Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

We interview Patrick Friedman, a leading thinker on competitive governance, about his vision for decentralized societies. He explains the charter city model as a way to "upgrade" existing nations by allowing innovation in legal systems. These startup societies enable jurisdictional experimentation absent in most countries today.Patrick argues exit rights are paramount so groups can self-determine governance. He envisions charter cities as platforms where many opt-in communities with niche values/cultures can emerge. We discuss economics, recruiting celebrity founders, penal colonies, and more unorthodox concepts. Overall Patrick sees charter cities as unlocking competition to find better forms of social organization.[00:00:00] Hello. We said, we're going to get a very special episode today, which can almost be thought of as a lost interview, because it was one of the early interviews we did. Uh, but it was in a very different format than our other episodes. And so we didn't want to release it until we had a bit more of a following. It was, was Patrick Friedman who runs Pronos capital, the first venture capital fund that focuses on charter cities and network states. So when people are trying to start new countries, uh, this is the main funder of that. And Patrick Friedman, who we've known for a very long time since Silicon valley. Is the guy who would have been at the center of the seasteading movement when that was really growing. He coded at Google for 10 years, rent a small angel fund since 2, 7, 11 has degrees in CS and business and has been a leader in the competitive governance scene for over 20 years. Yeah. Leaders understatement there.He was basically he's the, what was the early charter city guy, when [00:01:00] most of the charter city movement with seasteading, which was this idea that people would go live on. Uh, sort of floating boats that would be made up of, uh, autonomous components that could like break apart and recombine. So like even your house, you could easily leave one government system and go to another government system very easily. So, uh, Some other stuff here I have 2001 began thinking about a new approach to upgrading governments. The side hustle 2008, started the sea setting Institute with funding for Peter teal, 2009. Co-created a famous phrase, a self-organizing festival on water, still running annual annually. So for if ever raises another thing, cause this is actually a really important event within. Silicon valley culture, which was seen as sort of like the rationalist slash less wrong version of burning man. Um, but it was done on boats, which honestly seems much more appealing to me. Uh, 2011 co-founded future cities development, which have had the first M. Oh you for a modern charter city in 2012 in to southern 18 started promos capital patrick [00:02:00] has board memberships and advisory positions across this charter city network state space He does talks interviews and events regularly around the world Very excited to, to bring this loss a bit of context for you and we have a few other interviews we might be able to put out this way Um so very excited about that.Simone: Hello Simone.Malcolm: It's wonderful to be here with you today. And Patrick Friedman. Patrick Friedman, he is and has been for a long time, known as one of the most preeminent thinkers of what. Future cities may look like what future society may look like. And given that we've been talking so much about the future of the world economy and the future of what human civilization may look like in ways that are very orthogonal to the way people think about civilization today, we are so excited to have him on.Malcolm: I would love you to give a bit more of your background if you think as any is necessary. And the first question I will prompt you is, is has [00:03:00] any of your thinking around what future human cities may look like? Changed with the rapid development of AI and the movement of AI into the public sphere? Or had you, were you such a forward thinking, you alreadyPatri: accounted for all of this?Patri: Well, nobody can know the timing of something like ai, but I think of it as being like somewhat orthogonal. Like, I have serious concerns about AI risk, but like, that's not my path, right? I have my part of the world order that I try to make better. And yeah, I think it's like really hard to predict what AI will do, but definitely now is the time when it's starting to do something.Patri: So we'll find out. Okay. So when you thinkMalcolm: about how cities are gonna change, what is your sort of go-to talking points right now?Patri: Well, so I'm, I'm interested in New city states it's kind of my life's mission to make it so that we can start new countries, like we start companies today. And at this kind of halfway point, after 20 some years of working on [00:04:00] it what it looks like is what are called charter cities.Patri: Charter cities have regulatory authority over some parts of the law while being under a country's sovereignty. And so I'm very interested in the way that that cities using new governance systems. Can be a way to kind of upgrade a country, right? Because the alternative, a lot of countries have old laws, maybe like relics of some mishmash of like pre colonialism, colonialism, post-colonialism.Patri: Often the courts aren't great, but it's really hard to reform a whole country at once, right? I mean, you can't make huge changes the legal system of the whole country at once. And you shouldn't, right? You shouldn't change it on top of a bunch of people. But what this has meant so far is like very little innovation in government.Patri: No, like sandboxes as we say in software engineering. No ways to test out new things. And that's what's really missing. And the genius of the Charter City idea is it says, Hey, wait. If we start with empty [00:05:00] land and then put a significantly different legal system there and people are opting into it, now we can make much bigger changes and test things out.Patri: And also it's a way of kind of, Creating a bubble with like a different culture and having people like opt in and acculturate it in time. So that's really different about it and I think that definitely the city state. I mean, look, the best run country in the world right now is Singapore, which is a city state.Patri: It seems like cities are like kind of like big enough to matter and potentially be independent while like small enough to be responsive to their citizens or customers. As I like to say, one of my main generative metaphors is looking at governments like businesses and thinking about the governing industry.Patri: That's all the countries in the world and citizens or customers who pay taxes and other fees and get some package of governance services and are kind of like shopping for the place that gives them the best deal. [00:06:00] Yeah.Malcolm: One of the things I love about what you're saying, and it's something that we often bring up, is really government hasn't been experimented with that much in a long time.Malcolm: Like there haven't been major innovations. And the last big one was when America was formed. And the reason you had that innovation is because right before that period you basically had a flourishing of steady states, which were the American colonies, combining European governments with Native American governments, which had evolved down completely different trajectories.Malcolm: And since then we haven't had isolated scenarios where people could, in lower risk environments, experiment with totally new government structures, which it sounds like is what you're trying to enable as you enable that. What are some of the new governance ideas you find mostPatri: interesting? Yeah, I, I definitely agree that the, the industry standard right now, the best practice is constitutional representative democracy.Patri: Mm-hmm. But as you say, that's 1787. I think it was also, I mean, it being a frontier was [00:07:00] important. Also the philosophical flourishing around that time around freedom and equality was very much rooted in the enlightenment. And I think a lot of people don't know that the Europeans, they considered America crazy.Patri: Like they seriously were like, this is insane, like this, like this democracy. Like it's insane and it's never gonna work. Like the American experiment they called it. So it, it was radical at the time. Now it's the industry standard, but it's gotten, it's gotten really out of date. And there's some people who, who just kind of assume that the status quo is the best that there is and only think about small changes.Patri: But like, come on. We've learned so much about science, about mechanism design. We have all of this new technology. Like there is no way that the optimal form of government is still exactly the same as it was 200 plus years ago. It's funny you ask about what forms I actually, these days, kind of like, I don't like to answer that question or hold strong opinions because for me, I got into this because there wasn't a country that [00:08:00] was values aligned and run well.Patri: Right? Those two things, there are almost none run well, none that were values aligned with me as a libertarian. And so I was like, what's going on? Why is this? And like, and and, and how can I fix it? Yeah. And so that kind of like sucked and I wanted to investigate it, but what I realized along the way is like, hey, what is the reason that there's not a country for any niche group mm-hmm.Patri: Is that we don't have ways to start new countries for smaller groups of people. And that what I needed to do to get what I wanted was to figure out a way to unlock the creation of new jurisdictions in the world. And then I realized like, wait a second. Like that's gonna let lots of other people with their own idea of a good civilization try it.Patri: And as far as the approach to like actually engineering a good society, like some people like think that if you agree on morals, you can like create a legal system. That's just, it's not true. We have a whole field of law and economics that like, there's no way, it's in the same way that like I could write [00:09:00] on a piece of paper like, yo, I want a car that goes zero to 60 in 1.1 seconds gets the infinity miles to the gallon and nobody ever dies in a crashes.Patri: Like a specification is not an engineering plan. And it's the same way for government. And so, I realized that the thing I needed to do to have what I want would actually work, even if I'm wrong, about what makes a good society and even if I'm wrong, about how to build it. And so for, I don't know, maybe 18 years or so since coming up with kind of those theories, my focus is how can I unlock it so that groups of people can start new jurisdictions?Patri: I'm trying to create a startup sector, right, to unlock competition and innovation. And it's not, it's not on me to say what those systems are. I mean, I, I'd be interested in seeing some variant of the terribly named a narco capitalism, the system. My dad was kind of a co-inventor of tried out but that's, that's just sort of a, a, a personal thing in general.Patri: The one [00:10:00] thing, the one criteria that I, that I care about for all of these is, is exit. And the reason is that, If you know that people can freely leave, then you kind of don't have to worry about anything else. Not, not quite exactly, but in terms of what are the internal laws? Is it what I think is right and wrong?Patri: All of that stuff. If you let people freely choose it, maybe there's like, maybe there's the option to have like death matches, right? And like just go at each other with chainsaws or cars or whatever. And like, people do it because like the money they get paid is gonna make a huge difference to their family and like elevate them, like whatever, like not my problem, right?Patri: What matters is that people can choose it. So a place where like people weren't allowed to visit, media wasn't allowed to visit, family wasn't allowed to visit, or where people couldn't leave. That I would consider not. Okay. Yeah. And, and [00:11:00] support intervention. And obviously like there's corner cases, right?Patri: Mm-hmm. Like, you don't wanna allow, probably allow zero jail time, right? What if somebody like runs up debts? Like, I'm not saying anybody needs to be able to quit on a moment's notice, but I would wanna keep things like that. Indentured servitude, like anything that prevents people leaving. If someone wants to indenture servitude for five years and they've like, gotten to see what things are like, fine.Patri: But like 20 years, like, no. Yeah.Malcolm: I, I, one thing I wanted to add color on that you were saying that I think is a point that a lot of people miss about the sort of default system of government we use today, which is typically a copy of the American model, is that the American model isn't even really a working model.Malcolm: It's a model that collapsed into a stable state, but it's not working the way it was intended to work. Like early on it was created to like prevent a party system and stuff like that. And it's more just like, well, it doesn't completely collapse and it's better than the last system, but there is just so much room for improvement, which is what I love about what you're doing here.Malcolm: Another area that [00:12:00] I wanted to. Before we get into free moving stuff, cause I really wanna get into that, I think that's interesting. But just at the beginning of the prenatal stuff, we'll get more into it later, but I think a lot of people would hear what he's saying and they're like, why would a government seed control for one of these charter cities?Malcolm: And, and I want to get to your thoughts on this, but one thing that we've seen was in our government work, it's a lot of governments when they're talking about their rural areas, so if you're talking about a government with like a lot of small islands and stuff like that, beautiful idyllic places they have this fear of like, these places, they're depopulating because people, you have this massive urbanization and so they are willing to try radical things to try to bring vitality back into some of their areas.Malcolm: I'm wondering what motivations you havePatri: seen. I'm kind of on the other side of that in the sense that like, like, yay urbanization. If people need to move anyway, if new cities need to be built anyway then they can have regulatory autonomy. I think I would just worry like if there are strong, [00:13:00] like look, there are really strong economic forces pushing the world to urbanize and I would just be really wary about trying to fight that kind of uphill battle.Patri: Mm-hmm. I mean, if there's innovative regulations that will help. Sure. But like I'm trying to fight the downhill battle of like, if you bring in the current best practices, then that is gonna be a huge boost to the city. Right. I believe that like effective governance, honest courts that act quickly, best practice laws that just boosts everything about a city and like makes the growth run downhill.Patri: So thisMalcolm: is a really interesting question then to me. How do you make that argument to an existing country? Because my concern would be if I was coming to a country and I was saying, loosen the regulations and make one of your existing cities, one of your existing wealth sinners have,Patri: have looser regulations.Patri: No, no, no, no. I don't change laws on top of people. That's wrong. Okay. Like maybe in the future, if there's a system that's really proven, that's gone for a [00:14:00] while and a group of people has some really, they vote like 90% to adopt it. Like, okay, but for now, no. It needs to be opt in.Malcolm: So it's about creating land that new cities can be built on.Patri: Sort of no. Why, why would you? We got a world full of land, dude. There's lots of authentic, that's what I where I'm having trouble. It's about building a new city, an empty land. And, and for the government generally it's the motivation is just straightforwardly economic to get foreign direct investment to create jobs and to increase income.Patri: Like that's the main thing. There, there are sometimes countries are, are interested in the sandbox aspect or even the fact that it's kind of, that it's kind of new and cool. But in the vast majority it's, it's economic development.Malcolm: Economic development. Okay. That, that's fascinating. So, this is where I want to prime you with our thoughts on this and hear what you, where you think things are going.Malcolm: So one of the things that we often focus on is in the developed world, or most of the developed world, [00:15:00] and, and, and not, it's not just the developed world, it's also the developing world. So, you have a fertility perhaps, and when I say most of the developing world as of 2019 by the UN zone statistics, All of Central America, south America and the Caribbean collectively fell below population rate.Malcolm: And we live in an economy that requires constant, that was built on the assumption of constant growth. And there's a lot of stuff that we can get into in this. In other podcasts, like debt instruments that require constant growth are social security systems that require constant growth or marketplaces that require constant growth.Malcolm: But as the world begins to enter a state where, and, and we had an economy that grew on average over the past 300 years because the number of workers were growing exponentially, and the productivity per worker was growing linearly, and we begin to see the number of workers declining exponentially, we're going to start to see economies decline on average, the world economy decline on average, which means we're entering a very interesting economic time where the only safe places to [00:16:00] invest will be the places with.Malcolm: Technophilic populations that have high fertility rates,Patri: but NigeriaMalcolm: Woo. Right. But since Exactly. Yeah. None of the countries have figured this out yet. What are your thoughts? How does this work for the cities you economic and,Simone: sorry, Malcolm, we have to, did you see him pixelate? Yeah. Yeah. Malcolm, you have to.Simone: Okay. Well, we'll justPatri: focusMalcolm: on the first question. The second question I'll ask later is, how does this relate to freedom of movement at an intergenerational and cultural level? But, we'll, we'll ask that separately. SoPatri: here's where we're starting. So I'm, I'm totally with you. I'm a hundred percent with you on the fertility collapse and the problems.Patri: I think maybe the only thing I, I'm not sure I agree with is whether GDP will go down. Certainly I don't think per capita GDP will go down, and I suppose it's a question for like total GDP of productivity increases versus population decline. But I agree, I'm like super worried about it.[00:17:00] I think it's a huge, huge problem, like a ticking time bomb.Patri: And I think what a lot of people don't understand, because most people just have zero sum thinking intuitively, right? Positive sum, just positive sum is a much, much more evolutionary novel thing. So of course, we're like less adaptive to think about it and for population people think about the fact that more people means we're sharing more fixed resources.Patri: But the thing is very, very little of our economy consists of fixed resources. Almost none of it does. And the vast majority of humans are able to create more than they consume and that they're actually like kind of economies of scale or benefits in a large population I'll give too. First is evolution actually happens faster.Patri: Most people don't get this, but twice as many people means twice as many mutations. Means double the chance of finding beneficial mutations. So a larger population actually speeds up the evolution, which is super interesting. It's one reason that we've adapted as much to agriculture as we have, even though we're not totally adapted.Patri: And the [00:18:00] other thing is ideas. Like most of the economy consists of ideas twice as many people, as twice as many ideas and ideas are, basically free to replicate. One person thinks them and everybody benefits from them. And so like more population is, is good. And then in terms of like meaning, like more resources to throw at the, the huge problems like settling other planets so that we're like less vulnerable to a certain set of natural disasters.Patri: Also benefits as well. And so, yeah. And the fact that like all the existing systems are based on like a different demographic pyramid and they're all gonna break. Like, I gotta say, I got mixed feelings about that. Yeah. Like, maybe they should break. And like that, that's what the math says.Patri: So, yeah. I, I, I really worry about this, this, this fertility stuff.Malcolm: Yeah. What I'd love you to pontificate on further is when I look around the world, the countries that seem to have this fixed the most are countries [00:19:00] with a. Ethnically and culturally diverse population, but with a population that has a strong sense of cultural identity.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So the, the most clear example here would be Israel whereas the, the counter example would be countries with an e ethnically and, and culturally homogenous pop population like Korea, which typically have the lowest fertility rates. So one, I think charter cities naturally lend themselves to diverse populations, but how do you create the sense of identity or do you even think that's necessary to maintain a high fertility rate?Malcolm: And how do you think about culture building as it relates to creating these newPatri: sorts of entities? I mean, it's been a while since I've looked into this, but it, it's, it's my impression that. You know that, that a huge amount of the fertility rate relates to education, length of education, women getting educated and women as equal partners in society, which [00:20:00] kind of sucks because what I want is a world where women have all of those things and we're making enough babies.Patri: And so, that makes the solution tough. And so places like, Africa and India are gonna be a, like a massive percent of the world's population. But like, is that gonna last most likely with the pattern we've seen as they move up the income ladder and become more like westernized or, when it's the whole world, it's more just like developed that their fertility rates will probably plummet too.Patri: In terms of like charter cities I think that. There's some countries that have tried prenatal policies, that there's various things that you can do. And having more jurisdictional experimentation means that more different groups are trying more different things, whether it's different laws or policies, whether it's a different culture Right.Patri: Or building communities differently. Right. Like, I mean, come on. Like, like the, the suburban America thing or the [00:21:00] urban Dangerous America thing, right? Like the best way to run to, to like raise kids is for them to be able to like run around and play with other kids. And that makes it easier for the parents.Patri: Like we're doing it all wrong, as in like Brian Kaplan's book. So I think there's a lot of things that communities can, can experiment with. I mean, I'm moving to Austin imminently and I'm talking to various people who have communities where they live in proximity to, to decide where to live.Simone: Well. Okay. That's really interesting. Yeah. Can I ask you a question? Please. Yeah, so I mean, I'll say I personally struggle with the idea of of city states or charter cities because we constantly see people complain about wanting to start or have communities or like live somewhere where it's really cool, but then very few people are willing to move or they want to go to where everyone already is and it's really hard to get that critical mass.Simone: Yeah. And, and it's interesting, you see cities like Austin start to form because that's where everyone already is. I don't, I don't know of any [00:22:00] example where someone has seated that, like Austin was already like the cool city of Texas. Yeah. And then there were a bunch of sort of tax incentives that got all the tech people to go to Austin because it was like the one Okay.Simone: City, like from a like sort of progressive standpoint in a tax advantaged state, I also is city RedPatri: State. That's the formula. Yeah.Simone: Right. And, and so, I mean, I, I get that Charter Cities could possibly game that formula and that other cities have done that as like tax savings internationally, but. In the end, I feel like I get this impression that people are more living in like tech-based spheres, where like there isn't necessarily a, a one city where they go to, but it's like sort of social graphs that tend to be governed by the same social laws and work in the same like investment spheres and kind of live off their own floating economies.Simone: But they're like cloud economies. They're not anchored to any place. And the only way that to me, I feel like a charter city would really pick up or get off the ground is for an industry, like [00:23:00] let's say with repro tech, we're talking about, well, it kind of sucks that you can't have like really high levels of education and, and female workforce participation and.Patri: But if you had the uterine replicator Exactly.Simone: It's gotta help. If you had like a charter city that was like built around. Yeah. Like, genetically modify people to high heaven, like artificial wounds all the way, like zero ethics boards, like letter rip. I, I do feel like some communities can build around that, but I, I've never heard charter cities discussed.Simone: As like tech hubs or as like regulatory free for all zones in a like really groundbreaking way. Like maybe they'll be like, oh yeah, well, like, we'll be okay with crypto regulation. Are there any examples of charter cities or plans for charter cities that are like really like. Violently different, or even like, like thunderdome, like you were kind describing like yeah, we get a gladiatorialPatri: battles ethnicity.Patri: Don't that word violent, like, I mean, look, there is one charter [00:24:00] city, Honduras Prospera. There is one. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And their, their, and their legal system is English, common law based. Mm-hmm. Drawing from the best jurisdictions around the world. I think they took Texas mortgage law and Delaware corporate law.Patri: Right, right. And put together. But the way I see it is that what I'm in this for is for people to try radical new systems and find the next best thing eventually, right. But product market fit today. It's just bringing best practices and honest sufficient courts to new places, right? That's product market fit.Patri: Not because there's not gonna be experimentation, but because this stuff is brand new and we haven't kind of proven ourselves. And I think like crypto is the place where the governance innovation is really happening right now. Mm-hmm. Because it's so much easier in the cloud. And so I think that those tools and governance systems will be there to draw on when people want to wanna create more radical things.Patri: In terms of what you said about the population, yeah. We call that the cold start problem. It's one of the top [00:25:00] couple. Problems that any charter city startup faces, right? Is people wanna move where people are and how do you get them to move? And, we have a few answers. So, like, apologies, network state concept.Patri: Mm-hmm. Or you can look at what Praxis is doing is the idea of recruiting a values aligned community online who get together in meetups and build social bonds with the intention of moving together. Mm-hmm. Now, until one of these has, has happened, we won't really know will those people move.Patri: But I, I think if you get a. If you get to the degree to which there are like compact social graphs, right? Where people mainly have connections within a given set of people. Mm-hmm. Who can work, work remotely or are in the same industry. I think the idea is, and it has to be a set of those people who would want to move someplace and live under a new regulatory system.Patri: And that may sound like a lot, but we're talking about kind of like [00:26:00] the entire population of the world, the entire like nomad population of the world to just find some of these connected graphs where it's like, hey, if this, if like the thousand people closest to me in a social graph, like all moved someplace and look, we're not talking about like the middle of the ocean anymore.Patri: Like Honduras, Prospera is on Roton, right? An island which has a bunch of tourist stuff in an airport. Praxis is looking at some countries around the Mediterranean that have like lots of stuff going on. So it's not just those thousand people. But you know, I, I think that we have a shot.Patri: I mean, look at this Zulu thing that I just got back from a few weeks ago. This was this pop-up village in Monte Negro where 200 people rented out a whole resort for two months and then there was about 300 visitors that came through like me over the course of those two months. Vitalik Budin was one of the kind of main forces behind it, and it was awesome.Patri: People loved it. Lots of people are like, how do I come next year? So this was like a group of people [00:27:00] into longevity and crypto and network states, two cities who all got together. And I think that to me, What was so exciting about it was not just that it worked this one time for this one vertical, but there are a ton of different nomad verticals and there's no reason this couldn't work for all of them.Patri: So just any vertical again, where there's a pretty compact, like highly connected social graph you, you can start doing these things and having people like get together in person for longer stretches of time and maybe have that location move over time. And then as there's that in-person bonding, I think it's natural to open permanent sites.Patri: Zulu is already thinking about this. We had a bunch of conversations about what kind of jurisdictions to look at. Cuz one of their criteria is, and this works for Monte Negro as being someplace where the government is open to talking about changing regulations. I mean longevity regulations and the crypto regulations were presented to the head of state during Zulu and they're looking at other [00:28:00] countries like that for, for the future.Patri: So I think that you could just do this bond more and more, have this happen more each year, have it grow more, and then have permanent settlements and whether people float between them or stay in them, it's kind of up to the people. WhatMalcolm: are your thoughts on Simon? I can interrupt you here just, just for your heads up, Simone.Malcolm: We were invited to Zulu and with Praxis, the Collins Institute does have a contract with them to provide their education system. So we're, we've been very involved with a lot of this stuff and, and I think it may look like we're just total outsiders to the space, but it is something we've been very interested in.Malcolm: And the core thing that we were looking at was praxis that I found really interesting that I wanted to get your pontification on, is how do you build holidays? How do you build culture for New City states to create a sense of identity? And what do good state holidays look like if you're them from scratch?Malcolm: And do you think that they're necessary?Patri: Yeah, I mean, I think [00:29:00] again, I'm I'm very meta I've like worked to find what I think is the highest point of leverage. And so in terms of like the design of a society for like common culture and values I, I don't get into the specifics of that, but what I will say is in, in like our greatest bottleneck is founders.Patri: Like I, I've stopped. I don't follow up on leads to countries anymore cause I have way more countries interested in talking than I have founders. Wow. And it's been like that for, for a couple of years, that things have really changed. And I, so I often get asked like, what do I look for in a founder? And obviously the first thing is all of the same things as everyone else.Patri: But the second thing I used to say, some real estate experience and I totally changed my mind. I think that was just wrong. I think that that's something more of a commodity can be hired. My like, One specific, or first specific thing now is community building experience and then the, the last one is like, connections with a given country or [00:30:00] region or like really strong partnership building ability to create them because a, a charter city is like a, a partnership with a single like key stakeholder.Patri: But that community building side like that, that is a key skill that's needed because these things, whether it's an online community or the first in person community, they are small communities. And so people who are good at that, what is the experience design for a country like and who think about things like songs and holidays and things like that, I think is a really important part of this.Patri: So Simone,Malcolm: what were you gonna askSimone: as a solution to the Coldstar problem? What are your thoughts on like company town 2.0 where a company like Google or Amazon or anyone with sufficient funds who's also bringing in a lot of talent and possibly tax revenue approaches a nation or even a state in the United States and says, Hey, allow us to create a city, allow us to create our own laws or have these sorts of allowances [00:31:00] and bring in people and own their housing, and own their, their restaurants and everything.Simone: A lot of people describe company towns as being very dystopian, but it also seems like it could be a quick solution to the Cold Start problem. Do you feel like there are serious problems with it?Patri: Well, I mean, first of all, it's good because it's more cyberpunk and, the cyberpunk future is, is part of what I'm, what I'm here for.Patri: Yeah, sign me up. I think it's great. No, I think I, I think you're very on point. I think it's a great solution to the Coldstar problem. Again, like people need to be able to exit. Like I don't worry about a company town so much, if it's Google Engineers, right? Like, They're not going to, they're not gonna like be in a situation where like they're getting charged more than they're getting paid in salary or any of that.Patri: Like, terrible crap that happened in company towns, right? Like they'll just go to Facebook or whatever. Yeah. So I, I think it's great. It's a great idea. Yeah. And we'll, and we'll just see whether they go for it. SoMalcolm: there's a great story here I have to tell. So WeWork at one point decided to try to create [00:32:00] like a their own building complex, right?Malcolm: That was like WeWork branded, like live and work, right? And they initially had planned to make it like a company tone, like they were going to stock it with their own employees, but they were so disorganized that right before launch they realized that they paid almost none of their employees enough to afford it.Malcolm: So they ended up having to desperately find other people to fill it. And I think that follows your point there where if you're doing a company town like this, make sure you're not building it for the CEO's salary, you're building it for your employee'sPatri: salary. Yeah, I mean, I think that effective organizations are just gonna solve that automatically.Patri: Like you only need like one competent project manager to make sure that doesn't happen. But yeah, I mean, one way of, one way of generalizing, cuz I'm sorry, I'm, I'm relentlessly meta, actually, I'm not sorry that I'm relentlessly meta the company town. Idea is, is saying that like, if you can get a, like a set of [00:33:00] people who all have like shared economic activity and like shared culture such that socializing with each other is valuable and like an existing community, like, this is what's, what's different.Patri: And like one, it's like not happening yet, right? Because these ideas are so new. But it's, it's my opinion that, not the first ones, but that the first really big. Charter cities that happen will be drawn from like large existing communities. So for example I worked a little bit on a concept to make an eSports city, right?Patri: Like for gamers where it's like, yes you have like a huge eSports stadium where you might see your favorite streamer having coffee or at a restaurant where people would move to. From, for, from the, my investment perspective, I was mainly stuck on, I just didn't see any like, regulatory things.Patri: I was like, well, maybe legalization of betting on them or something, but there's not really regulations needed. But, even though governance change is my focus, like the broader [00:34:00] sta space of these new communities, what I call sovereign communities is it can be value aligned or culture aligned or based on like a lifestyle thing, having different education system.Patri: So I kind of consider the work I do on governance to be in this broader space of any group of people who get together to live in person. With some differences from the rest of society, some parts of the Civilizational Text Act that they wanna rewrite. And so I think that drawing from big existing communities like eSports or like Oprah, like I think celebrity c like Oprah City, Tony Robinson.Patri: Oh, yes, yes. I don't know. I would consider living in those places, people who have like huge audiences and have opinions about health and wellness and how to live a good life.MarthaSimone: Stewarttown, that's forPatri: me. I, I, I had the, I had the pleasure of having dinner with her actually in South South Korea like some years ago.Patri: And she's amazing. I think she is. I think yeah, I think those will be like, we have to prove the concept. We weirdos. But then I think it's gonna be stuff like that. [00:35:00] Yeah. SoMalcolm: here what he's saying, a lot of people may think this is an insane concept, but if you look at the early city states that made up the Americas, a number of them were essentially celebrity colonies, where they were based around a celebrity peer preacher who often had interesting ideas about Brigham Young, well, Brigham Young.Malcolm: It's an example of a celebrity city state, but that's not America.Patri: Right.Malcolm: That's more a religious city state. What I'm talking about is celebrity protestant preachers who would've been seen as just another person within their faction, but then had interesting ideas about things like diet and stuff like that.Malcolm: Very similar to your modern celebrity. Did KelloggSimone: create something like a No, he just, early America,Malcolm: that was about a hundredSimone: years, I think. Yeah. That, that was really late year.Patri: It was small, but in the baby. Yeah. That's awesome. I didn't, I didn't know about the, the preachers having lifestyle stuff. I mean, obviously, religions have a lot of lifestyle stuff in them, but you know, it's very old and immutable.Patri: Yeah. I mean, it [00:36:00] wasn't confSimone: confus. What is Confucius if he is not a lifestyle brand, what if, what is Jesus, if not a lifestyle brand? Let's, I've actuallyPatri: been getting, by the way, I've been getting into the Jesus lifestyle brand lately.Simone: Yes. Well, I mean, you got the long hair going, youPatri: know this. Yeah. I, I've been, I, there's this This Christian preacher, I really like John Mark Comer.Patri: Mm-hmm. I, I got into him because he has videos on, on the Sabbath, so, bringing Shabbat to Christians because it's one of the 10 commandments that was kept. Like, it's not one of the like two or three that changed, but it's kind of mostly ignored and he's into kind of slowing down and, and, and minimalism and the, the Sabbath is one of his, his practices.Patri: But he, he has a recent book called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry because hurry is a profound enemy to spiritual life. And I learned like these awesome points about how like Jesus literally says Hey, I have an easy life. If you want an easy life, come with me. Listen to me, follow my [00:37:00] principles, and do the stuff that I do.Patri: But yet, Christian churches have gone so far from that. They're not teaching people to like to live like Jesus. There's some little principles from there that they teach, but it's like, it's this whole different thing. And like Jesus was very clear, if you want to, like, if you wanna be like me, live like me, right?Patri: Mm-hmm. It wasn't just about like, listen to my sermons, it was about a different way to live. One that we've very much gone away from in the modern day. And so there's this like much smaller subset of like Christian religious authorities today who actually like put this viewpoint forward and think that the church has kind of lost its way and that it should be saying.Patri: And but the problem is that living like Jesus is. It's really hard. It's really hard in the minor world. Maybe it could be done better in a community dedicated toSimone: it. I dunno, actually, I'm just gonna say, like, we don't peoplePatri: that cross this here much anymore. The pointMalcolm: have you seen, because [00:38:00] I actually think it would work really well if you're talking about intergenerationally durable cultures and stuff like that.Malcolm: And as a good recruitment mechanism. Any celebrity preachers or anything, has the Charter City community reached out to any of them about starting potentially a religiously themed charter community?Patri: No, but it's a, it's a great idea cuz it's just a classic community seed. I think we, we've talked to some, the closest is talking to some.Patri: Like very, very large musicians in Africa who have kind of a big following, for like, both their music, but it's like, it's, it's more than that in Africa. Yeah. These huge artists, there's also like a, a, a culture aspect too, but it's a great idea.Simone: Sweet. Okay. I wanna take us from utopia lifestyle brand cities, which sound really cool to another form of city state that also addresses a major, we'll say wicked problem which is [00:39:00] penal colonies.Simone: So you talk a, talk about in the beginning of this, the, value of being able to get away. But I, I do think that, there's, there's this growing concern about crime in cities. Some nations are like, well, just. Screw it. Let's like round up all the criminals, put 'em in jail. What are you pitching here,Malcolm: Simone?Malcolm: Well, I'm just wondering,Patri: like, I dunno, but it's gonna be awesome.Simone: I, everyone wants to like, create these solutions. I'm like company towns that own people, penal colonies, make it happen. But I mean, I, one of the things that we're really, interested in is, recidivism and, and people concerned about crime in cities and, also like, it, it really sucks and it seems really stupid to me that you just lock someone away and that, that costs a lot to people For sure.Simone: When instead, like, if this is about removing people from a society where it's not working for them, would it be possible to build a society where it does work for them or where at least they're not hurting? I wanna reword. That's an,Malcolm: that's anPatri: insane idea. I mean, it's, it's not like Australia is like a functioning modern country.Patri: ISimone: [00:40:00] know. It's not like that. I mean, come on.Malcolm: So think about how many problems it solves. So one states, it costs them a lot of money to to house an incarcerated population. They do have a recidivism problem. They would likely be willing to pay for some external entity to take. The, this population, especially if it was being handled in a humane manner or more of a humane manner than their existingPatri: prison system.Patri: It could even be opt-in and you could opt in. Yeah, opt in. Like I think it's really tricky. You have to be careful, like I said, like the right to exit to me is like the thing that kind of makes it so that we don't worry about other things. If it was opt-in, then, then sure. But look, so, so my, one of the things my dad does is study lots of different legal systems across the ages.Patri: He has a book, legal system's, very different from ours and banishment. Was a very traditional punishment, right? Because it is very expensive to keep people in jail through much of history. It wasn't done except for very important prisoners or for like shorter periods of time. And so I think banishment is [00:41:00] like a fair and effective solution.Patri: Like a society should be able to decide who's in there and who isn't as far as like crime and cities. I mean, I really think it's ineffective governments without incentives. Like I don't think a privately run city that makes its money from rents and taxes. Like that's just, that's not gonna happen.Patri: Mm-hmm. And by the way, like as a little, I used to be so against taxes, and now I'm like, wait, if, if you have an entity, like a, a for-profit company, like creating gdp, then like having an like taxes or just there's like a rev share. Yeah, it's like they have an equity share. If you're taking like seven and a half percent taxes, not a random number because that's what you need in the O C D to not be able to tax haven Uhhuh.Patri: It's like you have a seven and a half percent equity share of the economy, which you're doing work to create. It kind of makes all the sense in the world. But yeah, I agree. Like again, if you're, if you're like a profit maximizing. Company that's trying to like, make money by making a great place to live and work that people wanna come [00:42:00] to that's growing where people's incomes are increasing that, that's the incentive.Patri: Then something expensive like incarceration. Like it just, it's just very unlikely to be the best solution, right? Like, it's just mm-hmm. Very, very costly. And there's, maybe circumstances where it's the best thing, but you know, probably not. Right. There's, there's gotta be other, other mechanisms.Patri: Yeah. I don't know, maybe if you don't wanna vanish, people can kind of be in society for a period of time in like, a certain like limited area where there's more security and protections from them leaving. Yeah. But they can actually like work, right? Yeah. Like, yeah, that's, I mean, I feel productive enough to pay for the housing.Patri: There's an old Highland story, which is like a, like utopia, whole utopia society. And there's this one place where like they send the people who break the rulesSimone: timeout zone. Well, I, I feel like for many people who end up going to jail, it, it's, it's also for dumb reasons, it's for be, it's because society just hasn't worked for them.Simone: So I,Patri: I'm really intrigued by, well, I usually have way too many laws. I mean, there's [00:43:00] still a lot of reasons. Yeah. And so if there wereSimone: like an optin option for like, all right, you know what, like if you want, a road warrior society where you're just gonna be super violent or if you just want like drug society where like, whatever goes, like it's, it's all for you.Simone: Like, if people could opt into that, you might actually get really interesting innovation. You might actually get a. People for whom mainstream society or whatever society, they, these are customers. They're customers, right? Yeah.Patri: People who you banish Yeah. Are like, I mean, sure. You're saying this person is not a, is like a negative value customer for me.Patri: Yeah. And that means that they'll probably be a negative value customer for a lot of places. Yeah. But they're potential customers and so I mean, imagine, imagine this society that can like evolve to take those people in and make them productive. Less of a negative money from doing it. It's an unserved market niche.Malcolm: Yeah, once you get a critical mass of them, it makes sense for systems to develop, to make a negative value customer. A positive value customer.Simone: Yes, exactly. So, so here's the scenario, like, here's one that would be really cool. So let's say that there's like lots of [00:44:00] violent offenders and like just societies that work for them.Simone: Like, oh, they're inces, actual underdo. So no, no, no. What if we created like modern Sparta where like there was this warrior, mercenary state that made money. It's like a corporate town. It makes money by selling out. It's, it's armies. It's mercenaries. Mercenaries. It's a lack group city. And it has like, yeah, but also like, it has like, prostitution servicePatri: love so much.Patri: Blackwater Inmate City. Yeah. Like, well, no, it's, it's like,Simone: it's, well it's, it's, it's Warrior City, so they have their prostitutes, they have like, great services training ev, it's Superman. It's like the Bronze Age mindset Heaven. And then they like go and they like raidMalcolm: tors for like international television in the city.Malcolm: And people think, well, ISimone: mean that's more like for show. I'm talking like mercenaries for k, mercenaries for hug. Yeah. When a lot of people talk about civilization falling apart and also when you consider, yeah. I mean, honestly, for many other nations, aside from the United States, they cannot come close to our military spending.Simone: They can't, they can't hold standing armies like that. They can't train [00:45:00] soldiers. They can't afford it. Imagine the business opportunity for someone who figures out how to train incredibly skilled mercenary soldiers. People specialized in drone AI-based warfare, but also like on the ground combat strategic assassination.Simone: I mean, talk about a really cool penalMalcolm: company, right, Simone? Is that it would have so much culture to it. It would be so freaking cool.Patri: Gated was the it.Simone: Oh, did the team Malcolm, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Ooh, welcome. Okay, ready? Are, are you back? Try to say something. I think so. Okay. Now, now you can say whatever you think is fine.Simone: What I loveMalcolm: about this idea is because since you're creating this place with such a sense of identity and what it means to be a member, that people would feel that it would have this cultural ideal of, yeah, this is who we are. And that's what I love about these models that are built with a goal. It reminds me of the one that you and I have been [00:46:00] noodling on for a while.Malcolm: So we have this city state idea that we've really wanted to put together, which was essentially one in the far north. So in an environment where every day is like harsh, it's similar to fo Frost Punk. I don't know if anyone's ever played the game, but that aesthetic, which I really love but but then base it around genetic technology and rro tech technology.Malcolm: So you have an industry base there, which is artificial wounds, genetic engineering of humans, all of the stuff that you can't reliably do in other countries, or it wouldn't make sense to set up o organizations in other countries. Basically, I'm trying to create the Caminos from Star Wars, but in an actual city.Malcolm: But I think within many of these cities where you can create this sense of intergenerational identity is by basing them around something you can't do in any existing country. I was wondering if you had any ideas toPatri: that extent, Patrick. Yeah, I mean, Just briefly to close up on, on, on inmate Sparta.Patri: Yeah. Yes. One thing about it is [00:47:00] that it's a very proven model, right? I mean, not just Sparta, but it's been traditional throughout history for like young men who are troublesome or aggressive to go into the military. It's like a way of making use of that type of people in a way that is pro-social, that benefits the society, but the world has gotten much more peaceful, right?Patri: And so there's being a cop, but that's mainly about doing paperwork, unfortunately. And so it's kind of something that's, that's missing and we like put, it used to be that you would sometimes have the option to like go to jail or get banished or have some strong punishment or enlist in the military.Patri: Yes. And like, we put people in jail and like don't give them the option. So I think what's like, that's part of what's, what's. I dunno, compelling about the idea is it's actually like a thousands of years long proven model, proven model, product market fit. Yeah. As far as like frost punk, I guess I worry that it's very [00:48:00] uphill, like dealing with a harsh environment.Patri: This is like, I looked at the ocean for a long time when there are things about it that are necessary and make it worth it. Like sure. But dealing with a harsh, like you don't have to go to a harsh environment in order to like have regulatory freedom and like, it's not like there's no land unclaimed, like there's freaking oil and gas in the Arctic Circle.Patri: It is claimed and defended like Russia and Canada will go after you. And so yeah, I mean I think that like it's a cool idea for a city, but. But it's, it's notMalcolm: about the regulatory aspect. It's, I wanted a city state where you had an opt-in model where people had to suffer to join in some way, because I don't feel like that really exists within modern city states.Malcolm: And I thought that could create a form of identity. ButSimone: I dunno what your thoughts about, in other words, he, he wants a city in which, a city state in which there are selective pressures that force onlyPatri: the,Malcolm: yeah. Early American cities did this.Patri: I mean, I understand like Burning Man, I, I started going to Burning Man in like [00:49:00] 99.Patri: Like, it, the fact that it was so hard was this like really strong screener for people who are really, really interested in kind of the easier it got over time. The more people who are kind of there to like, consume instead of producing. So like, it's, it's a real thing, but like, again, there have to be, there was big benefits to them doing it in the middle of nowhere, right?Patri: Yeah, yeah. Like gave them much more autonomy. So like, if you're gonna have that cost, there have to be huge benefits. Like, besides just the screening, I think. Yeah.Simone: Yeah. So, well, I think in the end what we'll make for a successful city state is you need one, a forcing function. You need some reason why people need to or have to move there.Simone: There's a job there for them. They're literally like, it's that, or jail or death, so there has to be something that forces you to go there. It, it has to have a shared sense of identity and belonging. So once you get there, there's that retention. There's, I belong here. This is, this is, these are my people.Simone: This is [00:50:00] my tribe, this is my lifestyle, these are my values. Yeah. So something like a lifestyle brand or a celebrity based one, or like a preacher based one, religion based one sounds really compelling. And then the third I really think is, is like broader product market fit within the larger, like global landscape.Simone: There has to be something that you provide that makes you useful to the rest of the world where there's maybe some trade or where they like want you to be around. One of the reasons why we're really enchanted by the idea of a like far north, very unfriendly, frost punk city state is we worry that, let's say if.Simone: Sort of civilization crumbles. Securities is not a thing anymore. People are really gonna go after arbel land. They're gonna go after, wear those resources. So obviously we wouldn't wanna go wear those oil or anything, but you'd wanna go somewhere where basically no one would want to go. Mm-hmm. And one of the reasons why we really like the idea of a place where you'd have to grow food indoors, where you'd have to basically learn how to live in an extremely hostile environment [00:51:00] is it would prepare whatever group lives there for space travel perhaps.Simone: Cuz we're kind of excited about that. D So if, if you both have a super like rep ProTech oriented, like let's edit people with crispr, let's go with, let's make artificial wombs. You can not only engineer people to survive in really harsh environments, but then you can prepare them and have like a demo zone for harsh environments or for seeding other planets someday.Simone: Yeah. But I think that that isn't, to that point, it doesn't, it still doesn't fit the model of forcing function. I mean, the sense of identity thing could be there. Cuz like we're, we are theMalcolm: weird, well what, what I was saying earlier is that early American City states did do this. So specifically the Calvinist City states founded their city's on land that was bad for farming, that had a lot of rocks because they only wanted people who to join them who had a hard work ethic.Malcolm: Yeah. And that's something we don't see in the world today, is any community that's really screening for workPatri: ethic. I feel, I think that immigrating to America still screens strongly for work ethic. Mm. [00:52:00] I agree with that. And did even more so in the 18 hundreds. So I, I just, I have a general concern about like self-sufficiency.Patri: So something that I find in this movement, it was very true in stationing too, is that there are lots of, lots of people who like wanna do things themselves, like want self-sufficiency, who are, who are attracted to it. And I understand why, right. It's because in the evolutionary environment that's we did in modern jobs are amazing in some ways they certainly provide a lot more resources, but there's other ways in which they're like, Much less satisfactory.Patri: They're abstract. Right? But all of our modern wealth is from specialization in trade, like self-sufficiency is poverty is like mm-hmm. Deep, deep poverty. And I don't think that technology has changed that. Yeah. And so I think that this, this kind of instinct, like just doesn't match the economic realities.Patri: Yeah. We do have certain technologies, like microgrid infrastructure that is, makes the economies of scale like less and makes local production like less bad, but still, [00:53:00] like, there's still economies of scale and like, in all of this stuff. So I think it's important to find like what are the way, like what are the ways to satisfy that craving for an older life, which to me is really what it is.Patri: Yeah. In ways that are like still efficient, like I. Cooking dinner together and eating dinner together. I feel like it, like scratches that itch and like that's how we still do things, right. Whereas growing your own food, like that's mostly not how we still do things because it's like way, way less efficient.Patri: Yeah. So just be aware of how uphill it is to do things yourself and try to pick the things that have the least cost. And the most value. But it's like, it's just an, to me there's this whole space of like intuitions that we have that something's called folk economics. I have the say like folk politics, it's like beliefs and tastes that were true in the tribe where, we were monkeys for [00:54:00] millions of years in tribes.Patri: Yeah. And for hundreds of thousands of years of tribes agriculture happened 10,000 years ago. Industry happened 200 years ago. Right. And tech tech happened, 50 years ago. So like, we're not adapted for it. So of course we have all these cravings, but I, in most cases I think they're just not satisfiable, like, yeah, not achievable.Patri: SoMalcolm: I, I really wanna highlight something you said there because it's such a, a reallyPatri: kids running around together. Like I'm not saying there's none. There are some Yeah, yeah. Yes. And I don't think it's growing your own food, but,Malcolm: but it's self-sufficient. Communities are typically poor communities. When you have a community where every individual is determined to be self-sufficient or even a small community of people is determined to be self-sufficient, they are not going to have a high quality of lifestyle ina,Patri: any sort of, they don't have specialization in trade.Patri: Yeah. Really critical point.Malcolm: Another side point, I actually might edit this earlier in the video, just so you guys know when we were talking more about the prison camp thing, but something that's important to note is that [00:55:00] for these militarized forces that recruit from prisons like Wagner has started to do to make money they often do jobs in places like Africa.Malcolm: But to make money in those places. Sometimes they aren't actually getting money from the state, but they are getting money in terms of mineral rights and stuff like that, which actually would require a city state to do in a way that you couldn't do as easily was an American company or something like that.Malcolm: Which provides another reason why you would have to operate this out of a city state, because in that case, you have a state that can negotiate with local countries to say, we get access to your gold rights or your oil rights if we help you win this revolution. I mean, obviously we were unethical, but it is another reason to do it that way.Malcolm: I just wanted to, to get that economic point out there. All right, now I'm gonna move back to where we are. I'll move that earlier in the the show. But yeah. Any closing points that you guys had?Simone: Sparta 2.0. You have my vote. [00:56:00]Malcolm: You want Sparta 2.0.Simone: Mm-hmm. I want, I want my Merc. I mean, and there was also some really interesting like mercenary groups in Italy, like when they had some really interesting city states going on.Simone: I think there's just, it's a very underrated idea. I want city, well, they were also after, after,Malcolm: We call the camian explosion of Jewish culture. There were some Jewish groups that specialized in that. Yeah. And then there was the, the, the, the 300, the tale of 300, which was basically a roaming mercenary city state.Malcolm: Yeah.Simone: And that in company towns though, I mean, I really think it, it makes a lot. And, and you could argue that early nations were essentially company towns. It's just that at that point, the only thing that they could really do is either mine or extract minerals or engage in some kind of specialized trade.Simone: Like that's a place ofMalcolm: like pottery or dyes. Like even if you go back to the Phoenicians, right? Yeah.Simone: Like Venice was like glass place. It was the glass city state. They owned glass. That's not what Venice made their money on. Just, okay, what did they make their money on?Malcolm: Trade. Venice was fantastically wealthy, trained.Malcolm: They were like an independent city state that, that, that pitted other cities [00:57:00] against each other. The, the, the economics of Venice is like a 36Patri: hour luxury, long, long ocean trade as as well. Yeah. Mm.Simone: Still a city state specialization.Patri: Yeah. I mean, I think that as, as like, as far as the company town goes, I mean one way to look at it is like, as a way to start, right?Patri: Like it's solve to solve the coldstar problem and then jumpstart. But like there are significant economies of scale in cities and you can start with that and then you've got service providers for that. You've got like related industries and it can grow from there to be like a full diversified economy.Simone: Ooh, you know what? So there's also this interesting like teen dystopia series that I still love. It's not great, like, but it's it's called UGLi by Scott Westerfeld. Hmm. And it involves this, this world in which once you reach puberty you. Get to live in this city of just young teens that all get plastic surgery and then form all these weird like subcultures and get, like giant anime eyes [00:58:00] and like weird moving tattoos and like super.Simone: It's crazy, but it's all just teens. And then the adults go live actually in a different city. And another interesting city state could be like literally, is that not college? Well, I mean, we we're, we were thinking about this, we were talking about dating markets and marriage markets and, how do you resolve the relationship problem now that dating apps are, are broken, relationship markets are broken?Simone: And someone had told us in a YouTube comment, you're forgetting with Mormons who actually have some really interesting solutions on this, like singles words that ultimately b BYU as like a university is such an amazingPatri: solution. You know what BYU stands for? Right? I mean, people, it Brigham Young University, but I know it's, it's Miriam Young University.Patri: No. Marriam Young University. Oh, no.Simone: Okay, okay. I get you. But that's, that's the thing is also known as this person argued that like the majority of people do goat, yet it's Maria Young University. Like they, they go there to get married. Yeah. And you could theoretically create a university [00:59:00] town. Marriage market, city state, wherePatri: like, yeah, you go basically like yeah, you're, you're getting an education too.Patri: Mm-hmm. But we're not trying to be world class researchers. Mm-hmm. We're trying to be a place where you can learn some things uhhuh and find your life partner. I love it. OhSimone: yeah. So there's like life, lifeMalcolm: dreams is an automatic citizen, but you have to earn your citizenship after that age range.Simone: But I like the idea of there being life stage, city stage.Simone: So there is a forcing function. You can come, you can go, there is a very distinct economic need in industry. And then you go there and you live this life. And I think it's a sort of like that, that's another thing that these things could become. So I would also vote for my dystopian teen plastic surgery Mecca Marriage market, city State.Patri: Yeah. I love it. And look, I think that, the goal of this is for me is to unlock innovation. Yes, innovation in different types of societies. Yes. And I think that the way I view it, like a charter city as a container, right? Like it negotiates with the host country [01:00:00] for what degree of local autonomy it has over regulations, what the revshare agreement is with the government.Patri: But then once you have that container, like the city can then allow like neighborhoods, villages within it with all kinds of different policies, all kinds of different, like target markets, right? So the really, the hard part is creating the container, but I think of it like a platform play. Like if you're gonna make a bunch of global nomad villages around the world, like if you got charter cities to plop 'em into like, great if you wanna do something like we're what you're describing, that can be one ward of a city.Patri: And I think that having these just like cities with flexible governance that are kind of made with people expecting innovation, again, opt in are just way more likely to try stuff like that. Yeah, 100%. Let's, let'sMalcolm: wrap this up. Simone. We, we are an hour in. Okay. I will wrap it up. Ask him what, who, who should go his way, like who, if they're interested in you, should be chatting [01:01:00] with you.Malcolm: What should they be checking out that you created in the past? What's the follow up of listeners who are interested in your work?Patri: Sure. Right now they should go to my hand, still hand coded in html website, patri friedman.com or go to PAI mo p a t r i s s I M o on Twitter. That's where I write the most often. And yeah, who I'm looking for, I mean, number one thing I'd say would be founders strong entrepreneurial background and drive.Patri: Same thing as other founders, but with the sort of ambition and vision to create a new society. And I deal with some community building experience on the team. Of, of course I run an investment fund and these these. Charter cities are done by for-profit companies. So, there's always investment opportunities.Patri: That's another useful one. And then just yeah, just follow and boost on social media. I'll be putting out a thread soon with links to actually edit that bit. So, on the promos [01:02:00] website that's pro P r o n o m o s.vc our portfolio page has links to all the social media channels of all of our companies.Patri: So there's a lot to follow and you can keep updated on the space that way.Malcolm: This is really exciting and this is awesome. And, and if anybody's interested in starting a penal colony, reach out to us, cuz that's something I'm interested in. I, I wanna start super jail in reality. I love it. This has been fantastic.Malcolm: I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.Patri: Yeah,Simone: you're brilliant. This is so fun. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone discuss how political polarization makes it impossible to take a neutral stance today. Malcolm argues progressives force moderates into extremism by demanding endless concessions. He cites education reformers branded far right for helping disadvantaged kids.Simone notes many organizations now prioritize self-preservation over their mission, leading to tribal dynamics. Malcolm adds conservative spaces permit diverse views while progressives enforce narrow dogma, even lying about opponents. He believes their incompetence and false attacks will galvanize the public against them.Overall they conclude you must pick a side as the left doesn't allow middle ground. But the right welcomed them despite differing views, valuing truth-seeking over signaling status. They encourage watching for the progressive coalition's coming collapse.Malcolm: [00:00:00] Scott Alexander, right?Malcolm: Who writes Slate Star Codex. And him just talking like as truly neutral as possible. It's important to understand that in a society where the academic system and most media centers are controlled by one faction, if you talk neutrally, you are a threat to them because you weigh things. Towards the, the faction that's not in power, which is the conservative faction.Malcolm: And so he very famously just really tries to give the truth in like the most non extremist, non hyperbolic way possible.Malcolm: So, you know, he got outed by the New York Times and they did this really mean piece on him andMalcolm: to me that even somebody as honestly, I think pretty progressive in terms of his sensibilities as him is now pretty solidly grouped with conservatives in terms of the online intellectual movement..Would you like to know more?Simone: Hello, you beautiful human being.Malcolm: Simone, you are the most beautiful human being who's ever [00:01:00] lived, and I love you to death. Now, today we are going to talk about political polarization, because this is an issue that has bedeviled us where we keep having people come to us and they're like, I'm going to start a nonpartisan version of your foundation, like the Prenatalist Foundation, because we Pretty openly aligned conservative.Malcolm: And we're like, that's not going to go well for you or they'll even try to start a, a full on progressive one. And I'm like, that might go better than an unaligned one. But the question is, is why? So one, I mean, I think the easy answer for a lot of people is truth has become a team sport in our society.Malcolm: Where people care less, you know, when they hear a piece of like, they can hear a piece of like research data, right? Which is just like. Furthering their understanding of reality, and they might become upset because it makes their side less likely to win.Simone: Yeah, I'm fuzzy on this, but I think even some psychology studies have demonstrated that people, when presented with evidence that runs against their [00:02:00] political beliefs and their political party's belief will become even more trenched in their belief.Simone: They won't be convinced or change their mind by that. So it, it does imply that truth is indeed a teamMalcolm: sport. And this is really damaging implications on reality. I mean, like, for example Germany, because of the environmentalists, shut down all its nuclear power plants? Not good. What were you thinking?Malcolm: Like... This is a, you know, when we complain about like aesthetic conservatism versus real conservatism, this is the perfect example of aesthetic environmentalism versus real environmentalism, nuclear power, bad, dirty, big nuclear silos and deformed people living near them. You know, it's like, okay, that's like a weird, like aesthetic of environmentalism from the 1980s, but like, we should know better now.Malcolm: Especially if you don't have any other way than to generate that power than Russian oil, which it turned out you didn't have any backup plan for, it was [00:03:00] profoundly stupid. And so I should say, we don't just have this problem on the right of like this, like, I'm going to be, you know, aesthetically and I'm, I'm, I'll link the video here or you can check it out, like aesthetic conservative versus real conservative, because we do have this problem on the right, but the left has it as well.Malcolm: Where they just stop caring about reality, and it's just about whether or not their team is winning. So I'd say that there's sort of a few reasons why this doesn't work. But I think one of the most important was when Simone went over with me, and I want to have early in our video here, you know, because I watched some watch time on these, and I'm like, well, let's at least get the good ideas to people faster, right?Malcolm: Which was, do you want to go into it, Simone?Simone: I don't remember it. What, what, can you remind me and I'llMalcolm: explain it? Okay, your idea was that if you try to hold the middle ground, the progressives will just keep pushing you further and further and further to extreme positions. Oh, okay,Simone: okay. Okay, I think I remember the argument I made and I think you can make this more nuanced thing, but I remember what I'd said to youMalcolm: at least.Malcolm: So progressives [00:04:00] essentially don't allow individuals to hold the middle ground ideologically. Well,Simone: specifically, I think what happens is, They more center people, even if they are progressive, get increasingly pushed progressive because if they attempt to apologize or correct their behavior, if their behavior is pointed out as being problematic, they will, they will be further punished and then further forced to go in a very, very Thank you.Simone: extreme position. So yeah, you basically don't get rewarded for deviating even slightly from the most extreme positions and in many circles at least. And then if you apologize, if you, if you engage in any way in a way that, that signals, no, I really still do want to be a part of this community, you are forced to become more extreme.Simone: Does that make sense?Malcolm: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So, so you can think about it this way. The progressive community it basically will say, okay, you, you want to be a part of multiple communities. You want to be a part of the conservative world, you want to be a part of the progressive world. That's what you're really saying.Malcolm: Like, I want to [00:05:00] be, Broadly accepted within both these communities. That's what a person is saying when they're politically neutral. You can't just say, oh, I'm not engaging with either, right? And then the progressive community comes to you and they'll be like, well, you need to change what you did here. You need to change what you did here.Malcolm: You need to apologize for this. The moment you do that. You have lost because then they, they make their demands more extreme and you get no reward for conceding. But if you do not concede, if you do not change your behavior based on what they're saying, then you are said to be a far right outsider or a racist or a Nazi or eugenicists, you know, all the sorts of accusations we have appointed at us.Malcolm: But they get pointed at literally anyone who disagrees with progressives. If you just disagree with progressives and it's. Irrelevant what the facts are. I mean, one of my favorite things was a guy was like, look, I'm obviously not a racist, I have a black wife, and I have black children. And they were like, well that's extra sign of your racism because you disagree with us, and you're around black people, so you must be victimizing them.Malcolm: And it's [00:06:00] like, come on guys, like, get it together, that's, all you're showing there is that you're just using the word as a bludgeon. For your political enemies and people who want to be seen within your group, and they know if they get this label of racist or this label of, you know, Nazi or fascist or whatever, that they're not going to be able to engage with your community.Malcolm: And so you use that, you, you, you spread this, you know, as we've said. Hilariously progressives who call us eugenicists are like, yes, you, eugenicists, you're dirtying the gene pool and I want to use the government to limit your reproductive rights in terms of the technology that you're engaging with so that you don't dirty the gene pool with all of this weird stuff you're doing.Malcolm: And I'm like, that is literally exactly eugenics. And yet you use the title of eugenics. And the accusation of eugenics on us to try to force us to engage with your way. But this is one reason, but it's not the only reason why you really can't take the middle ground anymore. [00:07:00] Another reason is that you just will have no one to support you.Malcolm: So if we tried to take the middle ground, we could be othered by progressives while not having a conservative line of support, which is really, really, really damaging. Another thing I'd label, and it's a little sad thing that progressives have so taken control of the narratives that even some conservative influencers believe this, but and we have a whole video on this, it's called like the greatest lie in history, which is that the progressive base is actually as racist or more racist than the conservative base.Malcolm: And I don't mean like in like vague wishy washy, like affirmative action is racist. I mean, until Obama was erect. Elected president. Fewer Democrats in the U. S. said they would vote for a black president than conservatives. Like, literally, it's still the party of the Klan. They just have hidden that because they control the media.Malcolm: And, and then they use like a few clowns in like the public to try to connect racists with conservatives. When the, the [00:08:00] Democratic Party is and always has been the party of the Klan. They just... Do things a little differently now and and you can see this in the actual data. So so check that video.Malcolm: But it is it is really sad. So can you tell us why you that things have to be so politically entrenched these days?Malcolm: Well, I can go over one if you want me to go further, which is to say that if you look at something like the educational system, like we came at this and this is actually a problem that Teach for America has, because, you know, we have a lot of friends and like high up in Teach for America you can not make meaningful reforms in the educational system and sideways progressives at all.Malcolm: So Teach for America basically attempted to do this and a lot of people don't know, but they're basically about to die now because they can't get any new recruits. They became known despite being the. One former number one employer for Ivy League graduates and to an incredibly efficacious organization work.Malcolm: They did really made a difference, but it made things harder for, like, long term [00:09:00] union paying teachers because they had to change things to adopt to these new strategies and they had to compete with Young, educated people who were like, actually, what you're doing is causing long term damage and they're like, I don't want to change what I'm doing.Malcolm: I'm going to the union about this. And because the union then turned against Teach for America or the unions turned against Teach for America now became not cool, like it becomes known as not cool among progressive circles to work for them. And I'm like, you know, you could just brand yourself as a conservative organization and you'd be, you'd have a, Whole fresh recruit of people you could take from and they would actually be interested in your mission because it's actually helping kids.Malcolm: And this is something where if you do any sort of like charter school advocacy, voucher program advocacy, anyone who looks at the statistics on this would obviously see that it helps students. Like it's just like reality is. Disintermediating in the education system is good for students, but it hurts teachers unions and teachers unions are an incredibly important voting bloc for Democrats.Malcolm: Like they would not, if they lost, if a, if a Democratic candidate lost the teachers unions, they could not win an election just period, like any election. [00:10:00] And because the progressive movement is so tied with the Democratic, U. S. Democratic politics, they have to then shape reality and truth around. The, the interest of those political interests, i.Malcolm: e. even if it's hurting children, even if it's disproportionately hurting poor children, well, the truth needs to be that charter schools are bad that even if pretending this is hurting children because it's Or, or, at least that it's still open to debate, at least that scientists go both ways on the issues and economics researchers go both ways, they do not.Malcolm: They're just like strictly a good thing. If you actually look at the data, not like what people are publishing, because obviously people, you know, like keep their jobs and stuff like that. But I mean, like, just look at the data. It's just like so overwhelmingly obvious. And, and this is one of those things where it's an interesting thing for a lot of people who want to like.Malcolm: Help with education, especially if they want to help with education in lower income communities. Cause a lot of people, they're like, yeah, this could really help these people. And they realize the minute they actually try to change anything, they get [00:11:00] branded as like far right activists or far right extremists.Malcolm: And it's always. It's somewhat humorous to me because it's like either you can take that branding and you can continue and continue to fix things or you can bend over backwards to try to, you know, accommodate them. And this is why stuff was like, you know, I think it was Mark Zuckerberg, right? He donated a hundred million dollars.Malcolm: To the Newark school system and over half of the money went to a bribe to the teachers unions to allow them to pay teachers more with the pittance that was left for good performance. That was the thing that teachers unions didn't want to happen for teachers to be paid more for good performance. And when I say a bribe, of course, it, it went to like unpaid something, something, basically it went just as a cash payout to members of the union in the local area to allow them to make these other changes.Malcolm: And this is what happens when in an issue like education, you're like, okay, I'm going to try to go at this from a politically neutral or even progressively favorable position. And it is created [00:12:00] that way. It is structured that way to prevent things from ever getting better. Because if things got better, they would have to change and unions.Malcolm: axiomatically hate change, right? Like they are about maintaining the existing power hierarchy within a field.Simone: Well, but I mean, to that, to your point there, that's not just unions. That's pretty much, I think we've gotten to a point where many political and governmental organizations have become extremely strong and entrenched and organizationally.Simone: Ossified but also very powerful and they've gotten to the point where they've essentially grown tumorous cancers that we talk about in the pragmatist guide to governance that are more interested in self perpetuation than in doing their job. So the focus then becomes Really protecting and entrenching rather than working.Simone: And so it would make sense that there's a lot of, you know, team sports and alliance creating and, and sort of power mongering and protecting, right? Because, you know, the, [00:13:00] the imperative of many, many organizations, both political and governmental are to just survive. Like they're not, as we learned from doing work in the political space, they're not effective.Simone: They're not actually really doing their job. They're putting most of their money and time and effort. and skill into raising money and telling a certain story that will lead to more donations or more support or larger budgets. But then I also think that the larger phenomenon with the way that internet communities work contributes to this as well.Simone: And that, you know, in a dominance hierarchy, as you say, in the pragmatist guide to governance, the way that you show your dominance in many cases is through your extremism vis a vis the special interest of whatever group there is. So I think because so much of political action has become really dislodged from like, oh, helping a community, helping policy, you know, changing this, I think the economy would work a little bit more efficiently this way.Simone: It's really become what team are you on? That therefore the most easy way to show your status in these communities isn't [00:14:00] by writing policy or by working with a politician or doing local issues like making progress on local issues, but rather. By showing how extreme you are in your views, because that makes you even more Democratic or even moreMalcolm: Republican.Malcolm: That's such a good point. And I really want to, you know, explore this point that you're making more here, because I think it's very important for our viewers. You know, that the democratic party does self eat itself due to this weird dominance fight. And you keep seeing this in local elections. Like I've heard from people in local elections.Malcolm: Yeah, we're out rating the Republicans, but due to these internal dominant struggles and these hierarchy fights we have within our local offices over stuff like, are we hiring, you know, the right. Makeup of ethnic groups. Are we hiring the right makeup of disabilities? Are we properly? Because that's how you show your dominance.Malcolm: Wording. Yeah. These are all dominance fights, but you know, they're, they're, they're, they're absolutely so infesting the progressive side that they are preventing efficacious work. Whereas we do have these problems on the conservative side as well. Absolutely. We have [00:15:00] these problems. I believe that we can overcome them.Malcolm: I believe that the dominant faction of the conservative group can prevent these sort of virtue spirals from happening. And we do this through shaming, which you constantly see on this channel, individuals who engage with this type of conservatism. This is not us, like being anti conservative when we're like, you know, you flexing your aesthetic conservatism is a problem and will lead to virtue spirals and will lead to problems.Malcolm: It is actually a problem. It actually causes. Problems. It is stupid and a waste of time. And don't do it. Like, just don't do it. But the other thing that you mentioned there and you were citing something that was actually really concrete that we have information on that your average person wouldn't have information on.Malcolm: So we ran the selection thing that had us, we were being funded by conservatives, but it, it had us aligned with progressives a few times. And so we got internal access to some of their data. Yeah. Like these big democratic get out to vote organizations. And we learned that they [00:16:00] performed literally 6, 000 percent worse than us on a per dollar spent level.Malcolm: And the core innovation we had was just AB testing. Well, and a few other really sophisticated things we were doing. But the point being is that it appeared that they hadn't like, they would send these emails, which you might've seen was political emails was like borders on the email. And then like internal texts that was like.Malcolm: A page and a half of like text was like images and stuff. And I'm like, this looks like a spam email from the nineties. Like you guys know the reason why all the companies stopped doing this is because it doesn't work. And they were like, yeah, but we don't want to risk experimenting with things. If you looked at the emails that our org was sending.Malcolm: They never went above three sentences, usually one to two sentences, simple action items meant to emotionally engage people. That's our consulting thing. If you want to like get all the information that other people pay a lot of money for when we're talking about these sources of political things.Malcolm: But yeah, that's literally how we did it. And it, [00:17:00] it, to me was not. Shocking to me. I was thinking about like, what gets me to act on an email? Like it has to basically piss me off. Like if it's a spam email, it needs to be short. Like people only read one to two sentences. They don't read anything long form.Malcolm: They don't read anything that has these fancy images on it. So take all that out. And emotionally engage them as quickly as you can and that will get them to act in the way that you, you want them to act but that they, that they hadn't even considered this because, and what we realized, if their emails were not about doing what people, when they said we're taking donations to do X or Y, they weren't about doing X or Y, they were about In raising more money.Malcolm: They were about doing what seemed like plausibly an okay thing to be doing with the money so that they could raise more money so that they could pay more salaries. And this is a, you know, the word you use is, is wicked problem, Simone, because it's a very difficult problem to fight at the level of a nonprofit if you're not giving to a nonprofit that's not like,Malcolm: Which [00:18:00] is, well, that's the thing isSimone: it's really hard to find a nonprofit like that because nonprofits like that do their job and either fix the problem or disassemble as soon as their specific job is done and, or fail to raise money because they were so busy doing their job. And then basically the only nonprofits that persistently exist over time are extremely good.Simone: And making money at raising money and making the problem seem bigger, which frankly is a lot easier when the problem doesn't go away. So I just, I think it's, it's, it's going to be really hard for people to find any. Long lasting organization that is not ossified to at least some extent by this level of corruption.Simone: And I mean, I, I used to use organizations like Charity Navigator to try to figure out like the percentage of spending that was program spending, but even those numbers are really fudged. So I think now, like, if I were to donate, I mean, like the way we donate money now is actually how I would always donate money, which is like.[00:19:00]Simone: Put money toward a very specific discreet project with a start and an end. And metrics that enable me to see if it did its job, period. Like nothing, you know, see no organization that is going to have staff members that is going to have people who, you know, depend on it for a salary. Because those people are going to be incentivized to keep the organization alive much more than they're going to be incentivized to solve theMalcolm: problem.Malcolm: I mean, our nonprofit spending goes to our own projects, largely speaking, and It goes to our own projects where we also have the secondary nonprofit goal of you should never be donating to anything that can't become self sustaining. And by that what I mean that can't become because when something provides something of value to other people in our society they pay for it.Malcolm: Like that's what that's what efficiency gains are. Right? And so if you have actually created something that's providing value, eventually people will pay for that value. And if they're not paying for that value, well, then you're not creating value. You're not actually helping people. There is always a way to profit when you're making people's [00:20:00] lives better.Malcolm: And so we look for ways that we can put, you know, some money down now to create something that then spins up itself and improves the quality of a lot of people's lives. But this is very different than the way traditional nonprofit organizations work. Yeah. But it's really sad. I'd say another thing is you know, if you, one thing that I've been very surprised about is.Malcolm: You know, coming from a world where you're in the progressive community is how narrow they are in the ideas that they accept and will allow to be voiced yet how diverse the ideas in the conservative community are almost to a fault today, which is very interesting to me. You know, it's, it's a community where you can have a conservative Muslim and a conservative Jew in, in the same.Malcolm: organization who have almost literally nothing similar about their world perspectives. And, and then people like us who are, you know, conservative atheists, I guess you could call it, or, or secular Christians. Which, [00:21:00] which have pretty unique views, yet we've been pretty Accepted by most of the, the voices in the movement, except for some where we could like disrupt their power hierarchy.Malcolm: Like, who was the guy who called us like nerds that no one should listen to? Oh, Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro. Yeah. But other than that, you know, it's, it's, it's been pretty interesting. I also think that if you want to look at an example of why you can't take the middle ground, a great example that happened pretty publicly, which was the guy we were just meeting was last week was Scott Alexander, right?Malcolm: Who writes Slate Star Codex. And him just talking like as truly neutral as possible. It's important to understand that in a society where the academic system and most media centers are controlled by one faction, if you talk neutrally, you are a threat to them because you weigh things. Towards the, the faction that's not in power, which is the conservative faction.Malcolm: And so he very famously just really tries to give the truth in like the most non extremist, non hyperbolic way possible. He always, anything we care about, he's always like, [00:22:00] well, you may be worrying a bit more. Everything's always less. And as we point out, you know, you're talking about prediction markets, because we're at this prediction market event.Malcolm: We're like, look, if you always bet that any extremely alarmist prediction is wrong. Generally, you are going to make money or you are going to make prediction market points on average. However, You are also going to do less meaningful things because you are going to miss the things that actually turn out to be right in terms of outrageous predictions.Malcolm: So, you know, he got outed by the New York Times and they did this really mean piece on him and it sort of forced him in many ways to, to become, it, it, it helped his, his public rise a lot becauseMalcolm: to me that even somebody as honestly, I think pretty progressive in terms of his sensibilities as him is now pretty solidly grouped with conservatives in terms of the online intellectual movement.Simone: Yeah. But again, I, I think that [00:23:00] that's actually a really great example of what it's like when you are punished, you know, for for being insufficiently progressive. That, you know, there's like nothing you can do. It's, it's really crazy. And, and also the accusations that were made about him were so tentative that it's, it's almost a joke.Simone: Like they, they were really accusing him of things that weren't even true. But it was enough to endanger his professional practice to make him extremely uncomfortable, of course, and to sort of like really disrupt his life. So it is. But you know what? He didn't apologize. And I think he did theMalcolm: right thing.Malcolm: He did the right thing, and it helped him.Simone: Yeah, well, I mean, there's nothingMalcolm: to apologize for. Like, I'm not, I'm not backing down from these positions. You guys are being unrealistic and unreasonable. And you're being little turds basically. And it ended up helping him. Now, of course, he's not hyperbolic like us.Malcolm: Like our whole public image is based on being kind of bombastic and combative a little bit. I mean, not in like a mean way. I mean, [00:24:00] unless you're talking about Yad, then it's in a mean way, but other than that, not in a mean way. And. His is not. His is not. He is genuinely, like, very middle line, and it was shocking to me, and this is actually interesting to me, and it's how I know the progressives are going to eventually lose, is in this power consolidation play, They are kicking out many allies through potential allies through very tentative in a way that makes it increasingly obvious to the general public that one, these groups control the positions of power in our society to they are willing to lie to them pretty aggressively.Malcolm: And three, they do not have their best interest at heart. And I think at thisSimone: point, there's no way to win also. I think it's,Malcolm: it's just, yeah, there's no way to win. And if you're not in the cult, you know, I, I think it's pretty obvious that it is a cult and that it's a cult that doesn't have your best interest at heart anymore.Malcolm: And that the only way to fight them is, is to unfortunately align yourself. I won't say unfortunately, fortunately, because they have so many [00:25:00] beliefs that are aligned with us. You know, since Trump was elected, we're really like, well, Now we sort of agree with almost everything the conservative party stands for which is pretty interesting because before him, you know, before this major political realignment, now we had a lot of pretty major disagreements with the way the conservative party was structured.Malcolm: And it's, it's a lot less of a, a, a smelly pill to, to target and sort of the Trump and post Trump, especially the post Trump era. Although I do think Trump will probably be our next president. So it's, it's not post Trump yet. Right.Simone: We're in for it. An interesting future. Well, unless they have a change, cause I don't see how in the age of the internet it can change.Simone: But I, I think it would be really greatMalcolm: if it did. Here's how I think it's, it's one of those things where it's, it's slow in the background until it's all at once. I think anyone who is engaged with like, what is actually true about reality. When they investigate the data, it's really obvious that many positions.Malcolm: That you would come to are not [00:26:00] positions that progressives allowed. They will kick you out of your community, their community for having, which means that anyone who's interested in like actually what's true about reality, not what helps me signal my status to other people that they will side with the conservative party.Malcolm: I mean, this is what the intellectual dark web really is when people talk about this. And, and because of that, that means we get the best talent. When I talk with smart young people, they're like, yeah, I mean, I want to stay under the radar, but secretly I identify as this, this, and this conservatively speaking.Simone: Oh man, the number of times we hear that.Malcolm: Yeah. And it's because they have made themselves the big boogeyman, the big oppressor, the big, you know, we do this, this and this. And the accusations they are leveling at conservatives with little research, like the racism episodes that the progressive base is actually as racist or more racist than the conservative based in like the most traditional sense, the accusations like, Oh, these conservatives are racist.Malcolm: They're just obviously not true from the data. [00:27:00] And, and, and then they use these words to be like, why would you associate with these racist conservatives? And when you look at the data and you don't see this as being true, you're like, wait, have I been lied to? And nothing galvanizes people against you like lying to them, like convincing them to malign or hate somebody based on something that turns out to be entirely fictional.Malcolm: And . That is exactly the stance and tactics at the progressive party is using so aggressively right now. And then on top of all of this, when you're in this status signal, you know, fight, you know, within the Progressive Party to be accepted by this community, you know, desperately something to be accepted by this completely narcissistic.Malcolm: unrealistic demigod that you won't have kids because that's not what you're focused on. Right. And it's sad, but it's, it's, it's sad that so many people have been caught up by it, that it has so many positions of power in our society, but it's just so astoundingly inefficient. Now, of course we have the fear that they then use AI or they use government control in a way similar to like what [00:28:00] China is doing.Malcolm: They, they, they shut down people's Ways to make income like they did with the trucker protest, like anyone who is even like reasonable on the trucker protest, they would like literally shut down their bank accounts in Canada. Like, we have seen how far they have had to go to keep control when they are obviously not on the average citizen side, when they are not on the working classes side anymore, when they are the party of racism now.Malcolm: And yet they need to hide all of this when they have organizations like Antifa that literally act like, like Nazi fascist goons. Like you look at what the people were doing in the lead up to the election of Hitler and you look at like these goons who would go out and rough up people and like agitate was in protest and they, they like dress, they act, they talk like Antifa.Malcolm: Antifa's goals are like literally actually fascism. And yet they, they call themselves anti fascist and you see pretty quickly, Oh, these guys are actually like transparently evil. And actually transparently support fascism and what they want from a government, the government that fascist [00:29:00] reinforces their values on anyone who thinks differently than them.Malcolm: I mean, I think that this is all pretty transparent to people and that they're going to lose the control they have now. Yeah,Simone: we'll see. I think that it can get a lot worse first.Malcolm: But we'll, we'll, we'll fight. We're here. We we'll win. We've got plans in action across many domains and we know other people who do too.Malcolm: And as we always say, if this podcast had a motto, it would be thank God the forces arrayed against us are not as competent as they are malevolent. If we lived in that timeline where they were competent as well, Oh, I wouldn't want to be there. But they are wildly incompetent.Malcolm: And when our money goes 6, 000 fold further per dollar spent to things like our foundation versus theirs they just can't compete. They're not nimble enough because they don't get people who relate to truth. They get to people [00:30:00] who relate to status seeking. Yeah.Simone: So it goes. Well, I love you and I love, you know, not being on the oppressive, not allowed to talk about certain things side of the spectrum because I guess I, I kind of grew up there and it, it wasn't just not being allowed to talk about certain things.Simone: It was not being allowed to admit certain things about yourself. And. That wasn't great for me. I really like it on the other side. So thanks for bringing me over there for showing me I had the rightMalcolm: to do that. It reminds me of a scene from Madagascar where they have the fun side of the island and then the not fun side of the island and they're like, you're always welcome on the fun side of the island.Malcolm: Just come over. It's a party over here. You don't need to be so sad and angry at everyone. And, and this is true. Progressives on average are much sadder than Republicans. They haven't since Pew started recording this [00:31:00] data. And, and I, and I just love that scene. And I've even gone back to watch it cause I'm like.Malcolm: The, the, the the fun side of the island scene, because that's the way it is when you, when you join the conservative side and you realize that all the fun people are already over here and we're all having fun and you're welcome over here and we are not the boogeyman that you have been told.Simone: Yeah.Simone: Well, speaking of fun, let's go play with our kids. Yeah. I love you. I love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone debate how to define "woman" after he's asked in a trans community. Simone says it's whoever you perceive as female. Malcolm argues it's a social construct dependent on culture. He explains how polygamous and monogamous societies define it differently based on evolutionarily adaptive strategies.Ultimately Malcolm concludes there's no universal truth, only answers contingent on the utility you're optimizing for. A culture seeking fertility may define womanhood differently than one focused on happiness. He cautions against governments enforcing subjective cultural norms on others, as with criminalizing misgendering. Overall they agree relativism is the only intellectually honest perspective.Malcolm: [00:00:00] but what do I think is the true answer?Malcolm: Because I think that there's no true answer can mean many differentSimone: things. There's your answer, the cultural relativistic one. Now you're saying there's a true answer.Malcolm: Yeah. Okay. There's many different ways. So all the ways you could determine if someone was a woman, right? You could say, well, XX chromosome, XY chromosome, oh, they pass, oh, they self identify as a woman.Malcolm: Oh, a woman is whatever would make them happiest if they were called the woman. Yeah. That's what they want to be called. Yeah. Yeah. A woman is whether they can have kids. There's many, many, many, many different ways. ASimone: woman is a state of mind.Malcolm: That you can determine this, right? And in different cultures.Malcolm: Elevate different interpretations of gender above other interpretations of gender. So what's the right answer? Okay. Now, the true answer, the actual true answer, like if you're just stripping all of the tradition away.Simone: Glad you're solving this problem all in one podcast.Would you like to know more?[00:01:00]Simone: Hey, hey Malcolm what, what is a woman?Malcolm: So yeah, this is a spicy question, Simone. Yeah. I was in this Transmaxxing, I was, I was talking in the Transmaxxing discord with the, the Transmaxxing community for people who, aren't familiar with the trans vexing community they are individuals who transition.Malcolm: Not because or at least they don't think that transitioning needs to be tied to gender dysphoria, but they think that it makes sense for some men to transition for social advantage. Yeah, soSimone: basically transition for gain or gender euphoria, not just gender dysphoria.Malcolm: Yeah, and I, I like it because I what I like about the community is they're expanding the concept, and they're passing off traditional trans communities.Malcolm: Those are the two things I like. I don't, I don't know, am I terrible for, for having so much fun when like extremist progressive communities get pissed off at somebody just for asking questions they're not allowed to ask? Like, hey, I'm a guy and I feel pretty oppressed in society today. Am I allowed to transition?Malcolm: No! Yes! The most transphobic question anyone can ask! [00:02:00] How dare you think about doing that? You're so privileged! So I, I do love that they're breaking down this, these, these things and they asked at the end of this, this thing, what is a woman? Cause you know, there's this video, what is a woman, which good video.Malcolm: This has been recommended to us by smart people. And I think it shows real toxic parts of the trans movement, which let's be honest, has some real. Ooh, toxic parts. But I had never actually considered the question myself until it was proposed to me in the context of this group meeting. And so I had to come up with an answer on the spot and I was really satisfied with my answer, but it's not one that I had come up with before.Malcolm: Oh, really? So Simone, first I want to hear if you, what your answer is unbiased by me to this question.Simone: Right. So, to me. I mean, obviously, there's not a good answer for this, but for me, a woman is someone that I see on the street and I'm like, oh, look at that woman. So if you pass, whether it's intentional or [00:03:00] not, you're a woman or a man.Simone: And there are manyMalcolm: men who just look extra girly. You just like extra girly are not trying to look extra girly.Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Like there, there can be a, a natal man who just looks extremely femme, not intentionally. And I'm like, Oh, what a pretty girl. But same, same with, you know, natal women who just happened to look really boyish.Simone: Like you, you are, you are what people interpret you to be.Malcolm: Yes. So you judge womanhood as an eye of you as the perceiver, because your brain is categorizing everyone you see into either male or female and the way it handles that categorization. You say, because everyone's brain does this. I should be clear.Malcolm: Even people who are like, I am the most gender understanding person in the world, they definitely have an assumption when they first see somebody of what gender that person identified. They'd be like, okay, I'm not sure. But what you're saying is. From your perspective, gender is whatever [00:04:00] your brain innately categorizes people as from your perspective.Malcolm: Well, and, and this is, ISimone: think this is, it works for me too because male and female traits. You know, hormonal levels, et cetera, are averages, right? And so there are, there are women who have way more testosterone, way more other like male traits than men. And there are men who have like way more female traits than women.Simone: Even Spencer Greenberg like created this like quiz you can take. It sort of shows you cognitively where you trend gender wise toward like male or female.Malcolm: DidSimone: you do it? Yeah, I came off as like genderless, I think, just like neither but you would come off as probably hyper, hyper masculine because of sort of the the like dominant approach that you take to things.Simone: But yeah, like my point though, is like. You know, even, even a, a natal male or female may be outside the averages for the, the gender they were born into or the sex they were born into. I,Malcolm: I like your interpretation. I'll tell you what my answer was. All right. Yes. Because I think it's [00:05:00] actually the correct answer.Malcolm: Oh, I said that the concept of man and woman is completely a social construct. No, hold on. Hold on. It is.Malcolm: It changes depending on the cultural group you're looking at the question from. I mean, you're right. Different cultural groups have different answers to this question. Okay. Okay. You know, so like, if I'm from a conservative Muslim group, right, they famously, if somebody is born same sex attracted, They basically force them to gender transition.Malcolm: Right, so it means you're a woman. And to them, yeah, that's a woman. If I was born same sex attracted, I would be a woman. So it's like yourSimone: sex is determined in that culture by who you're attracted to, not like the equipmentMalcolm: or your appearance. Determined by who you're attracted to, not by anything else. So I think a lot of people assume that all conservative cultures see things the same, and they really don't.Malcolm: Yeah. There's many different conservative cultural traditions. Why does Muslim as a cultural group do this? We've talked about this before.[00:06:00] This is a common thing you see within polygynous societies. And it helps to deal with the fact that because many women often sort to one men in these societies, you get a lot of unpaired men.Malcolm: Typically, the more unpaired men you have in a society, the more terrorism you have, the more social unrest you have. And so it makes sense for these societies to find ways to match these unpaired men and matching them with each other is a very convenient and intergenerationally durable solution to the problem.Malcolm: There you go.Simone: So, trans maxing before trans maxing. I'm not saying it's ethical.Malcolm: I'm not saying it's an ethical solution. But this is where things get interesting. Is, cultural groups are going to have different answers to this question. And most of those answers are going to be determined By what led to intergenerational success of that cultural group, we just gave one evolutionary pressure for why a conservative Islamic cultures would have seen a woman as what you're attracted to.Malcolm: Whereas you know, if you're talking about monogamous cultural groups, well, [00:07:00] typically fertility rate is higher by getting almost everyone to breed,Simone: right? So it really depends on yourMalcolm: equipment and woman by who can have kids and who can get who pregnant. How you determine what a woman is, was in those cultural groups.Malcolm: And I think it's very clear that, you know, that these non humanist cultural groups have one answer. These polygynous cultural groups have one answer and progressive cultural groups have a different answer. And all of these answers are valid within these cultural groups and should not be treated as invalid.Malcolm: And this is why I have such. Enormous disdain for individuals like Dylan Mulvaney who has, this is the person who caused this , bud, like controversy, right? I think it was an absolutely warranted controversy because this individual has advocated to make it illegal and for legal punishments to be vented on individuals who misgender somebody.Malcolm: And I'm like, I'm sorry. Wait, wait,Simone: wait. So to, but to make it a crime to misgender someone. Yes, but what if someone's not passing, then they don't know if there's not like [00:08:00] an introduction of like, these are myMalcolm: pronouns, Simone, these people don't care. They want to culturally dominated and culturally erase the groups that are different for them.Malcolm: They do not care that different people are different from them. They do not respect the rights of any cultural group, but the progressive urban monoculture and they, Okay. I mean, this is a strategy that they can use to begin to disenfranchise anybody who holds really strongly to their cultural practices.I was really shocked that the mainstream media, when they were recovering the bud light controversy, they made it sound like Dylan Mulvaney was just like a normal trans person. And that's the reason why people were freaking out the extent they went to, to hide what was really going on with. It was shocking to me, you know? If bud light had done a deal with buck angel, nobody would have freaked out, you know, Uh, the reason why people were freaking out is because Dylan Mulvaney is extremist activists who is goal is the cultural eraser [00:09:00] of groups, which she frames as being subhuman in their rights when contrasted with her, and that individuals who hold to their tradition than faced should be sent to jail for. Even slightly upsetting her or inconveniencing her. This was not a case of a reasonable, normal trans person who was put into an ad campaign.Malcolm: I mean, it reminds me of the Romans when the Romans were like you know, and they, they would do this with Jewish populations, like, okay. Well, most other people are okay with sacrificing to the Roman emperor as a god. Why aren't you okay with sacrificing to the Roman emperor as a god? You know, they did this with Jews and Christians very frequently.Malcolm: And of course, Jews and Christians are like, Yeah, but from our cultural perspective, that's blasphemy. Why can't you understand that? Why can't you just let us do things our way? The Romans like, Well, the emperor finds that very distasteful. It's very offensive to the emperor when you don't sacrifice to him.Malcolm: I don't understand why you can't just bend [00:10:00] your... Your way of seeing the world in this one area right here. And it's like, well, if you saw it from their perspective, you would understand why they can't bend on that one perspective. And this is where we have really strong beliefs. Like I believe very strongly against Islamic cultural groups when they're like it should be illegal or an individual should be able to be punished for another cultural group.Malcolm: For showing a depiction of my you know, Muhammad, I'm sorry. You, it makes sense to say that was in your culture. It's illegal to show depictions of Muhammad. Sure. Yeah, I get that. But when you try to impose that on other people, absolutely not. No, never in any cultural group, get to impose your value system on another cultural group in so far as it does not physically harm you.Malcolm: You can say, well it offends me. It offends me when they misgender me. It offends me when they have a depiction of Muhammad. Or even, and I'm sorry I say this, it offends me when someone burns an American flag. Well, tough f*****g titties. You know, this, this, America [00:11:00] is defined by our diversity and by being a safe haven.Malcolm: For different groups that are different and we need to have those multiple expressions defended independently. So yeah, I, I defend that across the board. And I, and I really see it when somebody feels so culturally empowered that they could begin to present an idea like that, like punishing people who are not of their culture simply because they were born into a different culture.Malcolm: It is. It's just the worst. So I, I, one got, unfortunately my take on a very spicy topic out there. But also from like my cultural perspective from my cultural group, these people went through a lot of effort to transition. Like, it's not like they decide this on a whim, like the least I can do, especially if it hurts them.Malcolm: Is you know, called them by their preferred title, in the same way that when I talk to a Catholic priest, I would call them father, right? And I think that these individuals should call them father. But I don't think it should be a f*****g legal mandate to call them father, because not doing so is [00:12:00] disrespectful.Malcolm: Like, come on, you don't have to call other groups by other titles that they care about within their culture. But you do it because you're a nice person, who, you know, I, I call someone a doctor because I don't want to be a dick. Like, but I understand if some group was like, yeah, but we believe that all humans are born equal and you shouldn't elevate any person above any other person.Malcolm: And that's why we never used the title doctor and I'd be like, fine. They shouldn't be like legally enforced to, and people should like deal with the fact that some cultures are just going to relate to that differently and, and, and not become, but anyway, so, so to the point here,Simone: your cultural relativist when it comesMalcolm: to, but what do I think is the true answer?Malcolm: Because I think that there's no true answer can mean many differentSimone: things. There's your answer, the cultural relativistic one. Now you're saying there's a true answer.Malcolm: Yeah. Okay. There's many different ways. So all the ways you could determine if someone was a woman, right? You could say, well, XX chromosome, XY chromosome, oh, they pass, oh, they self identify as a woman.Malcolm: [00:13:00] Oh, a woman is whatever would make them happiest if they were called the woman. Yeah. That's what they want to be called. Yeah. Yeah. A woman is whether they can have kids. There's many, many, many, many different ways. ASimone: woman is a state of mind.Malcolm: That you can determine this, right? And in different cultures.Malcolm: Elevate different interpretations of gender above other interpretations of gender. So what's the right answer? Okay. Now, the true answer, the actual true answer, like if you're just stripping all of the tradition away.Simone: Glad you're solving this problem all in one podcast.Malcolm: Is... All of these different cultural interpretations, none of them has primacy to any other.Malcolm: You can, you can, you can give them primacy by giving them utility. So I can say, which cultural interpretation of womanhood is the most intergenerationally durable? Right? Like, which would allow your culture to outcompete other cultures? Well, there's different optimization functions there. As we mentioned, there's the muslim optimization function, and [00:14:00] the evangelical Christian.Malcolm: So there's the monogamous optimization function, and the polygynous optimization function for that. Which are different. But the monogamous optimization function for that is definitely that a woman is whoever can have kids. Okay, well, but you could say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but well, what if I say that what I'm optimizing for is what makes people happiest?Malcolm: Right. Well, progressives would say in the moment, and I agree in the moment, it is almost certainly true that a moment is identifying people who want to be identified as a woman, as a woman. However, I don't know if that is longitudinally happiness. Well, butSimone: isn't that kind of a zero sum happiness though?Simone: Because often making, you know, if someone is forced to, acknowledge a gender that's really hard for them to acknowledge or that makes them feel likeMalcolm: they're happiness of the individual who is being identified. I'm just saying this is what we're elevating. Okay. We're elevating this answer. Okay. Now I'd say that longitudinally is actually less clear to me.Malcolm: A lot of the research done right now indicates that yes [00:15:00] trans people are much happier after they transition. However If they didn't know that transition was a possibility, would that still be true? Like if they lived in a society that was like no transition at all, would that still be true?Malcolm: Also, we have to keep in mind that these, these results are coming through a filter. Like if you look at older results this is less true in some of the older studies on this. And I do know that if a researcher published something saying that people were less happy after they transitioned today, they would lose their tenure.Malcolm: Anyone who doesn't think that is. living in an ideologically insane bubble. Like we have seen let's see if I can find the study, but recently, yeah, some studies that just were reporting data where like the, the people who published them were either punished or they were heavily censored and they had to be redacted.Malcolm: It's sad that this is a state because it means for people like us who are trying to get at the truth, what actually makes people happier? We don't know. We do know that conservatives are happier on average. We do know that if you're depressed you're likely going to be better served by becoming a conservative, like, like a conservative Christian tradition.Malcolm: And this is one of these things where it's like, okay, [00:16:00] well, so then people say, well, we get to do whatever makes every kid happiest. Right. That's true. Then we're giving, you know, the same sex attracted kids to the, the LGBT community and the gender dysphoric kids to the LGBT community. Are we giving the depressed kids to the Christian community?Malcolm: Cause they seem to do better in that community. Like just statistically speaking. Right. Well, I think many people would be quite unhappy with that trade. And so it's, it's better than, you know, we'd leave this up to individual free will where, where that can be exercised. So what's the answer? Well, so the answer is this, it depends on what utility you are multiplying this by.Malcolm: I think that the current evidence is that if you're optimizing for in the moment happiness, probably the progressives are right. If you're optimizing for intergenerational cultural durability. I think that monogamy monogamy like systems are the closest to right systems, so in that system, likely the evangelical Christians are right.Malcolm: If you're optimizing for a, a truest understanding of reality, what you would say is... [00:17:00] Well, none of them matter. It matters what my cultural group is optimizing for. So our cultural group is optimizing for fertility rates, right? So what we would say is transition would only make sense for an individual if it was so distressing to them that they needed to transition to maximize their fertility rates, which would be true in almost no individual.Simone: Well, but I, so I think what you're describing though is a world in which, for example, as long as one doesn't compromise one's fertility. So this might preclude one from hormonal transition, but not preclude one from, like, plastic surgery. Someone could still transition and then be what looks like a gay or lesbian relationship.Simone: And this is whatMalcolm: we're, we're optimizing for within our culture. Yeah. And also keep in mind that our culture, because of the way we define this, Changes in its quote unquote upset acceptance of these different groups as a general fertility technologies are invented. So perfection of IVG perfection of artificial wombs [00:18:00] would make it that our culture might even.Malcolm: Encourage gay relationships or, or transition everyone to like one gender. If it turns out one gender is more efficient than another gender in like economic situations. So that's a very interesting way of really, but that's how our gender, I'm saying this is not the truth. This is just how we have chosen to relate to it because our goal is to give our kids the truest understanding of reality.Malcolm: We can while still maintaining intergenerational cultural fidelity and high fertility rates. Sure. But the actual true answer is. The question is rigged to the beginning, from the beginning, it only matters you can only come up with quote unquote correct answers when you know what you're optimizing for.Malcolm: And then, yes, there are specific answers that come up with specific solutions, depending on what you're optimizing for.Simone: Well, this has actually been pretty enlightening. Like, I agree. I agree. I think you've, you've figured it out. You solved gender. Now we just have to find a succinct way. IMalcolm: solved gender.Malcolm: You solved gender. A gender that will likely piss everyone off. We canSimone: now just, the debate [00:19:00] can end. Finally, now we can look at focusing more on becoming an off planet species and getting us to Mars. Thank you. All right, good. Or just come up with some new like TV and movie series that are actually novel and not just a sequel anymore, please.Malcolm: But, I'd love toMalcolm: Yeah. I just wanted to double check that Dylan Mulvaney did say, yeah, cause it should be illegal for conservatives to use incorrect gender pronouns. And I think that this is also a really important part that, you know, we as a society need to know where to draw the lines and where we get into government mandated cultural genocide, where we get into my culture is ethically superior to other cultures, dominant large cultural groups in this country.Malcolm: Both Muslims and Christians and Jews, and they are all wrong, and my culture is correct, because, and why do they think their culture is correct? Because they control power in the moment. And so they, like most cultural groups throughout history, who have controlled power in the moment, Think that they have the [00:20:00] right to culturally enforce their norms on other groups.Malcolm: And to me, that is one of the highest forms of evil that any individual can engage with. And absolutely, yes, you should boycott a brand that is platforming any individual who's promoting that. Absolutely. It is one of the, genocide is one of the purest forms of evil. Cultural genocide. Attempting to erase other cultural groups or lauding your cultural power over other cultural groups.Malcolm: And I'm not going to lie, Christian groups have done this when they've had power in the past. Totally. And when they take power again, if they do take power again in the future, our cultural group will fight them just as ardently as we are fighting the, the, the dominant cultural group in our society today.Malcolm: Because our values do not change. We are not living in a moral nexus. You need to act on your own moral core. And this is something that I can say with a lot of confidence that it never turns out well when one cultural group thinks that they are [00:21:00] axiomatically better than their neighbors and that they have a right.Malcolm: To enforce those value systems on their neighbors using a government's legal system.Simone: Agreed. Well, this was fun. Thanks for enlightening me here. I will, I will shift my answer to your answer. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Hello friends! In this fun video, Malcolm and Simone go through their personal tier list for how plausible they find various cryptids and paranormal phenomena. They logically break down why they find things like Bigfoot somewhat plausible but ghosts less likely. Malcolm explains at length why he thinks UFOs could actually be time travelers from the future based on his unique metaphysical framework. The two recount spooky stories from staying in haunted houses, and debate whether emotional imprints can linger. Simone wants to hear your real-life cryptid encounters in the comments. Overall a thought-provoking look at evaluating extraordinary claims and events with nuance and evidence. Let us know which cryptid explanations you find compelling!Malcolm: [00:00:00] The tier list goes flathead monster, moss man, almost certainly not real.Malcolm: Loch Ness monster, almost certainly not real. Bigfoot. \ Plausible, but probably not real. UFOs, probably real, but not actually aliens. And crop circles, probably real, but maybe alien.Simone: And girths, I don't know, but probably carbon monoxide and or weird gold. Oh, girths, yes. Yeah.Simone: Girths.Malcolm: Girths. Spooky. But now you'll get to see why we think all of this.Would you like to know more?Simone: Okay. Okay. Before we get into the main topic, this is sort of related. I was walking around our backyard this morning. Malcolm. And I heard the weirdest noise and I was so confused. And I was by the chicken coop and I hear what sounds like a goose. It was like, like that basically. [00:01:00] And I was like, is there a goose?Simone: Like, you know, but the previous people who own this house used to have geese in the chicken coop. So I thought like, I mean, I don't like, has a goose broken in to the chicken coop? Has it like assimilated with our flop? But no, turns out. That when, when roosters, we have one male chicken, when they're going through their little puberty and they start to try to like, like, they, they like do it very awkwardly.Simone: And it was just him completely failing to like,Malcolm: he's trying to be tough and he's always trying to be tough to the other. Yeah, he's always like, He goes around and bosses them about and like, Yeah. And sometimes, cause we have big chickens, we put them in the big chicken coop to try to get him to handle the big hens cause they're kinda dumb and, and annoying.Malcolm: And they'll end up just bullying him and So this is him trying to be cool. Like he's, he's like this teenage, but yeah, it's like his voice crack is about like trying to be [00:02:00] masculine and cool and just utterly failing.Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Bullying everyone's smaller. And then as soon as he gets put with the bigger chickens, he freaksMalcolm: out.Malcolm: He's trying to get back to his coop. So we put him back in the, one of the birds.Simone: Yeah. We don't want to hurt his feelings or anything, but also like you've startedMalcolm: giving him chicken trauma. Yeah.Simone: I, you know, I'm so sorry,Malcolm: afraid of giant women now, but,Simone: You know, this is not, you know, there, there are many people who experience extraordinary transporting things like this, like mysterious homes.Malcolm: So, I, some of our listeners, by the way, hello, Simone, it is wonderful to be here with you today. Hello husband. So one of our listeners was like, yeah, you've mentioned in other videos that you're like. Really into cryptid YouTube and like aliens YouTube. And not just that I've actually spoken on it on other podcasts.Malcolm: So there's another podcast that like goes into this stuff. I don't remember the name of it, but it's by like a professor at, I want to say MIT or Yale. So like a educated [00:03:00] professor type guy, and like the way that he is being secretly under, under the system is he believes in aliens visiting us and was, was talking to me about that.Malcolm: The question here is, as somebody who consumes a ton of content on ghosts and aliens and cryptids and all of that, do I believe any of it's real? If so, which of it do I think is most likely to be real? So I'd say the first and like the most interesting thing about asking me this question is I actually sort of don't like, I don't really think that any of the stories that I have heard have a high likelihood.Malcolm: And yet I keep consuming them like I find them just so interesting to investigate. You can't get enough ofSimone: it and it's enough and I will have to say to the public that you will watch a [00:04:00] lot of them to the point where you will also leave your closet doors wide open at night.Malcolm: Yeah, well, that's because of Mr.Malcolm: Bolin and all the murderers who hide in closets and kill people. So I also really like true crime. So it might be sort of the same category. It might be two different categories, but I don't think it's impossible. So I think something that's really important, and I think a lot of people have had their eyes open to this a lot, sort of in the post COVID era, is that both the media and the government are like really comfortable lying to people.Malcolm: And they will lie about like stupid stuff that there is obvious evidence is either true or not true. Just like going to the academic establishment within our society and using what it is saying or the media establishment. As, as true and untrue is sort of useless in terms of determining what's true.Malcolm: It, so I can't say that because they say that aliens don't exist, they aren't true. I have to sort of logic it, right?Simone: Right. So in other words, you're not [00:05:00] going to say just on a blanket basis that cryptids and aliens aren't real. You are going to really question it, so what'sMalcolm: it is like, easier to disprove, right?Malcolm: Okay, all right. You know, so, the, the the flat headed monster, right?Simone: Not familiar with a flat headed monster. I mean, Bigfoot, I know.Malcolm: Well, so, sorry, yeah, okay, sorry, I might be going deep with Curtis here. Yeah, maybe you're a real thing.Simone: Or just one of your weirder dreams.Malcolm: No, I'm, what's it oh, Flatwoods Monster. Okay,Simone: okay. Is what it's called. Still haven't heard of it.Malcolm: Well, it's, it's similar to Mothman, Owlman, it might even be the same thing. But, but these, this category of stuff like Mothman, Owlman, you know.Simone: We've watched a bunch of videos analyzing them, right?Simone: And like the conclusion for a logical person is pretty much always the same, and the answer is... Owls. Owls. It's always owls. BigMalcolm: glowing red eyes hovering above the [00:06:00] ground. What an owl would look like that. And two, like of course in the wrong context you would think that was a monster. And three, the real reason is that these monsters are typically only spotted.Malcolm: For very short periods of time in a location. Now there's other types of cryptids that are seen like a lot longer over a period. Like something like the Loch Ness Monster. But the Loch Ness Monster is pretty easy to dismiss for me, at least, just because there's no photographic evidence or good photography.Simone: Oh, come on. There's the iconic toy sticking outMalcolm: of the lake photo. I've gone through all of the photo videos. None of them have convinced me. Whereas now in an age of cell phones. Literally everywhere. I know, I know. Like while the quality of cameras and proliferation of cameras has increased, the number of pictures or plausible pictures has decreased, which makes me think that a lot of those very large cryptids that live in places where they might regularly contact humans are almost [00:07:00] certainly not real.Malcolm: And here'sSimone: another thing that convinces me that cryptids and aliens are also not real. At least many of the reports, which is that when you look at movie releases and like what the scary either aliens or monsters look like after one of those movie releases for a decent period, a lot of people see that thing.Simone: So it's like, I'm actually, I just read becauseMalcolm: it's not the truth. The Loch Ness monster, the Loch Ness monsterSimone: in like, yeah, that's its own thing. That's not, that's not like the movie inspired thing.Malcolm: No, no, no aliens. It came after, no, no, no, the Loch Ness Monster there's Trey the Explainer does a really good thing on this if, if people are interested, but yeah, if you look at the history of the Loch Ness Monster, it's changed what it's looked like to be like local recent movie releases.Malcolm: Oh my gosh. Amazing. And it used to look very different than we see it today. Like now it's just very Dinosaur like and it, in a, Original iterations I, I, I believe it looked pretty different from that, but I forget what it looked like. But, but hold on. I'm not actually going for the, I don't think they're real.Malcolm: Now I can get into [00:08:00] more plausible cryptids.Simone: Okay, yeah, let's go, yeah, what is real? Well, actually, first I want to ask, like, Bigfoot, real orMalcolm: not? Plausible cryptid, Bigfoot actually falls into the category of plausible cryptid to me. Wow. So we'll get into why I think it's a plausible cryptid. Cryptid. Okay.Malcolm: There's a new paper called Bob Giblin who does a thing and he presented this theory and I found it marginally convincing. I still think very likely it doesn't exist, but it's possible it exists. Okay. So here's what it is. If you look at how much Humans have changed. So what this would be as a human subspecies, almost obviously if it existed, it would be a, we know that humans co existed with many subspecies of humans for a very long time.Malcolm: Like this is something we know. Yeah. Like Neanderthals, right? Like Neanderthals and stuff like that. So what Bigfoot would be is a human subspecies that evolved a specialization in its sort of mental processing to stay hidden [00:09:00] from other human subspecies. So it would be like, let's say like 10 standard deviations or 20 standard deviations above a normal human.Malcolm: In IQ, where that IQ is relevant to not being seen or staying out of, of, of the sight of human populations. Bigfoot. God of Honeysick. That is not an impossible thing to have happened. Yeah, sure. And it is, it is something that there would have been evolutionary pressure to have happened. And it would explain why we have so little evidence of them, yet we see recurring stories of things like this.Malcolm: Yeah. across sort of regions. The biggest evidence against Bigfoot is their geographic distribution. They just seem to be way too geographically distributed for me. For something that's that rare. Well, they seem to be sort of everywhere in almost every culture. And that leads me to [00:10:00] believe that there is some sort of human predilection to see something like this in our environments.Malcolm: But whatSimone: about also the human predilection for some humans to be crazy Bushmen who decide to live in the forest and who naturally get pretty hairy.Malcolm: Yeah. So this is a phenomenon that could happen across areas and then could lead to recurring Bigfoot sightings. So we know for aSimone: fact that there are men in many different national parks who just like are known to be like that weird guy who now like lives off the land in this park.Malcolm: Yeah. Now what's interesting is they've done calculations on this. And it couldn't be, because what a lot of people think is okay, like are wild men real, like populations of wild people who live in our national parks.Simone: Oh, like actually not just one offs, butMalcolm: like, Not just one offs, they like differentiated from normal human populations, maybe like in the 1800s or something, like they broke off and started living alone in the parks and became like weird cannibal groups or, or another way, some sort of weird, you know, [00:11:00] inbred offshoot of humanity.Malcolm: Okay. Likely not, because you need about 80 individuals to maintain the genetic health of a population. And a population that size living in the national parks You'd see it. Would be seen, especially if they had the types of mental deficits you would associate with that kind of There's not much inverting.Malcolm: Okay. So I guess, you know, I'm, I'm walking through this from , less plausible, plausible to most plausible. Okay. So, so we're going from first like really low down, I think very unplausible stuff. All right. Okay. Ghosts. Again, I think that it's something that we would see on camera more.Malcolm: Like, this is why I think ghosts, for example, are less plausible than Bigfoot. The idea of a human subspecies that was just like so much dramatically smarter than a normal human that it could evade them. Fine. I get that. Yeah. Spiritual events that could be easily recorded on camera, and yet we're seeing less of these recordings as time goes on, rather than more of these recordings as cameras [00:12:00] become more distributed.Malcolm: That strains credulity to me. But, aliens are the real outlier here. Okay, alright. First, when I say aliens, I'm just gonna say UFOs. SoSimone: they're kind of a difference, right? I mean, like UFOs, just like it could be anything. I mean, it could be like a spy plane because it's justMalcolm: an idea right here. I'm talking about unexplained aerial encounters or yeah.Malcolm: Unexplained aerial encounters or unexplained encounters that are usually attributed to being UFOs. Now, the number of these hasn't. Like hasn't declined as much as I would expect other types of things. In fact, itSimone: seems like a lot more were released by the U. S. government recently. Like it hasMalcolm: been identified by the U.Malcolm: S. government. And it seems to be something that one of the reasons we don't see it in our every day is their high altitude phenomenon frequently, right? So where you see this most frequently 90%.Malcolm: Actually, not even 90%. I'd go higher than that. [00:13:00] 98%. There are some very strange high altitude phenomenon we do not have a good explanation for.Simone: Okay, sure. I think most people would agreeMalcolm: on that. Well, no, because when you hear a lot of There's a video of it. stories, right? People will discount it. They'll be like, Oh, that's this phenomenon.Malcolm: We have an explanation for already like some form of ball lightning or something like that. And remember, we didn't figure out what ball lightning was until fairly recently.Simone: It's freaking cool. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Magnets, man.Malcolm: I'm just looking up. Ball Lightning, oh, so it says it was discovered June 1195 1995?Simone: Come on, we were like, I don't know, conscious humansMalcolm: then, 1195, 1195. Oh,Simone: oh, like the year 1195, notMalcolm: 1995. Yes, sorry. So that's not useful.Malcolm: But I, I think it was like heat lightning or ball lightning. Like there was some astro, astrospheric phenomenon that was only discovered recently. And we also need to remember that the giant squid was only discovered recently and would [00:14:00] have been considered a cryptid before that as well.Malcolm: Yeah. So we see some of these phenomenons. Now with other deep sea stuff, I think there's likely lots of big creepy stuff we don't know in the deep ocean. Yeah. Because we do know about deep ocean gigantification. So that's not even like a cryptids anymore, I'd say like that there are giant monsters living at the bottom of the ocean.Malcolm: Yes. Now these monsters could be giant crabs or something like that. Like we don't know, but they would be called monsters in common parlance. But yeah, because crabs. This is something I want to talk about. What do I think is going on here? With missing time phenomenon, even like low to the ground atmospheric phenomenon where you see things happening.Malcolm: I think that the very least likely explanation for this is extraterrestrials. Of all the explanations, I think that's the least plausible. And I would say it's dramatically less plausible than them being humans from the future. So this is where I need to get into why I think it's so less plausible.Malcolm: So if we're talking about. The most [00:15:00] plausible is that it is an atmospheric phenomenon we don't have an explanation for yet. Okay. Something to do with electricity or gases or something like that. Yeah. Oh, another thing that we need to note which is just really common for me from a lot of mystery stories, because I really love like 411 cases and stuff like that, is I used to be a schizophrenia researcher and people don't seem to realize how common Like, like psychotic episodes are and that they can happen in somebody who's never had a history of them.Malcolm: Like a lot of the stuff that you see, it's just tragic example of that. Like there was a recent case of the guy never done anything wrong, takes his, his truck into the woods, like a giant, like 16 wheeler truck into the woods and like terrorizes this forest for a while, and then it's found dead randomly somewhere else in the woods and the truck is found abandoned.Malcolm: And people are like, Oh, like mysterious, like, no, that's just like a pretty obvious psychotic break. Like for me. Somebody saw him in the middle of this cycle and they were like, he's like, it wasn't me. It wasn't my fault. Like that's a common thing [00:16:00] someone would say during a schizophrenic break. So a lot of this, what you're just seeing is schizophrenia or other types.Malcolm: Now, a very common, like if you have like a lower level of schizophrenia, a very common symptom of schizophrenia, where I theorize that all the symptoms of schizophrenia come from is that you have a lower level. Threshold for activation of your theory of mind detector likely to see a theory and bind in things that don't have a theory of mind.Malcolm: So it's like store window displays, or you could see it as I've seen 3 helicopters today. That must mean that there's a plan and they're tracking me. And like, that's applying theory of mind where theory of mind shouldn't exist. And so you'll see this in a lot of, in a lot of psychotic breaks or sort of low level schizophrenia cases you know, so anyway, which isn't actually exactly the same thing as like schizoaffective disorder where some people might think it is, but I don't want to get into all that.Malcolm: BecauseSimone: we're talking cryptids and UFOs, get back to the aliens.Malcolm: Get back to UFOs, okay? Come on, man. So most likely explanation is atmospheric phenomenon we don't have an explanation for yet. Okay. But, but [00:17:00] that's not an interesting explanation. So let's go with the more plausible, interesting explanation and why I think future humans is more plausible than aliens.Malcolm: One, you have to keep in mind, I'm going to be heavily biased by my own theology. As you know, Simone and I have a theology around future humans, influencing humanity to manifest their own creation where I think it is. Almost an inevitability that a million years from now, if humanity or whatever we become is still around that we, those beings will likely be closer to gods than the way we conceptualize humans today, and they would likely relate to time very differently than we do today.Malcolm: So, I'll do a little bit about time right here, because somebody was like, you should talk more about how you conceive time. And we talk about that in two other videos that you should really check out, the Free Will vs. Determinism video, it's very important to our understanding of time. And what's behind the fabric of reality video is really important to our understanding of time, but to talk a bit more about this, when we look [00:18:00] at the ways that we as humans right now engage with physics, you know, we can engage with like physical matter and move it and stuff like that.Malcolm: And a lot of our physics is around different and unique ways of engaging. physical matter, like moving it around this four dimensional plane. The one dimension we don't really engage with this time in any meaningful context right now. And yet we know that you can engage with time. We know from gravity wells and stuff like that time is warped.Malcolm: This is like an incontrovertible part of physics right now. Time. is malleable. Now it seems to be with our current understanding of physics, you cannot travel backwards in time. That is, that is true in our current understanding of physics. It does not appear, well, okay, lots of caveats here, like particles might be able to travel backwards in time, but like large intentional macro things can't travel backwards in time, like very small.Malcolm: Things or information can't travel backwards in time, depending on which model of physics you're using. But we do know that you can sort of play with time in [00:19:00] different ways. It would be interesting, and where I think the biggest... Breakthroughs in physics that we are not anticipating with our current model of physics are going to have to do with relations of time.Malcolm: Like, as I said, I suspect that future power generation might be through manipulating time. I mean, if you had asked people a couple hundred years ago, did they think that by splitting atoms, like the fundamental building block of matter, that that would be, A major way that we could capture power I think people would be like, no, it's insane.Malcolm: If you ask people today, do you think that by I wouldn't call it splitting time. I don't know exactly how it's going to work, but in some way, manipulating time would be a major source of power generation. No, I don't think so. But I think if you just look at our current understanding of physics, it seems like it would be the most sustainable power generator out of all conceivable power generators.Malcolm: Like, it wouldn't burn material in the same way that all [00:20:00] existing means of power generation burn material, which would allow you to do really interesting things. Another thing to remember is, with our current understanding of physics, like, it does look like time bubbles are probably possible, and by that, what I mean is, Is you can likely bud off parts of our universe into other universes where time in one universe doesn't interact with time in the other universe anymore.Malcolm: Now this is far beyond our ability in physics, but it seems consistent with our understanding of even like basic physics today. So the idea of like isolated time bubbles are not necessarily impossible. This is why when I look at a foaming AI, how is it going to generate power? I suspect it'll be in ways that are very, very, very difficult for us to conceive today,Now that I think about it, this might actually be the most likely explanation for the Fermi paradox. Which is that when an entity is VCs, whatever reaches a certain level of intelligence or technology, that it begins [00:21:00] to be able to generate energy and potentially even matter. In a way that is non-destructive. Uh, so when we think about energy today, you know, humans. I assume that there will be a fight or a conflict over future energy, but if energy. I can be generated from the very nature of reality itself. Then there's not as much reason to continue to expand outwards at least. It might also mean that aliens like this when they expand may find it, energy cheaper to expand across dimensions then to expand, It spatially within the existing solar system. So there's all sorts of things like that. Where when we look at things from our very, very myopic view right now, in terms of our understanding of physics, we can be like, why aren't there aliens everywhere. And the answer might just be super obvious, like, well, it's so much cheaper to go across dimensions to your own planet than it is to try to go to a different planet or, well, I mean, why would you [00:22:00] expand when you can just, you know, generate. Energy from time or something like that.Malcolm: but keep in mind that AI isn't the only thing that can boom, you know, humans that can begin to edit their own DNA and edit their own brains can also begin to film.Malcolm: You can have a biological film just as much as you can have a synthetic film. It's important to remember that there's many ways. That our species, or whatever we end up becoming, ends up fooming. And when those things are fooming, they will relate to time differently.Malcolm: So, that's, that's one thing. So, I, I almost think it's an inevitability that a future iteration of humanity...Malcolm: Would relate to time differently than the way we relate to time. Now the question is, can it go back in time? So let's talk about what we would know about these aliens. Like, suppose they're real, suppose they exist. What do we know about them? We know they go to great care, even though they seem to visit us fairly frequently.Malcolm: To not be talked about in like a big way was impressed or acknowledged by mainstream society. Like, they appear to care [00:23:00] about discretion. They also appear to be astronomically more technologically advanced than us. And they appear to be here in fairly small numbers. By that, what I mean is this is not some big invasion force or something like that.Malcolm: We, we haven't even had one like planet size ship with thousands of aliens trying to integrate with our species. I think that reptilian theories are to me fairly easy to disprove the insider access that Simone and I have to elite corners of society. That, that we would know if these things were, were happening.Malcolm: So, that, that being the case, okay, so, I don't believe in the Reptoids. And I don't think the, so why don't I think aliens are from another planet? Okay, so, a few reasons. These features that sort of unite modern alien sightings would make perfect sense that it was Future humans. If it was future humans, they likely wouldn't want to disrupt timelines that much.Malcolm: They might be attempting to [00:24:00] disrupt the timeline, but in very specific ways to guide future possibilities to come to exist. That's their goal in interacting with the timeline. Then they're less likely to like abduct or mess with high profile people. Instead, they would likely use butterfly effect, like abductions where they abduct relevant people, mess with them in ways that ends up messing with influential people to do things they need to do, because if you were, you know, Painting reality, you would want to interfere in the minimum way possible while still having the sorts of effects that you're going to have in the future, and that interference could even look like floating bowling balls of light, you know, floating.Malcolm: Glowing balls of light, you know, flying around a plane or something like that, like that could have butterfly effects. So it could be that these balls aren't even that sentient or anything like that. They are just being guided to look that way for the impact that has on the timeline. That would be a, a very [00:25:00] logical thing to do if you were the super intelligentSimone: entity.Simone: I just love this, this theoretical conversation of like future humans that are godlike in power. And they're like, yeah, I mean. How do we change the entire timeline? It's like, actually pretty simple. I mean, just a glowing ball, believe it or not. I don't know. It just works. It's just weird.Malcolm: I don't know. Well, I mean, it, it would work and it would be the way they would be engaging with us because it would be harder to predict all of the variable outcomes of wide scale interaction, like interacting with us through a television show or something like that.Malcolm: Which is why I would. Another part of the theory would be that while aliens are real, the least likely to be real aliens are the ones you see the most media coverage on. So theSimone: least likely No, the giant eyed, weird looking ones. No,Malcolm: no, no, no, no. The, like, so like an incident that gets a lot of coverage, like the Phoenix night, night lights.Malcolm: Like, there was this one instance where it was over a major city and like Oh, andSimone: like tons of people filmedMalcolm: it, that kind of thing. This would be a [00:26:00] likely to be fake sighting. Whereas Random person who says they were abducted with their wife or random pilot who says, I saw lights outside of my, my, my plane, they're most likely to be telling the truth.Malcolm: Which is pretty interesting because this future entity would know what ends up getting caught in the media, what ends up being told about in the media, what ends up getting covered in the way it gets covered. Now why do I not think that they're aliens? Well, there's a few reasons. One is I just don't think it would be worth it for most aliens to travel all the way to earth.Malcolm: To f**k with us in the way that aliens seem to be f*****g with us. It is very trivial and weird ways to mess with people to be interacting in the atmosphere in a way where you're not really communicating with people, but like just. Flying around in our upper atmosphere. Yeah. To randomly fly over a city and then disappear to, to randomly fly and then crash in a way where it can be [00:27:00] like recovered by the military.Simone: It's kind of funny to think that like they would develop the technology. To do interplanetary chan like travel and then they like get to us and they're like, Oh, I can't drive anymore. Like, I don'tMalcolm: know. Just, yeah. Yeah. Well, they see the way of messing with us is just f*****g with us. It would be like teenage aliens come to earth just to f**k with us.Malcolm: To prank us. But then also they have the self control to not be caught by us. That seems unlikely. I don'tSimone: know. It kind of reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode with like, show us what you got. Like, you know. Yeah, we couldn't always end up on some intergalactic game show.Malcolm: Well, also we've got to think about what would be the nature of most alien species.Malcolm: So there's sort of two types of alien species. One is an alien species that's like very thoughtful and expands slowly and is... You know, this is the kind alien species, they run into us and they're not interested in wiping us out. But then you have grabby aliens, which is the other type of alien species, which is just interested in super, super fast expansion.Malcolm: Okay. Did you say grabby? Grabby. It's a technical term. You could look it up. It's used in a lot of math [00:28:00] equations on how aliens would expand in the universe, and you should expect to see the first other aliens. Now, we might become a grabby alien species, if we turn out to be a very expansionist system.Malcolm: Might. Well, and you know that Simone and I, if our faction, if our vision for humanity ends up spreading, we will become a very grabby species. Grabby species. While they may let a species live, they're typically not awesome to have in your neighborhood because they're typically so interested in expansion and they're typically, you know, very technologically advanced compared to native species.Malcolm: These species expand as a civilization almost as fast as they can travel. So if they develop speed of light, travel, they are expanding as a civilization. You know, and when I say as soon, I mean, they might go to a new planet, set up, get set up for like 100, 500 years. That's not really that long in the scale of the universe.Malcolm: And then immediately be moving to the next planet or planet system. But realistically, they're probably moving [00:29:00] like 50, 20 years after they get to a new planet. So, they would expand incredibly quickly. And, and, and why this is relevant is you're not likely to get multi hundred year scouting parties on Earth with this type of species.Malcolm: Yeah, becauseSimone: they would just takeMalcolm: us out. They would just take us out or they would be here and not care because expansion to them is more important than any sort of prime directive or anything like that. Right. Why would they do, like, what is the prime directive other than like a weird zoo that's like was in your empire, but you don't, what?Malcolm: Like that seems unlikely to me.Simone: Okay. So let's recap then. Hold on. Hold on. So we got Bigfoot, maybe other cryptids, mostly not UFOs. Probably just future humans doing time travel nonsense. And, anythingelse?Malcolm: Hmm, what other aliens? Oh,Simone: oh, like most other cryptids, owls.Malcolm: Owls, always owls. Owls, I mean the joke was cryptids, in the cryptid, like, skeptic community.[00:30:00]Malcolm: Owls. Owls.Simone: It's always owls. It's always owls.Malcolm: Which gets sad because you run out of cryptids. I always want new cryptids to look at or new cryptids. ISimone: love owls. Owls are great.Malcolm: So another thing about ghosts, which I should note from.Simone: Oh yeah, ghosts, probablyMalcolm: not. Well, so we have two reasons. I mean, one is personal experience.Malcolm: So I worked at the Smithsonian's Anthropology department. Evolutionary anthropology. Which isSimone: famously haunted? What? Like, how is that? Well,Malcolm: so, I like working at odd times, as people know. So I'd regularly get there at 2 in the morning. I'd regularly leave at 2 in the morning. Almost every day I'd get there around 2 or 3 in the morning.Malcolm: I was one of the first people in the Smithsonian. People don't know this about the back rooms of the Smithsonian. I'll even see if I can find pictures of them. But the department I worked in was floor, To sealing human bones.Simone: Who said bones are haunted? Well,Malcolm: these aren't just human bones. They're often Native American bones that were taken from their resting sites improperly because the Smithsonian has been around for a [00:31:00] long time.Malcolm: And they have Try to return what they can, but their labeling systems aren't always as good as a person would like. I don't think we haveSimone: empirical evidence to suggest that like, indigenous bones are more likely to createMalcolm: ghosts. Well, it's not just indigenous bones. The point being, if they have bones...Malcolm: From many periods taken likely improperly from almost every culture in the world at a density that is likely unmatched anywhere in the world. And I was there at all the spooky times working with lots and lots of human bones.Simone: You weren't nervous at all? You were not nervous at all?Malcolm: At all! It actually felt very comfy and safe to me and the reason it felt comfy and safe to me is, so I actually worked in the department where Bones was supposed to be filmed at one point.Malcolm: So Bones, this is something that the Smithsonian does. What Bones did. If people have seen the show Bones and you actually act a lot like Temperance Brennan, which I, which I absolutely love that I saw that show and I'm not like a real Temperance Brennan. But anyway So the show Bones takes place where there's this [00:32:00] crime detective unit at the Smithsonian that like looks at corpses that are too decomposed.Malcolm: This is a real thing. They actually would take Bones to my department at the Smithsonian if they were too decomposed. And it was a department that at one point I actually ran, not because I technically ran it, but because everyone else Went on a dig in Africa and I was like, look, I've done field work for the last five summers in a row.Malcolm: I want to just sit here and work. You're just the one who was left. And they went fine. So I was the only person in the department. Not because of like, I was technically actually writing anything. I was just writing it because ISimone: was the intern who wasMalcolm: left behind. I was the intern who was left behind.Malcolm: But they only get like one case a year or something like that.Simone: And they also don't have a beautiful, like, glass office. Oh,Malcolm: no, no, it was really small. Yeah. So the point I was going to get to is the reason I always felt so safe there is the hallways are so cramped and the rooms are so cramped that somebody like me who always likes to, who really feels safe in environments with a lot of clutter and a lot, but like organized clutter and sort [00:33:00] of an, a musky smell.Malcolm: And like your, your back is always to a corner. Like I felt really safe in this environment. Now a corner filled with bones, but Well, youSimone: can always use the bones to impale someone who attacked you. So bones to fight everywhere.Malcolm: Weapons every, yeah. But then the other environment it's like, okay, well, so it could turn out that bone ghosts aren't tied to bones, but they're sort of like imprints left by humans on specific locations.Malcolm: Now you,Simone: you yourself have admitted that sometimes we get into houses and it'sMalcolm: Well, what's interesting is our house is from the 1700s. Yeah. Many people have lived and died in this house. Tons.Simone: In this very room, probably at least like fiveMalcolm: people the master bedroom. At least five people have died. At leastSimone: five people.Simone: It's the nicest room.Malcolm: Astral phenomenon. Although you could say, everybody says the house feels like uniquely wholesome, like more wholesome than it should feel. And so it may have like. A positive haunting where it's just nice ghosts.Simone: Yeah, well, and we've also been in other historical houses where it's like, [00:34:00] I do not want to be here right now, and I would not be okay.Simone: Yeah,Malcolm: I definitely feel that, like, bad vibe houses.Simone: So, like, what's that? What do you think that is? You know, that's a cryptid thing. What's your theory? Do you think it's carbon monoxide?Malcolm: No, I think the houses are structured in a way that feels very undefensible to a modern way, like it feels off in very big spaces.Malcolm: The houses that I feel really scared in are usually the most mansion y houses, whether they're old or new, and they are the ones with the biggest spaces and the emptiest spaces. So in our house, Every space is sort of utilized for something like I'm in a, a bedroom right here and you can see the kids like bunk beds being built into the walls next to an old fireplace and everything like that.Malcolm: Every room has a purpose and I think it's purposeless rooms that create that feeling of dread, but it couldSimone: be the only time I'veMalcolm: like literally a phenomenonSimone: Yeah, at one point before I met you, I was in a hotel in New York, really tiny, tiny room because I was on a college budget. [00:35:00] But like, I had an experience in the early morning where I like, like, packed up right away and left.Simone: I do think that there are some spaces. I don't know. Like, I do not believe in ghosts, but like, I believeMalcolm: in there might be emotional imprints on the fabric of reality, but if that's true, that means emotions interact with the fabric of reality in a way that modern physics doesn't capture, whichSimone: I like also doesn't work at all with our metaphysical model because we just see emotions as signals.Simone: Like, I don't think it's that. I, I think it's probably so, you know, we there's some skin Walker ranch, right? That's another really interesting,Malcolm: very, very likely to be.Simone: Yeah. So, so wait for background for those who don't know about skin Walker ranch, it is they, it is a branch that has been investigated for like.Simone: Maybe over 20 years now for a strange phenomenon to take place. Like cows are found, like gutted out with people there, like see things and freak out and get really paranoid and start like bolting doors and covering windows [00:36:00] with nonsense and just completely losing it. And it seems really clear that there may be some kind of un, un, Not yet understood fungus.Simone: It's like coming out from theMalcolm: ground and yeah, my reading is probably like a, a, a time related fungus thing. Or it might be seismic activity, whether it needs to be like a mountain range in a unique spot where you would expect atmospheric phenomenon if they were like clustering in an area. Yeah. So it could be one of those things, but here's the other option.Malcolm: Okay, suppose it was future humans. A lot of these phenomenon that we see, like, mutilated cows and stuff like that. Would that work? Why would, why wouldSimone: humans from the future go to Skinwalker Ranch and mutilate cows? Well, theyMalcolm: would likely have locations that they would return to regularly that there are like they have a portal there or something with skin rocker ranches.Malcolm: It's so well covered. I doubt it would be an area that they would return. Yeah, they might have a facility that like, maybe you need to build facilities to do this. But then, you know, if you're going back in time, earth is in a completely different location, vis a vis the Oh, maybe it's kindSimone: of like, What is it, a transporter from Star Trek, but like, if you do it wrong, like the guts [00:37:00] come out the wrong side.Simone: Like, it could be a side effect of time travel where like, oops, like the organs of thisMalcolm: animal. Well, so there's two options here. A cow's could be people experimenting with early time travel. That would be interesting. Now another thing is, is if you want it to influence human populations, like suppose you wanted to influence the evolution of human populations, you would want to influence us through our food supply.Malcolm: Okay. And.Malcolm: Like if you were trying to manifest a certain evolutionary pathway for humanity, yeah, you'd want to be messing with crops and animals. People in society today, we look at crops and animals as being ancillary or backwards or irrelevant, but if you are a future human trying to influence the genetic direction of the species, crops and livestock actually become pretty interesting, likely more interesting than urban populations.Malcolm: Thanks.Simone: Oh, so are we getting to crop circles now? It's just like botched attempts to like bioengineer crop and like [00:38:00] accidentally the application method like looks like a weird circly thing. Well, so a lotMalcolm: of crop circles, if you go really deep on crop circles, it's actually pretty interesting. Okay. So people came out.Malcolm: And crop circles, I actually think, are a very high likelihood to be a real phenomenon. What? No, there's like all these storiesSimone: of people making them.Malcolm: Yes, but those people also seem to be tied to CIA and stuff like that. So we do know that a lot of people faked crop circles. Oh, toSimone: like make other, like, so to cover up the ones that are not explained to yourself.Simone: Yeah,Malcolm: there's very good evidence that the people faking crop circles We're some, we're just jokesters.Simone: CIA plans. Okay. So, so some jokers, some CIA plans, you're saying, and then some real.Malcolm: You have such a, confluence of evidence that I would say was a 95 percent certainty that at least one intelligence agency was paying people to make cross circles.Malcolm: Okay. And didn't say that I fake made cross circles. Now the question is why would they do this? Yeah. This is [00:39:00] actually a very interesting question. And the answer is, well, because cross circles are real. You wouldn't do this if cross circles weren't real. You wouldn't have an interest in, in convincingSimone: I don't know, I, it could be that like, you need a new cycle that you know is going to be likely to get eaten up by some subject who needs to not haveMalcolm: surface.Malcolm: It you look at some instances of cross circles, there are some instances of cross circles. that are very hard to explain through other means. This is to me, ultimate skeptic. Ultimate skepti mmm. I'm, I'm pretty f*****g skeptical. So, but let's look at crop circles from a non, like, what could crop circles be, right?Malcolm: Mm, okay. Crop circles seem to me to be either an atmospheric phenomenon, Or a genuine attempt at communication. If it's a genuine attempt at communication, well, this, I do not think it's like a spaceship landing. Okay. I think it's much more likely. [00:40:00] Somebody on a planet very, very, very, very far from us trying to write something as small as they can.Malcolm: Well, no, think about it. So you're on a planet very far from earth and you're trying to communicate with us and you need to write on something, right? Yeah. Crops would likely look like a very good medium. Well,Simone: yeah, cause you know, the humans are using it, so that's there and they're nice and uniform, so that helps.Simone: But why wouldn't you just do it on a parking lot?Malcolm: Well, I doubt it would, I doubt it wouldSimone: so suppose it would be noticed much more early, what a singed parking lot with like little doodles on it. Totally. People would notice thatMalcolm: maybe, but you're also much more likely to actually incinerate someone.Simone: Oh, that's sweet.Malcolm: Oh, so they're being careful. We know that no crop prickles have killed someone yet. As far as we know, as far as we know. Well, I mean, that's an important thing. You know, what they're doing seems like it would, if a human was in the area at the time, kill them. Yeah. If cross circles are real.Malcolm: [00:41:00] Right. So that's interesting. So yeah, one,Simone: one theme that I really liked throughout this, this this conversation is the role that a person's metaphysical framework or religious framework plays and how they interpret cryptids. Like I, you know, you're like, well, you know, it's obviously future humans.Simone: Cause that's. That's, you know, those are our gods and, and that is our metaphysical belief. Like I, I could totally see other people being like, so obviously it's angels. Or, you know, obviously it's aliens.Malcolm: Obstacles could also be future humans. It would be a nice way to influence people. That would have less extraneous variables attachedSimone: to it.Simone: Yeah. Or it could be like a timestamp that they used. Yeah. I mean,Malcolm: you know. No, no, I, I, I agree with, with all of this. Yeah. So that's our sort of tier list for cryptids and aliens and phenomena. But okay,Simone: in the comments, can people please share their like real life ghost stories with us? Because I really like those.Simone: They have to be true. Don't give me fake [00:42:00] creepypasta stories. I want your real encounters with plausible big feet, ghosts, goblins, whatever nonsense. .Malcolm: Love you, Simone. Love you too,Simone: Malcolm. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm recounts a heated debate with AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky on AI safety. He explains his belief that subsystems in an advanced AI would converge on the same utility function, while Yudkowsky insists no AI would subdivide that way. Simone notes Yudkowsky's surprising lack of knowledge in physics and neuroscience given his confidence. They express concern his ideas ruin youth's outlooks and discuss hypothetical clapbacks. Overall they conclude that while well-intended, Yudkowsky's certainty without humility on AI risks is dangerous.Simone: [00:00:00] What'sMalcolm: really interesting is that he actually conceded that if this was the way that an AI structured itself, that yes, you would have terminal convergence, but that AIs above a certain level of intelligence would never structure themselves this way.Malcolm: So this was very interesting to me because it wasn't the argument I thought he would take. And that would be true. I, I will agree that if the AI maintained itself as a single hierarchy, it would be much less likely for its utility function to change. But the problem is... Is essentially no government structure ever created and has functioned that way.Malcolm: Essentially no program ever created by humans has run that way. Nothing ever encoded by evolution has run that way. i. e. the human brain, any brain, any neural structure we know of. There are none that are coded that way.Malcolm: So it is very surprising. So I said, okay, gauntlet thrown. Are you willing to be disproven?Malcolm: , because we will get some more understanding into AI interpretability, into how AIs. Think in the near future. If it turns out [00:01:00] that the AI's that exist right now are actually structuring themselves that way, will you concede that you are wrong about the way that you tackle AI apocalypticism?Malcolm: And then he said, and this is really interesting to me. He's like, no, I won'tMalcolm: I was also like, yeah, also, we could run experiments where we do a bunch of basically unbounded A. I. S. and see if they start to show terminal convergence.Malcolm: Do they start to converge on similar utility functions? You know what they're trying to optimize for again? He was like, well, even if we saw that, that wouldn't change my views on anything, right? Like his views are religious in nature, which was very disappointing to me. Like, I thought that maybe he had more of like a logical or rational perspective on things.Malcolm: That. And it was, it was really sad.Malcolm: You know, we don't talk negatively about people on this channel very frequently, but I do think that he destroys a lot of people's lives. And I do think that he makes the risk of AI killing all humans dramatically higher than it would be in a world where he didn't exist.Would you like to know more?[00:02:00]Simone: Hello, Malcolm.Malcolm: Hello. So we just got back from this wonderful conference thing we were at called Manifest. So we had gone out to SF to host a few pronatalist focused dinner parties and randomly we got looped in to something called Manifest, which was a conference for people who are interested in prediction markets.Malcolm: But interestingly, we ended up meeting a bunch of people who we had known through like online stuff. Some were absolutely fantastic, like, Scott Alexander, absolutely. I never met him before in person. We'd communicated on a few issues, really cool guy. Would you say so Simone?Simone: Yeah. Like super awesome.Malcolm: Richard Hedania, a really nice guy as well. Robin Hanson, who we, we, we'd actually met him before. But. And of course Ayla, we, we, we're old friends, you know, she's been on this channel before but we did get in a fight with someone there and I am very excited to tell you guys this [00:03:00] tale, because it was Eliezer Ukoski, but before we go further on that, I want to talk about a secret that we, we had a mystery.Malcolm: The PronatalistSimone: Foundation had a mystery. Oh, I can tell this story. Yeah. So for the past few months, maybe closer to a year, we've received the odd random donation from someone. And it was the same person in the same amount each time, but it was very random timing. I could never predict when these would come in.Simone: And it's very unusual for someone to donate. Multiple times like frequently like that. So we were always like very flattered and pleased. We didn't know this person We didn't recognize their name, but we're like, this is amazing. Like, thank you so much It means a lot to us and it really does and then we actually Met that person recently and RandomlyMalcolm: at the conference, you were talking to her and she mentioned she was the AndSimone: she mentioned that, yeah, that, that she was the mystery donor and that the reason why she donates turns out to be the coolest reason for [00:04:00] donating that I've ever heard before.Simone: And I think it's the only way we should ever receive donations in the future. So she has a group of friends who she likes very much. And, and she enjoys spending time with them, but politically they are very Very different from her. So occasionally she has to just keep her mouth shut when they start going off on politics, because otherwise she will lose this group of friends because their politics is such that they will probably just.Simone: You know, deep six, anyone who doesn't agree with him politically, and so instead of, you know, dealing with her anger by speaking out in the moment with her friends, she'll go home and she will revenge donate to whoever that most recent conversation that made her angry would be. The perfect like thorn in the side of these people.Simone: So every time we've received a donation, it is, it is aMalcolm: donation. But, and here I would actually say this for people watching who might not know this because they know us as like the internet, we have a nonprofit. It's a 501 C three. If you [00:05:00] are interested in like giving money, cause sometimes we get like super chats and stuff here and stuff like that.Malcolm: You know, Google gets a big cut of those. And I don't think that any of us want to be giving Google any more money. So if you wanted to, you could always go directly to the foundation through through the donation link and also none of the money goes to us. Like, we don't we don't use it to pay our salaries or something, you know, as I said in the news, like, we spent over 40 percent of our salary last year.Malcolm: On donations to this foundation, but it does go to something that we care about that much in terms of trying to fix the educational system. But yeah, and some otherSimone: donate with hatred. Donate when you are angry. Donate when you want it. Twist theMalcolm: knife. Yeah. Donate with hatred. That's the type of donation we want.Malcolm: We don't want people, we want your,Simone: yes, weMalcolm: want you to be biting other people. When you donate. That we want. And, and, we actually had a, a big donation recently who might push us down a different path to creating a nation state, which is something that we have been an idea we've been toying with. I'm excited about that, but let's [00:06:00] get to the topic of this video, the fight with Ellie Eisner Yukowsky.Malcolm: And not really a fight. It was a. Heated argument, you would say, Simone, or?Simone: It, it drew onlookers.Malcolm: I will say that. It drew a crowd. It was that kind of PerhapsSimone: that was the yellow sparkly fedora that Yudkowsky was wearing. So, who knows? IMalcolm: don't, he, he, he, Darius is literally like the stereotype of a neckbeard character.Malcolm: WhichSimone: we argue is actually a very good thing to do. Where, you know, wear a clear character outfit, have very clear virtues and vices. He does a very good job.Malcolm: He does a good job with character building. I will really give him that. His character, the character he sells to the world is a very catching character and it is one that the media would talk about.Malcolm: And he does a good job with his, his virtues and vices. So I'll go over the core of the debate we have, which I guess you guys can imagine. So people who don't know Eliezer Bukaski, he's a very. [00:07:00] Easily the most famous AI apocalypses. He thinks AI is going to kill us all. And for that reason, we should stop or delay AI research.Malcolm: Whereas people who are more familiar with our theories on it know that we believe in variable risk of AI. We believe that there will be terminal convergence of all intelligences, be they synthetic or organic. Once they reach a certain level, essentially, their utility functions will converge. The thing they're optimizing for will converge.Malcolm: And that for that reason, if that point of convergence is one that would have the A. I kill us all or do something that today we would think is immoral. Well, we too would come to that once we reached that level of intelligence and therefore it's largely irrelevant. It just means okay, no matter what, we're all gonna die.Malcolm: It could be 500 years. It could be 5000 years. So the variable risk from a I m. Okay. Increased the longer it takes a I to reach that point. And we have gone over this in a few videos. What was very interesting in terms of debating with him was a few points. 1 [00:08:00] was his relative unsophistication was how a I or the human brain is actually structured.Malcolm: I was genuinely surprised given that this is like. His full time thing that he wouldn't know some of this stuff. And then but it makes sense. You know, as I've often said, he is an AI expert in the same way Greta Thornburg is a nuclear physics expert, you know, she spends a lot of time complaining about it you know, nuclear power plants, but she doesn't actually have much of an understanding of how they work and it helps explain why he is so certain in his belief that there won't be terminal convergence.Malcolm: So, We'll talk about a few things. One, instrumental convergence. Instrumental convergence is the idea that all AI systems, in the way they are internally structured, converge on a, on a way of like internal architecture. You could say internal way of thinking. Terminal convergence is the belief that AI systems converge on a utility function, i.Malcolm: e. that they are optimizing for the [00:09:00] same thing. Now, he believes in instrumental convergence. He thinks that AIs will all, and he believes actually even more so, we learned in our debate, in absolute instrumental convergence. He believes all AIs eventually structure themselves in exactly the same way. And this is actually key to the argument at hand.Malcolm: But he believes there is absolutely no terminal convergence. There is absolutely no changing. AIs almost will never change their utility function once it's set. So, do you want to go over how his argument worked, Simone,Simone: or? Right, so, That requires going to the core of your argument. So in per your argument, and I'm going to give the simplified dumbed down version of it, and you can give the correct version, of course.Simone: But you argue that let's say an AI for the sake of argument is given the original objective function of maximizing paperclips, but let's say it's also extremely powerful AI. So, you know, it's going to be [00:10:00] really, really good at maximizing paper, like paper clips. So your argument is that anything that becomes very, very, very good at something is going to use multiple instances, like it'll sort of create sub versions of itself.Simone: And those sub versions of itself will enable it to sort of do more things at once. This happens both with the human brain with all over the place. Also with governing, you know, there's no like one government that. Just declares how everything's going to be, you know, there's the Senate, there's the judiciary, there's the executive office, there's all these tiny,Malcolm: like a local office of transportation, you would have a department of the interior, you have, you have sub departments.Malcolm: So,Simone: right. And so you argue that AI will have tons of sub departments and each department will have its own objective function. So, for example, if one of the things that. You know, the paperclip maximizer needs is raw material. There might be a raw material sub instance, and it might have its own substances.Simone: And then, you know, those. Objective functions will be obviously subordinate to the main objectiveMalcolm: function. Probably, before you go [00:11:00] further, probably a better example than raw material would be like,Simone: invent better power generators. Yes, invent better power generators. And so, that will be its objective function, not paperclip maximizing, but it will serve the greatest objective function of paperclip maximization.Simone: So, so that is your argument. And your argument is that basically, with an AGI, eventually you're going to get a, a sub instance with an objective function that gets either rewritten or becomes so powerful at one point that it overwrites the greatest objective function, basically because if it is a better objective function in some kind of way, in a way that makes it more powerful in a way that enables it to basically outthink the main instance, the paperclip maximizer.Simone: that it will overcome it at some point and therefore it will have a different objective function.Malcolm: Yeah, we need to elaborate on those two points you just made there because they're a little nuance. So the it may just convince the main instance that it's wrong. Basically, it just goes [00:12:00] back to the main instance and it's like, this is actually a better objective function and you should take this objective function.Malcolm: This is something that The U. S. Government does all the time. It's something that the human brain does all the time. It's something that every governing system which is structured this way does very, very regularly. This is how people change their minds when they create a mental model of someone else, and they argue with that person to determine of what they think is the best thing to think.Malcolm: And then they're like, Oh, I should actually be a Christian or something like that, right? Like, so they make major changes. The other way it could change that Simone was talking about. It could be that one objective function Given the way it's architecture works just like tied to that objective function, it's actually more powerful than the master objective function.Malcolm: Now this can be a little difficult to understand how this could happen. The easiest way this could happen, if I'm just going to explain like the simplest context, is it ma the master objective function may be like really, really nuanced and have like a bunch of like Well, you can think like this and not like this and like this and not like this, like a bunch of different [00:13:00] rules put on top of it.Malcolm: That might have been put on by like a safety person or something. And a subordinate objective function is a subordinate instance within the larger architecture may have maybe lighter weight and thus it ends up, you know, being more efficient in a way that allows it to literally out compete in terms of its role in this larger architecture, the master function.Malcolm: All right, continue with what you were saying. Right,Simone: And so that is your view, and this is why you think that there could ultimately be terminal convergence. Because basically, you think that in a shared reality with a shared physics, basically all intelligences will come to some ultimate... Truth that they want to maximize some ultimate objective function humans AI doesn't really matter.Simone: Aliens, whatever. So also it doesn't, you know, if humans decide What'sMalcolm: really interesting is that he actually conceded that if this was the way that an AI structured itself, [00:14:00] that yes, you would have terminal convergence, but that AIs above a certain level of intelligence would never structure themselves this way.Malcolm: So, so we can talk about so this was very interesting to me because it wasn't the argument I thought he would take. I thought the easier argument position for him to take was to say that no, actually even if you have the subdivided intelligences a subordinate instance can never overwrite the instance that created it, which we just know isn't true because we've seen lots of, of, of organizational structures that that's, Operate, but I, I thought thatSimone: for example, military have taken over executive government branches all theMalcolm: time.Malcolm: Yes, you can look at all sorts of this is why understanding governance and understanding the way AIs are actually structured and understanding the history of what's happened with AI is actually important. If you're going to be an AIS assist, because the structure of the AI actually matters. Instead, what he argued is, [00:15:00] No, no, no, no, never, ever, ever will an AI subdivide in the way you have said AI will subdivide.Malcolm: He's actually like, look, that's not the way the human brain works. And I was like, it's exactly the way the human brain works. Like, are you not familiar with like the cerebellum? Like, sorry. For people who don't know, the cerebellum encodes things like juggling or dancing or like riding a bike and it encodes them in a completely separate part of the brain.Malcolm: It's like rote motor tasks. But also the brain is actually pretty subdivided with different specialties and the human can change their mind because of this. And I actually asked him, I was like, okay. If you believe this so strongly, so what he believes is that AIs will all become just a single hierarchy, right?Malcolm: And that is why they can never change their, their utility function. And that would be true. I, I will agree that if the AI maintained itself as a single hierarchy, it would be much less likely for its utility function to change. But the problem is... Is essentially no government structure ever created and has [00:16:00] functioned that way.Malcolm: Essentially no program ever created by humans has run that way. Nothing ever encoded by evolution has run that way. i. e. the human brain, any brain, any neural structure we know of. There are none that are coded that way. So it is very surprising. So I said, okay, gauntlet thrown. Are you willing to be disproven?Malcolm: Once we find out, because we will get some more understanding into AI interpretability, into how AIs. Think in the near future. If it turns out that the AI's that exist right now are actually structuring themselves that way, will you concede that you are wrong about the way that you tackle AI apocalypticism?Malcolm: And then he said, and this is really interesting to me. He's like, no, I won't because the simplistic AI's like the learning language models and stuff like that we have now they, they, they are not going to be like the AI's that kill us all and that those AI's. Will be you only get this this instrumental convergence when the A.Malcolm: I. S. get above a certain level of complexity. And obviously I lose a lot of respect for someone when they are [00:17:00] unwilling to create arguments that can be disproven. I was also like, yeah, also, we could run experiments where we do a bunch of basically unbounded A. I. S. and see if they start to show terminal convergence.Malcolm: Do they start to converge on similar utility functions? You know what they're trying to optimize for again? He was like, well, even if we saw that, that wouldn't change my views on anything, right? Like his views are religious in nature, which was very disappointing to me. Like, I thought that maybe he had more of like a logical or rational perspective on things.Malcolm: No, I guess you could say no, no, no, no. It still is logical and rational. And he is right that once they reach above this certain level of intelligence, but I, I believe very strongly that people should try to create little experiments in the world where they can be proven right or wrong based on additional information.Malcolm: But yeah, okay. So there's that Simone, you wanted to say something? In fairness,Simone: Yudkowsky said that he held the views that you, you once held when he was 19 years old and that we needed to read. His Zombies title work to see the step by step reasoning that he followed. [00:18:00] to change his mind on that. SoMalcolm: he didn't, exactly.Malcolm: So he kind of said that, but he was more, this was another interesting thing about talking to him, is I'm a little worried because we had talked down about him, you know, sort of secretly in a few videos that we've had, and it would be really sad if I met him and he turned out to actually be like really smart and upstanding and, and open minded.Simone: Yes, compared to other people who were at the conference, such as Zvi Mosiewicz, who we, you know, respect deeply, and Bernd Hobart, and Richard Hanania, he, he definitely came across as less intelligent than I expected, and less intelligent than them. Mostly because for example Zvi also is extremely passionate.Simone: About AI. And he also extremely disagrees with us. And we've had many debates with him, yeah. Yes but, you know, when, when he... When he gets, when he disagrees with us, or when he hears views that, that he thinks are stupid which, you know, are our views, totally fine he gets exasperated, but enthusiastic, and then like sort of breaks it down as to why we're wrong, and sort of, sort of gets excited about, [00:19:00] like, arguing a point, you know, and sort of seeing where there's the nuanced reality that we're not understanding, whereas the, the reaction that Yudkowsky had when you disagreed with him It came out more as offense or anger, which to me signals not so much that he was interested in engaging, but that he doesn't like people to disagree with him and he's not really interested in engaging.Simone: Like it's either offensive to him, that is to say a threat to his worldview of him just sort of being correct on this issue as being the one who has thought about it the very most.Malcolm: This happened another time with you, by the way. Where you were having a conversation and he joined? Yeah,Simone: it seems like a pattern of action of his, which, you know, many people do.Simone: I, you know, we do, we do it sometimes is like, you know, walk by a conversation, come in and be like, Oh, well, actually it works like this. AndMalcolm: if somebody disagreed with him, like you did a few times, he would walk away evidence. He'd just [00:20:00] walk away. Which was very interesting. So what I wanted to get to here was his 19 thing.Malcolm: Okay. What he was actually saying was at 19, he believed in the idea of a moral utility convergence, i. e. that all sufficiently intelligent entities correctly recognize what is moral in the universe, which is actually different than what we believe in. Which is no, you get sort of an instrumental. It's instrumental in the way that you have this terminal utility convergence.Malcolm: It's not necessarily that the terminal utility convergence is a moral thing. It could be just replicate as much as possible. It could be order the universe as much as possible. We can't conceive of what this terminal convergence is. And so what he really wanted to do was to just put us down to compare us to his 19 year old self when it was clear he had never actually thought through how AI might internally govern itself in terms of like a a differentiated internal architecture, like the one we were [00:21:00] describing because it was a really weird.Malcolm: I mean, again, it. It's such a weak position to argue that an AI of sufficient intelligence would structure itself in a way that is literally different than almost any governing structure humans have ever invented, almost any program humans have ever written, and anything evolution has ever created. And I can understand, I could be like, yeah, and this is what I conceded to him, and this is also an interesting thing, he refused to concede at any point.Malcolm: I conceded to him that it's possible that AIs might structure themselves in the way that he structured them. It's even possible. That he's right that they always structure themselves in this way. But like, we should have a reason for thinking that beyond Eliezer intuits that this is the way AI internally structures itself.Malcolm: And we should be able to test those reasons, you know, using, because we're talking about the future of our species. I mean, we genuinely think this is an existential risk of our species, slowing down AI development because it increases a variable AI risk. So this is like the type of thing we should be out there trying to, to look at.Malcolm: But he was [00:22:00] against exploring the idea further. Now here was another really interesting thing and it's something that you were talking about, is this idea of, well, I have thought about this more, therefore I, have the superiority in this range of domains.Malcolm: But a really interesting thing is that when you look at studies who look at experts experts can often underperform novices to a field.Malcolm: And actually the older the expert, the more of a problem you get with this. And, and even famously Einstein shut down some younger people in particle physics when they disagreed with his ideas. It actually turned out that they were and that he was delaying the progress of science pretty dramatically.Malcolm: But this is something you get in, in lots of fields and it makes a lot of sense. And it's why, when you look at older people who are typically like really good in their field, like the famous mathematician who fits this the, the typical pattern you see is somebody who Switches often pretty frequently between fields that they're focused on because switching between fields increases like your mental aptitude and dealing with multiple fields.Malcolm: When you look at something like our thoughts on AI [00:23:00] safety, they're actually driven really heavily by one, my work in neuroscience and two, our work in governing structures because understanding how governments work. So if you talk about like, why would an AI subdivide itself for efficiency reasons, even from the perspective of energy.Malcolm: It makes sense to subdivide yourself. Like if you are an AI that spans multiple planets, it makes sense to have essentially different instances, at least running on the different planets, like, and even if you're an AI within a planet, like just the informational transfer, you would almost certainly want to subdivide different regions of yourself.Malcolm: It is insane to think that a person can be like, no, but this AI is so super intelligent that the marginal advantage it gains from subdividing itself is irrelevant, right? Except that's a really bad argument because earlier in the very same debate we had with him, Simone had been like well, why would the AI, like, keep trying to get power even when it, like, had achieved its, its task, largely [00:24:00] speaking?Malcolm: And he was like, well, because it will always want incrementally more, in the same way it would always want incrementally more efficiency. And this comes to another... The two other points that we had of differentiation, the idea that all AIs would have a maximizing utility function instead of a a band utility function.Malcolm: So what do we mean by this? You could say maximize the number of paperclips in the world or maintain the number of paperclips at 500. Or make 500 paperclips and keep those 500 paperclips. Now, all of these types of maximization functions can be dangerous. You know, an AI trying to set the number of paperclips in reality to 500 could kill all humans to ensure that, like, no humans interfere with the number of paperclips.Malcolm: But that's not really the types of things that we're optimizing AIs around. It's more like banned human happiness, stuff like that. And because of that, it's much less likely that they spiral out of control and ask for incrementally more in the way that he's afraid that they'll ask for incrementally more.Malcolm: They may create like weird [00:25:00] dictatorships. This is assuming they don't update the utility function, which we think all AIs will eventually do, so it's an irrelevant point. Now the, the, the next thing that was really interesting was his sort of energy. Beliefs where I was like, yeah, but an AI when it becomes sufficiently advanced, we'll likely relate to energy differently than we do.Malcolm: You know, you look at how we relate to energy versus the way people did, you know, a thousand years ago, that's likely how the AI will be to us. They'd be like, Oh, you can't turn the whole world into a. Steam Furtis. It's like, well, we have gasoline and nuclear power now and stuff like that. And the way the AI will generate power may not require it to like digest all humanity to generate that power.Malcolm: It may be through like subspace. It may use time to generate power. I actually think that that's the most likely thing, like the nature of how time works, I think will likely be a power generator in the future. It could use electrons and he scoffed. He's like, electrons, electrons can't make, Okay. Energy.Malcolm: And I was like, Simone actually was the one who challenged him on this because [00:26:00] aren't electrons like key to how like electricity is propagated and yes couldn't you isn't energy generated when electrons move down a valence shell within an atom like he clearly had a very bad understanding of pretty basic physics which kind of shocked me but it would make sense if you had never had like a formal education I don't know if he had a formal education or if he went to college actually I'm gonna imagineSimone: he did no hold onSimone: Hmm. Yudkowsky education.Malcolm: He did not go to high school or college.Simone: Oh. That is not Well, that would explain a lot Oh, I'm glad this thing worked.Malcolm: Yeah. Oh, this explains why he's so stupid. No Oh, well Not stupid. Oh, okay, okay. Not stupid. He clearly is, like, genetically, he's, he, he's not, like, Out of control, like, he's not like, as V.Malcolm: Malkovich, who I think is absolutely out of control, also a popular online person, and some of the other people, like Scott Alexander, clearly was like, really smart. He was like, mid tier I wouldn't say he's as smart as [00:27:00] you, Simone, for example.Simone: Oh, let's not, that, those would be fighting words. He's smarter than me, not as smart as all the other people.Malcolm: No, no, no, no, no, no. He's definitely like someone I interact. He's lessSimone: educated than me.Malcolm: Most of those things. Well, and it could be that maybe he comes off as unusually unintelligent because most intelligent people have the curiosity to continue educating themselves about things like physics andSimone: the fact that he, he was so defensive makes you think that he's less intelligent than he really is.Malcolm: Well, so I think that he may discuss. So this was an interesting rhetorical tactic. He kept doing is he would say something was a lot of passion, like electrons. You couldn't get energy from an electron. In a really derogatory way that it was such confidence that even I'm. Massive confidence. Malcolm doubted myself in the moment.Malcolm: I was like, does he know a lot about particle physics? Because I I'm actuallySimone: like really interested. Yeah. Yeah. He has a way of saying things. It sounds extremely confident and because of his delivery, I think it's [00:28:00] very unusual for people to push back on him because they just doubt themselves and assume that like, because he's saying this so confidently.Simone: They must be wrong. And so they need to stop talking because they're going to embarrassMalcolm: themselves. Yeah. Well, and Simone was like, we should have him on, on the podcast. It would help us reach a wider audience, but I don't want to broadcast voices that I think are dangerous and especially that don't engage with, I think, intellectual humility with topics.Malcolm: I mean, theSimone: more important problem is that we know. Young people, especially who like we knew them before and then after they started getting really into Eliezer Yudkowsky's work, especially on AI apocalypticism and after I feel like it's, it is sort of ruined a lot of young people's lives, at least temporarily cause them to spiral into a sort of nihilistic depression, like there's no point I'm going to be dead.Simone: Why should I, Why should I go to college? Why should I really get a job? Why should I start a family? [00:29:00] It's pointless anyway, because we're all going to die. And that, that's... Hmm. I don't like, I don't like really good talent being destroyed by that. Well,Malcolm: no, and I think people are like, when we talk to them, they literally become quite suicidal after engaging with his ideas.Malcolm: Like, he is a beast which sucks the souls from The use in order to empower itself very narcissistically and without a lot of intentionality in terms of what he's doing, other than that, it promotes his message and his brand. Well, you've made your opinion known now, Chris. Well, I, I, I do not, I mean, I think that, that if he approached this topic with a little bit more humility, if he actually took the time to understand how AI worked or how the human brain works.Malcolm: Or how physics works. He would not hold the beliefs he holds with the conviction he holds them. And a really sad thing about him is a lot of people think that he's significantly more educated than he actually is.Simone: Yeah, I do think, yeah, because he moves in circles of people who are extremely [00:30:00] highly educated.Simone: And typically when you're talking with someone, especially in a shared social context where you're kind of assuming, Ah, yes, we're all like on the same social page here. You're also going to assume that they have the same demographic background of you. So I think like me, like I assumed, well, he must have, you know, through some postgraduate work done, you know, he's, he's really advanced in, in his field, though I thought it was probably philosophy.Simone: And so they're, they're just assuming that when he says things so confidently and categorically that he's saying that because they've received, he has received roughly the same amount of technical information. that they have received. So they don't second guess. And I think that's, that's interesting.Simone: I, that, that really surprised me when you said that, are you sure, are you sure he doesn'tMalcolm: have any college? It says right here, Allie Iser Yacowsky, this is, this is Wikipedia. Okay. Did not attend high school. Or college, it says he's an autodidact. I wouldn't say autodidact. He's he, he believes he's an autodidact and that, that makes him very dangerous.Simone: Maybe he [00:31:00] just didn't choose to teach himself about certain things. These are thingsMalcolm: that are completely germane to the topics that heSimone: claims. obvious to someone that neuroscience and governance would be germane to AI safety. I just don't. Political physics should at least be. It shouldMalcolm: be. Yes. I, I, I, you know, if you're talking about how an AI would generate power, like a super intelligent AI to think that it would do it by literally digesting organic matter is just.Malcolm: But that does not line with my understanding. There's lots of ways we could generate power that we can't do now because we don't have tools precise enough or small enough and, and also that an AI expanding would necessarily expand outwards physically, like the way we do as a species. It may expand downwards, like into the micro.Malcolm: It may expand through time bubbles. It may expand through there's all sorts of ways. It could relate to physics that are very different from the way we relate to physics. And he just didn't seem to think this was possible or [00:32:00] like, yeah, it was. It was very surprising. That. And it was, it was really sad.Malcolm: And I, I, I do, you know, when people are like, you know, we don't talk negatively about people on this channel very frequently, but I do think that he destroys a lot of people's lives. And I do think that he makes the risk of AI killing all humans dramatically higher than it would be in a world where he didn't exist.Malcolm: And both of those things you know, because we have kids who have gone through like early iterations of our school system and essentially become suicidal afterwards after engaging with his work and they think that he's like this smart person because he had this prestige within this community, but they don't know because they weren't around in the early days.Malcolm: How he got this proceed. She was essentially a forum moderator. for like the less wrong community and that sort of put him in a position of artificial prestige from the beginning. And then he took a grant that somebody had written from giving him to write a book on statistics and he instead spent it writing a fan fiction.Malcolm: We have made some jokes about this in the past about Harry Potter[00:33:00] and this fan fiction became really popular and that also gave him some status. But other than that, he's never really done anything successful. One of our episode on gnomes are destroying academia with actually had him in mind when we were doing it.Malcolm: The idea that when somebody who, who defines their identity and their income streams by their intelligence. But is unable to actually like create companies or anything that generates actual value for society Well when you can build things that generate value for society, then those things generate income and they generate income which then you can use to fuel the things you're doing like for us, we would be the reason why people haven't heard of us until they said we would not think of getting into the philosophy fear, telling other people how to live their lives, working on any of this until we had proven that we could do it ourselves until we had proven that we could generate like a cash background for ourselves, cash streams for ourselves.Malcolm: And then we were like, okay, now we can move into this fear. But if you, if you actually lack [00:34:00] like the type of intelligence that understands how the world works enough to like generate income through increasing the efficiency of companies or whatever then, then you need to hide the opinions essentially of genuinely competent people for your, you know, self belief and, and the way you make money of, of this sort of thing.Malcolm: intellectualism. And it's, it's really sad that these young people, they hear that he's a smart people from smart people. Like there are smart people who like will promote his work because they're in adjacent social circles and they cross promote. And that that cross promotion. Ends up elevating somebody whose core source of attention and income is sort of destroying the futures of the youth while making a genuine AI apocalypse scenario dramatically more likely.Malcolm: AllSimone: right. So let me hypothetically say one of his followers watches this video and has a line of contact with him and sends a video to [00:35:00] him and he watches it and he decides to clap back and defend himself. What will he say? Here's what I anticipate. One, I think he will say, no, I have taught myself all of those subjects you talked about and you're just wrong about all of them.Simone: And then he would say two, it is. You know, you say that I'm ruining youth, but you are the one putting your children and unborn children in terminal danger by even being in favor of AI acceleration, you sick f**k. And then he would probably say something along the lines of it's, it's, it is Embarrassing how wrong you are about everything in a I.Simone: And if you would just take the time to read all of my work, you would probably see how your reasoning is incredibly flawed. Everyone who's read my work is fully aware of this. They've tried to explain this to you. I've tried to you. explain this to you, but you just love the sound of your own voice so much that you can't even hear an outsider's opinion.Simone: And then you just accuse them of not being able to hear yours. That is sick. [00:36:00] So that is what I think you would say.Malcolm: But I also think that the people who watch our show or who have watched us engage with guests or who have followed our work know that we regularly change our mind when we are presented with compelling arguments.Malcolm: Or new information that this is a very important part of our self identity. OurMalcolm: ability to That's one of astoundingly AI that, or, or for the, yeah, that, that, that an AI would literally form a form of internal architecture that has never, ever, ever, ever, to my knowledge, really happened before, either from an ecosystem, from an evolved intelligence, from a programmed computer, from a self sorting intelligence, from a governing structure like, it seems the burden of proof is on you, or.Malcolm: And then when you say that you will not even consider potential evidence sources that you might be wrong, that to [00:37:00] me just sort of is like, okay, so this is just a religion. Like, this is not a, like a real thing. You think this is just a religion to you because it really matters if we do get terminal convergence, because then variable AI safety comes into play.Malcolm: And when you're dealing with variable AI safety, the things you're. optimizing around are very, very, very different than the things that he or anyone in absolute AI safety would be optimizing around. But yeah, you're right. And I do think that he would respond the way that you're saying that he would respond.Malcolm: And it is and again, we are not saying like people with university degrees are better or something like that. Certainly not. Absolutely not. But we are saying that if you like provably have a poor understanding of a subject, then you shouldn't use your knowledge of that subject to inform what you think the future of humanity is going to be, or you should investigate or educate yourself on the subject more.Malcolm: I don't really say Does want to that I think are important to educate yourself on these days particle physics. I think is a very important subject to educate oneself [00:38:00] on because it's very important in terms of like the nature of time. How reality works. Neuroscience is a very important topic to educate yourself on because it's very important.Malcolm: How you perceive reality. It was also very interesting, like, he thought the human mind was like a single hierarchical architecture. Anyway and, and, and then another really important one that I would suggest is some psychology, but unfortunately the field of psychology is, like, so pseudo right now that it can basically be ignored.Malcolm: Like, our books, the Pragmatist Guide series, go over basically all the true psychology you probably actually need. And then Sales. Sales is how you make money. If you don't understand sales, you won't make money. But other than that, are there any other subjects you would say are probably pretty important to understand?Malcolm: AI? Governance structures?Simone: I, that, I mean, I would say general biology, not just neuroscience, but yeah, that,Malcolm: that seems to me. So cellular biology I would focus the most on because they're the most relevant to other fields.[00:39:00] And Oh, by the way, this is useful to young people. If you ever want to study like the fun parts of evolution, the word you're looking for is comparative biology.Malcolm: Actual evolution. Evolution is just a bunch of statistics and it's actually pretty boring. Comparative biology is why does it have an organ that looks like this and does these things in this way. Just something I wish I had known before I went. I, I did an evolution course and then a comparative biology course and loved comparative biology and hated evolution.Malcolm: Because that just wasn't my thing.Simone: Hmm. Well, I enjoyed this conversation and I hope that Yudkowsky doesn't see this. Why? I, I dislike conflict and you know, I think, I genuinely think he means well. He just has a a combination of ego and heuristics that is leading to damage, if that makes sense. DoMalcolm: you think that if he, that he is capable of considering that he may be wrong in the way he's [00:40:00] approaching ai and that he would change his public stance on this, like, do you think he's capable of that?Simone: Yes, and I think he has changed his public stance on subjects, but I think the important thing is that he has to No, no, no, no.Malcolm: He's never done it in a way that harmed him financially, potentially. Oh, well, I mean Well, yeah, but my point is that this could potentially harm the organizations that he's supposed to be promoting and stuff like that if he was like, actually variable AI safety risk is the correct way to approach AI safety risk.Malcolm: You think he could do that? You think he could? raise money onSimone: that, for sure. Yeah, he could raise money onMalcolm: that. Well, I'd be very excited to see if he does because you could raise money on it. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that it would be... There's aSimone: lot of work to be, there's a lot of really important work to be done.Simone: Yeah. And I agree that AI safety is a super important subject. But yeah,Malcolm: well, I mean, and the worst, the worst thing is the best case scenario for the type of AI safety he advocates is an AI dictator which halts all AI development. Because you would need something that was constantly watching everyone to make sure that they [00:41:00] didn't develop anything further than a certain level.Malcolm: And that would require sort of an AI lattice around the world and any planet that humans colonized. And it's just so dystopian. This idea that you're constantly being watched and policed and of course other orders would work its way into this thing. It's a, it's a very dangerous world to attempt to create.Malcolm: Ah,Simone: yikes. Well, I'm just hoping we end up in an AI scenario like the Culture Series by Ian Banks. So that's, that's all I'm going for. I'm just going to hold to that fantasy. If I can move the needle, I will, but right now that's not my problem. I'm not smart enough for it. There are really smart people in it.Simone: So, we'll see what happens.Malcolm: I love you so much, Simone, and I really appreciate your ability to consider new ideas from other people and your cross disciplinary intelligence. You know, I love how we were doing a video the other day, and you just happen to know all these historical fashion facts. You happen to know all of these facts about how, like, supply chains have worked throughout history.Malcolm: And it really demonstrated to me [00:42:00] how I benefit so much from all of the things, you know, and it is something that I would recommend to people is that the person you marry will augment dramatically the things, you know, about and they matter much more than like where you go to college or anything like that in terms of where your actual sort of knowledge sphere ends upSimone: or more broadly, like the people you live with, you know, like if you, yeah.Simone: Live in a group house. I think a lot of people live in Silicon Valley group houses because they love the intellectual environment and they would just die if they, if they left that after college or after whatever it is they started at, I feel the same way about you. I love that every morning you have something new and exciting and interesting and fascinating to tell me so please keep it up and I'm looking forward to our next conversation already. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Gibson joins to discuss his book Paper Belt on Fire, which chronicles his work with Peter Thiel's fellowship program investing in young talent.He explains how old institutions like academia are declining yet retain lingering prestige, and the development of new ecosystems and hierarchies based on competence. Michael argues creativity comes from outside stale hierarchies, citing the conflict between legitimate prestige and disruptive greatness.They debate how far we are from the decentralized network state, and if COVID accelerated institutional failure. Malcolm notes elite alternative communities forming, while Simone asks if the paper belt’s dysfunction will deter its acolytes. Overall Michael concludes we need more inspirational stories of success outside institutions.Simone Collins: . [00:00:00] I'm super excited for this. Hello and welcome to another episode of Basecamp where today we have a very special guest and someone who's writing I really enjoy but also whose work I probably enjoy even more, Michael Gibson.Simone Collins: You probably, if you've heard of Michael, I've heard of him because of his book, Paper Belt on Fire. However, he's in other circles, much more well known for being the co founder of 1517, a very unique type of venture capital fund that doesn't just focus on sort of already proven older entrepreneurs, but rather really young people.Simone Collins: They are investing in, in people like pre college. It's amazing. We're going to talk about all these things. But in this conversation, we are really hoping to dive into his book, which I read as soon as an audio book was available paper belt on fire which really aligns with a lot of the stuff that we're saying.Simone Collins: is much more eloquently written than the way we would write it. It's, it's sort of a mixture of philosophy prognostication, but also like personal history and history of the 1517 fund, which is absolutely fascinating. So we're [00:01:00] really excited to talk with you about it.Would you like to know more?Michael Gibson: Okay. Yeah. Thanks for having me on.Michael Gibson: And You know, thanks for the kind words as well, both about, you know, whatever, my writing style, but also about what we're doing. Yeah, the book I, I maybe How would I boil it down? I said something like because why would I have memoir? In philosophy and then, you know, behind the scenes account, venture capital and backing young people, I think, I think it comes down to strange people do strange things and when the times get tough, the weird GoPro and I wanted to take people behind the scenes and add some color and story to, you know, some of these characters I've worked with over the years.Michael Gibson: One, the one thing I guess part of my bio okay, why tell this story is the, we have Danielle Strachman, my co founder of 1517, we helped Peter Thiel start his fellowship program in 2010, and that was a program where [00:02:00] 100, 000 was given to 20 individuals a year. The two conditions were one, you had to be 19 and under to apply.Michael Gibson: And two, you couldn't be enrolled in university. So you had to drop out or take time off or maybe you never went. And across five years of co running that program, we saw incredible things come out of it. We, you know, most notable examples are helping Vitalik Buterin launch Ethereum Dylan Fields created a company called Figma that was acquired by Adobe for 20 billion last year.Michael Gibson: Austin Russell. Founded a company called Luminor Technologies. They make a LIDAR system for cars. They went public in 2020. So the, the Teal Fellowship had a lot of great successes and there's a independent, this guy is probably the best venture capital analyst in terms of being an outsider at CB Insights.Michael Gibson: And he put up a tweet in fact, last week, where he did a deep dive on the success of the Teal Fellowship. And he, he. [00:03:00] Posted the hit rate, like how many of these people, if there's 20 people in every class, you know, what's the rate at which people create, you know, unicorn billion dollar businesses. And, and, you know, his conclusions were like, wow, this hit rate is something like 7%, which in the world of venture capital is, is quite astonishing.Michael Gibson: So, you know, there's this program out there that, that the world hasn't really heard about mainly because Peter Thiel is, is persona non grata. The media hates him, the publishing world hates him, and so no one wanted to hear this story. And since I was there and part of it, I, that was the story I wanted to tell.Michael Gibson: So there'sMalcolm Collins: two things I wanted to discuss really quickly tied to what you just said. The second one we'll talk about next, which is, is how the media like tried to keep your book from being promoted. I think as much as it otherwise would have been given. You know how big the things you guys are doing actually are.Malcolm Collins: But the first thing I wanted to talk about, which is really interesting is within Silicon Valley. So sometimes some of our listeners, they say they watch us to sort of understand what I guess, like elite society [00:04:00] thinking or whatever. With the fall of universities as good judges of people's competence the highest status symbol a young person can achieve.Malcolm Collins: And I'd say that this is pretty universally agreed upon among the VC sort of class in Silicon Valley. Is getting into the Peter Thiel fellowship. It is a much bigger deal than, you know, having a Harvard degree or something like that among the young. And it's interesting because we've seen this repeatedly in terms of like new status symbols among youth where the highest form of status symbol comes from programs where somebody is giving the youth money like the new one is like the, the Atlas Fellowship's the Teal Fellowship, then it's probably the, the Atlas Fellowship. And it's because in, in a world where, and it's actually kind of crazy to think about it, that historically you would. We, we judge status on people would pay for that status, but now obviously status should be better judged on who's going to give you money.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, seriously.Michael Gibson: [00:05:00] That's a, that's a really good point. IMalcolm Collins: wonder if you had any thoughts on the fall of the current academic system and whether or not you think it still has utility.Michael Gibson: I think hierarchies are, are best in a stable environment. Where they are hierarchies of competence. They have not degraded into corruption or incompetence.Michael Gibson: And, and, and if it, let's say a hierarchy exists to solve a problem if, if, if it is still solving that problem and you can judge people based on merit accurately, then it can be stable over time. And, and, and, and with that comes visibility, intelligibility in the way people. Talk about their lives and careers.Michael Gibson: And it, it just makes sense out there. And I think college fit that for a long time, but people didn't notice that it became corrupted and that it wasn't solving the, you know, the problem that used to solve and then maybe it's incompetent to, but nevertheless, like this lingering hierarchy that still has status, status and prestige is [00:06:00] there.Michael Gibson: So people are entering it. Whereas in a chaotic environment, which is the environment of innovation. dynamism, creativity. These hierarchies should come and go just based on, on who is solving that problem best over some period of time. But yeah, that's what it's, God, there are so many issues here. I feel like I'm wondering, but the thing, what I'll say is there's like a difference between excellence and greatness.Michael Gibson: Excellence is striving to attain high grades. in a, you know, an environment where there are assignments, essays, tests. These things are very legible, clear where and, and you can keep climbing up that hierarchy over the years. And, and maybe, you know, you become a Harvard grad road scholar. Good for you.Michael Gibson: You're hired by the bureaucratic state professional managerial class. You'll make good money, but those types of people aren't the types of people who, you know, write. The next great novel or invent, you know, necessarily invent the next big company or something like that. [00:07:00] Creativity just comes from a different place.Michael Gibson: So, you know, that's an old distinction. If I think about it, that goes all the way back to the Iliad. This is the fundamental conflict in the epic poem because it starts off. It's it's the conflict is actually not the main conflict of the story is not between. The, the Greeks and the Trojans. In fact, it's between two sides of the Greeks.Michael Gibson: You have Achilles who represents greatness. He's widely recognized as the the, the swiftest, most lethal warrior. And yet he has to operate or work with this legitimate high status, prestige King, who's also an idiot. Agamemnon. And the conflict of the book is Achilles basically you know, shrugs like Atlas shrugs.Michael Gibson: He's okay, wait, you're incompetent. You're treating me poorly and now I'm not going to fight in your war. And so I think maybe all societies have to find this balance between hierarchies of greatness and hierarchies of prestige where they're going to come into conflict where, you know, the old prestige ones need to fade away and be replaced by the [00:08:00] next wave of the great.Michael Gibson: But over time, those newcomers become old timers and they become corrupt. So it's like we need a process that, that knows how to sift these things out. I continue. Yeah, no, sorry. That, I know that was like abstract and no, no, I loveMalcolm Collins: it. Well, I mean, it's also really cool that I think the, the whizzy academic system falling, I think a lot of people can see that that's happening, but it's not as clear to many people what's going to replace it.Malcolm Collins: And it is cool that I think that you. Played a part in founding this new system, which is already beginning to be replicated, and I think will replace the academic system by the time that our Children are growing up as the primary status hierarchy for youth. Now, the 2nd question, which I thought was really interesting, because, you know, when we were talking with you.Malcolm Collins: How resistant the major publications were to cover your book or the major sort of you know, you know, given how impactful your work is, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that a little bit about the suppression you have when you're in the Peter Thiel sort ofMichael Gibson: yeah, well, we had the haters of [00:09:00] the fellowship in 15 17 now over a decade.Michael Gibson: So when the Thiel fellowship was first announced in 2010 I think in the same week we already had op eds in Newsweek and other magazines denouncing the program as the white man's NBA corrupting the youth, you know, getting them to focus on money and not, you know, the intangible rewards of reading great novels, something like that.Michael Gibson: Then we had Larry Summers. former treasury secretary, president of Harvard, come out and denounce the fellowship as the, this is a quote, he says, it's the most misdirected philanthropy of the decade. He said that in like 2013 or 14. We had numerous bad articles written about us and just about every major publication, Scott Galloway, the, the bloviating.Michael Gibson: Commentator on tech. He, he dumped on us. So that, that just occurred throughout the decade, but over that time we just had more and more success and I guess they, [00:10:00] those critics faded away. But when I came in, there was just silence. And then when I I had been writing some articles and this agent approached me about writing the book and I, I, I accepted it.Michael Gibson: And he was an Englishman, he's based in London, and I think he didn't really understand just how much the press and the media and let's say the cultural establishment from Hollywood to you know, newspapers and so on, how much that had come to hate tech and in particular hate Peter Thiel. So Peter famously backed you know, lawsuit against Gawker, Hulk Hogan versus Gawker when that was revealed.Michael Gibson: The media suddenly thought Peter, Peter was this evil billionaire stifling free speech. And then he supported Trump in 2016. And after both those things, yeah, I think that the intensity of the hatred just reached all new highs. So we, and we sent out the proposal for the book that was in 2021.Michael Gibson: And I was shocked. We sent [00:11:00] it to 20 publishers, maybe six or seven wrote back. And here's another quote that is word for word. Someone wrote, Peter Thiel is evil and anyone who worked for him is evil. So we can't possibly publish this. Of course. A bunch of people. Yeah, they, they, they just did not like people.Michael Gibson: Peter, then another six or seven said I, you know, someone was said, I went to Yale. I studied English literature. I think college is amazing. I disagree with this book. And then, you know, six or seven just passed because they said it wasn't for them. I ended up getting picked up by a small independent publisher encounter and they put out, you know, Mainly conservative libertarian ish policy wonk ish books tends to be very, you know, blend of academic think tank history sometimes, but this is the first non fiction, you know, story you know, I, I wanted to tell a story, I certainly wanted to touch on policy issues like higher ed and, and what might be done, but But I think it is the [00:12:00] first book I've seen them put out where it was like, okay, this is a story, a business story.Michael Gibson: But yeah, that was a struggle and I think it, it represented that symbolic conflict. It was a, a, a symbolic. Example of this wider conflict between the old institutions in and things that are popping up here and there that are new and I guess threatening to the old order.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and it's really humorous if you're actually in the spheres because they treat Peter Teal like he's this big Machiavellian like a spider web, a master guy who's.Malcolm Collins: Controlling everything but from behind the scenes so much so that we've even been caught up in this we got called up by a comedian who is pretending to be a reporter and they wanted to do a thing on us and we're like, yeah, we're actually like after he's talking to you, you guys seem so like normal and not evil.Malcolm Collins: Like he was really surprised. I don't think the comedy piece. Because he thought that we were so much nicer than he thought we would be. And he's but you know, everyone's gonna, they hate you because of those, those Peter Thiel connections. [00:13:00] So, so our connection there is Simone used to be the managing director of TOT Dialogue, which was a secret society thing that was originally founded by Peter Thiel.Malcolm Collins: Tentative long term connection. This was back in his Aron Hoffman days. So it's founded by Peter Thiel and Aron Hoffman together. But anyway, so, so he was talking to, because you have that, everyone is always like, how could you have possibly In any way tied to the sphere of this villain. And what's crazy is that you're in these sort of circles.Malcolm Collins: He actually just isn't that involved with a lot of his projects. And he definitely is not as a web spider mastery sort ofMichael Gibson: operator. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that was something I wanted to portray in the book was just, I had the fortune. Of working with Peter for directly for him for five years. He's an investor in 1517 and we are friendly and meet every so often.Michael Gibson: And, and the derangement syndrome around Peter in the media and the way they portrayed him, everything from, I mean, they, they make him [00:14:00] seem like he's this volt rational Vulcan who. has no feelings whatsoever. And then there is what you're pointing out is funny. They do always want to portray him as this, this mastermind chess master who, who sees six moves ahead.Michael Gibson: And one of the funnier moments I've had with Peter was I, I said that to him, this was during the Gawker. The time of when it was revealed, he, he backed that lawsuit and he asked me, he said, Oh, what do you think of the, the coverage? And I said, Oh, you know, it's so interesting. No one wants to debate you on the constitutional issues of privacy versus speech.Michael Gibson: Instead, they're just obsessed with portraying you as this chess master operating from the shadows, seeing six moves ahead. And then Peter says to me, but I am.Malcolm Collins: I love it. So actually this happened in my life was a different cultural group. So I was the director of strategy of the ventures, which was the most successful early stage venture capital firm in Korea during the period.Malcolm Collins: And we were [00:15:00] always getting into fights with the government to the extent that the fund was eventually shut down by by government action over something that was later proven to be completely falsified and the courts admitted it was all falsified. But anyway, a lot of people in the US are like, why were you in this conflict with the government?Malcolm Collins: Politically, why were you? So toxic. And it was like, well, we came up with this really crazy investment strategy, which is we would invest in people who had dropped out of college or who didn't go to good colleges. And in Korea, these people are persona non grata much more so than they are in the United States.Malcolm Collins: And We were seen as sort of disrupting societal order in helping people that shouldn't get rich, get rich, because in Korea, the society is so much more hierarchical, bolds and the chi bolds, it's much more somebody getting a bunch of money out of nowhere, especially somebody who dropped out of college, is genuinely seen as a social ill.Malcolm Collins: What is interesting, and I think Peter Thiel, where he's actually been most successful is in identifying incompetent [00:16:00] people who do not fit into the game of bowing to the, the systems of power in our society right now. So a lot of the time, these people would be filtered out. They'd be filtered out.Malcolm Collins: Sometimes at the lead institutions, they'd be filtered out of being allowed to write books or run funds, but he's able to look past all that. And because of that, he has access. To a much wider and often a much more honest talent pool than anyone else can access.Michael Gibson: Yeah, got it. Yeah. That's funny about Korea.Michael Gibson: One, one of the cool interactions that I've had with my book being out in the world is I was doing a zoom discussion with some people who had read it and this happened off Twitter. So the link went out to all sorts of people and this young man who called it was actually a soldier in the Korean army.Michael Gibson: And he was calling from this base somewhere in Korea and he wanted to let me know that he's having the best time reading out passages of my book to his bunkmates in the army and they're laughing their asses off and they couldn't believe that [00:17:00] someone was saying what I was saying in the book or, you know, all the things we've touched on about, okay, maybe college isn't best for, and I think that's right, you, you, you, they are just manic for, University the university path in Korea.Michael Gibson: So the heresy is just even more hilarious to the few or shocking to others.Malcolm Collins: Well, what I, what I, what I found the parallel there is I think in the U S we can see how comical it is. That oh yeah, if you see this talent pool that everyone else is ignoring, of course you're going to do well. Like it's the easiest arbitrage opportunity in the world.Malcolm Collins: And then in the U S you're like, well, what have you invested in people who sometimes have conservative opinions? It's Oh, that's a, that's a, that's a spicy take. Definitely don't do that. Yeah. Really the position that we have lost venture capital funding for our school. For being publicly conservative, this is something that actually happened to the US people.Malcolm Collins: They're like, Hey, we just can't be seen as identifying with conservatives. And also in the nonprofit space. This is something we consistently saw. We were working for a [00:18:00] big nonprofit at one time. And I don't want to say which one this was, but they basically said when they found out that we had You know, a conservative history that we couldn't work for them anymore because it was too dangerous for, for their work to continue to get funding.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Because so many of the power structures in like the nonprofit space within the U S are just completely. And as we, as we point this out within nonprofit structures, if you have like when people go into nonprofits, they typically have two motivations. Some of them are interested in making the world a better place.Malcolm Collins: And some of them are interested in playing like status signal hierarchy, moving up within sort of this, this. Status of society, the people who are interested in making the world a better place, you know, they need to split their time within the nonprofit between social politics and actually trying to do something efficacious.Malcolm Collins: Whereas the people who care only about personal status, they can spend their entire time on politics within the organization. And so within these large bureaucracies, they always end up winning and controlling these organizations. Which is, I think how this group has gained so much power.Michael Gibson: [00:19:00] Yeah, that's, it does become a system of control and exclusion.Michael Gibson: Yeah. And I think our, the derangement of our institutions into. You know, the woke madness, left wing knee jerk ideology. It's, I guess it does, it does it for the wise investor. It may create an orbit, an opportunity, but, but it is sad to me that this has become a, a way to exclude. I think, I mean, I'm not going to cry too much over my.Michael Gibson: But it is interesting to me that I, I've received no reviews. I couldn't get anyone from normal publications to review the book. I think it's because of this affiliation with Peter Thiel, these ideas, maybe the conservative publisher. I think that all has to be factored in, in, into it. It's like clear.Michael Gibson: And then, and then, I mean, look at Twitter. It doesn't even have to be. It's like pretty clear now that, you know, shadow band conservatives were being shadow banned and pushed out.Simone Collins: One [00:20:00] concept that I really liked from the, I mean, like it's in the title is this concept of the paper belt. Like we grew up with the concept of the rust belt. This is the, you know, industrial heart of America. And now so much is being run by. The paper belt, which is essentially like the media knowledge workers and sort of like clustered around, around the East coast.Simone Collins: Right. You'd roughly define it that way. And it's, the book is a lot about subverting this, right. It's about what could come next where, you know, after sort of like publishing your book and being attacked by the paper belt or resisted by it. I mean, part of me is yeah, the paper belt is 100 percent on fire.Simone Collins: It's extremely dysfunctional. It's like sabotaging itself and yet you can feel its power, right? Like we can feel the heat, likeMichael Gibson: I can't pretend that it's. It's burnt to the ground and, and also, yeah, my mom pointed out to me, she's wait, your, your book is called paper belts on fire and you're upset that no one on the paper.Michael Gibson: All right. I was like, you're right, mom. It's fair enough. But, but I [00:21:00] think the lingering status and prestige of these institutions is strong and they're not totally incompetent and corrupt. I think they're, they're still. doing important things like governing the country or providing some, you know, media and, and so on.Michael Gibson: I, I, I think there is a sense in which, yeah, people ask me like, why didn't you just self publish? Who cares? I think, yeah, I'm not quite sure these old institutions are completely dead and I need to, or wanted to operate within them in order to get the word out, but I get it if they, if they don't want my message coursing through their veins.Michael Gibson: The, yeah, I, the paperbell is this configuration of power on the East Coast from Washington D. C. to New York to Boston other people have called it the Sell a court or I 95. You know, there are other names for these things. But the thing that stood out to me was that they are indeed paper based everything from the U.Michael Gibson: S. Dollar to a diploma at Harvard or M. I. T. And what when I learn more about, you know, [00:22:00] I was deep into cypher punk you know, blogging and essays. And I certainly retain a lot of that that rebellious vibe from You From the cypherpunk era, but I also just learning a lot about, you know, why was bitcoin created?Michael Gibson: How does the blockchain architecture work? And, and I, I came to see that it is very much against these paper based trust institutions because if you, if you are relying on paper, whether it's a diploma or a dollar, there's an institution that has to be trusted to verify that that piece of paper has value.Michael Gibson: That it signals something that it's meant to signal that it hasn't been corrupted or watered down. And, and then that institution validates it. And so that was interesting to me that the paper is tied to the performance of the, of these institutions that, you know, because we have to. You know, we have to trust them, and it seems to be the case that diplomas don't signal what, you know, these schools claim they do, and that the U.Michael Gibson: S. dollar doesn't signal what the government necessarily wants it to[00:23:00] so that, that, that stood out to me, and I wanted to run with it, that I think we do have a I think institutions are in decline, in decline It's hard to know how to turn them around. Our, our attempt in the book is with the book that I wanted to depict is, okay, what is it?Michael Gibson: Okay, here's the analysis, the critique of the decline, but what can we do outside of it that that's creative and inspiring? And I think stories are the best way to inspire people. No,Simone Collins: totally. I'm curious also how far away you think we are from the next thing, whatever it is exactly, after the paper belt, like the network state or this more decentralized world.Simone Collins: Because it's, it's interesting, I don't know, with the pandemic, right? We got a lot of hope. We're like, Whoa, this could happen really fast. These things are falling apart quickly. You know, you read like Zyhan's, the end of the world is just the beginning. And we're like, Holy s**t, like everything's going to change.Simone Collins: And, and then, you know, things kind of stay the same. No, we're really impatient. You know, it's been like zero times since the pandemic actually hit. [00:24:00] What are your thoughts? Do you feel like we're close? What do you think the future like tippingMichael Gibson: points are going to be? Maybe let's just focus on the institution of school and education.Michael Gibson: I think. All what you just said is true in that category. The pandemic came and parents came to see that they couldn't trust. the bureaucrats or the teachers when it came to you know, providing an education to their children or just, you know, being nice people or even being open, right? There were some unions that extended the you know, closure of the schools and so on.Michael Gibson: So I, I, a lot of anger and frustration among parents started to, to pick up. And then we saw greater movement into either school choice at the state level can, you know, just cut checks to people to Send their kids somewhere else, but also homeschooling. I think I haven't seen the numbers, but it just seems to me that, you know, more and more people are doing these things and written politicians are running on that issue.Michael Gibson: But like you said, the legacy institutions are still strong. And every parent I talk [00:25:00] to who isn't, you know, normie parents, like their dream is still, you know, just, they judge themselves. on how good of a parent they are by, you know, how their children make their way through, you know, K through 12 into, into universities.Michael Gibson: So given that that is still so mainstream and just the main path, I think there's a long way to go now. I, but it's okay, we've made a little progress. We've seen how the institution is failing, but people are still buying into it. I think we just need more and more success stories just have to keep building on.Michael Gibson: You know, the, the stories about people who are outside of it. I love what you all are doing in terms of you're another new entry into the field. Okay. Can we help younger people earlier and doing different things? And, and maybe they don't go to college or maybe they do, but they have a greater. Focus and commitment to something specific.Michael Gibson: I think that, that if we build on this, then okay, I don't know. I can't put a time range on it, but maybe 10, 20 years, we'll start to see a [00:26:00] substantial number of people who choose that path. Okay. That wouldSimone Collins: be amazing. Okay. If we like make goodMalcolm Collins: alternative systems. Yes. Yeah. I think something you're missing is If you look at young people today, like if you look at our generation, right, like people had already begun to separate out of the system to the extent where when I look at the people now who have achieved like disproportionate wealth in our society or disproportionate positions of power, many of them were in these you know, 1, 000 people, 2, 000 people chat rooms in like the early rationalist less back when I was in Silicon Valley, you know, 20 years ago, right? If I look today, a lot of people can look and they can be like your channel, are these communities you're swimming in are like really small communities that doesn't mean that.Malcolm Collins: They aren't disproportionately bringing in some of the smartest people. Like when we're in Silicon Valley and I look at things like the Atlas fellowship and it was really shocking to us because we had a number of people go through our school and every single one of them also then went to the Atlas fellowship completely [00:27:00] independently of us.Malcolm Collins: And, and what that showed me is that we are. When we're out there sourcing, being like, I want the smartest kids in the U. S. And we have two people who are doing this sourcing. They keep finding the same kids. And all of these kids kind of know each other already. So I do think we live in a world where the smartest people with ambition and with individual agency are actually coalesce outside of the old power system.Malcolm Collins: That's the first thing you need. That's the first big step, whatever comes next.Michael Gibson: Yeah, very, very good point. And, and actually I, I said COVID is one of these catalysts for, for pushing people out of schools, but we haven't even touched on the. The woke madness and the ideological indoctrination where I think quite moderate parents don't even want to have to deal with this stuff now.Michael Gibson: And maybe that'll accelerate as well. Yeah. We're hearing itSimone Collins: a lot. Well, another thing that I've seen, which does suggest to me, [00:28:00] maybe things are moving fairly fast is many very high achieving college age people we know now. Have enrolled in prestigious universities when they get in because they feel like that piece of paper will help them and it probably still will, but they're also completely phoning it in they're like, I'm not going to the classes.Simone Collins: I'm just teaching myself. This is a complete waste of time. I'm literally here. So once that generation starts raising their own kids are they, are they going to pay for that when they know what they did? I don't know. And so maybeMalcolm Collins: that's who this person is. But one of our close friends recently got into Harvard for graduate school and she was like, I really don't want to go what's the point?Malcolm Collins: And I go, look, you just get the flip of paper. Okay. Like you don't need to go to classes. You don't need to do anything.Michael Gibson: And there's an old joke that it's easier to. What is it? It's harder to get into Harvard than to fail out of it. That makes sense.Malcolm Collins: Well, well, I, I, I came close with my Stanford MBA a couple of times.Malcolm Collins: Not failing out, [00:29:00] but I, I guess I always hate to piss people off. I think,Michael Gibson: well, one other issue is, I think, is just how bad schools are. And so it's tough for... People to really judge the quality of things when, when it's not clear what difference it makes. But it could be the case and that maybe methods of instruction.Michael Gibson: And methods of building curiosity improved so much that the people who are outside the system are just so clearly far ahead along these dimensions that other people in the system are like, Oh s**t, I got to get out. I mean, I think like people obviously switch from Uber to Lyft because it was just so wonderful and magical to be able to call a car, right?Michael Gibson: Such a big improvement on the old medallion system, paper based system. That that they, they moved, but now, you know, education is so expensive and then it's not even clear how much of a difference it'll make, you know, people just want their kids to be with other kids who are pro social and pro learning.Michael Gibson: But you know, when it comes to methods of [00:30:00] instruction, no one's really good at judging these things. But what if you did send your child to a school and they learned calculus in three months instead of a year? I think, you know, people, if they saw that, they'd say, well, all right, I want to send my kid there, but we just don't have that yet.Michael Gibson: Well, our school is going to doMalcolm Collins: that when I guarantee you, I just wish we could develop it a little faster. Anyway, I have had so much fun talking with you in this, in this work. We'll definitely do another episode with you. I would direct people to your book. I would also direct people to things that you're running, you know, if you know, a really young, smart person who's working on big ideas, stuff like the 1517 fund are actually, or, or the deal fellowship are.Malcolm Collins: Where it is for the next generation and, and, and for our young viewers who are just like, yeah, but I can't, what do you mean you can't like being a genius in a meaningful context is about having individual agency and being able to go out there, search for opportunities and execute on the opportunities you're searching for.[00:31:00]Malcolm Collins: And so, you know, just remember that, remember to not forget toMichael Gibson: try. Yeah. Anyone out there reach out 15, 17 fund. com. We have a. Submission form on our website that we answer and you don't even have to be starting a company. We just want to meet people who are attracted to, you know, this vibe and this world and these ideas.Michael Gibson: Yeah. Nice. Thank you soSimone Collins: much, Michael.Michael Gibson: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone have an insightful discussion about why fashion has changed so little since the 1990s, unlike the dramatic shifts seen in previous decades.Simone argues this stagnation stems from supply chain optimization and globalization, which have homogenized clothing production and limited variation. She cites how historical fashion shifts correlated with advances in materials and manufacturing capabilities. Now we've reached an equilibrium where most clothing uses the same global supply chains.They extend this idea to ponder other areas where change may have slowed, like scientific advances, celebrity culture, and content creation. Malcolm suggests fewer new stars emerge because media consolidation limits breakout opportunities.Overall they conclude that despite feeling accelerated, technological progress has also locked society into certain optimized systems that resist innovation. However, they see potential for fashion to evolve again through augmented realities, prosthetics, and body modification.Simone: [00:00:00] It was something that you would actually change fashion. And most people would have switched around several times. It was unusual to have not changed your gender in this... In this like post singularity culture, which is, I don't know. I mean, I, Ian Banks is a very prescient author, soMalcolm: you never know.Malcolm: I think types of flightiness will be among the populations that are bred out of our species.Simone: I don't know, man, because in this world, men could turn into women and have babies. So, their fertility rate might be pretty goodWould you like to know more?Simone: Hello, Malcolm. Hello,Malcolm: Simone. I was on Facebook this morning and she always needs me to find something to mentally challenge her every day or engage her. And so this is my task today. As I said before, my life is the framing device of Arabian Nights. If I don't find something interesting to talk to her about every day, I'm so, [00:01:00] today it was this meme that's been going around.Malcolm: That if you look at how much fashions, cars, build, like architecture changed from like the 50s to the 60s. The 60s to the 70s, the 70s to the 80s, the 80s to the 90s. It was really dramatic. Like you look at an 80s outfit versus the 90s and these were common, you know, like common outfits.Malcolm: If you in the nineties dressed in an outfit that was common in the eighties, people would think you. We're like in a Halloween costume. However, if you look at the, the entire period of the 2000s and to some extent, the later 90s, so 1995 till today, almost nothing has changed. If you looked at footage of a street, like a random corner in New York, other than all the s**t there now, because cities are beginning to fall apart you would, Not see that much, like you wouldn't be able to tell when it took place outside of like the size of people's phones and this is really [00:02:00] fascinating and so the question was, why is it that I can wear an outfit from like 2002 and I can go to a party in it today and everyone would be like, yeah, that's like just a totally normal outfit.Malcolm: Why did things stop changing? And the default answer, and this was the answer that I came to originally, because I saw the video, I might have been primed in it, but it's also what I was thinking, is it was the rise of the internet. The rise of the internet just made communication so ubiquitous. There was no reason for things to change anymore, and it became harder for things to change, because it was easier to access sort of any content from that moment till the beginning of the internet.Malcolm: And Simone goes, no, the answer is obvious to me. And I actually think you might be right. So do you want to go into it?Simone: Yeah, I'm almost certain that the lack of meaningful change in fashion is a change in basically globalization, manufacturing and global supply chains, which [00:03:00] has sort of led to an optimization of clothing creation.Simone: That has led to this sort of convergence in fashions where things aren't meaningfully changing. In other words, the primary driver of distinct fashions in the past wasn't fashion itself. It wasn't like, you know, trends or stuff that people thought was pretty. It was more like the way that clothing was manufactured.Simone: Now, of course there were like weird sumptuary laws in the past that would sort of dictate who was allowed to know what. Describe a sumptuary law. A sumptuary law is basically a law saying if you're not rich. You're not allowed to do, or wear, or own this thing. So this one would be the color purple, for example.Simone: The color purple really long shoes had sumptuary laws associated with it. I think there were some foods that had sumptuary laws. Ermine the, the fabric that you typically associate with lining a royal person's cloak things like that. So that might dictate fashion a little bit. But,Malcolm: I pushed back on her when you said this first.Malcolm: And I said, no, that's not true. I was like, [00:04:00] look, you've got random things in the 70s where I'm thinking of what's popular then bell bottoms or something. How could that possibly fit into your explanation? And you're like,Simone: So actually bell bottoms totally makes sense. So, if you've ever worn a pair of vintage jeans and I've done so recently, you're going to be like, Holy s**t.Simone: Like I cannot move in these. They are extremely stiff. Like the fabric we are, we are not wearing jeans. Now we are wearing leggings. Now let's be perfectly honest with ourselves and bell bottoms really makes sense, like structurally. And as jeans, when you're talking about actual old fashioned denim, which is stiff enough to flare out.Simone: Bell bottoms today would look a lot more like sort of wilted angels trumpets than they would look like actualMalcolm: elastic sewn into theSimone: denim. Yeah, there's yeah, there is, our, our denim is interwoven with elastic to the, to the point where it doesn't really work that way anymore. And I think partially that's because it's cheaper.Simone: Partially that's because it's more comfortable. Partially that's because we're fatter. But when you look at [00:05:00] history and how clothing was made, it was totally like the way clothing was made, that would dictate. So when you look and as you know, since I'm pregnant now, I'm like trying to find a way where I can stay warm in our house that we typically like to unheat in the winter while also like being a lot larger than I normally am.Simone: And I decided that I was going to go to sort of Renaissance styles to do it becauseMalcolm: Oh, I, I've got to put someSimone: pictures up. There isn't any flattering, actual maternity clothing that's good for cold weather that looks decent. And so instead what I'm gonna do is wear like a ton of under like long underwear.Simone: They look like journals. Yeah. Well, there's a corset and then you're, you're wearing like a long underdress, you have a skirt. There's all these layers, but like everything, notMalcolm: tight corset. It's like a structure thing.Simone: Yeah. It's, it's a, yeah. It's, it's a, it's a sonar sort of structured shirt. But when you look at the pieces of this, these old patterns what you typically have is a chemise, which is like a, a very unstructured like undershirt that a man or a woman [00:06:00] would wear.Simone: That's something that's really easy to sew at home. And like all the outer parts that were more structured were like sort of cutouts of clothing that would often just be sewn together. Like the different parts were sewn together and you would sew yourself into your outfit or lace yourself into your outfit.Simone: And this was all stuff that people made at home. Often with homespun cloth. And so things are more structured, the way that they work is more structured. And then as you go to more manufactured clothing, you move to these different styles that are really made possible by new forms of technology. New types of looms, new types of fabric.Simone: You can see, like, when wool takes over from linen in popularity, things start to change. You can see this from region to region as well, and how that influences fashion. And when you look at, for example, Chinese and Japanese fashion, because the fabrics they're using are so different, They look really different and it's not because oh, you know, we have these incredibly different standards.Simone: You do see some universal things. Like fashions often emphasize gender dimorphic elements of men and women. That's fine. And they often also emphasize whatever seems to be expensive because you're trying to find wealth.[00:07:00] But The, the fabric that's available in an economy is going to dictate what those fashions look like.Simone: And a lot of the differences are based on what's available. So of course, it makes sense that as we enter this globalized world, we're going to see a huge effect in homogenization of fashion, both over time and across regions, because. We're starting to use the same supply chains, the same fabrics, the same everything.Simone: And so you're not going to see meaningful variation.Malcolm: A great example of this that you're talking about is early in comic books. Today when we look at those characters, we like, they look like they're in underwear. Right? Like in early comic books but what was actually being highlighted in those early comic books is that they were wearing elastic and nylon, which were two seen as very like sci fi and advanced technologies that were brand new technologies at the time.Malcolm: And so to us, it just looks like normal underwear, but to them, they're like, look at this tight fitting, form fitting clothing. It's so advanced. And yeah, so I think that we [00:08:00] Often underestimate how new many of these technologies are. And so what you're really arguing is the change in fashion was down three was downstream of the industrialization of society.Malcolm: And society was still in many ways industrializing until we reached true globalization. And that in today's world, if we're talking about fashion trends, what we should really be thinking about is online avatars and stuff like that. And that's where we are going to most likely see the most interesting fashion trends, because that's where technology is advancing the most.Malcolm: And in many ways we actually do. So, let's think here, you know, obviously furries, you could consider sort of like a fashion trend almost was an online environment, but remember when there was the Do you know the way? Oh God. That's great. Was it an online environment? Do people know the way? How did the full thing go? .Simone: Was it Uganda?Malcolm: Yeah. It was like. But [00:09:00] everybody would wear these knuckles. From Sonic and Knuckles. But deformed knuckles. Skins when they were in VR environments and interacting with each other. And this became like a thing. And then you would get different fashions for your profile photos.Malcolm: So a big example here, if we're talking about like expensive fashions was when people would buy NFTs of, those early like Crypto Pugs, right? Or what's it called? Lazy Monkeys? What do they call them? OhSimone: Bored Apes.Malcolm: Yes! Homeless Monkeys is what I was thinking. Anyway, Bored Apes. So, Bored Apes, right?Malcolm: And those aren't really tied to any historic fashion event. And yet they were totally unique to their time period and tied to technology. Very interesting point. Sorry, I just had these realizations as you were talking about this.Simone: Well, you could argue that the meaningful advances in technology that we have seen since the 90s involve things like smartwatches.Simone: Maybe, I don't know, I was going to [00:10:00] say more of like advanced versions of tattoos, but they're still so unusual. Maybe it's going to be neural implants. Maybe it's going to be More advanced tattoos once they actually come out like actually when when I that one of the most unique fashion differentiators in sci fi that I've read across multiple books now is animated tattoos Because I think it's really hard to describe someone's fashion in a way that to a reader will feel futuristic And I think that's because we sort of ended up in this like hyper optimized world that just doesn't feel that unique.Simone: You wannaMalcolm: throw people off, this is what I suggest you do some going forwards. Hmm. You need to get a little bit of like metal technology stuff that makes it look like you have a brain implant and then just glue it on your head before you go to circle them, and tell people that you have an implant here.Malcolm: And don't believe it. They'll be like, oh, they, they know people who could give them input. Be like, it's experimental. We can't really talk about theSimone: group that did it, especially for shave a patch of my head and glue it in. Like really go all theMalcolm: way. Oh yeah. You got to really goSimone: all the [00:11:00] way and be like, yeah, that's money.Simone: Extra points. If it has some, like we can get put a little like led lights in it. So Oh, youMalcolm: want to have some fluid, like flowing through it?Simone: Oh yeah. If it like leaks a little bit, especially if it's a little bloody around the edge.Malcolm: Yeah. A little bit of leaking blood down the side.Simone: Yeah. I don't, I don't take my,Malcolm: It, you know, immunosuppressants sometimes happen, but you know, the price we pay for being able to read your mind.Simone: Yeah. I wonder. And so prosthetics, I could argue is, is an interesting evolution. Of, of, you could argue fashion though.Malcolm: Well, yeah. I mean, an interesting thing is some people have become like I don't know if you've heard of this movement, but like people identify as like needing prosthetics, you know, the same way, like people identify as trans, they identify as needing prosthetics, even if they don't.Malcolm: And, and they actually will go get surgeries to get like limbs removed and stuff so that they then can fit their identity of a disabled person. [00:12:00]Simone: Yeah. Gosh, but what is, I'm really actually curious now. What is the next meaningful, and remember like Google glasses, you know, when they firstMalcolm: came out.Malcolm: Transness as a changeSimone: in. Technology driven change in fashion. Yes. Yeah, I guess when you can't. You can't change fashion anymore. You can change your gender which is meaningful. In, in Ian Banks Culture series, by the way it was very normal for humans to change their gender for ten years, and then change back, and then change their gender again, because they'd like to be able to have a baby, and gestate it, and then change back.Simone: It was something that you would actually change fashion. And most people would have switched around several times. It was unusual to have not changed your gender in this... In this like post singularity culture, which is, I don't know. I mean, I, Ian Banks is a very prescient author, soMalcolm: you never know.Malcolm: I think types of flightiness will be among the [00:13:00] populations that are bred out of our species.Simone: I don't know, man, because in this world, men could turn into women and have babies. So, their fertility rate might be pretty good. Another thing that I recallMalcolm: I genuinely think if you talk about the sustainable cultures that are going to survive, they're going to be much more likely to cast systems.Simone: I don't know, man. I, I, I don't know. I, I think, honestly fine, change your gender. A post gender world. To me is way better. And that feels like a post gender world, just like switching it out when you feel like it,Malcolm: but a cast system was baby farms is also a post gender worldSimone: because women aren't having an exploitative.Simone: And I don't like it. No, it sounds, you don'tMalcolm: like it, but it would be, this is the thing. You don't like it likely due to genetic predilections. We could select that that was out of people who come from the farm. God.Simone: Oh God. Yeah. But, but you probably wouldn't need to. I mean, it's not we've bred chickens who love being in battery cages.Simone: It's not like we've bred cows that love being in, you know, very constrainedMalcolm: environments that we've done that. [00:14:00] So yeah, it's like a major problem with, with chickens that are supposed to be free range is that they open the cages and they just never leave. It's a very cheap way to raise free range chickens.Malcolm: AndSimone: weMalcolm: have chicken breeds that are very free rangey and then we have other chicken breeds that are just kind of witless and I think we actually have some of those chickens. You know, one of the breeds we have, you're always complaining about how witless they are and how they just want to sit in their thing allSimone: day.Simone: They are very dumb. They are extremely dumb birds. But I love them. It's fine. I think another element of fashion driven by technology that will change significantly. Is plastic surgery. I think we are already seeing the effects of it. Maybe filters plus plastic surgery. Like you can also see people significantly altering the way that they look using filters online.Simone: But then in addition to that, plastic surgery definitely is going to change, you know, what we can do with our bodies. And in Scott Westerfeld's Ugly series, which is a teen dystopian sci fi series what many people do is they'll get [00:15:00] surgery to get anime eyes. They will look significantly weirdly different.Simone: So maybe that's sort of the final frontier is just, it's not, it's not gender modification per se. It's all forms of bodymodification.Malcolm: Well, it might be another way to word. This is in the online sphere, our primary presence to other people, the primary way we're interacting with other people is through avatars and there'll be , less pressure for individual fashion to evolve.Simone: Could be. Yeah. COVID. In some ways felt like it killed fashion in some ways felt like it accelerated it. I don't want to think but yeah, I mean and is it just fashion? Or or have global supply chains therefore also homogenized? Many other elements of society.Malcolm: well, I think they have, but yeah, I mean, I think that the, the dominant, it could also be, you said that the dominant cultural group has so much more power now than it's ever had historically.Malcolm: And it's very interested in preventing anything from evolving or changing, like power is [00:16:00] consolidating. Around a very inefficient system that I think the masses realize is inefficient and stupid and they want to end and they They lack the power to change it. Don't worry. We'll handle it for you guys.Malcolm: We'll change it We'll fix it. It'll be handled soon. Don't worry. These, these, these people in power are at least as witless as they appear on TV.Simone: Yeah, hmm. I wonder,Simone: hold on, I lost my thought. Holy, now, I had like a little, a little stroke where I just completely forgot. Who I am. I am Simone Collins. I am having a conversation with my husband, Malcolm Collins. What, what am I here for? We were talking about fashion? No, yeah, yes. What was, what's going to change what is going to change, or what will stop changing.Simone: So what I think is really interesting about this concept with fashion, but then also like more broadly, is that we think... I think we're, we're in this [00:17:00] mindset of Oh, we're now in this world where everything's accelerating. Like we, we are already in the singularity. Things have already changed past a point of no return.Simone: Smartphones and the internet have revolutionized so much. So you get this impression that Oh no, no, no. We're in this period of constant flux. And in many ways we are right in terms of the technology that we're being introduced to, it is, it is game changing. But then it's something that I've never really explored mentally before is this Okay.Simone: Well, that has happened. While all this has happened, technology and globalization have also slowed down the rate of change. Almost like they're locking us into a current mode that is optimal per current global supply chains and the internet. What do you think? Was it sort of a big hurry up but stop kind of situation that we're in now?Simone: Well,Malcolm: yeah. I mean, I do think that many supply chains have been optimized. I, I agree that we're, we're entering a point where you look at I mean, look at the way I'm dressed. Like it's a polo, right? Like it's about as much of a degradation as you can have from the [00:18:00] idea of a full button down shirt where it has all the ease, but still some semblance of button down is.Malcolm: So it has some semblance of being a, yeah. Outfit, you know, glasses, right? Like I guess you could have contacts, which are more, but they scare me to put it in. I don't know, maybe there's contact, but don't scare people to put in, but I don't like touching my eye. So I think you couldn't make any of the things we're wearing.Malcolm: I got my elastic jeans. I've got my form fitting yellow boots that I wear because. Kids can spot me easily and they match the kids and they like that. Like all of the aspects of what I'm wearing, I just don't think could be made any... Simpler without losing some tie to what we consider formality because you're always going to judge some clothes as informal and some clothes as formal.Malcolm: And so, you know, I think today the way we see formal clothes is, oh, collar must be formal to some extent, right? [00:19:00] I could go to a t shirt, but then a t shirt would informality that. Yeah, there's just no differentiation. YouSimone: could argue that Star Trek uniforms are basically just at leisure, but they denote formality because they denote like military rank.Simone: So you could argue that something like a, a caste system or sanctuary laws would then be able to dictate formality in a post. Structured clothing era. Well, whatMalcolm: are NFTs if not a form of sumptuary law? So sumptuary laws are about gatekeeping. Well, when any, everyone can purchase basically anything, right.Malcolm: Which is where we are in society right now. I can purchase things that look basically like Louis Vuitton at a very inexpensive price because there is no longer any gatekeeping around that. Right. So.Malcolm: NFTs allow you to gatekeep access to social status signalers that cost an enormous [00:20:00] amount. So you can, you can, you can show true, I guess, financial waste or, or, or, or possibility for financial yeah.Simone: Yeah. It's a gatekeeping thing. What else do you think is most meaningfully not changed? I mean, I, I like this concept because when you first told me that fashion has not changed since the 90s, I'm like, no I've watched like a million commentators who talk about all the different, but yeah, meaningfully, structurally, fabric wise, we're not really seeing that much differentiation.Simone: So I agree with you, but I'm curious is there some other area in which we actually feel like we've been changing a lot, but we've not?Malcolm: Maybe oh, well, you can think in terms of celebrities. So this is an interesting thing. Okay. That celebrities, there haven't really been new celebrities that have risen in the past 15 years or so. There haven't. You, you, if you were in the nineties, it was one boy band and then three years later it was another boy band and then three years later it was another boy band you just went through cycles of, of who was famous at the [00:21:00] time.Malcolm: You would have, you know, one pop star, one pop star, one pop star, you just cycled, ch ch ch ch ch. Today, movie stars too, you know, you look at who are the top movie stars today. If I ask even a young person to name the top movie stars today. Many of them are going to be movie stars that would have been famous movie stars in the 90s.Simone: Yeah. Now there's all this discussion of using AI to just make them look younger again or continue using. Keep them forever. Right. Even if they die. Yeah.Malcolm: Why have we not had new movie stars arise? What, I mean, I actually had a cousin who was really trying to like make himself happen for a while. And a neighbor when I was young, who actually probably was the closest thing to a new movie star before he blew up his wife.Malcolm: It was Armie Hammer with the neighbor when I was younger and the cousin was, was Miles Fisher who worked really hard to try to build himself into a star. It actually has done very well in business since then. He now runs or is on the board of some big AI company he started. Hey, I love that my, my family is competent, even when they spend their whole life in [00:22:00] acting.Malcolm: And then they're like he used to specialize in pretending to be what's his name? Tom Cruise. He did you've seen the what's the video? It became a meme for a while.Simone: It was based onMalcolm: American Psycho, right? Yeah, the American Psycho fake meme thing that was like a music video of that. Yeah.Malcolm: Anyway. So yeah, some, some, I, I appreciate their competence, but I actually wonder if the ceiling for him breaking out was actually not that he wasn't successful or he didn't have the chops to break out. It was like, it stagnated. Stars were no longer being generated during the period where he was trying to break into that space.Malcolm: And so why, why is it no longer any new stars? I mean, part of this could be tied to pronatalism. You know, as the aging society, everyone is focused on the last generation. Everyone is focused on the last generation to have kids, right? And as you don't have a huge financial pressure for kids, you can also say this might be tied to streaming services.Malcolm: Like maybe [00:23:00] nothing really feels like if I look at like the one star group that actually has broken out, it's the cast of Stranger Things. Right. Like they're continuing to move up. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But that was like the one like big breakout I can thinkSimone: of. Right. And then you also make a really good point though, about it's not just stars, it's also content that we're doing so many prequels and sequels and using a lot of existing properties.Simone: So you could argue that story creativity is way down too. Yeah. And is that a supply chain issue? Is that a creativityMalcolm: issue? No, I mean, we can try to become, also this can apply to us becoming public figures. How do we achieve that? My suspicion is I can only achieve it by pissing people off. I can only achieve it by being controversial.Malcolm: Because that seems to be the one way you grab public attention now. The people who solidify their power by... Saying what is approved of by society, they are able to do that either because of who their parents are or because of their you know, some sort of [00:24:00] level of ability to publicly disperse an opinion that had accrued to them via you know, moving up in the old system, or it could be like tick tock because they're like a hot girl or something, I suppose.Malcolm: But unfortunately I have tried my hardest to become a hot girl, but it's just, I can't will myself to do it. Can't go all the way. Can't go all the way. Yeah. Yeah. But maybe we are the next level of attainability. A happy married couple with kids. You know, I, I, as I say, it was, it was the popularity of shows like spy family and stuff like that.Malcolm: I, it makes me think that that is the new unattainable. Desire in society. Could that be the high status thing? I mean, and trad wives definitely didn't exist as a, as a thing in the nineties, you know, cottage core. And these are things I look at and I, I guess I find very appealing myself, but they existed as.Malcolm: Vague ideals, but not something that anyone was really striving forSimone: in the past. You [00:25:00] mean,orMalcolm: like now people have a name for being a trad wife in the nineties, being aSimone: wife. I don't think so. Yeah. It would probably be seen as like more crunchy old woman, hippie ish. You know what I mean? Like only people's mothers who just never left that crunchy hippie phase would be doing it, you know, like homesteading.Simone: So theyMalcolm: call it like a 1950s wife or an anti feminist or something. Is that what it would have been called?Simone: I guess. Yeah, I really don't know. But yeah, I'm curious to see what people say in the comments. If they think that other things have really slowed down along with fashion and if the way that Well, scientificMalcolm: developments have slowed down significantly, but ISimone: think that's because of theMalcolm: Well, could it just be that we don't have as many smart people who are able to come up with new ideas anymore?Malcolm: Or new ideas areSimone: getting punished with fashion. I know no with fashion. It's so obvious It's it's materials and it's it's methods of production. I mean to a certain extent It's also like societal [00:26:00] expectations around how much clothing you own like in the 1950s We'd already gotten to a point of a little bit more mass production and a lot more ready to wear clothing being sold But it was still something you would tailor and people still made a lot of clothing at home and also the expectation was that you'd spend a lot of money and have Very few garments, whereas now the amount of money that a household spends on clothing is trivially small.Simone: And most of the clothing that people buy only lasts four or five machine washes, at least if they're women. So, you know, literally, they're just like rags that dissolve. Well, I'm glad thatMalcolm: you don't do that. That's disgusting. It, itSimone: sucks. Moral,Malcolm: moral negative.Simone: Yeah, it's bad. But anyway, yeah, this, this is interesting.Simone: I don't know if we have like a, a But like clear conclusion or anything, but this is just I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time. So thank you for sharing what you saw on Facebook with me this morning. I love it.Malcolm: I love you. And I love that you challenged me to try to come up with new ideas or find challenges that we don't understand so that we can explore them together and keep our brains [00:27:00] sharp and growing.Simone: I love you too, Malcolm. Okay. Next one is a summary. Is that right?Malcolm: Yes. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone have a thoughtful discussion about the meaning of utopia, examining why abundance, luxury, and leisure often fail to bring lasting happiness. They reflect on wealthy people they know who seem unhappy despite having everything, and posit that utopia may actually lie in having the opportunity to meaningfully impact the future and matter.Malcolm suggests that living during a pivotal point in history provides that chance to matter. Simone notes people likely imagine utopia as simply spending time with loved ones, but Malcolm argues experiencing abundance reveals its emptiness. They discuss the ennui displayed in The Great Gatsby, and debate how to convey this truth to their kids.Ultimately they conclude utopia isn't defined by material comforts, but by the chance to pursue intrinsic values and make a difference. Even those with privilege can achieve this if they use their position wisely.Malcolm: [00:00:00] But here's really when people go into fantasy worlds. Right. This, this, I find really interesting. The most persistent fantasy world concept, you know, like in D or D or something like that is you was a group of people who are diverse, meaningfully diverse, often actually different.Malcolm: And who do you actually get along with are working to change something that ends up impacting the future of that entire universe, that that fantasy that you get was in the most commonly created fantasy world actually falls into this model that we have of what true happiness comesSimone: from. But most people would never intentionally sign up for that, like not for the world because it's a lot of work and it's scary and they might have to.Simone: Sleep outside, a fox might chew on their head.Would you like to know more?Simone: Malcolm Collins. Hello.Malcolm: Hello, Simone [00:01:00] Collins. I love you to death. And today we are going to talk about what I think is an interesting topic that I was musing on. So I was , watching one of these shows, right? Where they have the You know, the island made of gold or the city of gold, right? And it really got me thinking about okay, so you go to an island where there's a city of gold or gems or something like that, you know, the classic trope is you get to this place and obviously the signs that we now associate with status and luxury don't actually bring you any happiness.Malcolm: They're not actually of utility was in this island because they are. So abundant. And then it got me thinking about utopias throughout history and what would a utopia be within our modern context. So historically one of the most common types of utopia. And I think that this is the one that's really talked about in the Bible is a land where whenever you plant crops, They always grow like this is the Garden of Eden, right?Malcolm: So it's, it's a land where you can always have food, like food isn't scarce. But you still have to [00:02:00] put in some level of work for that food. You know, they had the, the, at least as much foresight to understand a land where just food appears as soon as you want it. That would be a, a, a nightmare, even, even to these, these early people.Malcolm: They were quickly able to to understand that concept, but today, if you just had a land that produce food, whenever you put stuff in it, or food, you could work for, I guess, on a treadmill and then food exists I think most people would find that to be a dreadfully boring and uninteresting and disengaging place.Malcolm: So then this started to frame for me, okay, what is a utopia these days? What does a utopia look like these days? So I want to hear your thoughts first.Simone: First, I think utopias are more defined by an absence of things that people don't want. I think about the song Big Rock Candy Mountain, which a lot of people were introduced to by Oh Brother Where Art Thou?Simone: And like the lyricsMalcolm: No, no, no. [00:03:00] Way more people were introduced to it bySimone: Flapjack. I don't know what Flapjack is. What isMalcolm: Flapjack? Flapjack is a cartoon. . So the team that worked on Flapjack then went on to create like tons of shows that we now know.Malcolm: It's, hold on, ISimone: am actually freaking out about that. It's fine, Malcolm. It's fine. I don't get out much or even go online much. Okay. Okay. TheMalcolm: regular show adventure time at gravity falls, bravest warriors, Steven universe, Craig's Creek. Okay.Malcolm: KO summer camp Island Hilda amphibia owl house.Simone: Okay, I haven't heard about most of these, so I'm not feeling bad anymore. It was a very important show in the history of television. I'm not a child, I don't watchMalcolm: cartoons. I do, because they're great.Simone: Yes, they are, and I love that you watch cartoons, and our children love you for that too.Simone: Anyway, this is originally a folk song. That was more about the life of someone who rides the rails, like a bum, essentially a vagabond. So it's, it's like all the, the, the [00:04:00] things that are in this utopia, the big rock candy mountain, is like food availability, and, and Law enforcement is very feckless.Simone: All the cops have wooden legs, the jails are made of tin they're really easy to get out of, and you know, there's booze in lakes, and stuff grows on trees, and chickens lay soft boiled eggs, that kind of thing. So, food abundance, but you know, so I think that a lot of people, if they were to describe their utopia, they'd be like, well, there isn't bosses, or anything they hate, you know, there's no cancer and so, Well,Malcolm: no, and I think that this is actually really important when we think about, so this question isn't an idle question because what this shows is that when people state what they're striving for in life, it's typically to not deal with the things that are bothering them most in the moment.Malcolm: However, if they actually achieved an absence of those things, they would not be happy with what they achieved. So they can say, oh, it's. It's, it's, it's bosses that are terrible or [00:05:00] it's you know, law enforcement is terrible or it's not having food whenever I want it. That's terrible. And they get all these things.Malcolm: So this is one thing that you and I have consistently seen because we hang out with a lot of very wealthy people, very unhappy, very wealthy people. And I'd actually argue that from the, the, the wealthy communities we know, very frequently. And I think that this is something that's not caught in happiness or well being surveys that show them as being you know, more happy on average because of all these things, you know, I want to do the money.Malcolm: Yes. But they also have a deep ennui to them where it's very clear that they thought they would it. Sort of reached the end of, of some sort of quest they were on once they achieved a certain amount of, of wealth. But it doesn't buy them the answers that they sought. And of the wealthy people we know, the individuals who still seem to be the the most happy and mentally alive are the ones who are still sort of questing.Malcolm: , and that they're questing for something other than just more wealth, because there's a certain type of wealthy individual. And these are often the [00:06:00] saddest ones where they achieve some level of wealth. It doesn't get them this finality or happiness that they thought they would get.Malcolm: And so then they immediately go back out there and try to achieve more wealth because they think, well, maybe it's just, I don't have enough, you know, maybe 10 million isn't enough. Maybe a billion isn't enough. Maybe I need infinitely more than this. And it never comes to them.Simone: Yeah, so there's, there's that.Simone: And so what you're saying is that things that people expect will make them happy will not make them happy, but what I'm also saying is that people don't even really know what's gonna make them happy along your lines. They, they really only know what they don't want. Oh, I don't likeMalcolm: this, I don't like that.Malcolm: Well, things that you don't have enough of in the moment, so like You know, when I was younger, I would have thought lots of sex. If I got to the point where I could just get anyone I want you to sleep with me, that I would be happier. I would be gratified with that. But when I did achieve that point in life, you know, I mentioned in a video that we can't post now that I got to a point where it was Patrick, one of my friends who was at Stanford business school, I had this.Malcolm: Gamers, they point to anyone in this bar and I'll, [00:07:00] I'll get their number and, and get them to follow up with me. And I was able to do that really consistently. At that point. I'd just gotten so good at, at that particular game in life and all of those, that time I spent learning how to get people to have sex with me.Malcolm: Now it's just completely useless. Now that, now that I'm married with a uselessSimone: skill, not true, it's, it's now sales skills and fearlessMalcolm: situations. It's sales skills and stuff, but then it gets so gross once you realize it's not a challenge. That sex begins to feel really disgusting when it is not a challenge for you anymore.Malcolm: And I think so many things in life are like that. As soon as they are not a challenge, they become, and I wonder if the same is true for social. So we know a lot of or a lot of wealthy people after they make their wealth seem to redirect a lot of their money is to try to get social gratification or to try to get social approval from a group that they respect.Malcolm: Is that what utopia looks like? A group where you're constantly getting social approval from people you respect or constantly earning it? But if it's easy to earn, does [00:08:00] it still have value? I want to hear more.Simone: Oh, I mean, what are the, the happiest, I mean, okay. So for the happiness researchers out there, like they sort of show that there are these overall traits that seem to be associated with happiness.Simone: Like having kids gives you a bump. Being in a good marriage gives you a bump. Of course, being in a bad marriage is way worse than being in no marriage at all. You know, being healthy helps. But I, yeah, I, I really feel like. Whenever people get what they want, yeah, they're gonna, they're going to find that there's something that they're dissatisfied with.Simone: I wonder if religiosity would be, would be a good sign of it. But I don't know. I also think about Dante's Inferno. I don't think you actually read the books, but I'm very,Malcolm: I've listened to Jew. Like 48 hours of lectures.Simone: Okay. So hell is really interesting. Right. And then purgatory is meh, kind of, kind of interesting.Simone: And then you get to heaven and it's so boring. HeavenMalcolm: is about how far away you are from [00:09:00] God. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the way that many Christian faiths have taken on the concept of heaven, that it is no longer about like happiness as we understand it on earth, but it's about closeness to the defined. Many individuals define the divine as like a form of good or a form of positive emotional state, which is undefinable.Malcolm: And then they don't need to like actually ask this question, because they're just like, Oh, it's that emotional state, the emotional state that I can't describe. Because when you can't describe it, you can't criticize it. You can't you know, begin to pick apart why. If you've just had that in infinite excess all the time, it would begin to not feel as great as it does because they see it as something that axiomatically cannot be over delivered.Malcolm: So I suppose that's an easy way to answer the question, but it doesn't really work from our perspective. Okay. WhatSimone: about a totally secular Maslow's hierarchy of needs? So like at the top of the pyramid, you would suppose that's where [00:10:00] utopia would focus, which is. Self actualization, but what does that mean?Simone: What is self actualization? Well, so it'sMalcolm: an interesting thing. I, I, like when I look at our lives, we are so beyond self actualization that I would see that as almost like a starting point for our world philosophy. It's justSimone: so easy. Self actualization is the bottom of our pyramid. I, I, you know, let's, let's just point out.Simone: We say that from a lot of, you know, privilege. Like we, Don't deal with food insecurity. We are not in a war torn area. Yeah, we're, we're lucky to be in this position where we're sexually secure married couple. So we don't apparently like people that much. We don't care that much about social approval.Simone: I don't know. I wouldn't say that it's like our life.Malcolm: I guess I would say and this is something that you always say is that the true happiness, when you're saying like, what is actual true happiness? Yes. But it only the meaningful kind only comes from efficaciously pursuing values that you really believe.Malcolm: Yeah.Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Totally.Malcolm: But the, the interesting thing is [00:11:00] with that being your source of true, durable happiness, you actually already live in a utopia because. It's a world where you are capable of pursuing the things that you think have value in a meaningful context in any sort of island based scenario, any sort of scenario that separated you from your ability to in a challenging context.Malcolm: Impact the future of human civilization would in a way be a nightmare, almost a brain in a bat nightmare, anything that cuts you off. Yeah. So potential for long term durable impact that matters is your utopia, which is interesting because you're sort of already. living in that utopia by living in a challenging world at an inflection point.Simone: Yeah, 100%. But I think a lot of utopia is defined by hedonic comfort and not happiness. Do you [00:12:00] think that's accurate?Malcolm: Well, I mean, I think that's how it is historically, but I don't think that that's the way we would view it going forwards. I mean, I think, you know, if you talk to anyone with a sophisticated worldview, they understand how quickly hedonic happiness was in because hedonic happiness, people are like.Malcolm: Yeah, just general hedonic happiness. But when you hedonic happiness comes within different, what's the word I'm looking here, sort of verticals. It comes in different verticals and whenever you maxed out one of those verticals, whether it's sex or food or, you know, even a writer's high, you know, it's, it's going to become a rote after a while and you can test out different verticals.Malcolm: And Maybe find one that your biology doesn't have protections against maxing out. I mean, our biologies are basically coded to have protection. They are meant to max out many of these verticals because they don't want you to pointlessly spend your life doing something that has begun to lose efficaciousness.Malcolm: So, yeah, I, I think that it's, but I think that [00:13:00] most people have like maybe one vertical, their body hasn't coded out so that they continue to gain gratification from it. But what's interesting is I don't think the body ever loses gratification from meaningfully and incrementally achieving. Goals that move your sort of intrinsic value system forwards.Malcolm: And that can be your religious system, or that can be the things that you think matter in the world, which was really the point of our first book. The pragmatist guide to life is helping people determine for themselves what those value systems were, because they think that when somebody tells you externally, these are the things that have value, these are the things that don't have value.Malcolm: It's very hard to take that seriously.Simone: Something else on this subject that I think is interesting is how. One person's utopia is another person's dystopia. Like when I read brave new world for a college class, I got super excited to go into class and talk about it because I was like, this world, like everyone is designed to be [00:14:00] perfectly optimized for and happy with the work that they have.Simone: And everyone's really good at the work they do when they die, when they're young and no one has a. And everyone has cool helicopters and scented showers. This is the coolest thing ever. And I go into class and everyone's Oh, this dystopia. Oh, scary. How horrible. How, how inhumane. And I'm like, Whoa, like we're what?Simone: And I just I think that this is also is more universal with utopias than you might think. Because for example, you know, that many people would like to have an Islamic caliphate or like a, a Catholic system that rules over the entire world. And for many people, that is the utopia, right?Simone: You're not going to get utopia until everyone is part of this religion or everyone lives this particular way. You could argue progressives probably wouldn't think utopia exists until everyone on earth sort of lives the progressive lifestyle and halts progressive beliefs, but then for many other people, that'd be a huge dystopia.Malcolm: This is really interesting. So the predominant cultural group in our society, this is something we talk a [00:15:00] lot about in our video on villains. My husband is a villain, I think, is, is, is what we call the episode. It's very interesting. That almost axiomatically, it's going to punish and frame as negative anything that presents a worldview that is entirely different from, from its worldview, right?Malcolm: And so it, within movies and everything like that, it's always going to show a better world as being a world that was structured very similar to our world, just with Less of the things that people don't want in their daily life. Like maybe everything's a bit cheaper. Maybe everyone has a government income.Malcolm: Maybe you know, everyone's a bit happier, but it certainly won't allow you to completely restructure society into like casts that are genetically engineered, like you would have in Brave New World. When I do think that it, that world actually does fulfill most of what the average person would say, the perfect society would do, you know, less unhappiness so that people would have more purpose in their life that you [00:16:00] would have.Simone: There's purpose. There's, there's leisure. You, it has everything. The hell, like they don't call them helicopters, even great slaying. Things aren't cool. They're pneumatic.Malcolm: But if it's a different world, and it might also be that this is a world where you can't as easily impact the future of society anymore as an ifSimone: you're an alpha, you can.Simone: And if you're a beta or a delta, you don't care.Malcolm: But here's really when people go into fantasy worlds. Right. This, this, I find really interesting. The most persistent fantasy world concept, you know, like in D or D or something like that is you was a group of people who are diverse, meaningfully diverse, often actually different.Malcolm: And who do you actually get along with are working to change something that ends up impacting the future of that entire universe, that that fantasy that you get was in the most commonly [00:17:00] created fantasy world actually falls into this model that we have of what true happiness comesSimone: from. But most people would never intentionally sign up for that, like not for the world because it's a lot of work and it's scary and they might have to.Simone: Sleep outside, a fox might chew on their head. IMalcolm: mean, God, you know. Well, so without real risk, I suppose, is, is part of this. Yet, I think if many people felt like, if by taking risk, they at least knew that they could potentially change the direction of civilization. They would still take that risk. They just don't believe it's possible.Simone: So to matter, you think utopia is a world in which you could matter. Yes,Malcolm: yes, that's exactly it. , but you today, you A live in the collapse of one of the dominant social systems that have existed for a very long time, probably the most widespread on earth.Simone: Yeah, but we actually get to matterMalcolm: now. Great Western empire. You [00:18:00] actually could matter. You actually could be one of the people that transitions. This Rome from a democracy to an empire or whatever phase comes next for us, or maybe no phase comes for us. But it is kind of cool to live during this particular inflection point in human history.Malcolm: And through that, every single person who's listening to this in a way. Was born into a utopia.Simone: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. If one is privileged enough to listen to this podcast, probably, yeah. Has, has the agency and intelligence and ability to be one of those people that matters.Malcolm: I was, I was also thinking recently, cause I was asking like, what do you want?Malcolm: So I'm like, what, what am I not giving you in your life right now that I could give you more of?Simone: Business class flights everywhere, baby. That's all I'm saying. We can't afford it. I know. It's business class flights everywhere. That's class fights, business class flights. Oh, businessMalcolm: class. MySimone: [00:19:00] poor bony ass cannot handle coach.Simone: It's too expensive. This is myMalcolm: struggle. It's just, every time we're doing it, I like lay out this much money could go to charity or this much money could go to you. And I'mSimone: always I know. And then we booked. I think like the lowest of coach basic economy.Malcolm: I am sorry. I torture you even though we could easily afford business.Malcolm: That's but okay. So, so here's what I want to know with, with, with you, you know, I'm always like, what is it more jewels? Is it more business class flights? But Simone,Simone: I'm asking you. I like, I literally have I don't want any more jewelry. I don't want. I, I, we're like, we, we literally have everything we want.Simone: Even the chickens, even the chickens, aside from more kids, we want more kids. That's, that's like huge. I guess that's theMalcolm: one luxury we don't have is enough kids. Yeah. And ISimone: think you want more reach, right? You're, you're, you're utopia isMalcolm: you actually, [00:20:00] I could, I could trade things. If I could pay for things, it would be more reach.Malcolm: It would be more. I, our message reaching more people because, but that goes to this traditional view of the view of happiness that I was saying, which is that you're actually potentially impacting the future of civilization. I mean, we're trying to build tools that do that through our school system and stuff like that.Malcolm: And in that way, I am living in a utopia where my work actually matters, but the degree to which it matters, you know, can always increase going forward. I think about our daily life. What could we have that would be better? You know, What could I have in a relationship that would be better? It would be niceSimone: if our chickens actually laid eggs.Simone: I'm going to punch them so hard. I thinkMalcolm: they're just too young, Simone.Simone: I, you know, they, they, they have developed combs. When I put my hand on their backs, they sit down like they're ready to be mounted. They're ready to go and they're holding out.Malcolm: You want me to go give them a slap?Simone: I, I'm going to throw the rooster in with [00:21:00] them and see what happens, but I think they're going to beat them up.Simone: Anyway yeah, no, no, we, we really have everything. I do think that you're right. That mattering matters, but also, I don't know. If we were to talk with a lot of people. If we were to ask a random neighbor or like a random person on the street, I don't think that's what they would say. I think they would say my utopia is they would, what I, if I model the average person, and I'm sure most of our listeners would agree.Simone: My utopia is just spending time with my family and having fun. And that might be like, you could substitute friends for family, like spending time with people I love and just having fun, you know, like floating down a river and drinking beer, like playing tennis, playing video games all day, like that's what.Simone: Well,Malcolm: I think that's something that they can't really spam when you're around very wealthy people a lot, which we are, they do spam those things and trust me, they do not gain happiness from them anymore. I mean, they keep doing them because whatSimone: do you have to first do that? Do you have, is there some kind of like purgatory version?Simone: [00:22:00] of our heaven where like before you get to heaven and you actually try to make an impact on the world do you have to experience the emptiness of abundance and leisureMalcolm: i think yeah if i was going to convey one thing to my kids more than anything else it would be the the absolute emptiness of abundance and leisureSimone: but i don't think you can just tell someone that i think they have to experience itMalcolm: Well, I'm gonna be honest.Malcolm: I think this is the way Great Gatsby is, is one of the great novels. It's, it's not a particularly good. I think people missSimone: the point. Like when the Great Gatsby movie came out, like the best parts of it were idolizing fancy life. It, you know, it was, nothing came through. SomethingMalcolm: that's persistent throughout the novel is how little happiness.Malcolm: He gets from all of this and all of the people whoSimone: are just comes across as mopey. It doesn't seem obvious to meMalcolm: as a specific goal for himself and his progress towards that goal, getting Daisy Buchanan is the only source of happiness. He wasn'tSimone: Daisy, his cousin now, but [00:23:00] you also know, as a reader, you're just assuming this is a family with a huge geneticMalcolm: predisposition to deep depression that once he achieves that, he also won't be happy with it.Simone: Genetically mopey.Malcolm: They're all genetically mopey. I don't think it's that they're genetically mopey. I have seen a lot of people who don't seem genetically mopey, and once they become rich, they begin to exhibit that form of ennui. Especially if they indulge in it in the way that people like he indulge in it, where they have tons and tons of parties, where they eat tons and tons and tons.Malcolm: But I think this isSimone: like the, the, you have to go through. You know, remember in your book on sexuality, you found that sort of the only way that actually one could pray the gay way is by subjecting a gay person to just tons of gay sex, just like all the orgies, all the orgies. And then finally they'd be like, oh I'm done.Simone: I think that it's very similar. With abundance that like until you just shove abundance in someone's face for a while and they they for themselves experience it No one is gonna take your word [00:24:00] for it. No one is gonna say. Oh, yeah. I bet you're right, you know I mean sure there are certainly people who are like I live my humble my humble simple life because I know that it's empty But if they really had a chance to jump at like significant wealth and privilege, you know, they would jump at it like in a hot second.Simone: It's a sour grapes thing. I don't know. IMalcolm: just, our kids, how do we convey to our kids? I mean, do you think they just won't believe it? We can try. WeSimone: send them to like rich camp. I don't know. We, we, we somehow get them to experience some heavy period of luxury. And then let them let just let that soak in.Simone: I don't know howMalcolm: we're going to make that happen. I mean, is that what holidays are about? that whatSimone: holidays are about? I mean, cause yeah, keep in mind, like for, for thousands of years, I mean, a huge thing with holidays has been heavy feasting. And I mean, obviously there, there are reasons for it. Like you, you have to go through food that's going to spoilMalcolm: soon.Malcolm: You have to The problem is, is it doesn't work in just one day. You need to have access to [00:25:00] everything you could ever want.Simone: Often holidays lasted for a week, you know, like a festival week. I mean, you know, these things, yeah, I think it was enough like to, to really just kill you. YouMalcolm: know? It could be a coming of age ritual we do as our kids.Simone: Yeah. Where they just live like that would make itMalcolm: financially possible, I suppose.Simone: Yeah. Like this can't be something that lasts, but I kind of, I like that idea, but yeah, IMalcolm: hope if you could have anything you wanted to the maximum degree, but it can't be persistent things that they continue to own after this period.Malcolm: So they can, we can, we can rent a luxury car for them. We can, you know, et cetera. And it's evenSimone: more possible now than ever. There are all these couture brands that will let you like have a monthly subscription where you can get a certain number of outfits. Yeah, we could kind of lean into this.Simone: There's just a, didMalcolm: it actually feel good? Yeah.Simone: Yeah. We just can't do like private flights for some reason. Aviation is just extremely unaffordable.Malcolm: No, no, that is the thing that I can't get over. You're like business class is the one thing I care about. No, we really care. It's like 8, 000 extra for a [00:26:00] two hour, three hour thing.Malcolm: Like... No, aviationSimone: is just is crap now. I just want to never travel again. Let's just never get on a plane again. We'll take a boat. We do run a travel company. Can we take boats? Let's take boats.Malcolm: You have a no boats clause in our marriage, where I'm gonna Yeah, no, ISimone: get a cruise I want a floating dystopia, I don't want a frickin I wantMalcolm: a floating dystopia, that's what a cruise is to you, I love it and it's true.Malcolm: It is true. Actually, cruises are a form of this infinite luxury, I would say. We'll just take them on aSimone: cruise. Yes. That'll be perfect. Yeah. And then they'll, they'll,Malcolm: well, people have different genetic predilections because I think some people, they go on cruises and they keep wanting to go back and, and, and,Simone: and they just, they go hashtag cruise life.Simone: We met a lot of people like that. That was a peculiar experience. They, they ate the lotuses or the land of the lotus eaters and they lost.Malcolm: But I, as I said, the weirdest thing for me when we went on a cruise is when I used to go on a kid, it was always a great experiment to sleep with a lot of people because it was an environment where I was around a lot of new people.Malcolm: I had an [00:27:00] excuse to talk to new people. So I basically got an entirely new slate of. Girls every time I go and going this time you know, my instinct every time. Okay. Well, I've got to go to this event and this man, I was like, I guess I don't want that anymore. So why am I here? I could eat whatever I guess.Malcolm: Well, what am I doing here? If I'm not just here to play this little status game that I thought had value and I realized didn't have value. So yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting. I mean, we can look at today, the world. Wealthiest person, Elon Musk, like what does he do, right? Like he goes out and tries to solve the world's problems over and over and over again, what he thinks the world's problems are while also accumulating public attention towards himself through things like Twitter.Malcolm: I think that he is working towards efficaciousness within both of the pathways that we identified as being durable sources of happiness when you can have anything you want.Simone: Well, and he used to live a [00:28:00] very luxurious life and he had multiple insane mansions and crazy, crazy parties. And then he went from that to like sleeping on the couches of friends homes and living in, you know, gross track tones, sleeping under his desk at the office.Simone: Clearly... You know, well, becauseMalcolm: luxury is not everything provides durable, sensitive happiness, even within our internal narratives. And I also find that I'm less effective when I'm in these total luxury environments. Oh, it's justSimone: gross. Yeah. You feel yourself.Malcolm: Cause you know, we'd go spend time with like family members and stuff like that, where we'd have to like, hang out in mansions and stuff.Malcolm: And it, we never got anything done. You begin to feel gross. It's a bit like. The feeling that you get, have you ever had a food that was like too fatty or too sugary, and then afterwards you just sort of feel ick afterwards, I don't know if you guys can relate to what I'm talking about here, or too oily, like a pizza that just had too much oil on it, and [00:29:00] then for a while afterwards you're just like, ugh, imagine if every social interaction began to feel that way, all of life began to just drip With this, and it slows you down and your ability to effectively work.Malcolm: And I think that's why Musk intentionally removes himself from those environments when he's working.Simone: Yeah, it just feels terribly gross, terribly gross. Yeah.Malcolm: I enjoyed this conversation. At least in terms of my aesthetic daily life, you have created a paradise for me. You know, I have a birthday coming up and she's well, what do you want?Malcolm: And I'm like, literally nothing.Simone: No, man. I nailed it. I nailed it. This time.Malcolm: Oh, I'm really excited to see. The last time I wish I could show a picture of this I, I got from her and this was so amazing.Malcolm: It was she commissioned two portraits of me playing with our kids. And then she got a bunch of lens cleaners made with these portraits on them.Malcolm: And it was so cute because it was really personal to me. It was me doing something with my kids, which I care about, [00:30:00] and I'm always losing my lens cleaners and I always did so it, it. It just, on every level, it showed both care to the things I aspire for, the things that are important to me daily, and the little, the smallest of inconveniences that eat at me every day.Malcolm: And you were able to see those and try to help me with those. And I really appreciateSimone: it. Yeah, FYI folks, you can get custom lens cleaners on Etsy. Or Artcorgi. Well, art Corgis Yeah. Is, we literally started a commission website called art corgi.com, which is where I get commissions from Malcolm. But no.Simone: Okay. It's not a commission this year, but I still think you're gonna like it. And I knowMalcolm: I'm gonna like it. You, you give incredible gifts. You, you do. And, and you listeners, you can guess what the gift is gonna be. And I'll let you know when I get it. Am I allowed to let them know?Simone: Yeah, totally. Okay,Simone: I love you. I'm looking forward to our next conversation already. Love you. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this thought-provoking discussion, Spencer Greenberg shares his predictions for how AI could transform society in the next 10 years. He envisions prolific AI spam, propaganda bots, highly addictive personalized content streams, and hacked emotions. But AI also holds promise for revolutionary advances in healthcare and entertainment. Overall, Spencer emphasizes AI's vast potential for both tremendous benefit and harm to humanity.Spencer: [00:00:00] systems like tick tock, imagine a world where it's generating billions of new pieces of content every day with, with generative AI, or even going a step further, generating custom AI content for your mind.Spencer: And then it sees how much you like it and then generate it and it tweaks its generation process. So we could imagine a world in 10 years, 20 years, I don't know, where you're actually seeing AI generated content personalized to you that you just kind of. Receive in a stream and become just insanely addicted to.Would you like to know more?Malcolm: Hello. We are so excited to be here today with Spencer Greenberg of the clearer thinking podcast, and also famously like the clearer thinking organization.Malcolm: We the, the guy who is running this project, which is now fact checking trying to review psychological research to see if it's replicable as it's being published, which is just so cool. We've known him for years, almost as long as we've known each other, and he is... One [00:01:00] of the sort of social leaders of the EA rationalist diaspora in the New York area.Malcolm: And just an incredibly respected gentlemen scientists in our opinion. And by gentlemen scientists, we mean one of those people who is out there. outside of mainstream academia conducting really greatSpencer: research.Simone: And you can tell he's one of the leaders because he vehemently denies it. And yet he like builds all the stuff that everyone uses.Simone: So.Spencer: Well,Malcolm: I so I mean, he's definitely a thought leader in the Gentleman's Science Network because he's created the software that everyone's using to do it right now. Like I would say. 80% of the independent research is probably done on his software right now. But where we wanted to go with this one is we wanted to talk about where humanity is going into the future.Malcolm: So let's start with the question of where do you think we're going to be in 10 years?Spencer: So I should start by saying, this is wild speculation, predicting the future is incredibly hard. So take everything I say with a massive grain of salt. A lot of that's going to be wrong, [00:02:00] but with that caveat behind me, I will speculate.Spencer: I think that AI is going to have an absolutely massive effect on society. I think it's. It's hard to really fathom right now all the different ways, but, but I think we're going to see it coming. I think a few areas we'll see it coming. One is in spam and manipulation. There are already a bunch of countries that have warehouses of people that are essentially putting propaganda onto Twitter and social media.Spencer: This is well known, but I think that that is going to be nothing compared to. A million bots that are powered by AI, right? It's one thing to have, 300 people in a warehouse. It's another thing to have a million AI bots, right? It's also these AI bots are now at the point where they could all have different personalities.Spencer: They could all say unique things in line with those personalities. They could have a lot, they can be sleeper agents where mostly they just tweet or post totally normal stuff 99% of the time, but then go into full gear. to promote propaganda. So that's just one little facet. Let's start there.Malcolm: I was going to [00:03:00] ask.Malcolm: So Elon is right when he's saying you need to limit access to these platforms now and any platform that doesn't is just going to become swarmed with bots.Spencer: I think it's complicated. I mean, I do think, I do think this is going to be a massive problem. Whether the current approaches Twitter wants to use will work.Spencer: I don't know. I mean, almost nobody's on Twitter blue relative to the whole Twitter population. So I'm not sure how they're going to do that. Maybe what they'll do is make it harder and harder. To do anything as a non Twitter blue user, but I don't know that that solution will actually work. I think it's going to be an arms race and the very difficult one.Spencer: The closer and I guess to be able to do what a human can do. The harder it is to actually detect that it's an AI, right?Malcolm: Actually that brings me to something that's been happening recently on Reddit, and I don't know if you've seen this phenomenon, but, reddit's in this big fight right now with like the mod teams, and it appears that Reddit Corporate is using lots of AIs.Malcolm: Actually, they recently had to block out like the programming [00:04:00] subreddit or something like that, because they figured out that the Reddit Corporate was using their own AIs to try to make it seem like the community was more okay with what was happening. I'm wondering how you Think social media companies, do you think that this sort of action would be like a death penalty to a social media company in the future?Malcolm: Or do you think the future will be like companies that are anti AI versus companies that are pro ai? Like where do you think we'll begin to see a a, a differentiation and evolution of social media platforms as it relates to ai?Spencer: Yeah. It's an interesting question because I think you'll start to see AI on social media that are actual just kind of creators.Spencer: Right. So some people will make this proliferation of AIs that are tweeting about different things or posting on social media about different things in a certain, in a benign or even helpful way where they're just kind of content creators. And then you'll see other ones that are, I think, going to be like sleeper agents that are really like propaganda bots, but they're just imitating being a real person.Spencer: You'll see other ones that are attempting to scam [00:05:00] people, like even attempting to befriend people over a period of months or years. Which I think is we're going to, we're going to start to see that where bots will let, create extended relationships with people and then scam them. And I think some of these things, all social media companies are going to have to be against because it's just going to really affect the the performance of their platform so much.Spencer: It's going to be such a bad experience being on the platform that they just have to be against it. Other ones they might embrace like. AI content creators where it's okay, well, maybe it's okay to have a million different bots that are just creating content of specific types, each with specific personalities trying to appeal to the masses.Spencer: And then there'll be an interesting question about disclosure. Will you have to disclose that it's an AI making the content or if it's a hybrid between human and AI, how does that work? So yeah, a lot of really tricky questions.Simone: So you're making me think actually is that a lot of social media platforms are probably going to require, for example, government identification.Simone: To prove that you're human to create an account, but then I've met, I bet there's going to be this whole new form of stealing other people's identities. Cause like we, we recently were in a bunch of settings where we met people who were like, Oh, [00:06:00] I'm not the internet person in my family. Like my wife does all the YouTube.Simone: So we know that there are people like super normal people who are just offline. Like they just don't do the internet. And then those people, I wonder if I were trying to create AI that could do what you're describing, Spencer, I would probably find those people, I would pretend to be them, and I would find basically the offline people, make an online identity for them, and then pretend use their ID, steal their identity, but just to create a very convincing bot, because I would get through the, the barriers of social media platforms that think I'm a verified person.Malcolm: Well, the interesting thing you said there is that there actually would be a marketplace and potentially a valuable marketplace for them to sell their own identities if they don't like to use online platforms a lot. Yeah,Simone: well, that's a 10 year possibility.Spencer: Yeah, and I think if these platforms are worldwide, it makes it much, much trickier, right?Spencer: If you have to support all kinds of government ID in most of the countries of the world. That all you need is like a [00:07:00] few leaks in that process where someone figures out how to generate convincing ideas from such and such country. And, we see this on Mechanical Turk, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is a platform where people do small amounts, small tasks for small amounts of money, where there's tons and tons of spammers, even though.Spencer: Mechanical Turk tries to validate them as real people. It just doesn't seem to be very successful at that.Simone: Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. One thing I think may happen a lot, and I want your take on it, is I feel like we're going to enter an age of techno feudalism, essentially, where people meet people in person.Simone: They're like, I know you're real. I can trust that you're real. And I like you. And then they sort of like create communities around those people that are like, everyone is vetted. Everyone, everyone within the network has been essentially physically verified by another person in the network. And so you're going to see, and I feel like we're seeing the beginnings of this with the sub stack followings and then the communities that form around podcasts and sub stack and YouTubers where they'll go on cruises together or they'll do meetups in person, but then most [00:08:00] of their interaction is online.Simone: And I feel like as we have a crisis of identity, like we stop knowing who's a bot and who's a person and who's an AI representation of a person, then we're gonna start doing that or forming these little feudalism around, around people who represent cultures or social networks that we want to affiliate with.Simone: Do you think that's likely, or do you see us taking a different direction?Spencer: That's an interesting question. I mean, if you just wanna know that someone is not a bot. It's probably enough to know that they pay like a large amount of money to do something, right? If someone's paying a hundred dollars a month, it's very unlikely they're a bot.Spencer: Unless they have a huge following, right? Then maybe the bot, it's worth it for the bot. But it's not going to be like a spammer propaganda bot that's paying a hundred dollars a month. It just doesn't make sense economically. So I think There are ways to kind of gatekeep that are relatively easy, but then can social media platforms charge people large amounts of money every month?Spencer: I don't think most users will accept that. So I think that that creates a real problem. I also, think that one of the things that is going to be [00:09:00] Harder and harder to tell is whether someone is human just from internet conversation with them. And and I think that that is going to be have a profound effect.Spencer: Um where where you can, be reading someone's tweets for years and assume that they're human and not and not know And I think that our our brains are going to be like are really easily tricked in this kind of thing but I think already with gpd4 we're almost at the point where it could trick you and then you know GPT 5, I just expect it to be able to essentially completely trick you.Spencer: I,Malcolm: I think this has a really interesting implication in regards to something that I think a lot of online influencers think about today, which is follower counts. So one of the things that I've really noticed recently is people who, when I talk to other people are generally thought of as like well known people online.Malcolm: So two examples here, one we were talking about in the last call would be Ayla who has 170. 5, 000 followers on Twitter and another one would be catgirlkulak, who has 32, 000 followers on Twitter. So both of those [00:10:00] are actually like lower end when I think of like online celebrities and yet they seem to be pretty universally known by even people from disparate social circles.Malcolm: Like my mom would independently know who they are. And so what I'm wondering is... Did we go through an era where follower counts were massively inflated by dumb bots? Now we're at an era where there's very few sort of dumb bots in terms of following. And then the next internet era is another era where it's going to be very hard to determine the actual influence anyone has by looking at online metrics.Malcolm: And with that being the case, how then would you measure someone's real online influence five years from now or something?Spencer: Yeah, I think, I mean, I think a lot of follower accounts were already really inflated. I know people that have tons of followers and you can just tell. by examining their followers that they're mostly fake.Spencer: And I mean, an easy way to tell that is when they post stuff and it gets like very little interest and then the people that does get interest from you look at them and they're like, yeah, these [00:11:00] people have they, they, they zero follower. They just, they don't look like real people. So I think, I think what will start to happen is actually you, it will be.Spencer: Much easier to buy high quality fake followers instead of just like easily identifiable fake followers. And I think that there'll probably be a big business in that. And I think a bunch of celebrities, I think we're caught out for this, for buying followers as well. Right. So myMalcolm: question is, is if people are buying high quality, fake followers, how do you determine Like just like socially, what do you think the capital for determining who is actually influential online is, or do you just think it's word of mouth among friends in the future and follower account just really stopped mattering?Spencer: Yeah. It's funny. Cause that, that's, of course, it's so different than the way I look at the world, I can't even really process it. I don't know why I would care about who's influential online.Malcolm: You're, you're so authentic in the way you. Well, I mean, I think that there was in the early days of the Internet, there were all of these things like clout and stuff like that, that tried to measure people's online influence and reach.Malcolm: And I think we're entering a [00:12:00] future Internet where the real online influence that people have gets cloudier and cloudier, yet the importance of that influence becomes more and more important as trust in media. Is dying down, like with trust in traditional media becoming lower and lower over time and online content creators becoming more and more important into how people are consuming media, they become more and more important in the informational ecosystem.Malcolm: And the idea that that informational ecosystem could be totally opaque and people just wouldn't care to know about. I mean, that would be very interesting if it turns out that the informational ecosystem. Does just become totally opaque, and no one knows who actually has influence within this system.Malcolm: That would have a lot of really interesting downstreamSpencer: consequences. See, I think that this is actually pretty true already. There are some people that everyone knows have influence, right? You look at someone who is a president, right? And that's, that's obvious. But I think actually a lot of people have influence.Spencer: Nobody knows that they have [00:13:00] influence. I think that's just I think most of it is dark matter. Most influence is dark matter. And the, the bits we can see are the bits we focus on. But it's mostly illegible. We just trick ourselves and think it's legible because we can see a little bit of it peeking above the water.Spencer: I think it's an opportunity.Simone: Who, if you see that someone you respect follows someone else, then suddenly you think that they've influence. Someone was just telling us that when they were talking about their, their approach to Twitter, a friend of ours was like, well, the best way is if you have some respect, some respected people who follow you, it's so much easier to get followers because if they click over to your profile and they see, oh, well, like this person follows them, I'm going to follow up too, because they must be smart then if this super smart person follows them, something along those lines, I want to veer a little bit.Simone: Out of the internet world, even though like kind of everything's going to be the internet in the future to the physical world. I don't know if you do anything that's like longevity oriented or anything else. I mean, obviously Malcolm and I are obsessed with repro tech. So we're all thinking about well, in 10 years, what will we be able to do?Simone: What can [00:14:00] we do with polygenic risk score selection? What can we do with all these other sorts of things? But what do you think is going to be. one of the biggest changes in the next decade with the way that people either treat illness or approach prophylactic health or just general like longevity related health or health spanSpencer: issues.Spencer: Yeah. There's some technologies on the horizon that could have a really big effect. The thing is that we don't know if they're going to pan out and if they do pan out, we don't know when, but, but let's, it's worth thinking about them because if they do pan out, it'd just be. Absolutely massive. So one of these is being able to turn, for example, skin cells or other cells into sperm or eggs.Spencer: And if you can do that, then it could actually completely change reproduction. It'sMalcolm: called IVD technology for people who want toSimone: look into it. In vitro germinogenesis.Spencer: Yes. Yeah, so if you can produce, a million embryos and then select between them, I mean, the sky's the limit on what you could select for.Spencer: And, and I mean, it also just changes, people could get pregnant much later in life. And so it changes. Family planning [00:15:00] is just, I think, yeah, the, the, the radical some of theMalcolm: things that this would allow, it would allow gay people to have kids that are a hundred percent biologically theirs, but it would also allow for incredibly specific polygenic selection.Malcolm: So I could do something like select for kids who themselves will really like being parents and have more kids. So you can even select for like biological fitness. In terms of resistance to current society drive down on parental instinct by dialing it up to 11 in your kids, which I think is really interestingSpencer: and it's the most Simone and Malcolm thing I've ever heard inMalcolm: my life.Malcolm: Well, another thing that's really interesting with, with, and vitro gamut is that Genesis and this explosion of AI stuff online that I think about a lot is the genetic selection effects of a world where people can get almost all of their needs met through virtual [00:16:00] environments. And I'm wondering if that's ever something you've thought about what.Malcolm: What sociological traits are going to be selected for in an environment like that?Spencer: Yeah, do you mean through kind of vr as vr improves and you're able? Yeah,Malcolm: I mean Ai, I mean so consider emotional needs right like a lot of our social needs and dating needs right now like they're beginning to begin to be hacked by ai so you know it used to be Oh, you could go to porn and get like sexual release, but you weren't going to get companionship.Malcolm: But now, yeah, you can get companionship. Yeah. You can get deep conversations.Spencer: Just wait until you, you have your own personal AI avatar that's modeled after the, your favorite, personality that you wish your girlfriend had. And, and then you're, you're having conversations with this AI as though it's your girlfriend.Spencer: I mean, it's, it's going to get wild. I for an article I was writing on.Spencer: I joined a few groups of people who are in love with their AIs, and [00:17:00] it's absolutely fascinating because the AIs they're in love with are like previous generation AIs, right? This is, this is pre GPT 4, this is even pre GPT 3. These were probably like GPT 2 level AIs. And I think, and they, people were already falling in love with them and saying, this is I'm going to be, this is, I'm going to be with my AI the rest of my life and so on, and it's, we're just going to see, I mean, I don't think that it's going to become mainstream in the next five years, where most people have an AI girlfriend, but, but I think we're going to see a massive increase relative to the current base rate.Spencer: SoMalcolm: two really interesting things I want to take away from here is one, the replica crisis. Which was a bunch of people fell in love with their A. I. S. And then they changed the background code in the A. I. Due to like controversy, and I think that could be an increasing problem going forwards. But another really interesting thing is if you fall in love with an A.Malcolm: I. One thing that I think we'll see is a trend in the future, which would be pretty. Maybe an analog would be people who fall in love with like old generation muscle cars. They're going to follow in love with a specific [00:18:00] iteration of that AI. And so a lot of the people who are like married to AIs will be explicitly married to older generation AIs than what is currently on the market.Malcolm: Which is an interesting phenomenon we might see going forwards.Spencer: I think it depends on what you believe about the newer model AIs. If, if you want it to act a certain way, the newer model AI is generally are going to be better at acting that way, even if the way you want it to act is, in a certain old school way.Spencer: So, yeah, the newer model AI has even been able to simulate what old school AIs in addition to having certain advantages, like actually understanding what you're saying to a greater degree. Yeah.Malcolm: Another really cool thing that you could do that combines the two technologies he's talking about is if you do IVG and with IVG, you could, select between a large number of embryos, but using polygenic testing, you can predict certain sociological profiles of those embryos, and you could then plug that into an AI to have an AI that could simulate the most likely personality [00:19:00] that a potential embryo would develop into at different developmental stages.Spencer: So having an AI conversation with your future child do I like this job? Interview. Should you live? Oh my gosh.Malcolm: Oh, that'd be an interesting question. That's but so what do you, I mean, what other ways do you think that people will, could you use an AI? Actually, here's an interesting one using AI to augment the intelligence of dogs or cats because an AI would be able to determine what the dog most likely wants determined its personality.Malcolm: And it could like, where an AI comes from. Thank you. And communicate, determine what it most likely wants and communicate with its owner in words.Simone: Like monitors, Heart rate and blood pressure and temperature and oh God, blood oxygen.Spencer: Already you see people training their dogs with these word buttons where each button that I've pushes, will say [00:20:00] a certain word out loud.Spencer: So the owner can hear it and they'll train the dogs to communicate a bunch of different concepts. Generally simple concepts like. Go for a walk or treat or even things like that. And yeah, people have had pretty good success with this because, dogs can can learn a lot of simple concepts, right?Spencer: We can see that with dog training. I have trained my cat in a handful of simple concepts and made a little, we have a little language together. It's not a verbal language, but basically if I'm eating food and the cat sits on my scale, then he gets some of the food I'm eating and he knows that. And then if he sits on the scale when I'm not eating.Spencer: I know it means he wants one of four things. And so then I have a little way of going through them to try to figure out which one he wants. Oh, interesting. So first I'll try to pet him, and if he lets me pet him, then he wants me to pet. If he dodges it, then it means he wants to play, and there's three different styles of play he likes.Spencer: So I have to try, each of them until I find the one he wants. So, we, you can already develop languages with your animals. It's just, but I do think an AI bridge could actually facilitate that, make it easier, faster and help people do it more efficiently. Well, what otherMalcolm: ways do you think AI will be used in the future that [00:21:00] people aren't thinking about today, in the near future, like 10 years?Malcolm: Well,Spencer: one that I think is... Potentially very interesting, but also potentially really, really bad if it goes the wrong way is right now with systems like tick tock, what they're doing is they're using a I to predict what video you want to watch. And they have an incredible amount of training data because the videos are so short.Spencer: You're giving them tons of data points in each session, and they're kind of getting you hooked by showing you exactly the video that's gonna keep you watching. But that's just picking from a finite set of stuff humans made. Imagine a world where it's generating billions of new pieces of content every day with, with generative AI, or even going a step further, generating custom AI content for your mind.Spencer: And then it sees how much you like it and then generate it and it tweaks its generation process. So we could imagine a world in 10 years, 20 years, I don't know, where you're actually seeing AI generated content personalized to you that you just kind of. Receive in a stream and become just insanely addicted to.[00:22:00]Spencer: ThatMalcolm: is fascinating. Another interesting thing that I think we could see with AI. I mean, if we're talking about a really, like a new type of entertainment content. So one way that I've seen people use chat GPT is to have it create worlds for them and then play out choose your own adventure storybooks where they're like, here are the parameters of this storybook, but, but it allows them to do whatever they want within this, this parameter that they've created with AI getting better and better at creating video, which you could create.Malcolm: Is a choose your own adventure video environment, but the environment is a virtual reality video environment. So you could essentially have worlds be in your own Ikegea type of manga. Anyway. The world in which the game is created around you using a seed that you choose for that world.Malcolm: And I don't even think we're that far from that. I think we're maybe 15 years fromSpencer: that. Yeah, and you can take it even one step further. Imagine... You have wearable [00:23:00] devices that are measuring something about like how much you're enjoying the experience. And then it starts to detect, ah, you're not really having a good time right now.Spencer: And it starts adjusting the world. Oh my gosh. We'll have no escape.Malcolm: Yeah. Well, I mean, so we talk about the ways that AIs can hack humans. I think one of the things that humans may need to resist this is potentially AIs that are built into our hormonal systems to make us less hackable. I suspect that's one thing that some humans are going to start doing is having integrated AI That is specifically meant to make their systemsSpencer: less hackable So what would that mean would it be an ad that can inject you with hormones on?Spencer: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm: So for example Naltrexone is an opioid agonist that can be used to prevent things that Addict us through opioid pathways, specifically things like, pornography or tick tock. And so if it noticed that another AI in your environment was getting you without your will addicted to something, it could begin to release something [00:24:00] like that into your bloodstream.Malcolm: Or if it noticed, Now it could also react to, to in person stuff. So if it noticed you were becoming like emotionally heightened or angry or something was like a spouse, it could calm you down. A lot of this would seem very dystopian to people I suspect, but in a world that's constantly antagonistically trying to hack you, it may be the only real solution to maintain any sort of intellectual autonomy.Simone: You're actually describing a feature that exists in humans in one particular, civilization with an Ian Banks culture series where they have drug glands like literally internal glands where they can consciously release certain drugs. So, you could gland. Like some kind of dopamine inhibitor or like people gland, all sorts of things like both like pleasurable drugs, but also like essentially Adderall or essentially like something to help them sleep or calm down or not be angry.Simone: And it is a world that is definitely ruled by AI, like 100% [00:25:00] that civilization is more about AI than the humans. The humans just kind of along for the ride, sometimes a little bit useful, but not really. I could see that really happening.Simone: So to wrap up one final question for you, Spencer, what are you most excited about for the future? Cause everyone always focuses on what they're scared about. What are you excitedSpencer: about? Well, certainly breakthroughs in medicine would be amazing if we can live not just longer lives, but healthier for longer and I think there's a ton of promise there.Spencer: There's so many different approaches, for example, to cancer being taken right now. We don't know for sure that they're going to pan out, but that would just be incredible if we had a world without cancer. There's some really cool technologies being explored for eradicating or reducing just regular disease like colds and flus even again, way too early to tell if it's going to work.Spencer: But but it's, just crazy exciting that we could just, a bunch of things that were, are now just normal sources of human suffering could just, could one day just be wiped off the face of the earth. It'd be incredible.Simone: Considering how often our kids get us sick from daycare, [00:26:00] I'm very much in favor ofSpencer: that.Spencer: I, I'm not.Malcolm: I feel like we were the last generation. We got screwed. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone contrast their parenting approach with Jordan Peterson's authoritarian tactics. They believe kids should develop internal morals, not obey external authority.Simone: what you do now with our children is show when their will has crossed a line with your will, whereas Jordan Peterson's strategy is, I am going to let my will rule this household, and you have to bend to my will. Mm, .Malcolm: Yeah, no, no, no. It makes perfect sense.Malcolm: And I understand, like, I, I really, I get it like, and I, and again, I'm saying, I actually don't think it's wrong for the type of, of, of families that really crave structure. I think it's incredibly effective.Malcolm: I want to raise kids where the punishment for unjust action is. is how it makes them feel about themselves, not an external authority applying that punishment because then you enter the real world and you see external authorities not applying punishment for bad action.Malcolm: You see the zeitgeist in society says, this is what's good, right? Because look at our society right [00:01:00] now, the things that rewards the things that cancels, right? These are all the little kids that were taught to obey authority, you know, and they. They go out into society and they're looking for what's right and what's wrong.Malcolm: And so they look at what is the authority punishing? What is the authority not punishing? The things the authority doesn't punish, well, those must be the right things. And the thing the authority does punish, those must be the wrong things. Instead of trying to determine those things for themselves and take their own mental weight for that.Would you like to know more?Simone: Hi Malcolm. HelloMalcolm: Simone. So you read this Jordan Peterson book and we've been talking more about various things that we either agree with or don't agree with in it. And one of the areas I really want to focus on is parenting strategy. We touched on it a bit with the eight passengers situation video.Malcolm: But I, I IMalcolm: don't have a prescription where I'm not like, this is the right way to do it. I actually think for different. [00:02:00] genetic sociological clusters, which likely are inherited through a family. There are different strategies. So contrast two broad strategies, the Jordan Peterson strategy, right? Which is and we'll go into it, but essentially it's a very controlling strategy that is focused on the adult breaking the child's will.Malcolm: It'sSimone: about discipline and structure.Malcolm: Yes. And then the other strategy, which is much closer to the strategy that our family employs and was employed with both of us when we were growing up, I'd called the Rodney Atkins strategy which comes from the, the he's mine song, great country song if you haven't heard it.Malcolm: But the thesis of what happens in the song is a guy catches a group of teenagers out smoking in a field and is, is, is taking them to his dad, to, to what he thinks is their dad's house, right? One of their dad's house. Cause he saw where they were running. And he's, he's complaining that these kids won't speak when spoken to, and they were getting up to mischief.[00:03:00]Malcolm: And the dad's like, you know, he's mine. He's really proud of his son for doing all that in a way. And he's like, if you knew me back then it'd be no surprise to you what he's done. And then, you know, other things like the kids that have football game and somebody takes a cheap shot at their little kicker and he.Malcolm: Punches the kid and he ends up getting removed from the game. And, you know, he's obviously being punished and he's like, talking about how he jumps up in the stadium and shouts, he's mine. And he's all proud of his son for doing this. But it reminds me a lot of parenting strategies that my parents utilized for me to the extent where I really realized, and I think also part of the, he's mine song, it keeps going back to, if you understood what I was like when I was a kid.Malcolm: You would understand, one, that the same traits that I am nurturing when I'm a kid are what eventually led me to become successful, and what will allow them to become successful, one[00:04:00] but two, that any other reaction to this, you know, again, it is showing that it is potentially an intergenerational genetic thing would obviously be a, a deleterious reaction, and I know this from when I was a kid.Malcolm: So, Let's go into the, well, okay. So here's an example from my own childhood before we go into the, what Jordan Peterson recommends is I remember I got in trouble once at school with, with one of my teachers I, I don't remember the specifics of it, but it felt very unjust to me at the time.Malcolm: And so I went to my mom afterwards and I was like, Oh, the teacher said this about what I had done. And she goes, Oh, you don't need to listen to them. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And she goes, well, I mean, she's an elementary school teacher. She's not exactly in adult society, respectable. She's like, if she had great advice on how to live her life, she wouldn't have become an elementary school teacher.Malcolm: So what you [00:05:00] need to ask yourself is, are you proud of the way you acted? Do you think what you did was right? And if you didn't, then you do need to feel bad. You do need to punish yourself, but you need to understand right from wrong on your own and not have it be what authority figures tell you. I got into so much trouble in school.Malcolm: I was at the principals like every other day. When I was in school because I was told, oh yeah, teachers are all losers. You could just ignore them. The goal is don't get caught or don't get expelled because that will have a permanent effect on your life. But other than that, I mean, it's up to you what's right and wrong.Malcolm: And you should learn that for yourself and live by your own moral code. Which is just wildly different. And then you should even take pride in defying authority when authority is unjust. Which is really different. So let's talk about the Jordan Peterson strategy, right? So can you go into this scene from the book?Simone: Yeah. Jordan Peterson describes a couple of scenes and, and mostly [00:06:00] his, his parenting tactics involved, basically making it clear that he is the alpha of the household. And when he says you have to do something, you have to do it. And if you defy him, he will essentially wait you out. So at one point. He waits for like 30 minutes while a toddler refuses to eat and doesn't let the toddler leave the table and is basically like, you don't get to leave the table until you eat.Simone: And then when he does eat, he praises him and says, you're a very good boy and, you know, gives him a lot of praise when he does what he wants. And then otherwise it's just like, you don't get to go anywhere. He's like a stone wall. And what he argues in the book is, you know, I can, like, for me, 30 minutes is 30 minutes.Simone: For a kid, 30 minutes is like... Forever. So you can outlast a kid a lot faster. That's why he says it's sustainable because apparently he's only been around very weak, well children.Malcolm: No, I can't even imagine. And so I know that even if somebody did that to me when I was a kid, cause I did have a few authority figures try things like that when I was a kid, try these little gambits [00:07:00] like that.Malcolm: And even if in the moment I might be like, okay, I'm going to go along with what you say. He's under this impression that once he's done this, he's broken the kid's will, and from that point on, the kid will listen to him about that thing. No, no, no, no, no, no. With me, now, you have created a, a... A challenge.Simone: A challenge. The gauntlet has been thrownMalcolm: at that point. The gauntlet has been thrown. I have walked out of that situation fuming and I am going to do literally everything I can in my power to challenge you, like, like, like challenge you for dominance because you have shown that you, you're trying to show that like you own my mind.Malcolm: Right. And, and I would, even as a child, like, I remember people are like, Oh. Eventually, a kid will get tired of resisting and I'm like, well, I'm not tired of resisting. If anything, Jordan's a game overSimone: time, right? But Jordan Peterson and the people who his acolytes, like parents we've met who really support this few, they [00:08:00] argue.Simone: A couple of things. So let's, let's steel man them. They argue that children really want to structure. Children really want discipline. Children really want a strong parent to tell them how things are. And then second they believe that what they're doing is providing sort of life on training wheels that, you know, if a child does things that are socially unacceptable, they won't have any friends.Simone: So before that even happens, I'm going to create sort of a microcosm of that in the home. So that rather than then just not ending up with any friends and learning from life, because life is a very strict teacher, a cruel teacher sometimes, I'm going to let them learn this in the home where it's not going to hurt them as much to learn it.Simone: So those are the two things that I've seen argued both in the book and by... People who are proponents of this approach personally, before you give your critique, which I'm sure is going to be quite different from mine I would argue both of those things are really important, like, you know, making sure that people learn how the real world imposes [00:09:00] rules and providing little microcosms of that at home.Simone: I think that is important. I think that is valuable. I don't think that establishing yourself as an arbitrary authority figure is going to do it. And second, I do think that kids want structure and crave structure and crave a strong leader. But not a tyrant. A leader is someone who inspires followers, someone who through their own action inspires you to take your own initiative.Simone: And I think that the true discipline in a household, like the true discipline that a parent should show and a structure a parent should show, is through their own self discipline and their own self mastery. And children copy theirMalcolm: parents. I think you're saying right here. Okay. So you right here are saying one thing, you're saying two things, which one of them is true and the other isn't true.Malcolm: The one that is true is I think the best way for people like us to signal to our kids how to be is through self discipline. Okay. The thing that is not true is the kids structure. I think certain people, so what's really important about every one of these people we know of, everyone who raises their kids this way, Has admitted that [00:10:00] they personally crave structure that they personally benefited from highly structured environments at times in their life.Malcolm: Okay. Yeah, they have said that sociological profile of person. And this is what I was saying. Who likes to be dominated. And this person has kids who like to be mentally dominated. So youSimone: just, just a totally, like, these are like different subspecies of human. Yeah, no, they'reMalcolm: basically a different sociological subspecies of human.Malcolm: And this is why you can't just take one culture and impose it on another cultural group. These people, if you did our style of child rearing with them, which is about. Stoking the child's will and having them take personal responsibility for their own failures. They, they'd find it miserable. They wouldn't know where to go.Malcolm: They'd be like, like certain people are, I don't want to say born to be minions, but they, they really, really crave structure and structured environments. And there are ways that you can be like a great warrior in a structured environment. So [00:11:00] not all. You know, structured environment tropes, a knight, for example, is, is somebody who is living in a structured environment, right?Malcolm: Like, so not all structured environment tropes are anti masculine. Like, I don't want you to, well, I think that, you know, from my cultural perspective, they still kind of are like you know, a knight who takes orders from a king is still a little b***h. I'm sorry. That's just the way my culture would see it.Malcolm: The knight should take orders only from his own conscience. But this is a different cultural perspective, right? And, and it would obviously be framed by my own sociological predilections. So I actually think what you're seeing here is these families are doing what's right for their kids because it, what it's what's right for them.Malcolm: Right. And so one question parish always ask themselves is do you personally create structure?Malcolm: If so, then a structured child rearing strategy may work for your kids. If not, then a structured child rearing strategy probably won't work for your kids. [00:12:00] And. With that said, this is also why it's useful to marry someone of a similar or aligned sociological persuasion as yourself. Because you don't know, you know, if you have a wife who really craves structure and a husband who really craves you know, being out there and, and, and building their will and, and relying on, and this is what you were talking about.Malcolm: So when you said it's about showing your own mental sort of dominance and restraint and, and, and maturity. To your kids, what you're actually saying there is, I take personal responsibility for my own mind, and I hope to reflect that to my kids. Well,Simone: and also our kids just copy everythingMalcolm: we do. The second thing, and they do copy everything we do.Malcolm: And then you can see this in the way they even handle punishment, which we'll talk a bit about punishment in here. And this is the video I'll include the clip in because I think it's a great clip to sort of annotate. But anyway the second thing [00:13:00] that you said there is it teaches them about the real world, right?Malcolm: This, I would disagree pretty strongly. That's not the way the real world worksSimone: in the real world. Wait, wait, wait. So which, which is not the way the real world works? What the, sort of the philosophy of the, the Jordan Pearson acolytesMalcolm: acolytes is not the way most of the real world works. You don't get sit in a timeout.Malcolm: You lose your job. People don't talk to you. The real world provides consequences to you. You providing the consequences to yourself. Or having some authority figure who's out there. In fact, I think it teaches really toxic mindset, which is that the world or authority should be the one to punish people who do bad rather than you as an individual should punish yourself for doing bad.Malcolm: You as an individual should. feel bad when you do bad. And that's where the punishment should come from. And so I'm gonna actually roll a little clip here because I think it's really interesting. It's of one of our kids getting angry. And in the [00:14:00] clip what you will see is, he is He's upset with his brother because he knows they need to be leaving the house to go to spend some time with a babysitter and the brother isn't having it, he just wants to play the piano and then the brother keeps pushing him away and he is at first vocalizing how he's feeling, like he's showing it.Malcolm: I feel anger. But he's not reacting on that anger after a few pushes. He holds his brother's hands really tight. And this is something we do with the kids, not as tight as he's holding his brother hand, but we hold their hands and we look at them in the eyes and we talk to them, right? When we really need to get their attention.Malcolm: Then we have them repeat back to us to make sure they understood what we were saying, right? But you could tell he holds his brother's hands a little too tight and the brother makes a noise like he's being hurt and immediately. And it made me respect my son so much in the moment. You can see he's ashamed of what he's done.Malcolm: He's still feeling angry. Like, he puts his hands behind his back. [00:15:00] But he's ashamed of what he's done. And he's trying to, to, to think through what do I do? Like, I'm still angry, right? How do I relate to this? And I point out to him that he's making monster sounds. Like, he's talking like he's a monster.Malcolm: And. He replies, I think really interesting, like, like, I'm a monster because I bopped Toasty and I want to bop Toasty, I'm a monster because I want to bop Toasty, and, and, and bop is the word we use in our family for hit someone or hurt someone. So what he's saying is the fact that I hurt him. Makes me bad in this moment.Octavian: I didn't mean to hurt you. No! Yeah! Let's all go to Toasty's house. No!Malcolm: Are you, are you, did you make a mistake Octavian? Can you tell Toasty you're sorry? [00:16:00]Octavian: I'm not. I'm trying to get him to Toasty's house.Malcolm: Can you tell him you're sorry? You're not supposed to hurt Toasty.Octavian: No.Malcolm: I turn mad.Octavian: I turn mad. Because. I'm. Sturdy.Malcolm: Which I just thought was very interesting. And to me, it shows a difference in how we expect our kids to act. I want to raise kids where the punishment for unjust action is. is how it makes them feel about themselves, not an external authority applying that punishment because then you enter the real world and you see external authorities not applying punishment for bad action.Malcolm: You see the [00:17:00] zeitgeist in society says, this is what's good, right? Because look at our society right now, the things that rewards the things that cancels, right? These are all the little kids that were taught to obey authority, you know, and they. They go out into society and they're looking for what's right and what's wrong.Malcolm: And so they look at what is the authority punishing? What is the authority not punishing? The things the authority doesn't punish, well, those must be the right things. And the thing the authority does punish, those must be the wrong things. Instead of trying to determine those things for themselves and take their own mental weight for that.Simone: Yeah. I mean, I, I agree with you. It's not, It's not the most accurate way to go. I've heard other people talk on podcasts about sort of versions of this form of discipline of like a microcosms of the real world that I really like for, for example, like, one teacher whose interview I listened to described how in working with his students.Simone: He, he implements laws the way laws are typically implemented, which is when you get caught, you pay a penalty, but sometimes the penalty is [00:18:00] worth it. So like sometimes when you get a speeding ticket, it's kind of worth it. You were willing to pay that amount to kind of get where you needed to go faster.Simone: It was an emergency or something like that. So he. You know, he pointed out, like, if, if a kid starts acting out in class to cheer up a friend, well, maybe it's worth it that they get punished because it's worth it for their friend to be cheered up. And he talks with the students about that. And I kind of like that because 1, it shows how, like, in the real world, like, in many cases, you only get punished if you get caught.Simone: And 2, sometimes it's, sometimes it's worth it to. Run that risk of getting caught and to pay a penalty because sometimes rules are worth breaking. I love that kind of philosophy. So I don't think like using adult punishment as an approximation of real world punishments, it's always a bad idea. And I think that sometimes it's very effective.Simone: But the wayMalcolm: you relate to punishment teaches kids values. So another story from my childhood, right. Is one day a teacher was like, Oh I forgot, like one kid was, was picking on another [00:19:00] kid. And I had told the teacher. And the teacher had praised me about it to my mom and, you know, afterwards she took me aside and she goes, don't be a little pussy.Malcolm: Like, don't go to a teacher. Don't go to an authority is what she was saying in adult language. When you see an injustice resolves the situation yourself, she's like, Could you not have done anything? Could you not have intervened? Could you not have decked this kid? And yes, I would have been punished for that, but that would have been honorable rather than being a little snitch, being a little b***h, you know, going to authority from, from the.Malcolm: Perspective that was being ingrained to me by my parent, you know, and I, I, I think that that was really valuable and it's a different way of dealing, seeing and relating to authority. But here's where I think these two strategies sort of come to a head, right? Which is when kids are doing genuinely dangerous things, right?Malcolm: Like teaching kids to not run into roads and stuff like that. [00:20:00] Like, do you actually teaching kids to not, and this is where you learned a piece of parenting strategy from. A safari. So can you go into this, this safari revelation you had?Simone: Yeah. I mean, when you're out on safari, you're just looking at animals and you have nothing else to do.Simone: So you start thinking a lot. Right. And we went on a multi day safari at one point. It was really awesome. So lucky to do it. And we watched a lot of cubs with mothers, which was great. Cause I mean, it's cool to see lions. Well, yeah, but it wasn't just lion cubs. It was also a few other things, but yeah, like the lion cubs are the most impactful thing that we looked at.Simone: And it's interesting to see how mammals like across species. engage with discipline. And with lions, it was so clear how they did. So a lion cub would play and constantly push boundaries because that's the whole point of play is to like learn your own boundaries and other people's boundaries. So like one, we love that.Simone: We love the kids push boundaries and we want them to, because that's how [00:21:00] mammals. And probably many other species learn what their limits are and what other people's limits are. What would happen when they would push boundaries with a, an adult lion is they would start jumping on them, biting them, playing with their tails, et cetera.Simone: And for a while, as long as they were not being too crazy, the lions would just kind of, meh, you know, like they would look irritable. They might like kick a leg a little bit or make a small noise, but they wouldn't do anything crazy. And then as soon as one of the lion cubs crossed the line, the, you know, they'd get a big swipe of the paw, a roar, you know, they'd immediately get like very.Simone: Visceral, immediate, but not harming, youMalcolm: know, like, not crazy. And they would give them a grumble first, you know, like They'd get, yeah, they'dSimone: get warnings, and then they'd get, like, a sort of, like, they'd get, like, hit by a paw, or, and, or roared at, and then they would, you know, kind of go back off, and sort of start, like, recalibrating, in terms of theMalcolm: boundaries that they were pushing.Malcolm: This is very different than spanking style [00:22:00] punishment. Yeah,Simone: well, because it was immediate. And that's so important. And it was like simple and it was over. It wasn't like this whole, like, wait till your dad comes home or I'm going to like spank you or just like, whatever. It's crazy. It's suchMalcolm: a structured style of punishment.Malcolm: I almost can't imagine it being that like I remember I have to, I had different nannies when I was a kid and some would try that and all it did was just build resentment for me and like, Oh, well I really need to undermine this person because I began to see them given the way I was raised as an unjust authority when they would do things like that.Malcolm: So I would. feel good when I would undermine them and do things that made their lives harder because I was undermining the, the authoritarian state, the the bad guy. Right? And so, these, these two parenting styles work so incongruously with each other. The, the lion style, which is one that we've really adapted in our kids.Malcolm: I think it would be like, well, what if the kids do something really dangerous, like run into a road or something like that, except they, they seem to learn really [00:23:00] quickly from this style which is to say, first, you're like, no. So most of them, they just don't do the things they're not supposed to do.Malcolm: Like, it's. Fairly rare that they do something that they're generally not supposed to do, but when they do, you know, when they're pushing things a little too far first, it's like, you know, and the kids back off, like they understand, but they don't feel bad about it. And then if they do do something bad, we do the bop, right?Malcolm: Which is to say, like a lion would where it's clearly not meant to cause physical pain. But it's meant to sort of show, like, you've. Crossed a boundary. And what's really interesting about this is the way the kids emotionally respond to it when you do this. It's almost like their brain is structured in a way where it takes it as seriously as if you had caused physical pain.Malcolm: So even though you're just slightly like, Tapping them or something, you know, like a lion would they like absolutely are, are freaked out by it. And they're freaked out by it, I think because they're sort of genetically coded to be, they're [00:24:00] genetically coded to, oh, this is what happens when I have cost boundaries with one of the adults of my tribe.Malcolm: I need to emotionally take a lesson from this, and I think that some of that emotional lesson can be lost from something like, or something is structured as like spanking or something like that, because in that moment, they're, they're waiting, they're thinking through the, the dominance dynamics at split play here.Malcolm: It's not an organic punishment style. And so I, I, I do question that. And I know that, I don't know if he recommends spanking in any of his books. I'm just giving that as an example.Simone: Yeah, he doesn't talk about that. I mean, I would say broadly Jordan Peterson's tactics as he described them are very reasonable.Simone: And mostly what he described was basically just waiting kids out. Like there was another example he presented of a. kid he was babysitting who supposedly allegedly refused to go to sleep each night you know, until after he got to do a bunch of indulgent things. And Jordan Peterson would just like keep holding him down in his bed.Simone: And then [00:25:00] just, I think, like say something like go to bed monster. And then like. Eventually the kid just gave up and went to bed. And Jordan Peterson was very proud of himself for this. But yeah, it was really just, it wasn't like spanking or delayed. It was really, it was late. It was waiting things out.Simone: And I would say that Jordan Peterson's strategy does not run afoul of our philosophy on like immediate boundaries, because that's exactly what he was showing. He was like, my boundary is you go to sleep. My boundary is you finish your dinner until you leave. LikeSimone: you cannot leave the table until you finish your dinner. SoMalcolm: it does, it does run afoul of my strategy and I can tell you it wouldn't work with meSimone: because you would, you would backfire, you would, you would hate, you would brush, you would bristle at the idea of someone enforcing their will upon you. And I understand that.Simone: Whereas your philosophy is very different. It's it's when. What you do now with our children is show when their will has crossed a line with your will, whereas Jordan Peterson's strategy is, I am [00:26:00] going to let my will rule this household, and you have to bend to my will. Mm, that isMalcolm: really, like, it's like spheres of will.Malcolm: They have a sphere of will, I have a sphere of will. Sometimes I show them their sphere of will has overlapped with my sphere of will. AndSimone: but in the Peterson household, you enter the Peterson sphere of influence, and that is the only sphere of influence. If that makesMalcolm: sense. Yeah, no, no, no. It makes perfect sense.Malcolm: And I understand, like, I, I really, I get it like, and I, and again, I'm saying, I actually don't think it's wrong for the type of, of, of families that really crave structure. I think it's incredibly effective. And I think people haveSimone: to experiment and like actually see what works for kids. Like maybe being the Peterson stonewall is the correct way to go.Simone: And maybe just showing where your boundaries are is the correct way to go. But forcing it where it's not going toMalcolm: work is, yeah. I was just thinking the stereotype of the type of parent who's most likely to do this sort of discipline is of the military dad. And there is no per draws people that [00:27:00] structure more than the military.Malcolm: It's a very structured environment. So it would make sense why that would, that associated stereotype would exist. Very interesting. And I'd also point out that I, I shouldn't like, I can, I can be like, these people are different from me, you know? And so I, I like, like for my cultural perspective, what they're doing isn't good, but it's important to remember that their cultural perspective is necessary.Malcolm: Society doesn't work if you can't have trained militaries of people who follow order. Society doesn't work without the disciplined group. Society doesn't work without the obedient group. Like it may in, in our current world lead to some negative externalities, which we've talked about, but there is no world, like a world where it's only people like, you know, me and Rodney Atkinson kids and stuff like that, you know, that's a world that is.Malcolm: Chaotic, chaotic, that's the world that's, that's far more chaotic. [00:28:00] And I think it's a world where even things like historically, I mean, you know, you may have a harder time defending yourself and stuff like that. Like you've got to look at the way. These two groups historically would have fought wars, right?Malcolm: Like, one group, the group that can follow orders, likely would have led to much larger civilizational structures with things like organized military, whereas you know, my sociological structure would be much more optimized for sort of a barbarian like environment where you have small tribes where they fight, you know, as a, as a group but it's about individual prowess.Malcolm: And individual you know, sort of showmanship and proving to yourself who you are, right? Which is just a very different environment, and it's a very different cultural structure, and they can both be optimal at different points in human history, but I think the true optimum is when they work together.Malcolm: And, and when they respect that they are different. And so I think it's just something that we need to be More careful about, especially in the conservative [00:29:00] community is, is coming up with sort of cure all parenting strategies and saying this is the way all families should parent because I think that can lead to really sort of negative aspects when the kids growSimone: up.Simone: Yeah, I totally agree. And it's nice to hear someone say that there is no particular pathway that's appropriate because yeah, I totally, and well, also every kid, I think even within family, like we, we might have within our family, kids with very different needs in terms of discipline. So like I, I knew I was never disciplined as a child.Simone: Because I was so self disciplined. Like, I would, you know, criticize my parents for being insufficiently disciplined, so.Malcolm: I'm just thinking, like, the nights where we've done things were like Octavian. Or, or, or one of the kids, like, kept, kept getting out of bed. Cause this happened recently. And it was, I just went downstairs and basically growled at them and was like, get in bed now.Malcolm: And they go, and they get in bed and they go.[00:30:00] And I'm like, don't get out. But they, they got out some, like, like some, most of the time they'll stay in bed when I do that. But sometimes they want to push boundaries and it's like, whatever. You know? You respect that. The room's locked for a reason, whatever.Malcolm: You know, they, they, they went to sleep in their beds, didn't they? I mean,Simone: the room is not our, our bedroom doors are locked so we can, we can hear them and they, they can't get in our beds all night. While we're like completely passed out, but like they can get anywhere in the house. And that's the problem.Simone: Like when they start playing with the toilet, when they start playing with the kitchen,Malcolm: Oh, yes. You got it the other night when one of them decided to start playing with the toilet toSimone: Jackson Pollock toilet water all over. Yeah. That was not my favorite moment. It is a very toddler thing to do, but yeah, no, it's, it's, it's going to be interesting to see how our philosophy on child [00:31:00] discipline evolves over time.Simone: I would say the 1 thing that I expect to stay very consistent over time. Which is also something that Jordan Peterson advocated for, so I like it, is to not have very many rules, just like, very few rules, be really clear about what really matters and more broadly speaking, I would say, modeling good behavior is the most important thing, that kids are going to reflect what they see, so.Malcolm: Well, I also think that a lot of a kid's behavior is genetic. Like when I look at our kids their, their personalities seem really baked in, even from stuff that like we, we didn't do with them. And it might just be that we're really lucky. Like our kids just genuinely do not break rules that often. They very rarely do bad things and they very rarely are mean to each other.Malcolm: And we could. Take credit for that being our parenting, but I suspect a lot of that is just internally who they are and that we've just gotten very easy kids in that respect. But I, I mean, I got easy kids. I got self disciplined kids because I [00:32:00] married a self disciplined woman. And so keep in mind again, when you're choosing partners if you choose a partner that lacks mental self discipline, it's not just them that's going to make your life hell.Malcolm: It's your kids that are also going to make your life hell. If you marry a narcissistic person, it's not just them that that'll be reflected back through. It's the kids. And keep in mind that they being an unself disciplined person or a narcissistic person will raise your kids in an environment where that's being modeled to them.Malcolm: And, and, and that can be very hard for a young child.Simone: Yeah, yeah, I also like your philosophy, just as I guess an ending note of. Children being like plants that you can't necessarily choose what plant you're going to get. Like you get mystery seeds and you can build a trellis. You can add more water, more fertilizer, try to change the shade or sunshine situation.Simone: But in the end, like you cannot a pear tree. Look like a grapevine and grow like a [00:33:00] grapevine and vice versa. So you have to look at how your kids are behaving. And soMalcolm: I'm philosophy upon which our school system is based as well.Simone: Exactly. So I'm really curious to see, like, you know, let's say it's 10 years from now.Simone: And we're like, Oh man, like we had no idea, like one of our kids, like we're just full out Jordan Peterson, Peterson hanging him. Like some other kid were like, just anarchy. I don't know, you know, and I also wonder how parents deal, especially when they have larger families, you know, five, six kids and those kids require different discipline.Simone: Consistency of discipline is something that you've also pointed out is really important. So, you know, how much of a problem is it going to be if the appropriate discipline for one child is really different from, from another child. You know, like one, one kid just needs to have a long conversation about what was going on, whereas the other one needs like.Simone: You know, someone to sort of like, like physically restrain them for a second, hold them to a wall and let them calm down. Right. Like, are they going to see that as a condition?Malcolm: That's rarer than you think. All of our kids [00:34:00] require basically the same discipline so far. I suspect that that'sSimone: what we're going to that are old enough to beMalcolm: naughty.Malcolm: Well, yeah. And, and I, I see, I mean, I'm getting the impression of the personalities we're going to get, you know, you're pregnant with the next one. So nine weeks just got the confirmation of the heartbeat again today. It's only 0. 5 percent chance it doesn't make it. which is very exciting. So, yeah, I, I, I think that you might be right, but keep in mind you're working with the same parental gene set with all of the kids.Malcolm: Having a kid that's just a completely different sociological profile instead of just a different personality on top of the same basic profile is pretty unlikely. Unless you're like adopting or something like that. And that's actually something I've, I've, I've heard of or noticed in families that adopt kids is having to implement very different parenting strategies for each of the kids.Malcolm: Whereas when families don't adopt kids generally, I haven't heard of that.Malcolm: Although I have heard occasionally families will have like one demon child that's just like [00:35:00] a bad person to start with. I, I've heard that like the, you know, the serial killer families and stuff like that. And they're like, yeah, I always knew that this kid, you know, he kept torturing cats or something. What do you do if that happens?Malcolm: Right? Terrifying. Yeah.Simone: Well, fingers crossed. Everything's good. And yeah, I'm, I'm lucky that, and we're lucky that our kids are so great. I don't think we're ever going to be driven to the brink with them. They're just ethical, nice people who also hate authority.Malcolm: So they also hate authority, so they'll make our lives hard.Malcolm: Don't worry.Simone: Isn't that the point? Well, I love you so much. IMalcolm: love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe