Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Join Malcolm and Simone as they delve into a fascinating discussion about the role of genetics, culture, and sociology in influencing human behavior, specifically related to extremism. In this discussion, they explore how twin studies can shed light on the genetic underpinnings of sociological profiles and delve into why religiosity might not be the main factor behind certain societal phenomena. They touch on the concept of the "right-wing authoritarian personality" and its prevalence across both political spectrums. With a deep look at the factors influencing high birth rates, the duo illuminates the significance of outgroup hatred and comfort with hierarchy. This conversation draws intriguing connections between cultural fidelity, fertility rates, and political polarization, ultimately discussing the impact of selective pressures on societal evolution.Based Camp: The Big Plan what the Pronatlist Movment is Really AboutMalcolm: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. So the thing that we are most known for publicly is our stuff on demographic collapse, collapsing populations, and the effects it'll have on society. Now, this is not something that we have talked about on our podcast as to why we haven't talked about this on our podcast yet. It is because , we've talked about it in a million other interviews in a million other places.Malcolm: Everywhere. Everywhere, yeah. And I figured people coming to our podcast, they don't wanna see it. That, that's, they've already heard this talk before, but now I am realizing from some of the comments that some of the people don't know it and haven't seen it. And so, instead of giving our standard stump speech on this,Malcolm: I wanna engage with this topic more conversationally, the way that we typically do this podcast, because, when I've sat down and tried to do this, this iteration of the podcast before I just end up narrating my stump speech, and then Simone's sitting there not talking, or Simone's doing her stump speech.Malcolm: And so let's see if we can turn this into a conversation.Would you like to know more?Simone: All right, [00:01:00] Malcolm, so, what happened aside from you and ending up living in brothel when you went to South Korea? I.Malcolm: Well, where I always start with, and this was really where I started to, to panic about this, is it'sSimone: actually kind of telling that you were living in a brothel and not like in a maternity word of a hospital.Malcolm: Yeah. Let's talk about living in a brothel. Cause this is part of the story that people dunno. Yeah. So, I had gone to Korea after I graduated from Stanford Business School and I had sent my wife, we had just done a startup together, which we had invested a lot of our money into. Yeah. Google had then hired me and then waited six months to employ me.Malcolm: Yeah. And during that time, the little money we had left after the startup had slowly dwindled to nothing. Yeah. And then you got into Cambridge for your graduate degree.Simone: Yeah. And, and I was also in, in contrast put in a cuz at Cambridge you belong to the university, but then also you belong to a college.Simone: And I'm living in a. The, the Catholic dorm. The Catholic College, St. Edmonds. And here you are.Malcolm: Well, and [00:02:00] it's beautiful dorm. Gorgeous, beautiful. Everything. Anyway, gorgeous. Yeah. So, I mean, I had to find a way to pay for you to, to go there, right? And so I ended up having to drop the contract with Google cuz they couldn't find, I, I don't know what happened.Malcolm: Like they had this system where they used to be able to hire people, but they wouldn't have a position for you. So I left them and I ended up going to Korea, but I had to live as inexpensively as possible to support my wife. So I was actually the director of strategy at the number one early stage firm in the country.Malcolm: And this was by a government survey at the time. Like, they asked all the entrepreneurs where they most want money, think of it's like Y Combinator for Korea. And, and that story actually gets really crazy and interesting. But anyway, so I chose to stay at a place. That was smaller than the room I'm in now.Malcolm: My entire room was, was really small. It was a twin, and then half of the space that a twin would be as a little walking corridor. And then they had a glass cabinet which was just where the toilet was. And then there was a little shower on top of you cuz they didn't have a different space for the shower in the toilet. And one day I remember I was walking back to where I was and, [00:03:00] and, and, and somebody at my firm, they go, no, no, no, no, you gotta stop, stop walking down into that neighborhood.Malcolm: It's a really dangerous neighborhood. And I was like, what are you talking about? They're like, look, if you need to get to the subway, here's the way you could go. And I'm like, I, I, this is the only way I know to get to our live. So I kept walking and then they're like, okay, well you just can't walk, you cannot walk down that particular street.Malcolm: And I was like, look, I know no other way. And they're like, okay, at least I'll accompany you. And then I turned to go down this alley and they're like, actually I. Seriously, there's got to be another way to get to where you live. I even can't follow you down this alley. And this alley is where my apartment was.Malcolm: And what I realized is in Korea, anyone who's been there, like it's such a nice clean place that apparently, like even this like really ghetto area where I was living, to me as, as a somebody from the US felt like really clean and nice. I mean, I guess I should have known given how cheap the apartments were there.Malcolm: But the reason specifically they said is they go, this is where all the brothels are. This is the brothel [00:04:00] street. And I was like, oh. That maybe that's why everyone's so nice to me.Simone: And yeah. And then, but what did you learn? I mean, I mean it's, it's again, it's telling that you are surrounded by people who are maybe interested in sex, but not families. You weren't in enough families. Yeah. You weren't in like a tenement full of crying babies. You were in just aMalcolm: process. But anyway, so to get to the part of the story that people normally hear is, I was working at this firm and there was this one day where, I've got a plan where the country's gonna be in 50 to a hundred years.Malcolm: So I'm, I'm, I'm making this plan, and I'm looking at the numbers and I'm like, well, s**t, there's not gonna be a country in a hundred years. I, if you look at their current fertility rate, which is like 0.79, 0.8, depending on what you're looking at, that means for every hundred Koreans of life today, there will be 6.4 to like 5.9 great-grandchildren.Malcolm: And this number is decreasing almost every year. So it's almost certainly gonna be less than that. And you can't survive [00:05:00] in the country if you're looking at like a 93% population collapse over the next century. Your e economic systems fundamentally ceased to work. And I went to the other partners in my firm and I was like, Hey, This is a problem.Malcolm: Like I, I, I don't understand how there is a future to the Korean economy and they're like, oh yeah, we all know this. Like everyone in the country, like in the financial class knows this. We just pretend like it's not true because the entire economy stops working. The moment we recognize this, and this is something people often don't understand, they're, I mean, what do you mean the entire economy starts working?Malcolm: So here I need to explain how debt works because it's this miraculous thing when things are growing. If I'm making a $10 investment and $8 of that investment is debt, and $2 of that investment is equity and it grows by just 10%, my equity investment has actually grown by 50%. If it shrinks by just 10%, my equity investment has decreased by 50%.Malcolm: We have leveraged [00:06:00] our land, our businesses, our houses, our families, our students, our cities, our states, our nation states, literally. It's not like we've taken out leverage on one thing in the economy. We have taken out leverage on literally every layer of the economy, which was beautiful in terms of the prosperity it provided while everything was growing.Malcolm: But the problem is, is everything was only growing in the developed world because the number of workers and consumers was growing exponentially., but the productivity per worker was growing linearly.Malcolm: When I came back to the US it was like traveling back in time 20, 30 years because we, in the US at our current rate of fertility collapse are about where Korea was in the mid nineties when I'm talking about the rate of fertility collapse in chorea, I can use fixed numbers, the current fertility rate to talk about how scary things get.Malcolm: But if I'm gonna talk about it in the US because we're still early [00:07:00] in the collapse process, I need to project forwards what the fertility rate's going to be. So if the US fertility rate continues to decline at the same rate it has over the past 10 years going forwards, and we have one generation every 30 years, that means for every hundred Americans alive today, there will be 4.3 great-grandchildren.Malcolm: So we are looking at it absolutely catastrophic collapse in the US if we can't get things under control.Malcolm: So I think we need to ask ourself, , who has this under control? Which groups are persistently resistant to this? And it's the groups that deviate most from the mainstream society, but also the groups with the most hope for the future. So if you look around the world, yes, generally the wealthier a country is the lower its fertility rate is going to be, but you will see some noticeable differentiations from that.Malcolm: For example, you have the US and Israel, which have unusually high fertility rates, and then you have countries like the block countries in China, which have unusually low, [00:08:00] demographic rates for their economic situation. , what appears to be the case here is the less hope. A country has, and the more people feel like they are only having kids to service an economic elite, the fewer kids they're going to have, where you can really see this play out is the one real, , counter to this rule of no country ever gets its demographics back up again happened in Georgia, which.Malcolm: Began to happen in 2013 after they kicked out the last of the, communist, former rulers and, , moved to total self-management. And then you had this rapid reversal infertility rates because people began to feel like they had hope again, and that they weren't just having kids to be like a grist for some machine that didn't care about them.Malcolm: But I wanna hear how you began to engage with some of these ideas. Simone,Simone: what really blew my mind was when you thought to ask Spencer Greenberg to borrow some survey data that he had to find what traits correlated with families that were having a lot of [00:09:00] kids. Because the big question we had was, all right, well, I.Simone: If a lot of cultures are just going to be extinguishing themselves, like in South Korea, like which cultures on the flip side of that are going to be inheriting theMalcolm: future? . Yes, because we don't believe that. Just a collapsing world economy is a reason to bring kids into the world.Malcolm: We alsoSimone: will, we also believe it's expected that there will be a collapse in world economy. Right. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. So the bigger question is, okay, so that's gonna happen. I, I mean, ideally nations will plan for a little bit better. We're trying to make that a, a possibilityMalcolm: by advocating that's a, a big purpose of our foundation.Malcolm: Yes. A lot of people see us as like, we're more like a. A climate change organization that's like climate change is gonna happen no matter what we do, we should start, let's prep planning around it at this point.Simone: Yeah. But then on, on the flip side, it's also really important to just look beyond that, to look to the distant future of, of what will the future of humanity look like in the face of this If, if there is isn't intervention.Simone: If there isn't an intervention, if there isn't an intervention, what we can expect is a [00:10:00] cultural mass extinction. And then the question is, okay, well if there's a cultural mass extinction, will it lead to like, A smaller but maybe super diverse ecosystem that then grows from there, which is kind of what we'd be cool with.Simone: Or is it gonna end up with a monoculture anyway, wewellMalcolm: explain what you mean. So, I mean, first I'm gonna say our naive assumption going into this is that most cultural groups that weren't religious would die off, and most cultural groups that were religious would, would stay. Yeah. And individual religiosity would be reinforced because , the amount, not a person's religion, but their amount of religiosity is highly heritable when you look at twin studies.Malcolm: So these are so there's different ways of doing this. You can do this using polygenic risk scores, but you can also do it using twins who are separated at birth, identical twins. Mm-hmm. And then contrast them with fraternal twins who were separated at birth and raised by different families. So, they're the same ethnicity, they're, they're in other ways, very similar to each other.Malcolm: What's. The only thing that would really cause this difference is if it was in some way associated with genes. This is how you can get an idea of how much of a person's [00:11:00] sociological profile within a specific metric is genetic. Anyway, so I was like, okay, so what this is probably gonna do is select for religiosity and both culturally and likely genetically, And that's not what we found.Malcolm: And so up until that point, we hadn't really been freaked out because like, I like religiosity, people might, I'm, I'm fairly pro reli religiosity. I, I think our family, while we are like technically secular, we are like religious extremists and we live kind of like religious extremists and we practice our life kind of like religious extremists and almost all of our friends are religious extremists.Malcolm: So, yeah. And weSimone: should be clear, religiosity doesn't mean necessarily that someone believes in God or adheres to a specific religion. Religiosity is fervency of faith in something. So some of the most religious people are actually atheists. You'll, you'll know Cause they'll, they'll tellMalcolm: you, well, this is, this is why I should have known this wasn't true.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. If you hung out with skeptic communities or in online spheres, what you'll know is that many of the, the, the people in these communities used to be some of the biggest fire brands before de converting. And when I think about [00:12:00] my daily life, when I think about like the sociological profile of religiosity, I haven't been preached to by a Christian in like 10 years.Malcolm: Yeah. I get accosted on the streets by progressive extremists with their preaching, every other week. So the, it it's clear that this mind virus in our society is uniquely good at peeling out people from these cultures, was a high level of sociological religiosity.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. But I'd love you to go into the data and what we found, Simone.Simone: So what we did find correlated highly with high birth rates is outgroup hatred or dislike. So this is people responding to questions, asking if they'd be cool, if like one of their kids dated someone of a different race or cultural group.Simone: And also a very keen comfort with hierarchy and like high power distance. So really what you're looking at is xenophobic. Authoritarians. Right? I mean, that's kind of like the, so ifMalcolm: you look at it, it's something called right-wing authoritarian personality. You can look it up on Wikipedia. There's a topic of [00:13:00] this and it's actually highly heritable as well.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Which, is done using polygenic data. It's, is like all these other things. So it is something that can be condensed within a population if it is really genetically successful, which is showing itself to be right now. And yeah. And it makesSimone: sense. Like, I mean, in the end we were like, oh duh.Simone: Like of course it's not religiosity because religiosity isn't going to maintain cultural fidelity. What will maintain cultural fidelity is not, not allowing your people to consider outside ideas. Like that is a kind of a big thing. More authoritarian cultures are gonna keep people in, have strict rules.Simone: Yep. A, a degradation or erosion of rules and discipline is one of the things that causes a hard culture to become a soft culture. And soft cultures are those that are most likely to see their fertility rates degrade over time because there's basically less motivation to do anything difficult. AndMalcolm: So the right-wing authoritarian personality is not actually a rightwing thing.Malcolm: It's seen equally in both extremists on the right and extremists on the left. This is what, if you're a left-wing person, [00:14:00] makes you Antifa, for example. Just an extreme hatred about groups, unwillingness to listen to anyone else., and a preference for internal hierarchical structures in the dehumanization of, of, of people who aren't like, everything that I, I think anyone really who is honest about what Antifa really stands for.Malcolm: I mean, it's the fascist organization that just labels itself, anti-fascists. It's like the Patriot Act lame itself as patriotic when it is anything but patriotic. But anyway, so, so you have these Antifa goon type personality clusters, which is going to increase. So why is it called the right wing authoritarian population cluster?Malcolm: It's called that because it was named by professors at universities who saw all these traits as negative and like were unable to see them in their own ideological faction. But since then, other professors have gone looked at this and found that it actually is present in leftist extremists as well. So essentially what you're getting is this personality cluster that creates dangerous ideological extremists is, is what's being culturally and genetically selected for in our [00:15:00] society right now, not religiosity.Malcolm: And again, this makes sense, right?What's really cool is you can see this phenomenon happening in real time. If you look at the period where fertility rates started collapsing in the U S and then you lay that over voting patterns. You can begin to see the two parties shift further and further apart. Due to this new pressure in both the cultures and sociological profiles that are being selected for which I think can give us some idea of how quickly.Changes. Selective pressures like this can be represented in major real world events. And this is not an older phenomenon either. It's, it's continuing to happen as can be seen in , this other graph here.Is it likely that Selective pressures like this is solely to explain this phenomenon? No, very unlikely. There's likely a number of other pressures that are causing this cultural drift we're seeing here. However, it is very interesting that the phenomenon would predict that we would see this in the [00:16:00] data. And it's also something we see in the data at exactly the time we would predict it.Simone:Simone: right.Simone: So it makes a lot of sense that these cultures would be like this because cultures that are more porous, more capable of losing people are going to lose them and to degrade into other cultures or lose their culture or lose their populations. Those cultures that kind of have these, these high walls around them, these, these barriers are going to be,Malcolm: well also personality wise.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So you are somebody who has this religiosity thing this seems to correlate most with like how much you study your culture mm-hmm. How much you study your religion. Mm-hmm. Which isn't actually that protective of staying within a culture. Yeah. Whereas not listening to outsiders and not engaging with outside ideas, that's going to be very protective of staying within a birth culture.Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Like I, I can actually think, so a lot of the most religious people I know have actually switched across many religions over time. Like they've gone from joining the Raj Nation wearing orange and [00:17:00] having really wild names to going to conservative Christian. And so that shows that, that , the religiosity always has been high, but they did move from one culture to another.Simone: Whereas , people who are much more close-minded or unwilling to look at outside ideas wouldn't do that kind of switching,Malcolm: right? But, but so religiosity, high religiosity of people who stay within these, these harder cultures. So what are these hard cultures that you're talking about and why are they useful to fertility rates?Malcolm: Humanity can be thought of as our sociological tendencies, , the aspects of our personality that are predilection one way due to our biology and our genes. This can be sort of as sort of like our firmware or our hardware. Then sitting on top of that are mimetic clusters.Malcolm: Today when we talk about memes, we often talk about memes as infecting an individual and then using that individual to replicate themselves through converting other individuals. But historically mimetic clusters function very differently than that. So what we today call religions and cultures, which in the book the pragmatist guided crafting religion we call cultivars, can be thought of, of these sort of mimetic [00:18:00] clusters that sat on top of our firmware, but was also subject to the same pressures that determined individual fitness.Malcolm: Because mass conversions during early human history were actually fairly rare and occurred only during very specific periods of time. And even when they did occur, often the culture would shift dramatically.Malcolm: Anyway, to get to the main point here, the level to which a person's culture carried with their family over time was really, really high in a historic context. And what that means is that the evolutionary processes could apply to cultures and cultural practices. Which increased individual biological fitness could outcompete cultural practices, which did not increase individual biological fitness.Malcolm: This is how you find things like Judaism and Islam figuring out hand washing, literally hundreds of years before the secular world figured out hand washing, because there were selective pressures on the groups that practice hand [00:19:00] washing rituals that you didn't see in the groups that didn't. And this also has a play in many psychological tendencies that individuals have.Malcolm: Right. So by that, what I mean is wherever you look in the world, whether it's Ramadan or Feast of the Firstborn or Lint, you have these arbitrary self denial rituals, which we now know strengthen the inhibitory pathways in your prefrontal cortex. They make it easier to shut down in truth of thoughts.Malcolm: And, and now the secular world is beginning to figure this out, whether it's juice cleanses or like arbitrary fasting rituals. So these older cultural groups actually did a lot to both increase a person's mental health. While also increasing their fertility. This is why out of pretty much all of these widely successful cultural groups in the world almost all of them have some level of underlying homophobia in them.Malcolm: Yeah. Increases biological fitness, even though it, it decreases individual quality of life. So we're not saying that all of these are, are good things, but you, you will see these patterns begin to exist across cultural groups that [00:20:00] systemically find themselves out competing cultural groups. Mm-hmm. So the tendency to stay within one of these cultural groups that has all of these software, patches that co-evolved with our biology over time, leads individuals to often be psychologically healthier.Malcolm: That's why you see religious individuals almost always being psychologically healthier in sort of big studies done on this. Unless they're like, born, same sex attracted, or something like that, and then you get negative outcomes. But same sex attracted individuals born into religious communities.Malcolm: Have higher fertility rates even today, so it's still optimizing for like technically what was being selected for when some cultures were out competing other cultures. So this tendency to not listen to outsiders and to think less of outsiders is of course going to be protective of people in iterations of these traditional cultural groups.Malcolm: So the iterations of Christianity that were more, open to outsiders, more open to outside ideas. These were the most porous to the virus and the first [00:21:00] to die.Malcolm: They got infected and then the virus started using them to just replicate the virus itself. So let's talk about this concept of the virus. If we think of cultural groups as these sort of evolving entities, Well, there's one strategy for an evolving entity that, that something could optimize itself around.Malcolm: It could say, I actually don't care about increasing an individual's biological fitness. What I'm gonna do is I am going to convert individuals to this new cultural practice. Then I am going to use them to just convert other individuals to this cultural practice. And in fact, having kids is a bad thing because it lowers the amount of time they have to go out and just constantly try to convert other people.Malcolm: Yeah, we'll do another video on the virus and how it works and why it's best thought of as a virus and, and yeah, we'll do that some other time. But anyway, so it began to infect these cultural groups that we're more open, more pro-social, more open outside ideas, and they began to be memetically sterilized.Malcolm: That is what caused the [00:22:00] tendency of this strictly hierarchical I don't like outsiders view to be the most evolutionarily successful view within current human context. When we found that out, that's when we began to panic. That's when we began to be like, oh it's not just religious people like we like religious people.Malcolm: It's a very specific sliver of religious communities that the, the Isis ification of the world is what we say. It's the Isis, like communities not Muslim, Christians, Jews, we all have that are going to outcompete the other groups. And that's where I began to really get worried about the future and began to say, well, is it even possible to create an alliance of deviant cultures?Malcolm: So this is cultures that are resistant to the virus. But that are also pluralistic and open to creating an intercultural alliance mm-hmm. To protect themselves both from the virus, but then eventually from these [00:23:00] other cultural groups that once the virus is self exterminated because it is a self exterminating thing, it's, it's, it's culturally cascading people can't exist into the future.Simone: So, yeah. So the big question is, will the future be a coercion caliphate of some sort, or will a future be a pluralistic diverse ecosystem? And we are hoping for, and fighting for the latter, but we think that without intervention, the former will form.Malcolm: Some of our progressive washers, they may be listening to this like, yeah, but what about a future that's like progressive and humanist and it's like you guys have lost, you are so dead in the cultural group.Malcolm: You're like somebody who's experienced the lethal dose of radiation and, and doesn't know that all their DNA has been scrambled already. Your fertility rates are socra, catastrophically low, your entire social structure. This is why the econom economic thing matters. Because what it means, and this is what I really realized in Korea, is [00:24:00] this dominant cultural group that exists around the world today.Malcolm: I. In New York. So like these cultures differentiate a bit, or London or Paris. It's the rural cultures that really differentiate. It's these weird or the weird religious cultures like in New York, like who's really different In New York, it's the Hispanic Jews, right? Like they're, they're from different cultural groups.Malcolm: But this dominant cultural group, in Korea, I was able to see how it reacted to demographic collapse. Like does it have a state at which it realizes how bad the situation has gotten? And what I learned is it doesn't, it does not have the capacity to react to this. Mm. In fact, it just begins to double down on all of its positions more and more and more.Malcolm: Like in Korea, what, what is it? Was women, the four nos movement. So you can see how Korea, so let's talk about how screwed Korea is already. So not only are they in this horrible demographic situation right now, But in addition to being in a horrible demographic situation, they're already at a point where 60% of their population is above the age of 40.Malcolm: There's basically no way they could solve this. They would need like a massive cultural push. They have spent 20 billion [00:25:00] in like the past, how many years? And it's, it is done almost nothing. And meanwhile, their society, if you look at the people who are most infected with this, this sort of progressive mind virus that exists around the world, well now you've got the the four nose movement, right?Malcolm: Which is women being like, no men, no sex, no engagement. Like that's gonna make the problem for that cultural group even worse. And so what that showed me is, is that. There is no like adaptive ability within this progressive group. They're just going to go extinct. So when we think about the future, what we think about is that the cultural groups that are conservative, that are fighting this mind virus, but want a genuinely pluralistic future, and then the cultural groups that are just like progressives and disguise and are just waiting for their turn to exercise their culture over other people and to try their own shot.Malcolm: I mean, now that the progressives are done trying to erase everyone's individual culture, they get a shot in the sun doing it themselves. And, and they still make good allies for now, but they're, they're clearly not long-term values [00:26:00] aligned with us. However, we also wanna be clear that we don't see them. We don't think any cultural group other than our own it, because obviously as our own cultural group, so obviously we're gonna see this better, but it's like a weird cultural group that's just our family, so it's not like anyone else, but we don't see any cultural group as being intrinsically better than any other culturalSimone: group.Simone: Yeah, like once someone in an interview ask me like, well, do you think there are any groups that shouldn't be breeding? And I'm like, no. Like, I want everyone to be represented in the future. I want more than everyone to be represented. I want new groups to form, but thisMalcolm: is, but this is really important. We do not have, if a group doesn't believe in gender equality, we don't see that as a negative thing, and we don't see that group as needing to be stamped out.Malcolm: Yeah, you do you, however, then people will be like, well, what are you talking about? Like this idea of like xenophobic, like hierarchical groups, so why are you worried about them? Right? Mm-hmm. We're worried about them, not because we see them as worse than other groups, but we do have a vested interest in our own cultural groups surviving for a long time.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And these groups will [00:27:00] try to erase us. Yeah. Like, it is naive to think that I could live in like ISIS controlled territory and maintain broadly the lifestyle I'm maintained today. Mm-hmm. I, and my kids would be killed. I, I can even see this within, the fact that our family, uses things like I V F and genetic selection, like we do a lot of weird stuff.Malcolm: That there are cultural groups in the US where if they had dominant power right now, they would try to erase us as a cultural group. Yeah. And that's why we are interested in this alliance because we understand that we need to create an alliance with the other cultural groups that, either don't exist parasitically, like they don't just exist to take people from healthy cultural groups that are able to motivate fertility in their populations.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. But that also that we will eventually need an alliance to protect all of these cultural groups from the next threat after the progressives have self extinguished themselves. Yeah. Which is the sort of next. Rise of the Nazis, basically. It's gonna be bad, and it's, it is where the future is inevitably going because it's such a [00:28:00] successful strategy in the world today.Simone: Be that's our, that's our tomorrow problem. But anyway, now back to demographic, perhaps more broadly.Malcolm: So the problem that we have as a world is we are going to see population begin to collapse within the developed world. Now, people often say, oh, well can't you use immigrants to fix this? Right? And it's like, well, you do know that, that as of 2019 by the un, that famously inflates these numbers, that even by the UN's own statistic as of 2019, all of Latin America, so Central America, south America and the Caribbean collectively fell overpopulation rate.Malcolm: Were like a, a farmer who is taking water from his neighbors pond to irrigate his crops because he has unsustainable water management practices himself. And you point out that this neighbor's pond is also evaporating and the firm is like, oh, I don't care. It doesn't affect me at all. Affect future generations or something.Malcolm: It's insane. And then they're like, well, yeah, but Africa still has high fertility ratesSimone: right now in the world, countries, [00:29:00] nations that are above repopulation rate typically have a per capita income.Simone: So that is per person on average of below $5,000 a year. So this is an extremely low level of earning, and basically as soon as people in a nation start opting in to the economy, once they start getting jobs, they. Stop having kids. And, and so that means that basically soon as people in, in Africa who are in nations that are below this, this number start to get access to, well, a little more wealth, which presumably we really, really want because it also means better healthcare, better education, better gender equality.Simone: They will stop being able to fuel the rest of the world in terms of supplying a labor force. So it's, it's, I mean, the, the incentive that is created by someone who says, Oh, well just rely on immigration is basically, oh, well, okay. Well we're also kind of incentivized to keep these impoverished nations really impoverished.Simone: CauseifMalcolm: we don't, well yeah, and even if it's not what they mean to create, you're creating an [00:30:00] environment where the developed world's economy becomes completely reliant on preventing Africa from developing. Yeah, exactly. And, and we're using Africa like a human, like, like a, a farm, like a human farm. Like it's really sick when you think about it.Malcolm: Not aSimone: good lesson. Thought we learned that lesson. It's a badMalcolm: look what they're saying. Yeah. I mean, think about what you're saying in the us , the progressive solution to the social security problem is because they didn't put in the effort themselves to have kids.Malcolm: They're gonna import predominantly black people from Africa to support a bunch of non-working, predominantly white people who didn't put in the effort to prepare for the future themselves. Mm. Like, that's not a good look. That's not the not racist plan. Mm-hmm. That's, that's a really bad plan.Malcolm: What we want is a world where somehow we can find a way to make prosper prosperity and broad access to e education compatible with a stable fertility rate. The problem is [00:31:00] for the progressive mindset is this social virus that has so contaminated their thought, that has so homogenized their population.Malcolm: It is not compatible with that thriving, which means some other cultural group needs to be invented and needs to work for that to happen. Mm-hmm. Or one of the conservative cultural groups that exists right now needs to rise to dominance for that to happen. And so what you're saying is, yes, we can win, we can have prosperity wide access to education hopefully even gender equality, but we can't have that and this urban monoculture still existing.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And. And obviously that's an existentially threatening idea to the people who are benefiting from this urban monoculture to this culture's precast, to the people who determine truth for this urban monoculture. And who is that? That's the, the academics. That's the journalists that, that it's true.Malcolm: Right. And you could say, oh, but Ade academia is getting worse and [00:32:00] worse. After academia was infected, it got worse at determining truth. It's the replication crisis has gone up. The amount of money needed. Yeah. Yeah. To get individual things. It is not, academia for the past 20 years is not pre eighties academia, that was a completely different organizational structure.Simone: Heck, we have friends who've decided to discount all medical research post 1950.Simone: So I think there's also so this logarithmic increase in, in bureaucratic bankruptcy in the academicMalcolm: world. Yeah. And, and I think that the scientific method in and of itself is the correct way to approach truth. However, I think that people are really naive if they think that's the way that academia determines truth.Malcolm: Mm. Academia is this weird organic system of citations which are used to determine your position within a status hierarchy and then eddie's that form. Mm-hmm. So this is something we often talk about, which is academic eddies, which is to say if there's a concept. In academia that a lot of people are writing on, there is more incentive for more people to write on it [00:33:00] because, well, it's what your advisor is going to do.Malcolm: So you basically always do your first few research papers on what your advisor does, right? Those are the conferences you attend. Those are the conferences that exist. And so there is a huge disincentive to study anything outside of the zeitgeist. There's entire departments in universities, like the women's studies department that are basically dedicated to getting you fired if you do something that goes outside of the ideological police.Malcolm: So why would you do that? Like what's the incentive to you as an academic? It can be really hard to get a job if you publish something. Like we have academic friends who, who have published just the data and gotten fired for this because, That there's entire departments now dedicated to, to going over everything that's being published by the, the formerly productive parts of academia and then just getting people fired.Malcolm: So this idea that, that I am pre-scientific method, I am anti this weird, broadly new system that we use in academia. And I think what we need is an academic reformation. , this [00:34:00] situation is what the Reformation was. There was a group that said True should best be determined by people who spent their entire life studying it and then have been certified by central bureaucracy.Malcolm: And then another group that said that central bureaucracy is prone to corruption. And then there was the reformation. And then I think post the Reformation, the bureaucracy cleaned itself up. Right. Pretty significantly. Right. And I suspect that after the academic reformation, the academic system might be able to fix itself.Malcolm: And then hopefully then we have two competing parallel knowledge about it all theSimone: better. Yeah. Because competition breeds strength. It's good.Malcolm: Yeah.Malcolm: But I wanna know your broad thoughts on what this means for the future of our species.Simone: What I think people discount. Cause a lot of people kind of don't care. They may not be long-term oriented, and that's not logically inconsistent. I mean, maybe you just don't really care that much about the future or you just are more oriented around problems right now.Simone: But I think the important thing to remember is a lot of the problems that you may care about right now, be it feminism or animal rights or the environment or overall suffering, will also be problems in the [00:35:00] future. And if you do not ensure that your culture is somehow represented in the future, those problems won't be solved after you die.Simone: And so there's a lot of environmentalists to say, I'm not gonna have kids, or I'm not gonna have more than one kid or two kids because that's gonna hurt the environment. But if they end up. Not, not just having few kids, but also raising kids to believe that the world is falling apart, to give them a sense of hopelessness that almost ensures that they won't have kids, or at least have very few kids.Simone: You're almost in, you, you're basically doing what, what you Malcolm have been describing this whole time, which is you're creating , a sterilizing culture, a culture that will self extinguish. And those values just won't be represented. So, we often, for example, get accused of trying to broker in some kind of Handmaid's Tale future coerce women into having kids, which is totally not true.Simone: We really care about reproductive rights and freedom. But what we, we wanna turn around and say is listen, the future that we'll get, if people like you, who hold views [00:36:00] around reproductive rights, who hold views around, women's rights, don't choose to have kids, don't choose to pass your culture on in a sustainable way.Simone: That's what we're getting. Which is, it's really, it's very frustrating because the very people who care about these things are to a great extent, the very people who truly are going to be responsible for this future. It's on them. And, and of course like we feel it's on us because we also wanna, we wanna protectMalcolm: basic, basically Simone is, well, I can keep taking kids from conservative groups.Malcolm: I can keep poaching kids. My culture can survive entirely parasitically off of nearby healthy cultures. What is your response to that?Simone: What that's going to do is ultimately breed cultures that are more resistant to outside incursions, to people taking away or picking off their, their young, essentially.Simone: So, imagine that there's a, a herd of rhinos and poachers come out and, if they can sneak up to a rhino and grab it and take it away [00:37:00] and sell it or whatever. Eventually all of the. Friendly docile, rhinos are going to be removed from the gene pool and you're gonna end up with super aggressive, super paranoid rhinos that charge at everything that moves.Simone: Well, I mean that, that's what we're creating. Yeah.Malcolm: In Japan, like where you had these deer that will like just come up and eat out of people's hands. That's because in Japan they didn't kill the deer that went up and ate out of people's hands. Whereas in, in Europe they did. So our dear are afraid you can do this to, to a human population.Malcolm: And you can actually see this in Amish populations. There's been some interesting studies where they show that the longer a, an Amish family has been within their culture. Mm-hmm. And you see this intergenerationally. Fewer and fewer of their kids leave theSimone: culture. Ah, so there you go.Simone: Be that's our, that's our tomorrow problem. We have a todayMalcolm: problem. That's the tomorrow problem. But no, we live in the last prosperous age for a while. Humanity goes through cycles. Like, people are like, why, why can you so confidently predict a downfall scenario.Malcolm: It's like, you know that this happened before. Mm-hmm. Like you look at Athens, we entered this period where, L G B T began to become accepted. [00:38:00] More women would get more equality. You look at the, the height of the Roman Empire, hedonism would begin to become more common, and then you'd have this collapse.Malcolm: Yeah, we, we keep seeing this in history. Like you see the end of the Renaissance, we are heading towards another collapse and we're seeing all the signs of it. And a lot of conservatives, I think they take this and they say, well, that means like acceptance of L G B T groups is what causes the collapse.Malcolm: And I'm like, no, A collapse is definitionally a decline from a cultural height. Yeah. Okay. That doesn't mean that those things are causing the collapse, but it would be nice. I do think the rise in hedonism, I do think the rise in a lack of self-control does lead to, to collapse. Well, I meanSimone: are isn't it just the suggestion that like when people are given an excuse to go soft and they're given the technology and the amenities by a, a city or a civilization to go soft, then they go soft.Simone: And then when you no longer have humans essentially holding up that civilization, then that civilization crumbles. [00:39:00]Malcolm: Yeah. No, I mean, I, I think, I think you're right. And so what we're trying to do is, is we know that like we are in one of the last prosperous eras, which means we need to accumulate resources for our kids, but also use things like the technology we have that can access large populations to begin to build this cultural alliance network.Malcolm: Mm. That can ensure, because my kids, they're like, you know what? I suppose the future a free internet doesn't really exist anymore because either the virus has taken it over or some fascist group has taken it over. Well then they'd say, why? When you, when you still had the free internet, did you not use it to broadcast the signal?Malcolm: Did you not use it to begin to collect people together? What we're trying to do is create parallel networks. Exactly. Yeah. Parallel communication channels that can begin to function after things do begin this, this process of decline.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So that the next time we have a civilization, so that the next time we have one of these periods of Renaissance, it can be perpetual. Yeah. And the iteration that our culture creates and, and one of the things that we're very fortunate about, and this is always one of our [00:40:00] biggest quotes, is thank God.Malcolm: The forces that are arrayed against us are not as competent as they are malevolent. Because, the, the progressives are self extinguishing. Like we basically need to do nothing other than protect our kids from them. The fascist groups are dangerous. Like they do want to see people like us extinguished eventually they do wanna take our kids often just as much as the progressives do.Malcolm: But they're often technophobic as well. They're often very conservative in how they relate to technology, which makes them out competable by techno folic populations.Simone: Well, yeah, I mean, I, I think one of the futures is a future in which, Kind of like with Jews, they need us because of certain, like economies or businesses that like we do and that they, for some moral or cultural reason cannot do.Simone: If that makes sense. Explain what you mean by that. Well, so like, like, many Jewish groups became powerful because they, for example, were capable morally, religiously of, of being [00:41:00] bankers in, in civilizations where the mainstream culture could morally not earn interest on lent money, for example. Mm-hmm.Simone: And obviously cities benefit when they grow, at least from, from debt and leverage. So we hope to be, to find a way with these little niche cultures that will not be part of the. Dominating culture of that, that inherits the future that will have some kind of technology that is, that is maybe, maybe morally repugnant to the future dominating civilization, but still necessary to it.Simone: So they, they need to keep us around for something and they hate us. They may pogrom us, but they will keepMalcolm: us around. Well, I think what you're missing here and it's really important to clarify this, is every cultural branch, like if you're looking at a cultural evolutionary tree mm-hmm. Has one of these fascist factions within it.Malcolm: We, we call it the isis because I, ISIS is like a, any evoked like it has a lot of emotions evoked with it. People can imagine what we meanSimone: by that. It's an easy shorthand for a religious state [00:42:00] that scares people.Malcolm: Right, right. But what I'm, what I'm saying is well specific type of religious state that scares people, which is the type of religious state that is out-competing others right now.Malcolm: Right? Yeah, yeah. So the point that I'm making is it's unlikely that any one of these is gonna dominate the future. It's likely you're going to have a number of them fighting amongst each other. And that was also true historically, if one of them ever conquered the entire world, they. They don't have to worry about the inefficiencies of not allowing bankers, right?Malcolm: Yeah. Because they control the world at that point. The reason why, for example, all of the European powers still needed the banking class was because they were competing against other cultural groups at the time. And so it mattered much more to them that their group won than the cultural purity of their group.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And this is why you have this thing where you have a pogrom, they'd kick out the Jews and then they'd bring back the Jews when they needed money or something like that. But, but so like we'd love our cultural specialty to be for example, genetic technology, repro tech, artificial wombs, stuff like that.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Because [00:43:00] it, as society becomes more and more infertile all cultural groups will need that more andSimone: more. And, and it'll secretly slink over to us when they have their henrie VII moment.Malcolm: But yeah, I mean, what other thoughts would you have on this right here that you'd want to make sure people understand about our organization?Simone: Basically that, that one day you stumbled into a brothel and that led you to understand that the future of the human race, that the future of anything you value depends on your ability to loveMalcolm: well. So what she means by that, and this is also something we can talk about, was in our broader framework, which I think is really important to understand how we see the world.Malcolm: When I was in Korea, something that kept shocking me is I'm like, this population will be, 6% of what it is today in a hundred years. Like, how are they gonna deal with all of the empty buildings? How are they gonna deal with all that? Are they gonna import people? Are they gonna, it's like, well, they can't import people from Japan cuz they're also collapsing.Malcolm: They can import [00:44:00] people from China because they're also collapsing. Hmm. And less than a hundred years ago, Japan went in. Killed millions of people to try to push their culture, because historically that was the way you pushed your culture through war,Simone: through conquest, et cetera,Malcolm: through conquest.Malcolm: And you could see Russia, attempting something like this. Now, this isn't the only reason that they're, they're in this war right now. Of course. Yeah. The last time that they controlled Ukraine, they did make everyone speak Russian. That is what they taught in the school system. They did teach that you are actually Russians, like Ukraine is a fictional concept.Malcolm: This is something Putin has said, which is basically saying, I want to push our Russian culture on this actually very closely aligned cultural group. Yeah. Which is an insane way to try to spread your culture when both Russia and Ukraine have desperately low fertility rates. The groups that are going to win in the future are not the groups that are best at.Malcolm: War, which historically was, was the successful strategy. Actually, many of the most successful groups right now are staunchly, pacifist. Look at the Amish, look at the variety in [00:45:00] Israel at least. Um mm-hmm. Most pacifist groups, most very high fertility rates. Yeah. But to an extent, those groups only survive because they have , pro war groups around them to protect them.Malcolm: To pro.Simone: Yep. Exactly.Malcolm: Yeah. And so, so that's not gonna be a long-term successful strategy, but the point being that, in this future that we're going into, you really need to completely change the way you think about geopolitics.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. The way you think about immigration. Even if you're thinking about your own independent cultural group, you are typically better off. For anything that increases the economy of whatever countries you are most present in and anything that decreases the amount of government control those countries try to exercise over your country.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Things like cultural projection through war and stuff like that, they're really largely irrelevant now. In, in terms of, of, of a intergenerational cultural victory. And the groups that are still thinking in those mindsets, they're going to go extinct. Mm-hmm. This reminds me because a lot of people, when you talk [00:46:00] about Accelerationist first non Accelerationist cultures, cultures that try to, to move forward, I mean, we saw this was a collapse as the Western Roman Empire, right?Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Which was as Rome collapsed, some people said, we want to go back to the old ways of doing things. And some people said well, we shouldn't be hedonistic. Like, obviously this sort of broad hedonistic culture that's dominating our urban centers is stupid, but we do need to culturally innovate.Malcolm: That was the Christians, this was this new religion, this new cultural group that was innovating in all these sorts of cool ways that was defining themselves, that was defining, what they were. That was having councils that were thinking about cultural innovation. And then the mystery cults really exploded during this period.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And these were individuals who were going back to the more pagan ways of doing things. And actually both the Christian groups and these mystery cults were growing in the, this same communities. They were growing among military organizations. Hmm.Malcolm: And so they were both actually working with the same populations, but the the groups that said, we need to [00:47:00] go back to the old ways of doing things. They died because the technological and cultural context that they were in had shifted. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's what we're gonna see in the future is I think that the groups that are most interested in innovating themselves to deal with this new cultural context that we're dealing with, are going to be the groups that are ultimately victorious.Malcolm: And what we hope is that there's as much pluralism within those communities as possible, and some sort of pluralistic alliance can form within thoseSimone: communities. Yeah. And I think it's possible. I think today we have technology resources the ability to spark something that didn't exist in the past.Simone: So odds are looking good. There's lots of hope.Malcolm: Yeah. And I can say that the one thing that our organization, we were like, oh, the prenatals, you must move about getting fertility rates up. We're like, that is so done. It's not gonna happen. No one's getting broad fertility rates up, and the problem isn't solved.Malcolm: By doing that, I, I solved nothing by convincing somebody from a, an iteration of like, progressive culture that doesn't wanna have kids to have kids like I I have solved nothing. Where [00:48:00] I have solved something is if there's some weird iteration of progressive culture that for whatever reason is resistant to most of the viral forces and does believe in having kids and does believe in, self denial rituals and does believe in sort of many things that would lead themselves to be natural cultural allies with us.Malcolm: Yeah, they would make a useful ally, but, but the people who are just completely brainwashed, they're completely useless to me. And I think that that's a message that people aren't used to hearing is, is to say, you just don't matter to us. They're like, well, don't you? How do you convince this progressive woman to have a lot of, I don't care.Malcolm: If, if, if she's already from this, this cultural group that sees their entire, like, reason Detra as surviving through parasitizing nearby healthy cultural groups, I, again, we're not like judging them. Like we're not judging them in, in the context of that's a worse way of doing things, but it's an unsustainable way of doing things that makes all of the cultural groups around them worse.Malcolm: Intergenerationally. Yeah. So,Simone: Yeah, you're, you're actually quite right in that they really do kind of poison the other groups [00:49:00] around them in a way that's really messed up.Malcolm: When I say worse I don't mean like worse in an objective sense, I mean more dangerous to my group and more dangerous to a pluralistic mindset because they teach all of the cultural groups around them that pluralism is threatening essentially.Malcolm: Yeah. That being accepting of outsiders is threatening and that's why they are like the ultimate dangerous force from our world perspective. Yeah. But it's also why we don't have really any animosity towards any cultural group, even if they're very different from us. Even if they're like, well, we don't like L G B T populations, we don't like, women.Malcolm: Those are things we believe in, but even groups that don't feel that way. We're like, do what works for you so long as your culture is thriving and you are not using force to force people into your culture, because that's where it gets really dangerous. And that's something we're really against.Malcolm: Or using force to keep people in your culture. That's another thing that we're, we're, we're quite against. So if we could live in a society where everybody's just completing on an equal playing field, the government isn't trying to use its [00:50:00] powers to take money from one cultural group and then use that money to convert people to this sort of dominant monoculture.Malcolm: But also nobody is with guns forcing people to convert or threatening people to convert, or threatening people to stay in their culture. I think that's the ideal cultural ecosystem that we're trying to create because we believe that our culture can survive within that ecosystem. Yeah. And thrive within that ecosystem.Malcolm: And we would encourage every culture that thinks that they can thrive within an equal playing field that they should want to join this movement.Simone: I'd be delighted if they did. So we'll see. We'll see how well we're, we're able to evangelize all this, get other people on board,Malcolm: get some good competition going.Malcolm: Mean concept. But it's, it's a, it's an interesting philosophy, we'll see. And I, and I do think, one person was like, oh, you don't believe in state services. I think that we should rely on our cultural groups to provide much of our services. Right.Malcolm: .Malcolm: So the reason why progressive groups so ardently advocate for state services is because if you want to convince somebody to leave one of these harder older cultures, most of these cultures offer a lot of what our state services, they offer[00:51:00] social safety nets, when you end on hard times, they offer services that help care for elderly individuals.Malcolm: They offer all sorts of services. And so if you want somebody to leave one of those cultural groups, but your group is parasitic and it's not willing to supply any of these services itself. Well, I mean obviously you need the state to supply those services. So what you do is you take money from all cultural groups so that you can more easily deconvert people from the cultural groups that are supplying these services to people.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Which is just really predatory and twisted. And so I think that, I guess my view of state services would be, it should be an opt-in thing. You should be able to opt into the state service system or you should be able to, like the Amish do with social security. Amish don't pay Social Security because the state understands that their culture is actually very effective at supplying social security to Amish individuals.Malcolm: Exactly. And I'd love to be able to opt into that. And then people are like, yeah, but then all of these systems wouldn't work. And it's like, Have you noticed something there? Is it that the [00:52:00] cultural groups, this sort of degraded cultural group that you've created that doesn't actually care for its own members, is that a problem?Malcolm: Nobody would want to join it if, if they had to, everyone would start going back to these older cultural groups that do provide all these services. If you took them away from the state, it's like, ah, maybe light bulb there. You've realized what it means to be parasitic. But anyway,Malcolm: We are so excited that you guys joined usMalcolm: hopefully we got crazy here. But it's something we really did need to talk about at some point.Simone: Yeah. Here's, hoping it turns out well save a copy of this video. Wait 200 years and half your either totally non-existent because you failed or existent great grandchildren check it out and tell us if we were right or not.Simone: Well,Malcolm: I mean, we successful, I mean, I think it's an existential quest to create a pluralistic alliance of conservative cultures that can fight both , this sterilizing mind virus, but also fight the [00:53:00] cultures that are just, progressives waiting in the wings to erase every culture they come across the moment they gain power.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And I, I do think that now we're in this position, very emperor of Dune, where all of the conservative cultures finally have a reason to band together. It it, so the plot of Emperor of Dune is the this guy basically says, how do I get these groups that have always been at each other's throats?Malcolm: Well, I need to create an authoritarian force so evil that they'll finally have a reason to build structures to work together. And they'll remember how bad it is to have one culture sort of ruling all other cultures dictatorial. I hope that this progressive mind virus has created that so that iterations of all of the conservative traditions can understand why they're better off in pluralistic ecosystems and why they're better off building cultural infrastructure that helps defend those pluralistic ecosystems.Malcolm: Because right now if we don't ban together, we all loseSimone: big stakes. Good luck. I love you, Malcolm. Hopefully love you. We'll have a lot of [00:54:00] successful grandkids and they with a bunch of other families save the world. Yay.Malcolm: Hey, we need people for our kids to marry. Right? That's why we gotta bring this group together.Malcolm: Yeah, that's theSimone: real long call here. So guys, hurry up cuz our kids need to not be single forever. All right, thanks. Okay, thanks. Bye. Yeah. Cool. Love you Malcolm. Speaking of which daycare pickup time? You're doing leftovers, right? I'm stir Frys or do you want me to Yeah, you makeMalcolm: great. She did tacos yesterday.Malcolm: They were fantastic. And she did it for a guest. She was telling me today that she was diluting the meat with onions to, to make it last a bit longer and how to stretch it. Yeah, I gotta stretch it now. I'm making taco leftovers. Getting a little glimpse into our life here, yu Okay. Mix it with some curry spices.Malcolm: Create something really special with it. Then eat it with chips, so it'll be quite good.Simone: Cool. I'll get it ready for you while you pick up the kids. Will do. Have a good one. You too. Welcome. 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AI generated summary: In this enlightening conversation, Malcolm and Simone explore the mechanisms of hierarchy and status within the Catholic and Jewish communities, and how intelligence and merit play significant roles in these systems. They examine the differences and similarities between the two, explaining how each system sorts for intelligence and their potential for abuse. They also delve into the topic of martyrdom and victimhood, discussing how these statuses are viewed differently within both communities. Watch till the end as they touch on the impacts of nepotism and how Catholic tradition has historically navigated this issue.Puritan Spotting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/Simone: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. This is an episode I was so excited to record. Because what we had done an episode on how our mainstream society and how the virus or the urban monoculture, how it sorts the intellectual hierarchy of status. And we had people say, that's a really interesting topic.Malcolm: I'd love you to go deeper on this, this concept. And what really got me excited is some conversations we had had afterwards with people from different cultural traditions, because different cultural traditions. Do this status sorting quite differentially between them, and I think that's a really interesting thing to dig into because it allows you to hypothesize on the pros and cons of these different methods for determining this.Simone: So in other words, what we're going to explore is the ways in which different cultures sort for leaders [00:01:00] and how that could affect their success, their vulnerability to mimetic viruses, their overall long term potential and all sorts of other factors.Malcolm: Correct? Yeah. Yeah.Would you like to know more?Malcolm: And I think the first place you see this is in where you get long tail results, like where certain cultures seem to perform.Malcolm: Unusually well or unusually poorly. So an example that I often mention, which I think is a very interesting and telling example, is that when you're talking about the conservative intellectual movement, like, if you look around at most, almost all of the mainstream conservative intellectuals today, like, I'd say, like, 95% of the well known ones, they are typically from Jewish backgrounds or Catholic backgrounds.Malcolm: They are very few from Protestant backgrounds. And yet the majority of conservatives in the United States are from Protestant backgrounds. And so this is very interesting. And it's, what's causing this? Why, why do we see this phenomenon? And part of [00:02:00] it has to do with how the Jewish and Catholic groups sort their internal power hierarchies, which are one of the things we always say is so if you're talking about really progressive Jews are really progressive Catholics, they all just buy into this mainstream urban culture.Malcolm: So there isn't as much difference in how their power hierarchies work. But when you're talking about very conservative iterations of each of these, there's actually a really enormous difference. So do you want to jump into, we were talking with a Haraiti rabbi friend recently around how he said his culture was sorted for internal intellectual hierarchy.Simone: Yeah, I think what we found was really striking about it is it did not sort based on credentials or time. It was sorted based on demonstrable knowledge that was easily verifiable. So if you came in to a group of people and you were able to refer to and quote a text really eloquently, but also accurately, [00:03:00] then you were able to do so better than the other people in the room, you would climb above in the hierarchy.Simone: And it was really easy to verify the eloquence and accuracy with which someone quoted and therefore understood a certain text because you could just quickly look it up.Malcolm: Right? Yeah. And so it allowed for this really interesting phenomenon where when you were meeting with another person, like another Jewish man in one of these communities, you could say, what are you studying right now?Malcolm: And from the texts they said they were studying, you could know approximately how advanced that they were in their general knowledge of this field. And then you could test them on that by saying. Oh, well, page 56 or whatever. What do you think of this? Right?Malcolm: And they need to know how this quote was sourcing other material, how it interlinked to other material. And it's a quick way for you to determine where they are in the hierarchy relative to you.Simone: So almost like, let's say, let's take the religion out of this and let's pretend that this is a totally different community.Simone: Like it's a Twilight fan fiction community. [00:04:00] So, if, if you were trying to gauge using the same general system and framework, you would ask, Oh, like, well, have you read this fan fiction? Well, what did you think about when? The werewolf like hooked up with the, Confederate vampire in this particular, alliance to destroy this weird faction.Simone: And then if, if they didn't really know how to comment on it eloquently, you would understand, well, they haven't gone that deep into the canon. They haven't gone that deep into the lore. Therefore I am above them in the status hierarchy. And they would understand that they are below me because they haven't read that book yet.Simone: Or they didn't, they said that they did, but they don't really know the lore that well. They didn't really take it in.Malcolm: Yeah, and a really interesting phenomenon you can get with this and a really interesting advantage to this system is it allows for different subgroups within the wider ultra orthodox Jewish community to focus on different texts.Malcolm: So some groups might believe that one text is like a more important thing for a learned person to know than another group and because of the way this power hierarchy structure works. [00:05:00] These groups will begin to interact with each other less and less because , there isn't a cross communication between their power hierarchies a lot.Malcolm: Like the way that they have dedicated their time doesn't cross to status within another community. Yeah. It's almostSimone: like 50 shades of gray fan fiction community branching off from Twilight fan fiction community. And at first they were the same base, but then they veered in so many different connect directions that they could no longer really.Simone: Be interchangeable in terms of merit. So one leader from one advanced version of that group couldn't immediately go over and own the otherMalcolm: group. But what this allows for cultural evolution wise is it allows for the, the texts that end up being more important in terms of like resisting the social virus right now.Malcolm: Those communities will naturally out compete the ones that are following groups of texts that are less strong at doing that, or texts that are more useful at, say, making the group uniquely good [00:06:00] at surviving and competing in a really highly technological age. Those groups will naturally out compete the other groups.Malcolm: And one of the very interesting things about Judaism that quite differentiates it from many other traditions, is most Jewish groups can reintegrate with most other Orthodox Jewish groups after they have split from each other. And why this is the case is actually fairly memetically complicated. And we go into detail in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion.Malcolm: And it's not totally germane to this conversation, but it's something worth noting here because what it allows for is the less successful groups, the groups that are studying texts, it turns out to be less. Competitive in current environments can then reintegrate even when they don't do as well. They just reintegrate as lower status because they don't know as much about the text that other people are following.Malcolm: But where this gets really interesting. With a Catholic comparison here, because we're going to get to that system next, is it allows for a Jewish individual, and this happens with rabbis in ultra orthodox communities, where a rabbi [00:07:00] might be giving a speech to a group, and if a younger individual essentially shuts them down, like they show they know more than the rabbi, Then that's over.Malcolm: Like people just walk out of the room. It's done. They have lost status. And, and, and that's a really interesting phenomenon because that really contrasts with the Catholic system. So one, I hope broadly you can see how this Jewish system would encourage people who are intellectually inclined to move into philosophical pursuits.Malcolm: And, and that's why you will often see them in the political space disproportionately, because if you are intelligent and in a conservative Jewish community, you are rewarded pretty dramatically for pursuing philosophical pursuits. . Mm hmm, mm hmm. So this is really interesting in how it contrasts with the Catholic community. So the Catholic community also really rewards people who are uniquely intellectual or uniquely [00:08:00] intelligent from engaging disproportionately with philosophy and theology.Malcolm: But the status of individuals within the Catholic community, like how smart they are, isn't determined using one of these organic systems that you see within the Jewish community. Instead, it's determined by a central bureaucracy, which then determines, okay, who below me in this bureaucracy, who below me in the hierarchy, am I seeing is high, like, high quality in terms of their intellect?Malcolm: And then let's raise them higher within the hierarchy. So within a Catholic sermon, you would never have somebody who is being preached to show the person up and then say, okay, now I'm the, I'm the preacher. Now I'm the, the high status individual now, because these are two different systems for sorting for intelligence in the Jewish system.Malcolm: It's actually the audience that's sorting for intelligence. Whereas in the Catholic system, it's the broadly agreed upon, more intelligent people, who have been certified by the central bureaucracy, [00:09:00] who are sorting for intelligence. Which creates it's a really good system. It, it, like, it's, it's not.Malcolm: It can sound like it's an easily abusable system, but it's actually really good at sorting for genuine intelligence and preventing weird little culty buds. One of the problems with the Jewish system is because you can get like one group focused on this book, and one group focused on this book, and one group focused on this book, is you can get esoteric cult like buds almost forming.Malcolm: that become quite different from what most people would think of as mainstream Judaism, whereas within the Catholicism, you have this centralizing force. And Catholicism is not the only culture that, that, that operates this way. You also see this within, like, for example, the Mormon community uses a somewhat simpler status sorting mechanism.Simone: What I think is interesting here when I'm thinking about these scenarios, the scenario in which someone stands up and is like, hold on. And the conditions in which that person is actually given space or given [00:10:00] respect. In contrast with other groups. So, with some Jewish groups, and I would say some, not all, I would say more Orthodox Jewish groups.Simone: If you stand up and you're like, hold on, you are given a platform and you are given status if you are able to back up your statement with true demonstrated knowledge. In, in the Catholic system, as you describe it, if you stand up and you say, hold on, well, first off, like you probably shouldn't do that because you should respect your authority more that you should be scouted based on your merit and based on that, then you're given the right.Simone: So you have to be scouted and you have to show your merit by basically participating in the system but more through a back channel kind of way. And then I think about in contrast, a lot of other cultures, both secular and religion. In which people who stand up and say, hold on, are given respect, not because they show their merit genuinely through their actual argument in the moment and knowledge in the moment, but literally because of their status and often because of their victimhood status, which I think is really interesting.Simone: So,[00:11:00] in, in these, in these Catholic and Jewish examples that you're present presenting. A victim or someone who has been disadvantaged in some way is going to have zero privilege and perhaps many disadvantages because they don't have the knowledge. They don't have the ability to show people up.Simone: So they're not given a, they're systematically continue to be disadvantaged. Whereas in these other groups, they're given a lot of voice, but is that voice. helpful to those groups. And I think that's the sort of really controversial question. Like, should we be giving voices to people who have victim status?Simone: Because are they even capable or in a position of doing good for the organization and the people on the whole or not? I don't know. WhatMalcolm: you just mentioned is actually one of the dangers of the Catholic system. It's the Catholic tradition has long lauded People who undergo suffering on behalf of the church, but some people have confused that with victimhood status, which are actually two different things to suffer for your faith is very different than to give somebody status just because they suffer [00:12:00] broadly.Simone: I feel like martyrdom or, or, or other forms of sacrifice actually have to come from a position of privilege because you have to have something that you're giving up. And if you don't have anything that you give up, then you can't, you literally can't make that sacrifice. So literally like the ultimate victims.Simone: Can't even be a martyr or a sacrificer in the Catholic system.Malcolm: Well, and I think that the iterations of the Catholic tradition, which make this differentiation are going to be the ones that survive this period. Another really interesting thing about the Catholic system for sorting hierarchy. Is its biggest flaw.Malcolm: Its biggest flaw is that it doesn't allow for quick cultural evolution. So you look at the Jewish system and we talked about this blood budding dynamic system within the Catholic system or the very closely related Mormon system. The people in power. Are almost always going to be older individuals, very much older individuals.Malcolm: They're going to be from previous generations and they're going to be hugely incentivized to largely keep things the same. [00:13:00] Now, unlike Mormons, Catholics are one of the longest surviving continuous cultural traditions. So the question is, how did they survive this? Because that's a very. Interesting problem to have, and they survived it through this really beautiful mechanism.Malcolm: Which is essentially creating new deviant subcultures within the central Catholic organization, and that is what the religious orders are. The religious orders allow for sort of an internal incubator within the Catholic Church, where a group has a slightly different culture than the mainstream church, a slightly different way of doing things in the mainstream church, and is often more fervent and lives in a very different lifestyle than the mainstream church, which brings in the sort of rebellious, pushing, Cultural limits type people.Malcolm: And what's really fascinating is most of these orders, as they get older, they then become more opulent, more hedonistic and they become [00:14:00] less cool and they fall apart. And then you've got the other, the new order. But what these orders allow the Catholic tradition to do is It's almost like taking stem cells from like a younger tradition.Malcolm: They can take the individuals who have honed themselves within these orders and then re inject them into the top of the Catholic hierarchy in a way that keeps the tradition acting much younger than it actually is and much more dynamic than should be possible, given the hierarchical system.Simone: Which is.Simone: It sounds almost like a skunk works or like innovation or VC branch of a business that's trying to stay fresh where they will spin off businesses and maybe those businesses ultimately will be strategically useful to exactly what it'sMalcolm: like a skunk works but like having multiple skunk works departments that are competing against each other.Malcolm: Yeah, which is ideal. Yeah. Which is ideal and a really fascinating cultural solution. Another big problem that you're going to have with the Catholic system is, okay, you've got this [00:15:00] system, you're going to end up with nepotism is going to be a major problem. Because people are going to be disproportionately motivated to promote their kids.Malcolm: I mean, that happens in any system like this. So how does Catholic tradition deal with that? Another really interesting solution, which likely has I think more probably long term negative consequences and positive consequences, which is to say that if you're entering the central hierarchy, you can't have kids.Malcolm: Now this had some really interesting effects. One, if you look and you can look at the Wikipedia article on this, it's, it's really fascinating. I think it's something like 40% of Catholic. Clergy is same sex attracted. And this is one of those things that I talk about when I say that becoming gay is just the progressive solution to being same sex attractive, different religious traditions have come up with different solutions to this historically.Malcolm: And many ways it was understood if you were like really intellectually gifted and same sex attractive, and you were born in a Catholic culture, you would go into the priesthood. It's almost like a. Ethically sourced eunuch. Now of course there's [00:16:00] many downsides to this cultural solution that I think we've seen fall out from the many downsides of this cultural solution.Malcolm: But it is a very interesting cultural solution. Actually one of the biggest downsides to it is one that people don't think of, which is , where the Catholic tradition is dominant. These regions didn't need to evolve culturally as many protections against nepotism, specifically family based nepotism, because they would have people in the church often running governmental organizations historically.Malcolm: As these regions secularized because they didn't have as much protection against familial nepotism, you see familial nepotism way, way, way, way, way, way, way higher in these regions. So if you look at majority Catholic regions politics in those regions typically have way more familial nepotism than regions that were historically Protestant, which I think is a really interesting outcome from this.Simone: That is. Yeah. Well, , what could [00:17:00] Protestantism do or shift about its culture? Like, let's say that you're part of a Protestant faction and you're like, well, I would like my. group to have more influence in business, culture, politics, media, whatever. How would you change it's meritocratic or whatever?Simone: It's hierarchicalMalcolm: sorting. Yeah. So this is really fascinating. So the Protestant tradition should also not be thought of as a monolith. No, definitely. I, I'm going to contrast two Protestant tradition solutions to this Calvinist solution. and the Quaker solution. So , now we've got to go back to how these two cultures understand truth, which we've talked about in other videos. To Quakers, truth is something that comes from within. That's why, in their meetings, in one form of their meeting you will have people just stand up when they feel internally moved because truth is this internal emotional thing that bubbles up within you.Malcolm: Within the Calvinist tradition Even having a preacher was in more strict Calvinist [00:18:00] face standing in front of the room. If you read things out of order that could incept people with your way of looking at the text, if you read things with an inflection that could incept the way people are looking at the text, if you add any commentary, if you do a play, all of that is highly sinful.Malcolm: It's supposed to be just completely logically. Self determined in the moment like I E I need to study my natural environment. I need to study the Bible and that is where I can determine truth. Now, both of these lead to very different types of status hierarchies within the Calvinist tradition.Malcolm: And you saw this from our cultural perspective in the video on. Like, how do we determine who we view intellectually? We're both from a Calvinist tradition, and the Calvinist tradition historically views a person's ability to compete in real world environments like their ability to Actually, like, do well in, in, in the world as a sign of their competence.Malcolm: And that is why often when you have leaders in Calvinist churches [00:19:00] they're often people who have been successful in other endeavors before they moved into that movement. And in addition, it's, it's, it's pretty common. Within Calvinist churches to have church leaders historically now the new Calvinist church is a different species in the old Calvinist church that's wearing it almost like cosplay.Malcolm: It was historically common for them to have jobs outside of running the church because that is how you showed like that you were a competent individual. But also that your loyalties weren't divided. You weren't reliant on the church for money because that's another thing that could corrupt you.Malcolm: The Calvinist tradition is very focused on all of the things that can corrupt a source of truth and this leads to many negative externalities. The biggest negative externality is that they distrust everything. And if you look at a lot of the traditions today, like QAnon and stuff like this, these definitely evolved out of the Calvinist tradition.Malcolm: This, everything's a conspiracy, only trust yourself. I can provide you with some clues, like look here and here. But at the end of the day. Truth can only come from you [00:20:00] logically looking at the world. The Quaker tradition did something very different. And we'll argue in other longer videos that, that you can guess what evolved out of Quaker tradition.Malcolm: But they have always, if you read the LBMC did a very good sort of analysis of early Quaker tradition. Their internal hierarchy was based on virtue signaling. From even the early Quaker tradition showing that you were a good person through what you were saying was the way within these, these settings where like you had God speak through you, so you would stand up when you felt moved to say something, well, how do you show your status vis a vis other things, people, you show things that seem more Christly, and what that meant within the Quaker tradition began to deviate more and more.Malcolm: Today we know how virtue signaling goes wrong, but historically they would have said, well, we don't judge people by how smart they are. We judge people by the quality of their character. That's how we sort our internal hierarchy. And that actually sounds really smart and enlightened. It just leads to negative [00:21:00] externalities after it's been allowed to like run on its own for a really long period of time.Simone: Well, because in the end, charisma is. Is not always right. It's not always correlated with with output or outcome or ability to build things. Right. And also there's the, the, the sort of inverse correlation between people who are willing to sit around and politic and signal and people who are willing to sit in.Simone: Churn and build, right? And, and so when you have a system that sorts more for the signaling and the politicking, you're sorting for leaders who are good at signaling and politicking rather than building. And that's one of the reasons why we're so obsessed with slash interested in this topic is we think constantly about, well, how, how do we put people at the top who are genuinely most able to build things?Simone: In a way that's really meaningful without necessarily sorting for people who are good at politicking. Although you need a little bit of that, because any leader also has to be able to lead other people and [00:22:00] convince them to do things. And so politicking is important.Malcolm: Well, so another Calvinist thing that was used to sort internal hierarchical structures that had nothing to do with a person's competence but led to a lot of stereotypes about Calvinists, was the level of personal suffering that you were willing to undergo to achieve something.Malcolm: So Calvinists would often try to show off to other Calvinists how austere their lifestyles were, or how intense their daily suffering was. And this is why in, in, in many Calvinist stereotypes, you see them being visibly disfigured, like they would show off more than other people, their, their physical disfigurement.Malcolm: Or ailments, like walking with a cane or something like that. So you look at Calvinist stereotypes throughout media, like Scrooge is a great Calvinist stereotype, right? He's a guy who's hoarding his wealth, like he's very wealthy, like that's always a traditional Calvinist stereotype, is they're very wealthy because that's how they determine their, their position within their local status hierarchy.Malcolm: But he didn't spend his wealth, even within his daily life, they talk about in the story. That he [00:23:00] would eat gruel, that he had no servants who worked for him, that he wouldn't heat the house which is something that even Simone and I do, so he wasn't, like, saving money to spend it on himself which I think a lot of people read the story today to know.Malcolm: Actually, Scrooge is a very interesting story. It's a, it's a corrective rape fantasy about Calvinist moral values. Because Scrooge was accurate. Giving the money to Tiny Tim's family was not the most effective use of charitable funds. And it was, it was quite indulgent based on his sort of personal community to, to do that.Malcolm: That's just not the way a good Calvinist would do that. And a lot of people today, because they're not familiar with the Calvinist stereotypes, they read the story and they think Scrooge is a Jewish stereotype. He was from Scotland, like that's a classic Calvinist stereotype. He, he said bah humbug to Christian, again, thinking holidays, obscuring holidays is another classic Calvinist stereotype.Malcolm: Being tall and gaunt is another classic Calvinist stereotype. Thinking you're morally superior to people is another classic Calvinist stereotype. But having your own [00:24:00] moral framework and not engaging with the world's moral framework is another classic Calvinist stereotype. And what's really interesting, even though Calvinists aren't that common in the world today, you still see this stereotype in media all the time.Malcolm: What are some other things you see? Typically they wear red and black. They often wear vests or Scottish attire. They're often physically disfigured in some way. And they are often seen as obsessed with pain to some extent. So, Scrooge, again, Scrooge McDuck, Donald Scrooge is a classic Calvinist stereotype.Malcolm: Silco from Arcane is a pretty good depiction of a Calvinist stereotype.Simone: I just find it really funny that Ebenezer Scrooge is like this, this, this caricature argument against effective altruism, you're saying? It's kind of true. Well, itMalcolm: kind of is. What's another one I'm thinking of? Vader and Anakin to an extent, because another, the flip side to the Calvinist stereotype is they're either seen as being very Like uncaring or sort of like manic like, like businessy manic and, and, and house is full of investments.Malcolm: That's another Calvinist stereotype is the [00:25:00] invention thing and having houses strewn with inventions that I know even some of my ancestors, when you go to their house, we would talk about like all the little inventions they had everywhere because that was a way that you showed how your intelligence had real world applicability.Malcolm: To visitors to where you live which was, was really interesting and a good list of these is actually found on a Puritan spotting by a star site codex. He did a thing on these, these Calvinist stereotypes, and I'll include a link to that.The one interesting part of the Calvinist stereotype that he did not touch on in Puritan spotting was the stereotype that if they have a. , so, or family. They are almost always featured. As working together, like the way that they emotionally relate to other people is through their work. And, when people look at someone mind's relationship, it can look really unusual in that we run our companies together and stuff, but that was actually traditionally the way things were done within the Calvinist tradition.And it's [00:26:00] something that you will see throughout Calvinist archetypes.Malcolm: Now, some people might say, Oh, like George Lucas didn't say that this was the stereotype he was going for, but he also didn't say that Jewish was the stereotype he was going for with Watto or racist.Malcolm: Just general racist was the stereotype he was going for with George R. Binks. He seemed to. Whole culturally evoked sets of things that seem to go together in his mind without realizing that these cultural sets came from like imprinted stereotypes because these cultural groups existed in the world around him or had existed and therefore had imprinted themselves onto media, even though now Calvinists are mostly extinct as a cultural group. But anyway, something that you had mentioned about the way these different cultures differentiate from each other that I found really fascinating.Malcolm: . Yeah, talk about the IQ shredder concept.Simone: Yeah, I mean, you and I were talking at first about how we were like, wait, this meritocratic sorting system in Orthodox Jewish communities is Super awesome. Like the fact that there is a provable way to, [00:27:00] to demonstrate your merit.Simone: Like, Oh my gosh, these are exactly the sorts of people I would want to have ruling my culture. And then we realized, Oh, but wait, like these are, these are people who are going in and spending all their time in deep, deep, deep esoteric religious study. And per our cultural background, we're like. Oh no, like we want them to like build spaceships that take us to Mars that we want them to get off a soft planet.Simone: We want them to solve like all diseases and they're reading these. So we, we did find it really interesting where like, this is a significant deviation from our culture and that our culture is like, okay, take these people. And like, have them solve the world's problems. But I guess per the moral framework of many of these very Orthodox Jewish communities, I mean, the biggest problems are delving into these deep religious texts.Simone: And, and the solution isn't necessarily to like, go off planet because there's a lot of other important religious stuff that's going [00:28:00] on that they need to workMalcolm: But there is a downside to what you're saying, right? And there's a reason that their culture doesn't do that. So that is essentially what Reform Judaism did. Is they said, we'll still sort our status hierarchy by how intelligent a person is. Right. But we'll outsource that to a form of intelligence sorting that has more real world applicability, specifically the degrees that people were getting.Malcolm: This is why you have the stereotype in traditional Jewish families of, go be a doctor, go to this fancy university because, and I also think it's why you saw Jewish families over represented in Ivy league schools, partially because. There is more cultural reward for Jews going into Ivy League schools than there are, for example, for a person of a Protestant background.Malcolm: In fact, I would be quite shamed within a lot of Protestant cultural circles for mentioning the fancy schools that we went to. ... It's just seen really negatively, like, like as, as if you actually weren't able to achieve things in the real world. Now, this [00:29:00] outsourcing worked for a while.Malcolm: The problem is, is it left a giant gaping back door for the virus to get through, which is as soon as the virus took over the institutions, it specifically was sorted into positions of power , was in the Reform Jewish movement. And... It allowed the movement to be really quickly and aggressively corrupted by the virus as happened to all cultural traditions that sorted for intelligence.Malcolm: By degrees. We also saw this within the Unitarian Universalist movement, which which did something similar. And what was really interesting to me is this more orthodox approach to Jewish intelligence. They now actively, like, look down on the university system in part because they see how efficacious list has gotten and that they feel like the cultural winners here.Malcolm: Like we followed the old way of doing things that may not have looked like. Why are you doing things this way? It may have seemed less efficacious, but in the long run, it's [00:30:00] keeping their fertility rates up and it's keeping their cultural identity strong in a way that you're not seeing as much in the, in the reform community, which is becoming just like holiday traditions and, and a few other differential things, but not so much a, a genuinely different, like moral framework than society writ large which I think is really interesting.Malcolm: So there are negatives but you're, you're trading one thing for another thing. We have to remember as much as we talk about like the Calvin, the Calvinist went extinct. Basically they used to be the time of the signing around the declaration, at least among white Americans, they were well over 50% of the population.Malcolm: And now they're like 0. 5% of the population. So it is a failed system. It may have done a good job of sorting for competence. That's why you got the, the, the stereotype of the. Wealthy Calvinist, but I think where it really failed people who wanted to stay in the tradition.Malcolm: Well,Simone: I also, I would, and there are, of course, are many exceptions here, but the stereotype of the wealthy Calvinist is also not the stereotype of a very [00:31:00] pronatalist Calvinist.Malcolm: They, yeah, because I mean, you don't want to have fun. I mean, the classic, who wants to marry somebody who thinks that dancing is, is, is sinful, and Christmas is sinful, and, and having too much fun is sinful, which is funny, which those are all things that you and I, music is sinful.Malcolm: Famously, like Geneva banned me after becoming a predominantly Calvinist band all music that had words for like a hundred year period or something because they didn't want people to have too much fun. That would be very Corrupting which is funny that that's still very much in our sort of secular tradition.Malcolm: So one of the questions we have for ourselves is, can we create an iteration of this tradition, which, which is able to both resist the virus and motivate high fertility rates? But I mean, the jury's really out betting odds would be against us, but this whole, the reason we're having this conversation is I think it's really important for people to note that there are actually.Malcolm: Like systemically, the way they sort their internal hierarchy, the way they see the world, there are really [00:32:00] big differences in the way different cultures approach things. And those differences lead to different long tail consequences. The, the Catholic system for, for sorting IQ is likely why the last Supreme court seven of the.Malcolm: nine justices had a Catholic upbringing. One had one Protestant, one Catholic parent. So you might not count them. And the other two. Came from Jewish backgrounds. Not a single one came from a Protestant background. That is wild when you consider the demographics of this country.Malcolm: Right. But it makes a lot of sense when you look at how these cultures sort for status. You simply aren't going to get up. Even I growing up, remembered the shame that my parents told me I would be looked at within the family if I became something as. Low status as a lawyer. Whereas in many other cultures, a lawyer would be seen as a very high status profession.Malcolm: And this has to do with how these cultures relate to truth within the Calvinist tradition. The lawyer is. The steward of the bureaucracy, what [00:33:00] could be lower status than engaging with the bureaucracy? You, you've become mentally addled, you, you, you become nepotistically polluted, but it's very interesting.Malcolm: And I think that. Through understanding these genuine differences within our different cultures and through better clarifying them and understanding the advantages and disadvantages that each have, we can better appreciate why we are all better off of being in a genuinely culturally diverse environment.Malcolm: Yeah. Because one of the things that I've always found really laughable about progressivism is they claim to want diversity and then you're like, Oh yeah, diversity is great because different groups are better at different things. That's the point of diversity. Being different is the point of diversity.Malcolm: If it's superficial, if you are going to pretend that all diversity is actually just completely superficial and doesn't really affect how different groups perform at different things, then You've created this, this mockery of diversity [00:34:00] and and worse when you can't explain why different groups are doing better at different things, then the only explanation you conceivably have is they're cheating.Malcolm: They, they've rigged the system in their favor there, and that creates animosity between groups. And that creates, I think, really interesting phenomenons where groups begin to tear each other down or try to frame other groups is doing better. And you get this whole system, which, it is really bad for groups that actually lead to better outcomes like, Jewish groups and Catholic groups, which I think disproportionately do really well in bureaucracies and academicSimone: settings.Simone: But I think it's also really important to think about these dynamics because it doesn't matter if you're looking at a friend group somewhere or a secular group or a fan community or a religious group, or even a family looking at how they sort for the people that they put in positions of leadership.Simone: will enable you to kind of understand where that group is going to go and what it will be able to do. [00:35:00] So all, all groups will produce something, but what it will be able to produce, whether that is like, really esoteric, creative, amazing things, or, real world, or we'll say larger society, agency, all sorts of things that, that depends on how meritocratic sorting works.Simone: So look closely at that and you'll be able to discover a ton of other things much more quickly than by analyzing a lot of other elements of the group that would take more time.Malcolm: Yeah, it's a really fun way to think about things, but also think about what you're doing for your own family, I think to a lot of people of this generation, they grew up without a culture because they didn't know what their culture was.Malcolm: And when they move back to cultures and they're trying to choose which one they adopt Or trying to recreate some iteration of what their family's historic culture was. They, they often think it's just the theology. When there's a whole worldview that, that worked alongside this theology, and a whole way of sorting yourself culturally.Malcolm: that led to these cultural [00:36:00] differences and you can make a much more informed decision as you recreate your family culture in, in, in the light of a virus that has eroded and erased so many family traditions.Simone: Yeah, absolutely. No, it was fun talking about this with you. I know we've been talking about it for daysMalcolm: now.Malcolm: Yeah. You've, you've helped all of these ideas. I might talk more, but a lot of these are just me parroting the ideas that Simone is telling me inSimone: private. I'm more like, I just ask you dumb questions, but that's our tradition. And I absolutely loveMalcolm: it. Yeah, that's our true. Oh, that's the way our gender dynamics work.Malcolm: Yeah.Simone: I ask really dumb questions cause I'm like so confused and he gives really smart answers and they're like so sexy. And I'm So I'm like hot for it, but that's howMalcolm: you incept me with your worldview. It's your womanly ways,Simone: my, yeah, my feminine, my, my sexuality for wherever it is this is a pleasure.Simone: I'm looking forward to our next conversation. Cause we've got [00:37:00] a good one coming up. Yeah. All right. Love you, Malcolm. Love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this enlightening conversation, Malcolm and Simone critically dissect the nature of intelligence and the hierarchy of knowledge. Drawing on historical anecdotes and personal experiences, they lay bare the institutional bias, gatekeeping, and hurdles that prevent truly novel ideas from taking root within academia and society. From the stifling of innovation to the ironic role of performative intelligence, they bring to light some hard truths about our education system and the ways in which it determines who is seen as smart. As they navigate through academic consensus and fashionable ideas, join them for an honest exploration of how we shape, share, and value knowledge.Transcript: Malcolm: [00:00:00] when somebody comes up with a genuinely novel idea, .Malcolm: Their idea is often treated like an insane cult. Wow. And, and you see this within academia today. The difference we have today is that ironically the academic system has more a monopoly on what's considered truth than the church ever had. And so it is very hard for new ideas to form. And when a new idea does form, people are punished.Malcolm: SeverelyWould you like to know more?Simone: Hello,Malcolm: gorgeous. Hello, Simone. I am excited to be chatting today. What are we talking about? Well, you'reSimone: being like Professor Malcolm because we have a quote to discuss. This is like homeworky. It sounds like.Simone: It reminds me of my honors classes in collegeMalcolm: the article was called The Mid Wit Menace, on a sub stack by somebody called Millennial Woes. And I don't think it's that much of a red sub either.Simone: All right.Simone: Because he has convinced himself by embracing fashionable ideas that he's very wise, he will not accept that [00:01:00] anybody is wiser than him unless they also embrace those fashionable ideas. In his mind, that is the only thing that could prove the person to be as wise as him, let alone even wiser.Simone: But a person wiser than him would never adopt those b******t, fashionable ideas. So they would never appear in the mid wit's perception as wiser than him. Thus, the mid midwife is trapped in his midwifery.Malcolm: I think this quote is describing a very real phenomenon in our society.Malcolm: Hmm. With how people judge what intelligence is. Yeah. When they are creating this organically formed hierarchy that determines truth within our society. Okay. So if you say something that is very antithetical to the accepted truth of society. People will look at you as an idiot, right? Mm-hmm.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So it is very hard to say something that is genuinely innovative or [00:02:00] move things forwards without being looked at as an idiot. It actually can become dangerous to say things that move things forwards. Mm-hmm. And this mindset is particularly true in academia. I've worked in academia for a while, andMalcolm: The hierarchy in intelligence is determined by an individual's ability to memorize, obscure things that other people who are widely agreed upon as smart have written or said determines a person's position was in this local hierarchy. Not their ability to override those things or come up with new ideas that counter those things.Malcolm: Makes a lot of sense because the people at the top of this hierarchy, they're the people who everyone else is quoting, right? And so they have a vested interest in ensuring that you are not just disrupting the hierarchy. This is something even famously like Einstein got into when he got older, where he would.Malcolm: Sort of snipe [00:03:00] at people's careers if they disagreed with his ideas. Yeah. Especially where it turned out that they were right later. Now they were right. Yeah. Oh, wow. And you see this across academic fields, and then when somebody comes up with a genuinely novel idea, you know, all La Darwin. They're basically crazy.Malcolm: Their idea is often treated like an insane cult. Wow. And, and you see this within academia today. The difference we have today is that ironically the academic system has more a monopoly on what's considered truth than the church ever had. And so it is very hard for new ideas to form. And when a new idea does form, people are punished.Malcolm: Severely if it goes against either the consensus or things that are of interest to the academic consensus. Mm-hmm. And I think it's one of the reasons why Acade has been so slow at advancing, but I think we also see this within the comments on our videos sometimes, you know, you know, I've looked at some people who say negative things about our videos [00:04:00] and.Malcolm: Cause I try to determine like, what position are they coming for? Cause I never know, is somebody mad at us because they're a far leftist, are they mad at us because they're a far rightist? , so I can never really tell, you know, and so I try to go into it and one guy who repeatedly comment sort of negative things on our videos, it seems that he's predominantly, he's just like, A generic philosopher, academic philosopher.Malcolm: Yeah. I be a philosophy parrot. That parrots, what everyone considers like smart philosophers have said, and that is how he determines, that he's smart, and so he thinks that we are crazy because I would never do that. I find that to be very disinteresting to, I say this parroting some random sub stacker, but keep in mind I'm parroting a suber that doesn't have a big fan base.Malcolm: So, I, I am recognizing that this concept here potentially has a lot of merit. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Simone, this idea of determining intelligence and how people determine who is intelligent around them.Simone: Well, I think a lot of this actually has to come with something that, that [00:05:00] really blew my mind when I was first researching the careers of artists.Simone: When, like back in 2012 when we first met and a bunch of the artists that I interviewed, Essentially said, well, I have to like, play up the extent to which I'm eccentric and weird and crazy and unstable seeming, because if I don't do that, if I don't have like paints like splattered on my face and my hair's all messed up, and I'm kind of like, oh, hi.Simone: You know, like, like really crazy that people, you like their art cells for less, you know, they, they just aren't really, you know, succeeding as artists. They're not taken. Oddly, they're not taken seriously, so to speak. So I think what's really interesting is that there's this performative image of smartness that people are looking for instead of really like validating.Simone: Is this idea interesting? It's more, does this person look like someone who's intellectual? Do they look like a philosopher? Do they look like a mathematician? In fact, we've even we've met people recently on a very different end of the spectrum. More like, on the technical or like data end of the [00:06:00] spectrum.Simone: Who, who look very. Like analytical engineering and they just always get hired for these positions because they're seen as looking like a trustworthy, reliable engineer, even if actually their track record is abysmal and they don't work at all.Simone: When I, what I think of when I see this quote is I think of the people who style themselves as intellectuals and also use really gatekeeper terms, , like very advanced vocabulary. They will grow beards. They will wear like very professorial looking clothes or weird clothes.Simone: And it even makes me think we, we, we joke about this all the time About ornamental hermits or garden noms. Yeah, so during like around like regency era in, in England, one fashionable thing for a while, and actually this comes very back down to fashion, right? Fashionable ideas. One fashionable thing to do.Simone: If you were a a, a Lord with a house, like a manor house, like a lot of [00:07:00] property, you would set up this kind of weird like, Refuge or shack on your property, and you would bring out an intellectual to live in the shack. And they often like in their, I guess like employment contracts, they were not allowed to cut their facial hair, so they would have these beards.Simone: In some cases they weren't allowed to cut their nails, so they'd have these like gnarled nails and they were supposed to come out when you were entertaining house guests for like, hunting trips and, and, and house parties to Pontificate and be smart and impress people. And of course like they weren't supposed to drink.Simone: They would be caught like at the local pub all the time. They were just supposed to like be alone with their books and you know, provide intellectual inspiration. And what I also think is really interesting is that people like that still do exist and that when like there are, we put them in our circlesMalcolm: and it's one of the worst things about being in these intellectual circles is if you are like known as being smart.Malcolm: There's like this whole class of people that's like known as being smart, but it's [00:08:00] like actively really not smart. We call them anti geniuses. It's where this before I get too far into the concept of anti-genius, there's two other things I want to discuss on this subject that I think are really important.Malcolm: Okay. One is the judgment of Paris, which I thought really related to what you were talking about in the art world, which is you don't just see this in the world of intellectualism. So the judgment of Paris was this famous competition where in, in Paris, where they did a blind tasting and it was thought gonna be a nothing burger that we knew the outcome of, of French wines against American wines.Malcolm: Yes. And what could go wrong? The American wines cleaned up. And what it turned out is all these people who'd been claiming to be experts and stuff like that, they couldn't even tell the difference between the two wines. Mm-hmm. And you have this whole hierarchy of like wine tasting. And there was that one experiment, which I love where they, with sommelier.Malcolm: Yeah, sommelier, they couldn't even tell the difference between white and red wine when it was blindfold. My gosh, it's so, and I was like, oh my God, that so many of these fields, not, not [00:09:00] everyone, like some of them were, were still pretty good. But the idea being is that the hierarchy of knowledge within a field can be almost entirely fabricated, yet it can still be seen as a really high knowledge field.Malcolm: Yes. And that is true. It was art. Well, we often say it was art. Like if one of our kids comes to us and says, daddy, I, I really wanna be an artist. I'm like, oh, well then you're really gonna need to practice and learn a lot about sales and marketing cause art, 100%. You don't need to know s**t about art to be a famous artist.Malcolm: Yeah. You have to haveSimone: a killer network. Yeah. You have to have the right look. Yeah, the, thoseMalcolm: sales. Well, and this is, there was actually that study that was done on artists to find out who was paid the most and it was completely determinant on their network. It was not determinant on how good they were as artists.Malcolm: That it's, it's, it's a completely a, a yeah. It's, it's, it's wild. But anyway, back to the concept of an anti-geniusn and where this relates. To garden nos as weSimone: call them, our nos ornamental [00:10:00] hermits,Malcolm: ornamental hermits in our communities. But we, we, we've come to calling them the shorthand noms, right?Malcolm: They're and, and, and these are people who are just like professionally smart people, but they are more people who are like word cells that got known as smart when they were really young because like they do seem to have a genuine competence in wording.Malcolm: However, I. None of their ideas ever turn out to have any real world applicability, and they don't seem to relate to any ability to change the world in any sort of a better way. They're just theorizing ideas. Mm-hmm. And it grinds my teeth when I, you know, someone who's built successful businesses, who's made multiple calls about, oh, the politics are moving in this way and this is gonna change about society.Malcolm: And then they come true. And, and, and that they're, and I'll be. Br, you know, brandied about by rich people when they're bringing out the, their smart people. And then there's this other group that's just like, Always been wrong about everything, but really good at sounding smart. Oh, butSimone: again, like keep in [00:11:00] mind, even for example, in the startup world, there are like successful entrepreneurs over here doing their thing, and then there are people who are really, really good at raising funds.Simone: And they just raise funds and then they, they have a failed startup, and then they like raise funds again. So I think that there's this world of fashionable ideas, performative signaling of legitimacy in whatever realm you're trying to play in. And then there's the real thing. And the question is, how, how can people know what the real thing is and why?Simone: Why are people not? Necessarily judging what the real thing is, we'reMalcolm: underselling how damaging this concept of an anti-geniusn is or anti-genius are. Mm. So the way that we judge intelligence, meaningful intelligence is it's a person's ability to look at a set of information about the environment or the world today, and use that information to accurately predict.Malcolm: And or shape future outcomes. Applicable intelligence. We had that guy David Rainey [00:12:00] who wrote the book on Changing Minds, and he came to stay with us. And, and we were talking about like, how do you create geniuses? And we're like, everything when we're trying to create a genius is based around real world applicability, real world ability to succeed in real world environments and this definition of intelligence.Malcolm: But then you have these other people who. Sometimes they even know that, that their, the type of intelligence they have doesn't have this sort of real world applicability, but their identity. Is based around being intelligent . Mm-hmm.Malcolm: And their value within, in their social circles is based around being intelligent. Mm-hmm. And, and people can get into this really early, like they get good grades on tests and stuff like that in high school. Mm-hmm. And then it turns out they're just not good at actually performing in, in, in real world environments as though now they have this identity as an intelligent person.Malcolm: Well, andSimone: actually let's, let's point out like related to this is one of the top things parents are told not to tell their kids. Never tell your kid they're smart. Always praise them for working hard because if someone is told they're smart, they will then stop taking risks. Cuz they never wanna do something where they can be proven not smart because it's part of their identity.Simone: This is the problem is and exact well [00:13:00] they feed in, right? This is a cumulative effect is when people grow up. With this reputation of being this wonder kind, it actually affects their outcomes because now they're not taking risks. Now they're not. They're really expressing that much intellectual humility or being willing to fail in a way where they can learn real things because they can't let go of that identity.Simone: They can'tMalcolm: risk it, but they also need the people around them to constantly fail. For sure. That's another thing, to maintain their position. They need to talk down to people who may have like genuine, measurable success in the real world, and they need projects that are, that are happening around them in their ecosystem to constantly fail.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And so, a, a great historical example, if you're talking about like a historical example of an anti-geniusn, one of these people who's known as being smart but has never been successful at anything and makes their living off of, of, of parasitizing wealthy people would be repu. I think he's the classic example of this, and they constantly, well, they damage the communities that they're in because, once you get one of [00:14:00] these the sort of parasitic anti-geniusniueses is attached to you as like a wealthy person. They will siphon your money and your reputation to increase their public image or how far they can broadcast their ideas and reputation because that is the commodity in which they trade in a way that can be very damaging to you as an individual. So. There's some famous, modern examples of anti-geniusn. I don't know. I wanna make beef. Who's the one who I can talk about or I won't make a beef?Malcolm: Greta Thornberg. Greta Thornberg's, the classic anti, obviously she's the child, she's not smart. Um, Like she's an actual,Simone: hey, they're, they're really smart children out there. I think the bigger issue is she's towing the line. She doesn't have any unique ideas. She's saying exactly what, which first thing famous.Malcolm: Yeah. But people would bandy her about like, oh, you have ideas. And so what anti-genius often do within a modern ecosystem is they make their entire career. Around tearing down a specific field. That is what they will do. And since we are associated with things like the, ea don'tSimone: name names.Simone: [00:15:00] Don't name names, yeah. IMalcolm: won't name names, but I would say good sign of an anti-geniusn is they've made their career around tearing down. Other fields around sensationalism., but they've never actually accomplished anything of their own within the field of any real merit. So that's one type of anti-geniusn you'll see. The second type of anti-geniusn you'll see is the mystical anti-geniusn. So these individuals hide that their ideas are really bad by covering them in forms of mysticism that can't be proven.Malcolm: , absolutely right or wrong, but that can sound really smart. Mysticism,Simone: Like the pseudo profound b******t thing.Malcolm: Yeah. But some people are so good at pseudo profound b******t that you're just not gonna be able to catch them on it.Malcolm: Yeah. Um, They, well, it's, it's, and, and us saying all this, this is actually one of our more dangerous videos because I, I am afraid that somebody who is one of these anti-genius will see this and recognize how threatening we are to their income streams. If, if we spread. [00:16:00] This just like, I think obvious.Simone: But here's the thing is I, I genuinely don't believe people who fall for, performative geniuses are going to stop falling for them. Like you've spent decades trying to convince people to stop listening. To either like scam artists, like on, and then like, I'm not saying these people are scam artists, but like you've tried to convince people for yours to stop listening to scam artists or stop listening to people who are just performative, who, who are misleading.Malcolm: We do financial advising for some, you know, elderly people. Exactly. And, and like, nothing, nothing. You say scams is just like a constant. No matter how many times I'm like, this is a scam. This is exactly like the scam you got hit was last time. Here's how you can recognize these scams in the future.Malcolm: And it's the same thing with with, with these groups, you know, we're like, okay, you know, this is another anti-geniusn, but no. Yeah.Simone: But no one ever. Ever, no matter what you say, has changed their views. So I don't actually think anything you're, you're you're saying,Malcolm: well, I think if I reach young people [00:17:00] early enough, they'll begin to build up pattern recognition around that.Malcolm: And so that's why I hope our, our channel and our podcast does reach. I mean, I like that we have older fans, but I think that, , if you can catch someone with some of these pattern recognition things when they're younger, before they build ideas like, this is what a smart person looks like, this is what a.Malcolm: And they'll think, oh, they, they do this, they talk like this. They have these degrees. Like none of those things are actual signs of a smart person. A smart person is their ability to predict or affect future outcomes with knowledge of the current world.Simone: Right. Well, so that's actually what I wanted to ask you.Simone: Like, so what are your tips to people on like, Should you actually consider this person an expert in a field or someone who has like really interesting ideas or someone that you should turn to for wisdom? And how do you determine whether someone is maybe acting like a genius in their field, but not actually someone who's going to give you advice that will get you where you wanna be?Malcolm: Yeah, so I, I think that there's a few core things here. One if when they're coming to you, their primary [00:18:00] recommendation is other people. Say they're smart. Or other people who are generally thought of as smart, say they're smart, but they don't seem to have ever actually accomplished anything concrete then that's a really big red flag.Malcolm: Mm. Because people who are actually that smart generally don't have that hard of time accomplishing things. Mm-hmm. Like whether it's starting a company and making it successful or coming up with a new scientific theory or. And a sign of a true genius. I think like the highest level of genius that we would say is somebody who has been independently smart in multiple fields where their intelligence was in one field, didn't contribute or contributed only minorly to their ability to be successful within another field.Malcolm: Mm. So if it, if they can consistently come at multiple fields and be successful in them, I'm like, wow, that's like the opposite of an anti genius. That's like a. Super genius. I, I would call that because a person could be successful in a field accidentally sometimes, for sure. It's really hard to be accidentally [00:19:00] successful in multiple fields in, in, in different areas.Malcolm: Then you likeSimone: that and of, of course shock calling. Like if, if someone said, I'm going to do this, especially if people doubt them and then they do it, that, that's a big thing. And yeah, cross disciplinary accomplishment I think is, is also super huge and, and hard to replicate if you. If you haven't if you haven't really mastered like life and wisdom, well, we don'tMalcolm: have a genuine understanding of the world, you know?Malcolm: Yeah, yeah. If you're understanding, if you're under, if whatever special access to knowledge you have doesn't have real world applicability, you don't have special access to knowledge. What you have is an ability to convince people you have a special access to knowledge. And for you to say it's not a, it is a scam if, if your knowledge has no way to measure it and no real world applicability it, it's just that you're good at convincing people of that.Malcolm: That's not knowledge. That's. And this is what, well, I think Minta is a great way to sort for [00:20:00] anti-genius. I know. Because if somebody was a real genius, they wouldn't be in Mesa. They'd be out there making a lot of money. They'd be out there doing something. Their, their special access to information about the world would give them some competitive edge if it had, if it's given them so little competitive edge that the way they prove that they're smart is through Mensa.Malcolm: Then they're likely not smart. And this is why a lot of Mensa, it's funny, a lot of Mensa has become, they say like a big problem with Mensa. It's become like a board game and like crime solving society, right? Or like no crime nights and stuff like that. Like just like nerdySimone: things. I guess if you have time to waste on joining and participating in Mensa, you are not really succeeding in the real world.Malcolm: Well, yeah, that seems like an obvious truism to me. Hmm. Do you disagreeSimone: or No? I don't disagree. I, I think that that's a, that's a good identifier. I think what you also pointed to earlier, which is that a really common thing among these people, like, you know, c CEOs of startups who constantly raise money, then like blow up their startups and then just do it again.Simone: Or like, people who say that they're experts in a [00:21:00] field but just aren't, they don't really know what they're talking about is they're really, really, really good with words and they're very convincing. They're charismatic. And I think that's another thing is I even just saw someone. Like tweet about this today that that it's, it's really hard to, like a lot of people just assume if someone is eloquent, if someone is well spoken, they're really good writer, that, that, that means that they must be generally very smart.Malcolm: It's the word sell version of autism. So if somebody's like that sort of. Autistic, really good at engineering and you can talk to them and you can immediately know, oh, this person might be good at engineering, but I'm not gonna like let them impart me with their life philosophy or let them impart me with like, a certain type of tax advice that I know they know nothing about.Malcolm: But if you happen to have that level of intelligence, but it's really narrowly focused at word selling, then you can become actually very dangerous. Because people improperly judge your level of competence and entrust you with [00:22:00] things they shouldn't trust you with. And a point I wanna make to something Simone kept saying, so if somebody fails at a startup, even multiple startups, that doesn't mean they're dumb.Malcolm: It's how they failed at those multiple startups, which is a sign as to whether or not they're actually dumb. That is not to say that people with this sort of ability can't multiple times raise money for something and have people. I've actually noticed most of the people who I thought were anti-genius in the startup world have washed out.Malcolm: Because I, I can think of some off the top of my head who I thought were absolutely anti geniuses. I was like, I. Okay. Right now everyone thinks this person is smarter than me, but I can tell they're not actually that smart. Yeah. Yeah.Simone: Like we just raised for something and you're just like, I'm, this is going toMalcolm: crash and burn.Malcolm: Oh. And I always grinded my teeth when they were like a higher status than me and intelligence. They're like, well, we gotta ask a really smart person. And then they have crash and burned and now they're just generally known as like smart people who go to parties with smart people. But like, oh no. VCs quickly learned not to give them money.Simone: One other point, and I think this is also important and related to what we're talking about, is sometimes you can be a true genuine [00:23:00] genius in one field, and then another common fallacy I see people demonstrate is that they assume that they're just a genius. So like, oh, like, maybe they're like a world class physicist and then they start giving people health advice and no one really questions it.Simone: Cause they're like, oh yeah, Nobel laureate. Like, no, let's. Let's hear what this guy has to say, and like, they really have, they don't really understand what they're talking about, but they're so used to being super, super good in their own field, and they actually have the experience and credentials and research and, you know, like life in their field to actually be really smart that they, they don't know what it's like.Simone: To be dumb. Like they, they can't understand that they're ignorant in another field, and then they, they start basically Yeah. Misleading a lot of people. Well,Malcolm: and I need to also make clear that this is a cultural perspective we have. Yes. It is not a truism. Mm. So different cultures, because I have defined how our culture defines intelligence.Malcolm: And by this definition of intelligence, these people are not intelligent. Different cultures relate to reality in different ways, and they may believe that there's like [00:24:00] some underlying. Metaphysical ness to reality, and that these people swim really well within those environments. Mm-hmm. And that they're not actually as damaging within those environments because they're able to focus all of their ideas instead of on like, tearing other people down on advancing this weird sort of word celly art.Malcolm: And so that's really fine. And also it changes the way that we, you and I have interacted with the world. We've written a number of bestselling books now. Our podcast is growing. You know, I'd love that. Grew faster, but it's growing. Right? And a lot of people are like, you guys seem like really like cogent intellectuals with a hard view of the world that you really thought through within a lot of different domains.Malcolm: Like, why are you just now entering the intellectual space? And the answer is twofold. One is, we wanted to make sure we had income streams before we entered the intellectual space so we would never be determinant on our audience. For what we said, because we never wanna get audience captured. We never wanna enter a space where I'm afraid to say something because I know I'll lose some audience.Malcolm: Like when we did that [00:25:00] Proje episode, we lost a number of subscribers and I was like, whatever. But the other thing is, is from our cultural perspective, it would feel immoral to go out and start acting like, I had any special access to knowledge had I not first applied that knowledge to the world and had it allow me to outcompete other people in multiple domains, whether it's the academic domain or the domain of the business world.Malcolm: So like I started my career in psychology and I had a bunch of weird ideas about how humans thought. And when I brought those ideas to, my supervisor, I they were just like, this is just like a completely different framework for how the human mind works.Malcolm: Like, yeah, why don't you just pick one thing and work on that? And I had this, this sort of epiphany where I was like, you know what? If I actually do have a better understanding of how humans think than the existing dogma of the psychiatry community. Then I shouldn't go into psychology. I should go into business school.[00:26:00]Malcolm: And that's, that's why I ended up going to get an mba. Cause I was like, let's apply these ideas in real world environments and see if they allow me to outcompete other people. And they did. Mm. And now I am fairly confident that most of my ideas are pretty accurate. And, and not just within business, within my relationships, I'd say we have a pretty healthy relationship.Malcolm: Like I wouldn't be going out there giving people relationship advice or advice on how to structure their lives. If I didn't have my own life together, like for example, if I was a, hypothetically, if I was a drug addict who like had like a room, that was a disaster. I wouldn't be going out there telling people to make their beds or that stoicism is the answer to all of life.Malcolm: Oh, sickSimone: burn, Malcolm. Um, I would just, and with that, hold on. There are some people who are much smarter than us who are waiting at daycare. Oh myMalcolm: gosh. Our little toddlers. Get them home. We gotta make them better than us.Simone: Yes. So, sorry we've to end this conversation, but I love talkingMalcolm: about this. I, I, [00:27:00] I love talking about it too.Malcolm: And this one might have been too spicy. I don't know. I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to edit out a lot of parts where I might allude to specific individuals. No. Yeah.Simone: I love you. I love you too. Malcolm Tally ho. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join Malcolm and Simone as they dive into an intriguing thought experiment about the nature of reality, existence, and the universe. Is math truly independent of our perceived reality? Can an equation exist before it's graphically represented? Are we living in a self-simulating reality, or as some may say, a simulation?This profound conversation will make you question everything you thought you knew about our existence, and ponder about the possibility of multiple realities. They also touch on the concept of determinism, secular Calvinism, and how these ideas can be reconciled with a atheistic understanding of truth and metaphysics. Don't miss out on this captivating exploration into the depths of theoretical reality!Based Camp - Reality MathMalcolm: [00:00:00] It's a very lightweight theory for sort of the fundamental metaphysics of reality.Malcolm: And it's, it's really one that I have a pretty high confidence is true just because it's lightweight and it makes predictions . Fun side note about the theory. I have had multiple people offer to sleep with me after I have told them this theory. What? That, yeah. That was a weird thing in college after I had it, this happened on two different occasions.Malcolm: I was hanging out withSimone: a way to bury the lead. Who cares about the nature of reality? This has, how to pick up chicks. Come on Malcolm, let's focus on the stuff that matters here.Would you like to know more?Simone: Hi, gorgeous.Malcolm: Hello Simone. This is gonna be a fun one cuz this is a big pet theory of mine. It is, it is where I'm gonna go crazy and I'm gonna label this something crazy. Simone today was laughing at some of my titles for videos cuz she hadn't seen them. Like, the one for, for. Our marriage contract sign on the bottom line and Simone's all like, [00:01:00]Simone: yeah.Simone: Yeah. But what we're about to talk about, I always, I, I, I joke with Malcolm about this a lot because there's this amazing YouTube channel called Down the Rabbit Hole, and one of the documentaries or videos is. Is on this crazy guy who has this like theory about the time cube and everything's like cube based logic.Simone: And ever since we watched that video, I make fun of Malcolm saying like he has pile based logic because he totally doesn't believe in like folding clothes or putting anything away. Like he has a separate room for his like office and bedroom and is, it is just piles, everything is piles. I have,Malcolm: I have like buckets like, like literally like these big plastic bins that I just throw my clothes in.Malcolm: Yeah. And my system for clothes is all of the clothes I'm actively using. There's two buckets. So I can dig through one bucket and throw it in the other bucket as I look for what I want that day. It's, there's not evenMalcolm: I would be completely, I. Boned, if I didn't have you in my life. Simone, actually, we wanted to start [00:02:00] this thing where we're gonna end our videos with little snippets from our lives. We created this great video of at least on YouTube, I mean on the podcast, you know, the people aren't gonna be able to see it, but to force people to build a, parasocial relationship with them.Malcolm: So we're going to at the end of this one, I'm gonna try to get that one of you cleaning up. Oh God. So people can see how useless I am at anything.Simone: No. Well, while I'm doing that, you're watching the, the nuggets.Malcolm: So I'm playing with my kids, I'm playing with my kids. I have. Brainwashed you into believing that's work.Malcolm: But again, how many housewives have done the same thing? You know? ISimone: mean but yeah. So yeah. I have to say though, like when, when I try to get you in, actually like hang something up, I'm like, oh, it's, but there's sky piles. It's a sky pile. It's a, and not, you're not hanging it, it's just a sky pile.Simone: That's how I got you to do strategy walks. Remember, it's like, you're like, I don't wanna go on a walk. I'm like, oh, but it's strategy walk. So that's, that's why we should, that's why we should go on it. But anyway, you actually have a time cube [00:03:00] kind of theory of reality Yeah. OfMalcolm: your own. I have a time cube theory of reality, and I mm-hmm.Malcolm: Genuinely, like with our future police thing, I'm like, I don't really know if this is true or not. Whatever. Like it's pro I, I, I like 70%. I, I've convinced myselfSimone: to believe it. You confirmation biased our way into kind of believing it. Yeah. But we also know that we've confirmation biased our way into believing it.Simone: Yeah, well,Malcolm: Maybe the future police made us do that, but anyway confirmed with this one. This one is, is, is quite different. This one, I'm actually fairly certain that this is actually how reality is structured. Break it down,Simone: friend.Malcolm: Okay. So it goes with a few premises. , it goes like, if you believe these premises, this is the logical outcome of these premises. First math. Is not dependent on our reality. And by that what I mean is in every possible universe if there are multiple universes, two plus two always equals four. And obviously you can change the rules of [00:04:00] math like using Non-EuclideanMalcolm: math,Malcolm: to mean that it, it has different outcomes like math on a sphere versus math on a plane, right? That's gonna be different, but that's still within the confines that you give the math two things. And two things is always four things. And so when I accept this, that means that math must exist outside our reality as we perceive it.Malcolm: So essentially sort of like all equations kind of exist outside of our reality as truisms. The second thing that I take as true, I. Is that the thing a mathematical equation represents, exists as an emergent property of that equation? So let me explain what I mean by this. So if you have a graphical line, like I can write an equation that is used to describe a line with, if this is true, it means that that line exists.Malcolm: As [00:05:00] a property of that equation, even before I physically graph that line.Malcolm: Finally, so this is just three assumptions I'm making here. four, if you include my assumption that.Malcolm: Because mass exists across reality that mass exists outside of any individual reality. So four assumptions of you include that, but I'm only having four assumptions here. So the fourth is that our reality, the way things interact in our reality can be described with an equation or set of interlinked equations.Malcolm: Now this is not something that physics has found yet. Okay? So this is a predictive assumption. About something physics will find that physics has not yet found, but is making this predictive assumption. Okay. And, and by that what I mean is we keep finding like if you go into physics and, and, and you dig into particle physics or something like that, we keep finding that forces that originally [00:06:00] appeared to be two different forces, . Like magnetism and electricity or the small force in electricity later turn out to just be the same thing. Once you go higher in the equation. Now physics has not yet, like there's the, the concept of the unifying theory of physics that we don't have yet. Right. But, but you know, they're working towards that and I'm predicting that we will find one and it will be basically a single mathematical equation.Malcolm: Okay. So if all of those things are true, then that single mathematical equation that describes how reality is interacting, all the little things within what we perceive to be reality must exist outside of reality. And the reality that it describes in the same way, like a graph that it describes, would also exist parallel to our reality, even if the equation wasn't graphed.Malcolm: I'll, I'll use the term graph manifested, however you wanna put it. Even if it wasn't [00:07:00] simulated. Hmm. Occam's razor. You don't need to assume that physical reality exists for us to be experiencing all of the things that we think we're experiencing. Does that make sense to you, Simone? Or is there anything there I need to elucidate on or?Simone: What I, what I'd love for you to elaborate on is a lot of people are like, oh, what if we live in a simulation? And I feel like this dovetails in interesting ways with that kind of theory because what you're saying kind of is Yeah, sure. Kind of we're like a, like a sort of an algorithmic simulation, but also like, That doesn't mean that our reality is any less reality.Simone: And I think people who think that, that we're in a simulation kind of get this perception that there's like some other more removed reality, like the real world,Malcolm: you know? So if this theory is true, it means the master reality.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. The reality outside of a simulation is a self simulating reality, and [00:08:00] so a reality that was contained within a simulation wouldn't be particularly less meaningful than the master reality. It also has some other moral implications. It means that, All possible realities that can be described by an equation simultaneously exist.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So there are multiple universes that, but you cannot travel between them. But any eco reality described by the same equation, depending on how the equation works. Potentially you can travel between them multiple ways for solving the same equation lead to splitting realities. So if there is one equation, but this equation can be solved in multiple ways, then you would have different realities for each one of those ways.Malcolm: The equation can be solved as a different graphical representation of the equation. Yeah. So it has some implications on the fundamental underlying like reality. So you can say, why do you believe this about reality? Like, this seems like a lot of things to believe.Malcolm: , this is the model for reality that [00:09:00] relies on the fewest assumptions that I could come up with at least. And the least complicated assumptions and the assumptions that seem the most obviously and intrinsically true to me.Simone: And one thing that's really fun about this is you know, a lot of people are like, well, how can you be secular Calvinists? Or How can you be, you know, have all this deterministic thinking, you know, with also like a, a fairly. Atheist background in terms of truth and our metaphysical understanding of reality.Simone: Well, this is how, like, we, we can believe that everything that could happen has happened and will happen, has happened in the same way that with an equation. Mm-hmm. When you plug in different numbers, you're gonna get like the, the, the outputs are there. So every graphical representation, as you say, you know, every reality is there.Simone: And I think that that's kind of fun. It's, I think it's fairly elegant, it's fairly lightweight. Yeah. And, and I don't, I don't know. It, I guess it does color our, our moral view of reality. It, it, it, I would say, offers some comfort in that. I think a lot of people are like, [00:10:00] well, if this is a simulation, we have to like, Please the players of the game or some like simulation builder and like, that's, no, no, no.Simone: That's not it. You know, it's, it's, it's really not. It's, it's just everything is, and everything will be, and everything has been, and everything can be all at the same time. And we're a part of that. And that doesn't invalidate our experience at all as humans. It's just kind of how things are. And I don't know, it gives me.Simone: It gives me comfort. It also doesn't do a whole lot, you know, it doesn't like change cuz you know, it doesn't practically on a day-to-day basis change anything about how we live. We still have the things that we want to fight for and we don't know how things are gonna play out. So we're still excited to see what happens per the weird way that humans perceive the world and reality in time on this sort of arbitrarily linear basis.Simone: Right. But has it changed your meta? Like are your morals different because of this view ofMalcolm: reality? That's a tough question. It has shaped my other views on reality. [00:11:00] Like this theory I came up with when I was in college. Mm-hmm. I actually wrote about it in the college Philosophy magazine.Malcolm: Oh. When I came up with it. Yeah, so it's a fairly old theory in terms of my views of the world, and so a lot of other views I have on the world, like the concept of the future of police, which, which we have as a family religion. This idea that eventuallyMalcolm: a million, 10 million years from now if my distant descendants are still around. If I ask myself, are they more the way I would think of a human today or more the way I would think of like a God today?Malcolm: And I consider that we're only like 200 years away from being able to literally create heavens, right? Like simulated environments that we can upload people into where they can get their every need served. Mm-hmm. Where we could have an AI lattice around the world that you could. Beseech for favors, basically pray to, and it can solve those favors.Malcolm: The type of God that these entities that my descendants could be a million, 10 million years from now is beyond anything that we can conceive today. Mm-hmm. And that being the case, I used to say they relate [00:12:00] to time, the way we relate to time. Mm-hmm. And that being the case, you know, we built this family structure around these descendants.Malcolm: , we call it descender worship instead of ancestor worship. Are rewarding us for creating a prosperous future for the human species. And a, a pluralistic future for the human species than Afu future where people are, are thriving and having new ideas and everything like that. So we you know, raise our kids believing that.Malcolm: So they have this motivation both to have kids, right, but also to try to make the future a better place and feel like they have agency over that future. Mm-hmm. So I think that this belief and, and the determinism that is. Sort of a result of it has big implications on the future. And we did another video, which is one of our least watch videos that's on like free will and determinism.Malcolm: And I'd really suggest people check it out if they hear the theory and they go, oh, this means we don't have free will. Because I don't think free will and determinism are incompatible at all. Oh, hardly. Yeah. , I really like what it means for a world in which we're simulated.Malcolm: Cause the really cool thing about a world in which we're [00:13:00] simulated is in many ways for the way some people judge morality. It could be a world with more meaning than a self simulating world. How I'll explain what I mean by that. A self simulating world exists simply because all equations bring simulations of themselves into reality.Malcolm: Right? Okay. But a simulated world. It exists for a purpose. Its creators. Were trying to do something with that simulation, whether it was do historical research or predict some future event or maximize like Qualia because they have some belief around like, that's a positive thing in the world. And so you are potentially serving your role within this great function, even if you don't understand it.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. But yeah,Malcolm:Malcolm: Another interesting thing about this theory is it becomes potentially less likely we're in a simulationMalcolm: in that literally an infinite number of self stimulating realities will exist based on these [00:14:00] equations. However, I. A higher infinite number of simulations will exist because even if an infinite number of realities will exist within each of those realities, people could create simulations. But I think for a lot of people, what they assume is that a like fixed number of realities exist.Malcolm: And this would assume that a literal, infinite number of realities likely exist depending on how these equations work. MmSimone: mm I see. I see. Hmm.Malcolm: But I do like what you said about it. It's lightweight. That's why I like it. It's a very lightweight theory for sort of the fundamental metaphysics of reality.Malcolm: And it's, it's really one that I have a pretty high confidence is true just because it's lightweight and it makes predictions. I just love that one day. It makes a bunch of predictions about the future. And if, if those predictions come true, it's more likely to be true. It's not saying that it's definitely true, but you know, it's a shock calling prediction on the fabric of reality.Simone: Yeah. So we'll see how it plays out. I'm very curious. I loveMalcolm: you. I do. I love that you [00:15:00] tolerate. My theory is like this, this is actually a, sorry, pardon. Fun side note about the theory. I have had multiple people offer to sleep with me after I have told them this theory. What? That, yeah. That was a weird thing in college after I had it, this happened on two different occasions.Malcolm: I was hanging out withSimone: a way to bury the lead. Who cares about the nature of reality? This has, how to pick up chicks. Come on Malcolm, let's focus on the stuff that matters here.Malcolm: I, well, I, I've never had any other thing where like I had an idea that people thought was so good that they wanted to sleep with me over it.Malcolm: And it could just be that they were drunk and they thought, oh, he just said something he's proud of. So I'm gonna flatter that aspect of his ego and use that to manipulate him. But, you know, we'll see.Simone: I don't know. I think it's, it's really hot when someone's passionate about something especially if they're like willing to be really open and honest about it, and it's not something you've heard before.Simone: So I could see that it's not necessarily this theory, it's the fact [00:16:00] that you are. Really passionate about it, you thought through it. That's a, I think a very masculine trait that's very underrated is, is the sign of a passionate outlier because like, what is, what is like more the essence of masculinity than being that dangerous outlier that actually succeeds.Simone: You know? And like, it's almost like, this sounds horrible, but like metaphorically begins like with the. Like with sperm, right? Like just that one, that one crazy outlier gets to survive. And then like now when women see like that one like man who's totally different but really passionate and willing to do something really weird, she's just like, oh yes, let me get my teeth into him.Simone: SoMalcolm: that, that thing you said about sperm, it actually reminds me, so the Federalists, they did a piece on us and they said oh no, they've put their kids in a sit game, we're the healthiest. Get to live. And it's like, what do you think is happening every time you impregnate a woman?Malcolm: Yeah. Imagine you said that about sperm instead of describing it as sex, a sick game, we're [00:17:00] only their healthiest gamma sexSimone: game survive. Well, what is, what is, you know, human as, as the the French court in the 17 hundreds used to describe it com, what is com, but a sick game? Honestly Well, yeah.Simone: Anyway, I find these, these conversations delightful. They're like our little dates. I certainly, which is real sad.Malcolm: Do we not do enough real dates?Simone: We, we don't. We don't wanna spend money on like getting out drinks. Oh God,Malcolm: sorry, I forgot that. We might have to spend money if we went on a date. Yeah, I'm so sorry.Malcolm: This is why we work together. You know, we're CEOs of the theme company together. We, we write our books together, we do our speeches together, combine the speaker, you know, to make it cheaper for the end. We like to be frugal for other people as well, but All, all, all of this is how we pay for our dates.Malcolm: Which is to say other people pay for them to like, well, if we're gonna go to X City to speak, we may as well walk around. Go for, go for a walk around town together.Simone: Yeah. It's like a date. It's like a vacation. PrettyMalcolm: sensible lunch. Yeah. The, they're the only dates that are [00:18:00] worth doing. No guilt.Simone: Yeah.Simone: The, the best meals out are those which you do not pay for otherwise. Not worth it, but yes, I love you very much. Looking forward to our next one already.Malcolm: I love you.[00:19:00] Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join Simone and Malcolm as they dive deep into the intriguing narrative tropes of heroes and villains, exploring societal expectations and the status quo. They draw upon popular culture references, such as Batman and Spider-Man, to illustrate their points. In this thought-provoking conversation, they ponder the concept of "Villains Act, Heroes React," the paradoxical portrayal of heroes and villains in media, and the real-world implications of these stereotypes. If you've ever wondered how societal norms impact the narratives we consume daily, this discussion will open new avenues of thought. So, get ready for a journey into the depths of societal constructs and perceptions, and don't forget to vote for your favorite 'villain'.Transcript: Malcolm: [00:00:00] inheriting your powers is a really common trope of heroes. Mm. And achieving powers on your own is a very common trope of villains. Interesting. Yeah. Even when heroes didn't inherit their powers, like Batman, he inherited his money. well, you want the rich, the people who deserve like the, the inherited rich, this long aristocratic, the people who inherited their powers, the people who, that they are there to maintain social order,Simone: I recently heard the screenwriting trope Villains Act heroes react . While there are counter examples, it does seem like the good guys are more likely to protect the status quo rather than try to change the world,Malcolm: the villain trope is somebody who's fighting against the status quo to try to make things potentially better because . To really make things better, you have to move things past the status quo. You have to move things to the next potential stage.​Malcolm: Hello Simone. It's wonderful to be joining you today for my super villain layer.Malcolm: We're talking about villainy more generally today, but I like to be. Super. [00:01:00]Simone: You are always superMalcolm: in my car. People may be wondering why I don't have my ring today. I lose it all the time. And in today's one of those instances, she jokes, I'm like, Sonic's a hedgehog. I I bump into something and rings go flying everywhere.Simone: I think I have one. Tied to the car keys. You do doMalcolm: that. I haven't taken that one. Cause it's hard to get off the car thing. But I'll, I'll use it. That's exactly why it's there. We're going meet with some like. Senator types. AndSimone: so that's why we always have backups all over the place.Malcolm: I gotta look like a traditional conservative male if they're gonna fund our campaign.Malcolm: So we gotta look normal. But actually Simone's the one who we're hoping to run.Simone: Yeah, that's gonna be interesting. But, we'll see if people vote for villains, which I honestly think is how we're often framed in the media. But we read a great tweet recently about heroes and villains from a friend of ours that I thought was just brilliant.Simone: So she, she noted. I recently heard the screenwriting trope Villains Act heroes react for the first time and it destroyed me. [00:02:00] While there are counter examples, it does seem like the good guys are more likely to protect the status quo rather than try to change the world, and that is so true and I find it really interesting.Malcolm: Yeah. No, I, I think it is really interesting and I am, well, , the series that both of us were immediately thinking of when this came up was the Kingsman series. Mm-hmm. , because the Kingsman is always about, somebody has some like vision for the future often how they can make the world a better place.Malcolm: And then there's this secret society for like wealthy, or at least culturally wealthy, if not individually wealthy, but, but it seems like the vast majority of the members do come from wealthy families. British, like elitist who are maintaining the status quo. Yeah. It's like about a secret society completely dedicated to maintaining the status quo of the world.Malcolm: But in the second movie one of the things we thought was really funny is to say one of the villains. Basically they're lacing, spoiler, by the way. Drugs, with something that kills people to remove the, the dangers of drug addicts where what do they, the other villains like, doesn't [00:03:00] care.Malcolm: And they're like, yeah, we'll let it happen. Because it removes the drug addicts from society and will make the world a better place. And it's like, that's brutal, but like an interesting theory at least. But what I loved, and Simone pointed this out to me, is how do they demonstrate that they're actually the bad guys?Malcolm: And you definitely shouldn't be on their side. They, theySimone: started doctoring festival drugs, which is just a step too far.Malcolm: They started to potentially hurt upper middle class people. And they, no, the real scene when you're supposed to realize, oh, these guys are really the bad guys.Malcolm: It is, when it turned out the like, Well-paid office worker was using like Adderall or something as like a performance booster and you'reSimone: like, oh, I thought it was when like a, a bunch of basically Instagram influencers were using the like laced. Lace drug and like talking about it and then talking about the side effects, and that's how it showed up in society that this was a widespread issue that many people were being affected.Malcolm: Well, no, but I'm thinking about how they coded for the audience. Cause it was [00:04:00] clear that they were afraid that a little too much of the audience would agree with this person. So they need to show it affecting upper middle class people as well, because that's the way most people identify. Regardless of their actual economic circumstances, it's, it's really interesting.Malcolm: There was a study done on this that's like something like 95% of Americans identify as middle class. Yes.Simone: Yeah, actually I was just reading a 1982 Ms. Manners book while we were on a call like earlier today. And she Emily post joked that there are three classes in America, lower middle class, middle class, and upper middle class, and there's like literally nothing else.Malcolm: Is great. Yeah. The versions I, I love that you say that. That is, that is so true because that's how everyone identifies Totally. That because nobody wants to identify as upper class in our society,Simone: except for us, because we're scared. QuotesMalcolm: elite, right? Yeah. We're scared. Quotes elite. We will take on the, we will be the only upper class family in all of America.Malcolm: That is what we're gonna do. We will just take that segment in society. Just for us, just for Malcolm andSimone: Simone and, and no bless o bleach.Malcolm: You could [00:05:00] say No. Bless o oblig. Yeah, I I remember I got a, a long thing about basically Noble o Oblig when I got into Stanford Business School, but it was from, from a family member.Malcolm: They like sent me this, but they, they, they said with great power comes great responsibility. Of course, I'm thinking, Spider-Man, right? I'm like, oh, this is a Spider-Man quote. And what I love is that Spider-Man, and I realize, no, that's just like no blessed beliefs summarized Spider-Man is Spider-Man based on no blessed beliefs.Malcolm: I think that's antithetical to his character, but that is what I associate that quote with most.Simone: So, oh God, yeah. No, this, this is so indicative of our generation. I was also just watching a YouTuber who was like, oh, it's like they say in the office dress for the job you want. And I'm like, that, that didn't, that didn't come from the office lady.Simone: But no, this is, yeah, of course, as Spider-Man's uncle says, as, as the office. Yeah. As Spider-Man's uncle says, it's famously quoted in the show, the office.Malcolm: Oh, man. Oh my gosh. Wait,Simone: wasn't there a joke like that? That's Stone Middle class. I, I don't know what [00:06:00] to say.Malcolm: I, I think you're good. No, I wanna talk about this larger concept.Malcolm: Cause I think it, it leads to a lot of problems in our society. Mm-hmm. Where any organization that is trying to change things from the status quo, or any individual that's trying to change things from the status quo is seen as villainous. Oh yeah. And. I, I, it's actually really interesting.Malcolm: I, I think that the people who fight for the status quo in many ways want to see themselves as like the big heroes. I think that's what like Megan and Harry have been doing. They're, they're, they're the true warriors of the, of the status quo. And, and, and that's how they show that they're good people because they look, they say, what does society say?Malcolm: Makes you a good person, and then I'm gonna do and care. About those things mm-hmm. That society say make you a good person. But I think in reality when people see individuals, especially individuals in positions of enormous privilege, just going along with what society tells them to, it also makes them at least a large portion of the [00:07:00] population, disgusted with them, but they don't see them as villains.Malcolm: It's interesting is they're often not displayed as villains. They're displayed as like slimy. They're displayed as, as, as pathetic and, and, and like money grubbing, but not villains, but mm-hmm. Elon Musk. Elon Musk clearly has like a vision of how he sees the world could be better and is trying to move towards that vision.Malcolm: Even if he does get distracted at times. Because his, his vision is quite expansive and not a lot of other people are working on it. But he does a lot of stuff. I dunno what to say, but what a super villain character to the extent that if you look at, I think a lot of content now they are actually framing the villains around archetypes of Elon Musk.Malcolm: Is, is you, you see this in a lot of shows now. Elon Musk based villains, I've likeSimone: noticed this, but Ironman was also like broadly inspired by his archetype as well. Although, I guess you could argue that, oh, is he trying to changeMalcolm: the world a new, I don't know. I wa I watch Iron Man and he's.Malcolm: Trying to, he [00:08:00] anhe be less, not like in wars, just have like weapons in wars be less efficient. ISimone: thought he, wasn't he a weapons dealer? I thought he was, yeah. And he was aMalcolm: weapons dealer before that. So he is only like trying, I don't see him as being somebody, he doesn't fit the villain trope. But the villain trope is somebody who's fighting against the status quo to try to make things potentially better because to make things better.Malcolm: That's the thing about the status quo. Right. You can be at a local optimum, but to really make things better, you have to move things past the status quo. You have to move things to the next potential stage. And what's really interesting is if you look at our message and all of our prenatal advocacy, you could say, well, a lot of people, one of the problems was trying to move things past the status quo is it removes individual agency to an extent, which is, which you see a lot of climate activists doing.Malcolm: So I can guess, I can see how those people could be framed as villainous. But when you look at prenatal advocacy, it's all based around individual. Like, like the major organization, which is ours, like the core mission we have is to ensure maximum reproductive [00:09:00] freedom at the level of individual families and maximum cultural freedom at the level of individual families.Malcolm: So even when we're fighting for more individual autonomy, Insofar as that autonomy removes the autonomy of the system, like trying to create new school systems and stuff for, for high school instead of these government ones which we see as erasing people's cultures. We get framed as, as super villains because we're trying to change the world.Malcolm: Well, I think there are two,Simone: there are two broad things in place. One is on a, on a individual level humans are afraid of change. Humans really don't like change. Different is bad. Having to try something new is bad and scary. So that's, that's one side of it. So anyone who's trying to push something new on you, even if like let's say they're trying to get you to try a new food and it looks gross and it ends up tasting really good, but you're still like hating them for making you try it, right?Simone: That that's something that, that is ultimately villainous cuz it's different. We don't like different. The other thing is societies at large are very optimized around driving and enforcing conformity. So anything that fails to conform, [00:10:00] anything that is different or new, even if it's better, is going to be villainized.Simone: Because of course, I think in the past and, and like from an evolutionary standpoint, that which is extremely different. Is more likely to probably do something that is going to cause risk, harm, infection al vulnerability. Well, you alsoMalcolm: just the cultural evolution standpoint. Mm-hmm.Malcolm: Which is to say the cultures that have survived are the ones that are the best at stamping out ideas and world perspectives that clash with their own. Mm. Because they, they represent an intrinsic threat to the existing world order, right? Mm. That's why you burn witches, right? You, because they represent a cultural mutation.Malcolm: Mm. And, and that's what we are seeing the dominant culture do today. So you are right. It definitely has that element to it. . To the first point you made though, that different is scary. I think even the idea, even making people aware that things will change, that society will change, that the world will change, [00:11:00] is threatening and to an extent can make you a villain.Malcolm: Just airing that. Mm-hmm. So one of the points that we make is, If you look at humanity, what it means to be human will change. Mm-hmm. Whether it's through genetic technology or AI or human integration with electronics and stuff. And so a lot of cultural groups, they're like, well, that is bad. Like humans should stay exactly what humans are today because if we deviate from that, then we're something else, and that is bad or monstrous, or.Malcolm: Whatever. Right. But the problem is, is then you really only have two potential futures. Either we do differentiate and we will differentiate in the future. I think it's inevitable. Mm-hmm. Cause even if one country, or one region, or one culture effectively prevents this type of experimentation and change, any region that does will just so significantly outcompete the ones that don't, those cultural groups will become economically irrelevant due to the advantages, the cultural groups that engage in.Malcolm: Genetic and [00:12:00] technological change we'll have. Yeah. But then the cultural groups that are against that stuff, they will need to be very dictatorial in how they impose that stuff. Mm-hmm. So whenever I see a show like, what we were watching or Orville or something like yesterday and, and that the characters in it, like the human characters that they think.Malcolm: Far in the future, thousands of years in the future that HU humans would look still broadly like we think humans look today. That's just absurd. Like that could only happen if basically a fascist one world government takes power that systematically prevents any sort of human technological integration and any sort of genetic selection or genetic Advancement.Malcolm: But even if you had that, it really wouldn't work. And the reason why it really, you'd also then need to kill a lot of babies. So the reason you need to kill a lot of babies in that scenario is only a few generations ago, it was true that about 50% of human infants died in when they were babies, right?Malcolm: Young deaths was really common. But this had a big impact on our genes. It took a lot of potentially [00:13:00] negative things out of our genes now that most babies survive. What it means is the things that were being selected against cancers and the like, are going to begin to build up in the human genome at a really fast rate rate.Malcolm: So if you go three or four generations down the line, we are going to be and, and you, and nothing happens. We're gonna be walking balls of cancer. Of course there's three solutions to this. One is to genetically, crisper out the, the, the parts of the gene that are causing these problems.Malcolm: Another is to pre-select embryos that aren't pro to these problems. So you're still having the babies die, basically, but the babies are dying at the embryo stage instead of the stage of a human child. Or you kill the children who are prone to this, you test them, which, which seems like the obviously immoral answer.Malcolm: But I don't know. , I guess you could say that you could use some technology to edit the genes of adults, like, use maybe a virus as like a vector. Mm-hmm. But that's really hard to do whenever you're talking about, like, editing a person's genes for like [00:14:00] cancer or something like that.Malcolm: The problem is, is our, our, our bodies are made up of billions, I wanna say, of cells, billions of cells. And you need to, you need to edit the DNA of every one of those cells that, that's really hard to do. And, and then I don't know that, that to me also doesn't seem like a good answer with any sort of near future technology.Malcolm: Yeah, not near future, not near future technology, but there might be other solutions to it. The broad point here being is the only way that we end up with a future where humans five, 10,000 years from now, look broadly like humans do today, is if you have a fascist state that is essentially preventing.Malcolm: Human genetics or human genetic toying or human integration with technology. Mm-hmm. But the other thing that always shocks me is when these shows think they're being like progressive by showing different ethnic groups. The only way that 10,000 years from now, we would still have.Malcolm: Black people and white people is largely [00:15:00] if racism survives in like a big way.Simone: Oh. Like if, yeah, if groups still like stay isolatedMalcolm: and don't inter well, you would need to have some sort of genetic isolation of the different ethnic groups for those groups to stay, looking anything like we think of today as black people, white people, Asian people.Malcolm: Yeah. So again, like when I see a show, which is so interesting, you see a show like Star Trek and they're trying to. Portray it as all really good. And in the back of my head I'm thinking, oh, so this is like a super racist society, was a fascist, dictatorial government. Which I, I suppose is why I see like star Starship troopers as such a brighter future.Malcolm: Mm. Because at least it's an honest future. At least they admit it's a, it's a dictatorial, fascist government that, that does honestly seem to be trying its best for people. Thanks for honesty. For sure. But, but it is, it is interesting that when you point out these basic things, that I, that, that, that humans will change, the things will change, that [00:16:00] the world will change.Malcolm: People freak out. It reminds me of these environmentalists who go out there and there's almost this form of morality, which I've always found really. Disgusting myself because it's so shortsighted. Mm-hmm. Where when you're talking to environmental groups, there's sometimes two groups of thought, which is, okay, we want to reintroduce like these old coyotes that went extinct a while ago, but okay, but now you're interrupting the new ecosystem.Malcolm: Right. Because things have evolved to fill that cultural niche. The animals have since evolved to deal with sort of the new environment that they're dealing with, but they believe that the state. And, and you see this in this, let's keep humans exactly the way they are now. Like keep humans exactly how they were when we first built our first cities.Malcolm: And they're like, and let's also keep the environment like exact, well not even our first cities. Cause they don't wanna bring like mammoth back and stuff like that. They wanna keep the world.Simone: Exactly. No. Isn't there a company right now that's bringing back nearMalcolm: community, right? I'm talking about this type of environmentalist.Malcolm: Ah, yes. Right. They want the world to be exactly where it was. [00:17:00] Like 1900, like that environment, those species need to stay static forever. No further evolution. Humans need to stay static like that forever. So in a way, humans are becoming this sort of perverse actor on the environment where we are now preventing further evolution of species preventing extinction, a species preventing them from.Malcolm: Having to come to terms with rapid environmental shifts or something like that. Something that has happened multiple times throughout the history of the world. Right? But, but no, not this time. We gotta end it this time. And they go, oh, it's because a species is causing it, except. That's happened before that there was the, the, it's happened a couple times before.Malcolm: There was a time when the first bacteria started producing oxygen and that was what called the Great Oxidation Event. I, I, I think I wanna say, and they gave, made themselves in almost everything like them. Extinct because they were producing oxygen as a waste product. And oxygen in, in, in oxidation is very caustic to [00:18:00] any sort of cell or biology that hasn't evolved specifically to deal with oxygenated environments.Malcolm: So they, it caused its own mass extinction. So like, not the first time we've seen this either, yeah.Simone: Also discussed in the Twitter thread was an observation that often the villains are. Either like Novo or not. Aristocratic and that the heroes are aristocratic, which definitely shows up in Kingsmen.Simone: I think in both Kingsmen movies, the first two it was like tech elites more that wereMalcolm: the villains. Well, I'm think inheriting your powers right is a really common trope of heroes. Mm. And achieving powers on your own is a very common trope of villains. Interesting. Yeah. Even when heroes didn't inherit their powers, like Batman, he inherited his money.Malcolm: Go, come on.Simone: Batman's. No, Batman doesn't have. Bruce Wayne's power is he's rich and autistic. No, he's bornMalcolm: rich. His power isn't that like, even though that he was born rich, that's his power. Thats his power. And people he's fighting are [00:19:00] like these self-made, like you got poison ivy, who's basically an environmentalist.Malcolm: Yeah. I do agree. Environmentalists are largely evil, but she's trying to engage action in the world. You got Joker, definitely a, a self-made man. You've got people like the Penguin who in, in most iterations has the affectations or was born into a wealthy family, but lost it all like orphaned.Malcolm: Right. Had to rebuild himself. Yeah. But of course that makes him truly villainous. Similar to me, my, my own backstory, going through, oh, do you, do youSimone: share penguins backstory,Malcolm: court appointed prison alternatives and stuff like that? And then Yeah, I have, I have a backstory similar to the the, the penguin from the Tim Burton's Batman returns,Simone: Yeah. So you're, you're not so much Batman as you are Penguin. Yeah, I guess look at how you're dressed. I, unless you're like offMalcolm: this way. Yeah, I'm going for you. I got the KAA pot. I got the Kaa Pot virtue here. Nobody is interesting because I think that society fundamentally believes, like in the back of our cultural brains, what feels nice.Malcolm: Is, [00:20:00] is actually classism the,Simone: the elite? Yeah. That you want the, the, the, the king to save the day.Malcolm: Right? Well, I, well, you want the rich, the people who deserve like the, the inherited rich, this long aristocratic, the people who inherited their powers, the people who, that they are there to maintain social order, thoseSimone: high and a greatMalcolm: chain of being, because historically that's what the story's told.Malcolm: What's a night? But often somebody who was born to a noble family. Yeah. And then was appointed to maintain the status quo. Yeah. And those are the stories that culturally our visions of heroes came from. And who's the villain? Well, it's the person with the other religion typically, like the witch from the woods, like your morana or something.Malcolm: I don't know if she came from a long line or something, but I typically think of the, the villains of the, the night stories as being some witch, someone culturally deviate. Often didn't come from a position of power. But, but they came through power perversely because they earned it themselves. They, they went out and studied.Malcolm: They [00:21:00] found it in, in books and, and, andSimone: working. Oh, because isn't that also in it in itself a villainous act? If it's a subversion of the social order?Malcolm: Yes. It is, you are right. Subverting the social order is a villainous act. Mm. And so I think in many ways we are the archetypical villains of society, and as such, people are right to hate us.Malcolm: Because that is the role of the villain. We believe we're trying to make the world a better place. But isn't that true of all women? That'sSimone: Yeah. It's exactly what, well, I don't know. There are some villains like bond villains and stuff who are just out to make money. But I think that's the other thing is, is we're also we're often villainized for being capitalist and people see, I think capitalist is like a whole different sort of fill.Simone: And I don't know if that's just because like. Socialism is a very pervasive kind of sentiment now that like a lot of villains are just easily just capitalists, just easy to hate people for it.Malcolm: No, I think it's that socialist. So when people believe in capitalism, I think it's typically because they've [00:22:00] thought through it.Malcolm: When people believe in socialism or communism, I think it's much more like a religion. Mm. And like a religion. When we talk about evolved systems that shut down any idea, that's a threat to it. Mm-hmm. They react as if. They're reacting to a, a religious threat. So one of the things we talk about in our book is the concept of cones.Malcolm: If people are aware in Buddhism there's this thing where they'll be like, oh, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, like what does it really make a sound? Right? This is a cone, but many religion, Catholicism has things like this. What these really are is. Gaslight. It, it's a form of gaslighting that's used to enforce a Master's authority over the pupil and to get people to doubt their own beliefs about reality.Malcolm: So what they're doing is you go, oh, what's the sound of one hand Classic? Well, I, no either, it's no sound like this is a definitional thing, and they're like, oh, no, you don't understand the question if you, if you come to me with that answer, which what they're really doing is just saying, I have authority over you.Malcolm: Basically, no matter how you answer, I always have a greater access to truth than you. And this causes people to distrust their own logic and helps. It's a, [00:23:00] it's a good system for establishing authority. But what's really interesting is that you see this within the communist worldview often is, is when you describe to someone white communism, stupidist, oh, you don't really understand communism if that's why you say communism is stupid.Simone: Wow. I did not expect you to connect like Buddhist cones with. Communist gatekeeping, but itMalcolm: works. But you see this constantly, whatever you explain why communism is stupid, they go, well, that's not, either, that's not true communism or that shows that you think that that's why communism doesn't work. That you don't of course understandSimone: course.Simone: Yeah. You just don't understand. And then they start using like, oh, well you haven't read this, or you don't follow this person'sMalcolm: voice. Well, then you're like, actually, I have, or I have engaged with this, or I have gone over this. I, I, I do have a, one of our books, it was a top. Top selling nonfiction book in the US by Wall Street Journal.Malcolm: It's is on governance structures, right? Like we are something of I wouldn't say full world experts on governance, but we're definitely in the top percent. And communism is stupid. Like you have to be actually [00:24:00] kind of dumb to think it's still a good idea. And we've done other videos on this, but the point being is it's the people who believe it now, they believe it for more religious reasons.Malcolm: So when they're attacking us, they're more reflexively trying to determine if we're part of their social group or not. And when they determine we're not part of our, their social group, they then just reflexively are like, I hate you because you're not a part of my social group. And that's what they're saying when they're saying, I hate you because you're capitalist.Malcolm: Whereas when capitalists are people with more nuance, we're not like pure capitalists either. I think the government definitely has a role in the economy. When, when people with a more nuanced understanding of, of economics attack us they're attacking us often for issues that are more germane to the actual reasons that they specifically don't like us.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like, I don't know that we're not using all of our embryos or something.Simone: That and we have punchable faces, but yeah. No,Malcolm: well, that's a good reason to attack us. It super villain legit means a punchable face. And I think I a punchableSimone: face just means you need to punch the face. I, I don't know what to tell you.Simone: Well,Malcolm: I need to, I'll do this for like the picture.[00:25:00]Malcolm: That'll be the nice YouTube picture for this one.Simone: Right. Very good. Very good. Well,Malcolm: can you do a super villain face? What's your super villain face? Um, That's just Dr.Simone: Evil Go. It's a universal sign Language for evil. Hello? I, I don't know what to tell you.Malcolm: I think we are universal sign language for evil, and I like being a super villain. I like being a super villain. I, I, as a kid, I always identified with the villains over the heroes. I always, I never saw the heroes and I was like, I want to be like that.Malcolm: I was like, because the villains. I could be like them. I could make my own suit, I could build my own science powers. I could maybe one day make my own money. And they'reSimone: self-made. Yeah, they're they're self-made. They're very, they're self-made.Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah. And so I always identified with that. Cause I was like, that is my path, respect.Malcolm: And so one day people will fear me and.Simone: Well, I love being an evil duo with you. You [00:26:00] are my O T P of Evil. I love you so much.Malcolm: Absolutely. And one thing we've mentioned before is in movies, another thing about villains. Only ones who have healthy relationships, whether it's, team Rocket or the Adams family, or you go through media.Malcolm: Vast majority of healthy relationships are villains because in our society's mind, I think when you're talking about these progressive Hollywood writers to them, they cannot imagine anyone who's like them ever having a happy relationship. Mm. So it becomes villainous and socially transgressive to them.Malcolm: To have a genuinely happy relationship. Well, it's the creative types. They are not, they are not prone, they often really buy into this urban mega culture, which makes it really hard to form healthy relationships. So yes, I think we have a healthy relationship. And that healthy relationship is in itself socially transgression.Malcolm: Well, it'sSimone: monsters, evil, villainous. It's beautiful and I love it. And I don't care if this is what evil feels like. [00:27:00] I wanna be evil cause it's so good. I love you. Yeah,Malcolm: sweetheart. I love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In today's deep dive, Malcolm and Simone discuss the complex interplay between physical attractiveness and perceived emotional stability. Drawing upon personal experiences and exploring social constructs, they debunk the notorious "hot-crazy" graph and redefine the spectrum as "hot-evil." The conversation expands on how attractiveness and dating dynamics influence people's emotional well-being and self-perception, and how this subsequently impacts their mental health.As a fascinating twist, Malcolm and Simone reveal their transformation from what they call their "ugly duckling" phase to their current attractiveness, and how this change has influenced their perspective on body image issues. This intriguing discussion delves into the impact of societal pressures and the unrealistic beauty standards set by online spaces. Stay tuned to see how this conversation challenges conventional wisdom about attractiveness and its influence on personality traits.Transcript: Simone: [00:00:00] it, is like having everything on a 50% discount.Simone: Like just not realizing the real price of things, but on a social spectrum, right? SoMalcolm: like is it a little worse than that? So if you're having everyone come fuss over you, every time you cry, every time you lose emotional control in some way, you are being subconsciously emotionally rewarded for losing emotional control for you, losing your composure.Simone: Oh, wow. So, so it's not just that they're given privileged treatment the whole time, it's also that they're, encouraged to engage in very toxic emotional loops that ultimately harms their emotional wellbeing and mental health.Simone: Yeah. So it's, wait, so the spectrum isn't hot? Crazy. It's hot evil, yeah. ForMalcolm: guys it's hot, evil if they're still singleMalcolm: And so this is why I think the guys that keep running through, people that stay on these apps that most women are actually exposed to that don't end up settling down. Mm-hmm. Why they ate. That's almost serving for evil guys because you begin to realize after a while is you've noticed.Malcolm: [00:01:00] Some people who you've hurt.Malcolm: Normal humans don't feel good when they hurt other people. Even if it was unintentionally,Malcolm: and so men who do have that emotion, take themselves off the marketWould you like to know more?Simone: Malcolm. Does being hot make you crazy?Malcolm: I, I think it just might, and I, I like this at the topic cuz a secret that people don't know about us. And I'm gonna post some picture of this proof because people will doubt this is that you and I were born. Ugly. We were born ugly. We were born ugly. We transformed.Malcolm: We transformed. You say, you would've always found me cute. I, I look at some old pictures of you and I would've found you cute, but definitely we are dramatically more attractive now than we were 10Simone: years ago.Simone: No. Okay. Yeah. One, one. Let's say I, I was an ugly duckling that now I'm normal. I would say you are always pretty cute, but you look better now than you used to.Simone: Look, you are way hotter now. IMalcolm: actually think you're delusional about this cause we play this game. I think you are normal if [00:02:00] who you're comparing yourself to is like celebrities and people you watch online. You have to understand, and I thinkSimone: this is, this is actually something we were discussing last night when we were watching a show and some, some female character came on who was supposed to be really hot.Simone: And you were like, I don't get it. She's not hot at all. And I think the issue is that she didn't look 22 and just in like the past five years, basically everyone online started looking 22, I think because of filters. That's an issue. And the problem is, yeah, we stopped, we see someone. Who's aged well, who looks good, but because they don't look 22, we're like, oh, Cris keeper.Simone: Like, what's wrong with, yeah.Malcolm: So I actually think that a lot of our viewers would think that you look normal as well, because I, I, I will agree that was in my evoked set of women. Yeah. You know, you might be on the more normal category, but whenever we're walking around, so we play this game, I play this game.Malcolm: Okay. Like if you're walkingSimone: around in a group of, of normal Americans, but also Americans have a serious health crisis right now,Malcolm: Simone. When we're walking [00:03:00] around, I play this game. We're walking around out into the town, we're walking around in a mall, we're walking around on a cruise. I go, look around, is there anyone in this room that's as attractive as you are?Malcolm: And she won't find anyone. And she'll be like, but that doesn't mean anything because we're what? Because the population sample we're comparing you to is Americans. Like, I think that you are forgetting how unattractive the average person is in this country now. And I think that, that this is a problem that a lot of our viewers have because we've had some viewers reach out to us about like their attractiveness and stuff, where when you are measuring yourself off of this cultural idea from what you see in online spaces, you can create a self-perception that you are much less attractive than you actually are when you compare yourself to the general population.Malcolm: And so if. In our audience has body image issues. I think one of the best ways to deal with those body image issues is to compare yourself to large crowds. Oh. To likeSimone: go to a mall?Malcolm: No, like if somebody thinks I'm not buff enough or I'm not skinny enough. Right. Go to a [00:04:00] mall and say, where am I percentage wise within this community? Mm. If you're in the top 20%, you don't have anything to worry about. And I think that that's a very useful way to reset your expectations in a world where we are seeing people online all the time.Simone: Yeah. Within limitations, like I thinkMalcolm: I.Malcolm: You don't wanna admit it because you have body image issues and you don't wanna accept that you, thatSimone: you're actually, I can't identify as female without having body dysmorphia, Malcolm, otherwise I wouldn't be a woman. You have to understand, like, the way that we all relate to each other is we're like, oh, I hate my thighs.Simone: And you know, someone else is like, I hate my face, I hate my chin, I hate my ear. Lobes are so fat. Anyway what we're here to talk about though, what. Hot crazyMalcolm: graph, right? Yes. We are crazy, but we're not crazy because we're hot. This is a crazy cause we're crazy. First talk about the hot, crazy graph cuz this is a very interesting.Simone: . So I think what I, I don't know where the meme came from, but certainly there are videos out there of like [00:05:00] people charting out a graph of hot and crazy where there's, you know, on one axis there's hot on the other axis, there's crazy. And basically there is a strong correlation.Simone: The hotter you get, the crazier you get. And this is funny to people. It's amusing because it, it often holds true and. It's fun to discuss the dynamics behind that. So why would, especially, and this is for women which is interesting. This is, this is a woman thing. This is not necessarily a man thing. Why would a woman be crazier if she wereMalcolm: hotter?Malcolm: I think it, it, it messes up your social development. Hmm. Because we live in a society today with low switching costs to partners, people can genuinely date a lot when they're younger. So it used to be, you know, if you're a young woman, Technically you can date, but not really.Malcolm: There's no reason to like just fallen over attractive women in the way we do today because you really have to commit to that woman your entire life. And so if she's dated anyone in high school, you know that's the person she's dated throughout all of high school. And if she's dated a lot of people in high school, then she's considered.Malcolm: Low value, right? Like that was the way things used to be. [00:06:00] Historically, I, I'm not gonna say this was a good way of doing things, but what I'm pointing out is that this is a fairly new problem. Mm-hmm. Which is women because they can sleep around without lowering their value as much in modern society.Malcolm: There is an enormous reason for like guys to just absolutely simp over the attractive girls, especially during their formative years, because that's when guys have the highest amount of. Testosterone and sex drive. I often liken male puberty to like, somebody injects you with morphine overnight, so you are addicted to something and it wasn't your choice.Malcolm: You'll just do anything to get it. Like really stupid stuff. And that defines I think, male puberty as doing stupid things to show off to girls. But anyway or, or, or boys sometimes. But anyway, so, it creates a, scenario in which the social limits. That normal people , are building, do not get taught to these hot women through no fault of their own.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Like a [00:07:00] huge number of social lessons that a normal person would learn. These women never get a chance to learn during that really important developmental period of their lives.Simone: Well, you described it to me at one point when we were talking about it, is like having everything on a 50% discount.Simone: Like just not realizing the real price of things, but on a social spectrum, right? SoMalcolm: like is it a little worse than that? , and we've talked about this in other videos, The more you allow yourself to indulge in any emotion, the harder that emotion becomes to control.Simone: It's, it's pretty, oh, right. It's like the, the punching bag thing where if, yeah, if you, this whole teapot letting off steam theory is really toxic because actually if you like punch the punching bag in anger, you're gonna feel more anger if you just kind of let it go. Yeah. This has been shown inMalcolm: studies people who like punch a wall or punch a bag after, after they get angry as a form of therapy for it, actually get.Malcolm: More angry in the future and get angrier due to lower amounts of stimuli that would induce anger, right? So it's the same thing as like crying. So if you're having everyone come fuss over you, every time you cry, every time you lose emotional [00:08:00] control in some way, you are being subconsciously emotionally rewarded for losing emotional control for losing your composure. And of course that's gonna really mess you up as a girl. And I think that that is why when I've dated, , really attractive women in the past, I have often noticed that they do have a lot harder time controlling their emotions than less attractive women.Malcolm: And they do cycle between emotional extremes much more often. And I think that's because they are often rewarded for doing that when they'reSimone: younger. Oh, wow. So, so it's not just that they're given to like privileged treatment the whole time, it's also that they're, it's encouraged to engage in very toxic emotional loops that ultimately harms their emotional wellbeing and mental health.Malcolm: Yes, yes, yes. But it's worse than all that. Cause our society. People are trained to find a lack of emotional control attractive. And powerful in many ways. You see this in shows like the huge emotional out [00:09:00] outflow is seen as a sign of power, whether it's, you know, dragon ballsy, like, you know, really, but, but you see this, you know, somebody gets really emotional and then all of a sudden they have the power to fix something.Malcolm: Right? Like, that's, that's often a, a, a tr in, in shows or the characters that are seen as having uniquely low emotional control, like a Harley Quinn or a jinx is shown as being like that aspect of them is shown as being desirable. Yeah.Malcolm: So we have archetypes of ideal sexuality, outside of sexuality as tied to like motherhood or sexuality as tied to like long-term partner traits as personified by the civil of crazy because I think people have come to associate the two to some extent, so, Women are rewarded by guys finding them more sexually attractive, but lower value as partners, which in another way is psychologically torturing these women, cuz the women are being rewarded for acting in a way that makes men more likely to show them in the moment.Malcolm: Kindness, but less [00:10:00] likely to over the long term, be interestedSimone: in that. I think there's also what I could call the Daisy Buchanan syndrome, which is like, she wasn't crazy per se as a character, but there were a lot of really beautiful. Women that I knew in college who clearly, like they would talk about this.Simone: Like I, I would work with, I I, at one point I worked in this cupcake shop where like everyone there was super hot and they like all slept with each other. It was amazing. It was a favoriteMalcolm: one from the Georgetown Cupcakes from Cupcake Wars.Simone: Not cupcake wars. Like I think the reality TV show that they had was called Cupcake Sisters.Simone: Okay. Continue. But anyway, everyone was hot. And, and hearing about their, their dating and, and love lives was really interesting. And the interesting thing about the most, attractive people was like, there was this deep sadness among many of them and like deep distrust of men specifically because , they knew that they were really attractive and that they were kind of apprised to be one.Simone: And that [00:11:00] many of the, the men who were interested in them were, were only interested in them because of their looks, and it wasn't about them. And they, they couldn't, they weren't, they weren't essentially allowed to be appreciated for their intelligence, for their interests, for other accomplishments.Simone: And I do think it's interesting that that would create so much sadness in, in a woman when, like, on the flip side, like men who know that women are after them because of their wealth and their Rolexes and their cars and stuff are like, kind of really proud of that. So like they don't have that same sadness of like, oh, the woman is only interested in me because I'm incredibly wealthy.Simone: What's goingMalcolm: on there? Well, I guess I'd call this another category of hot crazy, which is like hot on we hot.Simone: It's the syndrome fromMalcolm: syndrome. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I, I've definitely seen this phenomenon as well, this whistless, non-interested, engaging and keep in mind that these women also, Get less credit for anything they achieve.Malcolm: Totally. Yeah. So, so if they achieve money, if they achieve success, if they achieve academics, [00:12:00] often people just discount it. They're like, oh, you got that because you're hot. You know? Exactly. And so how demotivating must that B to B systematically discounted to have an entire half of the population that like lies to you about everything.Malcolm: And then another half. Because this has been shown in studies that women, when they're around attractive women, they'll undermine them. Like, they'll then beauty.Simone: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They'll pull them down because they're seen as threats, like when they stand out for their beauty. Yeah. Which ultimately makes me so glad to learnMalcolm: helplessness.Malcolm: That's what you're seeing in the daysSimone: Yeah. That they get. Yeah. But like, so, and, and so really you, you could argue that. Below average looking, especially adolescent women, which is what I was like May if I'm a five now on, on the internet. And maybe a little higher in reality. But like I was Oh, really? A little below average in my high school,Malcolm: was probably good friend.Malcolm: Well, I'll put up pictures and, and, and you were kept out of this reality show. It was filming while you were at the cupcake store and they hid you in the back and had the. AttractiveSimone: employees. Yeah, it was. I was, yeah. Yeah. Only the hot people were allowed to be to be in it, which was great. Amazing. [00:13:00] See, I don't qualify, but, but I honestly think it really helped me now, like there were guys who had crushes on me.Simone: I later learned, cuz I couldn't figure it out when I was in high school, but they had crushes on me because of my. Academic achievement and my intelligence or whatever, because the, these same guys also had crushes on like other really high academic performers at our school. So like, and, and, and imagine what, like, how, how nice that was that like, I knew that people were interested in me because, you know, I, I did weird things and because I was, you know, interested in, in weird stuff or because I, you know, was passionate about certain things and instead to just be appreciated because I.Simone: You're, you are attractive. It would be really hard, like it could really screw up a girl. It makes me think differently about how we might raise our own daughters because if we, give them all the tools to look really, really, really good young, it might actually kind of screw them up.Simone: Not that I want to make them look horrible, but like, I, I kind of understand now the [00:14:00] parental hesitancy to like, have girls learn how to use makeup really early, very effectively. Although now it's really messed up cuz you can just use filters to like completely skew the way you looks. I, I don't know what to make of this, but it is something to think about.Malcolm: No, I, I agree with what you're saying, but I hear, I'm gonna talk about the other thing, which is crazy guys. So the interesting thing about hot, crazy girls Okay, is that they end up acting crazy in ways they really can't control because they're psychologically conditioned while they're growing up, okay?Malcolm: And it's very hard for them to escape this. Okay? Hot guys typically don't get the huge advantage to being hot until they're older, because women prefer older men. And because that's. Advantage. And it is true. You can look at the data. It is, it is not an illusion that 20% of guys are getting 80% of women, but, but it's actually more extreme than that.Malcolm: It's more like, Two to 3% of guys are getting any woman they want or, maybe, maybe 6% I, I go like that. But what it means is these are the guys who a lot of women are engaging with because they're engaging with a lot of women. They're also what most women are [00:15:00] thinking about.Malcolm: When they're like, I hate men. What they mean is they hate these men who are really hot, who they considered worth their time going out with and everything like that. Mm-hmm. These men who at any point can choose between who have very low switching costs, you know, they can dispose of a partner and then choose a new partner at any time.Malcolm: Right. They have very little motivation to treat their partners well. And so they in many ways receive almost no punishment for being cruel. To their partners or being honorable to their partners. And so you just get this, this horrible action from them. And I think that the hot, honorable guys because I know a number of them, they get locked down early.Malcolm: They get locked down typically. Few years outta college at the latest. Yeah. And so what that means is if you're still on the dating market, like in your thirties and you're going after hot guys, right? Like guys above a certain level of attractiveness, they are pretty much all in this non honorable category because no one has decided to lie down, right?Malcolm: They're theSimone: the ones who wouldn't [00:16:00] ever marry you anyway, because all the ones who would ever marry you have been married off, right?Malcolm: So they're treating you. Crazily, but not crazy, like low emotional control due to something outside of your control that the women hot, crazy deal is, but like evil, crazy.Simone: Yeah. So it's, wait, so the spectrum isn't hot? Crazy. It's hot evil, yeah. ForMalcolm: guys it's hot, evil if they're still single. Yeah. For single. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so you can have a guy that goes hot and evil. But, but you know, try not to, but it's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I do like that. I'd like a woman in the same way they have the guys talking about the hot crazy chart.Malcolm: The hot evil chart. Yeah, the hot evil chart. Because the hotter they are, the more evil they're, they're going to turn out to be. But then of course all the red pillars would be like, well, that's the thing that makes them hot is that they're evil and Right. Yes. There's a component of that to it. But even if that component didn't exist, you would still have a reward for this behavior.Malcolm: Mm. But what I think is important to remember, and I would recommend this to all of the hot guys [00:17:00] out there my fellow hotties it's not that I'm hot, I don't know. No, you'reSimone: so hot. OhMalcolm: my God. I had an easy time with women. I've always had a very easy time with women. But what I would say is that not.Malcolm: Locking down a partner and, and getting in a long term relationship that hurts you just as much as it hurts the people you're, you're running through.Simone: Okay, but explain this, cause I mean it, if I'm thinking about this from a guy's perspective, like more, more female sexual partners equals better. Why wouldMalcolm: I not?Malcolm: Well that really get into high numbers. So this was seen as like when ALA lined everyone up, she did this live Twitter poll of how many partners you'd slept with. And I realized that like in a giant crowd, how many people were there?Simone: I. I don't know, like 200. I'm really bad at counting 200. IMalcolm: was second to the end, third to the end in terms ofSimone: number.Malcolm: I've had this experience, and what happens? Is sex begins to become gross once you get like well over a hundred people.Malcolm: Like your body count gets that high as a guy, it becomes routine and gross and you start [00:18:00] thinking more about like the cleanup, and you are really only still doing it at that point for the status it grants you. Mm-hmm. And I think that the people who still sleep around a lot, like in their thirties, the guys who do that, I think they're trying to make up for either the way they see themselves or maybe not getting enough sex when they were younger.Malcolm: And so having some self-image issue because sex is just, it actually doesn't reward guys enough to really do it that frequently with that many people. You begin to get sick of it after a while. Mm-hmm. So, so one, I just don't think that they're actually enjoying it that much. The anticipation of sex is a much stronger mechanism than the actual reward for having sex.Malcolm: When you meditate on it in the moment, the, the actual feelings from having sex are just not that good. They, they're, they're fine. Like they're good, but they're not, like, they're not worth like a day of work. Much less like months of labor in trying to get someone, if, if you're one of these, you know, guys who is really [00:19:00] struggling with this.Malcolm: So, so one is, I think a lot of these guys are just not getting that much reward anymore. Mm-hmm. And then too, I think what guys really want, and the truth of what they want is, is somebody who genuinely cares about them. Somebody who's who, you know, kids, I can tell you. Having kids. Around the house, like playing with my kids is so much better than sex.Malcolm: In terms of theSimone: actual, isn't this a damnation of my sexual prowess, Malcolm? No, no, no, no. I'veMalcolm: had sex with women. It has nothing to do. The point that I'm making. Is that the core difference in our society is one of these things is tied to a lot of guys' self-worth. So they think I'm not a real guy, I'm not manly enough if I'm not out there sleeping with a lot of people.Malcolm: Yeah. And, and our society pretends like that, that it's a lot better than, than playing with your kids. But if you, I think to most of men, now, keep in mind people are different. Some people are born like, some guys are born liking penises, right? Like, I, I don't know. I, I guess some people [00:20:00] are born probably getting less intrinsic happiness from playing with their kids.Malcolm: I. People are born all over the spectrum, but at least for me, like what if I actually tried to , meditate on how much actual positive emotions I'm getting from the two experiences. Yeah. If like, not evenSimone: close. So you think part part of that's though this stage of your adult development? I think if you were a teenager, definitely like spending time with kids, probably not gonna be as satisfyingMalcolm: as I think you're right.Malcolm: I think you're right, but I think that your development reacts organically to your environment in many ways. So I think if I was younger and I got into a developed relationship sooner, like a committed relationship sooner, my testosterone would drop sooner. Yeah. And, and, and this sort of stage of, of my, the human life cycle would begin sooner.Malcolm: Yeah. But I, I, I guess what I'm saying is as somebody who went through that experience of. Being able to just, sleep with whoever they wanted for a long period of time. , when I was, , really horny when I was at that stage in my life where like that emotion is, is [00:21:00] maximized.Malcolm: I can say that when you're at the stage of your life where like fatherhood is maximized that emotional well is just a much richer emotional well yeah. And you feel much better afterwards cuz you never like, That was another thing is I, I think when you sleep with a lot of people, you begin to worry about hurting people.Malcolm: And I think that this is something that people don't talk about, but I think a lot of guys, and, and so this is why I think the guys that keep running through, people that stay on these apps that most women are actually exposed to that don't end up settling down. Mm-hmm. Why they ate. That's almost serving for evil guys because you begin to realize after a while is you've noticed.Malcolm: Some people who you've hurt.Simone: Yeah. And so those, those who keep, keep going at it or those who just don'tMalcolm: care. Yeah. Who felt their emotional connection to you was stronger than the emotional connection you had to them. Or they develop like some really strong bond to you because you know you're the first person they slept with, and then when you, you know, you move on because that, that wasn't what you were in that relationship for.Malcolm: And you signaled that to them very clearly. They just didn't believe [00:22:00] you or thought it was some sort of a gambit. Yeah. They end up hurting. And I think that normal humans don't feel good when they hurt other people. Even if it was unintentionally, even if you signal to the person, you know, I suspect you're gonna get attached to me and when I leave you, it will hurt you.Malcolm: And so I think that, that people who do have that emotion, men who do have that emotion, take themselves off the market and, and in, in a way that, yeah. So that could be another reason why you have this hot, evil graph with guys who the women are engaging when they go into the market. The ones that are still on the market are just more likely to be evil because they don't care about the people they hurt.Simone: And I'm, I'm, I'm just thinking about the similarities between kid time and sexy time. Oxy toss. Oh, oxytocin surges. Yes. Cleanup is necessary. You know, yes. You might wanna shower after Yes.Malcolm: But, but you never, I never feel like, did I hurt my kid? No, just wrestling with them or fighting with fake swords. Well,Simone: They're devastated when playtime is over and they have to go [00:23:00] to bed.Simone: You have, you know that the negotiation that that happens with our, oh no, I stillMalcolm: need, I want this. I lead you to handle those negotiations. Don't leave me.Simone: Oh no. I want another hug. I don't know, man. Anyway, though, you're in for a treat because we've gotta go pick up our kids right now,Malcolm: so. Ooh. And then we have our fancy dinner tonight.Simone: Yeah. So you gotta run up. Get your shirt on and I'm gonna get some bottles and diapers together and off we go. Love you, Simone. I love you too, Malcolm. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm takes a deep dive into the current societal trends, specifically highlighting what he calls the "progressive mind virus". This "virus", he suggests, aims to homogenize society and systematically extinguish all genuine cultural diversity. He passionately argues for the importance of unity among diverse cultural and religious groups, focusing on Orthodox Jewish populations, to counter this prevailing issue. Also, Simone and Malcolm engage in a light-hearted conversation about performative Star Wars fandom and the impact of cultural signaling in our everyday interactions.Transcript:Malcolm: [00:00:00] right now the big boogeyman is this progressive mind virus, which is, taking control of our education system and using it to erase and eradicate any culture. That shows any sort of independent thinking Everyone needs to have exactly the same views on gender. Everyone needs to have the same views on morality. Everyone has to have the same views on sexuality. Everyone has to have the same views on how we relate to the environment. Everyone has to have the same views on how how women and men relate to each other and, and they're pressing this and they're like, they are trying to homogenize society, systematically extinguish all genuine cultural diversity . One of the groups that has the longest. History of fighting against that. Regardless of what you think about like their their allegiances, they do care about their own kids, Orthodox Jewish populations, and because of that, not only are they disproportionately in positions of power across the conservative movement, why they're in these positions of power, why they're fighting so hard.Malcolm: Makes sense. It's because it's the same reason that we're fighting hard and they're not trying to convert your kids. Yeah, that they [00:01:00] don't, they don't want an all Jewish world. That's not the way their religion works. That's not the way their cultural group works. They are genuinely one of the lowest threat groups to you and one of the highest value aligned groups to you.Malcolm: And , one of the things that really gave me heart is when Andrew Tate converted to Islam and conservatives weren't like, oh, you bastar, they were like, oh yeah. We understand that because that's what society is though. It's an alliance of conservative groups against this progressive mind virus that wants to systematically erase and homogenize every culture on the planet.Malcolm: And we all have a lot in common. And if you try to form an ideological faction that is just your narrow cultural group in the hope that one day you can dominate the entire planet.Malcolm: I'm sorry. You are so delusional about how much power your cultural group has right now. All of us, all of the Orthodox groups, all of the conservative groups are on the back foot right now. And the only way we win this is through working together.[00:02:00] And I do think that we can beat this progressive mind virus. I do think that, that it will not win. And I hope that some alliance of different cultural traditions can stay together coming out of this and fight off the cultural traditions that like the progressives want to do now, want to erase all cultural diversity in the world.Malcolm: But even if you are from one of those cultural traditions, just understand that you're on a weak footing now.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And you need to fight with us or we all get erased. . And we need to just have this conversation where we need to have the conversation that we are different.Malcolm: The conservative Protestants are different from the conservative Catholics, and they're different from the conservative Jews, and that's our strengths because that's not true of the progressive Catholics and the progressives, Protestants and the progressive Jews. If you scratch beneath the surface, if the same views on gender, the same views on sexuality, the same views on our relationship to the environment, the same views on morality, the same views on the future of our species.Malcolm: They, they just have different holidays. What's that? That's not, that's not [00:03:00] difference. That's not strengthened diversity. That's, that's people who have had their cultures hollowed out and then worn, like a ghoulish skin mask is dusting and horrifying. And, and, and I am sick of it.Malcolm: I am, I am sick of this cultural extermination campaign that so many people are standing by. Wow. And, and I think that it, it will take an alliance, it will take all of the people of middle Earth coming together to fight these hodes that want to see us erase from this earth.Simone: So this morning while we were dropping off the kids at daycare I was talking with Malcolm about our difference between performative Star Wars fandom and actual Star Wars fandom, which which is actually inspired by the fact that like all the cars in our daycares parking lot are really nerdy.Simone: Like they all have anime and Star Wars stickers on them, and it's really hilarious. It's, it's how mainstream these things are, but I was, but when I met Malcolm incredibly, A [00:04:00] performative Star Wars fan, like I didn't, I don't really like the movies that much. Not that into it, not into the lore. And yet my OkCupid username was Mos Eisley ton, a ton of Star Wars references in my Okay.Simone: QID profile. And um, I was also posing in film grade Storm Trooper Armor, which I owned. Um, So it's, it's funny that I just use that as a signaling method. I, I think many women do use nerdy things as a signaling method without actually being into 'em at all ,Malcolm: oh, because arbitrage play, there's less women in nerdy communities.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So you can mm-hmm. Oh, and you admit it, youSimone: sneak, I own it. I own it. I, no, I'm just like, this is a thing that happens and women who pretend otherwiseMalcolm: are, yeah. You didn't even go to anime convent conventions and like, did you even care? You don't even No, no, no, no,Simone: no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I love anime.Simone: So don't even, don't especially manga. No, don't go there, friend. But we, we were, we actually just. In the afternoon revisited my complete performative Star Wars fandom and his [00:05:00] genuine like weird star Star Wars fandom. No, no.Malcolm: Hold on. I like the lore. I don't like any of the new stuff. Okay.Simone: Right, right. You like, yeah, you're in it for the plot friend.Simone: Okay. So anyway That's, I, I asked him like, what do you mean you wanna talk about don't, don't order 66 your own Jews? That just shows like how performative I am. Because orderMalcolm: 60, no order 66, order 66 in Star Wars is the order that was given to the clones to kill the Jedi. And I, I often feel when I'm in conservative communities these days, one, one really Crazy thing is, you were on Ed Dutton's podcast and people were like in the comments trying to figure out if you were Jewish.Malcolm: Jewish I don't know. So she is like one 16th Jewish, not that much. Like one eighth Jewish, I think one eighth Jewish Junos. Right.Simone: I have a Junos one. JuMalcolm: knows, right? But, but Matrilineally Jewish though, I guess like technically she is kind of Jewish, but, but she didn't grow up knowing that she was Metro Jewish.Malcolm: She found that out when she was an adult and they went into family history. But what was interesting [00:06:00] was just the hostility that a community that's not even like religious, like his listeners are like edgy, atheist types, right? Ethno supremacist sortSimone: of types sometimes supremacists.Simone: That'sMalcolm: great. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess they are, and, and they, they have such hostility towards, and then we talk to other people. We, we've talked to some like really spicy conservative people and they're sort of like, oh, I don't know. Is this a Jewish idea? We should be worried about this.Malcolm: And I'm like, I think that there is a serious misunderstanding of, Jews as a cultural group, and I say this to somebody who is, has no like history personally with like I have a lot of Jewish friends, but like I. Personally, I'm not genetically Jewish, I'm, none of my ancestors are Jewish, anything like that.Malcolm: And yet as an outsider, I can see that there is a misunderstanding of what's going on here. So here's where I think conservatives are correct when they say, Oh [00:07:00] Hollywood is serving our kids bad values, and Hollywood has a disproportionate number of Jews within it.Malcolm: Okay? And I'm like, okay, those two things are true. But the conservative intellectual sphere, fear also has a disproportionate number of Jews in it. The, the people who are getting conservative politicians elected has a disproportionate number of Jews within it. Pretty much any position of power in our society has a disproportionate number of Jews in it.Malcolm: And it's, and so this is one of those things that's, that's really offensive. And I think it is partially why when I talk about the, the order 66 on the Jews, why I'm increasingly getting worried for the Jewish community. So, so just quick aside here. I, I think the conservative movement has always had a ethno isolationist aspect to it.Malcolm: I, I think it's getting smaller and smaller as the conservative movement shifts and it's, it's, it's distributing throughout the movements. But historically in the US a the, the progressive movement has been until recently, the more pluralistic movement. But now part of the progressive philosophy is defined [00:08:00] by this idea of.Malcolm: You can tell which groups are evil by which groups who have power and victimhood is a virtue. And so if, if they've created this narrative of these groups are in power only because they have victimized other groups, and then you look around and you're like, oh, well, Jewish people do I think very inarguably disproportionately end up within positions of power in our society.Malcolm: Yeah. Does that mean. Like it, it, it's very hard to maintain this narrative that they historically are a victimized group. If you buy into this mindset, it's oh, well they must be oppressive and, and worse within different progressive groups, we're beginning to see now this idea of. White people aren't the bad guys.Malcolm: The Jewish people are, the most overrepresented group was in positions of power. You're talking about in proportion to the percentage of the population. Therefore, they must be the ultimate bad guys. And this is why you see people what was that communist group of That was . Burning Anne Frank's diaries for their campfires. [00:09:00] And, and this is what you're seeing on the extreme left right now, which I think when you begin to see antisemitism rise within the extreme left and within in the extreme right, that's not good.Malcolm: But, but to my larger point here, I think that there is a, a, because our politics today are so focused on your enemies, Groups can ignore their allies and they can begin to define, okay, this group is overrepresented within positions of power among my enemies. Therefore, it is an enemy group. And yet the most competent conservative allies, you know, and Ben Shapiro, right?Malcolm: I, I actually really like Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro calls us nerds. He did like a whole, like you podcast on like us being nerds and like people shouldn't listen to us. And, and, and because we're nerds, basically. He's who are these weirdos? BenSimone: Shapiro says, we're nerds. ButMalcolm: I think that's a sign of true nerdom.Malcolm: You wanna say No. Star Wars fronting about Star Wars. That's not how you become a true nerd. No. [00:10:00] When. Holy b***h, you broke all you a nerd then. You're a true nerd. Oh God. But you know, he's done a lot to progress the conservative cause. And I, and I think one of the things there was this YouTube a while ago, and they're like, look at how many of Joe Rogan's guests are, are Jewish?Malcolm: And it's yes. Because a lot of leading conservative intellectuals are Jewish. Right? And this is what I talk about. If you have a group that is disproportionately in positions of power, this is why use a Jedi analogy, don't order 66 year old Jews. Do not start stabbing them in the back. With this whole anti-Semitic movement that is gaining steam, I think on both the left and the right, if the right moves back from this position and becomes a safe haven from the Jews at the same time as the left is moving more and more anti-Jewish.Malcolm: Yeah. You'll never win Reformed Jews, but reformed Jews. I mean, they are, they are. So, they are like the Unitarian Universalists. They, they are to Judaism as Unitarian Universalism is to. Evangelicalism, or Catholicism. Right? When you see people in [00:11:00] positions of power on the left, You see they are reformed Jews and you say, ah, this is proof that Jews can't be good conservative allies or, or the Jewish population at large is against us.Malcolm: To me this is very much like a person looking at the leftists in positions of power and seeing Unitarian universalists in a lot of these positions and being like, well, this is why I can't trust Protestants, right? Like, What, this is the, a highly memetically in infected with this progressive mind virus group.Malcolm: Like you can't, that that's not representative of the Jewish people more broadly. You look at the Orthodox Jewish group, these people are incredibly conservative in the way that they view everything, and they've been able to maintain their traditions with fidelity across generations. So, In the face of highly diverse, if we're dealing with a world where immigrants are posing more of a threat to us, if anything, we can learn from Orthodox Jewish populations that have for [00:12:00] a long time been the minority in their, their cultural environments and been able to pass on their cultural group intergenerationally with fidelity.Simone: Something, something, gift, horse, mouth, et cetera.Malcolm: Well, I mean, don't look at if, if you, if you take inventory of both, who are the most competent people on both sides of, of the cultural battlefield right now there are few groups.Malcolm: As motivated and, and, and, and that have dealt with a situation like this historically. So if right now the big boogeyman is this progressive mind virus, which is, taking control of our education system and using it to erase and eradicate any culture. That shows any sort of independent thinking from our society.Malcolm: You know, Everyone needs to have exactly the same views on gender. Everyone needs to have the same views on morality. Everyone has to have the same views on sexuality. Everyone has to have the same views on how we relate to the environment. Everyone has to have the same views on how we relate, like how, how women and men relate to each other [00:13:00] and, and they're pressing this and they're like, We support diversity just except anywhere where there's actually like meaningful ideological diversity.Malcolm: It must be stamped out there, right? Like they are trying to homogenize society, systematically extinguish all genuine cultural diversity in our society. One of the groups that has the longest. History of fighting against that. Regardless of what you think about like their competency today or, or their allegiances, they do care about their own kids, Orthodox Jewish populations, and I think because of that, they are, not only are they disproportionately in positions of power across the conservative movement, why they're in these positions of power, why they're fighting so hard.Malcolm: Makes sense. It's because it's the same reason that we're fighting hard and they're not trying to convert your kids. Yeah, that they don't, they don't want an all Jewish world. That's not the way their religion works. That's not the way their cultural group works. They are genuinely one of the lowest threat groups to you and one of the highest [00:14:00] value aligned groups to you.Malcolm: And one of the things that really gave me heart is when Andrew Tate converted to Islam and conservatives weren't like, oh, you bastar, they were like, oh yeah. We understand that because that's what society is though. It's an alliance of conservative groups against this progressive mind virus that wants to systematically erase and homogenize every culture on the planet.Malcolm: And we all have a lot in common. Even when you're talking about other groups, like a lot of conservatives these days, they have some, animosity towards Muslim cultural groups. These Muslims aren't converting your kids. They, they do not have any aims at erasing your cultural group through capturing educational systems and converting your kids.Malcolm: That's where the immediate threat is right now. Understand that they are just as threatened, a Muslim immigrant. By the progressive elite within our society as you are, as are the Orthodox Jews. And if you try to form an ideological [00:15:00] faction that is just your narrow cultural group in the hope that one day you can dominate the entire planet.Malcolm: I'm sorry. You are so delusional about how much power your cultural group has right now. All of us, all of the Orthodox groups, all of the conservative groups are on the back foot right now. And the only way we win this is through working together. It's through genuine pluralism.Simone: Well, yeah, I mean, what I think is interesting about this, and part of me thinks that this is our, like Silicon Valley.Simone: Background speaking. So it could be a view that actually people strongly disagree with. But we were raised post meeting each other and certainly in our entrepreneurial and career lives to believe that he who moves first and fastest and most boldly is he who wins. So a defensive strategy oh, let's trademark this, let's copyright this, let's stealth this.Simone: Like all, protect, protect, protect. Attack anyone who tries to copy you, like you will not win it is move fast and break things in Silicon Valley. And I think that we view things very similarly culturally. [00:16:00] It, it is move fast and break things. So it doesn't matter like a, a defensive strategy it's not something that would ever occur to us culturally speaking because we come from a mindset of, I don't care about my enemies.Simone: My enemies will not even really exist because I'm going to build the future and they won't be a part of it. That kind of thing. You know what I mean? Well,Malcolm: I mean, I think what you're missing here is our enemies are so good at erasing our cultures right now that many of the conservative cultural groups will not survive this.Malcolm: When you look at things like Mormons falling below population rate, when you look at their bleed rate, I would have thought 10 years ago if I was like, there's an alliance of conservative cultural groups who's one of the strongest positions here, and that blanket's breaking. Um, You know that that's, and, and, and I think that some conservative groups, part of their strength is their traditionalism, their unwillingness to accept new ways of doing things.Malcolm: . You can look at a great example here in the Amish are a great example of this, right? Hmm. They don't adapt to new ways of doing things. They don't move fast and break things.Malcolm: What we should think of ourselves as is a, a [00:17:00] multicultural and multi front. Battlefield and understanding that different, the, the strength in our diversity is different players on this battlefield have different strengths. And sometimes that strengths is a group's traditionalism. It is their steadfastness and it is their defensiveness.Malcolm: But if the defensive groups say, no, no, no, we wanna get rid of people like you and, and Malcolm, right. Because you're from a highly accelerationist, a highly aggressive group. Mm-hmm. It's well, If you just take a defensive position, eventually the entire front loses. Mm-hmm. We need certain groups that are going to at risk to themselves.Malcolm: An acceleration is position. A culturally experimental position puts our culture at more risk.Simone: Well, yeah. It's offensive, it's moving. It's moving more of your team into an offensive position and leaving. Leaving, honestly, your defense kind of weak. Well,Malcolm: yes, but that's for our culture because we have other people on our flanks.Malcolm: Mm. Cause we have the, the, whether [00:18:00] it's, it's the Amish or the Catholics on the flanks holding ground where we move in and do things with the Collins Institute, try to break through the front lines and take control of an aspect of the education system so that we can protect the cultural diversity that I think makes the world strong.Malcolm: Hmm. At the very least, do not attack the groups that are making these aggressive maneuvers because you cannot win just by holding steady. You, you do have to make aggressive maneuvers. You do have to break through lines and , no group, no conservative group has enough numbers or enough willpower even to win on their own these days.Malcolm: Mm. , and I think that some conservative groups are really just like progressives in disguise. Like they want to impose their cultural group on everyone else after they win. One of the few groups that I'm really not worried about here is the Jews, right? So I'm like, why?Malcolm: Why? They're, they're one of the few groups that I'm like, I know they, they don't want to, well, maybe my kids because they're technically Jewish, but most kids, it is, I think just an [00:19:00] incredibly dumb position that takes the perspective of a world that no longer exists, a world in which you had a country.Malcolm: Where you were, the culturally dominant faction in which the world was made up of, of countries where your country was your ethnicity, which was your culture, that's not the world anymore. And the countries that have stayed in that world are some of the weakest on the current playing field. It is the weakest strategy you can take.Simone: Right?Simone: Okay. So a good example of a culture following the strategy is Korea by staying homogenous, either through inaction or inability to bring in outsiders or an unwillingness to do so. Yeah, and they've doneMalcolm: a very good job of keeping out immigrants, but eventually they will die.Malcolm: Just keeping yourself in a hermetic pod doesn't save you. Mm-hmm. And I think that learning to work in a multicultural ecosystem is, Something that the surviving cultural groups will have to do. I think coming out of this period in conservative history, [00:20:00] one faction of conservatism will be a genuinely pluralistic cultural group that is okay with different cultural groups.Malcolm: I. Working together towards a common goal. We're from a Calvinist cultural group, which also isn't that interested in converting other people, we'll, we'll breed our, our, our, our cultural affection. We don't need to convert people. That's, that's not something we're interested in. But I do believe that we gain strengths from a diversity of opinions.Malcolm: And I think that coming out of this, I do think that we can beat this progressive mind virus. I do think that, that it will not win. And I hope that some alliance of different cultural traditions can stay together coming out of this and fight off the cultural traditions that like the progressives want to do now, want to erase all cultural diversity in the world.Malcolm: Want everyone to think the same, want everyone to have the same moral system. But even if you are from one of those cultural traditions, just understand that you're on a weak footing now.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And you need to fight with [00:21:00] us or we all get erased. Everyone who differentiates from the mind virus and the mind virus does not lead to a prospering, intergalactic human ecosystem. They, they do not want that. You look at what they, when we, when we're behind closed doors with them, they're genuine, negative utilitarians.Malcolm: They're like, yeah, but would the world really be so bad without humans? Look at all the suffering we cause, look at all the suffering we cause in animals. Look at all the infighting we have. If we go extinct and it's just due to low fertility rates, is it really that bad? They do not care about extinction events.Malcolm: You look, and I point out to them, I'm like, look, you guys have controlled the academic system for the past 25 years, and the amount of money that needs to go into new discoveries, and new discoveries in general are slowing down. The replicability crisis is getting worse. It seems that you have genuinely gotten bad at searching for truth.Malcolm: Does that not concern you? And they're like, well, not really, because we're creating less negative emotions in the world, right? Like through the ideology we're pushing, we're lowering negative emotions than that. It might be true, but that's the way a [00:22:00] negative utilitarian sees the world.Malcolm: They, they, they cannot take us to the stars and therefore they are an incredibly risky group to leave in a position of power. I don't mind if, if, if. Some group that's radically different from us war Hammer style ends up on giant cathedral ships going to the stars, right? That, that, obviously that's not how they first went to the Stars in War Hammer.Malcolm: Sorry, I'm getting nerdy about lore here that again, the Empire of Man turned into. I'm just saying I do like cathedral ships. Aesthetically, I think they're pretty cool. We, we, we can do that.Simone: Yeah, I mean, when, when I think about like cool sci-fi scenarios of this, and I don't think you ever like it, but I really like Dune.Simone: You've got all these really different groups that kind of use each other may not respect each other, sometimes respect each other definitely mess with each other are very ideologically different but still create a very interesting universe and. I like that because there's a lot of interplay.Simone: I don't know how that works in the war hammer universe. [00:23:00] But I, I do, I do love sci-fi explorations of how it could be though. I guess they're kind of just, Extrapolations of what is here now.Malcolm: Well, it's interesting, you're talking about the war hammer universe. It depends on how you would interpret it.Malcolm: So some people would say, well, they're all technically following, the same religion, like worshiping the emperor of man. Right. Okay. But if you look at the cultural differences between space, marine units, for example they are easily. As big or bigger because they're also genetic cultural differences.Malcolm: Mm. Between the pretty big genetic cultural differences. Do you gain people's memories when you eat them? Oh, oh, okay. Bigger than cultural differences between most of the conservative cultural traditions that exist today. So if they can work together towards this, this prosperous future for our species, hopefully we can,Simone: fingers crossed, well, Let's see.Simone: Have you changed my view on anything? We talk about this a lot, so, or we're a little bit too [00:24:00] aligned maybe next time. Well, what IMalcolm: like to create is I like if I'm thinking like 3D chess, how do you play this? Mm-hmm. If you can really damper down the antisemitism in the conservative party.Malcolm: Really have people attack it whenever they see it. Okay. ThenMalcolm: in an era in which the progressives are moving more and more towards anti-Semitic positions and the progressive fringes are becoming more and more virulently, anti-Semitic you.Malcolm: Allow in the same way. So a lot of people don't know this, but in the 1970s, Catholics were majority progressive. They were Democrats majority. Mm-hmm. And this is when the conservative party took the position against abortion. Before this, the majority of re conservative Republicans at the 1970s conference were actually more, they were not only pro-abortion, but the conservative your average Republican was more pro-abortion than your average Democrat.Malcolm: Oh. And a lot of people, they're, they're not familiar with this. The core reason the conservative party made this shift was to bring the Catholic cultural faction into our fold. And it worked. [00:25:00] It worked with flying colors. And it was because at the time Democrats were taking shakier and shakier positions vis-a-vis Catholics.Malcolm: Right now we're in a society where the Democrats are taking shakier and shakier progressives, vis-a-vis the Jewish population. We can right now, we can peel off that population in the same way the conservative movement did.Malcolm: The Catholics in the 1970s. And I think that the, another population that we can easily peel out, which I'll talk about in a future video, is the Hispanic population. Because I think naturally they're very aligned with us, same with Orthodox Jewish population and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population.Malcolm: They're just naturally very aligned with the conservative movement, so long as we can commit toSimone: cultural pluralism. Okay. I'm, I'm sold on this Sounds great, but I mean, what actually would it take. To get the conservative party to be a little less anti-Semitic seems kind of like not plausible. Yeah, sure.Simone: It would be great if that's possible, [00:26:00] but I just don't like would major influencer if enough major influencers in this space just. Decided to not be cool with it and shamed it a lot, would that make the difference? AndMalcolm: what would it take? I think the number one thing we need to do is talk about it. So this whole video, the very fact that I'm talking about Jewish people is like a unique cultural group that is, uniquely successful within certain, and it's just measurably, they're uniquely successful.Malcolm: Whether it's like getting Nobel prizes or you look at the number of, millionaires or whatever, like just uniquely successful. Mm-hmm. But just saying that, that's considered offensive. People are like, well, that's a stereotype. And it's well, You, you, you nutter butter. It's like simple statistics, right?Malcolm: And they're like, well, that's an offensive statistic and you, and you shouldn't say it. And it's due to historic discrimination. How is it due to, what are you going on about? We're different. Different people are different. And then, and then, I love it like Nicholas says, he's well, the, the signs that they have positions of power is a sign that they're doing something Machiavellian together.Malcolm: Even, hey, they'll say this. I'm like, oh yeah. Well then what do you think about the last Supreme Court? Where, seven of the nine justices were Catholic or raised [00:27:00] Catholic. One came from a Catholic and Protestant household, and many people say Protestant, that actually Catholic didn't go through this.Malcolm: . Does that mean that there's some like Catholic conspiracy to control our court system? No, just different cultural traditions. The, the great strengths about cultural diversity is that they have different things they're good at, right? And, and, and it's a fact that we're different.Malcolm: The fact that we can recognize our differences and see that by working together, by working with people who are different than us, who are culturally optimized for different outcomes, yeah, you're gonna see different long tail distribution outcomes. That's our strengths, is our difference. And it's something that progressives will never have.Malcolm: Because they lack genuine diversity, they even lack the ability to recognize the strength in genuine diversity comes from the fact that diverse groups are going to excel in different things. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Okay. And we need to just have this conversation where we need to have the conversation that we are different.Malcolm: The conservative Protestants are different from the conservative Catholics, and they're different [00:28:00] from the conservative Jews, and that's our strengths because that's not true of the progressive Catholics and the progressives, Protestants and the progressive Jews. If you scratch beneath the surface, if the same views on gender, the same views on sexuality, the same views on our relationship to the environment, the same views on morality, the same views on the future of our species.Malcolm: They, they just have different holidays. What's that? That's not, that's not difference. That's, that's not, that's, that's not strengthened diversity. That's, that's people who have had their cultures hollowed out and then worn, like a ghoulish skin mask is dusting and horrifying. And, and, and I am sick of it.Malcolm: I am, I am sick of this cultural extermination campaign that so many people are standing by. Wow. And, and I think that it, it will take an alliance, it will take all of the people of middle Earth coming together to fight these hodes that want to see us erase from this earth. ISimone: thought you wanted to sail away on some Elvin ship, which would be super lame.Malcolm: The vin ship is a life [00:29:00] extensionist, the Elvin ship that these people who are like, I want to live forever on an island, right? Don't matter. And it's okay, you go away.Malcolm: You, you live forever. And I'll be like, Sam, and have kids in a happy life, youSimone: know? We're gonna be the same way as, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let, let's do it. Team Ji. Do you want me to saute some meat for you?Malcolm: I would like you to saute some meat for me. Yes. Okay. And put in some oyster sauce earlierSimone: this time.Simone: Okay. We don't, do you want me to do an onion? We don't have shallots left.Malcolm: I do, I got some more onions, so Yeah, goSimone: for that. Perfect. Okay. I love you. I love you and I'll see you soon. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join us as we dive into an intriguing conversation about the phenomenon of Rule 34 and fandoms, particularly focusing on the "My Little Pony" fandom. Malcolm and Simone discuss evolutionary pressures that could contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon, addressing arousal patterns, societal norms, cultural traditions, and much more.Transcript:Simone: [00:00:00] the first impression that the internet gets is, oh my God, you sick, disgusting monsters.Simone: How are you turned on? By cartoon ponies, and what you're saying is actually the people turned on by these cartoon ponies are actually very good. Like they're, they're triggered by instincts. Driven by being a very good, committed partnerMalcolm: I'm sorry I don't consume my little pony porn.Malcolm: I, I'm, I'm, I'm a terror. This is,Simone: this is probably one of your greatest downsides. Think about all that, that, that is recommended about these, these gentlemen here and true gentlemen is theMalcolm: word really. Men of class and, and men,Simone: no men of class and distinction. Checking with me and like the whole gradation of, of genres of this type of material.Simone: I have to say, hats off to these guysSimone: Hello, gorgeous.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. I come to you today dressed as an intellectual. Hello. Because people have said [00:01:00] we are intellectuals.Simone: Well, LAMalcolm: Doll, well, I don't know, like elite, not an intellectual elites. This is, this is the brand we have publicly, I guess. So this is an elite conversation.Simone: Elite, if that counts as what Yahoo News calls us in scare quotes. In scare quotes. Yes, elites. Well, tell me, Mr. Elite, intellectual, what have you been reading about today?Malcolm: Well, so there was this poll on Reddit, which was going through the different fandoms that people create, R 34 artwork of. So R 34 is based on the internet rule, rule 34, that even exists.Malcolm: There is porn of it. GodSimone: bless America,Malcolm: God bless the internet. You little herbs. Anyway, so the second most common fandom the material was coming from [00:02:00] was Little Pony, which is interesting and it's actually something we talk about in our book because if you think about it, humans are degenerates, of course, especially males.Malcolm: So you would expect it would be some fandom with like scantily clad women. Actually the, the fandom that that beat it was Pokemon, but,Simone: No.Malcolm: Okay. Well, I don't, I don't want to get into that, but yeah, you expect that it's gonna be top by a bunch of these fandoms because there are a lot of fandoms out there.Malcolm: That have a lot of scantily clad women in them. Yeah. So why, why aren't those the fandoms that are dominating these spaces? Well, I'd love to hear, do you have a theory or,Simone: I, I mean both, both of these top, top rankers are kids shows, so I feel like there's something that has to do maybe with, I. I don't know. It can't be nostalgia though, because the adult audience that got into My Little Pony was not into My Little Pony as a kid. It was the new reboot of [00:03:00] My Little Pony that they only consumed asMalcolm: adults.Malcolm: Exactly. So I think it's a couple things that are happening here. So I think the core is, is we need to understand what sexuality, like what are our arousal patterns today We think of them as being these like, Despicable disgusting things because so many of our cultural traditions have evolved around repressing them and, and for good reason.Malcolm: They lowered fertility rates if you just indulge in them whenever you have them. So a lot of cultures the cultures that were like just indulge in your sexuality whenever you feel it, they did not have as many surviving offspring and they were out-competed. But the cultural groups that recommended a high level of self-control.Malcolm: However, however what did all of these systems evolve for in the first place? And it was to. Breed with high quality partners who would also dedicate resources to the offspring so that those offspring couldn't make it to adulthood.Simone: Right? So far so good. Yeah, this seems reasonable.Malcolm: So, so good. So it would be almost crazy if our arousal systems [00:04:00] were not paired in a way where we find people who our brains subconsciously recognize.Malcolm: As good life, partners and members of our social group who we think about a lot, who we mentally engage with a lot as more arousing than ones we don't. You particularly ones that we feel uniquely safe around, particularly ones that model our society's ideals around womanhood as it relates to long-term partnership.Malcolm: And that's what I really think you are seeing here is the very system that evolved to motivate the most wholesome of emotions, be more likely to become aroused by people who you see as wholesome and your friends, right? SoSimone: the, the first impression that the internet gets is, oh my God, you sick, disgusting monsters.Simone: How are you turned on? [00:05:00] By cartoon ponies, and what you're saying is actually the people turned on by these cartoon ponies are actually very good. Like they're, they're triggered by instincts. Driven by being a very good, committed partner who wants to, well, I'mMalcolm: not saying it's a good thing to, to be out there consuming this sort of material or creating this material, but what I'm sayingSimone: is, but you're saying it comes from a good place, you're saying?Malcolm: No, I'm not saying it comes from a good place. Okay. What I'm saying is the evolutionary pressures. That motivated this behavior were actually, I mean it's, it's obviously, so suppose you're coding software, right? Okay. And you're like, well I want people to form like good relationships, so let's code the software to be like, yeah, be more likely to form a relationship with something you see as wholesome.Malcolm: Something you spend a lot of time around. And if you think like specifically the My Little Pony show, you look at these characters cuz we used to be brownies, we [00:06:00] engaged in like, Is said, like my little pony memes in my proposal to you, when I did that Reddit proposal that, that with viral. Yes. I've had some of our listeners don't even know they were those, those people who, who did those, those types of people.Malcolm: But anyway the, if you think about the characters in the show, they each represent a different stereotype of ideal long-term female partners. Hmm. With, with all of the aspects of that exaggerated and very few of the downsides. So if you're talking about a cultural archetype that people would glom onto.Malcolm: Yes. And then two, because a large community formed around the show, a lot of people saw them as almost like high status individuals within the community. Like that would be the closest thing their evolutionary brain would have to. What a star of a show is. Well nowSimone: hold on, hold on. What you're saying here, actually, I feel like this doubly recommends, this community to women. Okay. So let's say that I'm a woman [00:07:00] who's dating and I discover that the guy I'm dating is aroused by, what do they call it? Lop arousing material related to my Little pony. Or they, they watch it for the plot or something, something like that, right?Simone: But I find my boyfriends into it, or the guy I'm dating. What you're saying is he, one is aroused by people with whom he has, or characters figures with whom he has a close emotional relationship. And two, he's aroused by characters and people who show diligence. Pro-social behavior. It's, I, I think most women.Simone: Would, would think, oh, this must be a freak. I can't date him. Red flag. Whereas like, oh, I would see a bigger red flag would be a guy who's like super aroused by violence in porn, like gang bangs. LikeMalcolm: get to that in a future a podcast. Yeah. Well, okay, so two things here. What is, I'm sorry I don't consume my little pony porn.Malcolm: I, [00:08:00] I'm, I'm, I'm a terror. This is,Simone: this is probably one of your greatest downsides. Think about all that, that, that is recommended about these, these gentlemen here and true gentlemen is theMalcolm: word really. Men of class and, and men,Simone: no men of class and distinction. Checking with me and like the whole gradation of, of genres of this type of material.Simone: I have to say, hats off to these guys.Malcolm: One thing that I think that, that you're touching on here that I really wanna dive into more on a, a later podcast, but I think it's interesting is we didn't have this theory and we were doing our sexuality books, so I wasn't able to elucidate on it. But since then, we've gotten to be friends with Ayla and we've talked a lot about the way arousal patterns work.Malcolm: And we've gotten a chance to look at some of her data that this come out. And we've gotten some new ideas. And one of the ideas we have is that male sexuality may actually be polymorphic. And by that what I mean is it expresses itself differently, in different environments. And I suspect that somewhere was in the male brain.Malcolm: There may be [00:09:00] something that. Tries to determine if a potential partner is in the long-term partner category of their brain or is in the we are raiding a village time to make as many kids as possible before we, we leave right part of their brain. Because the optimization of arousal patterns for these two different types of potential breeding interactions is wildly different.Malcolm: Mm. And it would almost seem to be useful for men to have both of these patterns stored within their brains for different scenarios. And in women, we actually argue in, in the book that women also have a polymorphic sexual behavior pattern. So in women the more partners they sleep with, the less oxytocin they release with new partners.Malcolm: And that basically means that they are forced to fall in love less with a partner, like they have less. Instinctual. I love this person because they slept withSimone: me and this, well, they're just less likely to get super attached person. They're not gonna see, receive the same level of, [00:10:00] of like addiction. This can actually cause trouble for women on the dating market.When, if they've slept with, , a number of people, they will start to say, well, I'm looking for a guy. Who made me feel the way, , X, previous partner I had made me feel. And it may be that their biology has just adapted. So no other partner will ever make them feel that way, which can lead to them. Discounting potentially really good romantic partners for longterm relationships.Malcolm: But what that means is their biology is basically saying, okay, if I am in a monogamous tribe and I like, this is the optimization. It's actually a really brilliant sort of polymorphic behavior pattern. It's saying, well, if I'm in this tribe, right, and this is a monogamous tribe and it's a stable tribe, and I have one partner, then it is useful to form an illogical attachment to the first person you sleep with.Malcolm: But if I, my tribe has been rated and I'm being passed around as like a sex slave, well then it's, it's useful to not form attachments to everyone I'm sleeping [00:11:00] with, right? So in women, you see, This one pattern of changing sexuality, but in men, you'd want those two sexualities to overlap on the same mind and what we were arguing from the data might be true.Malcolm: That we haven't collected data specifically on this. There's just hints of it, is that a lot of men may actually have two overlapping sexualities. One that expresses with people they see as potential long-term partners. So this would express in, in terms of like shows that they really enjoy for a long time or something like that.Malcolm: As well as so like rule 31st, Jeff. But as well as like their wives. Right. And then another firm of, of sexuality, which is like the type of sexuality that gives them arousal. When they're consuming porn or something like that.Simone: Well, okay, hold on, hold on. Let me see if I, if I understand you correctly.Simone: So we've more discussed in, in other places this polymorphism with female sexuality, which is basically, The fewer sexual partners a woman has, the more attached she gets. And if she has more sexual partners, that's a sign you [00:12:00] should get less attached. Okay. That's smart. It means you're in a society where maybe you need to be a little more flexible.Simone: That's good. Okay. So, but for men, the thing is like men may also be in a position where sort of us, which. Can flip of like, Hey, like it's time for me to be aroused by committed relationships, because I'm in that kind of stable society. And then the other flip is sort of like, oh, hey, I should more what devalue women just be like, Willing to churn through them as what, what, what, what exactly are signs of the other form of like male polymorphism?Simone: Like one, one is pair bonded husband kind of material. What is, what does the other one look like? Well, I, I'dMalcolm: argue that it's probably like brutal sexuality, like, like much more hardcore you would think. It could be expressed in online porn as. Rape, stuff like that.Simone: Well, what, what I'm trying to get at here, which, which I think is interesting is what we've seen with swipe based dating and the failure of, of relationship markets [00:13:00] is that probably the vast majority of men, the implication of your theory is the vast majority of men who are not really getting many sexual partners, if any sex at all, are gonna fall into this husband category, which, we'd, we'd say is fairly pro-social and, and good for a relationship, whereas like the smaller group of men.Simone: That is able to access a very broad array of women and actually does have a pretty high sexual partner count, is going to be, per this theory flipped to a much more, at least from the perspective of female partner, toxic form of sexuality.Malcolm: Well, not necessarily from the perspective of female partner, because if we live in a society where women also have lots of sexual partners, then they are going to be in slave state sexuality, which basically means they are going to be more turned on by beingSimone: By more violent scenarios.Simone: By more violent, by more violent scenarios. Yeah. Which, which shows up in our data. Right. Then the percentage of women, what was it like around 40% who reported actually being aroused by these violent, coercive scenarios? Yeah. Had more sexual partners. Yeah. Yeah. .Malcolm: So what we saw in the data that really [00:14:00] tipped us off that this might be happening came from interviews of people who life like really extremist porn.Malcolm: And th they often in their relationships were not actually interested in that with their partners. It was like their primary partners. Hmm. That was really interesting. Like why did you keep seeing that? So the point I was making is the type of porn a guy is consuming does not necessarily correlate with what they prefer in a relationship.Malcolm: And I think that that is really interesting, but it can also cause problems. So if a guy's sleeping around a lot, like you have one of these Chad guys who's sleeping around a lot when they first engage with a woman, it means they're going to treat them much more in this brutal sexuality way.Malcolm: But as they begin to form an attachment to them, they will treat them much more caringly like their brain will conceptualize them within the long-term partner form of sexuality. But then the problem you have there, Is that the woman may have found them attractive for this sort of brutal type of [00:15:00] sexuality.Malcolm: Right? And I suspect in BDSM dungeons, this is why taking on roles is so important as well as the huge environmental change because you are trying to trick your brain into believing the person you are engaging with is not actually your long term partner, which is going to allow that different part of your sexual brain to activate.Simone: That's interesting. Yeah. And of course that, that creates a problem if, in some communities that would be framed as losing frame, failing to maintain frame when what you're saying is it would, it's a natural course of events based on the way that that humans function.Simone: So it's something to prepare for for sure. But that's That's interesting.Malcolm: Yeah. Well, but I do really like your take it, it's such a fun idea of a take is like, oh, this, this, this type of material recommends a guy to a woman. Yeah. Wouldn't it beSimone: fun if and I, I think this is something ALA's even [00:16:00] asked her Twitter followers about like, wouldn't it be really fun to sit down with someone you're dating and go through their erotic material history?Simone: Which I think some people think about that and just like, Their faces go pale. Like they couldn't imagine sharing this with anyone. Like it's this shameful thing that they would never, ever wanna share with someone when I feel like you could actually learn so much about someone like looking through that search history and view history.Malcolm: You could learn a bit about, and this is what's really interesting about arousing things. Hmm. You could learn a bit about the things that are pre-coded about them. Oh. But I think that's what's really important is they didn't choose those things. Mm-hmm. And what's important to remember with sexuality, whatever a person's sexuality is, I it, the, the, the things that arouse them is you have very little control over that.Malcolm: And this is something that religious traditions admit as well. Like a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people are like, oh, they're trying to like erase gay people or something. It's like, no, they admit that some people are born same sex attracted, they just have a different cultural solution [00:17:00] for that.Malcolm: Yeah. And whether or not it's a more effective cultural solution is it's probably not, like I admit, I, I would imagine if you're born same sex attracted, you probably have a much higher chance of committing suicide if you grow up in a, in a Christian household. But We also know from the data that if you're depressed, you have a much lower chance of committing suicide in Christian households.Malcolm: So what does that mean? We give our depressed kids to the Christians and we give our same sex attracted kids to the progressives. Just do a, a child swap there for whoever likely to, I'm just, I'm just talking about the data, like if, if that's what we're going on there, but yeah, so there's, there's.Malcolm: Different cultural solutions, but the point being, and I think that this is very important for people to remember, is the things that arouse you are not who you are. Mm-hmm. And so they, they are literally the least you part of you because they are like randomly coded things about you. They do not justify behavior.Malcolm: But if somebody's just consuming content, right? Like that, that is, I don't know.Malcolm: I, I don't know if, if I can pass judgment here, but [00:18:00] I do understand what you're saying, Simone.Simone: I, you know me, I love seeing how people are weird. So I see it as a major, a major perk. Well that's, and I also want people like, this is a very controversial thing in that a bizarre number of, especially female partners think it counts as cheating.Simone: Even if a male partner just looks at erotic material, which is. AMalcolm: lot. That's, that's, yeah. I, I, I, I actually hate to say there was this famous study where they were going to try to find men. That didn't consume porn to compare with men that did consume porn, and they had to drop the study because they just couldn't find a large sample size of men that they consumed.Malcolm: There was no porn. And I think that when you as a woman are sorting for guys who don't consume porn when they're in a relationship, what you're really sorting for is a guy who lies to you.Simone: Because, or you're sorting for asexuality, which I do think we're gonna see going, oh yeah. You could be sorting for asexuality.Simone: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, I think we're gonna see more and more asexuality [00:19:00] because it seems to be that there's a strong correlation between large amounts of endocrine disruptors and first trimester bloodstreams of mothers and less complete male sexual development for Right. ThoseMalcolm: babies. So, well, and I love people would be like, yeah, but you can control, how, how often you consume erotic material, and I would say, well, the data doesn't really seem to suggest that.Malcolm: If you look at areas like there's this great study that looks at areas by like the, the number of like religious people in them, and you actually get higher rates of porn consumption. When you are in a cultural group that is more against porn consumption, like the think act of trying to constrain it leads to it being more of a problem in yourSimone: daily life.Simone: It's the same as as binge eating. You're more likely to see binge eating behavior among people with very strict diets. Well, well this is,Malcolm: yeah, actually that's, that's correct. Mm-hmm. It actually comes to, in our book, we were like, well, could you actually go to like a camp to cure gayness? Cause you were talking about how like, Okay.Malcolm: Sexuality can change, like if you use hormone therapy, like the 25% of, of, of people when they go [00:20:00] through trans hormone therapy, they change their gender of primary attraction. And we're like, well, okay, well, can you use this information can for anything? Like, no, because it's, it's random and, and these people aren't gonna wanna go through hormone therapy, so what could you do?Malcolm: And we were like, oh, well, I guess you could go to a camp where you just have like tons of gay sex because you can actually desensitize yourself. That is true. Yeah. The downside to this sort of a camp, of course, would be that you would have to do it regularly. Like it would have to be a once a year or twice a year thing.Malcolm: And then we started thinking, we're like, oh, these all male secret societies in the woods for like, The conservative elite? Is that something that exists?Malcolm: Oh, it is a thing that exists. Oh, is that like a camp that's meant to make them less gay? We do know. Hold on. I actually will say I, I can't talk to any of my own, but there's a famous quote from Nixon about the Bohemian Grove where he said it was the gayest thing he's ever seen.Simone: I think he used a word meaner [00:21:00] than gayest, but yeah.Malcolm: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. ButSimone: we're being polite. But I love it. Yeah, thereMalcolm: all types of else other, oh, I, I really do wanna do a longer video on vore at some point, because I find that to be one of the most interesting weird arousal things. So this video is made in, in, in response to either being like, yeah, talk more about sexuality and our sexuality videos get the most clicks.Malcolm: Because that, that one is confusing to me. Until we do a video, I, I would, I would venture to say, I. Suspect the answer might be boring. It might just be a misfiring of the dominance and submission system. Yeah. Potentially that system was borrowed at some point. One of the things we always say about evolution is evolution's a cheap programmer, and it might have been borrowed at some point of our system used for hunting.Malcolm: Or maybe the hunting system was like trying to be hijacked by the, the system used to like, Hunt someone down and rape them when you're like raiding a village and, and that system beca, I don't know. I, [00:22:00] I, I suspectSimone: it's something like that. Well, when you, when you look at like VRE illustrations though, you can see that it's a, a confluence of so many things, even like swaddling interest.Simone: Like I, I think, eating I think extreme dominance, its Submiss mission totally show up there too. But then there's a lot of like furry content in there. So I just, I think what's really interesting to me is how cross-sectional it is, because it's very niche.Malcolm: Oh, we've gotta do a video on furries sometime.Malcolm: I, I love that. Our, our theory is always actually um, coverage, an ancient practice. Well, you look cross-culturally, almost all cultures have some sort of furry like practice where people in animal costumes dance around a fire to music.Simone: It's traditional culture.Malcolm: Yeah. Well, what I'm saying is I actually think it might be in.Malcolm: A evolved group bonding ritual. You see this, in, in medieval Europe, if you look at what the masquerade balls were actually like, they were often done with like animal mass during that period. You look at ancient Egypt early Native American cultures, early Asian cultures I think in some [00:23:00] Polynesian cultures you see similar ceremonies, like why would every culture on earth have the animal mask, fire music ceremony?Malcolm: Like that's weird. And then we see it in today's society, it's because they're men of true culture. But we'll go full into furries at some point cuz I, I think that's really interesting. Yes. Course of course. Course we're trying to bio-engineer a cat girl army that is the faction of elite that we are want to be aligned with is the, is the cat girl army.Malcolm: To, to replace you. That's the type of conservatives that we are,Simone: cat Girl, because that faction is the winning faction.Malcolm: It's the winning faction to think that the master race already exists. The master raceSimone: is, is the cat girl. It lacks, it lacks the cute ears in Entail and, and soon today approach to relationships.Simone: I, I don't, I don't think we're anywhere close to the pinnacle until that comes. Well,Malcolm: love those conversations. Weirdo Simon, I love how you combine this weirdness. It was just such an openness to groups that are very [00:24:00] different from you and, and eagerness to understand them. I, I really appreciate that. It's, it's, it's, so, it's the thrilling to have that in, in my day-to-day life, and it really helps simmer portions of myself that may.Malcolm: Be overly judgmental or, or look through groups that are different from me. Yeah.Simone: But you're still way better at diving down through new rabbit holes and finding the things that I love, which I'm just, I love that. I love waking up each morning and having you surprise me with some new discovery, so never stop that.Simone: Anyway, I love these conversations. Let's have another one soon. Okay. I love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join Malcolm, Diana, and Simone in a stimulating conversation addressing some of the intriguing contradictions that arise from certain sociopolitical stances. They delve into complex issues like prenatal screening, abortion, and embryo selection, juxtaposing these topics against the backdrop of social biases. Listen as they highlight the inconsistencies in certain beliefs and reveal how individuals often tailor their convictions based on social approval rather than logical reasoning. Whether you're interested in bioethics, social commentary, or philosophical discussions, this conversation offers a fresh perspective that challenges conventional thinking.Transcript: Malcolm: [00:00:00] he is pro aborting. Fetuses. Yeah. If they show signs of a potential medical problem, yeah.Malcolm: But against not choosing a pre implanted IVF embryo because they might end up showing one of those diseases. So he is more pro. Abortion, like even mid-stage abortion, then he is pro embryo selection.Diana: That is whack,Malcolm: well, not whack, but I think what it shows is this, and this is a wider topic I wanted to talk about here, is this insanity you get and you see this on both the left and the right, but right now the left is more in control of media, so they do it more.Malcolm: Were they, there are individuals who clearly like put genuinely no thought into their actual beliefs about the world and they're choosing their beliefs on what they think will get them the most socialDiana: credit. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's absolutely a progressive status quo bias [00:01:00] because at one point in a debate that we were having on Twitter months or years ago, Noah, Carl said, Let's say you could do prenatal screening with blood on a woman and a woman finds out that her baby's gonna have a lower IQ than she will on the basis of this genetic screening.Diana: What do you think if that woman aborts the baby, is that eugenics? And he says, I think that's misguided, but I don't think that's eugenics. And so, because he can't say that. Any abortion is in any way bad because that is a sacred progressive cow, right? Ah, and so I remember when I used to ha teach I taught human sexuality and I taught some other Topics around philosophy of science to undergraduates.Diana: I remember asking students is it worse for a woman to abort a baby that she finds out as a girl when she wants a boy? Or is it worse for her to choose an embryo that's a boy? Rather than choosing an embryo that's a girl and almost, I mean, it was really profound that people thought the abortion was okay [00:02:00] because abortion is a sacred value in the uk to abortion for any reason is a sacred value.Simone: Wow. I think what that kindaMalcolm: terrifying is the percentage of the population that are, I mean, so when we, we on our podcast talk about like this progressive mimetic somfy virus and I think that people might think we're going too far when we call it a virus that sort of whipes out people's higher order logicSimone: hi. And we are excited to welcome back Diana Fleischmann, author of the Soon to Come Out book, how to Train Your Boyfriend, but also evolutionary psychologist, host of the Aporia podcast, an overall amazing and awesome.Simone: Writer and reformed academic. She's made it out, ladies and gentlemen, and thank God,Malcolm: so what we wanted to talk about today was an article that they're, they, they've actually recently written on usDiana: it's called Bad Arguments versus Healthy Babies Rebutting Ruthford on Embryo Selection.Malcolm: So it's about all of these deranged people who [00:03:00] attack Simone and I online. Yeah. For selecting against things like our kids getting cancer in terms of like the, the genetics of our embryos.Malcolm: And arguing that this is just like, And Al, it'll always have terrible results to do this. Even though whenever you're doing ibf, a lot of people don't know this. They actually already sort your embryos, but by how pretty the embryos look. Yeah. Which isn't really correlated with that much, but they're still getting selected based on a, a trait like that.Malcolm: But what I wanted to talk about this podcast was specifically like the meta around this. Why do people react like insanely to topics like this?Simone: We can start with Adam Rath referred too. Cuz he, he presents a lot of great examples of just also being like, he conflicts in a lot of areas. It's very strangeDiana: you. I'll just give an overview of the piece really quickly. So the piece talks about polygenic embryo screening. Right now people do look at single trait or single allele diseases for their offspring.Diana: They look at aneuploidy when they're [00:04:00] selecting an embryo. But polygenic screening is fairly new. You guys and raffles, McCrosky and some other people are, I don't know, are there 200 babies that have been polygenic screened? Something around that. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's this, this very outspoken critic who's a BBC presenter.Diana: His name is Adam Ruthford. He's a geneticist and he's written a book against Eugenics and he has a beef with Steve Sue because Steve Sue has written some blogs about making sue intelligent people. And whenever I saw him come out saying polygenic screening is terrible, he kept saying, read my book.Diana: Read my book. So I read. The relevant, whatever, 20 pages of his book. And it was almost entirely b******t. It's like, really, it's very, very bad. And the, the evidence he uses is really asymmetrical for his claim. Of course, about seven pages of it is just like about how bad Steve Sue is and how he's friends with Dominic Cummings, and then how Dominic Cummings is associated with some other people that liberals don't like.Diana: And the actual meat and potatoes of like what his case is, [00:05:00] is made very succinctly and not very well. In a smaller portion of, of that book. So that's there's, there's a few different arguments that I make. GoMalcolm: ahead. Oh, no. Before you continue, I wanna pull on something you said there, which was, I just find it really rich.Malcolm: I. That he could be arguing like that. This guy who is clearly a eugenicist , is pretending to take an antigenics position. He's the guy here saying, we need genetically pure humans? Don't alter human D N a. I want to use the government. To restrict the reproductive choices of individuals to maintain humanity's genetic purity is like, is there anything more eugenics than that?Diana: Well, I don't actually know if he's, this is one, one thing is like, it's, it's pretty short on actual policy. Mm. So he often endorses this guy called you and Bernie who says, yes, polygenic screening should be banned. Right or not allowed in the, in the uk. And it doesn't surp, I mean, the UK is really, has very strict laws, a lot of which don't make a lot of sense about reproductive freedom.Diana: And [00:06:00] one of the best things I think about the United States is, is, is the reproductive freedom here is the fact that people can do IVF and can do sex selection, can do polygenic screening, can do, can do what they want, but. What I thought was really weird about what, how Rutherford responded to this.Diana: It's one thing to say polygenic screening won't work. The people who are using it are like wasting their money, whatever, whatever he called you guys, energy vampires, he made fun of your appearance. Like not once or like two or three times. Like he was like very intensely against you both. And I didn't really get it.Diana: I know that there was a huge backlash against the Tism stuff more generally, but I think that people bristled at the idea I. Because they just read the, the title of that telegraph piece that said that you were elite. But people bristle up the idea that you guys think that you're gonna have great kids.Malcolm: Well, here's the, here's first of all, like, that's not what we're trying to do. But one of the things that I, I read in this article, I didn't know about that just to meet like signals this guy is a complete grifter, is that he is pro [00:07:00] aborting. Fetuses. Yeah. If they show signs of a potential medical problem, yeah.Malcolm: But against not choosing a pre implanted IVF embryo because they might end up showing one of those diseases. So he is more pro. Abortion, like even mid-stage abortion, then he is pro embryo selection.Diana: That is whack,Malcolm: well, not whack, but I think what it shows is this, and this is a wider topic I wanted to talk about here, is this insanity you get and you see this on both the left and the right, but right now the left is more in control of media, so they do it more.Malcolm: Were they, there are individuals who clearly like put genuinely no thought into their actual beliefs about the world and they're choosing their beliefs on what they think will get them the most socialDiana: credit. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's absolutely a progressive status quo bias because at one point [00:08:00] in a debate that we were having on Twitter months or years ago, Noah, Carl said, Let's say you could do prenatal screening with blood on a woman and a woman finds out that her baby's gonna have a lower IQ than she will on the basis of this genetic screening.Diana: What do you think if that woman aborts the baby, is that eugenics? And he says, I think that's misguided, but I don't think that's eugenics. And so, because he can't say that. Any abortion is in any way bad because that is a sacred progressive cow, right? Ah, and so I remember when I used to ha teach I taught human sexuality and I taught some other Topics around philosophy of science to undergraduates.Diana: I remember asking students is it worse for a woman to abort a baby that she finds out as a girl when she wants a boy? Or is it worse for her to choose an embryo that's a boy? Rather than choosing an embryo that's a girl and almost, I mean, it was really profound that people thought the abortion was okay because abortion is a [00:09:00] sacred value in the uk to abortion for any reason is a sacred value.Simone: Wow. I think what that kindaMalcolm: terrifying is the percentage of the population that are, I mean, so when we, we on our podcast talk about like this progressive mimetic somfy virus and I think that people might think we're going too far when we call it a virus that sort of whipes out people's higher order logic in the same way that one of these funguses like replaces is an amps instincts.Malcolm: And causes the ant to become a zombie ant that's only job is to replicate this fungus. But when you hear things like this and you see this even in majority population surveys, especially with an educated group like students I really don't think I am underselling how zombie flying this virus is because to me there's just no logical argument where you could be anti it.Malcolm: It is, it is wrong. To, to select something at the stage of the embryo, but Right to do it at the stageDiana: of the fetus. Yep. And not, not only that, so one of the arguments that Rutherford makes where I got, I [00:10:00] pulled a, a few quotes from Simone, is that he says that doing I V F in order to do polygenic screening is somehow exploitative of women.Diana: That the people who talk about polygenic screening are mostly men and therefore it's a feminist. Position to be against polygenic screening. I've heard this exact same argument about a sex selective abortion or even abortion more generally, that women are gonna be pushed into aborting babies if they don't want to.Diana: And, he talks about I v F not being fun. Abortions are also not fun. And I, I just, it, it seems very strange to me that he hasn't thought about all these alternative arguments, which is there's a ton of arguments in, in the feminist sphere, which are things like, We should outlaw surrogacy because surrogacy can exploit women.Diana: We should outlaw IVF cuz outlaw, because IVF can exploit women. Pornography. Prostitution. Abortion because women can't make their own choices and he doesn't realize that he's actually making the same really, I think, kind of misogynistic argument.Simone: So what I'm realizing after listening to this is that like [00:11:00] there are two elements of discourse or two spheres of discourse online.Simone: One is just people Sending signals to rise in their own local status hierarchy and, and they're not actually engaging in discourse. And then there are people who actually enjoy kind of discussing these things or, or seeing if they can win a debate and actually engage with the ideas, but, How can one separate those out and know when it's worth it to engage or not?Simone: Well,Malcolm: I mean, I think the communities are pretty separated from each other. The sad thing is, is I think the first group that you're talking about controls our university system. Mm-hmm. Which many people see as the, the priest class in our society that determines what's true and what's not true.Malcolm: But I'd love your take.Diana: I'm not sure, but I just think that it, it that people, one thing that happens on Twitter that I see a lot is that people curate a following and then they're beholden to the, the whims of that, of that following. Right, right, right. So like, there's some people who I see bite bullets all the time, and their audience loves that.Diana: They bite bullets. There's people [00:12:00] like Ruthford who I see attacking other people. Like, I think he called Boris Johnson like a. Like a saturated bin rag or something. He's like, got these. Really?Simone: That's wonderful. A floored language. You do get points for that. I like him likeDiana: 10% more insult about people.Diana: Like he's got a million different synonyms for s**t that he uses, like against people. Right? There's, there's all these kinds of insults that he used and his audience is like, they love that red meat. But one time it's was like a few years back Richard Dawkin says, you might be against eugenics, but eugenics works.Diana: Right? Remember, I dunno if you guys saw that there was a tweet by by Dakin saying, you might be against it, but selective breeding definitely does work. Right. And and this is the only time where I was like, okay, Rutherford says you're right, it would work. And he like went through it and he said Eugenics actually would work.Diana: Right. No, like selective breeding actually would work. And he had so much s**t and I, since then I have not seen him bite a bullet. And that was 2020, ISimone: think. Interesting. That's, that's really, that's really sad. I'm, I'm in the middle of [00:13:00] reading how Minds Change by David Raey, cuz I think it's really interesting to go into like, the psychology of how humans are able to change minds.Simone: And in this one chapter on reasoning, he goes into a lot of the research on how and why humans reason. And there's one study where it, it suggested that basically when, when. Subjects were provided with their own reasoning for coming to a conclusion as though it was someone else's reasoning.Simone: They would criticize it. They were like, oh no, here's where it's wrong. This isn't logical, because they didn't realize that they were arguing against their own reasoning. And, and it, it indicates or suggests that human reasoning is really meant to happen in some kind of social format where people present their thoughts, they present why they came to the conclusions they came to, and those are, they can criticize others' conclusions and also their conclusions are criticized.Simone: And then that in a. In a social environment, especially where people are motivated to be somewhat cohesive, which makes sense. And that social cohesion does play a big role in why we believe what we believe or what we choose to [00:14:00] believe. Then you, you are able to get to the truth in an interesting way.Simone: So, I'm, I'm, I'm hearing this research. I'm, I'm interested in it. I'm reading about it and I'm like, oh, wow. I mean, you would think. Then in the right conditions, social media would be perfect for this. We would present our reasoning as to why we believe, certain things are good, like apologetic, risk score, selection.Simone: And then some people would say, ah, here's the fall on your reasoning. And because we want to be acce accepted by them, then we would, we would do that. And yet that doesn't seem to be how it ultimately plays out at all, especially for people like David Rutherford because instead of, being able to like, Survive flaws in his reasoning being pointed out.Simone: He's just like, wellMalcolm: here's, here's what I think you're missing. He's a high priest of the existing priest, cast of our society, given that he needs still within the university system, which Diana has escaped. And, and being within that system, given how spicy these topics are, if he deviates.Malcolm: Even a little bit from the socially accepted norms was, was in that ideological tribe. He can lose his [00:15:00] job. Like it's not a small thing. You get fired and you're that kind of a personality. No one else will hire you because your only audience is this, you know far. He's already pushed out any other audience he may have.Malcolm: He's got no real skills other than being in this priest class. I,Diana: I don't know. He also works for the bbc. So I mean, when I was in academia, I felt like I could say whatever I wanted and I did say almost whatever I wanted. BARR, a certain, like certain edge cases but actually working for the BBC and so what he says reflects on the BBC and also it reflects on Humanist uk, which is where he's president.Diana: The thing that shocked me about his attacks on you guys is that if I frame this a certain way, Which I have in this article is that he's attacking people who chose an embryo with a low risk of cancer. Mm-hmm. He's attacking people for using their reproductive freedom, a mother, for using their reproductive freedom to prevent her daughter from dying, what her grandmother died of.Diana: Like, that sounds awful. And yet nobody gives a s**t cuz you guys are eugenic. Right, right, [00:16:00] right.Malcolm: Again, I need to. To keep pointing this out. We do not support eugenics. I knowDiana: you don't. Exactly. But you guys are, you guys are labeled as eugenics, but we're labeled asMalcolm: that. We're labeled as that definitionally a eugenicist if he wants to use the government to maintain the genetic purity of our species.Malcolm: That is whatDiana: eugenics is.Diana: So a few months back, I talked to Brian Kaplan for Aporia and Brian Kaplan, who wrote Selfish Reasons to Have more Kids, and I asked him if there was backlash against selfish reasons to have more kids because right at that time I was thinking about Tism. You guys were getting really attacked on on Twitter.Diana: Yeah. And he said that. Yes. He got attacked a lot for selfish reasons to have more kids. It seems like Tism now is more controversial than even Antinatalism Telling people they should have kids is more controversial. Yeah. And the way he framed it was, when I tell you when I, with selfish reasons to have more kids, I said, I'm giving you a 20% coupon for having children.Diana: Having children is 20% less work than you think it's gonna be. He's like, if I gave you a 20% coupon for chocolate, and you're like, I don't like chocolate, would [00:17:00] you, would you attack me online for having given you a 20% coupon offer for, for That's great. Putting it. Yeah. And so, obviously not, but, but when it comes to this question about child rearing and even things like the other day my husband Jeffrey asked somebody if they were gonna ha if they were interested in having more kids and we're very close to these people, so I think it was okay.Diana: But questions like, are you planning on having more children? How many children do you wanna have? What kinds of conditions are keeping you from having kids have become really touchy. Oh yeah. And that maybe it's because people are waiting to bear children. Maybe cuz people who are infertile see it as like a form of inferiority.Diana: You guys grapple with all of this stuff. But it's it's a very tricky for me to untangle why this is such a dumpster fire. Well,Malcolm: yeah. So, there's a few subjects I wanna touch on here. One is you said that he was like, because he was able to frame us as eugenic, the whole eugenic thing really had nothing to do with it.Malcolm: From his perspective, it's that we are conservatives and he is a progressive and therefore he can call us any slur no matter how illogical [00:18:00] and his side will buy that. And I think it's the same thing with like the coupon argument. Like if somebody was giving out coupons for like 20% off a gun or something like that.Malcolm: Progressives are like, guns are evil. And, and the reason why the mind virus went to this position of kids are evil is because people who are quote unquote from the virus's perspective Yeah. Wasting their time not proselytizing and instead caring for kids. They, they are not. Following the sort of reproductive strategy of the virus and therefore are, are less efficient at it.Malcolm: And those brands of progressivism are out-competed by the other brands of progressivism. And so I think what you're really seeing when you talk about Antinatalism versus Tism I, is, it's really just in the same way that if I went to a, a conservative event and I said something like, About global warming being a problem or like pro environmentalism, I might be immediately attacked, even though there's no reason for them to really be intrinsically anti-environmental.Malcolm: It's more just that this would become a calling card of people who they see as their enemies.Simone: So I get it. And let me, yeah, let me build on that actually. I mean, Malcolm argues that [00:19:00] the key differentiating point between progressives and conservatives is that progressives are optimizing for.Simone: Intergenerational fitness and wellbeing. Also for like minimizing in the moment suffering or discomfort, whereas conservatives are not really caring about in, in the moment suffering and discomfort. And they're more optimizing for intra generation. So from generation to generation wellbeing.Simone: And there, there's basically, I mean, having kids. Inherently means in the moment suffering over comfort. Right? It's the hard choice initially. And for like a good, 18 to 30, to 40 to 50 years, however many years it is. And it is definitely not about having like an easier time in the moment or a more pleasant time in the moment.Simone: It is really about In in intra. Sorry. AndMalcolm: I think it also to, to something else you pointed out is I, I think that people, and this is an issue that's just not as talked about as it should be talked about, given that it, it, it's, it, the progressive, like the super virus doesn't really care about this as the concept which [00:20:00] is the increasing a fertility of our species.Malcolm: And, and this is causing a lot of heartache for a lot of families. And, and it requires the use of, unfortunately, I think, a lot more aggressive fertility technology than was needed in the past.Simone: Yeah. Which, which still runs counter to the progressive thing. If the progressive thing is, oh, if this hurts your feelings, don't engage with it.Simone: If this hurts your feelings, look the other way. Give up, stay inside. Don't go outside. Don't do that hard thing. They don't mention itMalcolm: in front of somebody. If it could hurt their feelings. Even if it, even if you're talking about technology like you, you couldn't go to someone and be like, Hey, there's this technology you might not have tried yet that would be seen as, as wrong and, and unethically how much you actually, itSimone: shows up in Rutherford's argument, right?Simone: Like one of his core arguments is, oh, I V F is hard and it's painful for women. Mm-hmm. Like, how dare you imply that women should go through ivf And that I think that that is fairly indicative of this, this general theme that anything that. That requires, a suffering or discomfort or obligates.Simone: It is therefore bad. And, and having kids is kind of it. I mean, obviously like the joy you get from kids is so much more right, and, and, and the [00:21:00] meaning in life and all this amazing contentment. But definitely like the in the moment, convenience and comfort. Does take a ma major hit with like,Diana: everything.Diana: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I've been through IVF lots of times cuz I'm an altru. I was an altruistic egg donor and I just, in the piece I say like, I'd rather do IVF than have four hours of, of early labor. And I've been through totally early labor. Early labor is no fun at all. And also the actual.Diana: Sleep training or the early whatever, months or weeks. Like, to me this is like, complaining about traffic on the way to a 10 year prison sentence. Oh. Like, yeah. Seriously. Although that frames it all very negatively, but like, nobody, nobody would do that. Right. Yeah. This is the, another thing about, demographic collapse.Diana: This idea of demographic collapse being incredibly controversial is that you're saying a variety of things that are, anti progressive views, which is they're interested in doing things for the greater good. So to speak, like recycling or not flying or being vegetarian or whatever the case may be.Diana: And so what you're saying is like you guys are doing the opposite of what you should do for the greater good, [00:22:00] but another one of their key tenets is that immigration can solve all these problems. And by saying that we should have our own children, what you're saying is that immigrants can't solve this problem.Diana: So it's like implicitly an anti-immigration sentiment.Malcolm: And, and for our listeners, I just wanna touch on this point really quickly cuz a lot of people in the US don't know this, but as of 2019, by the UN's own statistics, And they are famously, really aggressive with these. So, so it's almost certainly worse than this.Malcolm: By 2019, all of Latin America, so Central America, south America and the Caribbean collectively fell below repopulation rate. So we are, are, are draining from an evaporating pond and they refuse to look at that.Diana: Yeah, I mean I just, I don't know how much, brain drain. I tried to do a deep dive on brain drain the other day.Diana: I don't know how much that's the case. I know that you guys say when you import people from other places, they acquire the sterilizing meme. They do. And so then they, they end up having fewer children, although apparently Japanese people have more children when they come our career. Well,Malcolm: this is really interesting.Malcolm: So actually, I wanna touch on this a little bit. So one of the things that I think goes against the [00:23:00] conservative meme, which is. That typically the more diverse an environment someone is in, the more children they will have. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons why in prosperous countries the US and Israel have some of the, the lowest cases, the fertility collapse, whereas monocultures like Korea have some of the highest levels of fertility collapse.Malcolm: But if you take a Korean immigrant and they come to the us. Their fertility rate actually increases by, I think around 50% on average from when we were doing the statistics, which is just insane, but obviously they're in a much more diverse environment. Now, if you're talking about first generation immigrants on average to the us the fertility rate is 1.7 right now, which is around the US average.Malcolm: It's a bit higher. It's like 0.5, I think, is US usaver. I mean, 1.5 is US average right now. Okay. But what's really interesting there is it's not that much above the US average, even when people come from really high fertility rate cultures. So what you were seeing there, Is that there's all of these talks about like we're not good at adapting people to our culture or whatever, but in terms of fertility rate, it actually happens really, really, really quickly.Malcolm: And what that means from a [00:24:00] progressive standpoint is you can't like bring in an immigrant population that's high fertility and have that work. You need to continually import these people for it to be a solution. And the only way that you are able to continually import them is if their countries stay high fertility.Malcolm: And on average, a country only has above repopulation fertility rate right now if the average citizen is earning less than 5,000 u s d per year. So you basically need to keep these other countries poor,Simone: not optimal.Diana: Yeah. Yeah, it's, it is, it is interesting in terms of the. Yeah, the incentive structures and how all these things don't work.Diana: And I, I'm really interested in digging into the immigration debate. I just feel like I need to devote like a two solid weeks to it cuz you know, Richard Hania and Noah Carl and all these people, Garrett Jones have been writing about immigration and whether or not it's it's good or bad. There was a very funny tweet about, basically about how confederate whites moved up north and about how they changed the culture of, of the north throughout the United States.Diana: And Philip Lemo who's on on [00:25:00] Twitter was like, yes, of course. Confederate Whites changed the culture of the North forever when they immigrated there. But of course that would never happen with immigrants coming to the United States today. And so, he was, he was basically making fun of this idea that this was actually a very It was a progressive talking point, was about this historical yeah, this historical phenomenon, which is something that they would never extrapolate towards the future.Diana: Right.Malcolm: Well, I mean, for our listeners, our position on on immigration, cause I bet they're wondering here, I, we, we are very pro policies that Let in productive individuals to immigrate. I'm really, yeah, in no way against productive immigration to the United States because we live in a different world today.Malcolm: If something makes the US as economy strong, we need to focus on individual cultural group thriving, and your individual cultural group is going to die. If you, if you seal it off from the world, I mean, look, what do you want? What's your best case scenario? You're like, okay, one country, one people.Malcolm: So you end up like Korea, like a, a desperate old man in a hermetic tube who's slowly dying keeping immigration immigrants out because you're weak. It just [00:26:00] allows you to die in peace. Either strengthen yourself or don't.Diana: For me, there's two different arguments that are very compelling that pull me and diametrically oppose directions.Diana: Mm. So there's this Peter singer, utilitarian child in the pond thing that Brian Kaplan talks about, which is like, why wouldn't we take anyone and everyone who wants to come to our country, we make their lives better, they increase our gdp, they increase their country's gdp. It's a win-win. Not even selecting people, just letting anybody in.Diana: Mm-hmm. And he also says, that immigrant. Crime stats are overblown, that's very anti-conservative kind of talking point. Mm-hmm. Even though Brian Kaplan is, is quite conservative in many ways. There's this other kind of IQ realist idea that I have. Also, I think that people are often happier in more homogenous societies.Diana: It can be very difficult to get along with neighbors and people that you have nothing in common with. Yeah. But I. I also wonder, what is the tipping point? Is there a tipping point in terms of people who are from very culturally diverse backgrounds? What is the tipping point in order to being able to sustain the civilization and [00:27:00] institutions that we have come to enjoy and rely on for prosperity and stability?Diana: Yeah. Like, is, is that, is that a possibility that you can That, that, that there could be some kind of voter base or letting in certain number of immigrants. To me, I was looking at this stat the other day, the idea that a Sweden with 40% Muslim population and a a Sweden with 5% Muslim population are going to sustain the same institutions the same way without any difficulties.Diana: Right. Seems really farfetched to me. So these are all difficult questions, I think to grapple with.Simone: Yeah, they really are. It's gonna be interesting to see it play out.Malcolm: We can do an immigration po po podcast sometimes, cuz we have a lot of thoughts on that, that are very controversial. You guys shouldDiana: talk to Kaplan about cuz he is like, yes, he knows everything and he's just the, the best faith interlocutor about immigration that I've ever heard.Diana: He's just amazing. Yeah. Mm-hmm.Simone: Yeah. Although, Diana, I have to say, I'm already like dying to talk with you again. When you're ready, when your book is closer to coming out, will you come back on and talk about how to train your boyfriend? [00:28:00] AndMalcolm: you can check out her podcast right now. Which is similar.Malcolm: How we divided the world into two spheres. One is people just trying to ideologically signal to their tribe, and the other is people trying to get to the truth. They're very much in the, get to the truth camp. And it's,Diana: Aporia is is is really great. And, and I'm grateful that, given that I have a, a small child and another on the way that I managed to find a place with them because I really feel good about what I'm doing.Diana: So yeah, my most recent interview was with. With Paul Bloom. I recorded an interview with Simone. That's gonna be great. And there's, there's a, some on the back burner, Ayla, Mike Bailey. Those people are all coming out at someSimone: point. Oh good. Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm looking forward to those. That's really exciting.Simone: And where else can people find your work, read more ofDiana: what you write? I'm on se I'm, I'm on Twitter too much. I'm at Sentient. And yeah, check me out there.Simone: That's great. Oh, Diana, you were such a delight to speak with. I'm looking forward to all of your upcoming podcasts and articles. I just love every time something from you comes out. So everyone check out Diana's work if you haven't already, and hopefully we'll have you back on the podcast soon.Diana: Love to talk to you guys again. Thank you.Simone: Thank you. [00:29:00] Woohoo Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to Based Camp with Malcolm and Simone where we dissect different, fascinating aspects of human cognition. Today's episode centers around sexuality and arousal patterns, as well as fetishes that seem strange to many. Malcolm challenges the traditional Kinsey spectrum and offers a groundbreaking new perspective based on arousal to disgust spectrums for specific stimuli. Simone, meanwhile, shares her unusual hobby of exploring NSFW subreddits and trying to understand the various unique kinks and fetishes she discovers. From the "Gone Wild Audio" subreddit to the world of vorarephilia, we dive into a deep discussion about the nature of sexual arousal and how it's often far removed from societal norms or physical realities. This episode might just change the way you think about sexuality.Transcript:Malcolm: [00:00:00] .the Kinsey spectrum is just completely nonsense.Malcolm: It is a really bad mechanism for understanding arousal patterns. The way arousal patterns should really be thought of is as individual arousal to disgust spectrums for specific visual, auditory, or conceptual stimuli.Malcolm: Now one could be like the concept of, of being eaten, or the concept of farting, or the concept of disgust or some set of visual stimuli, like a large breasts or something like that.Malcolm: Or secondary sex characteristics of a specific nature. . So what do we mean by this? Cause a lot of people are like, what Disgust isn't part of your sexuality? But if you think about it, what happens when you're aroused by something? You look at it longer, your eyes dilate.Malcolm: People often take a breath in. What happens when you're disgusted by something, your pupils contract, you instinctively look away from it. You hold your breath. These sound like exactly mirroring reactions, almost as if they're the same system with a negative modifier [00:01:00] reply to it. And then when we started mapping from our data, all of the arousal and disgust things that people have, what we realized pretty quickly, Is something you would find is anything that disgusted a portion of the population would arouse a corresponding smaller portion of the population.Malcolm: And anything that aroused a portion of the population would disgust another smaller portion of the population. So what it seems we have here is that some part of the developmental life cycle, and this happens much more in males,Malcolm: and this is where another interesting thing happens that you regularly see. In gay males, which you don't see as much in gay females, and is a very interesting thing to explore and was one of our sort of hints in this is in gay males you will often hear active disgust.Malcolm: Towards certain female arousal stimuli or, or, or visual stimuli or physical or conceptual stimuli that we associate with women. [00:02:00] And, and so the question is, well, that's weird. Why would they begin to develop disgust around that when you don't actually see that in lesbian communities as often?Malcolm: So what our data actually showed is if you look at men like anyone would expect, the predominantly arousing thing is. The naked form of either males or females,Malcolm: but if you look at females, what we actually found is that is not the most arousing thing. It's a close second, but it's not the most arousing thing. The most arousing thing was, submission or dominance. And so what we pointed out there is even the concept of gay or straight, even the concept that our sexualities should be primarily defined by male or female predominant attraction.Malcolm: Is misogynistic because had women invented the field of sexuality research, they likely would've defined our sexuality as being predominantly dominance or submission based [00:03:00] instead of male or female based. And that the only reason why this wasn't caught earlier, isMalcolm: because the field is so dominated by identity politics that people can't say, well, let's just throw out all of the identity pol. Like let's pretend like gay straight is just like not an important dichotomy. And look at just like the data, like what are the core things that are arousing different populations.Simone: Hello, gorgeous. Hello,Malcolm: Simone. How's it going today?Simone: Really good. Should I share one of my dirty little secrets with.Simone: Our followers,Malcolm: I think they find it a very fun and weird hobby to have.Simone: Right? Yeah. So whereas other people like research World War II history or learn how to knit, collect Barbies I like to explore N S F W sub subreddits and try to figure out why exactly weird things seem to arouse people because.Simone: I, I really don't get it. I'm largely asexual, so like, this is fascinating to me. I feel like I'm an alien [00:04:00] exploring another planet and it's amazing. And I thought, I thought I'd seen every separate that it was N F S W. I thought I knew everything, even the really weird things like Sharpies and Anuses, like, you know, I, I thought I'd seen it all.Simone: And then I'm at this one late night dinner and, and someone brings up gone wild audio. I guess I never checked it out as a subreddit, an N S F W subreddit. It sounds boring. Yeah, it sounds boring. It, it just sounds like, I don't know, people telling sexy stories, and so I'm like, this is lame. Not gonna, and like, who wants to like sit down and listen to something?Simone: You know, when, when you know, you're like idly exploring stuff online. So it it just like, this person was like, yeah. Gone wild audio. Like I discovered I could orgasm without Without anything or anyone touching me uh, listening to this stuff. And I'm like, okay, so what uh, like what? So immediately I, I go, I go and I, I, I like, dive down this rabbit hole and I am, [00:05:00] my mind is blown because it is.Simone: It's like taking a theme park ride. You know those haunted house rides where you're like on a little track and you're like going through the haunted house and like, ugh. Like things are like coming out at you. It's like doing that. You're like putting yourself into the body of someone who's having some kind of arousing experience, but these aren't the experiences you would.Simone: Think necessarily. So like obviously the really popular recordings that have gotten the most dead votes in all time and stuff. Cuz the great way of exploring, you know, weird things on Ns FW is to both see like what is the most popular and what gets the most votes for all time, but also like what's trending, like what weird niche things are, what's controversial.Simone: So obviously like the vanilla ones are, you know, typically very like mainstream kind of vanilla plots, but like the weird ones are like, You are being assimilated into the Borg and like, you know, you're listening to this audio clip and like you, the listener are like going in some, into some [00:06:00] kind of machine and it's like beep boop, beep boop.Simone: You are being assimilated. And it's just, it's like what is happening to me? That was a deep cut. I, but I went deep. Cause there are all these different tags, like you can look you in, in gun wild audio.Simone: You can do M four F, F four, m, M four A. So you're getting a male voice for all audiences, a female voice for male, et cetera. So like, And they have, of course, like lots of tags like rape, non-consent incest like fantasy sci-fi and Star Wars. There was, there was a recently like a, a Boba FET sort of themed one.Simone: And like, this is just so nerdy. This is amazing.Malcolm: I love this as a lead in like we were talking about cuz somebody is like, oh, you guys should do an episode That's like just on fetishes. People have and the reason why, you know, we wrote a book on sexuality, the Fragmented Guide to Sexuality, the reason why we're so interested in fetishes more generally, especially fetishes that are unmoored from reality.Malcolm: So one is, is, is you know, [00:07:00] audio, but then another you can look at is like Hint I sites and stuff like that. And in both of these instances, what you're looking at, Is turn-ons for peopleMalcolm: that are unmoored from any constraints of reality. And when you see something that is very odd happening across populations, especially across cultures, and then especially if you see it happening over and over again historically, which is really interesting what you are seeing there is something like a scar, I, I would call it like an evolutionary scar in our psyche.Malcolm: Mm. By that what I mean is it's. Some point there was some really weird evolutionary pressure or evolution was using our psychological systems in an odd way that reveals deeper and truer underpinnings about how our brain is programmed. Yeah.Malcolm: So you look across cultures, you look across websites, you will see vore, which is often [00:08:00] talked about online, like somebody eating somebody else or like something eating something else. This is like, yeah, it's like carnivore. Yeah. This is like a persistently common fetish that like has nothing to do with breeding.Malcolm: And yet in the US if you look at our survey on this, And, and you can contrast those other surveys. So the numbers are about equal. It looks like the number of people who are into this is larger than the number of people who live in the state of Massachusetts. Mm. Which is like, I, I forgot like the force, most populatedSimone: state or something.Simone: And also, I don't think it's a new thing because in the. Movie gentleman prefer blondes with Marilyn Monroe. There's this one scene in which Marilyn Monroe describes a somewhat sexy encounter she has with the owner of a diamond mine, where he was pretending to be a python and she was pretending to be the goat.Simone: And that is so boring. We're like more role play. When or when did this come out? Oh, like late fifties, sixties,Malcolm: but certainly beforeSimone: the internet. Oh, no way. Pre-internet, way, pre [00:09:00] like any sort of mainstream, no. AnotherMalcolm: interest thing is people often think of as like, hint I being a modern thing. But if you look at Tijuana Bibles are Tilly, MacBook, these were common in like the 1920s and they were stole under the table at , Newspaper stands and like some other types of places, and they would have like Betty Boop porn and they'dSimone: have So isn't that like what, that's rule 34.Simone: It's like basicallyMalcolm: Rule 34. Yeah. Like rule 34 is really old. Yeah. And I, I would actually bet if you go back his. Historically to like ancient Greek times, you probably would've found, you know, similar sorts of wellSimone: You can even see political cartoons really early, and I'm sure even earlier, but around the French Revolution where they have illustrations of like Maria Antoinette and her primary ladies and waiting, doing raunchy and naughty things.Simone: Obviously some of that was political co commentary and slander, but a lot of it was also like, And these are women doing sexy things and people enjoy looking at images of that. You know what I mean?Malcolm: Well, you know, it sell, right? Mm-hmm. So I, I think that a lot of people view, you know, a [00:10:00] lot of our weird stuff today as being like modern degeneracy.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Oh, another great one was, oh, we have this in our book. I, I. Who's the Irish author who was really into fart porn? OhSimone: gosh. It wasn't James Joyce, was it?Malcolm: I thinkSimone: it was James Joyce. Yeah. I wanna say it was James Joyce.Malcolm: Yeah. Hold on.Simone: You are gonna read it. You're gonna, you are gonna,Malcolm: . I gave you a bigger, stronger F than usual fat dirty farts came sputtering out of your backside.Malcolm: You had an as full of farts that night, darling and I F them out of you. Big fat fellows, long windy ones. Quick little Mary cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty parties ending in long gush from your hole. And he just goes on and on paragraph after paragraph about farts. And this is something that I think today we think of as like a modern degeneracy.Malcolm: And the larger point here are you look at like bdsm. This used to be called the English vice. It was so [00:11:00] common and the assumption was. School teachers, spanking school kids with with paddlesSimone: hot. That's hot. I don't know. I hear that passage and all I can think is here's this woman who really cares about James Joyce or is very incentivized for him to stay with her, who's like, I don't know.Simone: You know, he, he's coming over that night. She's like, shov beans. And she's like, okay, how about like, trying to hold it in the right way to give him the right variation of farts. Like, I'm just thinking, how's this woman pulling this off? Because I'm, I'm thinking about this like, clearly elongated lovemaking scene about the logisticsMalcolm: of how this, yes, probably like prostitute keeps him interested.Malcolm: This, well,Simone: this, this is honestly like what I think about as I go through like. N N S F W subreddits. I'm like, wow. Like where, where do they get the diapers? You know, like where, like where do they source that really weird whip? Like how are they handling, like how are they managing their energy over this five hour session?Simone: Like what kind of antibiotics are they on right now? All these sorts of things, like, these are really interesting things to me and I okay. Okay.Malcolm: So now to [00:12:00] the, the question at hand. So what is probably really going on with all of this? Mm. And there were two. You know, one of the first things we really noticed from our book is when we contrasted our research was existing research.Malcolm: One of the things that we added to the research that we were looking at was not just the consumption of like drawn pornographic material mm-hmm. But romance novels and fan fiction,Simone: because that's the real stuff rightMalcolm: there. Yeah. All of a sudden women and men stopped looking as different in the data began to see about equal amounts of pornographic consumption in terms of the diversity of the consumption, not in terms mm-hmm.Malcolm: But,Simone: well, the great thing about that too, for women, I feel like women just like, one, they're super pervy, and two, it's totally like, just like it's not fair how like acceptable their erotic material is like, you know, we're not paying for a very, like a, a. Raunchy cite subscription as a family. Like we'll pay for a Netflix subscription and Bridgeton is sitting on that.Simone: And like, that's totally like, you know, [00:13:00] you know, it's, I mean, we,Malcolm: we live in a world where 50 Shades of Gray was like the bestselling book in the world for a long time. Yeah. And this was just like kinky female porn. But anyway, but I mean, that's a weird thing. Why do women like that? Why do they like being put in these scenarios?Malcolm: So that was one we already did. Mm-hmm. So if you're interested in why women or men like submissiveness, we have covered that in a lot of detail in the interview with Diana Fleischman that we did. Mm-hmm. But what I wanna cover is how human sexuality works more broadly now that we've done this fun intro thing here.Malcolm: So, When we were looking at things, the point I was making on the Vore thing that I wanted to get to is you'll see weird turn-ons like that. Or like a category of porn where like people get stuck in mud, right? But then there's other big categories where you will see almost no porn, like people catching on fire are falling off.Malcolm: High locations. Yeah. Never seen that. Oh yeah. Yeah. These are things we have like visceral fears of or emotions around. So [00:14:00] like why are you seeing it in some areas and not others? Because I think some people think either one, this is a new thing. Two, this is a thing that's just anything can turn people on.Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And three, it's a sign of our, our current moral degeneracy. And yes, that may have added to it. Yes, the internet may have added to it, but all of these things existed before the internet or a lot of them existed before the internet. So what's really going on here? So the first in sort of understanding our arousal spectrum is the Kinsey spectrum is just completely nonsense.Malcolm: It is a really bad mechanism for understanding arousal patterns. The way arousal patterns should really be thought of is as individual arousal to disgust spectrums for specific visual, auditory, or conceptual stimuli.Malcolm: So a lot of people. May say something like, oh, the male, like, like males are one stimuli. So it was like males to females. How much are you? But that's not really it. You, you, if you look at [00:15:00] straight males, one of the things we found in our survey is like a huge portion of them are turned off by the site of, of vagina, but turned on by the site of a penis.Malcolm: So this is like a quarter of them. Yet they are turned on by the concept of a woman, the silhouette of a woman. Breasts, but in a female, everything else. So what you're seeing there is, okay, so let's talk about primary and secondary sex characteristics. Primary sex characteristics are really just the stuff you use to reproduce i e, the stuff below the belt.Malcolm: Secondary sex characteristics are things that are useful like after reproduction. So it might be a guy being larger, having rougher hands or bigger hands. It's female breasts. These two systems for arousal actually seem disconnected for each other given how. Frequently they uncouple in terms of the populations we were looking at.Malcolm: So to even talk about arousal patterns to males, arousal patterns to females is wrong. And this is likely why. You see things like FUTA porn being so common The, because that's appealing to this portion of the male [00:16:00] demographic or the otherwise straight male demographic who is interested in this sort of weird combination of parts that you don't see that often in nature.Malcolm: And, and, and then you have to get to why that's happening, which we'll get to in a bit. But anyway, so we talk about individual stimuli. Now one could be like the concept of, of being eaten, or the concept of farting, or the concept of disgust or some set of visual stimuli, like a large breasts or something like that.Malcolm: Or secondary sex characteristics of a specific nature. And then we say these exist on an arousal to disgust metric. So what do we mean by this? Cause a lot of people are like, what Disgust isn't part of your sexuality? But if you think about it, what happens when you're aroused by something? You look at it longer, your eyes dilate.Malcolm: People often take a breath in. What happens when you're disgusted by something, your pupils contract, you instinctively look away from it. You hold your breath. These sound like exactly mirroring reactions, almost as if they're the same system with a negative modifier reply to it. And then when we [00:17:00] started mapping from our data, all of the arousal and disgust things that people have, what we realized pretty quickly, Is something you would find is anything that disgusted a portion of the population would arouse a corresponding smaller portion of the population.Malcolm: And anything that aroused a portion of the population would disgust another smaller portion of the population. So what it seems we have here is that some part of the developmental life cycle, and this happens much more in males, this sort of flip sign in the data something that's supposed to disgust you.Malcolm: Turns out to arouse you. So this is why you get, like, there's a category of, of arousal and arousing things called like creepy crawlers where people have like insects poured on them. But then you also have stuff like, you know, feces being poured on someone, stuff like that. All of these random disgusting things.Malcolm: And so what we think is happening there, you have this disgust modifier, and this is where another interesting thing happens that you [00:18:00] regularly see. In gay males, which you don't see as much in gay females, and is a very interesting thing to explore and was one of our sort of hints in this is in gay males you will often hear active disgust.Malcolm: Towards certain female arousal stimuli or, or, or visual stimuli or physical or conceptual stimuli that we associate with women. And, and so the question is, well, that's weird. Why would they begin to develop disgust around that when you don't actually see that in lesbian communities as often?This is something we also don't see in straight female populations. So gay males, sexuality does not look like straight female sexuality, but more like a mirror of straight male sexuality, where you also see this disgust reaction, but to male associated stimuli.Malcolm: And what we suspect is going on here is something during the developmental life cycle in males determines their primary [00:19:00] gender of attraction and then starts supplying negative modifiers to other things.Malcolm: But this process is why in males more than females, because there's already this negative modifier process. What it's actually doing is not applying to negative modifiers, to things. It's basically multiplying pathways by a negative one. Is what you can think of it as. And it will sometimes turn arousal pathways to discuss pathways and sometimes turn discuss pathways to arousal pathways because you see that phenomenon much more in males and females.Malcolm: So this is just a broad understanding of how we, we see arousal. Do you wanna talk to any of the subjects here, Simone?Simone: No, I just, it's, it resonates so much more. Like it's so odd to think that sex is limited. I think one thing that you point out in our sexuality book that is useful for people to think about is that, I think men are, are more likely to be really sensitive to signs of gender.Simone: And also men were the original ones doing this sexuality research and doing it from that very male [00:20:00] perspective without even thinking that things like romance novels would be considered as erotic material, and that could be one of the reasons why for so many years, that was the paradigm for all this research.Malcolm: Yeah, I really love what you're saying here. So what our data actually showed is if you look at men like anyone would expect, the predominantly arousing thing is. The naked form of either males or females, right? Like that is the normal thing that most arouses males if you look across the population.Malcolm: But if you look at females, what we actually found is that is not the most arousing thing. It's a close second, but it's not the most arousing thing. The most arousing thing was, submission or dominance. And so what we pointed out there is even the concept of gay or straight, even the concept that our sexualities should be primarily defined by male or female predominant attraction.Malcolm: Is misogynistic because had women invented the field of [00:21:00] sexuality research, they likely would've defined our sexuality as being predominantly dominance or submission based instead of male or female based. And that the only reason why this wasn't caught earlier, that women, you know, focus on that more than they focus on male or female is because almost all of the early researchers in the space were male.Malcolm: And they just weren't thinking like women and they were leaving out tons of data sources that would've immediately elucidated this, as Simone pointed out. And I find that really fascinating because I think it shows how nascent the field of research here really is. Yeah. And how much is being ignored.Malcolm: Because the field is so dominated by identity politics that people can't say, well, let's just throw out all of the identity pol. Like let's pretend like gay straight is just like not an important dichotomy. And look at just like the data, like what are the core things that are arousing different populations.Malcolm: And then you start to be like, oh, so like in women, gender is less important than dominance or submission. [00:22:00] Why isn't that a primary spectrum?The reason, of course, being that people began to develop their identities around the rather nascent concepts. Coming out of the field of sexuality a few decades ago. And now if you update the research, if you update the academic consensus, then you are undermining people's identities.So you can't really update the consensus in academia anymore. It's.It is permanently cannon wherever the field happened to be. About 30 years ago. And that is. A big reason why the field of sexuality is just so backwards right now.Malcolm: But even here, so let's talk about like our system versus McKinsey spectrum. Mm-hmm. Because I think that this is a very useful thing to understand. So if you boil down our system to its simplest level, the way you would think of it as is if in we're using McKinsey spectrum, part of the system, arousal to females, To disgust the females arousal to males, to disgust [00:23:00] the males.Malcolm: And these are two different stimuli categories that have no tie to each other. So two people could be all the way on arousal to both males and females. Two people could be all the way to disgust on both males and females, and two people could be all the way in the neutral to both males and females.Malcolm: Right? Right. And the reason why this system is much more useful is within the Kinsey spectrum, you would literally mark somebody who was exactly equal neutral to males and females, and who was. Like neutral to males, but far disgust to females as exactly the same part of the spectrum, or disgust to female, disgust to males, neutral males, neutral females.Malcolm: All of these people would be in the same part of this, this bar, even though there's, they're actual sexual representations, they're wildly different. Yeah. It's crazy. And the other thing that helps elucidate is that disgust, if disgust is an inborn part of our sexuality, if it is something that is lar or so, so saying sexuality is unchangeable is a wrong thing.Malcolm: You can, you know, in trans people, [00:24:00] the predominant gender of attraction change is about 25% of the time during hormone therapy. So like, you can change what turns you on, but you, you can't change it like intentionally.Simone: You can also change like how much you're turned on.Malcolm: It's like rolling for loot in Diablo.Malcolm: Like you can roll for loot, but you don't know exactly what you're gonna get. You can't like, choose the outcome. But the point here being is if, if, if the things that are discussed to you don't are, are things outside of your control, right? Mm-hmm. Well then one of the problems we have is that when we feel this, this feeling of disgust and we don't know why we're feeling it, one of the, the, the, the jumps tos that most people have is this thing must be immoral.Malcolm: And this is something we see, you know, historically. So you look at lepers, like people assume there was something immoral about them because they created this feeling of disgust in people. And, and the disgust was, stay away from this person who might get you a disease. You know, like evolution was using that system.Malcolm: But this is a big problem for arousal patterns because when we hear people with arousal patterns that cause disgust in us, we [00:25:00] often assume that there must be something immoral about them. And I think that it's very important to distinguish between consenting things happening between adults. So that in no way, like.Malcolm: It hurts their ability to reproduce in anything and things that we should actually see as disgusting because of some sort of moral framework we hold other than the J. Just, this causes disgust in me, therefore it's immoral. Yeah.Simone: Yep. Yep. Yeah. And just because something turns you on doesn't mean you think it's moral or good or that you even like it or want it to happen.Simone: With rape being the really big example that there's a shocking number of people aroused by not, not role play, but real actual rape I wouldn't know. We know this because weMalcolm: ask these questions in a row. Yes. We asked rape role play, and then we asked real rape. And so we got like a huge, we, we, we knew this.Malcolm: There was no confusion in the, in the survey. But yeah, but that doesn't mean that they wanted it to happen to them. And I think that's another really important thing.Simone: Yeah. It's not like [00:26:00] people who, you know, experienced it or people who actually did experience it themselves and then found it arousing, like that doesn't mean they're okay with it.Simone: That doesn't mean that they wanted it or asked for it or ever wanted it to happen again. So I think it's, it's just really important, but that it's, it goes both ways and, you know, in, in that you may feel this instinctive desire to see someone. Who is aroused by something that you don't morally accept to be themselves, reprehensible themselves, bankrupt, when really they have no control over that.Simone: Just because something turns someone on doesn't mean that they morally condone it, and it also doesn't mean that they want that thing to happen by any stretch of the imagination.Malcolm: So this has been the briefest of overviews of our sexuality research.Malcolm: We didn't go into any of the weird side paths or anything like that. We just went over like a broad spectrum of how we understand sexuality. And we can go deeper if people want us to go deeper in future videos, but I don't want to just have the algorithm think of us as like a sexuality channel. So we let us know.Simone: Let us know in the comments if there's something else you want [00:27:00] us to explore, and I will leave you with this. One of my favorite things about Gone Wild Audio and why it is probably my favorite NSF F W. World on the internet is it really enables you to explore things that arouse other people in a much more first person way.Simone: So it's not like looking at an image and being like, I don't know what's going on here or looking at a picture or a video and just not getting it. You are, you know, if you close your eyes and like really try to put yourself in the position of, the way that the audio works is you as a listener are experiencing something, like someone's talking to you, things are happening.Simone: There's often like sound effects. It's, it's like people go all out. It's, they put time into it. I such. Deep respect for this. And it really allows you to more empathetically experience someone going through whatever the scenario is that turns them on. And you may not like it, it will not arouse you. If you're like listening to something that's not like part of your particular network of things that turns you on, but it will.Simone: I think it will [00:28:00] help you just better understand other people and what other people are turned on by, especially when you rank by what gets the most up votes. So, and, and do this. Don't just do this for like, if you're a woman, don't just do this for men. Targeting women content. Do this also for women targeting men content because then you understand like what a large number of men are turned on by like scenarios.Simone: It really turned on like it's just, it's so good at helping you understand other people's points of view. So just if you do one thing, let this be your homework and enjoy.Malcolm: And I, just to add to what she's saying, cause I think it's really interesting is, is I think what she's capturing there and the reason why she finds this so engaging is it's the one aspect of other people that is hardest to empathize with.Malcolm: Yeah. It is hardest to model. The way that other people are fantasizing when something's arousing them because it is probably psychologically the largest area of differentiationSimone: between humans. Mm-hmm. And it's really hard watching like two or three or however many other [00:29:00] people doing a thing and to really empathize with them.Simone: It's very different to, this is as close as you can get. To walking in their shoes, to like, literally trying to embody their, it's like going into someone else's body and loving it. It's, it's fun, it's awesome. Do it. And I,Malcolm: I don't know if I'd say do it. It sounds good. I've never, she's, I, I, I think it's delightful how much she finds this engaging and, oh no, you'llSimone: find your f You're like, your face will contort into the most massive cringes sometimes.Simone: And sometimes you'll have to just, yeah, I don't, I don't, that doesn't sound, there's some, there are some portions I have to fast forward through. I'm not gonna say what, cuz there's some, there's some things that a lot of people really like that, like for me, Extreme disgust response, extreme disgust response.Simone: But again, like just it helps me understand like, oh, I am in the minority here. Like I may think that everyone thinks this is gross. I'm super wrong and I've learned a lot from this. So anyway, do it Malcolm. I love you. This is really fun and I'm looking forward to our next conversation already.Oops, you can see. Ah, froze there at the end. , so that's why you didn't have the sign [00:30:00] off for me. , I would love people. If they do like these sorts of topics, , to let us know in the comments. And, we can do more videos like this, especially if there's specific areas of arousal that you personally find really interesting. We've almost certainly done a stupid amount of research on the subject.I mean, we did write the book on this stuff, so, , we're really happy to dig into it with you guysOne final little thing. If anybody wants to help out with any part of this channel. Whether it's to create some sort of community group. Or. To help edit shorts or manage a Tik TOK or something for us. We would be really happy for the assistance. In regards to the group, If anybody does start a group or anyone has started a group. Cause I know some people were talking about that in previous comments. Please let us know because we actually only post about half of the videos we make. , we do that to try to keep the quality really high. So I'll sometimes get through video and I'll just be like, ah, I don't know if this is good enough for our Watchers. Uh, but you know, it would be maybe fun to dump some of the ones that we don't [00:31:00] publish in a community like that.And then if any of them get a lot of attention, then I can post them to the main channel., this is, this is probably far more work than I should be putting into a, a YouTube with, less than 5,000 followers. , but I really appreciate the recent follower growth and the encouraging comments we've been getting. It means a lot to me in a, it keeps me motivated to try to make this a thing. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe