Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Dive into the controversial world of plagiarism as the hosts discuss Kamala Harris's recent accusations and a troubling trend among DEI officials. They unravel double standards in accountability, highlighting how political and racial affiliations shape the perception of misconduct. With a blend of humor, they critique current economic realities, the absurdities of rising grocery prices, and the polarized media landscape. The episode also offers a glimpse of culinary creativity, bringing fun and laughter into the mix.

In this episode, we explore the evolution of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, focusing on market timing, cryptographic challenges, and the potential impacts of quantum computing. We examine critical technical upgrades such as SegWit and the resistance within the Bitcoin mining community. The discussion also covers our decision to exit Bitcoin, investment strategies for high net worth individuals, and the shifting dynamics in venture capital driven by AI advancements. Further, we delve into the promising sector of AI-driven GPU data centers and their investment potential. Lastly, we touch on the unexpected shutdown of the UK Biobank and its broader implications. Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone! I'm excited to be here with you today! Somebody told me, one of our fans, they said, you guys need to do more episodes on like, How to make money and do business stuff . And at first I was like, well, I think we sort of covered those in our episodes.Like how do you get rich? And things like that, because we've already done episodes on that. But I was like, no, actually I have some updates because in that episode, I told people very strongly. I said by Bitcoin this was on, this is notSimone Collins: investment advice. We are not advisors and this is all hypothetical.And we're talking about our personal experiences.Malcolm Collins: I strongly felt it was a good time to buy Bitcoin. And the episode largely went into like, why in terms of valuing and investment, why Bitcoin was good on November 13th, 2023. And this is when the price was at 36. 5 K. Today the price is at 65. 4 KMicrophone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: No, the price has gone up to 67.2 right now this morning. So if you sold now, you would make even more moneyMicrophone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: off of this idea that we did. And for those who are like, oh, well [00:01:00] you, you know, you didn't. Get out at the top here. I am okay. Was doubling my money.Speaker 5: I was paid too much! Billion dollars worth of Bitcoin two billion dollars well at the time a few days later the value spiked to like ten billion Then filled a fifty million and spiked again to a trillion and then dropped a bunch of times and right now It's all worth like seven or eight bucks.Ah, geez. Yeah, I'm super pissedMalcolm Collins: And we will be airing this a little after we record this, but we ended up closing all of our Bitcoin positions. And one of the reasons why we're doing this episode is just as like a, if I have an episode out there telling people go buy Bitcoin, And I have sold all my Bitcoin, which you didn'tSimone Collins: do because it's all not investment advice.And this is all hypothetical.Speaker 6: BiTcoin and you. Why you should be using the only truly free currency.Greetings, financial wizards, industry leaders, and curious spectators, and welcome to the future. Yes, we're living in a high tech cyber world where just about everything is digital. The cinema has gone digital, radio is digital, why even love is digital? So then why, with the whole world going digital, are we still using dirty, crazy, non digital [00:02:00] government money?That dollar bill in your pocket? A Nazi probably touched that So there's another way to spend and save money without the involvement of the government or the Nazis.Bitcoin is that way. , Bitcoin is a purely digital currency that uses complicated cryptographic science to generate lots of super hard math problems. These math problems are converted by computers around the world into seemingly random strings of numbers that some people have agreed to pretend stands for a highly volatile potential sum of money.Solving these math problems is called miningyou see, Bitcoins aren't backed by any real world items, such as gold or by a governing body like the Federal Reserve. So the value of a Bitcoin is entirely bubble based. But what a bubble it can be! Without the nuisance of regulation or real world value, a single Bitcoin could be worth anything from negative infinity to infinity billions of dollars.I imagine if it reaches even half of that. So, whether you're a libertarian or just want to spend your money like one, consider converting your wallet to a Bitcoin wallet. Who knows how much it'll be worth tomorrow? It could be anything.Simone Collins: And we're only talking about oneMalcolm Collins: person says I bought X, you know, other people are going to be like, eh, it should probably, [00:03:00] you know, be interesting ifSimone Collins: people were influenced by that episode, one, they would have profited as long as they held aboutMalcolm Collins: doubled their money. So good for you if you did, but also remember to sell.But I want to say,Simone Collins: yeah, we, we don't want to be dicks to people who we may have inspired through our own actions. to get Bitcoin by not also sharing our concerns about Bitcoin now.Malcolm Collins: Yes. And I will say, I mean, I'll, I'll briefly give my bigger concern about Bitcoin then I'll go into the specifics of it, the ways that Bitcoin can get around this particular problem and why I don't think they will be successful, but where they have been successful at doing something like this in the past yeah, there's a time in the past where Bitcoin got around the miners.Where the miners didn't want to do something and Bitcoin forced them to the rest of the Bitcoin community to force them to. So we'll go around how that ended up playing out in the past and why it's very unlikely to happen this time.And after we talk about Bitcoin, what we're going to do is we are going to go into what we are thinking about doing with capital right now. [00:04:00] Because it's a pretty tricky time in the markets right now to know where to deploy. So the general gist of why we're getting out.So you don't have to watch the full episode is everyone has always known that quantum computing is a risk to Bitcoin and it's a unique risk to Bitcoin because the Bitcoin governance system is kind of captured by the miners who have equipment that is specific to Bitcoin. to working on the type of simple algorithm that bitcoin uses, which is not very quantum resistant.And so they have a huge interest to not have a change and we'll get to where the fight is going to be over that in the future. And people can be like, well, it might update or anything like that. But here's the thing. I have talked to a lot of Famous Bitcoin investors recently who invest publicly in this stuff and their firms and ones who are like really, really big on Bitcoin.These are people who have, you know, multi billion dollar positions in Bitcoin. And I was asking them about what they thought of the quantum risk threat and they were like, yeah, it'll probably be a threat in a couple cycles, but [00:05:00] it's not going to be a threat right now.And I've, and this is the conversation. This isn't like if you, if you're hearing this and you're like, oh, he's describing a conversation he had with me. No, I've had this conversation with like five people. five people at this point. This is something that like everyone who is very educated and still holds a position in crypto seems to think right now.And that really worries me because this is very different from the Bitcoin narrative before, which is to say, Bitcoin is a persistent new financial disruptor. And a new type of asset that will be on the market permanently. This is now people saying, Oh, well, eventually it's going to go off the market.But in the meantime, I think I can make a profit in this cycle or the next cycle. And for me, that's where I was like, well, that's not really the way market cycles work. You don't want to wait. Till to sell when everybody realizes that this asset doesn't have long term value And you sent me a quote in regards to this.I thought it was really interesting. So the quote you sent me was [00:06:00] from Scott aronson who is one of the leading quantum computing scientists And he saidSimone Collins: to any of you who are worried about post quantum cryptography, by now I'm so used to delivering a message of maybe eventually someone will need to start thinking about migrating from RSA to Diffie Hellman and Elliptic Curve. Crypto to lattice based crypto or other systems that could plausibly withstand quantum attack.I think today that message needs to change. I think today the message needs to be yes, unequivocally worry about this. Now have a plan. I saw that and I was like,Malcolm Collins: Well, we've always sort of had in the back of my mind. I just wasn't aware of how far quantum computers had gotten recently. And it was it was inSimone Collins: my I keep goals for every year and I penciled in for 2025 a goal of.Sell all of our Bitcoin position because I have been increasingly concerned about quantum computing and and to be clear, our [00:07:00] concern isn't like, oh, suddenly quantum computing has reached the tipping point at which it's financially feasible to like, sort of undermine Bitcoin entirely by the time that happens, Bitcoin is already so far gone that it doesn't even matter because Bitcoin's price is not A product of quantum computing per se.It's a product of people's expectation of its future price. So as soon as people suddenly start to realize that soon quantum computing is going to be a real threat, then. Bitcoin loses all its price. So it doesn't really matter exactly when quantum computing becomes a genuine threat. What matters is when people start to believe collectively in any significant proportion of the Bitcoin owning population that it is.Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-5: To where this another way you don't need to exit your Bitcoin positions before quantum computing becomes a threat to Bitcoin, you need to exit your Bitcoin positions before the market realizes that in the future, quantum computing will become a threat to BitcoinSimone Collins: and with. This guy saying this, [00:08:00] that is, that is when this begins. It has begun. If someone who already in this space is that respected. Is one ofMalcolm Collins: the leading people in the space and previously was saying, don't worry about it. We'll figure it out later. That's a tipping pointSimone Collins: that makes me uncomfortable as an investor or as, as, as an owner of Bitcoin.And IMalcolm Collins: will also say here, people would be like, Hey, why are you right now when everybody's high on Bitcoin saying we should sell our Bitcoin? That's always when you should sell something. Hold on. I'm saying this is coming to you from somebody who, when we did our first Bitcoin video, Bitcoin was irrelevant.We are not people who make regular videos about bitcoin doomerism, nor are we people who regularly pump a bitcoin. We are somebody who made a video saying you should buy it a long time ago when the price No, we never said youSimone Collins: should buy it. We said, we think that bitcoin is something that we've heard about in the past.It's aMalcolm Collins: good asset. Okay, sorry. I worded it differently. I said something like that. And now we are people saying that we personally have decided to exit this asset class. I think that that makes this quite different than [00:09:00] a regular video where you're dealing with somebody who's like, you know, either really into crypto or really cares about this stuff.We're just people. And I should give you also a, I guess I'll give you an idea about the confidence of our various positions here. We had over 10 percent of our portfolio in crypto, 15%.Simone Collins: Oh, dude. At one point it was like, Oh, and of course, always, this depends on the fluctuating price of Bitcoin, but we bought really, really low in the beginning and it surged a lot.And so at one point, I think over 30 percent of our net worth was in crypto in general. Yeah, so and then it went way down and our net worth went way down and I'm sure a lot of people who were early investors can relate.Malcolm Collins: Well, and that was another thing that we learned from the last cycle is buy when you're sure you're probably below the average of a cycle and sell when you're sure you're probably above the average of a cycle.And I can tell you right now we're almost certainly above the average of the cycle right now.Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): Actually, this is a really important point to internalize because some people like. [00:10:00] For example, since we've sold, the price of Bitcoin has gone up a bit. , some people look at something like this and they're like, oh, you didn't fill at the top. Your goal was a. Heavily variable asset. Is not to sell at the top.It is to sell it above average. Your goal is not to buy at the bottom. It is to buy at below average, do not beat yourself up over, not heating the very top of a market because that will lead you to make dumb decisions. Think, am I above average or am I below average and mentally reward yourself? If you were correct in that particular assessment?Not in the assessment of did I sell at the very top? And this is also important. Take your, your realistic. What do you think the top of this cycle is for Bitcoin? For example? With something like Bitcoin. The realistic top of this cycle, I think is around 120. , I think my expected top of this cycle is maybe [00:11:00] 75 to 80. , and when I look at the difference between the gain I made by buying in, in the mid thirties, , and selling in the mid sixties, , versus getting out in the mid seventies is just not that big, a difference.Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-7: Also, , for full transparency here, we did make a, another major sale during the market cycle. When the price hit 70, we sold a half of our position. , but we ended up buying back in again, when the market went down to 50, unfortunately we weren't able to buy quickly. So we ended up getting in at 55 price, , the entire position back in., so we do do a bit of playing the markets when it looks like it's at a unique, low point or a you Eddie unique high point, but the decision we're making right now in. Bitcoin is a bit different than that in that it's an entire decision just to not play in this market, going forwards.Malcolm Collins: Want to go further into one, why this is an issue and why Bitcoin specifically, not other cryptos, Bitcoin can't easily adapt to it.Okay. Bitcoin's cryptography. [00:12:00] Bitcoin primarily uses two cryptographic algorithms. ECDSA, that's the elliptical curve digital signature algorithm. This is for digital signatures. And SHA2. 256. And this is for the proof of work mining algorithm. Of these two, the first, the ECDSA is considered the more sensitive to quantum attacks.Then the, the othernow the problem that we have here is the role that miners play. So the way that miners right now use a specialized hardware called a six. So in the early days of of bitcoin what they used was more like generalizable hardware like gpus. Now these are different from cpus. They're used they're meant for doing tons of somewhat complicated little things at the same time asics are used for doing extremely simple things like an extremely goal directed activity But eventually asics were built that could just do the Crypto algorithm.Now, this led to a problem well, for the Bitcoin system [00:13:00] that Satoshi never would have been able to really anticipate because I don't think that he ever saw, I mean, it would be so hard for him to really see it getting as big or as globally dominant as if it's gotten that entire chips were being designed just for the algorithm.So in his mind, when he's building this, he's like, well, You know, you can just have it switched to a new system, right? If it's really obvious that it needs to switch, but I'm going to make the difficulty of switching to a new system quite high. Right now, the norm within bitcoin for a change is that 95 percent of miners have to go along with something.They don't actually have to have to. We'll get to that in a second. But this is the idea. 95 percent of miners have to go along with something. And this is great if you want to make a system that's not like wildly swinging in different directions or that's susceptible to like somebody starting a ton of mining rigs and then trying to do like a 51 percent attack on something with votes by, to change the algorithm to insert, you know, a dangerous code in or something like that.All [00:14:00] that is great. Here's the problem. Now you have all of these miners with these ASIC things in they, they really can't do anything other than this one algorithm and you somehow need to get 95 percent of them to selflessly vote their own machinery. Oh, intoSimone Collins: obsolescence and then buy entirely new machinery.Malcolm Collins: This machinery is like billions of dollars. And what equipment,Simone Collins: what, how, like how much more expensive is the equipment they would need to buy?Malcolm Collins: Well, it's not that it's more expensive. It's it literally everything that they own, their entire operation would be worthless. You, you and so here I'll go over how A change happens.So first you need minor signaling. So when a new upgrade is proposed miners are given an opportunity to signal their support for the upgrade. Typically, this isn't done through, including a special flag or code in the blocks. They mind the threshold for approval of 95 percent is mentioned as a common threshold for Bitcoin upgrades.This means [00:15:00] 95 percent of the blocks mind need to. Or mind within a specific period. So like usually the 2016 blocks, which is about two weeks, need to include a signal supporting the upgrade. The importance of minor support. Minor support is crucial and plays a vital role in processing transactions and securing the network.This agreement helps ensure a smooth transition and reduces the risk of chain splits. Now, can upgrades be made without minor approval? Yes, it has been done before. The segwit, the segregated witness upgrade, and the associated BIP 148 . U. A. S. F. upgrade in 2017 is a fascinating case study. And in which miners were resistant.So the background, the SegWit was proposed as a solution to Bitcoin scalability issues and the malleability problem. It was designed as a soft fork, meaning it was backwards compatible with older versions of Bitcoin software. The initial minor resistance, miners initially resisted SegWit for several reasons.Some miners, particularly [00:16:00] Bitmain, had developed An optimization called ASIC boost, which SegWit would have made less effective. There were concerns that SegWit might reduce transaction fees, a soft, a source of minor revenue. Some miners preferred alternative scaling solutions, like increasing block size, which eventually led to the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, which largely failed.So, for people who don't even like Bitcoin Cash still exists, and it was a hard fork that ended up happening, and it turned out to not be the best option for doing this. But let's Why was there resistant to segwit among miners? Okay, there was resistant because it would be marginally less profitable, maybe, okay?Simone Collins: Now, it wasn't even like essential. So I mean, it's not exactly, they didn't evenMalcolm Collins: know necessarily that it would be super less profitable. It would be marginally less profitable. Maybe that is how they bullied them, but that's the position they were bullying the miners out of not, I definitely will need to scrap the billions of dollars [00:17:00] of investment I have made in mining chips.And keep in mind, these chips are much more durable in value than they have been historically. So you might be thinking of the person watching this, well, they probably upgrade their chips every few years, it's not that big of a deal. Which just isn't true in modern chip markets. Because Moore's Law doesn't decrease like it did historically what that means is, for people who don't know, Moore's Law basically stopped like five years ago.And so chips just, Don't lose value that much anymore. You know, you will be selling like a new GPUs like three years later. Like if we because we're looking at getting into like selling GPUs personally and when we run the numbers, it looks like they retain about 80 percent of their value over a span of three years, which just shocked me when I think about like graphics card in a historic basis, which is what a GPU often is so what ended up happening?How did they force them? So, Flag day was set August 1st, 2017, after which nodes running BIP 148 would reject blocks that didn't signal support [00:18:00] for SegWit. So, okay, I should explain who the nodes are. The nodes are something that like anyone can set up if you're interested in caring about crypto and helping the Bitcoin network stay secure.And they basically are ledgers of all of the transactions happening on the Bitcoin network. Okay. They actually, at the end of the day, really decide what's happening for voting. And so they said, look, we are, we need to force the vote. So basically they forced the hands of the miners by saying we won't process nodes that don't have a vote on them signaling support for the SegWit update.That would be very unlikely to have the same effect for quantum computing for two big reasons. But here we'll talk about the miner support really quickly here. As Flag Day approached, miners began to realize resisting Sedgwick could lead to a chain split, potentially devaluing their mined coins. This led to the creation of the New York Agreement and BIP 91, which was essentially a compromise to activate Sedgwick.[00:19:00] Outcome. The threat to UASF, Combined with the compromise of BIP 91 led to miners signaling support for SegWit before the BIP 148 flag day, SegWit was successfully activated without a chain split. So this looks like, oh, we can get them to do it, but it doesn't actually mean that if it was devaluing all their equipment.You would need to find a way to get the existing equipment to compete on quantum safe Cryptography, which is basically like systemically different from this non quantum safe stuff. Some people have talked about like building a layer two solution, but I can't imagine how that's functionally going to work or why the miners would allow that.And I think that all of this comes down to, A huge problem in the way investors think one, these miners aren't necessarily individuals who care about crypto. There are people who are running businesses and need to make money on these businesses. So they are going to keep [00:20:00] signaling this until the last day that they can signal this in crypto crashes.Basically they don't have a ever a reason to devalue all of their investment. In terms of the People who are like, yeah, but we probably have a cycle or two more as of 2024, the largest quantum computers have only a few hundred qubits, far short of what's needed to break Bitcoin's encryption.Google's current quantum computer has 70 qubits. And to crack a Bitcoin within a 24 hour time frame, you would need 13 million qubits. If you were going to break it within a 10 minute time frame, you would need 1. 9 billion qubits. And so, people can be like, Oh, that seems like we're really far from this right now.However most experts agree that that by 2032 to 2048 there will be a system for cracking the quantum computing algorithm on crypto,Simone Collins: which is quite some time away, to be [00:21:00] fair, according to that.Malcolm Collins: Well, but again, it doesn't, this is, this is the very interesting thing, and this comes to the conversations I was having with investors, but also conversations that I've had with investors around things like demographic collapse.The reason why something like China just hasn't completely collapsed yet economically, which it will trust me. This is my main thing. We're like, everybody's definitely wrong about this. China will collapse as a world power. It cannot and as an economic system it's just, it's just cannot be stable where it is right now.And I'll put on screen here for people who like, don't understand how bad the East is right now. Just within one generation, the percent drop in their populations at their current fertility rates, not considering for the fact that it's considering to continuing to drop, but investors in mass right now are not pricing fertility collapse into their models.Investors right now in Bitcoin are not pricing quantum risk into their models.Simone Collins: Yeah, it certainly doesn't seem that way at least.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. [00:22:00] They're like, Oh, other people aren't pricing into their models. So I'm not pricing it into my models. And it's like. That that's how you get rapid collapses out of nowhere.Don't happen because of a change in anything that happened because people start pricing something into their model.Simone Collins: Well, I need so hard to predict because what we're talking about is essentially when a meme goes viral. And in this case, the meme is Bitcoin is no longer a safe investment, even among those who are enthusiasts.And once that happens. It reaches a tipping point. There's no coming back and you won't have enough time to sell and often the way these things crash. It's kind of like when GameStop started plummeting, you know, things freeze up pages. Don't load. You can't sell fast enough. Even if you're 1 of the 1st to know.So I just, you Wouldn't wanna be in that situation. So I tellMalcolm Collins: you what probably gonna happen with Bitcoin for people who wonder what happens when quantum computers get to that level. And this is [00:23:00] assuming civilization doesn't crash first, you know? So other thing, other things can happen, but so what's gonna happen is there's gonna be a big kerfuffle.The miners are just gonna be like, absolutely not. We're not gonna do this all the same. People will be like, oh my God, you actually have to do this. The price is going to drop a lot because a lot of people are going to think, oh, this problem isn't going to get resolved in time. And right now, if you're looking at like major stakeholders, you're getting things like BlackRock buying in tons and tons of money.Do you think that they have like the ideological commitment to the price drop during this battle? No, like Bitcoin has moved to a more mainstream asset. And because of that, you're likely going to get a lot of cash outflows during this battle. But then what's going to end up happening is there is going to be a quantum safe version of Bitcoin created.However, it's going to cause a hard fork but the hard fork isn't going to have a clear winner. And it's going to permanently damage both sides of the hard fork until the quantum computing kerfuffle ends up eating whatever the new basically Bitcoin classic, the, the version that doesn't go for quantum safe ends up being [00:24:00] because for a while it will technically be safer because it will have more mining computers running on it, which will lead to a portion of the community going with it.And Bitcoin has a very conservative community when contrasted with other communities, just due to the large vote shares that are needed to do anything within the Bitcoin communitySimone Collins: because of the governance design. They behave conservativelyMalcolm Collins: because of the governance design. They behave conservatively.Okay,Simone Collins: like, I mean, anyone in crypto isn't necessarily seen as conservative. So I get it.Malcolm Collins: So I do think that they'll get through it. But I think that the price is going to take a and and bitcoins price really hasn't taken an exogenous bash in a long time. So when I say an exogenous bash. What I mean is Bitcoin has not had to deal with one of two things that might be coming up in the near future.One is a serious depression. Bitcoin has never had to deal with a very serious depression. [00:25:00] And when it has, like in the recession that happened during the COVID situation. It, it took a realSimone Collins: big deal. Yeah. We got a lotMalcolm Collins: in during the COVID period. That was when we first got into it.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, I mean, we, we like to call any sort of. Stock dip or whatever, a flash sale. And I think it's because like when we first started learning about investing, we went to, someone sent us to a bunch of family office meetings, not because we have a family office personally, but because They thought we would learn from them and everyone there who represented these really high net worth family offices was just sitting on loads of cash and they just all anticipated a stock market crash and other market crashes and their habit.It seems that the habit of people who have a lot of money and are good at hanging onto it is to sit on dry powder when times are good and when times are bad, buy everything on sale which is logical. And so we do that. And we get really excited when the stock market [00:26:00] crashes. WeMalcolm Collins: do help with financial management for some people.Somebody's like, I would love it if people like you ran our family office. But we've written a book on family office government structure as well. This is true. It is something that we care about. But yeah that is Sorry, I forgot the point I was making here. I guess the wider point is it's very clear that just the mindset among the people who are putting the most money into Bitcoin specifically has changed to a mindset of we know it will eventually have this crash.But we just think we can make money off of it in the short term. And I think whenever you hear a large pool of people having this mindset, you need to get out of an asset.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, Oh, like I'll just know when to, when to go get out. It's, it's, I think it's very similar to that. Like Ponzi scheme mindset or LM MLM scheme mindset of like, well, as long as there's someone downline for me, it's going to be okay.Except you never know where you are in the scheme and you don't want to be the one left footing the bill. You just don't.Malcolm Collins: [00:27:00] Yeah. Yeah. So, what are we doing money-wise these days? I think it's an interesting question. So we've made two big changes to the way we do our finances.Simone Collins: At first I wanna say, here's a reason why. One, not only are we not providing investment advice, but two, we may not be the smartest investment advisors in the world. We did something specifically because I asked, so this is not a Malcolm thing.This is more of Simone thing, but we did something that pretty much anyone who provides financial advice would say is super dumb, which is we we had a bunch of excess cash from something. And I was looking at our mortgage and I was looking at that amount of cash. And I was like, Ooh, we wouldn't have a mortgage if we just.Pay it all off. We could use this cash to pay off our mortgage. And people normally say, this is a really bad idea, especially if you have a low interest rate mortgage, which we did when we bought our house. And that is because the argument is that you will be getting better returns by [00:28:00] putting the money that you could put toward paying off your mortgage or just buying a house outright on the stock market and get better returns.And then you're paying an interest. And if, as long as that's the case, as long as you think that your loan will charge less in interest than you will be getting an investment payout, then you should maintain that loan. And I just didn't care and I wanted to get rid of it. And I wanted to be 100 percent entirely, completely debt free because I hate the idea of ever having an ongoing payment obligation that I don't have to have.And Malcolm. Being the ever doting husband allowed me to yeah, youMalcolm Collins: asked for it as a big present You're like I know this is financially irresponsible, but I want it as a presentSimone Collins: This is my push present for kid number four. I was like, can we just be completely debt free? It will make me feel so happy.Malcolm Collins: Well, it's it's it is Historically a financially dumb thing to do.I would actually not tell my kids to do it because I suspect either within Our lifetime or [00:29:00] within our kids lifetime, we are going to move to a market that goes down on average due to fertility collapse. Yeah, but inSimone Collins: our time with our I mean, again, I don't know, like, I just, I can be very pessimistic too, where I'm like, I, you know, there's anotherMalcolm Collins: silly financial thing you did.Which we should also talk about because it's different from our last advice, which is we put all our money in S& P instead of investing in stock market theses that we thought were good investments. The reason you made this move is just because whenever you went over any of the studies on this the S and P always outcompete pretty much anyone who claims to be an expert on stock markets.And so it's just not worth investing in them. You also have a problem with the VC market right now. So the VC market right now like, like we've heard of VCs, like, because we have lots of friends in VC. So we're just like, and for those notSimone Collins: familiar with this, because actually a lot of people aren't VC count stands for venture capital.That is to say investing in startups.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the startup marketplace since the invention of AI, which has really [00:30:00] changed what a good startup looks like has become a lot harder for the traditional VCs to access and arbitrage in the way they used to. So the way it used to be is the top VC firms really made all of the outsize returned in the VC space.And most VCs just didn't make much money at all. And the way the top size firms were able to do is they had unique access to outsize talent. But that unique asset, Access was, I think, really based on let's call it like the Silicon Valley prestige networks that they could build. And those Silicon Valley prestige networks are not as stable as they were historically for two reasons.One, Silicon Valley isn't where everything is happening anymore. Just because a lot of people are building Well, because of the housing price there and their crackdown on group houses is what really like destroyed it as a place for building good startups. It's just too expensive if you're a scrappy entrepreneur to live.And then two a lot of scrappy entrepreneurs are what category of people? They are extremely libertarian males. And extremely [00:31:00] libertarian males are what? Usually right leaning these days in the past. They were usually left leaning but the left has scared away Most libertarians who formerly were sort of on their side was a recent more authoritarian push and that has further pushed a lot of the Psychological profile of person who otherwise would be a successful entrepreneur out of silicon valley and they're often interestingly these days, not because of anything to do with white people, but disproportionately white males, if you would be like, wait, why does it not have anything to do as white people?Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: I should clarify here, white, Asian, or Jewish because, , DEI treats, Jews and Asians as if they are white.Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-4: And it also note here I'm not taking a stance that use an Asian or white. I'm just saying DEI treats them as if they are, maybe they are. Maybe they aren't. I really don't see ethnic Distinctions as being particularly important in terms of how I view the world.Malcolm Collins: Well, it's because the D. E. I. Programs have become so, so, so aggressive right now. That if you are a minority and you are [00:32:00] technically competent. You can get a large arbitrage just by going into Google or by going into Facebook. You know, there is a much easier pathway there for you than going into entrepreneurship.Whereas if you are a white male, you are near frozen out of these companies. If you present assist these days like, yeah, you can get in, but it's harder to rise up. It's like, just all the cards are stacked against you. So at that point, you know, why not? Like, if you're judging a decision and you think you have a good idea, why not start a company?So unfortunately it means that the type of people who are likely to be Republican or likely to have some resistance to the Silicon Valley ethos are the ones who are being disproportionately pushed out from a political perspective. Then you have the secondary problem, which is you know, as I've said before in my show, Startups these days, you know, they used to be like a hundred, 200 person teams of engineers in Silicon Valley going to these cool, like open space offices.Now it's three guys and then a huge outsource team in the Philippines and then a ton of [00:33:00] independent AI agents. And these people are just not networking with these old you know, Silicon Valley VC groups. AndSimone Collins: they also need less money. You know, we're, we're getting to an age in which you can do with AI.So much of what would otherwise have cost so much to raise. And, and also things that used to cost a lot of money that people used to need venture funds for things like teams, things like advertising. They're kind of broken. I mean, one, we can use AI and outsourced labor for most of the things that hires new hires and initial hires that people raised funds for used to do.Then. Advertising, I think people are learning more and more. It's just inherently broken. It doesn't really work. So where a lot of people raised a lot of money to just own a market and advertise, which is something that was really pervasive in the venture capital world earlier. It was like, oh, we'll raise venture capital funds.Just like flood a market. And basically outcompete unfairly everyone else who's trying to compete in this market, because you can just infinitely spend money and like undercut them in [00:34:00] price and then take over the market, put them out of business and then own the market. That doesn't really work anymore.And advertising doesn't really work anymore the way that it used to. So I think that there's just less reason overall, but I think the other issue too, is that a lot of venture capital firms are returning a lot of the money that has been invested in them saying, well, sorry guys, we're not going to be able to spend this all because they're not.They don't have enough opportunities to deploy the funds into it. I can give youMalcolm Collins: a concrete example from our own experience of like why this is happening. Consider the Collins Institute. So with the Collins Institute, a lot of people are like, Oh, the text written in the Collins Institute looks like it was written by an AI.And that's because, yeah, I mean, it was written by an AI, and we're using humans to go through and edit it and everything like that. And we have a some dry powder that we're sitting on, and we had taken it, and we were going to originally the plan when we first had the idea for the Collins Institute was to hire a team of PhDs to write every one of these answers.And then we were like, Oh, no, it's easier to do with AI and then have, like, lower skill. People go through and clean [00:35:00] it up. And now we're looking at, like, what AI is outputting these days, and we're like, we actually shut down the team that was going through and cleaning it up because we're like, look, in two years.I'm going to be able to have an A. I do all of this for a trivial cost. So we took a task that was originally for Ph. D. S. Okay, then said, Oh, we can give this task to outsource low cost people combined with a I to Oh, in two years, we can give this task just to a I. And so the amount of money we need to put together a project like this is just astronomically less than it would have been on a historic basis.And this is what all of the VCs are seeing in terms of where they would have deployed capital. So that's created a problem. But thenSimone Collins: also in terms of selling and getting liquidity, I think that's another really big problem is that it, it seems that there are fewer opportunities now for startups to go public, to sell to like M& A seems to like, I think we're seeing some more friction when it comes to [00:36:00] M& A from like a, an antitrust perspective as well where it's more difficult for people to.To cash out investments that they've made in startups because those startups aren't going public or selling the way they used to. And that's just another issue that this market seems to be breaking more and more. So that doesn't seem like a good option, but most people. Listening to this podcast, aren't accredited investors who could make venture capital investments anyway.So I don't know how much this is relevant.Malcolm Collins: It's very relevant and we'll explain why people need to understand what's going on in capital markets that they want to broadly understand what's going on in the world to these days. If you don't understand the, what the people with money are thinking about or what they're doing, you are making bad decisions.About the way you're optimizing your career the way you're optimizing your finances and I think that that's why people come to this podcast partially is to get a perspective that they're not otherwise going to get so we one I would say that we've come up with a solution for vcs it's actually not fully [00:37:00] finished yet.But you can check it out right now the site is basically a draft at this point, but we're going to do a big launch soon it's hard and ea.org. And what we are going to do is try to compete with the or original EA message, the effective Altru message, which is like, we're gonna fix major problems in the world but not do so in a way that primarily socially signals that since have been, I mean, the, everybody knows the only a movement has been completely captured by social signaling at this point.It's all like environmentalism, which has like no arbitrage capability. It's all like all of these, the, it's this giant bloated. Bureaucratic peerage network at this point. Well, yeah, justSimone Collins: yeah, it stopped to be what it was all about which was actually Achieving the greatest good regardless of signaling status and how things looked or felt or signaled.Malcolm Collins: And so, what we're going to do is to try to create a network that, that actually puts money in places where it might matter. One of [00:38:00] the things that horrified me the most recently as going through, because recently, you know, this podcast, we're often you know, sort of pooping on AI safety. And recently, I was like, you know, it is an actual risk.It's more just that I think that people focusing on it right now are doing so for personal gain and that the ways that they're attacking it can't actually fix it. And we are going to do a different episode on that. So I started going into what they were doing. I was like, Oh, none of these solutions.Even a chance of working. You got real stuff there. And with this organization, we've already made a few capital deployments specifically in the bioacceleration as them space. So this is on stuff like IBG technology. This is on stuff like you know, human genetic stuff. And I realized, well, the way that I want to deploy capital as opposed to the traditional EA, which is doing it in this peerage network format is I want our nonprofit to to invest in companies that could potentially turn cash positive, but that also have a chance of saving our species.And the way that we wanted to structure it is to say, okay, we will do that as a nonprofit. [00:39:00] We will open a grant and we actually have the grant thing open right now. You can apply if you want. But if you are a VC and you donate to us, we will give you our deal flow pipeline as we make these investments.So that's Which could be useful to VCs, specifically in either the AI or bioacceleration of space, which are the spaces we're going to get the most potential opportunities. But then the other area where, anything else you wanted to say here, Simone?Simone Collins: No, I'm just really excited about it. I, I want to support people who are doing.Real work in this space.Malcolm Collins: Okay, so we met through this podcast somebody who reached out to us and has been a fan from very early on in the podcast somebody who has a data center that used to run crypto stuff and what we are doing is we are like we personally have bought from I think NVIDIA or like a third party some GPUs, like a rack of GPUs that we're putting [00:40:00] in their facility.And then there's these VARs that we can resale them on. Value addedSimone Collins: resellersMalcolm Collins: to be clear. That's a value added reseller. So we put the GPU in the facility. His team helps us with, with running those. And then we help manage how it's being sold to people. So it's a, it's a more active investment for us than like a you know, like a security would be, for example.It's something where we need to actively put some attention into it and like, make sure that it's being used by people. But when we run the math, it looks like because a lot of the, right now people who are focused on these big gpu data centers What they're doing is they're converting old data centers that used to be focused on Processing for like websites and and and the old processing that needed very low latency Periods because they were like being actively used by like constant online user stuff.They Would put them in like expensive cities and stuff like that or in areas that were expensive Just because they had low latency and they were [00:41:00] next to like the main lines that the internet runs along whereas a lot of the crypto stuff was done very far from these areas. In areas where where power was super cheap and so we're looking to put them in those facilities and see if we can make money off of them we are going to see if we can put this together You In a way that it's possible for an average person to sort of, buy and manage their own GPUs so if that's something that you're interested in deploying capital on, you can reach out to us.That said we'll, we'll see if we can find a way to make this, this, this work legally. The, the, the key thing to it is we can't manage it for you. You're going to need to do the management yourself. That's why, and you're going to need to own it yourself. So we'll like facilitate the buying process, but you will be the actual person owning the product.A GPU, but anything I I'm personally really excited about this opportunity. Well,Simone Collins: what makes me excited about it is we still believe, I think inherently in this process of, we want our [00:42:00] money to be in a thing that we think is going to grow, that has strong tailwinds as it were. And when we think about the only thing we can really depend upon in the near future with the rise of AI is a need for AI compute.And power, like those are the two things I'm very confident about that power is really important and AI compute is really important. So, yeah, I want to invest in businesses that are providing those things, please. Like, I wish they were, you know, Small batch nuclear companies that appear to have a path to viability in the U S you know,Malcolm Collins: our, our friends who are like super VC, you know, very, very, very competent VC people.They're they're in small micro. They're allSimone Collins: about it, but the pathway to getting proof from a regulatory standpoint in the U S is really patchy. And it's hard to say, What companies specifically are going to be the ones who finally make it through. That's why I'm like, I wish I [00:43:00] could, but I just don't see opportunities personally there right now.But what I do see is that there is this opportunity at least to work with this team. And we, we really like them personally to be involved in AI managed hosting. And I'm like, all right. Yeah. Because the, you know, you want to, you don't want to in a gold rush, you don't want to go out to California. Yeah.A pick and pan to go panning for gold. You want to go and sell jeans to gold miners and sell picks and gold panning dishes to them, you know, like just sell their supplies, be their restaurants build the roads, but don't be them. So that's what I'm thinking about. That's why I like this.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so we'll see.What, what other things are we focused on right now? I mean, we put all our money in the SMP. That was one thing, but, but when I say all, not all, we, we still own a lot of property, but we've been getting out of multifamily housing, which is where we were traditionally the largest part of our, our investment.Still [00:44:00] some medical office,Simone Collins: still some multifamily housing. Most multifamily housing is typically like large apartment. buildings or condo units where people are renting that are managed by property management companies. TheseMalcolm Collins: were, these were things that made money and we're growing during a period where the family unit was dissolving.And, and this is something that people don't understand. They're like, why is real estate going up when population isn't going up? Right? Like why, or when population is even falling and it's because, well, one of the reasons population is falling is people aren't getting married. And so. And that means that people who would have had one house now need two houses.And, and people aren't living with their parents and people aren't living with their kids. So they just like the number of people living in a house has dramatically decreased. Which means that low end houses and multifamily housing has been a really hot sector for a long time. But I no longer have faith in the sector at all.Like when I'm looking at the multifamily housing returns, we can get, we're looking at like six or 7 percent and if we put our money in a long term savings account we can get 5 percent interest. So, like, why am I dealing with the risk and the [00:45:00] non liquidity of multifamily housing investment? When I can, you know, put my money in long term savings and then invest in, like, GPUs and stuff like that.What are your thoughts more broadly?Simone Collins: I know that we're not the best with money, but are youMalcolm Collins: serious right now? Like, do you have any idea how much we've made on investments in the past? I want to say four years. You've probably doubled our capital.Simone Collins: I don't think so. I can show you,Malcolm Collins: you know. Okay. I'm just, just offline.I'll cut this part out.Simone Collins: Back, I'm sorry.Malcolm Collins: Now that you've looked at the numbers, you realize I'm closer to right than you thought you were. I was.Simone Collins: Y yes,Malcolm Collins: I'm so bad at math. This is soSimone Collins: sad.Malcolm Collins: Anyway the point being, Simone, I, I love you. I hope that we can find a financial Ooh! Inflation!Simone Collins: That's what I meant to say. Like, with inflation.Malcolm Collins: One of the things that [00:46:00] we've been trying to do recently is really, really, really pulling back on our jobs and stuff like that I don't want to be involved in a day job that much anymore I want to be focused on things that make a difference in the world I think we're dealing with short timelines I want to be focused with this hearty a project once we can get it all cleaned up and nice looking I want to be involved in ai I want to be involved in the things that matter in the world today and in this podcast more I want to put more time and effort into researching for this so I can give you guys better Spicier more fun takes every day And I think that that's something I really want to focus on over this next year is to just say, even if we don't have a pass for like daily income, which is something I'm not focused on at all anymore, what?No, I'm just not. I'm like, Simone's like, what are we going to do if we leave our jobs? And I'm like, well, we'll figure it out because I, I think that these other projects are where our attention needs to be focused.Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, our objective functions matter more than income. We like living [00:47:00] frugally. And yeah, people might be listening to this and thinking like, well, if they have all this money to invest, clearly, they have enough money to live without jobs.But I think the key to not being broke is to do pretend that any money that you have invested and that includes any interest or dividends or payout that comes from that money is not yours. Any dividends and interest immediately gets reinvested. Like it doesn't exist. So it's not as though I can pretend like, Oh, I'll just use that.If our income goes away, I have to pretend that it doesn't exist because. That's the rule.Malcolm Collins: We only get to spend the money that we earn now is basically what she's saying, but it's for the greater good.Simone Collins: I like living lane anyway. So it's fine. I love you,Malcolm Collins: Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm. She's awake. So I, and so this starts your process. I love this [00:48:00] weather. It's just so nice. Okay, turn your ring light up. I read today that 23andMe might go bankrupt as soon as next year.Malcolm Collins: Ooh.Simone Collins: Yeah, a lot of people are really concerned. Really shadyMalcolm Collins: stuff.Simone Collins: About their genetic data. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: I love that. Everyone's all worried about it. And meanwhile, I, they have our genetic data and I'm excited about it.I'm like, yeah, bigger genetic data sets in the hands of people with money. That's a good thing. Cause that means more science. That's one of the things I always bemoan is there's not good genetic data sets right now because the big, like the bank in the UK, like close it off.Simone Collins: It sounds like your mic isn't plugged in, by the way.It'sMalcolm Collins: not close to me.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: So for people who don't know, they the big gene bank in the UK ended up actually closing off access. The UK. What?Simone Collins: The UK biobank. That's what it's called. The British biobank.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And the reason they had to, [00:49:00] they, they ended up cutting off access to, to most of the projects is because somebody in one project accidentally, now this all happened accidentally, but they found out that within one, let's say Ethnic immigrant minority population in the UK rates of children that were born via father, daughter, something relations relations at a were 5000 percent higher than in any other group.And apparently this was an offensive fact for them to discover. So they had to shut down access to most people doing anything really interesting with the data, which isSimone Collins: Yeah.Yup. So, let's do it.Malcolm Collins: Alright sorry I'm pulling up my notes right now. It [00:50:00]Simone Collins: was interesting though, to read.Speaker: See, tell me something crazy. Uhhuh. Okay? Octavian. You popcorn. Oh, popcorn? Is that it? What? Popcorn. Oh, you like popcorn? Yeah, with popcorn. You like popcorn? Are you a popcorn? Yeah, I'm a wet popcorn. You're a wet popcorn. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join us as we explore the fascinating evolution of marriage traditions from polygamy to monogamy within biblical, Roman, and early Christian contexts. This discussion delves into Old Testament laws, New Testament teachings, and Roman cultural norms, shedding light on how figures like Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon navigated polygamous practices. We also examine the impact of Roman culture on Christianity and Judaism, the role of marriage norms in societal stability, and the modern implications of these historical traditions. Reflecting on both ancient and contemporary perspectives, we dissect the complex interplay between monogamy, polygamy, and cultural evolution, offering a thought-provoking take on the roots and consequences of marital practices. Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Understanding, the meta narrative of the evolution of monogamy was in the church as a norm. Tells a deeper story that is missed if you attempt to misinterpret them to make your modern sexual mores.Look like they were the mores that were had at the time of various parts of the bible being written which which hides from you I think a deeper and more interesting truth it is kind of weird that the Bible isn't that explicit about one husband, one wife, but seems to assume it in the New Testament, where in the Old Testament, it seems to assume that wealthy men have multiple wives.Yes, yes, actually in Roman cultural norms, it was one wife. , Rome definitely represented a, The core of of civilizing forceAnd I think what we see here is civilization crashing into religion, creating something that is a merger of both of them. [00:01:00]Speaker: It's law.Speaker 2: Roman law. Is there some other form of law, you wretched woman?One thousand apologies.Malcolm Collins: One, In the form of Christianity, but also in the form of post second temple Judaism. And this is where things get really, spicySpeaker 3: You must guarantee, of course, to keep your Jews in line. They will do as I say, or they will suffer the consequences. Congratulations, then, Herod, you have the full backing of Rome.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Be talking with you today. Today we are going to be talking about an issue that I think just doesn't get a lot of good and honest coverage, which is What does the Bible actually say about taking multiple wives? And the reason why you're not going to get good coverage of this is [00:02:00] Christians generally sweep under the rug that there's a lot of people of the Bible with multiple wives because now it is normal within modern Christianity to only have one wife.And it's the same with modern Judaism. Modern Judaism is mostly a monogamous religious system. So they just, you know, the, the people who are like super pro Christian or super pro Jew generally don't dwell on this point too much. So when you go and you're reading about this, it's usually people who want to dunk on the Bible or who want to dunk on Jews or who want to dunk on, you know, early, whatever.Right. And I think. Because of that, people miss interesting things we can learn about the development of Christianity and Judaism by studying both one, what does, what are the actual rules laid out in the Bible around this? And two, how and why did they develop and change over time?Simone Collins: Okay. I'm excited for this.Any thoughts? I, I, I'm, I'm kind of afraid of what we're going to [00:03:00] learn. Is it, is it more in the end biblical to just I'll give you aMalcolm Collins: summary of what you're going to learn, because this is really interesting. So it is kind of weird that the Bible isn't that explicit about one husband, one wife, but seems to assume it in the New Testament, where in the Old Testament, it seems to assume that wealthy men have multiple wives.Yes, yes, yes. And I thought it was really weird. I was like, it's almost like, the cultural norms changed before the New Testament was written. And so I started to study the issue more. And what I learned is actually in Roman cultural norms, it was one wife. And so, The area of Israel being a Roman colony at the time, it would have been culturally normative for them at that period, at least within like the, the power structure of society to default to monogamous [00:04:00] marriages.And so Jesus was, when he was preaching to people assumed that they all knew we had already made the switch to one one.Simone Collins: So it's almost as if, like, if the new Testament were written, when the Macarena was the dance of the season. Then everyone would be doing the Macarena in the Bible, and we would just assume that it's biblically correct.To do the Macarena.Malcolm Collins: Kind of, I actually would word it a bit differently, and I'll go into this conception more in a second. But I think that you can see Christianity as a marriage of Roman culture, or the first true civilization. In terms of, from my perspective, like the, the descendant of modern civilization.When I look at something like Egypt, it wasn't like a modern civilization. The real precursor to the modern state. So you may have Greece or something like that, but I think that Rome is a successor state to the Greek culture. And what Christianity is, is that what we call the Western cultural canons, marriage with the Jewish cultural canon to [00:05:00] create Christianity.And I think that once you understand through the story of how it relates to monogamy, that it is this marriage, then you can better understand the role in the Western tradition That pre that marriage, the Jewish branch of the system should play and the Roman slash Greek branch of that system should playSimone Collins: that actually really resonates.And I've never thought about that before that. In the end, there's a ton of Roman culture in both. the New Testament, but also the Catholic Church in general.Malcolm Collins: Catholics more than anyone else have adopted the Greek slash Roman side of this cultural marriage in their elevation of great thinkers of Greek among their own great thinkers.Yeah. We did a very good job of pulling in and marrying that canon and creating something which is. fairly unique to Christianity as a religious system, which is a presumptive assumption of a separation of church and state. Which is to say that, you know, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. This is what, you know, the famous Jesus line, which, which [00:06:00] assumes that, Church and state will be separate, which I think was one of Christianity's greatest strengths in terms of its growth, and very unique.That's not true of Judaism. That's not true of Islam. That's not true of Confucianism. That's not true of most other religious systems, but let's get into this. Okay, so arguments for monogamy that could be made. The best argument for monogamy in the Old Testament is going to be Genesis 2 24.Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And you, you generally see the Adam and Eve narrative is played out here. They're like, Oh, Genesis. But unfortunately if you take the interpretation we take of this line, which I think is the correct interpretation, a husband and wife do not become one flesh when they have sex.That's insane. They become one flesh when they make a baby. That is when a husband and wife become one flesh. And so If you take that assumption, there's no reason that a man couldn't also become one flesh with other women. This is not a line laying out that he [00:07:00] should only have one wife. Nor is the Adam and Eve story laying that out.And I think that in the original interpretations of both of these stories, we have that laid out as very obviously not the mainstream interpretation, given that Like pretty much every powerful Jewish person in the early Bible has multiple wives. So I don't think that that's a strong interpretation.The next here you have Jesus reaffirmed this view of marriage stating, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast with his wife and the two shall become one flesh. But again, I don't really see this as necessarily exclusively being Monogamy, if you take one flesh to mean make babies.Well, also when you,Simone Collins: yeah, when you think about how things are described in a nature video, for example, like, and the male manatee will mate with the female manatee. And it doesn't imply that the manatees are monogamous. It just implies that this is how the reproductive process works. Yeah, it's,Malcolm Collins: it's, it's not an implication of that at all.Then here you have [00:08:00] Corinthians 7, 2, where Paul states. Each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. Now, this is, in the New Testament, I think the strongest place where it is just like really obvious there is an assumption of monogamy. However I don't know, like to me, because these are in, you know, the letters, right?This is more to me like, well, when you're talking to your people, we know because we're Romans, we're Romans. That it's a monogamous relationship, right? Like that's the assumption there. And then the next line here, you know, if you look at like Timothy three, two or Titus one, six they also seem to assume monogamy, especially among the wealthy people, which is when you see polygyny more commonly specifically with lines where Paul states, when talking about the qualifications for church leaders being quote the husband of one wife in quote now Here's the interesting thing Simone. You might have just heard that quote and thought something in in [00:09:00] in in in in in in Timothy and Titus when they're when they're laying out What the qualifications for church leaders are.It says, I'm just wondering, what question is brought to mind for you? The qualification for having leadership was in the church, being quote, Each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. Who is that a problem for? Grace. Catholics. Yeah. It's a problem for Catholics. Do you know how they get around it?It's actually pretty interesting. I was, I wasSimone Collins: sorry, she's teething and really sharp teeth. Wear a wedding ring and they, they marry Jesus essentially. So,Malcolm Collins: The way the Catholics get around this is, is I've read too. They go, it's meant to be taken metaphorically. That's my favorite where I'm like, what, what? Like you believe the craziest stuff. Like you're literally eating Christ's body and blood.And that's notSimone Collins: metaphorical. No.Malcolm Collins: You're like, ah, that was probably metaphorical. [00:10:00] But then to they'll say, well, it doesn't explicitly demand that they, that they must be married. It's meant to be read as they can't have more than one wife. It's saying that church leadership shouldn't be polygynous.And I guess it can technically be read that way, but that's quite a squirrelly reading of this and seems not to be what's intended. The husband of one wife. So what they mean is that what they say is it means that not more than one wife, but, but even then it's clearly saying that church leadership should like broadly speaking, be married.Like,Simone Collins: yeah, that's, I didn't, I haven't, it's been a while since I've read Corinthians. So I guess That's what this is from, right? I guess I missed that part. Wasn't paying attention as much as I should be because that's pretty strikingMalcolm Collins: Yeah, now Here's the thing with jesus. So if you remember the quote earlier I mentioned, [00:11:00] where Jesus says have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and he said Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast with his wife and the two shall become one flesh What he's actually doing what jesus You you know, and in context, when I think about Jesus, I think about Jesus as a Jewish preacher in the early days, preaching to Jews, he is in two parts of Genesis and trying to use them to make an argument that changes.I think it is possible that he was trying to argue for monogamy there. And if he was, he was doing it in the way I classically, like a Jewish rabbi would have done it. I don'tSimone Collins: know. I feel like he's Jordan Peterson hanging, which, you know, he's like, get out of your family's house. Get a job, make your bed.Instead of specifically get married and be monogamous. When I, when I hear, when I read, when I hear that statement is. You need to leave your parents house, start your family, and become independent. Yeah, well, I canMalcolm Collins: see what this was said in response to.Simone Collins: Yeah, because the [00:12:00] context of it does make a really big difference. If he's saying this specifically with regard to the type of composition of a marriage or adult life, then I can get that maybe it's an argument for monogamy, but I don't know. This sounds more to me like you got to grow up and start your family.And that could be, you know, he's using the most common form of pairing for your average person. And of course the average person who's not super high wealth or high status is going to not have more than one wife.,Malcolm Collins: Just getting a answer here.So this is specifically about divorce, apparently. Huh?Yeah, he's using against, he's arguing against an easy path to divorce. Okay. Which I can see now could be a stronger case for this being about monogamy specifically. So, Because, [00:13:00] because this is being said in response to divorce have you not read that he who what created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, therefore, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh that it could be taken to also argue for monogamy with the implication of, well, then why not just take another wife here?I don't see it as being that strong an argument for it, but I definitely see it as being an argument for it. And, and no, the reason why it needs to be a strong argument is because what this is evolving is the old Jewish traditions. Which, now let's start to talk about these, because Oh, actually, before I go further There is actually another change in marriage tradition that happened during this period is pushing away lever, right?Marriages are marrying brothers, dead spouses. Yeah. Cause there was,Simone Collins: there were a bunch of rules in the Bible and there's a bit of rules in the tablet about this, right?Malcolm Collins: Generous thing you would do historically, you know, if you're in one of these cultures where women wouldn't have [00:14:00] had a way to support themselves, they might've had other kids with a man.It's your genetic closest relative. It's actually almost. Like a perfect system. Like in my estate was going to a wife and she was still genetically fit. Evolutionarily. I would want the kids that she bared to, if they can't be 50 percent me, because they can't be literally my kids, they can be 25 percent me.And then that for every two kids, it's like one kid that I had with her or more, you know, given that, you know, the, the, the amount of genetic similarities siblings have that is. a really easy system and a really good system. But because the culture in Rome was beginning to move away from that you had things like Paul further developing the, this teaching by reversing the Old Testament command for a man to marry his dead brother's wife.Instead, Paul said that widows can marry whomever they wanted. This is Corinthians 739. In the Old Testament, there is only one section that could be used to argue against polygyny. One man having many wives. Specifically, Deuteronomy 17, 17 which again, this one is not great for Catholics. He [00:15:00] should, and this is speaking of the king, right?He should not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself an excess of silver and gold. So it's saying That just sounds likeSimone Collins: moderation. I'm hearing too many, not I mean, like, many is more than a few. I think he's justMalcolm Collins: relevant when you consider the, the, the context of this, which is Solomon being punished for 700 wives.That is in my mind, too many wives,Simone Collins: especially when you compare it to wealth. I think this is about, again, not having too much and many is more than a few though. Of course we don't know the original.Malcolm Collins: I'll tell you, 700 is more than was intended by this line. 700 wives, 300 concubines. So,Simone Collins: butMalcolm Collins: I, but wait, oh,Simone Collins: whoa, wait.Okay. So a total of a thousand.Malcolm Collins: A thousand. Yeah, this guy wasn't even sleeping with all his wives at this point. This is just wasteful. This is just wasteful at this point. You can't possibly have a cycle [00:16:00] that would work for impregnation with a thousand women. Some of these women must have grown old without you.There's only 365 days in a year. I know, you likeSimone Collins: marry her at 23 and then finally you consummate the marriage when she's 30 or something.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this is, this is, no, this is ridiculous. But I, I, I'd also say here that what's really important here is the immorality of having too many wives in Deuteronomy is said to be the same type of immorality as having too much gold.Wives? And gold similar forms of immorality here. Okay. Well, no, I mean it's just you often get people like Oh, the bible doesn't say having lots of wealth is the bad thing especially not like religious institutions or leadership having lots of wealth and i'm like it says it like everywhere it says it.Um, but anyway, and for people who want to go to the tabernacle and be like, yeah But the tabernacle had gold in it. You got to watch our track series. Specifically track eight. We go into that a lot Now arguments for polygamy. All right, so, several prominent old [00:17:00] testament figures practice polygamy without explicit condemnation including abraham jacob David and solomon.And potentially also moses, but I I didn't get that one confirmed some old testament laws seem to regulate rather than prohibit polygamy such as exodus 21 10 Which states if he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her from marriage food, her closing or her marital rights, which by the way, I love the line.There is saying, when you take your second wife, you can't sleep with your first wife less. She's gonna she's gonna get a say in that. Okay. And then deuteronomy 21 15 17 Provides inheritance rules for children of multiple wives implying acceptance of the practice and then samuels 12 8 Could be interpreted as God giving David multiple wives quote and I gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your arms ​there is no explicit blanket condemnation of polygamy in the bible Yeah, so [00:18:00] basically nowhere in the bible does it say polygamy polygyny bad and if god had really really felt this I think that would be there however have quotes like, quote, Have you allowed all the women to live? He, Moses, asked them. Quote,now kill all the boys and kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. So this is Moses. Saying like okay when you're conquering a region You've got to kill the men. You've got to kill the wives. You've got to kill the boys but The young girls who haven't slept with a guy yet.Those are those are For the taking and then there are lines which give rules about taking what are essentially Mmm, what's a word that I can use for this? Mex slaves. Captured women could be taken as wives after a period of mourning, but had to be set free if the man no longer [00:19:00] wanted them as a wife.So it's Deuteronomy 21, 10, 14. Um,Here is the full quote here from a different section. If a man has sex with a slave girl who is engaged to another man, but has not yet been ransomed or given freedom, there must be an investigation. But, they aren't to be put to death because she wasn't free. The man must bring a compensation offering to God at the entrance of the tent meeting.of meeting a ram of compensation. The priest will perform the ritual of atonement for him before God with the ram of compensation for the sin he has committed. Then he will stand forgiven of the sin he committed. So, what this implies here, just for people who aren't quite putting all this together when you are conquering a territory in the ancient Jewish days you know, we may think of these people as wives but it doesn't say like, They're allowed to say no.It says, yeah, yeah, you take them. Gives them a, a period of mourning. But after that yeah, you [00:20:00] take them as a wife and it's clear here that take them as a wife is not the same kind of wife as a Jewish voluntary wife. Why do we know that? Because different rules apply to them, specifically the rule that they can be divorced and that if you divorce them, you set them free.Or they can be divorced more easily. It seems here. And with this other one, it's saying, oh, if somebody else has sex with him in the meantime, I mean, don't kill them, but you know, they should like. Apologize. And tomorrow or tomorrow, I don't know when the next episode of this series is going to go live because I want to make it like a series of this.We're going to go into what the Bible actually says about slavery and what the real rules are around slavery in the Bible. Now let's talk about. Extramarital relations in Rome, because this gets interesting. While marriage was monogamous, Roman men often engaged in other sexual relationships.Sexual activity with slaves, prostitutes, and women of lower status was socially acceptable for married men, and not considered adultery under the law. Powerful men frequently had [00:21:00] multiple sexual partners in addition to their wife, a practice sometimes called male resource polygyny. Concubinage, a man having a long term unmarried female partner existed, Though its prevalence and legal status in different periods is debated.So I, I should note here that in Rome it wasn't like fully modern in its understanding of monogamy. It was a monogamous system where you had one real wife that produced errors, but you know, you would have sex with other women if you were a powerful man. In many ways, I might think that the Roman system is actually morally superior to our existing system in the West.Because In what way?Simone Collins: Just that it's less uptight, less brittle?Malcolm Collins: It's less brittle because it's more honest. As I've pointed out when people are like, Whoa, Christianity, we need to go back to the old ways and be monogamous. And I'm like, okay, like, what do you consider like old ways, monogamous Christianity?And they're like Catholicism. [00:22:00] And I'm like, you mean like Louis the 15th? What was Louis the 14th? Louis XIV. The height of the Catholic Empire in terms of its culture, in terms of its wealth, in terms of its technology, and the most powerful man had tons of concubines. It's stillSimone Collins: seen as a classically French thing, where any married couple, there will be dalliances, of course you have your mistress, of course you're seeing someone on the side, that's still a French trope.I don't know, it, it's one of those, Awkward things because catholicism being pervasive in the country. And this is also an issue with the way the 14th is the the church was constantly like Threatening to not give him communion, you know threatening of this in in in in france still there's this constant thing of well It's not okay to do this, but at the same time everyone knows but it's like a very catholic Yeah, so it's like if youMalcolm Collins: can't if you can't when you guys control like literally the the this is like the height of your cultural influence on Humanity and [00:23:00] this is still happening.Like i'm not like, okay. Well clearly the system's not working and you you as I point out there's no such thing as a non polygynous society The question is just where is the slider on how wealthy and powerful a man has to be To be allowed multiple wives without anyone blinking an eye.As you've all seen on the news, our country is facing a major crisis why? Why are rich, successful men suddenly going out and trying to have sex with lots of women? Why would a man who's famous Use that to try and have sex with lots of different women! And these rich celebrities have perfectly good wives at home! Why would they even think of sex with others? Dammit! I want answers! . Of course, we all know the normal healthy male thinks only of sex occasionally and has no desire for sex with multiple partners. Yeah, that's right, of course. Definitely true. Yes, we all know that.Go on.Simone Collins: What you see I think pervasively in You Non French like [00:24:00] societies are non Roman style societies today.Even is now just serial monogamy where and in the end men appear to have multiple wives, just not exactly at the same time, just one after another. So I don't even, I feel like yes, the Roman system is better. It's less brutal. It's more honest. And I think a lot of relationships would be better off if men could just.Sleep with people on the side when they needed to, or maybe occasionally women to, you know, it gets kind of complicated with that. But like, if you're just open about it, instead of being like, no, it has to be in a marriage or 1 or after another, or the marriage ends once the man sleeps with someone else, because that's not practical.It seems.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, I will say that this reading the Bible this way and understanding, I think, what is intended by the meta narrative of the evolution of monogamy was in the church as a norm. That, I think, tells a deeper story about [00:25:00] sort of the soul of Christianity and the true nature of Christianity that is missed if you ignore these lines, or you attempt to misinterpret them to make your modern sexual mores.Look like they were the mores that were had at the time of various parts of the bible being written which which hides from you I think a deeper and more interesting truth So in some of our videos here, I talk about how my ancestors were savages Until they were when I say savages You know, I'm talking about like the ancient Celtic people of, of, of Britain you know, killing children, Sacrificially and burying them under bridges to ensure the bridge's stability, like, Savages, savages, you know, evidence of human sacrifice at Stonehenge, like, Genuinely savage, monstrous, backwards people who didn't produce anything but mud huts and I think, We, as a world, are going to become more mature and get better able to deal with our differences and [00:26:00] our histories when we can admit that most of us come from traditions.When I, one of my favorite things is, is and I often mention this when I'm bringing this up. Somebody's like, we can tell he's a white nationalist because he named his kids Roman names. I'm like, the Romans! Colonized and conquered my people. That's like saying we can tell this person's a black nationalist because they gave their kids victorian names.It's like what that makes no sense. But what they are showing which is what is true is that I look upon rome The seat of civilization at the time and Rome did not invent civilization. Modern civilization evolved out of the Greek city states. I think that is the birthplace of civilization, which spread from there.It spread to the Romans. The Romans helped spread it around the world. The Britons then helped spread it around the world faster. And it was one of these things where it was a meme. I saw once, it was women looking towards their ancestors. And it was you know, you know, women [00:27:00] looking at like of different ethnicities, looking to ancestors of their, their ethnicity.And then it was men looking at their cultural ancestors. It was one of those superimposed things was men of all the different ethnicities sort of overlapped, staring back atlike, Caesar. And it's like, it's so true. You know, there's the famous quote, like, men think about Rome X many times per day or whatever.But I don't think that that's wrong. I think that Rome And it was one of the baton holders of civilizationSpeaker: It's law.Speaker 2: Roman law. Is there some other form of law, you wretched woman?One thousand apologies.Malcolm Collins: And I don't think that, like, I don't glorify, for example, Rome over its successor states whether that is Charlemagne, or the Holy Roman Empire, or the Victorian British Empire but I, I do, I, I will say that, for a time, it definitely represented a, [00:28:00] The core of of civilizing force and what Christianity represents is when Rome contacted the Jewish people, if you go to our track eight, you know, we go into a lot of the genuinely savage stuff that was happening in the temple, like ripping off doves heads then ripping them apart by their wings.Sacrificing goats, you know blood would have been running from it every day. That's I mean when Jesus was flipping stuff over It was the the money sacrifices for buying like animal sacrifices to sacrifice at the temple And we argue in that track that I think that that's actually a form of ball light worship And this is made very clear and it wasn't ever meant to be done.Within The, the true religion. And I think what we see here is civilization crashing into a truly divinely inspired religion, creating something that is a merger of both of them. One, In the form of Christianity, but also in the form of post second temple Judaism. And this is where things get [00:29:00] really, spicy here, which is to say that like Everyone when they're first colonized the jewish people and this was the people who you know The king would have 700 wives.This was a people who you know ripped apart animals and did all these animal sacrifices This was the people who otherwise was fairly You They may have been more civilized than my ancestors when my ancestors first contacted civilization, but Rome was doing them a favor. It was bringing them into the era of civilization, and the Jewish people resisted, and the Jewish people resisted,Speaker 3: You must guarantee, of course, to keep your Jews in line. They will do as I say, or they will suffer the consequences. Congratulations, then, Herod, you have the full backing of Rome.Malcolm Collins: And eventually, I believe that God used the [00:30:00] Roman Empire to Smash the temple for their incalcitrance. The other forms of really, I, I, I'd almost say sort of tribal polytheistic worship. That doesn't. You'll like part of like the one true religion helped them get out of this cycle of, you know, polygynous tribal culture and move into the civilized culture.And this is where I you know, just kindSimone Collins: of by normatively rubbing off on them.Malcolm Collins: Yes, because Jews did move out of and we'll get into a second how they moved out of. Polygyny is a cultural norm that is obviously no longer a cultural norm in most forms of modern judaism and many many roman things are no longer cultural norms in Modern judaism and this is one of the areas where people see our show as being like overly philosomatic That means like overly pro jew.And we are very pro jew like I have respect for The the modern jewish people and the ancient jewish people but I would say [00:31:00] that you know when I am reading You Literature do I believe that time equivalent stories in the Old Testament versus ancient Greece who was culturally more sophisticated?It was the ancient Greeks. I'm just like civilization was more sophisticated. And that I think what allowed for the modern Jew to become what they are in this absolute powerhouse of a cultural tradition was the sort of smashing of the old temple, which freed the Jewish people from all of these, these ancient Policyistic like traditions and allowed them to evolve into the modern form of Judaism.But people could be like, oh, that's so anti Semitic to say that point there. They're like, how could you say that Judaism now is fundamentally different than what it is? And I think that people who argue that post Temple Judaism isn't fundamentally a different religion for pre Second Temple Judaism.I think that that belief is mostly driven by a, The theological motivation and not a [00:32:00] practical or fact based motivation where I would argue that they're probably about as different from each other as Christianity is to pre second temple judaism.Maybe maybe a degree maybe like half as much more different I mean but keep in mind like you didn't have books like the kabbalah during that period and stuff like that like They added a book.We added a book like things change things evolve. That doesn't mean that you don't have You The right to say we still have a connection to these ancient people. But I think that the, the structure of the religion is quite different now. But Simone, thoughts before I go further here.Simone Collins: No, that makes sense.But what you're saying though, is that biblically speaking, there's nothing saying that polygamy is a bad thing. And it was more of a normative and civilizational stability development where monogamy came in, which is to say that monogamy is more normative now within religious [00:33:00] cultures, not because morally or biblically, it is superior, but from a civilizational stability standpoint, it is correlated with more flourishing.That is to say, you're going to have a more stable culture if monogamy is pervasive because you have fewer free radical uncoupled men who are likely to cause violence in society.Malcolm Collins: Research that we talk about is monogamous cultures generally outcompete non monogamous cultures in a historic context you have fewer unattached men which caused civilizational instability because they're basically genetic free radicals that have no reason not to become terrorists or do something else crazy.And you see this, there's been a big study that correlated monogamous versus non monogamous cultural groups that are otherwise equal. And you saw lots higher rates of lower trust and business transactions in the non monogamous group. You saw Lots of cheating in, in more murder. You saw more terrorism.You saw more prostitution. It's just generally not super healthy from a cultural environment. I actually think the Roman system is [00:34:00] probably the best, but before we get to that, because then you can have Well, okay, before we get to that, I want to go here with what it actually means that this is in the Bible this way.What it means is, if in the future, for some technological development reason I can't imagine now, we moved into a world where polygyny was the norm, that would not be outright counter biblical as a way to live. However, The Bible, especially the New Testament, is leaning towards a stronger monogamist interpretation.And here, I would note how this began to change. Several early church fathers spoke against polygyny, including Justin the Martyr, 160 A. D., who rebuked Jews for allowing polygyny Irenaeus, 180 A. D., who condemned Gnostics for practicing polygyny Tertullian, 207 A.D., who explicitly forbade polygamy, and Methodius, 290 A. D., who argued [00:35:00] polygamy had ended by the time of the prophets. And then at the Council of Neocrestria in 315 AD there is reference to a purification period for polygamous, indicating that it was considered sinful at that time. Now, you might wonder, okay, so you have some prophets here, but you don't actually have like any of the Catholic councils, them outright banding polygyny.Do you know why they never outright banded, even though it became a cultural norm? Why monogamy?Simone Collins: I imagine it would be hard to find the specific grounds, so you would just be presumptuously doing it.Malcolm Collins: Super hard.Simone Collins: Oh, because you'd have to give up your wife, your extra wife. No, notMalcolm Collins: give up your wife, you have to make a number of women homeless.You, you no longer look like a woman. A good guy. If you are coming into a tribe somewhere and you're like, Oh, well, the chief has to choose one of his 10 wives and the rest get to be homeless.Simone Collins: LikeMalcolm Collins: that's [00:36:00] not a super awesome thing to do. And so the way that they would typically do it, if they took this softer line interpretation and then they'd say, well, intergenerationally, like, just, you know, like the Bible doesn't explicitly ban it, but like, it's not super cool with it.Okay. SoSimone Collins: like, maybe just don't do that anymore.Malcolm Collins: Yes, so now let's talk about the decline of polygyny among the Jews. In the Talmud, 4th 5th century CE, treated monogamous marriage as the norm, though it is still discussed polygamy theoretically. And here I would note that while by the time of Jesus, many Jews had come to agree with the Roman view against polygyny, it wasn't officially outlawed, and we only have one Jewish family history from this period, it was found in a cave and we know from it that there is on part of it, one additional wife.Where one person had two wives. So, like, the only sample we have shows two wives. Now, what's very interesting about this incident is the wife came into the marriage with property in an estate. So, she wasn't doing it for economic reasons. [00:37:00] It might have been for love. It might have been for any number of reasons.It might have been a Levite marriage. We don't know. Okay.Simone Collins: Maybe she was hot for the other wife.Malcolm Collins: Oh, getting spicy there. Then we have the first outright ban on polygyny for Ashkenazi Jews came around 1000 CE. Rabbi Gershman ben Yoda issued the ban, Tanaka, on polygyny for Ashkenazi Jews in Germany and France.This ban was initially for about 250 years and became an entrenched tradition afterwards. Reasons for the ban included Reducing friction with Christian groups. Preventing men from taking advantage of wives. Avoiding and fighting between rival wives. And concerns about properly providing for multiple wives during difficult times of exile.Isn't that so interesting that they, Jews ended up banning it not for legalistic like God reasons, but just a And this is causing for kind of the same reason the Mormons did like this is causing unnecessary friction with surrounding Christians. Yeah It's kind of a [00:38:00] pain in the butt anywaySimone Collins: yeahMalcolm Collins: Then for sephardic jews polygyny was never officially banned but became increasingly uncommon over time It survived longest among the yemenite jews until their immigration to israel in the 20th century in 1949 the newly founded state of id Israel made polygyny unlawful.Socio economic factors also contributed for the decline of polygyny. It was financially straining to support multiple households. Rabbis and religious leaders generally did not practice polygyny themselves. So yeah, it just basically fell out of fashion over time. So what is your wider thoughts on all this?Simone Collins: That apparently it's totally biblically okay, and the only reason we don't do it now is that Kind of isn't seen as socially cool and there are some societal reasons why it's not in the best interest of any particular society or government. Yeah, but I mean, like, basically, if, if you want to do it and you can make it work, go ahead and do it.Just know you're not going to be getting any [00:39:00] rewards socially for it in mainstream society.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I guess I just say it's not anti Abrahamic, and it may be anti Catholic, for example, like, different religious subsets have added new rules. You know what's funny here? Is the Christian group with the most explicit rules against polygyny biblically speaking or in their, in their actual like theological literature might be the Mormons.Because they had to ban it. And so they have an explicit ban on it. Oh my gosh, how ironic. Whereas none of the other Christians do. Which is really interesting. So yeah. That isSimone Collins: hilarious.Malcolm Collins: And as to my thoughts on it, and I've talked about this before specifically as it's framed as polyamory, first, I don't think it ever makes sense to have a relationship where the woman can sleep with multiple partners. That's just stupid. There's no reason for it historically. There's no reason for it evolutionarily, genetically, family wise, like, no culture in history has ever done this.And No, there'sSimone Collins: one. There's no reason. [00:40:00] There's the oneMalcolm Collins: that was in the mountains where they, a wife would sometimes marry two brothers. Yes. That wasn't a successful cultural group. Like it almost immediately died out. It's like a weird thing that we know about. But it's just not done because humans don't do it.Whereas multiple wives is done many times. So why, what do I think about this in terms of, and I love so many poly people. They're like, Oh yeah, like we're truly poly. And yet like when they're rich, I know what they always mean is this one guy and a few girls. And maybe the girls will have some extra girls on the side, but very rarely do I see additional guys in these sorts of relationships.But interestingly I've seen people try it and it just hasn't led to polyamory where i've seen it tried over long periods Hasn't been stable like i'm not intrinsically against it. I just haven't seen it stably work and I think that the Roman system is probably best where you have You have sideSimone Collins: chicks, the side chick system.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you can have side chicks, but you have one [00:41:00] wife. I think that's probably the most stable system. But I don't hate Levite marriages either. Like I think what you're missing here thoughSimone Collins: is that it wasn'tmany of the side chicks in ancient Rome were married. And I think that there, there are actually advantages to this where there's kind of this black market thing going on when you have a mostly monogamous society and yet men have mistresses and women sometimes sleep outside of their marriage. I, I think that in some cases leadMalcolm Collins: to faster evolution,Simone Collins: it's going to lead to faster evolution.It allows for women, for example, to sleep with more fit partners, for example, more desirable partners, and then have children with them that are raised in the end by other men who've been cucked, but you know, it still leads to theoretically more desirable traits being [00:42:00] passed on to future generations.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, a society with a lot of cucking is definitely going to evolve much faster than a society with a small amount of cucking.Simone Collins: Yes. Well, and I was just reading some research on trait selection and sort of what we've seen actually play out through history. And it appears to be that. The most common form I'm going to butcher this I think is negative selection.In other words, like bad traits get removed. That's how we evolve. It's not like multiple good traits are selected. It's more that people who have for some reason traits that just aren't very competitive are just less likely to see those genes passed on and in a society that's monogamous, that's only going to happen very efficiently.If women are taking on side pieces as well,Malcolm Collins: I, yeah, well, and I think that I mean, you could fix this with, with polygenic selection. And so I think that polygenic selection, you know, society wide [00:43:00] could be used to prevent a dysgenic spiral, but this is actually 1 of the things I've talked about is.We have created one of the first societies was, was, was very, very low cucking because of the really tight child support laws, which mean that like me sleeping with somebody else in, in risking getting them pregnant is really potentially dangerous to me.And so a lot of high value men aren't going to do that while low value men are still going to do that at a very high rate. And so, you know, that ISimone Collins: want to argue to women in ancient Rome weren't always sleeping around to get pregnant by other men. There was, I don't know if it was. A daughter or sister of Octavian, but there was some letter or something where, like, she had signaled to someone that she knew what she was doing, that she was being careful and she knew, like, to never set sail unless her ship already had cargo.[00:44:00]Yeah. Spicy.Malcolm Collins: Never set sail unless my ship has cargo.Simone Collins: That isMalcolm Collins: a great form of a birth control already being pregnant by your husband.Simone Collins: Yeah. So, you know, she wasn't going to mess up or anything, but she could still have her fun. So I do, you know, I, so I'm just going to push back a little bit on the. Now, obviously it will piss men off immensely for women to cock them, you know, have kids that aren't genetically theirs or even sleep around.But there do seem to be, I would say genetic advantages to it in some cases for like a population on the whole and it happens. So you just have to admit that.Malcolm Collins: Simone, I would, I would push back on not selecting for good genes. Like, for example, I don't think that I, like, I think I'm unusually maybe intelligent or I have an unusually good ability to read people, which is a good gene.I don't think I have any like bad genes and yet, you know, I had [00:45:00] such an easy time getting people to sleep with me when I was younger. And I had many people actively pursue me where were we in a society like Rome or something like that? Would I be getting lots of people pregnant? Yeah, probably.Simone Collins: You, you had. Yeah. People who had boyfriends sleep with you. Like you benefited from this female propensity. Like what's your argument?Malcolm Collins: That's the exact argument I'm making that he's saying that it only removed bad traits didn't increase the rate of good traits. I'm saying that my own background shows that it does potentially increase the rate of good traits.Okay. But me not wanting to pay child support. Now if I had been in Rome, I probably would have had the exact opposite. Motivation because you know, it's frankly more fun when someone can get pregnant, right? And you know another guy's gonna care for it. So what's the problem? That's I've mentioned this in another episode, but I think that men are hard coded to find it more attractive when they are [00:46:00] sleeping with somebody when they know another guy's gonna have the kid because as I noted on the girls when I would sleep with another guy's girlfriend My standards were much much lower.Because I found it Really hot. And I've noted I'm not the only one. Trump has said the same thing. Trump has said that he prefers to sleep with other men's wives. I don't know if that'sSimone Collins: considered the golden standard for Well,Malcolm Collins: I'm just saying if people are like, Malcolm, you can't admit to this horrible fetish.You'll never get far in Republican politics of admitting to that. And I'm like, Trump did it and admitted it. So, you know, apparently that's not true. HeSimone Collins: broke so many, so many glass ceilings. So many glass ceilings. So manyMalcolm Collins: glass ceilings. Anyway, love you to death, Simone.Simone Collins: Love you too, gorgeous.Malcolm Collins: Tilt your camera down a bit and we're gonna do slaves.Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): If you were watching this and wondering where these clips that have to do with Rome, come from. , I pity you in the extreme. It is from the TB mini series called Rome, probably one of the best. Shows ever put to film. I strongly recommend if you haven't watched it, maybe because you're [00:47:00] young and you weren't around when it came out. It is dramatically better than something like game of Thrones. , and it is educational to boot.So you really have no excuse to not try at least to the first episode and then see if you can stop watching.Speaker 5: How fitting that we welcome this new beginning by swearing in the youngest consul in the history of Rome, Gaius Octavian Caesar.Speaker 6: My father died on this floor, butchered. By men he called his friends. Who will tell me that is not murder? Who will tell my legions, who love Caesar as I do, that that is not murder?Who will speak against the motion?Speaker 8: Pumpkin pie! Yeah? Does it smell good? Oh! I hear something! I hear something! [00:48:00] It smells so tasty! Yeah? It's done! Something is done! What does it smell like? Look! Look! Mommy! Mommy! Yeah? Oh, the oven is preheated! So then we have to roll out the pie crust. Are you guys ready to do that next? Yeah! Um, look, it's almost done.Speaker 7: Excellent! It's mixing all the, it's mixing eggs and starch, all the ingredients together to make pumpkin pie! Alright! And did you put them all together? Did you dump them in? Uh, yeah. What did we put in? We put in eggs and starch and all the ingredients. Yay! Yay! Did we also put in pumpkin? Yeah. Did we put in cloves?Speaker 8: Yeah. And nutmeg? Yeah. And cinnamon? Yeah. Excellent. Alright. Oh, you're ready. It's mixing. It's mixing. It's mixing. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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