Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

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The video explores whether 'love at first sight' truly exists, examining historical references and scientific studies. It touches on selective memory bias, medieval concepts of love, and modern research on oxytocin and dopamine. The hosts also discuss how physical attraction plays a vital role in these instant romantic connections, the role of cultural attractors, and how AI could predict romantic compatibility. The conversation digs into the biochemical pathways involved in love and lust, historical perspectives, and culminates with reflections on genetic predispositions and societal norms regarding relationships. [00:00:00]Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I've got a question for you. Do you believe in love at first sight?Simone Collins: I believe in lust at first sight.Malcolm Collins: Well, around 52 to 66 percent of people in the U. S. claim to have experienced love at first sight. However, this belief may be bolstered by a selective memory bias where individuals romanticize their initial encounters over time.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: However, what I would say is we have actually seen the concept of love at first sight discussed All the way back in history. We see it in Greek stories. Oh, so you see it in like Ovid metamorphosis, the story of Pygmalion depicts a sculptor falling in love with a statue he created at first light.Site or the greek myth of narcissus who falls in love with his own reflection Also embodies a form of instant love And they even had a mechanism of action for it in the medieval period where The eyes of the lady [00:01:00] when encountered by those of her future lover thus generated And conveyed , a bright light from her eyes to hisSimone Collins: laser.Malcolm Collins: So, yeah, no, they thought that, like, love was something that, like, woman generated inside of them and then, like, shot at men with their eyes. This is terrifying. This is just Captured his heart. But they might've been right about that. We'll get into in a little bit, but I want to hear, well, your lust at first sight comment is really astute when they look at the data.And we'll get into this in a second, but what they found is yes. It appears that there does. appear to be this emotional thing that people call love at first sight. But it only occurs to people you find physically attractive. People aren't falling in love at first sight with their chubby whatever husband, they are falling in love at first sight with people who are generically [00:02:00] attractive.And when people say they love someone at first sight who is not well, arousing to them or more generically attractive. They're typically lying in a supposed fact saying Or they wereSimone Collins: looking at their Bugatti instead. They just happened to be inside it.Malcolm Collins: Yes. One of my favorite is that medieval texts also would, would compare the gaze of a beautiful woman to the sight of a basilisk.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: You've got Medusa as well that turned men to stone with her beautiful gaze. Oh, they madeSimone Collins: them rock hard. Yes. This is whatMalcolm Collins: happens. Made them rock hard, right? Yeah. This is whatSimone Collins: really, there was just something was lost in translation and we thought, Oh, you mean they, they turned into a stone.They're like, nah, kind of. So one thing I will say that I think is interesting is that even now When I have our podcast on or something and I, I freeze it and. [00:03:00] I walk by our computer screen and I see your figure, but I don't realize it's our podcast. It's on the screen. I'm like, Oh, who's that? And then also when we're in airports and you and I are separate or you're out walking by yourself and I'm just gazing across a crowd.And I see you and I don't know it's you. I'm all like, who's this? Who's this? And I think that that's what people are describing as love at first sight is that you're just so much my type that even when I don't realize it's you, my body is just like, Yeah, weMalcolm Collins: definitely had that reaction when we first met where you're like, and I stillSimone Collins: have it.I still have it when I don't realize it to you. I have a different reaction when I know it's you because it's more like my person. But when I don't know, it's you. I definitely feel this like. Spark and I can totally understand what [00:04:00] these whatever medieval writers were talking about in terms of this, like, like lasers.So, but again, I, I, I think that's entirely physical lust. And not well, and I mean, it wouldMalcolm Collins: logically have to be so I'd also like to walk back here where people act like the concept of love at first sight is a romantic concept when really I see it as an anti romantic concept. Oh, yeah, because you don't know anything about the person yet.You don't know anything about them.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You would have to believe that In magic or the soul and that love is somehow capturing these systems Except we we understand love very well at like a psychological level. And it is not magic. It is not fairy dust uh Well, i'll read a quote here anthropologist Helen fisher who studied the brain activity of people madly in love with each other through mri scans says that romantic It says here through MRI scans, but it's wrong.[00:05:00]It must have been through fMRI scans. But anyway says that romantic love takes a very quote unquote primitive pathway through the brain. The good feelings we experience when falling in love is driven by dopamine, the brain chemical behind our motivation to find food, water, and everything else we need for survival, and also some oxytocin, which we'll get into in a second.It's just like the other survival mechanisms, like fear, for example, it can be triggered instantly. So, what we mean is, because we understand what love is, fundamentally, in the brain then the concept of, can it be triggered instantly, is just a concept of, Are some humans born abnormal? And yeah, of course, you know, even, even though we might be coded for like men to find women attractive and women to find men attractive, you're going to get some percentage of the population where that's not the case.It's the same with a system like love. It was coded to only form after long periods of time. time it's going to accidentally fire sometimes when like the lust system is supposed to be firing or something like that. Well, andSimone Collins: I think it's you're wrong to [00:06:00] use the word love when you say that yes, love at first sight exists because there are very different things that are happening hormonally between lust and love.And also Let's say you see someone and you feel that spark and you're very attracted to them, but then you discover that they were war criminal and they have a habit of torturing people and you know that you're probably not going to love them. You know that they may be hot, but they're really bad. I disagree.Do you know how many? Sorry, I should have. Okay. Okay. I need to use a better example for you. It turns out they're French. Okay. And then you're just like, Oh my God. Yeah. So nevermind. I'm just saying, The loving a person is very different. It involves knowing who they are, how they think. Although I will, I guess you have to add, there's this additional complication in Alexander cruel.I think I sent you a link to this on what's up today. And we should probably include it in the description has 1 page. He put together of just all of the studies that show what AI and [00:07:00] or researchers. Can infer from just an image of someone's face so you can infer anything from mental health problems to various genetic conditions to whether they are liberal or conservative to are they happy or depressed?And I guess against my own argument and judgment, I could argue that based on just someone's appearance alone. You could make a lot of inferences about them and perhaps know them better than the average person would like to suggest. Yeah, that might be aMalcolm Collins: big part of this, actually. And this is something, you know, obviously the progressives don't want to talk about, or the urban monoculture people don't want to talk about, because it's like, Oh, if you can tell something by somebody's face, what you're really looking at is genetic correlates there.And we build enough patterns to recognize, like, you can judge with a really high probability whether someone's conservative or progressive.Simone Collins: Even criminals look different. Like even on average, people who commit crimes, they're, they're, they're amalgamated faces look [00:08:00] quite different. AIMalcolm Collins: is going to get really good at making these sorts of judgments, which I I'm very interested to see if we can work this into the criminal system or hiring systems and stuff like that.Cause I imagine that facial judgments made by AIs are probably going to be more accurate to personality than these big, long, like, Surveys that people fill out for like, ifSimone Collins: already AI is 60 to 70 percent accurate and judging things ranging from mental health conditions to political affiliation, it's going to only get worse.And you're right, but I think most people, when they discover this are not going to say, oh, how great that is. They're going to say, oh, my gosh, this is, this is minority report. We're going to be arrested just because our face implies that we're going to become an ax murderer. That's not well,Malcolm Collins: we can do a little minority report, but you know, actually, I wasSimone Collins: just looking at another study actually that was looking at sex crimes and it found that there was a really high genetic correlate.In other words, if if your brother commits a [00:09:00] sex crime. You are much more likely like your odds of also committing one of those crimes is as much higher. And the researchers who looked into this were arguing that, you know, this is a strong basis for perhaps engaging in preventative interventions related to siblings of people who are convicted of these crimes.Because if you do that preemptively, You could probably keepMalcolm Collins: in mind. I mean, for the blank Slater's who are like, Oh, keep the baby when you're great. I'm not in favor of that.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: I think not abortion in the attachment to the kid because they raised the kid, but I'm just saying, like, there are.Externalities involved here for other people that you might not be thinking about because you'reSimone Collins: choosing to also pass on the behavioral traits of a criminal who committed who committed a crime creating that human who is innocent and guilty. I mean complicated.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I will [00:10:00] also say here before we go further into the science to go over our theory of love, which we talked about in either the pragmatist guided relationships or the pragmatist guided sexuality which would actually preclude love at first sight.So when I was looking at the concept of love, my general assumption is that love probably first evolved in mammals. And in the book, we go over a lot of evidence for this to keep us from competing, whiz, killing, eating our offspring. It was something that we needed to be able to develop so that we, you know, when we looked at an offspring where we're like, Oh yes, bonded with this.I am going to I love this thing. Yeah. And we always say evolution is a cheap programmer. So evolution will pick up an emotional state that was created within one scenario to use in a different scenario, but it becomes highly useful. Love is very different from lust. Yeah. In that it is longer term, it leads to caring for the thing, not just wanting to pay more attention to it, and it [00:11:00] leads to admiration and veneration for the thing.And all of these are very useful in the way you treat a spouse if we were beginning to develop as a monogamous species. As such, the love system needed to learn to trigger for spouses. Here's the problem. We don't have anything that is unique to a spouse. In terms of our daily interactions. Like, is it the person you interact with the most?Is it the person you admire the most? Is it the person you, you know, there's just not a really, so, okay. What collection of things did it begin to collect as this is a spouse? So I will generate love emotions for them. And. It's a bit like if I'm going to word it this way, the way we can determine what the love system is measuring is by looking at when the love system breaks.So when do we experience love when we shouldn't be experiencing [00:12:00] love? And it's a bit like was Indiana Jones. It's like, okay, this. Stone is triggered by weight, so yes, it could be triggered by a golden idol, a spouse, but it could also be, you know, triggered by a bag of sand.Simone Collins: And if you get itMalcolm Collins: wrong, you know, then the ball starts rolling, right?You know, so you gotta say, okay. What is, what is the actual mechanism of action here? And when I look at when I've experienced love, other than interacting with a partner or child, it is when thinking about or meditating on really big, expansive concepts examples here would be. The vastness of the universe and how small I am in relation to it.Or the ways that various like really complicated sciences interact with each other, like the vastness of how like neurons actually work and the brain actually works and everything like that, or. When I think about my relation to [00:13:00] something like a deity that does a very good job of that, but specifically when I am thinking about incomprehensible aspects of the deity from my own perspective, it could be things that are designed to be incomprehensible, like the trinity or a cone by the way, a cone is one of those things in Buddhist philosophy where they're like a tree fell in the woods, but then when they're, P O A N.Simone Collins: Right? Not. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And you're like, well, I mean, it created a reverberation, whether anyone picked that up with their auditory, they slapped you. They're like, that's not what it means. And it's like, well, I mean, then you're just like gaslighting me. Like you're trying to show me that you are, are, are superior to me.When really you asked a fairly simple question. Do you mean, did it create a vibration or was there anyone there to hear the vibration? That we interpret as sound. And because you are from a simple backwards culture, you don't think of it that way. You think of it as, as some intractable question, which maintains this hierarchy.I am not a fan of cones. I think that they are a form of [00:14:00] abuse and within any other world, we would call them gaslighting. But anyway I'm sorry, it's just a horror meant to systemically disempower people from asking questions or trusting their own judgment. But let's not get into that. They do, they do create this love emotion.And so when I look at that, I'm like, okay, so then what's really creating the love emotion? I think it isanything that you think about frequently. So it's not looking at how often you interact with a person. It seems to be measuring how much you are thinking about a person or a concept. The second thing is, The vastness of that concept, like how deep is your thought about this concept, right? And this can be triggered with something that is arbitrarily incomprehensible to a human mind, like the Trinity or it can be something that is genuinely complex and deep, like the vastness of reality.And then it looks at, do you find this thing to be comforting and safe? And if you hit all of those things, you're going to experience this love output. And I [00:15:00] think that these things aren't experienced in this love at first sight, which is really, I think, a lust output for most people, except people was like, really like broken systems.But let's go into the research on this so we can see what's actually here. But do you have any thoughts before I go further?Simone Collins: You had said to me just the other day that you weren't sure if you ever really felt the feeling of love or that you, you said that you don't really know what love feels like.And I kind of agree with you on that. So that's where I, I can generateMalcolm Collins: a feeling that appears to be the feeling that other people are calling love by meditating on complex topics. AndSimone Collins: like that doesn't resonate for, I mean, but also I don't know if this is an autistic thing. Like maybe I can't figure it out.RememberMalcolm Collins: my mom said that autistic people can't love. Yeah, there's like a wife who truly loves you because she's autistic.Simone Collins: Yeah, she's so great. I love her so much. I miss her. I,Malcolm Collins: I honestly, I prefer a wife who is infatuated with me than one who loves [00:16:00] me. That is, that is.Simone Collins: Yeah, but I mean, so there's this, I hope you can find this clip.There's this famous clip with. I've told you about it when Prince Charles and Princess Diana were engaged and a journalist asks Diana and Charles, are you in love? And Diana says something like, yes. And he's like, whatever that means, obviously the worst thing to ever say. And that has come back to bite him a billion times, but I don't disagree, right?Like what even is love?Speaker: I suppose in love. Of course. Whatever in love means.Simone Collins: Like, what are you asking me? What is this? And. It's such a kludgy thing. And another point that we make in the pragmatist guide to relationships is that Love is not useful to anyone. Abusive people love their partners. That doesn't help them. You know, creeps stalkers, murderers often love [00:17:00] their victims a lot.So much that they just want to eat their faces, you know. Just like, love is not useful to the recipient. And there is a correlation to your point about evolution being a cheap programmer and perhaps it hijacking the love of a parent that's very, you know, hormonal for, you know, the love of a child.And there are many correlates that are also then, I think, highly associated with last year, there's oxytocin and there's dopamine and there's serotonin, you know, all these things kind of factor in. And there, so there's like the hormonal elements of love and lust, which are all kind of. You know, they're, they're correlated, but they're not directly together.And then there's these more complex concepts that you describe, like when you're thinking about the complexity of the universe or God or cones, and then there's this whole, like, you know, your mind gets just kind of fuzzed up and you're like, I don't know, love. So,Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, I suspect that that love is like, if we're describing it in like a neurochemical sense, yes.A combination of dopamine [00:18:00] and oxytocin release that forces a bond with another individual. And I say this because we know, remember I said, I think that it originally evolved for our children, post childbirth women, for example, are flooded with oxytocin, hugeSimone Collins: surge. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But you also experience it.Women get a higher dose of oxytocin if they haven't slept with as many men and they sleep with a man, which causes a bonding.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Where we talk about and the studies on this have all been like scraped from the internet. It's really weird because it used to be, I could find it. And like I went back and tried to Google it and I couldn't find it.But women who have had sex with lots of partners reduce, release less oxytocin every time they have sex. I'm like, that makes perfect sense because that would mean in an ancestral sense, they were probably a. slave, basically. And that, that if you were in a monogamous situation, ancestrally, yeah, it would make sense to fall in love with the first person you're having sex with.So, you know, of course the systems would function this way. But I, you know, we see a lot of, okay, you're getting this oxytocin release. It causes you to bond to a person. Here's my question for you. You're like, I don't know if I've ever experienced love. [00:19:00] Well, what's the emotion that bonds you to the kids?Like they haven't like, okay, little, Indie there, right? She hasn't said anything, done anything, and yet you feel a fondness for her that is undeniable. I mean, I watch the way you set her on the table when you're working and everything like that and get so excited when she's being cute. What is that emotion that you're feeling?That is the love emotion.Simone Collins: I mean, I, I, I feel that feeling when I look at Rain on glass, you know, when it, when it hits a window, I feel that feeling when I see autumn leaves shimmering in the sun, like, is that, that, that it's, it's not, I don't think calling that love is, is accurate,Malcolm Collins: right? No. Okay. What you are describing here is, and I think that this is a component of love is you were describing a set of environmental stimuli that CorrelatesSimone Collins: with the feeling of bliss and contentment.Malcolm Collins: That correlate with the feeling of bliss and [00:20:00] contentment, which you feel when looking at infants that are yours. So then my question to you is, do you ever feel that feeling of bliss and contentment when looking at, say, me? Yeah, so that's especiallySimone Collins: when you oh my god when you eat and I hear the sound of like you chewing or something.I just likeMalcolm Collins: Other women are so likemy husband likes Maxine's food. You're like, I love listening to him munch Yes, makes me so happy. Oh god.Simone Collins: Okay for you Yeah, I I don't know. So then is is love Oh, this person or thing correlates with a feeling of contentment and bliss for me. Like that also just seems so shallow.Malcolm Collins: And because most humans do not correlate with that for you. You don't look at most human bodies and get a feeling of blissfulness and content. You wouldn't feel that way. If a stranger at a restaurant was eating and you overheard them, you'd [00:21:00] probably be like, ew, gross.Simone Collins: Yeah, but if, if that, if that. If other things like rain on, on glass or the pitter patter of rain on a roof, you know, can, can trigger that.Like how does love for a human, how would love for a human be special? You know,Malcolm Collins: what do you, what do you, what do you mean? I mean, there are other things,Simone Collins: there are other elements in life that are non organic that can also trigger in a human. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So what you're saying is it activates the bliss and content system and not the lust system.It's a completely different category of, of thing that isSimone Collins: elevatingMalcolm Collins: and that's actually interesting that you are looking at an attractive man and instead of feeling a lust, you are feeling blissful contentment which is clear that you were meant to feel for children.Simone Collins: No, that's, yeah. So that's true because we were talking about that going, when I see you in an airport, I don't realize it's you.And then there's the separate like, [00:22:00] but I feel when I. Are you eatingMalcolm Collins: food? So I love the description of it going.Yeah. So that's the difference here.Simone Collins: Lust versus love. Okay.Malcolm Collins: But, but let's go further. You know, in the first few months of a relationship, your serotonin level dropped, causing cortisol, the stress hormone, to flood your body. This is why your heart beats faster and your pupils dilate, and maybe you start feeling quote unquote butterflies in your stomach.Lower serotonin levels might also be why you are suddenly obsessed over the new person, unable to think about anything other than them. So it is a rise in cortisol and a drop in serotonin. Your body odor may play a role. part in how attractive you are to someone. Some studies have shown that during ovulation phase of the cycle, women may be more attracted to musk like pheromones that men excrete.By the way, I don't know if you've seen this study, but there was a study where people like wore dirty t shirts and then put them in a pile and men could pick out the shirts of women who are ovulating and women could pick out the shirts of attractive men. I [00:23:00] haven't gotten a 1995 sweaty t shirt study.Where it, it showed that women sniff t shirts that had been worn by men. No cologne, no deodorant, all natural. Results showed that they preferred the odor of men with major histone compatibility complex MHC genes that were different from their own. This would produce offspring with a stronger immune system.Oh yeah. Okay. I've heard of this. The general like fitness and stuff. Another interesting thing is a 2019 study found that when women were in love with someone, their immune system was bolstered. Now this is the study I found most interesting.One study found that 60 people who had never met before and found that prolonged eye contact between two people increased the romantic attraction they felt for each other. Blood pressure skyrocketed and the participants wanted to be paired with the same people again in the future. They wanted to know more about the other person.These effects were even stronger when people allowed quote unquote mutual touch despite the fancy wording that meant holding hands. And we know that holding hands causes oxytocin [00:24:00] release. We know that long eye contact causes oxytocin release. I think that yeah, that's, that's what we're seeing here.That's really interesting to meOne of my favorite studies on this was done by Arthur something or another and it showed that you could basically force people to fall in love. We had this idea of I like sit two people down and they look into each other's eyes and they ask a series of questions of each other that they'll fall in love and people who were in the study as random participants even ended up getting married.That is how good it did at creating this emotion, which is to say that love systems can be hacked. And this is one of the things that really scared me away from like the early effective altruism community and early singularity community is they would do a lot of these sorts of events where you'd like sit down and stare someone in the eyes.And I'm like, this is what cults do to brainwash people. It's also what touchy feely did at Stanford, which is a hijacks the love system.Here's the final bit here that I found really interesting. First and foremost, they found that love at first sight didn't exist without a strong physical attraction.Looks did matter. Also probably [00:25:00] unsurprisingly, people in long term relationships scored higher on quote unquote love tests than people who had met for the first time, but reported love at first sight. So. Yeah, it doesn't appear that's that easy to accidentally motivate the love system, but what are your thoughts and think about them and I'm gonna get aDon't think about them too much. You are a woman. I'm gonna have to put the womenSpeaker: An ordinary dinner party, the sort of occasion we all enjoy. The men are exchanging witty stories, and look at the women, aren't they pretty? But now the conversation turns to more serious matters.Speaker 2: I wonder if the government should return to the gold standard. I think it should. Good, then we're allSpeaker: agreed. But oh dear, what's this? One of the women is about to embarrass us all.Speaker 3: I think the government should stay off the gold standard so that the pound can reach a level that will keep our exports competitive.Speaker: The lady has foolishly attempted to join the conversation with a wild and dangerous opinion of her own. What [00:26:00] heartbreak drivel. See how the men look at her with utter contempt.Women, know your limits.Malcolm Collins: The importantSimone Collins: thing is To I think understand the underpinnings and mechanics of love as well as one possibly can. Same goes for sex so that you don't pedestalize it to your detriment and trying to find a well matched partner.Speaker: Look at the effect of education on a man and a woman's mind. Education passes into the mind of a man. See how the information is evenly and tidily stored. Now see the same thing on a woman. At first we see a similar result. But now look. Still at a reasonably low level of education, her brain suddenly overloads.She cannot take in complicated information.Simone Collins: And that's, I think one of the bigger problems. This is certainly not the heart of problems for forming relationships these days. There are so many other big factors that are a like the fact that [00:27:00] women want higher status men than them. But most middle class women are going to struggle to find men who can thrive more in a middle class, like bureaucratic job system than they do.So they can't find partners and people are all waiting to have to get married until after they're completely set up with their lives. Whereas they really should be getting married as they begin building their lives. So they're obviously bigger fish to fry in the relationship world. It is nevertheless, a big problem that we still see.And even people who understand that they need to get married early, and even people who understand all of the weird asymmetries that need to be in place to make a relationship work, they still pedestalize love and sex in a way that is incredibly stupid. And they're like, well, I have to feel this spark and I have to feel this.Oh,Malcolm Collins: absolutely. And, and, you know, you see this with arranged marriages, right? I'm like people like, well, shouldn't I have like the chemistry as a person? Like, no, it doesn't really matter. And, and arranged marriages after 10 years of marriage, people have the same love [00:28:00] rates. As people in, with chosen partners, but here's the thing that's not accounted for.Arranged marriages have a dramatically lower divorce rate than non arranged marriages. So it means when you account for survivorship bias, you are actually more likely to be in love with someone in 10 years if they are chosen by people who know you well without you having much input. Then you are, if you choose someone who you already love in the moment, which just shows what a bad compass love is.And I think we see this in the history of love. Remember all those early stories of love? Love was always seen negatively. Especially love at first sight was seen negatively in a historic context. This was understood to be a negative thing, a form of madness, depending on what culture you're looking at.Simone Collins: Like,Malcolm Collins: In, in, in some cultures it was just seen as like an intrinsically immoral thing, no different from lust. And I think that that's really the healthiest way to look at it.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and, or it was, it was supposed to be something that was uncoupled from your marriage. So if [00:29:00] you, if you wanted to pursue love, it would be in the form of a dalliance or it would be in the form of a mistress.It wouldn't be in the form of Marrying someone, it can even be some kind of platonic like Dante and Beatrix. Sorry, not Beatrix, Beatrice like Dante and Beatrice in the divine comedy. So there were all sorts of forms of love that were very passionate, but when they worked out, they weren't done within the capacity of.Attempting to marry and trying to make that work was deadly like in Romeo and Juliet. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you're killing your kids by not arranged marriage by letting them just marry whoever they want like like like animals like What is this you you that's that's not the way this works No, I I really appreciate what you're saying there and I think it's a very important concept to elevate and I think that Really the only culture that [00:30:00] I'm aware of in a historical context that elevated the idea that you should marry the people you love.This comes down to Western culture but it's not a historic component of Western culture. It certainly wasn't around in the Roman Empire. It was something that came downstream of and for people who are wondering how things worked in Rome, you had strict monogamy in Rome, i. e. you only had one real wife, but you would hook up with other people, right?You know, and here I could, I can put the clip of Octavian reprimanding Marcus. , for sleeping with people who weren't, weren't his wife.Speaker 9: Remember, colleague, you are talking to my wife. Your wife in name only. Still mother that performs the wifely function, is it not? Well, Octavia does the same for my good friend Agrippa. That's very convenient for all involved. DOSpeaker 10: you deny it? So What? What if it is true, eh? What are you going to do about it?Speaker 9: I shall have this sad story told in the forum. I will have it posted in every city in [00:31:00] Italy. And you know the people are not so liberal with their wives as you are.They will say you wear cuckold's horns. They will say your wife betrayed you with a low born pleb on my staff. You will be a figure of fun. The proles will laugh at you in the street. Your soldiers will mock you behind your back.Malcolm Collins: But it, it, it came through the courtly love culture that was largely created by people who don't know, like they hear courtly love and they think courtesans were writing these books.Courtesans were not writing the book. You'reSimone Collins: using the wrong word. Courtiers? Maybe you're Courtiers,Malcolm Collins: whatever. Not, yeah, sorry. Courtiers. Court People in the royal court. It wasn't written by people in the royal court. They were predominantly written by monks. Or as we might call them today, nerdy incels.They were writing their version of sexual fantasy comic books. There begin to become a, a, a culture of this. And this [00:32:00] is, this is what was being made fun of in stuff like Don Quixote, right? They were like, these, these, these people are ridiculous idiots. Like, this isn't the way any of this would ever actually play out.You know, they're living these fantasy lives in order to, well, fulfill their own fantasies. You know, that's, that's the way this stuff works. And as a result of that It goes on, it goes on, it goes on. Still these incel monks are writing this, but they end up creating some genuinely amazing literature eventually.Think of it a bit like fanfiction communities. Yeah, I mean, fanfiction is like raunchy and smutty, but eventually some of it's really good. There, there's some good fanfiction out there that I think is better than some of the best books I've read.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And as a result, when people were creating the early literary canon in the West, they relied on the tropes from these, well, basically infel comic books.And that had the problem of creating early [00:33:00] Disney. I think is where a lot of this enteredSimone Collins: the mainstream.Malcolm Collins: Is the idea of love at first sight and needing to love someone to marry them. I think was largely disseminated in modern Western culture into the mainstream by Disney and normalized by Disney.And I think that that is where the rock comes from. So it's interesting that Disney rotting our culture isn't a new thing. It's, it's, it's, it's been happening since its inception in its borrowing themes from the quarterly love culture. That weren't necessarily common in American culture before this.Simone Collins: This isn't to say that I don't think you should be. well matched with your partner. I think that what you saw, for example, in Puritan and even Quaker early colonial communities, where there were times when youth could get to know each other and, you know, they would choose to marry and they could choose to not marry.And they, I loveMalcolm Collins: the Puritan thing of like being in [00:34:00] the bed was the person and they would tie you up in a sack.Simone Collins: Yeah, or there was, you could be in the company of a bunch of chaperones, essentially, but they would give you a tube or a hollowed out log to talk between so you could talk privately. We should, we should,Malcolm Collins: They actually have a scene where that's done in the Patriots. TheySimone Collins: do, and they joke about how they would. IMalcolm Collins: hope you tie the knots better than my father did or something like that.Simone Collins: Yeah.But I, so yeah, I think you should be really stoked to marry whoever it is that you marry, but you should be looking at it as a lifelong business partner and not.A lifelong yeah, like a lifelong entertainer, a lifelong professional friend or entourage member, or quite honestly, mother or a father. That'sMalcolm Collins: actually such a good point. And, and, and a watcher of the podcast once asked me they were thinking about bringing an additional person into their relationship and they were like, okay, you know, this is somebody who I find attractive.My partner finds [00:35:00] attractive. Should we bring them into the relationship? And I was like, well, I mean, the first thing you want to ask is how efficient are they, how much how good are they at work? And I think that this is the thing they were thinking. Like, I like being around this person because I like having sex with them.I like spending time with them. And what they weren't thinking was is this somebody I would want to start a business with? And that should be the first thing that you think and vet when you're choosing someone to marry or spend your life with or have kids with.Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and there's this whole trope on social media of what do they call them?Like single, single married women who just feel like their entire lives. Is taking care of their husbands. They're just doing their laundry. Like that, just their husbands kind of just married someone that they expected to do the same thing that a mother would do for a child. And that's lame. And then there's all these women who just want sugar daddies.Like they just want a new daddy. Who's going to spoil them and pay for everything and buy them things and send them on vacations. And they just sit around and do nothing and [00:36:00] expect to be pampered. And that's equally toxic. Perhaps even a little more disgusting because I don't know. I just really hate that.I find it gross. So. You know, both of those are really bad. So yeah, but what you're looking for again is a business partner and anything else should be seen as purely recreational on your own time with your discretionary income and nothing else,Malcolm Collins: Your discretionary income. I don't know. I think you know, Like if I was, was, was going to hook up with someone other than you and I use my discretionary income on that, that would be quite a violation of our marriage.Simone Collins: No, it wouldn't. Our discretionary income. That's, that's your money that you get to spend on whatever you want.Malcolm Collins: Well, let's thank God. Neither of us have any particular makes it, it makes it very easy. That was the, the, the unfortunate thing on the, are we monogamous episode that we did ages ago where like, the core thing is like.You have rules against sleeping with other people. I don't. I just don't see a reason to like, it's so much effort. It's so much effort. This, [00:37:00] this fantasy of, Oh, I'm going to sleep with all of these people. It's like, yeah, but what you're not thinking about is the work and the risk and the grossness and the, like, why would you?It's so much effort and ickiness and it just makes life harder. Like I don't, I get the desire, but like, if it slows down the speed at which you actually marry someone and start having kids, like what's the point of all that, right? Like,Simone Collins: or if it puts an existing marriage at risk, which is, I'm even in poly relationships, there's just always this very real risk that.Yes, it goes fine until it doesn't. It goes fine until something falls apart and that that's difficult. So,Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah, no, I hear that. And well, and this is because systems that may have been designed for a monogamous relationship end up firing in the wrong way, you know, they're like, Oh, [00:38:00] now, now this person is attached.And keep in mind, even historically, when you had a societies that practice a polygyny where they had multiple wives. There was genetic competition between the wives. I mean, the wives not only wanted to have the maximum number of kids of the wives in, in a marriage but they wanted the kids to get more resources than the other wives, kids like that was the goal from a genetic standpoint here, I'm, I'm saying and that this was ever harmonious, I think is a, a fantasy.There's just a strong incentive where actually women within cultures that are intergenerationally polygynous, i. e. having multiple wives, would likely be, I'd say, more spiteful and cunning towards other women than women in cultures that aren't polygynous. Because they would have been genetically rewarded for that intergenerationally speaking,Simone Collins: MuchMalcolm Collins: more than women in cultures who aren't polygynous, like monogamous cultures, where women generally get, get [00:39:00] genetically rewarded for cooperating.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: An interesting point I hadn't considered before. I'd love to look at the data on that to see if there's data supporting that hypothesis.Simone Collins: Yeah. TheMalcolm Collins: women from societies like in Muslim societies are women more backstabby than in two other women. I mean, than in you know, like Christian societies, like, is that a thing?I don't know.Simone Collins: The research I've seen of women being backstabby are in Western societies and there's no positive backstabbing. What IMalcolm Collins: say is women are backstabby in Western societies. Yes. Like very well studied. Two other women, I mean, like women are very intersexually competitive in a way that men are not.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like the famous research that found that. If, if a woman was more attractive than her hairstylist, the hairstyle was more likely to, for example, cut her hair a little shorter than she asked.Malcolm Collins: I like the study that was looking at bosses and like almost no woman in the study preferred a female [00:40:00] boss to a male boss.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Like this idea that like women are better off cause we're promoting where women is not true. Women are much worse off for itSimone Collins: onMalcolm Collins: the whole.Simone Collins: Unfortunate.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it is unfortunate. It would be great if we could genetically modify this trait out of women, which maybe we'll be able to do soon.It's calledSimone Collins: autism, Malcolm. That's why.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's called autism. Just give all of my femaleSimone Collins: friends are a little more, a little more autistic than your average there. That'sMalcolm Collins: true though. You have so many autistic female friendsSimone Collins: and you think the increase in mental health diagnosis is a bad thing.Malcolm Collins: Hmm.Simone Collins: I don't know.Malcolm Collins: Anyway I love you to death Simone, you're quite a special woman and I'm really, really lucky to be married to you. And I actually wonder because you said you'd never found anyone attractive before me. What was the like emotion you felt when you first saw me? Is it not something you had felt before?Was it something you had felt at differentSimone Collins: levels? No, I mean, I, I found people attractive before. [00:41:00] I just. Like, there was never this, this combination of like being attracted to someone and then also finding them like to be such as a person, an attractive person as well, like both physically and everything else attractive.But no, I mean, I certainly found other people attractive before. Okay. You just happened to be veryMalcolm Collins: much my type. So it was the first time that you had both found somebody attractive and really like jived with them at like, I guess a cultural level. And then again, culturally we're very similar. People often joke that we're twins.Apparently we're called the Cromwell twins and in fundie circles, which I'm okay with.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too. Oh, am I not making you dinner tonight?Malcolm Collins: No, I didn't end up going out. I didn't have time. I had too much to do. What would you like? Grilled cheese with tomato soup. Would you like? Oh my God. Yes. Yes. Okay. Do we have anymeat left bythe way, song, [00:42:00] orSimone Collins: I can take more out.Do you want something with me? No, I can do more of the slow cookerMalcolm Collins: cheese and tomato soup.Simone Collins: Oh, okay. So that's okay.Malcolm Collins: You don't want to have a, yeah, no, two girls. She has thoseSimone Collins: kebabs. I can make you an addition to the girl cheese. You're going to two kebabs, like from trader one kebab, one kebab, a bowl of grilled, sorry, a bowl of tomato soup and a girl cheese sandwich.Two girl cheeses, two girl cheeses. Consider it done, sir.Malcolm Collins: I love you, my beautiful, beautiful wife. I love too. You are so Cutty, kitty, kitty, kitty, and I'm just so lucky to be married to you. . What?Simone Collins: We're intolerable. I, I hate people who are in love, you know, they're, they're gross. And I, I feel bad inflicting ourselves upon other people.Yeah, I do. I hateMalcolm Collins: people who are in love too, and I'm, yeah. One of the interesting things about love is a desire to signal it publicly and loudly, which of course makes it, but no one wants toSimone Collins: see it. No one wants to see that. It's like.Malcolm Collins: Well, right, [00:43:00] because I'm basically saying, okay, this mate is mine, just so everyone knows, like, competition will ensue if you try to compete.I thinkSimone Collins: it's more like screaming. You know, when you scream, it doesn't hurt, but when someone else screams, it hurts.Malcolm Collins: Is, is people will say in, in like high school, in my high school, I mean, maybe people have matured out of this because they've gotten better at like how bad this looks, but early on when they'd be dating, Oh, I love X person.I love X person. We're so in love, love, love. Why are you so perfect? They just needed to shout it to the stars. And I think like shouting it from the roof, which is a sentiment you hear historically is one of the biological reactions to the love emotion.Simone Collins: Yeah, but I do think it's interesting that this whole and then they, they got, they married and they lived happily ever after.And there just aren't really, you don't see a whole lot of media in which people really love each other. And if you do, it's that they love each other, but for some reason they're kept apart because I think there's something about people who love each other and are successfully just in love and not having [00:44:00] problems.People just hate it. It's just intolerable, like nails on a chalkboard. I don't want to watch it. NoMalcolm Collins: famous influencers who like actually care about each other and love each other.Simone Collins: Well, yeah. Where they have to like make up drama or something. Yeah. Maybe because people just don't want to see it. It's gross.It's terrible. And so they have to make something either. They have to make up something wrong about them. And make up separate drama about how they're evil and not really what they say they are. Well, you're the puppetMalcolm Collins: master. That's what I've heard. Yeah. You control me. I've seen other people comment on us and they say that I am this dull, witless puppet of a man who's being controlled by the cruel puppet master Simone, who seduced someone out of her league is what they said.You, you saw this video.Simone Collins: Well, you are out of my league. I, and I guess technically I seduced you through my work ethic. And you discovered that you couldn't do better than me in terms of. You know, sheer, I, I, I basically left you with no choice. Yeah. This was not something where you really [00:45:00] had a lot of choice in the matter because I, well, how did I not have choice in the matter?Yeah. IMalcolm Collins: mean, yeah, I guess I didn't have choice because Yeah, you didn't have a choice. Nobody seduce you.Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I, I, so I did seduce you, but with work ethic. 'cause I'm obviously way below your league. So from a, an aesthetic perspective, just fortunately. You are not as sensitive to aesthetics as other men are.You're like Mormon polygamist men, you know. I don't think that's true. Well,Malcolm Collins: okay, so you got to do the Mormon polygamist quote here. Can you pull it up?Simone Collins: Yeah. Mark Twain. Went when he was young to Salt Lake City at the time. I think when Brigham Young was still alive. He was vehemently against this concept of polygamy and he had a change of heart.And here's what he wrote up after his experience in Salt Lake City. He writes, quote, I had the will to do it. With the gushing self sufficiency of youth, I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve great reform here. Until I saw the Mormon woman, then I was [00:46:00] touched. My heart was wiser than my head.It warms toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically homely creatures. And as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, No, the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity, which entitles To the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure.And the man that marries 60 of them has done a deed of open handed generosity. So sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.Malcolm Collins: I love this. So this is so, but I did notice something because you were actually talking about this where I was talking to one of our Mormon fans and we were going over pictures because, you know, we were trying to identify traits, you know, that are common in the people who are having kids who aren't having kids, etc.And at one point it was like, oh, you know, the hot one. Right. And I realized that his [00:47:00] perception of which of the hot one I go, Oh, you mean this one? And he goes, no, the hot one is this one. And I realized that, and I think you actually see this like genetically was in subpopulations. What? Is considered attractive can be radically different than what another group considers attractive.And this is why people often naturally end up going for their own cultural group. So for like somebody like Simone and I, people are like, you guys look like twins or siblings or something like that. It's like, yeah, she's part of my esoteric cultural group. Like of course I would have found her more attractive than competing people, especially at the arbitrage level.I either degree to which I value her type of attraction. is much higher than, for example, a random Mormon man would have valued her iteration of attractiveness. And the degree to which I would value, you know, the average Mormon woman would be much lower than the degree to which a Mormon man would value a Mormon woman.And I think between cultures, sometimes it's differentiates a bit more. [00:48:00] Like I, I, I notice that I think what I find attractive overlaps with. Maybe surprisingly to the audience what Catholics find attractive. Like, I find often whatever the Irish are selecting foreign girls very attractive.When I was younger, I, I loved Irish girls. So maybe, or yeah, this is another thing where I noticed where different communities have different things that they find attractive. And I don't know if I can like build a whole video on this, but it's something I mentioned in an episode that hasn't gone live yet.So for example, with me, the women who I pursued in disproportionately had relationships with when contrasted with their percent of the population, heavily Jewish, first of all, I'd say a good 40 percent of the women I've ever dated have been Jewish. In, in ancestry, at least Irish. I found Irish women disproportionately attractive.Outside of that, like freckles and stuff like that, like that's my thing. But again, our kids, we've [00:49:00] got like redhead and freckles. So clearly, like we're still in this tradition. So my ancestors must have felt that way too. And your ancestors must have felt that way too. The one category that I've always found surprising is the group that disproportionately pursued me the most.Was Romani women or gypsy women like really people of that descent group up here to find whatever I'm bringing to the table like disproportionately attractive. And I remember Simone was like, well, there's almost none of them. And I'm like, and that's why it's weird that I have hooked up with so many of them.I don't know what it is. It might be a cultural thing or it could be a genetic thing. I really don't know within these different groups that leads to these cultural pairings. Any thoughts.Simone Collins: No, no. I mean, I just think they're, they're probably more likely to be broadly. You know, genetically close ish to you. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of travelers in the UK, tons and tons, and you were super UK, so I don't know. Yeah, but I don't findMalcolm Collins: Scottish women attractive.Simone Collins: In modernMalcolm Collins: Scottish women, [00:50:00] but yeah.Modern Scottish women look like dysgenic selection. When, but keepSimone Collins: in mind, like a lot of the most you could argue like bit adventurous entrepreneurial, you know, capable of getting out of really dire situations. Ancestors moved to, you know, it's hate. So they're here. You wouldn't necessarily realizeMalcolm Collins: that's also true.So you, you, you are partially Scottish descent as well. So yeah, I guess I do like Scottish women, just the ones who immigrated. It's the same with Irish women. I like the ones who, who, emigrated, e emigrated, i. e. left I don't know, I don't remember walking around Ireland and thinking people were uniquely attractive.It was more I lived for a long time in Massachusetts and the, maybe that disproportionately colored how many Irish girls I was encountering. For people who don't know, that's for the large Irish population settled.Simone Collins: Well, I've got to go make dinner because I've got that campaign tonight and I want to make dinner and shower the kids.So you have it fairly easy tonight after I leave. So [00:51:00] let's get her done. I love you too. And I'll start your sandwiches, your Sammies. Love you, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: She makes the best grilled cheeses.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): To anyone who's like Malcolm, your voice has been shot in terms of recent episodes, you are feeling horribly sick or something. No. , this past week Simone and I were on vacation. So everything you thought this past week was like really prerecorded. And I was just adding those bits and final editing. , because we were at Heredic on, , where we were giving a speech. , which is such a cool experience, but every night there, they would have these parties up until like two or 3:00 AM. And, you know, Two things about me.One, I am not the type of person who knows how to party or go to parties or nightclubs or whatever, but I'm also not the type of person who would ever turn down an opportunity to network. If it could be used to help the larger cause that we're working on. And the people at these events are so high value.I couldn't turn it down. So I just had to stay up like yelling, to talk to people at nightclubs at like one or 2:00 AM. And I do not know how the rest of the world handles this. [00:52:00] But fortunately, we were able to make it back in time to take our kids out trick or treating and hear the video of my. You know, very obviously. What's the appropriate word here.Neurally diverse children. , sorting their trick or treat candy. I love these kids so much with one of them. , wanting to watch us eat his candy or tried parts of it, but him not wanting to eat it himself. It is so sweet.Speaker 14: DoSpeaker 15: you want to try it? Here, do you want me to open it for you?Try it.Speaker 14: Okay,Speaker 15: well I'll see if I can find it. I think I know where thatSpeaker 14: is.Speaker 15: Here, do you want to eat it? It's very yummy.Speaker 14: Hm. What? I follow you. Try it.Speaker 15: I'll try it, babe. I try it. You have to promise to eat the rest, okay? Mm. I can. Here. I don't wanna, this whole thing is been here. Daddy, try it. I tried to buy it and now he won't eat it.And then [00:53:00] I tried this. And now he won't eat it.Speaker 16: Toasty, eat your candy! No!Speaker 14: EatSpeaker 16: your candy!Speaker 14: I can't!Speaker 16: Eat your candy! I don't want to! But it's candy, Toasty! ButSpeaker 14: I want to eat food!Speaker 16: Candy's a type of food. Try a bite.Speaker 14: Um, hey!Speaker 17: Toasty, what do you want to eat? I'veSpeaker 14: been, I've been,Speaker 17: I've been stopping toSpeaker 14: eat this, and this one.Yeah, butSpeaker 17: are you going to eat it?Speaker 14: No.Speaker 17: You wanted a flat chocolate, Octavian, youSpeaker 14: said? Uh. CanSpeaker 17: you help me openSpeaker 14: this? Help me openSpeaker 17: this. But Toasty, you don't even want to eat it.Speaker 15: I think you'll like this, Octavian.Speaker 17: Why do you want to open it if you don't want to eat it?Speaker 14: It's got a chocolate bar so you can't. Do you see it?Let me open this by myself. LetSpeaker 15: me see, what is it? Do you know what that is? That's gum.Speaker 14: Gum? Do you want toSpeaker 15: eatSpeaker 14: it? Um, no thanks. I want to eat gum! [00:54:00] You want to eat gum! I can't! I want gum! I want gum! Where's theSpeaker 15: gum? This is the strangest Halloween I've ever seen. This is his first year doing a real Halloween.Speaker 14: I can't! I want gum! See, I like themSpeaker 17: on the top.Speaker 14: I like stuffSpeaker 15: in there. Let meSpeaker 14: open it.Speaker 15: Okay, here, do you want meSpeaker 14: to open it for you? Yes, please. I got this for you. It must beSpeaker 15: stuff. It must be stuff. Okay, let's put this in. Here, I'm going to open this for you. Oh, look, here it is. It's food. It's food? Yeah, it's food.Let me,Speaker 17: let me. Are you going to eat that food? What?Speaker 15: What? Here, Torsten, look, it's food. Do you want to eat it?Speaker 17: We're not [00:55:00] going to have you open this. It's justSpeaker 14: solid.Speaker 17: Toasty! You better eat your Halloween candy. You better eat it untilSpeaker 15: you're sick. Torsten, Daddy will take a bite to test it to make sure it's safe. I want to eatSpeaker 14: it!Speaker 15: Do you want me to test it? YouSpeaker 14: can't eat it! Well,Speaker 17: gum is for chewing. It's such yummy food!Speaker 14: No! Uh, you better put that back.Simone Collins: Yes. You have to look visible and beautiful. You need it for reasons.Malcolm Collins: I don't know why I married you.Simone Collins: Yeah, you do though. Yeah. Yeah. It worked out well. It worked out well. I had to fight for it, but man, I got what I came for and then some. Did youMalcolm Collins: want marriage when you first found me?Simone Collins: No. No. You, you know what I wanted.Malcolm Collins: When you just wanted sex you were likeSimone Collins: I didn't know I didn't want [00:56:00] I wanted to fall in love and have my heart broken and live alone forever. You know exactly what I wanted. I was so clear about it. And sex was a part of that. Sex was a part of it. Yes. Yes, and yes, you are very much my type. So,Malcolm Collins: you were Which is actually something I want to get into in this episode.So, I'll get started with that.Simone Collins: Dive in. This is a public episode. 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In today's episode, we delve into recent revelations about China's drastically inflated population numbers, which have significant implications for global demographics and economic stability. Our discussion covers the impact of China's misrepresented fertility rates on stock markets and global population estimates, drawing comparisons with similar issues in Nigeria. We explore independent research on China's population, including discrepancies in birth statistics, Lunar New Year travel patterns, and salt consumption analysis. Additionally, we theorize potential dystopian solutions for China's demographic challenges and discuss parallels with historical and current geopolitical situations. Join us as we unpack these complex issues and their broader global significance. Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone! I am excited to be talking to you today. Today we are going to be talking about China and recent information that has come out through multiple angles.that leads people to believe that China's total population, a lot of people know that, their fertility rate was lower than the official figure said it was, so they did all of this. Oh, we got it wrong. We're readjusting our population numbers. We're readjusting our fertility rate numbers. Turns out that their total population is still being represented as dramatically higher than it really is.And this has major implications because it means that one, their entire stock market might be vastly overvalued right now, even given how fragile it is. And two for people who are thinking about global population numbers right now, they might be way lower than we think they are. And this isn't just a China problem.I'm also mentioned a lot recently. It's a [00:01:00] Nigeria problem, which is another very populated country. A lot of people don't know, but Nigeria. Gives out oil money dollars to different provinces based on their reported PopulationandThere's nobody overseeing the populations that the individual provinces are reporting So there is always a huge incentive to lie in the extreme and I mean it's africa, right?How corrupt are these numbers going to be? SoSimone Collins: this is very similar to the blue zone scandal which came out whereby they found that All these supposedly very old people that lived in countries were not actually alive. It was their family members collecting their pensions and lying about them being alive.And here's just another issue of incentives being misaligned. People are lying about their populations because they get more money when they say that these people are there, aren't there. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And I think that globally speaking, we may have to do a re ledgering. That's going to have people realize that the total global population is dramatically lower than anyone thinks it is.Especially if you're looking at UN numbers, there was a case recently where somebody sent an email to the UN saying Brazil's own [00:02:00] tabulation of their population shows it's 10 million less than yours. And the UN in response, they go, why don't you update it? And they go we don't want to alarm anyone.I'm like, and that's over a double digit off from where their fertility population actually is. Percentage, double digit percentage off. So the UN is just lying through their teeth at this point to try to hide this.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: So it turns out after recording this, this situation was astronomically worse than anyone anticipated. And this first series of graphs I'm showing you. The red line is the actual fertility rate of these countries. The blue lines is UN repeated projections of the fertility rate of these countries was interesting year.As you can see with some like Columbia, it never even was really attached to the real fertility rate with others like Korea every year. They just expect it to stop going down anymore. Which is just well negligence. They're lying to people. If we go to this next set here, you can see what's happening throughout Latin America. The red [00:03:00] line is the real fertility rate.And all of the other lines are UN every year saying, stop worrying about this.This is why the world's not panicking. If the world saw these red lines projected forwards by any reasonable equation. They would be shitting themselves right now. Look at this, even in Africa.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: And the middle eastMicrophone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: So here you have Tunisia and Turkey. The same thing is happening and it's not just the UN you also haveMicrophone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: and I H M E every major organization is attempting to Gaslight people about the severity of this. We're going to have a different episode where we go over this, but wow. I am shocked to see this coming out in a mainstream newspaper.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: No, here. Like you to take a moment to think, okay. If the UN is lying about all these other countries, fertility rates. And these countries own governments are like, Hey, actually, you are hugely overrepresented. Our fertility rates. , imagine what's going on with China right now. When their government doesn't want [00:04:00] people to know how bad things are. And has been famously able to push around the UN.Malcolm Collins: All so specifically China doesn't have a 1. 4 billion person population. Their population is probably below 1 billion people and fell below 1 billion people a while ago.Speaker: See, out of all the places, this is the place that I'm worried about the most. Why? Just, the way they live, they're different. What, Chinese people? They just wreck everything, they make everything weird. That's what I'm worried about. To you? To you? Everything. Chicken. Why is it orange in Chinatown?. The way they write, the letters are weird. Their alphabet's not like ours.Theirs is like, like someone testing out a biro. Everything's There's no logic to anything that they do. There is! Of course there's a logic to it! The way they read a book, it's all the other way round. From back to front, instead of from front to back, and up and down, and Everything that we've done, they've gone, Right, we're gonna do it weirder.Malcolm Collins: But let's talk about this. A [00:05:00] lot of this episode, and I always want to give credit when a lot of it comes from somebody else's research, came from a show called Lei's Real Talk. Or Lee's Real Talk. Anyway, pretty decent China watcher show. It's certainly not as good for me as like China's Fat Chasers. But she does real solid work and she sometimes breaks stories and it's definitely a source that I think people should have in their back pocket if they are doing China stuff.But everything that she's talking about here is data that can be independently checked. So first there's an argument that China's birth statistics are inflated as evidence by the discrepancy between reported births and the number of deaths. Of bcg vaccinations administered logic in china. The bcg vaccine is mandatory and given to newborns within 24 hours of birth Therefore the number of bcg vaccines should closely match the number of births A chinese researcher conducted a study comparing the official birth data to BCG Vaccine Administration records from 2008 to 2021.The [00:06:00] study found each bottle of BCG Vaccine can vaccinate between 1 to 5 babies with an average of 1. 35 babies per bottle. Using this average, the calculated number of births based on BCG Vaccine usage was consistently lower than official birth statistics. Over the 14 year period from 2008 to 2021, the discrepancy totaled 58 million births.Extrapolating this trend back to the 1980s when China's economic reforms began, the total overestimate could be as high as 178 million people. This research argues that this discrepancy suggests systematic over reporting. And I will have a link to this study in the description. It's in Mandarin.So be aware of that. Wow. Then there's data from the Lunar New Year travel study. A significant decrease in Lunar New Year travel between 2019 and 2023 suggests a potential population decline, particularly among lower income groups. Logic. Lunar New Year is [00:07:00] the peak travel period in China with almost everyone traveling to visit family.A large decrease in travel numbers, especially among lower income groups, could indicate population decline. Data and source official data from Zeonoon News Agency shows in 2019 2. 984 billion person trips during the 40 Day Lunar New Year period in 2023 1. 556 billion. Trips during the same period, which represents a 47 percent decrease overall.So these might be representing very large population drafts breaking down. The data air and rail travel is typically used by more affluent travelers decreased by only 15 percent bus and road travel. Typically used by lower income groups. So the largest decrease calculation, assuming 422 million people, 30 percent of the official 1.4 billion population didn't travel due to poverty or old age In 2019, 986 million people made 2.984 billion trips an average of three trips per [00:08:00] person in 2023, assuming 2.5 trips per person due to economic factors. This suggests a potential population decrease of 556 million people who didn't travel in 2023.Now this something ain't right. Yeah, I'll explain what would cause this. And she's actually done a different piece where she goes into this in a lot more detail, but she argues that this unexplained decrease is due to unreported population decline. due to COVID 19 fatalities. So not only is the overall population less than they're reporting, but they're hiding a huge chunk of the population that died during COVID 19.She has a different episode where she goes into kindergarten closures because there was a sudden increase in kindergarten closures were 20 percent closed year over year this last year. And she says, this indicates. that a lot of people were either died during COVID or something like that or etc. And they decrease in specific regions at really high levels, specifically smaller towns.And we don't have the rural data. But she argues that the country could have lost more than 20 percent of its [00:09:00] population in COVID. And from someone simply from death. deaths from death. And some of the CCP's behavior indicates that this is the case. By that, what I mean is right now they've had a mandate to destroy records of deaths during the COVID period.In a lot of hospitals and we'll go into more data that the COVID deaths may have been dramatically higher than they're reporting. But so not only is their overall population lower because they were lying about some stuff, but their overall population is higher. lower because of people dying and keep in mind for the flight thing.It was the low in middle class numbers that dropped this huge amount, not the upper class numbers that didn't drop that much at all. And peopleSimone Collins: who. We're uniquely hurt in a disease outbreak would be those who can't go to a private hospital, for example and get better treatment. So that could be the play.I see.Malcolm Collins: Or we're more likely just to be shipped to 1 of the I forgot what they call them. NotSimone Collins: really. Yeah. Scary isolation [00:10:00] zones where you just went to a cell.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Really bad situation there. And the next is the salt consumption analysis. This was an analysis of regional salt consumption data, which suggests China's population is significantly lower than official figures.Salt consumption per capita is relatively stable by analyzing regional salt sales data and known per capita levels. consumption rates, one can estimate the population. A Chinese researcher conducted a comprehensive study of salt consumption data from 2000 to 2022. The methodology involved collecting regional salt consumption data from various news reports over 20 years using known daily salt intake figures for different regions ranging from 8.5 grams to 11. 5 grams per person per day. They calculated the estimated population based on salt consumption data and compared it to official census data. Findings from 2000 to 2014, calculated population was 19.29% lower than the official data in 2015 to 2022, calculated population was approximately [00:11:00] 31% lower than official data.So again, the huge chunk disappeared there so that they've been over reporting for a while, but now they're not even reporting what happened with Covid. Applying the 31 percent discrepancy to the official 2022 population figure of 1. 4 billion yields an estimated population of 986 million. The full study will be linked to in the description. Was interesting here is the arguments are supporting from multiple directions. So it's not just one study. They're all showing this huge like 31 percent lower number. And then she ran a different set of math just for another set of math. You can run here where she looked at the reported fertility rate of China versus India and starting populations of the two countries.And then showed that China showed a much higher growth than it should have an overall population when contrasting with India. And then people can be like that might be because they have better medical care. And so then what she did is she looked at, okay, what was the lifespan [00:12:00] increase between China and India during those periods?And India had a larger lifespan increase over that period than China had. Which implied that the numbers should have favored India further, which implied we are seeing systematically wrong numbers here. Wow.Simone Collins: What good sleuthing on her part. This just sounds, these are such amazing questions. I'd be so proud of one of our kids.If they looked at a problem from this many different angles, I really respect her.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I really respect her as well.Yeah. There was also a Russian and a Japanese study that put their population at around 800 million.This specifically the Russian experts name. Was Victor McCove, and he concluded China's population is not the official, the number that's nearing 1. 5 billion.Simone Collins: This seems like a classic China problem in terms of the way that rewards or funding is dealt out to different regions, causing.Major problems. I recall this being [00:13:00] an issue in like the height of early communist ChinaMalcolm Collins: with this is really interesting. So Russians gathered Chinese urban populations, added them up, and then arrived at a total urban population at 280 millionandassuming the rural urban populations have a one to one ratio, then China's actual population should be around 500 million.Simone Collins: Why should they be run to one? That doesn't make sense to me.Malcolm Collins: But if total rural. population carries a higher weight. It may not be one to one. But they said that China's total population should not exceed 800 million, but I'd expect their urban population to be higher than their rural population, China's recent push on this.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: that is fascinating. So we've got more stuff here. Here's an article. And so just, in terms of like China having a lower population than it otherwise might have had. 1 here for people are wondering how big this difference is. It could be. So they did 2 different [00:14:00] calculations here.So what you might have is a real population. Population of, oh yeah, so this was just a 944 million and priority set. Okay. Now in terms of who is saying that more people died during covid than official numbers This is not an urban monoculture cover up. There was an article by the cdc on this topic And there was an article in nature on this topic and the Atlantic did a piece called, can a million Chinese people die?And nobody know official statistics on COVID can't be trusted because they share Beijing's political interests. Making the dead disappear is only part of it. And then evidence of underreporting satellite imagery revealed heightened activity at crematorium centers during the outbreak , domestic footage of overwhelmed hospital wards circulated on Chinese social media before being censored.A morning and funeral index based on online search volume for related terms indicated 712,000 excess mortalities, so nearly a million excess mortalities from December, 2022 to [00:15:00] February, 2023.Simone Collins: Oh that's recent. That's after after the pandemic. 2022 to 2023 is. When the pandemic is very quote unquote old over.That'sMalcolm Collins: whatever the case may be over a million more people died So basically they're just hiding their deaths. They're Fudging their births the whole chinese situation is not only a paper tiger It's a Potomkin village. It's fake. It isn't an actual economic superpower in the way that we believe that it is.And I think that right now, another thing that she's been arguing in her recent videos, and I actually think she's right about this is when we ask, why is Xi Jinping not doing logical things to protect his economy or his people right now, given how bad things are. The answer could be that he's trying to transition into a wartime economy, and a wartime economy is not going to be driven by consumer demand.It's going to be driven by [00:16:00] centralized production queues.Simone Collins: Do you, are there signs that they are centralizing their production?Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Keep in mind, all the billionaires have been like disappearing. They've been centralizing all their major industries. Remember when what's his face?Alibaba guy disappeared, right? Yeah, that's very much a move to a, howSimone Collins: does that have to do with what does that have to do with centralizing production?Malcolm Collins: Okay. Remember how we have defined in other videos the difference between a socialist state and a fascist state? Yes Whereas a socialist state puts the state industry like the economic means of production Under the state for the purposes of distributing wealth as equally as possible Whereas a fascist state Puts the means of production under a state for the purpose of spreading a particular ideology or worldview in keeping existing oligarchs in power, i.e. what the Democrats are doing. That's why the Democrats are fundamentally a fascist party. A lot of people don't understand this. They think I'm like exaggerating when I say that. Anyway that's what China is doing right now. It's they're transitioning. [00:17:00] To a fascist economic system where they are putting the means of production under the authority of the existing power structure to heighten the power of the existing oligarchical structure because I think that they know that an economic collapse is impossible.Basically, the entire economy there has been. More of a Ponzi scheme than the rest of the world's economy for a while. It's like foreign investors come in, foreign investors come in, your money will always grow, look at how many people we have imagined how big this could be. And I think that, very similar to what happened in Japan in the eighties but about a thousand times worse.Simone Collins: What are the implications of this?If they'retransitioning to a wartime economy, do we have good reason to believe therefore that they are going to come for Taiwan faster?Malcolm Collins: Oh, I think they meant to go for Taiwan by now, but Russia's F up in Ukraine has significantly lowered their desire for [00:18:00] that particular conflict.That's my read of it. Like all of this, I think started Before they saw what happened in Ukraine and right now there's like an ongoing conversation. Do we do it? Do we not?Simone Collins: So I thought it's more of just a siege scenario and taiwan from an energy independent standpoint Is so screwed that all you have to do is just besiege themMalcolm Collins: Do you know how much our gpus that we've been buying up?Simone and I have been buying up gpus are going to be worth if taiwan gets siegedSimone Collins: How you will look pretty good to getMalcolm Collins: a very good resale value on those. By the way one of the things we're looking for right now is a CTO for the companies, if anyone's like a GP, GPU specialist, or a, running data center specialists, let us know we'd really be interested in, in, in working with you or has a good technical resume otherwise For a position at a startup, but yeah, so the implication could be that they're going for taiwan I don't know.It's just such a dumb decision if they do but it could be with the goal of securing the existing administration Knowing that [00:19:00] an economic collapse of the region is not going to happen but already underwaySimone Collins: Golly. Okay. Yeah. I was reading in totally outside of, let's say someone wants to write all this off as conspiracy theorizing and they choose to not believe any of the stats presented.I was just reading that China's getting to the point that for every child born, six people are dying. It's that bad. Wait, is thatMalcolm Collins: bad now? That's horrifying.Simone Collins: Yeah, it, let me make sure I have that right. Okay, here we go.Demographer warns that if China's fertility rate remains on its downward trajectory, eventually six people will die for every newborn. This was from an article called China's pro birth policy is not yet enough to counter demographic crisis. Expert warns published in the South China Morning Post. So that's mainstream.Not question people talking about, just how bad things are, how their fertility rate dropped to 1. [00:20:00] 09 in 2022. But that's likely highly overstated. We don't have numbers for 2023 officially. And to your point about this, anything they do send to us may be very highly overstated. Even in China's, Best possible, most enthusiastic and optimistic number presentation, we're still looking at an extremely dire scenario if things are even worse and as bad as you describe and as bad as people are seeing through things like baby vaccinations and salt intake and vacation travel and morning, it's bad.It's also very concerning that apparently excess deaths are so much higher, even between 2022 and 2023. It implies.Malcolm Collins: Gets me on this. And I think that a lot of people, what were you going to say? It implies.Simone Collins: It implies that it's not just a COVID thing and it's not just people being hopeless and not having kids anymore thing that [00:21:00] people that the country may also be deeply unwell in other ways that we aren't fully aware of when they're, IMalcolm Collins: guess my takeaway from a lot of this is one.India is likely a bigger player in the global future than we think. China has long Basically what this means is India's population is higher than China's population, and going forward for the rest of human history we can project right now will continue to be higher. But in addition to that, it just means that China is when people are predicting future events, do not over-index China's role in those events?I guess I would say when I talk to a lot of people, I would say this is one of the, in terms of smart people who I talk to, like really smart people, consistent mistakes that they make in the single most consistent mistake I see they make. Is believing too much that China has a future seeing them trying to play out the roles and the moves that they make, 50 years from now, 100 [00:22:00] years from now, thinking that they are going to find a way to fix this quickly when.They should have already done that. Like it's basically too late for them at this point, even if they start going on a forced birth campaign or something like that, I just wouldn't expect that much benefit from it, given that it would need to admit things that mainstream training officials just aren't admitting right now.Keep in mind, they were one of the first countries to. Jail someone who is doing gene editing in humans. Very publicly, right? Like they made it clear. We don't do genetics here We don't believe in genetics here all humans exactly the same and that's going to make any sort of a campaign they do to try to increase fertility rate Likely create an adverse outcome.So I just don't I do. And it also means that their existing power on the world stage might be being overstated. And a lot of China's existing power, people misunderstand that like their existing power is due to what they produce. And I'm like, [00:23:00] that is not true. Their existing power is due to the amount of money American and European investors have poured into China.That is where their valuation comes from. Obviously, China.Simone Collins: So you mean people buying.Malcolm Collins: Companies putting companies in buying stock, investing in, et cetera, investing in China is why China has a high valuation. Like, when you're looking at like Chinese GDP or like the share of the global market and blah, blah, blah, a lot of this is like basically fudged numbers due to the people who have put money into that.And that's also why. You don't get this counter narrative of actually China is not that relevant, politically speaking, because nobody benefits from this. The wealthy oligarchs who run our society, they have tons of money invested in this that they can't quickly get out. And so they're not gonna want it widely disseminated that actually China is already over.So they don't publish it in their newspapers. [00:24:00] They don't talk about it. They don't promote people who are talking about it. It's the same with the political apparatuses in neither serves the conservatives, nor the Democrats well to say China is not particularly relevant as a power player.Because, people want to focus on what do we do if Taiwan gets attacked?And as I've always said, what we do if Taiwan gets attacked is nothing. Because Taiwan won't exist in 100 years at their current fertility rate. We are not saving a thing of persistent value by saving Taiwan at this point. If Taiwan can get their fertility rate up, I would commit American force to help them.But at their current fertility rate, you are just delaying their death by a century. There is no point. This very seriously. A country with a fertility rate that's hovering around 1, halving their population every generation, why would I have our either capital or actual human beings dying to defend that?That's insane.Simone Collins: [00:25:00] Yeah but by that logic, are you trying to argue that we should only fight for countries with high birth rates? So if someone invades a high birth rate African country ah, defend them.Malcolm Collins: No, it's not just based on the birth rate. It's based on their relevance in a future Earth scenario.That'sSimone Collins: Africa. They're the ones who are going to decline last.Malcolm Collins: I don't think that you are actually really helping that much in terms of the future trajectory of Earth by committing tons of resources to preventing random groups in Africa from attacking each other whether or not, it just all comes out in the wash there because the infrastructure and the economic infrastructure in that region is so poorly developed that you're just really not getting much of a, an outcome from that.But if somebody was to say. Okay. Oh, would you care? Like where would you care about defending if they were attacked? What's a country where you're like, this country is going to have an outsized, a level of impact in the future. When I look at current India, no Israel.Simone Collins: Oh,Malcolm Collins: Israel's the big example here.[00:26:00] Technologically, they're going to matter in 50 to a hundred years fertility white wise. They're going to matter in a 50 or a hundred years. In terms of Who is it worth investing to protect? Israel is who it's worth investing to protect. Taiwan is not particularly worth investing to protect. In terms of the Ukraine, I thought that it was worth it to just show that Russia couldn't push people around in the beginning.I no longer think it's worth it. Now they're just fighting over land, and neither country's gonna matter much in the future either, and Russia has already expended all of their military power.Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess if this were like an elimination based reality TV show and you're trying to decide to who to ally yourself with if there's someone who's just clearly tanking they lack the charisma or physical prowess or whatever the show's based on, cooking ability.To hang in there. Yes. You really need to look at someone's ability to be there in the future. And it's not just whether you like them or whetherMalcolm Collins: I like Taiwan a lot.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I they're aSimone Collins: [00:27:00] contender. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: they're just not a contender. It's the same with China. So keep in mind, like China and Taiwan are enemies.I am very pro Taiwan. I am very anti CCP, but I admit that they both are dealing with this population problem and there really isn't an out for them at this point that I can see. And so when people are like, Oh, what do you think the, China's going to be doing in X many, I'm like, they're not going to be doing anything that matters.Now this does have impacts on like semiconductor production and everything like that, but I think we'll be able to offshore Taiwan's semiconductor production at least the relevant parts before things go tits up. Keep in mind that because we've hit a Moore's law sort of ceiling now we are Entering optimal semiconductor world at this point.Do you understand what I mean by that Simone? So historically if one company was like really ahead of other companies in semiconductor production it didn't really make sense to try to compete with them because it's you've got You, you want to try [00:28:00] to catch up with this company, but every year they're improving so much.They're like 30 percent better every year. So even if I figure out how they're making the semiconductors they're making this year, I'm not going to be able to compete with them economically by the time I get that up because by the time I get that Fab up by the time I get all that up, it's going to be 5, 10 years from now.And they're going to be like a generation, not one generation, like 10 generations ahead of me, right? Like I will be able to make very simple semiconductors, but nothing particularly impressive. But now the advancement in semiconductor production has lowered dramatically. You are getting very small increment because we reached the edges of what physics can do.And so this gives other companies and countries a long time to catch up with this. And I think the next major advancement in semiconductors that we should focus on from a human civilizational perspective is how can we, one, Lateralize semiconductor production. Right now, it takes 40 different [00:29:00] countries all developing.The lasers are developed in Norway and the plans are developed in California and the end products developed in Taiwan. How can we lateralize this process? And how can we microtize this process, i. e. I think we're going to need to focus on more modular and smaller semiconductors as global supply chains begin to break down even if they are slightly slower it's going to be equally useful given the way that cloud networks work in the way that you can just chain like GPUs together.Simone Collins: If you were living in China right now let's say in a place like Shanghai where the birth rate is so low. Where would you move? If Shanghai's fertility, by the way, is 0. 6 as of 2023. So not even this year. Lower than I get out. IMalcolm Collins: don't think that there is a way to to, [00:30:00] I think that China is internally burning itself.I think that the situation in China is going to get astronomically worse than it is today. YouSimone Collins: think they're going to start blocking emigration though? I feel like they already.Malcolm Collins: Stopped they stopped it like five years ago. They put major bans and restrictions on people out migrating. Yeah,Simone Collins: so then that's not a realistic you're just saying figure out how to figureMalcolm Collins: out figure out like you're running from a holocaust that's about to happen like Figure out like you don't get how bad things are going to get.That's my read of China right now. You do not know, you cannot comprehend you. If you want to know how bad things are going to get in China in the future, ask your grandparents about the great famine. Okay. That's the scale things are going to in China right now.Simone Collins: Yeah. What does worry me is.Again, those excess deaths between 2022 and 2023, like we're not in the middle of the pandemic anymore. And to my knowledge, there have been no [00:31:00] immense natural disasters in China, though, okay, I'm not following the news that closely. I do wonder, especially after all these stories of people being like buildings collapses or infrastructure, not really working well.And I guess it's just so hard to trust what you're hearing, because then when you hear from anyone who is in any way proud of China, and I think there's a lot to be proud of in China, I think the Chinese people are awesome. And I've traveled through China in a decent amount, not an amazing amount, but I've been to like Zhangjiajie and Changsha and not like your typical just Beijing and Hong Kong and Shanghai, though I've done those too.It's an amazing place. But when you talk with anyone who has pride in China, then it's just propaganda talking points. So I don't know who to consult, right?Malcolm Collins: This is the thing also about out migrating from China, historic. And real Chinese [00:32:00] culture is better preserved in the immigrant communities than it is preserved within CCP China.If you like, if you're like, I want to get in touch with my Chinese traditional roots, you are better off living in one of the American Chinese immigrant communities than you are under CCP China because they often were founded by individuals from before the Cultural Revolution, and they maintain more true uninterrupted through lines.To traditional Chinese culture.Simone Collins: I do think that's really interesting that when in some countries you get these selective pressures where people with a certain fidelity to a certain culture, just leave on mass and then anyone who stays basically gets completely changed through those same selective pressures.And then the original country. Is somewhere else now. And you can even see this and not necessarily in holistic cultural sets or cultural mimetic religious, whatever [00:33:00] sets, but even just an accents like I've ever argued that the true British accent of will say before the American Revolution may be more alive in some versions of American speech in like the 1900s than even the modern British accent.Which is an interesting, yeah. Because like certain groups migrate and like things evolve, it's not like after a point of great migration, do things stay the same in the original home country? No things change. In fact, often when there is a great migration, it's because there's significant change in the home country.So I'd like that point about cultural fidelity, maybe not even being in China. And if you really love China and if you believe in China, you maybe need to rebuild that somewhere else.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I like that way of looking at it. It can be rebuilt, but I don't think it can be rebuilt in China. Not so long as Xi Jinping is in charge.Now, he have, and this is one area where I realize I have a [00:34:00] big difference between my friends who believe that China has a future in me, is they're like Xi Jinping, he won't be in charge for long. He's got replacements in the wing. As soon as he Fs up enough, they're gonna replace him. And my belief is, The opposite of that.I don't think they have real replacements lined up for him. I have looked into these people's, they've said, oh, this guy is competent. I'm, I don't see it. I don't see it. I don't think that they have a good replacement for him. And if I wereSimone Collins: him, I would not want to take, or if I were anyone else, I would not want to take his place.I would be terrified to take his place.Malcolm Collins: I don't think that they I think that he's for a long time purged everyone competent who might take his position. I don't think that there is somebody who can competently take his position. I think when Xi Jinping falls, a lot of people think, oh, this is when things begin to fix themselves.No, I think that's when warlords begin to take over. I think that's when things begin to fracture or they go incredibly stupid, a la Venezuela, like a bus driver taking over. I [00:35:00] think that as much as Xi Jinping is a problem, he's also the bulwark against complete idiocy. And I have intense fear around what happens when he does fall because I think people think some competent bureaucrat is going to take over and that's not the tea leaves I'm reading.The tea leaves I'm reading is. Some idiots going to take over who, we would never have assigned power was intention. And if I'm wrong about this if the system is still working, if they still can get a competent person in there and they can get rid of Xi Jinping, China has a chance, but it's got no chance under Xi Jinping.Or the Dowager Empress, as I call him.Simone Collins: The Dowager Empress.Malcolm Collins: He reminds me of the Dowager Empress in the last fall of China.Simone Collins: The scary dragon lady. I guess everyone calls Dowager Empresses or any mean woman dragon lady. But yeah, the one with the really young son who just killed a bunch of people, that one.Malcolm Collins: In fact, if I [00:36:00] was in office I would always call him the Dowager Empress. Because I think people need to draw this connection more to one, understand just how much he's hurting the country into two through a historic parallel into to understand just how long within the Chinese bureaucracy, somebody who is that toxic to the country's long term best interest can stay in power.If people don't take care of them.Simone Collins: If you were, let's say someone incredibly competent, the right person for China were suddenly installed and given autocratic power. What would you have them do? What would you encourage them to do? If they came to you and ask youMalcolm Collins: for something you need to do is become completely transparent about all of their records their economy, their population, their part of meSimone Collins: wonder.So what if Xi Jinping doesn't even know the gravity of this and can't because There are so many adverse incentives at play where a province is not going to tell you because then they won't get their tax [00:37:00] revenue. I feel like there's a crisis of realityMalcolm Collins: in place, independent departments, independent branches of government using things like AI and satellite images, all the stuff that foreigners are using.And then they get, or commendations and wealth for finding areas where people are fudging things. All right. So let'sSimone Collins: say first thing you established the department of, and they go out and their job is to just find out what's going on.Malcolm Collins: Department of transparency. Then you need to re institute goodwill among investors that if they invest in something, they will be able to get their money into and out of the country easily.That's one of the big things that's going to drive down investment right now, right? As people are terrified that if they put money into China, that the money's never going to be able to come out of China. And because that's true right now, China's basically realized like it's excessive.You need to suddenly you do that. And all of the money, a lot of the money, this is all going to cause short term pain. All that you're saying was in China's autocratic system that apparently can think long term, even though it [00:38:00] definitely can't. No,Simone Collins: You are a long termist autocrat. You needMalcolm Collins: to, you need to, basically all of this is around developing investor confidence.You need to develop investor confidence, long term investor confidence with foreign investors. That is the. First core thing you need to do. So all, everything involved in that, not jailing making things. If somebody achieves a certain level of wealth, you're not just going to go after them.You're not going to, all of that stuff. So investor competence is thing. Number one thing. Number two is fertility collapse is a national security issue right now. And I may even put it under the purview of the military focusing on artificial wombs in the lake.Simone Collins: Oh, so just invest heavily in science.HeavilyMalcolm Collins: in science and genetics.Simone Collins: Right, but what good will artificial wombs do you if no one wants to have kids anyway, whether or not they get pregnant?Malcolm Collins: You have the state raise them.Simone Collins: Huh. So you would encourage the first ever government [00:39:00] funded human productionMalcolm Collins: plan. I think if you do those two things simultaneously and big enough.I guessSimone Collins: you could, would you, this is very dystopian, but would you Offer to pay women a a living wage to carry pregnancies to term. And then if they don't want to raise those children, No, but IMalcolm Collins: wouldn't disallow anyone from a high level government position with less than four kids.Simone Collins: So to say, I know the anti cat lady tenure policy.I thinkMalcolm Collins: you need to create,Simone Collins: and you might need to create But that's nobody, because no one has been allowed to have a lot of kids. No, there,Malcolm Collins: It's been long enough under the three child policy and loosen one child restrictions. What?Simone Collins: Come on, when was the three child policy, No, when wasMalcolm Collins: one child policy loosened?Simone Collins: No. Because it was still culturally so discouraged. They're basically no. The policy was formally passed into [00:40:00] law by the National People's Congress, the National Legislature of China on August 20th, 2021. With this one childMalcolm Collins: policy. Simone, the one child policy was loosened in 2016. Loosened!Simone Collins: Loosened!Malcolm Collins: You could say this is the thing and this is where everybody gets things wrong.They always blame us on the one child policy, but the problem is that fertility rate now in China is lower than it ever was under the one child policy. And that's a culture problem. I just, I'm notSimone Collins: going to listen. You shouldn't penalize people for not having a lot of kids. You under Xi Jinping in China during COVID in China, would you be having kids?No, you would be shouting. We are the last generation along with everybody else. Yes, and those people needMalcolm Collins: to be penalized. That's the exact point I'm making, Simone. You need to penalize people who are investing in your career. No, you shouldn't penalizeSimone Collins: people who are making smart and logical decisions.Malcolm Collins: I disagree strongly.That's the only way you create a cultural change. In fact, I would go further. I may disallow [00:41:00] salaries above a certain amount to people who have less than a certain number of kids. I would tap your max possible salary To the number of Children you have, which will quickly create the perception that more kids means more wealth.Simone Collins: No, I would that's a fun That's a fun concept to reconnect from just from a policy perspective in general, because the thing in the past and why people would have a lot of kids aside from, other cultural reasons was the more kids you had, the more wealthy you were. And if we just reconnect those in some way.Either, of course, through progressive tax breaks for the more kids you have, but also just through other means. Yeah, the more kids you have, the more money you're allowed to earn or something. It's just the level of dystopian control that you have to have over a people to do that. It's too much. Aren't we too libertarian for that?You and IMalcolm Collins: No, but you're It's different from what I want for America. China is [00:42:00] culturally different from America. OkaySimone Collins: so yeah, you're trying to come up with a solution that certainly doesn't fit with our cultural values, that is more coercive, that is more I'm not gonna say evil. That is just Creepy because you're like, this is going to work for them.Yes.Malcolm Collins: You're saying if I was in China, what would I do? Like the person who's I'd started democracy is an idiot. That is not what you would do. You need to fix the problem in a Chinese way. What's actually going to work.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. I could see a kind of China making human production army thing with artificial worms.They could pull off the look. I feel mean saying that I, again, respect China, I was really, I was on like a five. Did I tell you about my five hour bus ride to. Zhang Xiaojie from Changsha, it's about five hours, like some [00:43:00] guy had this cell phone that constantly kept ringing and it was just children's choirs singing Christmas songs in English.And they were chewing this thing that smelled incredibly strong, like throughout this bus that just made me want to vomit the whole time. And we're on these twisting roads. So I'm just hearing children's choirs singing Christmas songs and smelling this putrid smell of whatever it is people are chewing and spitting out on the bus.Malcolm Collins: It's Betelgeuse, probably.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Badal nuts are an addictive stimulant that's chewed in parts of China. Particularly the Southern provinces, such as a non. A high nineSimone Collins: yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yes. BetelgeuseSimone Collins: did not smell good. So they were, I've had good moments and I've had bad moments. But like good moment just before that bus drive, the taxi driver or the taxi cab driver who took me to the bus station where I took that bus was so [00:44:00] concerned about me that he got in to the bus station and helped me buy a ticket and told me where to sit because he was like, girl, what are you doing?This is not safe. So they're really they're awesome, cool, bro people who help out total nonsense, idiot foreigners who are kind and hardworking and enterprising and creative. And it makes me so sad to think that they're under this level of threat. Damn. But I don't know. I wish there were a less dystopian way to do this.Malcolm Collins: There are less dystopian ways to do this. But you've got to I think that the less dystopian ways of handling this are going to be handled in the immigrant communities. You can't find a new, like in the U. S. I'm like, experiment with new ways of having your family culture work, new traditions, new holidays, new ways of relating to things.What can China do? This doesn't work in China.Simone Collins: What can China do right [00:45:00] now that other countries can't do? So if suddenly you become transparent and you're like, okay, guys. Now I'm in charge. We're figuring out our population situation. We're going to be financially transparent. You can leave and enter the country as desired.We'd love to welcome immigrants. We'd love to welcome industry. What would you do? Peter Zion talks about their natural resources being not great. Like they're not that energy independent. Then I'm not having that food independent. What are you going to make them like a nuclear hotspot?Fast, like that wasMalcolm Collins: the thing I was talking about was transparency and everything like that and taking a short term hit. The big problem China has now is they got so used to that period where they were a growing power instead of a weakening power that they built this idea of will always be bigger tomorrow.And therefore let's believe the neighboring countries, let's believe the people around us. They need to understand that they are in a position of short lived power right now and they need to be doing. Everything they can right now to build goodwill [00:46:00] among their neighbors. That nine dot line that they've drawn, that's not going to hold for 50 years.And when it stops holding the people who they were bullying are going to be awfully mad at them. Meaningful walk back all of this stuff they've been doing to the local region. Okay.Simone Collins: So start playing nice with others, but then, what will a Admittedly smaller going forward. China do. To build prosperity and.TheyMalcolm Collins: need to, as I said one, forcing competent people to have more kids, culturally speaking, through the way that you influence them. Okay, incentivizing,Simone Collins: not forcing, incentivizing through cultural means.Malcolm Collins: The state raised kids, state produced kids, that could be an option that they have access to that we don't really have access to.And they, I think right now is something that is being understated in the investment world is how much of a problem it is that nobody trusts Chinese stock market or wants to put money onto [00:47:00] it. And it's not just because they're shrinking. It's because the government has basically said, okay, now you've put the money in, now we're going to keep it from going out.Like we trickedSimone Collins: you. Here'sMalcolm Collins: an interesting idea.Simone Collins: If you create state created humans, and state raised humans, maybe China, because China also has an international reputation, I think of producing very smart, competent, hardworking people. To with your army of government creative people, like be as though we are the intellectual mercenaries of the world.You want to hire Chinese people. You want we will build the best factories we will build and then they just start investing in all of the type of human infrastructure that will matter in a post AI world because the rest of the world is too indolent, probably to raise the sort of disciplined, smart person, practical person not hedonic [00:48:00] person.To thrive in a post AI society and still matter in a post AI society. So maybe if China did that and they continued with the same Oh, America, you suck with your titty attainment. Like you go and enjoy your hedonism and we're going to produce our competent, hardworking, tight lipped people who we will produce and train, then maybe they can just be like the one non idiocracy.No, that would really be cool if they could do that.Malcolm Collins: And I'd also say that one of the core things that people get wrong when they're predicting future world events and stuff like that is how cheesed America is from so many perspectives. We are not moving into a multipolar world. We are moving into a world in which America is dramatically more dominant than it is today.AndSimone Collins: I think a good book to start if you're interested in the subject is Peter Zeihan's book. book, the end of the world is just the beginning. He talks through in a very sort of guns, germs, and steel kind of way. Just why America has the [00:49:00] tailwinds that will give it a huge advantage in the instance of a world in which there is no more.support for international trade.Malcolm Collins: So one is as globalization and global economic systems begin to break down. Yes. That is part of why America will be strong is we are the most self sufficient country in the world by a dramatic margin, whether it's energy or food or any of the things that civilization needs to survive.But in addition to that we also have A weirdly high fertility rate for our level of prosperity and output. And it's because America has what it turns out is the greatest resource any country can have in the 21st century, which is we have religion. And a lot of it, a lot more than any other developed country.And it turns out that a lot of these countries, when they were modernizing and got rid of their religions, did a great harm to themselves. And when I look to the future, when people are like future world polarity wise, where are you looking at world [00:50:00] power centers? One, people are hugely sleeping on how much power America is going to have.The other area that they're hugely sleeping on. Is Israel like, no matter how positive you could be about Israel, you need to be 10 X more positive than that.Simone Collins: Yeah. I guess if we were to look at any country that actually was producing some kind of hyper competent workforce, it does, that is, famous for going out and getting a lot of things done.And it doesn't focus on hedonism over everything else. It was so weird how in your class at Stanford's graduate school of business, One of the most difficult schools to get into in the entire world. There were so many Israeli students. So many Israelis. And not only that, but So many Israelis. And they weren't just Oh, they were all having kids.They were all having kids. They all had businesses and they were going through school. They were like so much more on top of their lives than anyone else. And even though they worked harder and even [00:51:00] though they were incredibly conscientious, they all just, they just seemed very happy. Like they didn't, they were the tortured souls at your school, but they weren't aMalcolm Collins: lot of the American Jews were among the tortured soul category that you're talking about reform.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And actually Simone, we have an invitation to go to Israel and meet with, and live with some of these variety families for a bit. I'd like to take it up at some point.Simone Collins: It's a really cool invitation.Malcolm Collins: We It would involve being around people. Has invited us to stay with some of the Haraiti families in Brooklyn in the next couple of weeks because he's going to be there and he's going to be That'sSimone Collins: so cool.IMalcolm Collins: was like, I don't think we have time. I was like, Now theSimone Collins: timing is not amazing, alas.Malcolm Collins: In future years, I really want to, but not right now, unfortunately. But the yeah, people are they do not understand how much fertility rates in technophilic regions matter.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the cool things that China has the building blocks.[00:52:00]China has the technophilia. China has this I just love how modern so many of the things there areMalcolm Collins: another big advantage, which is they don't have the bureaucratic bloat of other regions.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: it would seem,Simone Collins: I don't know. Like October 7th seems to have been largely a product of the government not having time to doMalcolm Collins: an episode on this, but we can just briefly mention in this now.I have looked at their competence since October 7th in terms of essentially wiping out all ofHezbollah In Palestine,Simone Collins: but keep in mind those, that groundwork was laid well before October 7th.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. And the problem is Simone, which you might not be considering that groundwork was weighed. Before October 7th, they wouldn't have been able to execute on that groundwork if October 7th hadn't happened.Why were they making plans for how they going to take out Hezbollah? Like that they obviously from a geopolitical standpoint, couldn't [00:53:00] execute on unless I, I used to think October 7th, I was like, Must have some level of impossible stupidity.Here I am now leaning towards the, oh my God, this was all planned from the beginning.Simone Collins: I'm leaning toward, they put so many resources into embedding devices with Hezbollah and getting intel from Hezbollah that they snoozed on Hamas. Just being like, you guys are so incompetent. Do you thinkMalcolm Collins: they could have had if Hezbollah wasn't attacking 'em as aggressively as they are right now, do you think they could have had all those things explode?Simone Collins: Oh, you mean just from a diplomatic standpoint, because there's so much hate on it. I think it was an insurance policy because keep in mind, they weren't just incendiary devices or explosive devices. They were also Intel gathering devices. So it was, I think it was about optionality to have that there.And who knows? They knew. That Iran was probably going to get more resources at some point, Obama had started that trajectory and that's [00:54:00] about when they started doing this. So I think they knew it was going to be rising threat. I don't think they, they could have anticipated or even encouraged October 7th.I think. I think it's more of a, just, they thought that they knew what they were doing or the, I just, it seems plausible to me that just what Hamas did was so out of.Malcolm Collins: I'll tell you what British intelligence, they looked at this. There was an ex British intelligence guy and he was saying, I, it is shocking that Israel accomplished more.In a year and a half that we accomplished during the entire war on terror against the Taliban. He's if we could have dismantled Taliban, the Taliban to the level that Israel dismantled Hezbollah. This would have been, this is like 99 percent more than what we did. Like it was a stunning that they were able to accomplish.Simone Collins: Here's what we need to do. We need to get like spy novel [00:55:00] writers. In the same room as like government officials or like sci fi writers and just be like, figure it out guys, get creative, man, get drunk and then just start makingMalcolm Collins: plans. Is it was all of this in context, we should consider ourselves very fortunate of the Secret Service agencies that apparently are actively attacking us now, which is the British one that it's not.Yeah, we should be glad that of the ones most likely to support us. It would be the competent,Simone Collins: but here's the thing about massage. You won't know that they're out to get you until you're dead. that effective. So who knows? But yeah I guess we just did a surprise attack. We're going to talk about China.Here's where we dunk on China. Oh, ha. WeMalcolm Collins: love Israel.Simone Collins: Another one of those episodes.Malcolm Collins: It's like when I'm thinking about like world players who matter.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: it's literally like in my future calculations of geopolitics matters [00:56:00] to X what China matters.Simone Collins: Yeah, the other kind of in the potential to have outsized influence, very similar in my mindscape to.The UK or Britain, before the they became the British imperial empire. They were this sleepy backwater. Rome didn't even want to hold on to them, right? They sucked. They were gross. It was cold. No one took them seriously. They were a bunch of barbarians. Like you, you said in that other episode on our one civil, your one civilization theory.I'm just, I identify too much with you, Malcolm, but I'm not trying to take credit for it. It's a really good theory. No, it's ours! Yeah, Royal We. Nobody reallyMalcolm Collins: helped inspire it by telling me that I should think more of ancient Chinese civilization. That was really the thing that got me investigating and then I was like, no, actually they suck.Simone Collins: Oh my god. So Poor China. I'm trying to point out things that I love about China. Szechuan food people in Szechuan province. I love ChineseMalcolm Collins: food. I eat Chinese food almost every week. I love it. AlsoSimone Collins: people in Szechuan province are [00:57:00] just genuine, genuinely awesome people and really cool.Malcolm Collins: No, I have a lot of Chinese friends.I think that the whole, like a lot of the Chinese people I know are some of the smartest people I know.Simone Collins: They're crazy smart. Anyway, so yeah, we love China but I can't remember where I was going. It doesn't matter because we need to make dinner. But I'm sorry to anyone who came here just wanting to hear about China.And there we go. It's real again, but no, no. Yeah. Great. Yeah. So yeah, no one thought, yeah, Britain was backwater. No one cared about it. Relatively small population. And yet so much influence. In the entire world. And I think it's, yeah, it's easy for people to write off Israel to be like, it is a tiny postage stamp of land within a hostile area.They, why would they matter? Why are we trying to help them? I don't know before the rise of the British imperial empire, I would have wanted to, Now, what was going on with these guys, see how I could work with them. So I guess I see your point in that we have to look to the future and [00:58:00] look for their potential.So yeah,Malcolm Collins: Don't make big sacrifices to make alliances with the Ottomans. Yeah, exactly. Right now is the Ottoman. They'reSimone Collins: the Ottomans. Yeah, sadly. But I think what also gives me hope at the end of this, and I want to end with this, because it's where there's hope for China, Is that China isn't in China anymore, just like Venezuela is not in Venezuela anymore.Yeah, I agree.Malcolm Collins: We know throughSimone Collins: our travel agency, which works with a ton of Venezuelans, that all the Venezuelans are in Spain, they're in Peru, they're in Doral, they're inMalcolm Collins: I should say.Simone Collins: Yeah because they left. It was Cuban, like allMalcolm Collins: the good Cubans, I'm sorry, not good Cubans.Simone Collins: We are going to hell so many times over, Malcolm.Real Cuba's in Florida. Yeah, though. And that is a theory that gives me a lot of hope. Because when I hear about new news with China's demographic collapse. I just think I weep for China and it makes me very sad and scared. But then I think about, yeah, all these amazing Chinese immigrant [00:59:00] communities throughout the world.And you've got stuff, so yeah, people can move, populations can move and build something even better. And as we've talked about in other episodes, the more, That you evolve and move around and play jazz with other cultures and take the best from them and do it better yourself. The more you will thrive and own the future.AndMalcolm Collins: I will say that China is not the most effed world power right now. Germany is. Germany is. And LatinSimone Collins: America is just vaporizing and no, butMalcolm Collins: the thing is that Latin America has cultural enclaves in other countries that have decent fertility rates. Germany has no backup plan. If I was a German that wanted to maintain German culture, there's nothing left.Simone Collins: Gosh. Yeah. We're there. There are no, I guess you could say that Amish people are,Malcolm Collins: but now, Oh my God, you should hear their stuff on Trump. We watched the video of them, like them talking about Trump. They are so based.Simone Collins: Yeah. They're so based. Love the phone. I'll let you go. Bye. Okay. Ciao. Ciao. [01:00:00] Oh,Malcolm Collins: are you going to do theSimone Collins: Just get the kids, you get the kids, I'll stir taquitos.And then if you just drop them off, I'll play with them while I cook food and you can wrap up work for the day. Yeah? Yeah. You ready for that?Malcolm Collins: And let me know what we're getting for replies on this. This is a long and spicy thread with lime and stuff. OhSimone Collins: no.Malcolm Collins: Have you even checked it?Simone Collins: No, I'm just going to ignore it.I'm very bad with Twitter. Remember, I thought that someone had closed, somehow closed their tweet to replies and I just didn't know I was blocked because I'm so old.Malcolm Collins: Other people said then they were blocked. I don't know. But yeah they, weird.Simone Collins: Yeah I don't understand Twitter, x. Sorry.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we're definitely at an age now where there's things that I don't understand and things I make a real hard focus on staying on top of. AI. AI is something I'm like, I gotta be up to date. Love you.Simone Collins: I love you, too. You're seeing the thousandth time. [01:01:00] Yeah,Malcolm Collins: so today antinatalism documentary, which I actually loved. I haven't seen it at all.Simone Collins: That was so well done. It was the best. So well done. This guy is a trueMalcolm Collins: star. Yeah, Tim came out. I hope it does incredibly well.Yeah. So people haven't seen it. This is the guy who's done some other like really big documentaries.I want to, I haven't watched it all yet. I only watched the beginning. I was like, Oh my God, this is. HisSimone Collins: storytelling is top drawer like the way he, but the problem is that it includes stories of. Conditions that cause babies to die terrible deaths I, and then so of course I'm crying first thing in the morning while watching this frickin thing.Malcolm Collins: I'm so sorry. And then the limestone thing happened today.Simone Collins: Limestone Claymore. So yeah, that was, oh, it was so much reading. It was so much reading.Malcolm Collins: So much reading and so much, I don't know, felt like disingenuousness he posted the thing. He's like, why are they attacking me out of nowhere? This is a guy who runs the Institute of Family Studies thing.And we're like, he does the whole, whoa,Simone Collins: hold on in his whole, you haven't even read the he's I don't run the Institute for Family Studies. This is just 10 percent of their [01:02:00] spending that I'm involved with. So he takes umbrage.Malcolm Collins: He just, out of the blue he's they just attacked me out of the blue and I'm like it may have been that article that you wrote on us that was really long and compared us to Nazis and eugenicists and said that you should be running the pronatalist movement and not us and that we shouldn't even be considered pronatalists and tried to throw a that might've been, and mischaracterized everything we've ever done.He's they're, I don't know. communitarians. Like they only care about people in their community. They're not about trying to help everyone. I'm about trying to help everyone. I'm all about freedom and I'm gonna give everyone freedom. And not only is my movement about freedom, but how dare their movement allow people to use surrogates or do genetic testing.And I'm like, You're like contradicting yourself here MMMMMM, seething! But I'm not gonna attack him anymore, because I said I'd stop attacking him after this if he doesn't try to [01:03:00] undermine the big tent pronatalist movement again to try to take it over. We honestly could have been a lot worse to him.I had a much meaner episode planned about him, but we ended up just talking about it in the episode where we were talking about what was it? When it is not true, because this is something he believes that more wealth doesn't lead to lower fertility rates, and I'm like, that belief continually arguing that, which he does persistently throughout all his work and he's like, why are they telling reporters not to talk to me?I'm like, that's like an environmentalist arguing that it's an environmentalist. Like industrial logging doesn't hurt the rainforest because one person is like planting trees or like they can find this one study like broadly everyone who's saying and knows that industrial logging hurts the rainforest and other environmentalists aren't going to send reporters to talk to you like obviously if you're the pronatalist version of a flat earther, When a reporter comes to me, I'm like, yeah, don't talk to the guy who doesn't think that wealth causes lower fertility rates.That's pretty [01:04:00] insane position when you can just Google any graph on this and you will see it as a very strong trend. But yeah, I don't want to go too deep on, on that particular thing. So what would the other thing you said? There was something else that came out today that was stressful. You read this one.It wasn'tSimone Collins: stressful. It's more of a Swedish piece. They were so mean to us. The Swedish place that I think it was a translation, but it was like, they said the parents who beat their children. Yeah. The parents who beat their children and want everyone to have children. And then we live in a dank farmhouse.They said we live in a dingy farmhouse. Dingy, that was the word, dingy. Oh, I wonder if there's a like, more diplomatic way that this is written in Swedish, or did they, she just like flat out call her home dingy? Was this somebody who came toMalcolm Collins: her house, or were they writing about somebody else? Yeah, she,Simone Collins: yeah, she's the woman who came to her house.Her picture's at the very end of the article. Remember, she wore the bright shirt.Malcolm Collins: Oh I like that. They included a lot of our full arguments in that piece. That's always nice. When somebody does that, we alwaysSimone Collins: ask someone to come at us. We're always like, be [01:05:00] controversial, but it must as villains.And she's I'm glad she did it because it made the article more interesting. But yeah, it's always stressful reading those being like, wait, my house is dingy. I try to clean up before you. IMalcolm Collins: broadly, I thought it was a good article. It is the type of article that I would want written.But it's always,Simone Collins: it's always stressful to, for anyone to talk about, like to read anything about you. It's just as stressful if it's positive. So I'm just ready to de stress. Let's talk about China as a dumpster fire. It's going to make me feel so much better. Okay. Let's do it.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Do I have any debris on me or anything like that? Ooh,Simone Collins: yeah, let me, not that I can see, not that I can see. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: this right here.Simone Collins: I can't, is wiping your nose on it going to make it go away? I'm trying to lick it off, but it's not that scary.[01:06:00]Just give me the shirt to wash. I, we have a, I brought a bunch ofMalcolm Collins: shirts and pants down for you to wash.Simone Collins: I hope you didn't put them in the clean laundry basket. I need to make things more. We need a better hamper system. We will work this out.Malcolm Collins: I'll just change my shirt.Simone Collins: What do you want for dinner, by the way?Malcolm Collins: You know what would be really cool if you learned how to make, if you learned how to make taquitos.Simone Collins: That can't be hard to do, but I would need oh my God, wait a second. No. I can use, hold on. What if I tried this? I will make corn tortilla taquitos using your slow cooker beef and keep in mind that is prime beef, the Christmas beef.I willtry it. I don't know exactly how they're properly cooked. I'm just going to First, lightly fry corn tortillas in butter, then I'm going to roll them in the meat, which I will saute ahead of time with some pumpkin. Would you like put some of it or not? Yeah, that's aMalcolm Collins: great idea. And [01:07:00] thenSimone Collins: I will cook them further in the air fryer.Malcolm Collins: That's exactly what I would have suggested.Simone Collins: All right, let's see with maybe some melted cheese on top. I don't know. I haven't gotten there yet, but we're going to see how that goes. No, no melted cheese. We're going to try dry. You can dip them in sauces. We're going to see how this works. I'm excited for it.Okay.Malcolm Collins: By the way, the episode we did today on the spy, it got demonetized. And I think it's because we were talking about things that we aren't allowed to talk about. So just don't, no, even saying we aren't allowed to talk about something. You can't say that.Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. DeletedMalcolm Collins: everything else. So that must've been what flagged it.That is so creepy. That's really dystopian. Yeah.We live here. Have fun. The deep state is spying on us. AndSimone Collins: we can't say that.Malcolm Collins: One of the comments that somebody had that got to me as they were like they did arrest like random women who nobody follows for questioning their school board. Do you think was your guys platform? They're not going to attack you. [01:08:00] And I was like, That makes sense.Simone Collins: Touche. Creepy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, we dive into the controversial topic of hereditarianism in dogs and why many progressives acknowledge it in pets but not in humans. The discussion covers the pit bull debate, including the moral implications of neutering the breed to prevent attacks on other pets and humans. We also explore the historical and societal roles dogs and cats have played, arguing for their special status and potential future alongside humanity, even in space. The script wraps up with an exploration of online backlash against the hosts and their defense of hereditarian views, followed by a personal conversation about dinner plans. [00:00:00] Most progressives do believe in hereditarianism and dogs. And the question is why did they believe it there and not in humans?And it is because they have raised and interacted with dogs. It is very hard to miss hereditarianism if you have actually been around young people . So what you're saying also is this is a product of the fact that they don't have human children.I think the previous thing is what everyone's gonna freak out about in the comments. He wants to genetically modify dogs to be smarter? How dare he? But this is where things get spicy. The pit bull debate yeah. I do not think that there is a huge moral negative to neutering the pit bull population humans who love dogs, neuter dogs all the time.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: Pit bulls in the United States kill an average of 8,730 dogs per year in 2,904 cats per year. That means that if you neutered the entire us pit [00:01:00] bull population,You would be saving one cat or dogs, a life that is somebody else's pet for every 3.8, six pit bulls. You neutered.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: Over the next hundred years.And I will tell you the best argument for not neutering pitbulls. And then I will tell you why it doesn't even work.Would you like to know more?Hello Simone, I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be doing an episode that was inspired by somebody who was criticizing us. It was an article that was actually not so bad. Where was the article published? It was like The LA Review of Books. Yeah, and what's really interesting in it is when you went to look up The the writer of the article to learn more about her and her perspectives.She was in the middle of a fight on the internet based on this article because she called out us and a few of our friends like Johnny Anomaly and diana Fleishman podcast. Yes. And so she calls out a few of our friends. And so, you know, obviously they've got supporters as well online and she's getting trashed in, [00:02:00] in Twitter.Which is actually interesting that it happened this way because Often when people attack us. Enough of a Twitter spasmob forms, like whenever we go viral, that we are on the minority side, but when they fail to go viral, the only people who notice are the supporters of the various people who are being attacked and they end up getting s**t all over.So, she was getting having to be defensive and somebody found and she ended up defending this position, a post where she claimed anti hereditarianism in dog breeds. So specifically. Not only does she not believe that none of a human's personality is heritable, but she doesn't believe that any of a dog's personality is heritable.Right. So like on, on, on Twitter, I can read a bit like how some of this conversation played out because this is a very common conversation we see again and again, which is really weird. With Emily Merchant, the author of this article representing [00:03:00] the, the kind of person who is very well educated and very well meaning but also very progressive and just will not believe, will refuse to believe that, that behavioral traits, including intelligence are heritable.So Stegosauro Benedet writes, I can't help thinking I should really be screening for the gene that makes otherwise apparently intelligent people fall for pseudoscientific nonsense like eugenics. And then. Conchabar responds, I haven't read the essay yet, but the claim that we can't select for specific traits in a population is utterly wrong.We've been doing it with animals for millennia. To which Emily Merchant, the author of this article responds, it's much easier with animals, but a project by behavior geneticists in the 1950s to 1960s to breed an dog failed utterly. And she links to this, this study. And , someone reads it and [00:04:00] then includes a screenshot of the study saying, just skimming this, they seem to suggest that.That it can be successful with dogs. Emily merchant responds. No, they're saying that differences between dog breeds are small, especially under similar living conditions. She continues. Scott was a member of the American eugenics society in the 1960s, and he expressed extreme skepticism about the possibility of breeding intelligence and humans on the basis of his experience, trying to do it with dogs.So she's trying to argue that, you know, this, this dog breeder. Okay. So first of all, I should note. The other study that she's citing here, because this is going to be important in a lot of progressives who do believe like anti hereditarianism in dogs is real, will cite this it was a recent study, actually, used a giant sample size.Showed only about a 9 percent personality difference between breeds. What they won't tell you, this reminds me of the spanking studies where huge sample sizes did not control at all in the way they were collecting data, is the personality of the dogs is based on owner's self reports. Yeah. [00:05:00] Here's the problem with that.The owner's self report of a dog personality is going to have more to do with the owner's personality than with the dog's personality. How many owners speak of their pit bull? They're just the sweetest little things, you know, because they use their dog to augment their own self perception, which is of course, you're not going to get much correlation there.Man, you can just look at like, just to go into pit bull statistics so people can understand how absolutely insane this position is. Pit bulls make up 5. 8 to 6. 6, nice around. Let's say 6 percent of the total dog population in the United States, okay, but they're responsible for 69 percent of fatal dog attacks.Okay. From 2005 to 2019, they killed 346 Americans, which is 6. 5 X higher than the next closest breed. So. 650 percent higher than the next closest dog breed. Which only killed 51 people. And [00:06:00] pit bulls inflict nearly half of 48% of all fatal attacks on infants. Those are babies under 1-year-old, not okay. And from 2015 to 2019, 76% of the fatal attacks on children under nine years old were from pit bulls. Keep in mind, they only make up 66% of the doll population.Mm-Hmm. So you like, well, that's the people who maybe buy pit bulls and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like what? Like, it's very obvious to me. And if you've owned a dog, and this is the other thing that gets really interesting to me in regards to this. When you were talking to this lady, you were like, or you mentioned with somebody who was like, well, try to teach a non Well, yeah, I'll read it.I mean, first someone, James Dog on Twitter Made a very good point saying, if you're concerned that EA, cause she also writes about effective altruism is a crude measure. Perhaps you should be campaigning for researchers to be permitted to access vast existing IQ linked databases, which is something that's being quite restricted right now.But then he continues, alternatively, try teaching a Greyhound to memorize over 1000 distinct commands [00:07:00] and use it to herd sheep. And then Kanchabar comes back in with, OP should, should prove how intelligent these, these breed variations are by raising a pack of Basset hounds and putting them through IPO.She'd lose her mind trying to get them to IPO, probably like a, maybe like an assistance dog training. I don't know. She'd lose her mind just trying to get them to stop sniffing, let alone competing against breeds specifically bred for it. I mean, the thing It's so clear with dog braids. Wait, here I need to talk about like herding dogs, for example.So we, I've always believed that the core difference between dogs is what they're bred for. So I think that dog personalities predominantly, if you're like, what type of dog should I get? You're looking are, are you a ratting dog, a herding dog, a hunting dog, or A fighting dog. I mean, pit bulls are fighting dogs.Let's, Oh yeah, fighting dogs. Like, is it a dog meant to kill other dogs? Yeah. The, the typically in my experience for like what my family [00:08:00] likes, I always go herding dogs and I find herding dogs are fairly similar across herding dogs, but if you've ever had a herding dog, it will be clear to you just how much of their behavior is genetic.So a great example is I grew up with an Australian shepherd. Today we use corgis, which are another type of herding dog. But for, for our family's primary dog. We adopt Corgis. We don't use them. Yes. Australian Shepherds, they it, when it rained when I was a kid because they need to get the sheep to high ground whenever it rains.So they didn't drown. And clearly we didn't teach it to do this. It would nip at all of the family's heels to try to get us upstairs. That is really sweet. And also, yeah, really weird. If you don't believe things are inherited because no one taught this dog to do that. Yeah, no one taught the dog to nip at our feet to try to get us to go upstairs.So where did it get this really specific behavior pattern tied to hurting? And, and you see this yeah, just sort of like across, it's, it's, it's, I mean, it's so wild to me that someone could [00:09:00] think this, but then it gave me this realization, which was something I hadn't realized before, which is that most progressives, I mean, you've got a few crazy ladies like this lady here who are like dog breed differences.Aren't heritable. I mean, she's not crazy. She's the weird thing is that she's. Very sane and reasoned and tempered in most of her analysis. I don't think so. I think you need to basically be an occult to believe this, or have never interacted with dogs. But this is what they I know. Here's the way that I look at it.Like, if we were to frame this from a perspectives point of view, there are lots of Otherwise sane reasoned people who believe in scientific inquiry, but also believe that the earth is flat and the non hereditary and people, the blank slightest, I think are similar. You know, they can, they can engage. I don't think that's true.I think you always want to see the best in people. I think that. A lot of the people who think the earth is flat are generally stupid. I think that people who believe on hereditarianism in dogs are generally just brainwashed [00:10:00] cultists. They are not. Well, and I think the other thing that's notable of course, is that most even blank slate as progressives who insist that no traits behavioral are heritable.Or like, Oh yeah, I'm like, of course you've got a border Collie. They're going to behave this way. I was about to make, which is to say, it made me realize that most progressives do believe in hereditarianism and dogs. Most monoculture does. And the question is why did they believe it there and not in humans?And it is because they have raised and interacted with dogs. It is very hard to miss hereditarianism if you have actually been around young people of a specific species. So what you're saying also is this is a product of the fact that they don't have human children. And I think that's a really good point.I was listening to a podcast called The BCC Club, which is broadly about internet drama when, you know, I run through all my blocked and reported episodes and still need some kind of [00:11:00] Gossip, please. People recommend something better than that. That's about internet gossip that I can listen to as a podcast, but basically the BCC club is two very, very progressive lesbians who talk about internet stuff.And there was one episode where they talk about buying pets online. They talk a lot about dog breeds and behavior and dog DNA. And then, you know, they also frequently talk in their podcasts about the amounts of money that they paid for medical care for their pets and things like that. And they, 100%.Understand and empathize with each other and talk about the, the, the grief that they feel upon losing an animal. And then they, they like literally can't empathize the same way with what it would feel like to lose a human child. And I think really seeing it, I'm seeing exactly what you're talking about here where they can't understand.They can't, they can't even really put it on the same level of their dog, their dog parenting, which is really interesting to me. That, that, that humans wouldn't be as lovable to them as dogs. Because. Well, I think they've still [00:12:00] disconnected from their natural instincts at that point. I mean, they're not sleeping with men.They're not, you know, engaging with people who are interested in like rational discourse more broadly. They have artificially constructed a lifestyle. That masturbates, I think mostly status for them. That seems to be the core thing that they're focused on is individual status was in the urban monoculture, which is achieved through adopting more fringe and modern lifestyle choices which leads to them no longer, I think really identifying, and I'd say they don't really identify as human anymore, but what I really mean by that is it's, they don't identify most human behavior as human anymore.They think they're still human, but when they look at like your average rural American to them, that individual is an animal. And that's what they are thinking about when they are trying to model kids and stuff like that. I don't think that's quite it. I think they're not thinking I just I just don't think they they have that like empathetic basis to work [00:13:00] with they don't their world is their cats and their, their partners, and it's not kids, so they just can't empathize.If you see this in people all the time who have lots of kids, is one of the things I've noticed, like, that most, when I hear people's stories where they became hereditarians and they weren't formerly hereditarians, Yeah. Is after having kids. Yeah. Like, that's the biggest debate in their life. I had kids, and then I realized, eugh.Well, both you and I were, I think, just intuitively from our upbringing, because I think, blank slate theory, if you go through a public school system, or a mainstream private school system, Is, is going to be more or less what's tacitly hammered into you. You can learn about genetics in school, but you're still kind of raised with blank slate theory, I think subconsciously.And so I think you and I came into parenting kind of with a blank slate mindset, and then we're blindsided. By the traits of our children They're just very obviously hereditary. Yeah, even when it's stuff that we've never shown them never [00:14:00] demonstrated They're not picking this up from us. Like we've hid it from them.And still well And the studies on this are incredibly compelling that look at babies. For example young infant Girls, for example, if you're talking about differences between males and females, they will look at an adult much longer like I think like 10 X longer, like dramatically, dramatically longer.They crave social attention than male babies. But if you look between for example, ethnic groups there was a study in like the 1940s on we mentioned it in a different episode, but it looked at Caucasian babies versus East Asian children younger than six months. And if you put a blanket over their heads the Caucasian ones like freak out and we'll rip it off.Where the East Asian ones will just clear a path for themselves to breathe. And it's a very different reaction to this negative stimuli and that you can see this reliably in infants shows that there are some clustered sociological differences. But I mean, again, I think that progressives in the [00:15:00] fact that they have to deny that this is true when it is so obviously true.End up discrediting the claim that they make that their system that they are creating for the world that this urban monoculture can actually be fair if there is any degree of genetic differences between individuals. And this is something that's really made clear to us by one individual who is like.Well, yeah, but if you intergenerationally select for IQ in your kids, and it does work, I mean, what happens if in a few generations, they're much smarter than other people? And it was clear that she didn't have a world framework where humans that are born differently from other humans can safely coexist with other humans.It's like, well, if one group ever did show genuine superiority to another group, they would have like a moral mandate to erase that other group. Or the other group would have a moral mandate to erase it. Like that is genuinely what the urban monoculture believes. because they don't have a system for dealing with genuine diversity.And that is really horrifying. Yikes. [00:16:00] Yeah. Another thing to go into here is the pit bull debate because we got to go into the pit bull debate. Yeah. Here is my thing on pit bulls. Okay. I believe that humanity does have a moral obligation to dogs and cats. Actually, this is. Before I get into the pivotal thing, I need to make one thing clear.We have a moral obligation to dogs and cats that we do not have to other species. Somebody's gonna be like, why would you think that we have a moral obligation to dogs and cats that we don't have to other species? And it's because the partnership that humanity formed with dogs and cats was not a partnership of subjugation.Most of the other species that we have, where we have domesticated them, it was us capturing them and forcing them, they're not, like, cows don't serve us because they wanted to serve us, because at some point, some cow in distant history made the choice to work with humans. That is [00:17:00] not the case for dogs and cats.So we can start with cats, which were actually the later domestication event, and made human civilization possible, period. Okay, why did cats make human civilization possible? Because before cats we couldn't do long term grain storage, which was critical to To the types of bureaucratic infrastructures, it was the distribution and collection of long term grains, i.e. early taxation that allowed, specifically in the Nile in Egypt, that allowed for the first real major civilization to start, which was Egypt. But you couldn't long term maintain grain in these primitive silos because they'd get rat and mice infestations. And so the introduction of cats, which were an obligate carnivore and wouldn't eat the grain, but would eat anything else.There is a reason that the Egyptians worshipped cats. There is a reason they had cat gods, and they mummified cats, and they because cats made their lifestyle and civilization possible in a way that people today do not appreciate. And these cats were [00:18:00] not captured cats. These cats were cats that came and made themselves at home within these grain silos.Okay. And then some Egyptians began to live with cats. But another important thing to note about cats as well is that cats were never fully domesticated. They do not in many categories of domestication count as a fully domesticated animal. Often when cats are living with humans, it is because to an extent they have chosen to live with humans.Now dogs are a different, and I think an animal that we have even more responsibility to than cats. So what I mean by that is if you look at the early domestication events from what we could see about the way that dogs were likely domesticated, is it appears that some canines began to lose the instinct to basically attack and kill humans or fight humans whenever they see them.You know, before they were a social animal and their tribe would be their tribe and our tribe would be our tribe and we would fight and kill each other and hunt each other and we were enemies. But the. The group that made the first [00:19:00] Overture was the dogs, it appears. What they did is some dogs began to hang out around the refuge piles of early humans, and then over time they began to become less afraid of humans, and humans began to integrate dogs, which already had a pre coded, you know, social clan structure in them, into our societies.And it's important to note that our current concept of dogs as pets is likely not the way that they integrated into these groups. They likely integrated as a separate sort of cast, but as an independent cast. And we can see this in some primitive African communities when anthropologists have gone to learn about them.There's this story that I found really interesting where one anthropologist was walking around a settlement and she was talking to a person about their dog. She goes, Oh, your dog. And they go, what do you mean my dog?And they're like your dog. And they're like, I don't know what you mean my dog. And the person was like, well, the dog that sleeps in your house. And they go, Oh, well, yeah, I mean, it sleeps in our house because it chooses to, it could sleep in any house that wanted [00:20:00] to. It's not my dog. And this is likely the way that early Humans to animals, and we even see this in modern times where you will have a town dog or a town cat.When I was in St. Andrews, we had a few of these. Did you have any where you grew up, Simone? Yeah. I mean, I think even in houses where people have domesticated cats, sometimes people like neighbors will start feeding one of those cats and the cats sort of two times families, you know what I mean? And we'll like sleep over at the other person's house and hang out in the other person's house.And. I think animals do that in general. I certainly saw it a lot when I was in Mexico that there would be definitely like ownerless dogs that would just be beach dogs that everyone would feed and kind of take care of and the dogs would sleep wherever, and they were healthy dogs, but no one owned them in particular, but I do find it notable that even in scenarios where humans.own cats where, you know, you can have cats more freely move between houses. If they're outdoor cats, you still see [00:21:00] this, this phenomenon. Well, and it's important to understand why dogs were such a useful partner to our early species. Dogs can help in terms of like their capacity to sense the environment around them.They have like, I think like 15, 000 times our sense of smell. And, and like, I think like 15 X are hearing. So they make humans, they're the first bionic add on to humans. Yes. They were humans first bionic add on. And I'd also note here, another thing that we mentioned when we write about dogs, but people should note this.Is because dogs have been selected for their love of humans. That is one of the things we breed them for. They likely experience an emotion towards us, which is a louder form of love than any love a human is capable of experiencing. Hundred percent. And we've always said, if you really actually, if you want one unconditional love, don't find a partner.Don't just find a dog. Get a kid. Yeah. No, you're only ever going to get unconditional love from a dog. No human can give that to you or should be expected to give it to you, [00:22:00] you know, but with all of this being the case was dogs being a voluntary and useful partner to humanity. I think as we start encountering other species out there in the universe.Or we start building our own other sentient species, and we begin to have to form what is our relationship going to look like with species that are strictly more intelligent than us? And when do we decide, like, where these relationship boundaries go? It's gonna be important to us that we have some voluntary relation with another species that we do not factory farm, et cetera, right?That we treat with a dignity level that is To an extent comparable to human dignity and that is something that I think we should do with dogs. And I also think that we have a moral obligation to, if not have dogs on the spaceships we use to colonize the galaxy, bring their genetics so that they can be recreated when we get to these environments.and potentially even to genetically uplift dogs. It wouldn't be that [00:23:00] hard to do. For example, even with our existing technology, you could give a dog like pox to, and it would likely be able to understand and respond to human speech, not with speech, but with other things much higher than dogs do today from the other experiments that we've seen.I don't know. I feel like this, this may just be social media hokum, but there are definitely people on social media who set up buttons for their dogs that actually seem to be fairly effective. Yeah, but Now the question is, what do I think of pitbulls given how much I think of dogs, right? Okay, yes, yeah, now get into the controversial stuff that lost a ton of followers.I think the previous thing is what everyone's gonna freak out about in the comments. He wants to genetically modify dogs to be smarter? How dare he? No, I'm not saying today, I'm saying eventually, okay? But the, the, this is, this is where things get spicy. I do not think that there is a huge moral negative to neutering the pit bull population for three reasons.One is, [00:24:00] is humans neuter dogs all the time these days? Yeah. Humans who love dogs, neuter dogs all the time. Now humans, humans, neuter humans all the time. Humans neuter themselves all the time. Yeah. But I'm talking about the neutering of another being. Yeah. The non consensual humans should be able to sterilize another human.I don't believe that's morally okay. But should a human be able to sterilize a dog? Absolutely. It's something we do all the time as to why. There shouldn't be a moral problem with humans neutering dogs. If people are wondering, like, why do I have such a different belief around this than humans, it's because dogs breed uncontrollably, which can lead to big problems in regions where they are not neutered.They lead to more aggregate suffering of canines and humans. And so it's strictly and obviously a good thing to do. If humans bred like that then it might make sense to consider sterilizing humans, but humans don't breed like that. So that's not [00:25:00] Well, they don't breed like that anymore. You could argue that there was a time when they did.No, I think it was always an illusion. But the point being is You're probably right, actually. If we lived in a world where if you didn't sterilize humans, humans would exhaust their food supply and eventually start killing each other that changes the moral equation around sterilization. Even and we do live in a world and we've seen this because a lot of cultural groups like well My cultural group lauds dogs.You want to see more about this year episode? Why don't jews own guns? It's one of our best episodes we've ever done. But some groups like jews and muslims for example are pretty anti canine historically and in a modern context and just do not historically own dogs and they're What do these cultures have in common?They were typically urban focused cultures in the middle ages Yeah, what did the fiddler on the roof do? Playwright writer say about dogs if a man owns a dog either that dog is no dog or that Jew is no Jew So [00:26:00] so if people don't know this has been a lot of papers like I sometimes mentioned to like Jewish friends I'm like, you know Jews don't own dogs and they're like What do you mean Jews don't own dogs?I've seen Jewish people with dogs. I'm like, look at the literature. Jews don't own dogs. . And if you look at, and we know this goes back to early settlements because we can look at settlements to the ancient, ancient Israeli period and see that dogs appear very rarely in the Jewish cemeteries.So we can actually see exactly when this cultural practice came about. As to why the practice came about, it was because if you're an urban based population, typically. Like urban specialist cultures are typically very wary of dogs because dogs can become major problems like stray dogs in cities and you don't really need them for anything.Why, if I'm in an urban environment, do I need to be able to hear 15 times, you know, my range and smell 15, 000 percent stronger? If you are a rural person, dogs are critical to your way of life. So rural cultures usually have a much closer relationship with dogs. If you want to get a feeling of, is your family from an urban or rural background?Think, what was your parents perspectives on dogs? [00:27:00] That's the core answer, right? Like, are they seen as a moral necessity, or are they seen as a moral negative and just a waste? But anyway where was I going with this? The pitbull scenario. Okay, so one, neutering. There doesn't appear to be any moral negative to neutering dogs, at least within our society.And I, I, I could see the involuntary neutering of an animal as a moral negative. If there wasn't the sort of gun to our head of, but dogs will just keep breeding until they become a problem to other dogs. Right. So that's one problem. The second problem is, is then why am I okay with neutering pit bulls specifically the, the infant murder machines that they are right.Like again, you've got to keep in mind, dog murder machines, even if you don't like humans, that is where it gets. It gets for me and I just see no way to defend this. Pit bulls were selectively bred for their tendency to kill other dogs. Not for their love of humans, not even for their ability to kill humans.If you love [00:28:00] dogs, you should hate pit bulls. Because even today when we talk about all of the human deaths that result from pit bulls, it is Nothing. It is a drop in the bucket when contrasted with the pet dog deaths that are due to pitbulls.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: Pit bulls kill an average of, and this is just in the United States, 8,730 dogs per year. 2,904 cats per year. And 10,250 other pets and livestock per year.In total pit bolts are estimated to kill around 21,886 pets and livestock per year. Pit bulls were responsible for 81% of the animals killed by dogs in a documented attacks over a 10-year period.For attacks on other dogs, specifically 90% were carried out by pit bulls.All you need to do to top. This is neuter pitbulls. If you just neuter pit bulls. You could, within a few years save the lives of around 9,000 dogs per year, 3000 cats per year. The people who [00:29:00] don't do this are genuinely sociopath's.Given how flippantly we neuter dogs for just about anything else.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Well, what if you're not a dog lover and you're just an animal lover in general. This report here shows that pit bulls killed 30 times more animals than human crime dead. In fact, it found that pit bulls were 500 times more deadly to other animals and humans. Then all other dog breeds combined.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: In fact pit bulls that are rehomed by shelters and rescuers killed more animals than persecuted Setas. Eve you are one of those people who's like, but my dog is so nice to me. And so sweet looking, you come off, like one of those parents of a serial killer, who was like, well, my kid was nice at home.It's like, it doesn't matter. A dog can be the sweetest dog in the world. You know, Every hour of a year, but one where it murders a toddler. That dog was still better off, not existing that year. That's the problem. [00:30:00] If you are not weighing the statistics against your emotional connection with a specific dog.And this statistics are reality.Yeah. In fact, I'd go so far and say that you are probably saving one dog life for every probably hundred pitbulls that are neutered.That seems like a safe bet. Just considering the number of people, I think if you know dog owners, you will probably know. You know, someone who at least knows someone or someone who themselves has had their dog attacked by, not necessarily killed, but attacked by, for sure, a pit bull. YeahMicrophone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: so the breed is survey 2019 more puppies, yet fewer homes for pit bulls shows that there are around 4.5 million pit bulls in the United States. If that number is accurate. And if the above numbers are accurate, that means for every 3.86 pit bulls, you neutered, you would save the life of one cat or dog over the next hundred years. So it is neutering. [00:31:00] Less than four pit bulls for the life of every cat or dog you are saving. I just can't understand the moral equation of not neutering for dogs to save the life of one other.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: That dog who is going to die has kids who care about it. A family who cares about it. People who love it, just as much as you love your pit bull. And they're not even asking you to put down your pit bull, they're just asking you to neuter it. That is insane. The moral equation at play.and this then gets really interesting, because, well, some pit bull owners will be like, well, But when pit bulls are well raised, they don't do this, and I'm like, then we still need to ban the breed.And people are like, wait, why would you say we still need to ban the breed if it's a problem with the people who are buying them? I'm like, those people shouldn't be buying dogs then! So we need to ban the breed, whatever the desire is that's causing these people to go out and raise them so poorly. And you shouldn't have a breed that when it's raised poorly, Horribly murders other small, innocent dogs.[00:32:00]Okay. I think another problem too is the, one of the big elements of this controversy is the bully XL, which sounds like a uniquely terrifying version of pit bulls, but at least as marketed in some corners as a breed of pit bull that is actually much more docile and friendly. The problem is that even though it looks really, really tough is that, you know, breeding is not an incredibly well regulated.Realm. It's, it's a little kludgy. And so you don't necessarily know if you are getting a docile version, someone could tell you that this pit bull that they're selling to you for between one and 5, 000 or more is a bully XL and is docile and will be super nice to your kids and won't hurt a fly. But you really can't know that for sure.It's not safe. There's a reason that of under one year olds, 48 percent of them that were killed by a dog were killed by a pit bull. You know, that's mostly the dog owner's own children. Or children that they are [00:33:00] babysitting. Like, that is horrifying that we are allowing this to happen. These are infant Murder machines.These are toddler killing machines. That is what they do. And again, I should note here that even if the owners, and this is what really gets me with the pitbull owners, they'll go out and when people are like, look, we really shouldn't allow, like we need to, and I'm not saying we should kill pitbulls, just saying we should neuter pitbulls.When they're like, Oh, Presumably make their sale and breeding illegal. Yeah. How dare you do this because we, we like pit bulls because they're so sweet and kind. And it's like, yeah, but I can look at the ads of the pit bull breeders and I can see that functionally that's not the case. The high value pit bulls are being sold because of their adjacency to savagery.And some of like pit bull ads here.They're like, This is, this is like King Cyrus, the murder machine. He can murder 10 infants in a day. No, they won't. They won't, obviously they don't mention the infant murder, but they just, you know, mention how tough and strong and savage they are [00:34:00] because individuals who buy them are using them to modify their own self image often.That is why they will buy dogs. And this is where I'm like, okay, well maybe these people are actually of this category of it's the. It's the owner's fault because they are buying a dog. They want to make them appear like a savage, tough individual. And so they are training it to be savage and tough.Fine. Doesn't change the fact that we shouldn't have this breed. Right. When you consider that you are literally like how many dog neuters is a human child not being horribly savaged worth, right? Like I just don't understand the moral equivalency here when you could get another kind of dog. Yeah, and that's the thing is there are so many amazing dog breeds out there and dog breeds that are super tough, too.Yeah. You just, there are lots of hunting dogs out there. There are lion killers. You could get a Rhodesian Ridgeback. You could get all sorts of very interesting and, and tough and [00:35:00] protective, but also sweet dogs. This is not going to be a challenge for you. It just seems so unambiguous that pit bulls are a step too far.Yeah. Very polarizing. We're definitely going to lose followers. I think this is a lot like, Korean K pop stans and Taylor Swift fans. No, no, no, no. Here, if we have somebody who disagrees with us on this, I, I need them to answer a question. Okay? So, let's, let's deal with it. Let's bring the numbers down a bit.Yeah. So that they can understand, would they neuter one Pitbull if it saved the life of one child? And from being horribly, horribly murdered, a toddler, a three year old, horribly murdered. And then I say, okay, they're like, well, of course I neuter one pitbull if it did that. People neuter pitbulls all the time, right?You know, for different reasons. I say, well, would you neuter ten pitbulls? To save the life of one child, one toddler. I'm like, what number, what's the number that's too high for you? What's the number of pit bulls to save the life of a three year [00:36:00] old that is too high for you? Because categorically by the data, you can save a lot of individual toddler lives by doing this and other dog lives, right?Like at what, what, what about another dog? So I want two numbers here. How many pit bulls need to be neutered for the life of another dog that was horribly. Mutilated. Yeah. And how many for a toddler? And if you're just like, not, I wouldn't even neuter one pit bull for one child. Then we don't want you as a follower.I guess that's Yeah, like, you, you're, there's seriously something wrong in your ethical equations of reality, given that people neuter pit bulls all the time. Get out of my pocket! It's general population control. You can see the door, walk through it. Okay, I get you. And that's, that's entirely fair. Because I, I, I need to know how they are internally constructing this argument.Because what they do is they do, do redirect the argument. They're like, well, it's not the dog's fault. It's the owner's fault. Yeah. Or, or, well, then you should accept bully, bullies [00:37:00] XL because. They, they're docile. But then, you know, how do you differentiate? But then the question is, is then why aren't you campaigning?If you want the bully excels to be the thing, then you need a better system for determining which ones are the bully excels and you need to work on a breeding program to make them more docile and you more than anyone should want to get rid of these other pit bulls that are giving the bully excels a bad name.But you don't do this. I don't see the people defending Bully xls saying, but of course we need to neuter the other pit bulls. They're just, they, they're just trying to redirect attention. It's like, well, we need to neuter pit bulls. And they're like, well, but what about Bully xls? Yeah. Or it's, well, what about the bad owners?Or this whole thing is, I think. More largely, it reminds me of arguments around abortion. It reminds me of arguments around immigration. I think that, that we have as a society become at all. Really? No, I know. Hear me out here. I think people have come to a way of dealing with ideas where it's [00:38:00] no longer about the facts.It's about once you've established your side. Your goal is to defend your mind from any ideas that are offensive to it. And that is an outcropping of progressives. Really? Okay, why? I think that that is something that happens, however, I think that if you are talking about immigration, or you are talking about abortion, abortion, there are genuine, well intentioned people with logically sound structures for arguing on both sides of these topics.I have my own positions on these topics. But I think that there are individuals who seriously listen to all the evidence and have seriously thought through like different positions who genuinely fall on either side of this issue. I do not believe there is a single well intentioned person who has really thought through All of the arguments on the we should not neuter pitbull side of this argument.I do not think that there is a logical structure when you consider how [00:39:00] lightly neutering is treated in our society for not neutering pitbulls. And I will tell you the best argument for not neutering pitbulls. And then I will tell you why it doesn't even work. The single best argument that you can create for not neutering pitbulls is the don't take my gun argument.That is to say, Well, yes, I agree that I want a pit bull instead of another dog because of the effect that the pit bull has on my personal self identity. Right? Mm-Hmm. . Like I'm, I, I need it to be who I am is a deadly weapon. Yeah. And it may be a deadly weapon, but Americans are, should be allowed to own deadly weapons.Mm-Hmm. , right? Mm-Hmm. . And we argue that. Here's the problem. Okay? A pit bull is closer to an autonomous AI with guns set up on it. That is, that is trained to, in some instances, kill people. Do you think humans should be allowed to own kill bo, like kill drones? That. And, and I actually, I'd [00:40:00] even go so far as to say humans should be allowed to own kill drones.But I don't think they should be allowed to own kill drones that are constantly circling their house and sometimes randomly shoot people. That's where I'd be like, obviously a human should not be allowed to own that. Are you insane? Well, or, or kill drones with any any track record. of being a public safety threat, which is to say if a kill drone were to attack civilians or civilians fill a pets, obviously those would be considered extremely dangerous and unpredictable pieces of technology that would be immediately banned.And yet, when this happens with dogs, for some reason, it's not banned with, you know, intensity. You're absolutely right. Yeah. And this is a, but there's the secondary reason, which is to say, I don't defend people's right to keep guns because of how guns positively augment their self image. I defend that right for two core reasons, one is that in certain parts of America, [00:41:00] guns are necessary for self defense.If you were in an extremely rural area where it takes 30 minutes for the cops to get to your house or an hour for the cops to get to your house, you need guns. I'm sorry. Well, but also, you know, guns are sort of what prevent. Takeovers of, but that's the other core reason is that guns are a part of our checks and balances system in the United States.And people are like, no, do, do guns really help in like a drone fight? Do guns really help? Like if the U S military wanted to take over and it's like, absolutely. Yes. We, we, if you even look at like, Hamas's raid in Israel, if more of these families had been armed and the families that were armed had a very easy time fighting them off.The, the core reason they got hit so bad was just the Jewish cultural predilection to not own guns at high rates. Another really interesting thing about these raids that a lot of people don't know is the settlements that really got brutalized were not the conservative religious settlements. They were mostly spared.It was the loosey goosey. Kibbutzes that were sort of like [00:42:00] hippie nonsense. Like, let's get along with them. It was like the peace concert that ended up getting absolutely massacred where nobody had guns. It was not the groups that were like, Hey, we need to be worried about these people.We really need to, you know, be harsher in these scenarios that had to deal with, with that much bloodshed because they understood the risk and they were armed. So that's important to note as well. There are externalities to guns that don't exist with pitbulls. If you can explain to me an externality that can be resolved by a pitbull that either makes you safer as a citizen.Okay. Or that makes us safer from like a democratic standpoint. I will take that argument as well. I just haven't heard one. A pit bull is genuinely differentially not better in a military context than a Rottweiler, which already exists. Like why are you using a pit bull and not a Rottweiler if you're using it for fighting humans?Pit bulls are just toddler murder machines. They're not really useful for [00:43:00] anything else. They're useful for that in killing dogs. Horribly. Horrifically. Anyway, any other thoughts?Nope. We like dogs. We'll take dogs to space. But, yeah. We, we, we only, I think, you know what? Actually, this is very similar to our cultural viewpoint. Which is that we We ultimately support pluralism and human groups that play nice with other human groups. And if you can't play nice then we have no interest.That's actually a really good point is people wonder why we're both so pluralistic, but so quick to turn our back on any group that just attacks another group and say, okay, they lost their right to exist. But that's the way that we play more broadly. Yeah, I am okay with pluralism, but if you run out and attack your neighbors the pluralistic protection that I culturally believe that every human has a right to is immediately revoked from your group.We support human flourishing insofar as you do, you [00:44:00] are not a net drag on human flourishing.And we promote dog flourishing insofar as it is not a net drag on dog flourishing. And it would seem that pit bulls. are broadly a net drag on canine flourishing, so. Love you to death, Simone. You are so special and amazing.I love you so much. I just got a call from George. Can you call him back to see what he wanted? I'll call him. Would you mind getting the kids? Yes, and I'll bring my food down and make you some fried rice tonight with oyster sauce. Will do. An egg or no egg? Egg, please. We've got chicken for a reason. Spring onions, but no vegetables?I'd actually love it if you put in some other vegetables. I got like a frozen vegetable pack that could be good for a stir fry that would go pretty well with fried rice. Okay, I'll see what I can do there. That's what I got it for. You know, it's got like baby corn and yeah. All right, we'll give it a try.Love you. Love you, too. I'll call him.Speaker: What? It's impossible. [00:45:00] Yes. Oh my gosh, it's a heart. Wow. You can come sit with me. That was the best thing ever. Yay! Bye! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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