorally, like what is. What is something that you do, or a way that you react to things that is not optimal, or what is something you wish you did, or a way that you wish you reacted

Malcolm Collins: to things?

What's your behavioral goal this year?

Simone Collins: My behavioral goal is to focus, instead of on like, things that stress me out on making you and the kids happy. So, like every, every week to do something nice.

Malcolm Collins: You're doing a spectacular job. You've got this horrible flu right now. She is barely alive right now and yet she puts

Simone Collins: on day 8 of pneumonia fever.

And I feel like I'm going to die. Which is not good. But yeah, like so, but I think focusing instead on How can I make you and the kids happy has actually made this an easier period of intense and very painful sickness. [00:35:00] So, I think that's a good goal so far. And then in terms of lifestyle, that's much more like aesthetic and hedonistic like, you know, like one of my lifestyle goals from like a long time ago was like get my own bedroom.

Like I just wanted my own bedroom so badly. And I did and another one was like, when we really hated living in Miami was, you know, get our headquarters moved out of Miami to anywhere, anywhere. And we did so, this year it is to get rid of stuff, something every week, to like have something non trivial that I've removed from our house every week, because with three and soon four kids, the amount of accumulation of stuff that we have is deeply disturbing, deeply

Malcolm Collins: disturbing.

You, you I love how ordered you are about all this, and I would encourage anyone who's doing this to do it on a 1, 5, and [00:36:00] Lifetime timescale. You can also add a 10 year timescale in there in terms of thinking about how the various projects you're looking at will play out where you were like,

Simone Collins: I have like, anticipated goals for the future.

I do. Yeah. Like where, you know, like, like, you know, have, have kid five, have, you know, frozen embryo transfer, kid five, have kid five, you know, move like biannual CT scans. To, or sorry, MRIs to annual MRIs all sorts of things like that. Like get colonoscopy screening screenings when we're, when we're older, you know, like, like these are things that we, there are goals that are appropriate for certain times in life.

And they are definitely changes in our habits that we should remember to not forget. Cause I think a lot of people like they hit age, like for example, whatever age you hit where you're supposed to start getting an annual colonoscopy and people miss that and then they don't do it and then it becomes a big thing.

And yeah, anyway, so yeah, I would say definitely keep a record of all your past goals, but then [00:37:00] like. Outline anticipated future goals. And the really cool thing is if you're like, yeah, in 10 years, like I want to start my own business or I want to be, you know, this kind of person, you know, you can, you can set that as a milestone for that year and then it'll get you thinking like, well then what do I have to achieve?

In the years leading up to that to get there and it may help you get more inspiration for your imminent goals

Malcolm Collins: One goal I would love to have for my brother is I'd love his his little app to take off So if anyone is interested you can get it on the chrome web extension store. It's called bun box like bunny box bun box b u n box and it has an ai that Automatically summarizes your emails and can automatically reply to your emails.

And it's free and you just need to remember to, after you install the widget, to click it and activate it. And anyway, Simone I've had a fantastic day talking to you.

Simone Collins: Love you, Malcolm. Love you

Malcolm Collins: too.

Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe