Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Dive into the intriguing world of Effective Altruism, where connections between polyamory and sex work take center stage. Explore how women in these communities face exploitation amid shifting societal norms. Hear personal stories about navigating Silicon Valley's relationship landscape and the power dynamics that play a role in emotional and professional opportunities. Delve into fantasies and societal perceptions of sexuality as the speakers challenge cultural norms and reflect on the implications of modern dating. Expect a balance of humor and critical observations throughout!

The discussion unravels how male earnings are surprisingly linked to marriage and fertility rates, revealing that increased wages don't necessarily result in more marriages. They explore the chaotic social shifts during the fracking boom and other economic trends, including the unexpected impact of lottery winnings on personal choices. Amidst statistics, they share humorous parenting anecdotes and insights on evolving perceptions of gender roles. The conversation highlights the complexities of family dynamics in a changing cultural landscape.

Dive into an intriguing discussion on heterosexual men's mixed reactions to male affection vs. disgust. They unpack the biological roots of disgust and its impact on societal norms around same-sex interactions. Explore the interplay of genetics, environmental factors, and unique sexual fetishes, alongside cultural influences on attraction. The conversation also tackles cognitive dissonance stemming from progressive upbringings and their effect on mental health. Plus, enjoy amusing anecdotes about cooking and the surprising uses of ozone in home care.

The podcast dives into the mental health crisis affecting progressive women, revealing strikingly lower life satisfaction compared to their conservative peers. It explores how urban monocultures and harmful online communities exacerbate loneliness and mental health issues. The discussion highlights shifting identities among youth influenced by political ideology and social media. Additionally, it critiques traditional mental health practices and examines the potential of AI therapy, all while addressing the societal impacts of these trends.

The conversation kicks off with Spoon delving into the relevance of democracy today and exploring alternative governance systems. The duo discusses the allure of rebellion in politics and contrasts left and right ideologies, examining church-state dynamics and cultural influences. They critique the shortcomings of democratic ideals and the moral integrity of politicians. Humorous takes on topics like Daylight Savings Time and the complexities of sexuality add depth to the dialogue, culminating in an engaging exploration of modern governance and generational views on monarchy.

Dive into the intriguing dynamics of political empathy, exploring how conservatives often show more understanding towards liberals than the other way around. The discussion reveals surprising insights from research on ideological perceptions and the complexities in grasping opposing viewpoints. Delve into the gaming community's political biases and the polarization that affects friendships. Plus, discover how political identity shapes mental health experiences. With a blend of humor and personal stories, they tackle serious issues while keeping the conversation light-hearted.

Dive into the fascinating world of pessimism and nihilism as the hosts explore Emil Cioran's philosophies. Discover how these mindsets can serve as psychological shields while contrasting them with optimism and personal responsibility. The conversation addresses the nuances of relationships and the effects of negative attitudes, urging a shift toward positivity for mental well-being. Reflect on the subjective nature of pain and the importance of enthusiasm in overcoming life's hurdles, all while challenging the traditional views of desire and meaning.

Discover the surprisingly modern origins of Wicca and Druidism, revealing key figures like Gerald Gardner who crafted these practices in the 20th century. Unravel how folklore, personal beliefs, and societal influences shaped contemporary interpretations. Challenge common myths about these mystical traditions and dig into the fascinating blend of ancient beliefs with modern spiritual movements. Dive into a humorous look at cultural stereotypes and the quirks of pop paganism, exploring how these 'placebo religions' captivate today.

In this engaging episode, the hosts sit down with Mike Solana, founder and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, to dissect the contemporary political scene. They explore Solana's role in shaping the tech-right political movement and the significant changes since the recent election cycles. The discussion spans from the transformation in Silicon Valley's political affiliations to the rise and strategy of Donald Trump's second term. Solana shares insights into the surprising status gain of Trump supporters in tech and the implications of such a shift. The conversation also delves into broader societal changes, including the shifting values in America, the decline of mainstream media, and the increasing significance of niche communities in a post-job economy. The episode is a fascinating look at the undercurrents shaping today's political and social landscape. Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. We're excited to have with us today. Mike Solana, the founder and editing something chief of Pirate Wires. 1,Simone Collins: 2, 3. Hello everyone. We're so excited to be day today. Oh my gosh.Okay. Yeah. Sorry. You went,Malcolm Collins: this is why we go with mine. Okay. Anyway. For people who don't know who Mike Salona is he doesn't just have a podcast. It's very popular. But in a publication, that's incredible. Yes. You also sort of put together heretic on, right?Mike Solana: It was my idea.Yeah. Founded it, created it. It's out of done out of out of Founders Fund, but yeah, it's mine. All mine.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So you've been a central figure in the coalition or sort of the consolidation of this sort of new right or tech right political movement that right now is sort of blowing through the country within the White House and a lot of what we're seeing.And I wanted to talk with you as somebody who [00:01:00] is. Totally integrated in like what's going on sort of the venture capital Silicon Valley tech worker scene the vibe shift that you have seen post election cycle there What's changing about how people are relating to things as well as the role that you played in this?Consolidation to to write some history here as the country changes and also to discuss the political realignment. We're seeing in the United StatesMike Solana: Well, I think first of all my own in my own personal life. I kind of i'm like very cagey about labels I Have tried to just be honest about what I'm seeing.And so people tend to put me in a box based on that. Maybe I belong in the box. I don't know, but I can talk about what I've seen. And in terms of what's different right now, I think the best thing to contrast is not what's happening today versus what was happening like four years ago with Biden, but just to, to just, we have this great example of Trump's.[00:02:00]Presidency and his inauguration and you can just compare the first one to the second one. He's had two first terms in a sense Really like he hasn't had a first in a second term. These are two totally separate I said not too long ago. It sort of feels like He played the video game and and, and lost.And he just started the exact same game over from the very beginning. Now knowing where all of the bosses are, right? It's not like he's gotten to the second chapter. He's just still in that first chapter, but he's doing it all over again. So we've never seen that. None of us have seen that in any of our lives.So it's, it's like a very kind of new thing. And within tech, you can compare that first one to the second one. And it's obviously night and day. I mean, the first one was there was one person in tech who was open about his support of. Donald Trump. It was Peter Thiel, and he was completely alienated right out of town for it and has since been sort of forgotten to a, to a large extent because there were much louder people who came to Trump's defense and support this second [00:03:00] time around who've, I think, occupied a lot of the, Discourse surrounding that in tech.And I don't want to like, obviously I feel some kind of way about that. Having been on the front lines of it, obviously not like Peter, but I mean, I work for Peter, I've known Peter forever. So I have a feelings about the way he was treated. But the difference is just obviously today, Trump supporters.Have status in Silicon Valley. And in fact, being a right wing person almost grants a certain amount of status, I would say at the higher levels. So I think it's really unclear what's happening among the rank and file. We haven't seen another round of fundraising data. The last time that we looked tech was still overwhelmingly voting.funding Democrats, venture capital will so overwhelmingly funding Democrats, but all the people openly talking about it are, it's just like overwhelmingly Trumpian. And then everybody else is, I think either conflicted because the Biden term was so [00:04:00] disastrous or quiet. And I suspense it. I suspect it was conflicted rather than quiet.I think people actually just didn't know how they felt.Malcolm Collins: So I want to pull apart the two things you said here to focus on each individually, because I think they're really, really interesting. The first thing that you noted, I think is so true. It's like that game the movie with I want to say the Scientologist guy where every time he dies, he plays the same day tomorrow.What was it, Colleen?Mike Solana: Edge of Tomorrow.Malcolm Collins: Edge of Tomorrow. Yes. Trump's edge of tomorrow ing it right now, but the thing that's weird about this and the part of this I want to focus on is why is the left doing everything exactly the same? Like why are they being so predictable? Why is it the exact same play through?Mike Solana: I think that they. I have no idea what they are right now. They're, they've lost so many things and it's not just an election, right? They've lost the culture. They've lost the youth. They have lost their sense of political identity [00:05:00] because Trump is not a regular Republican. Trump, they tried really, really, really hard to make the kind of like, Oh, he's a rich guy who wants to just help rich people, things stick.But even if you could, maybe that is secretly true. His policies are populist policies. They are economically populist policies. There's a reason that Tucker Carlson was aligned with him and is talking about things like banning self driving cars to protect the jobs of drivers. That's like a Democrat idea.And so I don't think it's like, if you've taken away the economic populism or at least provided a competitive economic populist. Platform you, what are you left with to differentiate yourself and what they were left with in the last election and even now today is like, maybe we should trans the children, maybe that's okay.Right. And that's, I don't think they even believe that they're just, that's something they were just forced to say by the party elites to sort of be in the party, but that's all they have now. It's like those really deranged far left social issues because also the right over the last 20 years has moderated a [00:06:00] lot on social stuff.I think there's, yeah. A lot of transformation happening on the right on the social stuff and conflict on the right now, but that's that's like coming That's not currently where we are like the terrain right now is the major the dominant figure in right wing politics Republican politics, but I don't think it's really that is Donald Trump and he is an economic populist who does not give a s**t about gay people marrying.He just does not care I also don't think the thing that's really hard to make stick is the abortion stuff because Yeah, he has been like, Oh, yeah, like, I'm, I'm against Roe v. Wade, but no one believes that that man hasn't paid for an abortion. Like he's not a Christian right kind of guy. And and he also is strongly said, you know, I'll knock out the any kind of federal ban for or whatnot.He's like states rights only. It's a bad case, but he just isn't that kind of. He's not that kind of right wing socially extremely far right wing kind of guy. It's just more complicated. So they don't know what to [00:07:00] be. And I thinkMalcolm Collins: there's, I've noticed two big differences in this particular playthrough.One sort of highlights the point that you're making here and Trump has even said this verbally. He's like, I'm pushing this issue because it's a nine 90 10 issue. This was specifically when he was talking about trans people in sports. And, and I think. The administration right now is looking to only battle 90 10 issues at the beginning because Democrats culturally have a compulsion to double down on whatever he is opposing.Mike Solana: So, well, because it's also always worked. They've always been able to just. Scream until they got what they wanted and they've, they've, the country has changed a lot because of it and the other overwhelming sort of like, let's say 80 20 issue at least that trump first one on and I think one on again is immigration.And they don't know what the f**k to do about that because they presided over an open border for four years and have people in their party who have now normalized that to the point that they can't go backwards. That's the thing about the [00:08:00] left, man, is like they can never go backwards, that they can never pivot.They can never change their mind. Trump doesn't care about changing his mind. And he's also not a Republican. He doesn't care about Republican baggage. He's just this guy who's doing what he thinks is the right thing to do. And so it comes off like common senseMalcolm Collins: rather than ideology. Well, so the second thing that he's doing differently this time, and I want to hear your thoughts on this, because this is like a huge difference.It's like when you're choosing to run for president and you're like picking a character, like your character is your VP, in many ways, in terms of like how you're colored, and the VP he picked sort of demonstrated a completely different alignment. I mean, Mike Pence versus J. D. Vance. Yeah. It was really like the.GOP Inc versus the new right or the tech right?Mike Solana: Well, I wouldn't even say it's the tech. I think, I mean, the tech right thing is something that's put on. That's like a Steve, Steve Bannon likes to, I think there's a, there's a tension between Steve Bannon and the tech right with JD Vance I think it's complicated because he's come out like in favor of Lena Khan and people like this who [00:09:00] want to regulate the hell out of the industry.But I agree you're right that the difference between VP pick is really important and the first one is I need it was Trump like I want approval from. The elite, and I don't know why he wanted that, but you could tell that he really did. And so he picked an establishment guy and he wanted establishment approval in the press.This new term is like JD Vance is an anti establishment guy and he blew up the press. He blew up the press room. He's now got like Mike Cernovich in there asking questions alongside the New York Times. It's like he, he, Trump knows that he will never have establishment approval. And so that actually was a huge mistake on the side.of the establishment. They should have brought him in instead of trying to ice him out because now he doesn't have anything to gain from working with them. He has a lot to gain from destroying them and that's what he set out to do. He'sMalcolm Collins: completely surrounded now and it's this weird phenomenon with people who hated him in the first election cycle.I mean, JD Vance, Elon, RFK, you know, it seems like his entire administration is just former adamant opponents. [00:10:00]Mike Solana: I don't know that. J. D. Vance was ever an adamant. I think it's like he has some comments that he's made and whatever, but he wasn't like, IMalcolm Collins: thought he led like the never Trump movement practically.Yeah, because he wrote hillbilly elegy and then he did this like apology tour for everyone who voted for Trump.Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Just for clarification here so I don't look uninformed, here are some quotes from J. D. Vance about Trump in his early days. He called Trump America's Hitler. He called him an idiot. He called him reprehensible. He called him cultural heroin. He called him unfit for office.Mike Solana: Okay, so I don't know anything about that. I know that he, the hillbilly, I know that he's defended trump supporters and things like this. I don't know if how committed he was to like the sort of never trump or cause in the beginning.It's definitely true that the others were against it. But even Ilan, I feel It's like, you have to think back to that period of time. And I give people all sorts of grace because at that period of time we were living in like a one party state, which became very apparent the moment that Trump [00:11:00] entered office and the whole entire deep state apparatus rose up to prevent him from doing anything and then tried to put him in jail for the following four years.And I think that was really the radicalizing moment for most reasonable people. It was like, you maybe didn't support him in 2016. You maybe didn't vote for him in 2020, but what happened after 2020. Was really scary. That was like the coordinated tech thing to the platform him. Then the government went after him, started putting his allies in prison, tried to put him in prison.I think that he would be certainly in prison at this point or on the path to it if he didn't win. And that's really scary. And so it's like everything the left is saying about him. I have not seen that from him, but I have seen it from them. And the sort of jig is up in that respect. Like you can't really hide the fact that you tried to put the front runner presidential candidate in jail, like in the middle of an election.Malcolm Collins: So you're going to hypothesize where the left goes in response to this?Mike Solana: Well, I think they have two choices. I think the first choice, no one wants to hear this, but I think that Gavin Newsom. Starting his new podcast is [00:12:00] really interesting. Mm. He is a total sociopathic political creature. He's like a classically presenting sociopathic politician in the late 20th century modelMalcolm Collins: of this.Yeah. Yes.Mike Solana: He's like a Bill Clinton kind of person.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. What's coming to my head as Bill or, or Hillary Clinton. Well, he feels, he's more like Bill. HeSimone Collins: feels more like a mayor out of Gotham City.Speaker 2: I'm just a poor schmoe, got lucky. I wish I could Hand out world peace and unconditional loveSpeaker 6: intimidate me. Bully me if it makes you feel big. I mean, it's not like you can just kill me.Speaker 4: Actually, it's a lot like that.Simone Collins: Like to me, he's more of a comic and I grew up in San Francisco. Like I, or well, right next to it. I grew up like sort of around, yeah.Just steeped in his, his lore. It just feels comic book ish.Mike Solana: Yeah, I think though that he's really smart and really underestimated. And the fact that he's now speaking to like Steve Bannon on the second issue of his episode of his podcast is really fascinating to [00:13:00] me because what I saw while I was watching the clips of that was he had clearly never, ever in his life.Had strong pushback on any of his ideas, even on the issue of was the election stolen? That's not something that he's whether, regardless of what you think about that question, that's not a question that, that, that he has, that Newsome has ever had to answer before. He's never had to beat back against the argument that it was stolen.And so to have them there. Laughing it off and pivoting in a smart way. He's also learning the fact that he's even talking to Steve. Ben is means that he's learning from the culture. He's his son is obviously red pilled and he's like, Holy s**t. Why is the youth Republican all of a sudden? And so he's trying to talk to these people.He's going to learn or whatever. He'll still be a sociopath. He'll probably be a centrist and he'll have some better signaling or. What I think is much scarier and maybe more likely is the like Hassan pikers of the world, the pro like the Luigi Mangione left the populist, radical, yay murder left the pro [00:14:00] Hamas left like, and I think the Hamas thing is less important as As the reaction to Luigi Mangione has really frightened me because it's so earnest and so deep and it also crosses into the world of Trump supporters.Anytime a left wing policy, you start seeing Trump supporters talk about it is like, Oh, that's real policy. That's like a Bernie Sanders, Trump overlap kind of thing. And I think that rather than put up that little, I forget his name. He's the ex Parkland kid who became a leftist activist and had the pillow company briefly.And now he's like a DNC chairperson.Simone Collins: Yes, we know of him, we don't know his name.Mike Solana: So that little dweeb rather than him, if they put Hasan Piker up there, who has a lot of energy, is good looking, is very, I wouldn't say he's masculine, but he peacocks masculinity, and he has a lot of young male supporters, and he's a total monster, like an actual earnest, like, guy who would have put all of us in, had all of us killed in a communist revolution, like they might win.So those are the two paths. I think the energy is actually on some [00:15:00] form of the populist left side and we'll see what happens.Malcolm Collins: That's really interesting. Okay, so I'm just sort of thinking through this in my head. If they go the Hamas Piker path, I actually think that that would lose their support from the mainstream institutions.In the same way, like when Trump ran the first time and the Republicans had to sort of like re coordinate Because, you know, he's, he's, he's supported like the kill. He said babies are legitimate military targets.Mike Solana: Sure. But what have, what is the left not normalized? Give me like a crazy left wing policy that they have not normalized.I mean, open borders now is a normal policy. The transing of youth women. Let's say biological women competing against biological men in youth sports. Like these are all things that 10 years ago we would have been like, Oh, that's crazy. Free speech is no longer it's like we must do government censorship, right?Like that's a mainstream Democrat position. I do not trust that there's anything that they won't actually normalize. And so I think that might be right.Malcolm Collins: That is really [00:16:00] scary. A world where that becomes normal.Simone Collins: I feel like your average American though, if you get out of especially coastal cities is not cool with that stuff.And I think that whether or not we see a radical left versus a reasonable and corrected, like market corrected left depends on trust and institutions. I think that the reason why Luigi Mangione is seen as a saint. Is because there is this fundamental sentiment that there is no law, there is no order, there is no justice.If you are not wealthy, if someone steals from you, if someone attacks you, if crimes are committed against you, well, sorry, nothing's going to be done. And I think if the Trump administration manages to restore some sense of faith in institutions, like, oh, now we actually First, prosecute people for breaking the law.That would be kind of huge. So it, it, I'm really watching closely to see what happensMike Solana: with the fact [00:17:00] that he's doing the things that he said on like immigration, for example, huge,huge.And he really didn't in the first term. And then the second term, it seems like it's all he cares about. And. Well, he cares about, he's doing a lot actually, but this is something that he promised that he seems to be taking seriously, even deporting Mahmood.What's his face? The Columbia guy. Yeah. Yeah.Simone Collins: Who? He's married and has done nothing but organized protests that are anti USA. Right.Mike Solana: He's been here for four years. He's only participated in anti American protesting. It's like he's being deported and that's a difficult move for Trump for a variety of reasons.Because I think there's actually. Once someone gets a green card due process enters this, it's, it should be harder to kick them out rather than if they were just here on a visa, it seems like he's just doing it. You know, the optics there are not great for him and he doesn't give a s**t. He's like, this is the kind of stuff that I talked about.If you hate the country, you're. going back to where you came from. If you don't belong here, you're going back to where you came from. And and these are things that, [00:18:00] you know, people have a harder time talking about online, including friends of mine who are on like the more centrist people, more thoughtful libertarian type people.But when you just talk to anybody who's regular, they're like, Oh yeah, why would we want that person here? Obviously, back to Syria or wherever the f**k he came from, it sounds like he likes it better. Why would we don't want him? Why do we want him?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it seems like active enemy propaganda, like in our school system.Simone Collins: Yeah, I think actually just maybe today you tweet something like your, your, your minimum requirement for citizenship. Should be that you want to be an American. You like it. There's something along those lines. You should loveMike Solana: us and want to be us. Like you should want to become what you see here. It should not be like, Oh, that would be a great country.If only I could change it and make it like a little more Islamic. No, we're not doing that. That's not what we're doing here. Yeah,So would you like to see Sharia law in Canada replace Canadian law? At some point, it will. You know, Because we are, we have families, we are making babies, you're not your [00:19:00] population is going down the slum, right?. One day we can have a Muslim majority nation here in Canada.Right In your face!Malcolm Collins: all of these people who point out that you have these big protests going on in California where people are protesting being sent back to Mexico with Mexican flags. It's like, what, why, why are you madder thanMike Solana: you're with like, I feel that way about Israel and Palestine too.It's like my problem with it. Is I don't want to see either of your flags in my streets like I, it's an American flag or no flag is kind of how I feel about it. I just don't care about either one of these flags. You're perfectly nice people. I'm sure. Definitely what happened on October 7th was disgusting.Like definitely it happens a lot. Terrorism is bad. All true. I don't want your like multi thousand year old blood feud Being litigated in the streets of New York city. It's like, I just don't want to see that. And this is the problem with immigration. And this is, I think the reaction of the average American who is like, why the f**k are we even [00:20:00] talking about this?This has nothing to do with us. I don't want to have to think about this. I don't care. And Trump is just. He has like an instinct for that and he just talks to the people who no one else talks to, which is most people, by the way, that's like,Simone Collins: yes, well, I mean, it's, it's not just him mentioning 90 10 issues.I'm hearing it more and more, even on issues when he doesn't plan to support them, like with daylight savings, when he was asked. Will you finally get rid of daylight savings? He said, well, this is more like a 50 50 issue. I'm not going to touch it no matter what I do. Someone's going to get mad. He really, it's so refreshing to hear a president look at what the majority of reasonable people want and try to get that because it seems like we haven't done that for a really long time.Mike Solana: It's not ideological at all.Simone Collins: Yeah.Mike Solana: That is the thing that people get so wrong about him is he's actually, I think the most. Pragmatic president. We've had, you see this on issues of things like trade where and also things like, I mean, any policy [00:21:00] position he has, it's never, it's never about what should the world look like?It's always about like, well, what is the landscape and how do I get the best deal possible based on what? People all seem to want, he's all about making deals with people. He loves striking deals between people who don't want the same things. He loves brokering those kinds of deals. And that's just unlike we've never seen anything like that for better or worse.It's just a new thing. And I find the honesty of that refreshing.Malcolm Collins: I want to transition from this into the second part of the very first thing you said, which I thought was just really interesting is the conversations that are happening on the ground, the nature of them is really changing. And you mentioned it a little bit here in terms of like what people are saying.I know from my experience, I got this email chain from Stanford MBA. And, and it was from my class and it was all of them were like panicking, like panicking, panicking. I was like. The one person who would start just went on it and started magging and I probably really burned my chance of ever getting a job through that [00:22:00] network.Just by being like, Hey, if you ever want to talk to somebody with the opposite perspective,Mike Solana: They don't newsflash or narrator narrator's voice. They did not,Malcolm Collins: But the, the The at the same time, you know, we have people on our show all the time who have nothing to do with politics, like I'll invite somebody on because he runs like a statistics channel on fertility rates in like Eastern Europe or something or a religious thinker and like before the recordings turn on, it's always like, oh my God, like, I'm so glad, like, I wish I could move to America or I'm so jealous for what you guys are getting to go through right now.We're like,Mike Solana: yeah,Malcolm Collins: a lot in Europe. Is, is, how is this, is it like filtering down from the top within Silicon Valley, like in the intellectual class of Silicon Valley, because we're really connected to them, I'd call it like the EEO sphere, like the former effective altruist community, like the top intellectuals who we have connections with, they're like They're, they're, they're moving more centrist on this sort of stuff when previously they would have been hyper reactionary against it, but I [00:23:00] feel like the rank and file still think they're supposed to hate Trump.Yeah. Like that's sort of what I'm seeing.Mike Solana: That's the culture of there's this thing that is like. The aesthetic of thoughtfulness and they feel you have your centrist people, you're like Yimby type people, any kind of wonkish policy person, your former EA type people, your rationalists, they care more about projecting a sense of their own personal thoughtfulness than they do about securing.High level goals. I truly believe this for the country, like just positive, let's say growth borders, law and order, things like that. They don't care about that as much as, as how they come off to their friends and things like that, which is a weird thing to say, because they're rationalists and they're not supposed to care about that.But that is truly my read of most of them, even the ones that I like and friendly or whatever. I think that that's what's happening. And there's nothing about Trump. The aesthetics of Trump, there's nothing reasonable about them. He comes off [00:24:00] way crazier than he actually is. So the way that he just like, even on tariffs or something where it's an issue that you could actually get behind the idea of reciprocity and trade, he just every day is announcing something new.And so if you're like, your aesthetic is thoughtfulness. That, well, that's not thoughtful. He didn't think it through. He's changing his mind. He changed his mind five times. What does he really believe? And I look at that and I have to do the math and I've now known him for, not personally, but I've watched him for however many, 10 years almost.And it's like, Oh he's creating leverage out of nothing in advance of some kind of trade negotiation or deal negotiation that I don't even. Know anything about right now. The other day I saw him throw Google under the bus for something. And I was just talking to myself like, I mean, I wonder what he wants from them.Like maybe that's what's happening. Right? Like, like, I don't know what's going on over there, but probably something is going on there. And so that's how I approach Trump is just the principle of charity. I. I just assume that he's not deciding, Oh, I would really like to tank the economy today by doing something [00:25:00] crazy.I would like to just tank the stock market or whatever. My assumption is there's a plan and I just don't know what it is and we can judge him for it in, you know, six months or whatever. And it's like we can change the whoever's in charge now anyway. I wasMalcolm Collins: talking to New York times reporter today.And she was like, well, what do you think of like what he's done to the economy? And I'm like, he didn't like. Plan to take the economy if he even if he did he meant for it to be short term Like his goal is to make the american worker feel more secure likeMike Solana: well ain't also just to shore up Manufacturing security and that is a goal.It's like we just F*****g forgot that that's an important goal. COVID happened and proved that that's an important goal. It proved that it's not just a thing that you should care about. If you are this plebe who is saying, Oh, I wish that I could afford a home. And you're this, a rich person is like you idiot.That'll never happen again. That's not what we do here anymore. We don't give you like great middle class jobs. It's no longer just an issue for those people. It's an issue for all of us when you have a country like [00:26:00] China controlling so much of the manufacturing, and then they're also manufacturing viruses that they're then releasing, and then they're hoarding things like PPE, and that is something that was not nearly as bad as it could have been, but I think that the takeaway from that has to be.Oh, wow. That could have been easily so much worse. It could have been a little more lethal and that would have been way more devastating. And we were way not prepared for it. And so I think about it in those terms that completely 20, how could 2020 not have changed your mind completely about things like domestic manufacturing and Trump really cares about it.And we'll see what happens.Malcolm Collins: Interesting. So there was something you said there that aligns with one of our recent theories that I thought you might find interesting to pull on. So we were looking at why American conservatism like Americana conservatism is the only group really other than Jews who stay above repopulation rate fertility wise when they get wealthy.And what we pointed to was the truck nut fertility thesis, which is to say within Americana [00:27:00] culture, there is this idea that if some sort of culturally dominant force or respectable force wants to force something on you. Your reaction to that should be reflexively reactionary. Like put truck nooks on something because it's not respectable.Put the little naked girl on the thing, the Hooters chicks, you know, like, be. offensive in your existence. And that this was Trump authenticated him in a large part of America's mind rather than undermining his credibility. And there is, with these individuals who live their lives just to signal, I'm a good person an incapability of recognizing this.Mike Solana: I think that's true. I think that the way he talks, even just the cadence and the strangeness of his vernacular is all signaling a segment of the population that is considered [00:28:00] not elite to elitists. And when people like my parents heard it, all they really registered was like, Oh, this guy hates it.All the same people who I hate. I, they don't care that he was rich. They don't care about his dumb real estate deals in New York city, which by the way, like, does anybody think that there's no corruption in real estate in New York city? Like the only way to do real estate in New York city, like they don't give a s**t.They're just like, he's going to throw. a grenade at the machine, which I can't stand. And if he doesn't do that, we're going to have a problem. And then he didn't do it enough. And there was a problem in the election is my read of the 2020 election. It was like, he didn't do enough of the s**t that he was going to say, but I think, yeah, the way that he speaks the offensiveness, everyone thinks that's fun.The supporters think that's funny. And, and they register it as, oh, he cares just as little about, he has just as little respect. For this system of morality, the elitist morality as I do, you know, these people are people who [00:29:00] grew up saying before white privilege was a phrase. It was in the early nineties.You still had politically correct language. And there was this idea of like, why the average, like working middle class white person is like, what, what do black people What do I have that black people don't have like no one has ever given me anything? Why do I have to have this like reverence for this idea that the black person is persecuted or something in 1992?They don't believe they just never believed that because their lives weren't that good and they were really hard and the government wasn't giving them Anything and so to disrespect to show disrespect for that system that never in their minds gave them anything Is absolutely a part of his credibility.They're like, Oh, he gets it. That's a guy who doesn't, he hates the same stuff that I hate.Malcolm Collins: I think what's really fascinating is that it, I think that that also gave him credibility with like the tech bros, I guess I'd call them like the Silicon Valley VC crowd has always had an intentionally contrarian streak to it.But it's almost [00:30:00] like. Like for me, for example, I wasn't pro Trump his first election cycle. I, and, and I see it now as like maybe internal cowardice or something like that, but it took me a while to recognize the contrarianism in what he was doing and that that aligned with the value system that I was, you know, purported to have.Mike Solana: I don't agree. I think that it was more a matter of for the people who are maybe more famously pro Trump, like David Sachs and Mark Andreessen, that's probably true. But for the rank and file, like all of the, like the Mark Zuckerberg and the Google people calling up Trump and everybody was donating to his inauguration parties and stuff.That was much more about. Tech had tried for years to be a part of the elite and succeeded to a certain extent when he was censored while Trump was in office, they succeeded, like they, they, there was. It wasn't just remember the tech platforms or the speech platforms. It was like every tech company [00:31:00] cut Trump off and we're lockstep with the Democrat elites who were in power.It was a very scary moment in American history. I was like, Oh yeah, that was like straight up. Like we were teetering on the brink of real authoritarianism at that point. And and I would say that most tech people were. Aligned. And then what happened was four years in which it became absolutely certain that the Democrats were going to do everything in their power to dismantle that power.They were, they were, they were never going to be aligned with tech power. It didn't matter how much the tech elites peacocks the same values and pretended they cared about the same things like they were just not going to work because the https: otter. ai Do not want competition in power and tech was becoming too powerful.It was powerful enough, for example, to silence a president. The Democrats saw that and they were just as nervous as the Republicans. They were like, Oh my God, if you can silence the president, who is actually the powerful person here? It's not the democratic party, even all of a sudden. And so there was suddenly they were out of alignment and the backlash against the Democrats was, I think, totally expected just in terms of like.A read of [00:32:00] the, the, the power structure.Malcolm Collins: You think, you think the Democrats started, cause I, I personally didn't see any of the Democrats really targeting tech institutions leading up to the election. I, I remember them being really happy when they're banning stuff other than Elon.Mike Solana: This last, this, which election are we talking about?Malcolm Collins: This last like, like Zuckerberg that didn't really, you know, they were fine with him. They,Mike Solana: you have antitrust legislation targeting like every major tech company Valley. You have the global trade war targeting tech from Europe that our administration not only did nothing about, but abetted by. Sharing information with the Europeans.They talked about, they were constantly dragging tech people before Congress to yell at them and talk about whatever the issue was. They were talking about new taxation stuff. They were talking about, you had people like Elizabeth Warren, who talked about I don't want to get that wrong. So I don't want to say who it was, but there was an a conversation about going after unrealized gains.That is very popular on the list. Oh, yes. That would kill the entire concept of startups, how we know [00:33:00] about them, which is like raising equity to people who don't have money to pay the taxes on something like that. Yeah, because the, the, the gains have not been realized, which is like a basic economic concept, but they don't, the Democrats don't care because there is an, there is a huge part of that party.Many centrist Democrats would, of course. Would care. And in fact, there were many Democrats in Silicon Valley who absolutely cared and talked about it, but the Democrats have in their party, a group of people who do not believe in like industry as a concept, this is like, they're very socialist and it's not a small number of people.And so I think at that point, When they were in power and all of this happened. It was like, wow, if we want to keep on existing, we cannot work with these people here. Maybe they will, that party will crash and burn and the new version of the Democratic Party, we will be able to work with. And that's, I think what someone like Gavin Newsom is trying to demonstrate even in his rhetoric, he's trying to demonstrate that.But what we currently saw, the Biden thing, whatever, whatever was in charge while Biden was technically the president, that thing. [00:34:00] The tech industry just, it was straight up pragmatic. It was like, we will die if this is in charge. So,Malcolm Collins: so, no, I, I, I think you might be right about it. It's very different from my intuition of what was leading the tech community.Which was, if I look at like the words of the tech people, like Mark Zuckerberg, it was the. Government forcing him to censor stuff in weird ways. So I think the censorship, my read was censorship handling of COVID and the trans stuff is actually what turned the tech intellectuals away. But you see it as more just like pragmatic economic orientation.Mike Solana: Well, it depends on who you're talking. If you're talking about like, again, the Mark Andreessen's and the David Sachs's of the world, I think those are always thoughtful people who kind of disagreed with that stuff. And they, their opinions are not that different now than they were. I think a while ago if you're talking about corporate leadership, you know, the C suites of all these companies, I think it was just straight up economics and for Mark specifically, I think there was probably, there is something earnest to the evolution there for someone like Jack [00:35:00] Dorsey, who I've covered really closely, I absolutely believe there was an earnest intellectual philosophical development there.I think that he saw what happened during the Hunter stuff, not even from the administration, but from his own team, from himself, from what he Really antithetical to all of his like crypto libertarian values, which he has talked about forever. I think he was horrified by what he had become and I think he gave it, he worked to put Elon in power to end that whole entire machine.I love Jack. I defend him all the time and people always get mad at me. But I, I think that he is one of the most earnest, that's like the most, the most earnest evolution on the issue of the safety stuff. He would maybe even argue, he never. Evolved. I don't know, but he certainly, his company certainly had become something really terrifying on the censorship stuff.HeMalcolm Collins: ran blue sky for a bit too, right? Like he was on their board.Mike Solana: That came from Twitter. He was on the board. Blue sky was a protocol developed by Twitter. That's why they don't like own it now. It's, it's not a [00:36:00] part of the company. But then he was on the board and then he left because he was like, well, this just became the exact same thing that Twitter was.Malcolm Collins: What are your thoughts on, because we're talking about like how it almost became fascist of the US with the alignment of censorship and government, and yet I look at what's happening in Europe and the shutting down of election cycles, the extreme censorship. Do you just think Europe is cooked? Or like?Mike Solana: Yeah, I mean, this is a good example of, we were saying, oh, well, not everyone in the country, like most people in the country aren't going to stand for these crazy ideas. That can be true. As it is true in Europe that most people in Europe believe that you should want to become European, you should want to be if you're German coming to Germany, you should want to become German, you should want to learn German, you should want to integrate with the German population and ultimately be a part of the German nation,you canall believe that and still have people in charge of your country who are doing things in the opposite direction, because they've just They've really seized power and the democracy doesn't matter at [00:37:00] that point.So the only thing I think that is going to stop what's happening in Europe is some kind of, I mean, it would have to be a major change in the political structure, even cause they're like an endSimone Collins: to the EU.Mike Solana: I don't think that's enough. I think it's gotta be like on an individual level, like, cause you could, you'd have a change in a country like France, political change in a country like France, EU.I think the EU doesn't matter as much as France leaving the EU matters. But I think, right, I feel. Like it's over for you. I don't think that they have, I don't think they're going to do it. There's no mass deportation coming out of Europe. And just on the demographic, the demographic question alone there 20 years from now is going to be such a different world thatMalcolm Collins: you're absolutely right.I mean, one thing I point out is, is 25 percent was actually 24 percent of German's population is either immigrated or the descendants of immigrants after the 1950s. Well, that'sMike Solana: close to a third of Canada's population is from a different country. [00:38:00] Like, like immediately.Simone Collins: Wow.Mike Solana: Immediately. It is, it's like, it's 20 something percent.I'd have to Google it really quick. But, but it is, it's extremely high number. That's like a lot of people in your country who are not from your country. Yeah. And you may or may not want to be a part of your country.One day we can have a Muslim majority nation here in Canada.Right In your face!Malcolm Collins: Of Canada. There's been one like a gambit that I don't understand why Trump hasn't polled and it's like really surprising me actually.Why not just like go to Alberta, go to, there's one other conference. Province that would probably flip. And provinces can secede from Canada just by a popular vote. Why not just say, Hey, you want to join the U SMike Solana: I don't think they have those. Numbers yet. I think that's like the most likely province, but they're not quite there.And I go back and forth on whether or not Trump even actually wants Canada to become a state. I think he'd love it. It'd be fine. He'd be open to it. But I think the reason he's talking about Canadian statehood is just to demoralize Justin Trudeau. I think what he really wanted was to get rid of [00:39:00] Justin Trudeau.And that has, he succeeded. Justin's now out and he just resigned today. And I don't know. I don't know that he thought much more about it other than that other than like this really works for me rhetorically in terms of rhetoric and it really works against him. It makes him look like a total loser and he's just going to keep hammering it because it made Justin look, you know, impotent.Malcolm Collins: That makes sense. I would like to see a push on that. That'd be really cool. Simone, you've been quiet here for a CanadianMike Solana: statehood.Malcolm Collins: Well, no, to take the economically most productive regions of Canada just take their oil regions because they already don't want to be part of Canada. Canada established when the whole Quebec thing was going that you can just secede.And Canada has been using these regions resources to fund the rest of their stupidity.Mike Solana: I kind of think Canada is on a long term path to American integration. It's like the, the way is just in terms of. It's a slow [00:40:00] cultural economic, you know, integration until there's just we forget why we're not even the same country and then it just kind of happens.I don't think it will happen like this. But then also, I would say, like, if the demographics totally change in Canada becomes a very different place. I don't know what that looks like. And that could happen because this country is a country that seems to hate itself is a country that seems to not want to be Canada anymore.And that is what we're seeing in Europe too. And that is maybe the fundamental thing of our era that I don't understand that the weirdness of our era is like what seems to me to be a pervasive self hatred that in America, we have now room to not be that it used to, we had to be that culturally there is all we have now that everyone else does not have is we have permission.To love ourselves. And they don't have that in Europe. And in fact, when I was abroad just about a month ago, a few weeks ago for a conference I was in London and that is the thing that everybody kept saying was like, man, I wish that we had that over here. I wish that that we had people who loved it that much over here.It seems so fun and exciting to be over there right now. They didn't even care [00:41:00] about the policy. They only cared about it. Just like the permission to be excited about being alive and, and being your, your nationality. And yeah, they truly just do not have that there and we do, and that's precious right now.We'll pop it. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: It's funny that you mentioned that. Cause I was talking to some reporters about the prenatal conference and I was like at the last one. Really the most shocking thing about it is that everyone, it was the first time for a long time. I've been with a group of people where everyone was happy to be alive and excited about the future.Even though they think it's bleak and I think that the reason for this is just cultural evolution, which is the dominant culture in the world right now. It's the urban monoculture as we call it. And to convert somebody out of their birth culture, because the urban monoculture is a very low fertility cultural group, you need to disillusion them with the starting cultural tradition.If I want to convert somebody out of Americana culture, if I want to convert somebody out of German culture or British culture into the urban monoculture, I need to cut them off from their family, you know, convince [00:42:00] them their parents are horrible, and convince them that the culture itself is horrible, that that's how I deconvert them.And as such, I need to convince them that they are. Horrible. And a lot of cults do this, you know? And so I think it just sort of spiraled out of control. And then everyone was like, why do we, why do we all hate it? What, like what, why am I supposed to hate my ancestors and our tradition and our civilization?Mike Solana: Yeah. And then it turns out when you just refuse to do so and a bunch of other people say, yeah, I don't, I'm not doing that either. And you talk about it out loud. The hysterical screaming eventually dies down because it no longer works. It's like the behavior only persists for as long as they get a positive reaction from it and it just eventually it just dies down.I kind of think of 2020 as I thought of 2017, I thought was the peak and then 2020 happened and I thought, holy s**t, it's worse. Okay. There is, it keeps getting worse. But there's this idea in behaviorism called behavior extinction. [00:43:00] And the idea is that you know, people will act out to get a reaction.And then when you stop reacting. They don't stop reacting. They don't stop acting out. They actually act out much more at first. It's it's like they have to do much more to get the same reaction and then that works. And so they have to do much more. And the behavior extinction happens when as much as they ever acted out and then they don't get the reaction and then it dies.And the behavior being that, like The sort of woke behavior is broken and part of that sort of constellation of bad ideas was this expectation that you hate your culture in America. At least that no longer exists. That behavior has gone extinct and those people still maybe there are people out there that have those ideas, but I'm allowed to not and nobody can stop me and nobody even really cares, which is why I find so tedious.The people who are still doing anti woke. Content in 2025 as like their whole beat, which is like every day. It's woke whack a mole. It's like, look at this [00:44:00] blue haired idiot telling me that that white people are bad. It's like, no one cares anymore. I don't care. Like no one doesn't matter what that idiot says.They don't have power over me anymore.Simone Collins: That's actually one of the things I wanted to ask you about, which is a lot of energy and time went to that sort of the resistance. And now you have a whole bunch of people who don't really shouldn't be thinking about that aren't talking about that anymore. I'm really curious to see because you're so.A finger on the pulse of the cutting edge. Both societally and in the tech world in some spheres, what you're seeing is like new dialogues and new obsessions and new themes that are emerging that people are talking about and obsessing over and thinking about how to solve now that they're not trying to fight.Sort of progressive overreach.Mike Solana: I think that whenever Trump is in office, he casts this like crazy smoke screen. He just, I think he just, I'm trying to find the right metaphor for this. But he just makes it hard to think about anything else. And so I think a lot of people are distracted by him and I'm trying my best.To [00:45:00] sort of be like engaging with the culture, but to not be distracted by him from like, I'm, I'm sort of really refusing to be upset ever by anything that's going on. And whenever he says some crazy thing about tariffs, whatever, I'm just going to wait a few days and see what we learn. And people get mad at me for that, but that's just how I'm going to move on.But I think a lot of people are distracted by him.Ithink on the far right of politics, on the far left of politics, there's total. Collapse and confusion and not even far left. Let's say the center left. That's where it's collapsed. Confusion disillusionment, sadness. They don't know what to be. And they're just not being productive at all on the far left.There's excitement because the center left is dead. They have no competition and they're gaining followers. Then on the far right. Not even the far right, the whole spectrum of the right. There's a huge war for what it means to be right wing because Trump is bizarre and he's not the future of the party because no one is like him.He is. No one else is as pragmatic as him. Even the Trumpians like they're Trumpian. He's not Trumpian. He's just Trump. It's a very different thing. There's no philosophy there for him at all. So whoever comes next, that's the war and you see it. I think [00:46:00] the. On both the economic side, where there's a conflict between the Bannon types and the the sort of the tech writer, the Elon Musk types, and then you see it on the social side, where there's also a conflict between like Elon Musk and his.It means like Genghis Khan. It's like, how many kids is he going to have with random people? And the Christian right? The people who Pretend they're the Christian right, the trad right, which started as a meme and feels more real to me by the day. I think there's a lot of interesting, just no one knows what it's going to become.And there's like conflict there, and it, without a common enemy on the woke left, it's becoming much more vicious.So that is going to be distracting right wing people. And I think it's just going to be that what's happening is just going to be culturally quite chaotic because this is also happening at the same time that media fragmentation has happened.So not only are all, are all of these things, would it have been natural even with standard media that was closer to what we saw like eight years ago with a few big giant tech companies and then the mainstream media, it's way more fragmented now. So no matter what you believe, you can [00:47:00] hop into a place that confirms all of your biases, shares news with you.That is true. But super radicalizing about what you're about, what you believe. And so everyone is like very different and becoming more different. And yes, I think chaos for a while, unfortunately.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Here's a question that leads from that, that you might have an answer to. Cause I asked Simone about this.So Hassan Piker is most popular Twitch streamer. If you look at the most popular long form podcasts eight out of 10 of them are right wing, right, right wing. Why do you think the podcast scene has gone right or right wing people succeed in the podcast scene? And. On YouTube as well. And the, the left is becoming focused on things like Twitch and TikMike Solana: TOK.I have no idea. I don't know. I've even, I had this idea. Yeah, no, I don't know. I, I actually have no idea. I just know that it's true. And I don't know that I don't know Twitch. I'm not familiar enough with Twitch to know who the other popular people are. I know that a lot of what they do [00:48:00] is, I mean, they love to fight with each other.And get on into their shows and attack each other. That used to be popular on YouTube and it's not really as much anymore. And that was at a time when YouTube was more left wing. I don't know if there's something related to that, that it's all more He's just like a good WWE kind of star. I don't, I don't know.That's,Malcolm Collins: that's, that brings me to another point where you're like, you know, people used to fight when you had the lefties in control. It is something that you mentioned as part of the narrative, which is personally not something I'm seeing. And I've sort of taken it to be like a left wing gaslighting because, you know, they do a lot of this was media is that the right is now fighting each other.I just personally haven't seen that much of the right fighting each other.Mike Solana: I mean, you see it even with just like the Babylon B talking about anti semitism and getting attacked for it by there are all sorts of sort of. Is real skeptical where you really see it breaking down is on the question of Israel and Palestine, which is like a shadow war for all sorts.It's our proxy war for all sorts of ideas about [00:49:00] nationalism and the influence of Jewish people and things like that. And try my best to just stay out of that entire thing. Because I think it's one not what I focus on America only. And then to It just seems like there's no way to enter that world and not become like a way scarier person.I think that you just become the things that you fight and everybody there that's fighting that I see fighting. I don't want to be like so I've just tried my best to stay out of it. I worry that that fight that's budding up on the right is going to. Kind of overtake us all and we'll be dragged into it and have to pick sides or whatever.But for now, I don't think we have to, but I do see a lot of fighting on the right. I think it's on the question of Israel, Israel's influence. The influence you see, Bannon really trying to gin up fights between the, what he calls the MAGA right. And what he calls the tech, right. I, those are, I don't believe in that distinction.Maybe it will become a more serious distinction in the future, but he for sure feels. A conflict there. I just saw him on a Newsom podcast talking about the tech oligarchs and he hates the [00:50:00] influence of tech people on Donald Trump. I think this Elon thing really, really, really bothers him and he's going to stoke those flames and stoke those flames until he gets back into a position at the right hand, I think.But yeah, those, those fights, I see a lot. I think the left is correct about those, those who is maybe I actually haven't seen the left to talk about this as much.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's interesting. My, my read of Steve Bannon, and I could be super wrong about this, is he's just like deep state slime and like everybody recognizes that now and he's mad because Elon is showing that he, he was the Elon of the first administration and he did effing nothing.Mike Solana: Right, exactly. He failed. He ended up in jail. That's, and that, by the way, That's what happens if you fail on this game, you go to prison, like you lose your life. That is what they proved. And that's why the stakes are so high, right? Like we, everyone knows going to prison. If he doesn't nail it, this does not succeed.We all are going to jail. Like that is what is going to happen. They say it, they actually just f*****g say it is like they lost the game fair and square. And their response to [00:51:00] that is. We should do communism. And and that's, that's like, that's the scary thing that's hanging over our balance. And that's why I worry about people like Hassan, because I think that he's the only one who's being really honest about, about.His intentions.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and people find that honesty, very attractive, very appealing. I mean, for the same reason they love Trump,Mike Solana: which is a very difficult question. You'll have to answer eventually. If that conversation picks up is like, do you have to act like them or something? Because that, again, it's like, it's just, it's the only way to survive a fight like this, I think, is you become not even, I don't know if you can even resist it.If you're in a fight with someone, I think you just start to become them. That is what happened with everybody who fought. The woke people is like, you just fought fire with fire. You used to, you get obsessed with the culture wars you became. And I say this even a little bit like just self reflectively, like I became too much like them over the last few years.I don't regret it because I don't know that I could have been effective in that environment if I didn't,butit is a sad thing. I look back at [00:52:00] my work from. Six, seven years ago when I was first, like, why can't people just let me write about this f*****g Mars thing? Like I'm doing a podcast on Mars. Like leave me alone.It's not white supremacy. Shut up. Like, I look back at that guy and I'm like, man, I have, we like, I personally lost a lot by Fighting this thing. And I want to like get back to it, but it's hard. Like you just, you change in this kind of, in this kind of idea environment.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I can see that. One thing that I find really interesting that to expand it a bit from what's going on in the tech world.And I don't know how much insight you have into like a nerd culture stuff, which is another area that we do like a lot of stuff on, but the, how nerdy are we talking? Well, I, I was going to say Too muchSimone Collins: WarhammerMike Solana: lore? I played Magic the Gathering, and I had familiar with DungeonsMalcolm Collins: and Dragons. The, the breakdown of the video game, like the woke video game industry in the United States has been pretty catastrophic to the extent where you'll have like 400 million dollars, and this has [00:53:00] happened multiple times, it's about to happen again with Assassin's Creed Shadows, 400 million going to a project and like 500 people buy it or like 1000 people buy it.And it's, it's, it's destroying a giant industry. There was like the major media industry. And at the same time as I'm seeing this industry burning, I then see the, the news media, like the traditional MSNBC. It almost feels like a light switch flipped and everyone now is like, Oh yeah, they're not like meaningful sources of news anymore.Even the people who work at these companies,Mike Solana: well, even the left, they're like, Oh, they're too right wing or whatever. Like there's the trust in media is totally collapsed. But I think I was going to say, as you were talking about, I was going to connect it with media and I, I just see that as opportunity, especially as AI as our, as our AI tools advance and we are more able to create these things more easily ourselves.You're just going to see new gaming companies and new people, or gaming people, single individual creators of incredibly popular, beautiful games. You're already seeing that on the media side. And that's maybe the future of everything is people doing more with less and creating new [00:54:00] institutions, new balance of status and power and wealth and things like this.Malcolm Collins: It's funny that you mentioned that we're actually doing that. We're building a video game company right now with AI. Which I'm really excited for because the big like institutional players are so bad at using AI effectively.Mike Solana: Yeah, I mean, well, so new it's like, and no one has ever super incentivized as a giant to embrace the new thing for this.Like the, what is the famous innovators dilemma? You don't want to be creating the thing. That's going to put your, your bread and butter out of business. I guess they should be able to use new tools, but if they create tools that give way more autonomy to the user, just to get to a point where, You start to wonder what the point of this thing is, which is like, you know, that's what kind of is happening with the sub stack ecosystem and social media and stuff like this.It just got to a point where I remember the whole blue check conversation was so crazy. And when Twitter was still Twitter. And the first thing that Elon did was he was like, I'm taking rid of, you're no, no, you no longer get blue checks just because you're like this anointed, you know, priest, high priest of the establishment, you're going to [00:55:00] have to pay for a blue check.And anyone can have a blue check if you're a person and you give me money. And they were furious. The shift had already, like no one took that blue check seriously. It was just like, you don't deserve this because you have, you have 400 followers and you're crazy and you happen to work for like Vox.That's, I am more influential than you. And that's crazy. Like you don't, you're not more special. You don't deserve a new, a special suite of tools and access to the administration or the art, what I consider my administration, which is whoever runs Twitter. You're not, you're not better than me. And he just, Elon just made, he forced his company to confirm with the reality that already existed.And that's always a really interesting place to be when, when there is something that everybody already knows to be true, but you can't say it, or everybody's already doing something, but you can't, you can't talk about it or discuss it or plan for it. And then someone just. This is the real thing. This is what we're doing.This is reality. And people love that. It's [00:56:00] like, thank you for saying the truth. And also now the world is different overnight.Simone Collins: We're going to see a lot more of that in the coming years. What doMike Solana: you think the things are? Maybe that what is the one, what, maybe one thing that you think most people kind of think, but you can't saySimone Collins: about social media or the news.I think people realize that we live in a post job economy already. And that also money doesn't matter anymore. Those are my two big things.Malcolm Collins: It's in the process of not matter. And Elon has said this as well, like because of AI because of AISimone Collins: and also because of sort of debt cycles and inflation. And we're, we're headed towards a Jubilee.That's not going to play out like a Jubilee, like social security is going to fall apart. But then I think the government's just going to mint money to sort of cover it. I don't think social security is going to be privatized. And then, I mean, even if that doesn't happen, so even if our currency isn't massively devalued that way people are already behaving in a way especially younger generations and especially people who aren't wealthy and there there's a lot of them like, well, money just doesn't matter anymore.I'm going to be in debt forever. I'm [00:57:00] going to put it on a credit card. Cause I'm never going to pay it off. It doesn't matter what the interest is because it's never going to be paid off.Malcolm Collins: Weight of relating to money has inverted. So historically, the core store of value was anything that was fungible and had a set value like land or Bitcoin or house, you know, whatever.But gold but now because those things were great for storing value because the number of people who wanted them was growing exponentially. But when the population begins to stabilize and then begins to collapse. The core thing that we thought of as a store of value collapses, and you could say, well, you could put it all into the economy like the S and P or something like that.But all of the large companies are going to be the companies that are most at risk from the AI transition. So all of the places where you could store value are very unsafe.Simone Collins: Yeah. And I think a lot of people feel like they've been scammed so many times. Yeah. I mean, I can't buy a house. I can't, you know. I can't afford this.I'm in debt. Money doesn't matter anymore. Everything's going to be on credit. And eventually we're going to say, well, this happened in Japan a couple of times where they're just [00:58:00] kind of like, huh? Okay.Malcolm Collins: It is always a part of the beginning of demographic collapse.Simone Collins: Yeah. Let's what, what debt it's gone.So yeah, money's going to go crazy. And I think a lot of people are already the idea ofMike Solana: our national debt. Like, I don't know how you pay that back. So do you just have to say, I'm not paying that back? I think that that's actually how it ends. Yeah.Simone Collins: And our currency can be. Massively inflated until it doesn't really matter anymore.And, you know, the portion of our budget that it becomes is going to be so silly because we get to just inflate it to high heaven. So yeah, that's, it's something that we think about a lot because, you know, we, we keep, our kids are now becoming obsessed with money and asking us. You know, how, how will I, how will I buy things?And, and where do I get my job? And we're like, no, you won't get a job. That's never going to happen. And it's, it's, we're not trying to figure out what to tell them. To help meMike Solana: understand, what do you think is going to happen rather than having a job?Simone Collins: You're going to have to create a niche personality.That's that is capable of selling gatherings, events, access [00:59:00] or artisan goods of some sort. That people want that a niche of people wantsMike Solana: That's a fraction of the population. So what happens to what, I don't know what that world looks like.Malcolm Collins: There have been worlds in the past. And I think that people just fundamentally, like in our generation, art.Capable of accepting this. But if you go back to like the 1910s 1900s you know, you didn't have a welfare. You didn't have social security. You didn't have medicaid when people were poor. They just died. And we're going to go back and a lot of people are just gonna And the rest of us are going to be scraping by and there's going to be a few people with an astronomical level.There's goingSimone Collins: to be extended families sort of, I mean, we're going to, I think we're going to see a bit of a return to feudalism where you're going to see sort of these walled gardens where the top 001 percent is going to be. And then these ecosystems around it sort of in a, in a feudal format.I think that there could be a world in which there's basically UBI, but then you're going to see systems kind of like [01:00:00] in you can see in prisons where. Sure. Your food is covered, your housing is covered, but there are all these artificial economies where people are making food for each other, they're trading services, they're cutting each other's hair, they're threading, they're, they're doing all this.So there's going to be a lot of like human to human service exchanges. And that's, that's for the, everyone else who basically is just getting by sort of living in these. Localized and I'm not meaning even geographically, but often sometimes we call them like techno feudal where like you're sort of living based on your cultural subset, like, you know, the furries over here and like the, whatever.And they're all sort of exchanging services and you're probably a member of a bunch, like you're probably a member of your geographical one and then maybe one or two social set ones like the FLDS and you're this geographic area or like EDM enthusiasts of this weird subset. And. this local geographic area, and you're going to be exchanging goods and services based on that.And the ones who really thrive and manage to gain wealth, who are not part of the 0. 001 percent who just maintain all the wealth in the future, you have to have some kind of celebrity status where that 001 percent [01:01:00] comes to you for their artisan vegan leather bike shoes. Because you are the one, the master, the one whose, whose content they've watched, who, you know, they get obsessed with your artistry or the fact that you can weave.This rare silk fabric using the method used in the 1500s in, in some obscure region in China, that kind of thing. You gotta, you gotta sell to the autist and you gotta be an autist. I guess IMike Solana: just, things will change. That's such a radically different world. ThatSimone Collins: it's more like it's been for thousands of years.It's back. It's back to what things were. We're in the aberration. We're in the sci fi world.Mike Solana: What, what is the, what, it was like I guess the era of industrialization.Simone Collins: The era of industrialism and the era of, basically with the riseMalcolm Collins: of,Simone Collins: it began with the British Imperial Empire and it is ending with AGI.Mike Solana: What I'm hearing is colonialism was not that bad.Simone Collins: It was [01:02:00] a good run. It was interesting. It produced a lot of cool stuff. It's just also, it's like a wave crashing on itself. It will produce something new.Malcolm Collins: For us, this is existential. Because, you know, we want to have a lot of kids. We want to create a culture.We're building a religion. And so we've got to think about, you know, next hundred, next two hundred years. And I just think that things are going to be astronomically harder for the next generation. And they're going to have to, like you would need to in, in, in these earlier eras, figure out how to support yourself, but maybe without a community.Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, the future is here, just not evenly distributed. You can get got by probably telling a kid. Teaching them to get a job and do that and like do the traditional breadwinning stuff, but it's going to be shakier. It's going to, it's kind of like a game of musical chairs. There are not going to be that many chairs left.I think a lot of the people getting laid off from corporate tech jobs and from the government are just, they're just never going to get jobs again.Mike Solana: Yeah. Well, the good thing is we'll be able to see that happening soon and maybe we'll have more information. TheSimone Collins: numbers are so off, like the reporting's really [01:03:00] off.So I feel like we're flying blind a little bitMike Solana: in techSimone Collins: and in employment and do people have jobs anymore? I think that we are, we've gone off the rails.Mike Solana: Here's, I think one good indicator that they do have jobs is the protest sizes have completely plummeted since the BLM era. Everyone is out of work.That's really the true, that's the real story of the BLM protests and why they were so big is because no one had anything to do. And right now you're looking at protests at like Trump tower or whatnot. And even like they're, they're cleaning up BLM alley. And no one's even there protesting. There are reasonsSimone Collins: to lie flat.Malcolm Collins: I know. I think it's the Hikikomori causation that happened during COVID. I think COVID taught people, you can just stay in your house in bedrot. And a lot of people never came out again.Simone Collins: Yeah. Why protest? I mean, they know it doesn't do anything. LikeMalcolm Collins: it just, there's, I think it's not. We see in our fan base who reach out to us sometimes and stuff like this, just never interacted with another person, really.[01:04:00]Mike Solana: Yeah. I don't know why. It's super not rational, but I just feel like this is not, it's not that bad. I think even AI. You're soSimone Collins: wholesome. You're so like, you're so, your interpretations, though being heterodox and though being cutting edge, I don't know how you managed to do it. They come across as so kind, so charitable, so optimistic.And I love it. I love, I love your vision. I justMike Solana: think it's like, like even with AI. It's did you guys see this Sam Altman? He posted the AI telling a fiction story.Simone Collins: No,Mike Solana: it just wasn't. He's like, this is great. And all the people were like, this is there. It's fake. It can do fiction. And I just felt like, it could do a lot, but it couldn't do what he said it could do.And we're talking. I don't think so, actually, because what it's really good doing is predicting The words that are going to come next based on words that have already happened. AndSimone Collins: guess what? So are you. [01:05:00] So are you. We've done it. Do youMike Solana: believe, you believe that I am an LLM? This is, but we've always done this.Simone Collins: We think that there's. Abundant proof.Mike Solana: But this is what people have always done with technology. If you look back 150 years ago or whatever it was, people were like, what is the future going to be? And it's like a crank machine that gives you knowledge. It's like, how does the brain work? The brain, the way we describe it, we describe it in terms of the technology that we see.And so I don't think it's like this. LLM is what we are. I think that that is just how we're understanding ourselves because it's the most advanced thing that we have and we recognize that the brain is Actually still the most advanced Piece of technology that exists in the world by far. It's a very, very strange and I don't utilizeSimone Collins: his training data to come up with.I mean, like, come online, likeMike Solana: a car, like it's not the same. I think it's not the same. We can do things that it can't do. And have youSimone Collins: been in a car with a 16 year old who was just learning how [01:06:00] to drive?Mike Solana: Cause I've been the 16 year old who was just,I'd note here that this is a bit different from times in the past where we have, , said, Hey, humans work kind of like a machine. , it would be more akin to if we said, Hey, humans work kind of like a machine. And then we got the first fMRI images of a person's head and it was filled with gears. , that is basically what's happening as fMRIs.Studies on how humans process language get better with LLM related stuff. We have an episode on that right here if you're interested in this topic. But I didn't want to derail this particular conversation too muchMalcolm Collins: no, hold on, the smartest humans can do things that AI can't do.I don't know if like, there's a few things that AI is bad at because they appear to be using different systems in our brains like counting or something like that. But I don't know if like, when I look at the, the language processing of AI, that seems better [01:07:00] than 80 percent of humans. 70%? It's not about Sorry, I'mMike Solana: getting a phone call right now.Simone Collins: Oh, we've probably gone over time. Yeah, we'll leave you go. We kept you for way longer than we said we wereMike Solana: going to. This is another fascinating conversation. I wish we could have done more about it. But it's been great talking to you guys.Malcolm Collins: Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. Is there going to be another Hereticon?Mike Solana: I think there will be, yeah, I think it'll, I don't know if it's going to be the last one or not. Maybe these things will be good. It's a feel like a trilogy is important,Malcolm Collins: yeah, we love having you on. Go check him out. Oh yes. Very similar to this show, but much more mild. And if you hate our AI takes, which like a big part of our fanbase does, because we're very pro AI, like, this guy is like us, but with saner AI takes. More optimism. This is if you like us, but you don't like our pro Luigi Mangione stuff.It's like us, but not pro Luigi, you see, thanks guys. so much. Enjoy your weekend. Bye. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, we delve into the famous 'moral circle' chart from the study 'Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle.' We discuss common misinterpretations of the study, highlighting errors made by the researchers that led to widespread confusion. We explore how conservatives and progressives allocate their moral concern across different layers, from immediate family to the entire universe. We also examine neurological and psychological differences between these groups, touching on aspects such as threat sensitivity, cognitive processing, and brain structure. This comprehensive discussion aims to shed light on the fundamental ideological divide and how both sides perceive and value their moral priorities. [00:00:00]Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be chatting with you today. Today, we are going to go in to the famous circles or charts of interest. It comes from a study titled Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle. And so this is a moral circle chart that everybody loves to show. And I wanted to go into this in an episode because one, what the study actually says, Versus what people think it says is hugely misinterpreted, mostly because the people who wrote the study made a mistake in the way they described the procedure of the experiment, which led people to completely misunderstand what was being shown in the graph because the graph is intuitively not what you would expect it to be.So there is actually data that looks at what people think this is, which is on average what conservatives and progressives care about. But it's not the graph that you think you're looking at. Okay, so what a lot of people think that this graph shows that I have shown you is [00:01:00] sort of moral expanses of what people care about.Where do they put their intention with each layer of this circle, representing moving out from like yourself to your family. To out out out. So let's go over what the the various rings mean. The innermost layers include categories like immediate family, closest friends, et cetera.Simone Collins: Okay,Malcolm Collins: then you have the innermost layers, layers, sort of the middling layers, all people you've ever met, all people in your community, all people in your country which reflects sort of a broader sense of community.Then you have the outer layers. These encompass all humans, all mammals, all living things in the universe, including plants and trees. And then you have the very outermost layer, which is all things in existence, like rocks and everything like that, okay? And what a lot of people interpret this chart as meaning is the average of what conservatives and progressives care about.And in a way, it's telling, because not a lot of people pushed back against this interpretation. I. e., you see here, conservatives care about things like family. [00:02:00] their countrymen, whereas progressives in this interpretation cared the most about things like rocks and plants and stuff like that. And, well, I mean, people intuitively hear this and they're like, yeah, that sounds like the type of brain dead thing a progressive would care about.The problem is, is they did ask that question. Okay. It's just the data that they collected from asking that question was shown in a separate chart. Which I will show you in a second. And this chart shows data around the question of what is the furthest extent of the things you care about.Simone Collins: Which makesMalcolm Collins: progressives look a little less crazy.IE conservatives often do not really, it actually makes the conservatives look a little sociopathic with many conservatives not really caring much outside of their family, their friends, etc. And with, and I, and progressives being like [00:03:00] almost sort of sociopathic in the other extreme. I care about the universe and everything.I care about all things.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so let's look at the real graph that that actually looked at the answers to this rating and you'll see why nobody shares it because it's done terribly and it's hard to interpret.Now,if you saw this graph, you'd think that the first graph was the, what do you care about most? Not the extent of your beliefs. And right. This graph was the extent of your beliefs question, but no, they did it oppositely because they were bad at their jobs. It was great for memes and they haven't really gone back and commented on it much because They're scientists and they don't like that it's become like a meme thing and they feel kind of bad about messing it up to begin with.It's sort of like my read of what's going on here. But what you can see from this chart is this took the thing that you care about most on average basically gave people a number of tokens. And you can slot them into different categories. You can put like all your tokens on family and only like one or two on country and stuff like that.Or you can distribute [00:04:00] your tokens more evenly. And so when you divided people into human versus non human categories, what you see here is that generally the more progressive somebody was, the less they cared about human things. More plants, animals, space, rocks. Or more,Simone Collins: I, I would argue the more equally you care about all things.Malcolm Collins: Well, including non human things. Yes, including non human things. This is assigning value to non human things, which I think is weird, but okay. And then I'll put another graph on screen here, which will give you a bit more, because it shows like the error bars on each of these. Or the, the margins so you can get an idea of how much they separate from each other.And what you'll notice here, is some interesting things. But in general, the broad trend is that, yes, liberals actually do care about non human things more. Now I want to, now suppose you're like, okay, but what if we did like a heat map of what people were caring about? [00:05:00] Graph what people are caring about.And then we're going to go into the neuroscience of this because the conservative and progressive brain are actually a little different.Simone Collins: Okay. Oh.Malcolm Collins: So here, here you can see like a depth map or heat map of where people were actually clicking and it does show that yes, the conservatives largely viewed their loyalty in tranches, i. e. a lot of them were really loyal to family, a lot of them were really loyal to country and then you have a smaller like out there group, whereas progressives are much more unified in their beliefs with sort of a out there, probably all plants and animals.Yeah, like it'sSimone Collins: very, it's much more outwardly focused with. Very little emphasis put on the nearest circle.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I I'd say that I also understand this conservative idea of okay. I'm distributing tokens. What do I care about? It's gonna be Family a lot in country a lot. Yeah, or when I think of country, I've been like wider cultural System that I'm a part of right maybe not necessarily exactly like just a country for arbitrary like countryman's sake [00:06:00] Yeah, and I think that's the way a lot of people would interpret that and then the second graph here that I'm showing what you can see is Approximate distance from center aggressive versus conservative, and you can see that what you actually get is progressives actually care about almost everything more except for family, where the conservativesSimone Collins: beat you a little bit more.That makes so much sense that you always make the point that like the urban monoculture works like a cult by starting. with a separation between the person and their family and their support network. The therapist goes and finds about all the terrible things that supposedly were done by this person's parents in their childhood.And there's a lot of hatred for one's inherited group and their traditions because they're backwards. And Savage,Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah so, I think that, why is this a meme? Before we go into neuroscience and stuff like this. Why is this all out there? I think because it shows something that we all know to be intuitively true, which is that [00:07:00] progressives care about things outside of sort of their immediate circle.People will be like, well, why can't you care about everything? Why can't you just Like, I guess you can say that, but care units are attention units. You can say care units are units of like, what are you weighing? Right. And somebody who distributes too many care units outside of, because that's what I'm saying when I'm, when I'm distributing a care unit, I'm saying when I'm making moral decisions or equations, how much am I going to reference things outside of my immediate communitySimone Collins: and, or how much of your mental bandwidth goes.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And this actually matters a lot if I'm thinking about the type of people I want in my community or I want to invest at invest in, in members of my community because these individuals, I can invest in them, but then they will make decisions or the community can invest in them. And they will make decisions that benefit things other than the community.It's [00:08:00] like. You know, you have the old grandma who you're giving money to, to try to help her and her cat and you learn that she's been giving it all away to Rwanda. And you're like, well, you know, yeah, I gave you this cat grandmother. You were supposed to be taking care of it. Like, what are you doing?Like, it's like, well, I gotta give it all to Rwanda. And it's like, well, I gave you the money. For you, like, do you not have any loyalty to that? And it's like, no, I don't because we're Wanda. And I think that this is, this is why it makes sense for conservative cultures, i. e. cultures that have survived a long time and are just like made up modern philosophical hokum to want to reject and eject individuals who over emphasize moral weight of things far out of the system.Simone Collins: Mm hmm. I mean, I would also argue just from a logical standpoint, I've I've definitely shifted from being very, very outward circle focused to very, very inward circle [00:09:00] focused because I'm aware of where I as an individual can make the most difference and you can make the very most difference at the local level.Not, you know, not very far away. And honestly, if you really care about Rwanda, the best way you could make a difference is probably by well one either like Donating as much of your income as you can to that and just focusing on it exclusively or honestly going out there and helping like getting on the ground and helping.Yeah. If you can't make a lot of money. And then, and then what? Then it becomes your local circle. So now you're, you've, you've shifted the circles and now you're, you're, you're, you're an inner circle person. It's almost like they, they, they want to make the outer circles their inner circles, but they don't.And so they're feckless. And that's, that's what bothers me.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's almost like, But I think having kids really switches this up for people, because then you get invested in this sort of the intergenerational part of life, investing in the next generation, thinking about how you're going to set things up for your kids, for your country, for your cultural group.And you begin to realize. That a [00:10:00] lot of the signaling of things far outside your immediate cultural group is ultimately signaling to make yourself feel like a good person. I think I don't think that a lot of this is actually deeply caring about these things as you see with a lot of progressive causes, you know, they care.They say, Oh, I care about human suffering. And I'm like, well, yeah. Population collapse is going to lead to astronomical suffering when social security systems and welfare systems collapse. Don't you care about that? Or I care about the environment. Well, then shouldn't we be doing nuclear plants? Why are you shutting all the nuclear plants down in Germany, right?Like, that's people who say they care about the environment doing that. Like, that's nuts. But it's because they don't actually care. They care about looking like somebody who cares about the aesthetics of the environment or the aesthetics of family or, or, or human suffering. Whereas I think conservatives, when you are allocating your points pragmatically, like, where am I actually going to be able to make an impact in the world?I think that that's a big part of why conservatives [00:11:00] allocate their care in this way, because they know that that's where they can matter and where them, when you. Help communities that aren't your own overly you typically end up one causing communities that are less healthy and cause more suffering over the time to proliferate and end up making your own community suffer.So just on net, you cause more suffering in the world. When you look at our video on, on Nietzschean philosophy on this where we critique it, but we say, but you know, it's not wrong on everything. But let's go into the, the, the brain and psychology of all this. Psychologically, progressives tend to score higher on traits like openness to experience, a big five personality dimension tied to curiosity, imagination, and tolerance for ambiguity.They're often more comfortable with change and uncertainty, which aligns with their inclination towards social reform and making things up. Here it says innovation, but. I'm gonna say making things up. Conservatives on the other hand typically score higher on conscientiousness, particularly the sub trait of orderliness, and [00:12:00] they value stability, tradition, and structure.You see, Simone, you were always meant to be a conservative. Orderliness, conscientiousness.Simone Collins: Well, and why I was the black sheep of my family as I grew up in California.Malcolm Collins: Low anxiety, structure. Order this can make them more skeptical of rapid change and more focused on preserving established norms. And, and I think that this is not as much what we see from modern conservatism because we live in an odd time where the dominant culture is a progressive culture and to maintain tradition and what the conservatives largely make up today is people who are rebelling against a domineering and fascist like Social order attempting to force people to live and think what it believes if you look for example Let's say like the reason why the people who are labeled anti lgbtqia or whatever are anti it now very few are anti it because they're like This is what the bible says [00:13:00] if you look at the most prominent leaders of this space They're generally just anti trans And started as pro trans, but moved anti trans when engaging more with the science and with like J.K. Rowling didn't go anti trans because she was a Christian curmudgeon. Elon Musk didn't go anti trans because he was a Christian curmudgeon. Both of these people started as avidly pro trans. and moved against it over time as they learned more about the, the science and the social costs and the, the nature and psychological, you know, stuff.You can look up our trans episodes, we don't need to go into that here. But the point being is what motivates people to be a conservative today is often very different than what motivated them in the past, which was maintaining traditions. Which I think changes a lot of the nature of the community.When the conservative community of today goes towards traditions, they go towards them [00:14:00] not out of a fear of change, but because they believe they work. Like you can look at someone like J. D. Vance, like why is he going towards traditions? And I love that all the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Monocle and stuff all now said, because the evidence does show this, it turned out that the Christian traditions were probably better and we shouldn't have met with them.And the one, the Muslim one who did end up converting to Christianity, she even said when the, you know, people would be like, why did you convert, you know? It wasn't like a religious argument, it was, it was a functional argument. She was depressed, she had tried everything, and her psychologist was like, I know this is going to be offensive to you.Oh my gosh. Thought about just trying to pray. Really? And that's what did it for her. She tried and it worked and she started to feel better. And then she, she got into it again.Simone Collins: And this is like Grimes saying she, she might, she might be getting Christianity because it helps her quit vaping, whatever it takes.Malcolm Collins: Sometimes you just need,Simone Collins: sometimes religious fixes problems. That's so true.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, I, I think of that, that well, no, but I mean that that, that means that [00:15:00] the modern conservative today, actually the, when the old right tells the new right, you guys have a lot of progressive traits or, you know, you, you guys used to be in the progressive movement.I think they're, they're right about both of those things, but they're misdiagnosing what's happening. What they picture is happening is the Overton menu, just moving window, just moving further and further to the left. And then. People who, you know, in the nineties would have been like standard progressives in their ideology becoming conservatives today, and I don't think that that's what's actually happening.The core reason why they look like progressives of the nineties is because that they are the rebels trying to buck the social order. And that's fundamentally where the new right comes in is most of them are people who are like, they didn't like the censorship of tech. They didn't like all of these.like anti reality stuff, like, Oh, men, when they transitioned, don't have an advantage in sports. When like, everybody knows that's like clearly, obviously not a true thing. And yet we're supposed to repeat it. They are people who feel like [00:16:00] in the same way that many of them built a grudge against Christianity, telling them what to do in the nineties and in the eighties.That same instinct and those same cultures are now antagonistic against the progressives. And it's funny that it turned out that the way that you got these people to become Catholics, like, like, say, J. D. Vance or something like that, was just to have atheists tell them what to do. Like, you know what?I'm going to become a Catholic, dammit! And, and I actually think that this is where we're getting a lot of growth in Christianity today, is the urban monoculture overplaying its hand and trying to force people to become believers. And I also think it's why, when you look at faiths that are the minority within their region, their members are typically much more faithful.I. e., if you are a Catholic in a majority Protestant country, and the Catholic communities in majority Protestant countries are typically Much stricter in their faithfulness and much more believing and in their sense of community than Catholics in [00:17:00] Catholic majority countries where you see Catholicism dying out much more quickly in terms of fertility rates and in terms of strictness of practice.And, and I think that that's what we're seeing here is being a rebel is useful. And even within America, I think that it is fundamentally wrong to try to raise your kids to be full. America, American, you can be Americana so long as Americana is framed as a state of rebellion against those who control our society and the, the, the people in power and everything like that.But trying to try to push for this normalcy, I don't think works, but thoughts before I go further.Simone Collins: I think you're right. And I think this shows up in, in the fact that you see lower rates of fertility in homogenously religiously conservative, like when it feels forced on you. That back, there's backlashMalcolm Collins: emotionally, fear and threat sensitivity play a big roles.Studies like those from John Himmering and colleagues suggest conservatives have a stronger physiological response to [00:18:00] threatening or disgusting stimuli, e. g. images of spiders or rotting food, measured through inconductance or brain activity in the amygdala. The fear processing hub. This heightened sensitivity might explain a preference for security, authority, and clear boundaries.Progressives, while not immune to fear, seem less reactive to these triggers and more attuned to empathy driven concerns, often prioritizing fairness and harm avoidance as seen in John Haydite's moral foundation theory. Now, I note here that this has actually changed. Okay, continue. John Haidt. John Haidt.Jonathan Haidt. Oh, yeah. Where I do not think, I think in the 80s, a lot of the conservatives, and I mentioned this on other videos, you can check it out, really interesting, where we talk about conservatives motivated voters with disgust. You vote against gayness because of disgust, because it makes you feel disgust.This system largely just collapsed and fell out of favor, culturally speaking where very little is motivated by disgust anymore. Then we had a system that was motivated by. Fear of social shame. This is the cancellation system that progressives really jumped on to. And [00:19:00] the new conservative system is motivated positively through sort of vitalism.Which you see in Trumpianism and everything like that. This idea of like. Be alive, have hope in the future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You think for yourself.Speaker 5: let's go start a f*****g revolution. Take it!Speaker: The entire world would be better off if these people were permanently removed from these platforms. Like, there is no downside and only upside to see people like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Tim Poole never be allowed to publicly broadcast their opinions ever again.Speaker 5: Tread on them! Tread the f**k all over them!Speaker: I don't give a f**k about anybody that winds up at any of these rallies and gets shot or whatever the f**k, okay?Speaker 6: You gotta fight! For your rights! At home in such despair. NowSpeaker 20: Is free speech under threat in the UK? With the rise of so called non crime hate incidents, arrests over grossly offensive memes, can you really speak your mind in 21st century Britain?Speaker 7: [00:20:00] bussy. You gotta fight for yourMalcolm Collins: And there's very little discussed, but I can see why in the older disgust based framework, when these studies were done, discussed would be found more among conservatives.Simone Collins: Oh here, here's a study I found actually just in, in contrast to the one that you cited that in this case, researchers found that conservatives do not appear to feel more disgust than liberals.Malcolm Collins: When was it done? Remember I told you that the way that people motivate political action changed over time.Simone Collins: Yeah, so, this is My guess is is discussed a conservative emotion published when was yours? I told you. Yours was later.Malcolm Collins: No, the one I did was a long time ago, that would have been like the 80s. What I said was, is that in the past, in the 80s and 90s, conservatives [00:21:00] used disgust to motivate voting behavior.Today, they don't use disgust to motivate voting behavior. They use vitalism to motivate voting behavior.Simone Collins: So it's just less Which means that you would noMalcolm Collins: longer see this trait clustered in conservatives like you would have historically. So that makes perfect sense and seems to validate my theory.Simone Collins: Interesting. Okay, fair enough.This is, this is interesting though, because I, I kind of gave up for a while on reviewing studies on conservatives and progressives, because After a while, it became so obvious that it was just about people with agendas, like, basically a bunch of researchers just wanted to publish a study saying conservatives are dumb or conservatives are whatever, it's the same, like, progressives are stupid and, and then they, they're just not really well done they're not very interesting, there's not much that I can act on.So I just, I kind of gave up on them, but I do think that when you see the averages that come out, [00:22:00] you see patterns and there is, we, that, that should help us understand what's going on and what it actually does mean to, to be more progressive versus conservative so that it's a worthwhile discussion and I'm glad you brought it up.Malcolm Collins: If you talk about threat sensitivity, research actually suggests that leftists exhibit higher threat sensitivity to certain types of threats, such as environmental issues and social inequality when compared with conservatives. However. Conservatives are more sensitive to what we would call real threats, such as physical threats or social order threats or crime and terrorism.Interestingly Social studies have shown that conservatives tend to be less threatened by social threats, e. g. outgroups, but more responsive to physical threats, which goes against what a lot of progressives would want to believe, that conservatives are the ones afraid of people who don't think like them, which isn't true, they're afraid of being stabbed by somebody who doesn't think like them, but it is fundamentally the progressives who are more afraid and have a higher tendency of being afraid of people who think differently than them.Simone Collins: I think this, [00:23:00] this reveals though, a very deep set understanding of how you relate to the world. I remember, remember that interview around the pandemic that went viral of some woman who is progressive saying that she was assaulted on, I think the New York subway and how that was just like, you know, normal, like she wasn't supposed to do anything about it.And I think it had to do with this broad concept that it's. I don't know, like it's, it's not your responsibility or there's nothing that you can do about these immediate physical threats and really the, your way of relating to the world is so much more cerebral, so much more, I mean, if you want to be prerogative about it, you would be, or sorry, derogative about it, you would say that it's performative.But I guess they would say that they're focusing on the big problems that really matter. Whereas the conservative mind seems a lot more oriented around what. Do I need to physically address in my immediate area now? Well, [00:24:00] there can I actually protect? Can I actually help?Malcolm Collins: It's like a mass action solutions as we've seen, whether it's, you know, social services or, you know, UBI or anything like that.See our UBI video. They, they appear to make people worse off intergenerationally.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yes. And, and they appear to make cultures that they end up getting bloated. They end up not serving their original function. Argentina is basically a case study to all of this. The ways that progressives attempt to fix things doesn't work, but the ways that conservatives attempt to fix things do work intergenerationally.I. e. because they're focused on the cultures and people who they can influence, i. e. my own culture, my own community my own people. And the paper I was talking about earlier is titled, Who Fears Strangers and Spiders? Political Ideology and Feeling Threatened. Neurologically brain structure differences pop in some studies a 2011 study by found that conservatives tend to have a [00:25:00] larger amygdala, potentially amplifying threat perception, or at least certain types of threat perception.While progressives show more gray matter in their anterior cingulate cortex, ACC, a region linked to conflict resolution and handling ambiguity, fMRI research also hints that conservatives active Regions tied to rule based reasoning more strongly, while progressives lean on areas involved in social and emotional processing.I actually think what we're seeing here, and we've talked about this before, is the memetic virus. It's sort of like a self replicating virus, which Is represented in the urban monoculture when I mean it's a memetic virus. I mean quite literally It's a virus that gets into people's heads and then starts replicating and then uses them to spread itself it needs a certain amount of structure And so it's pretty bad at spreading in people below a certain level of intelligence Um in in which case those people only really conform to it when they realize that they can use signaling their conformity to it Do you get other people to do what they tell them to?This is why you see was like [00:26:00] the low IQ communities. They use the wokest context concepts when they think that they can browbeat someone into following them.Or when they're afraid of bring Val break themselves,Simone Collins: That's really interesting,Malcolm Collins: cognition is another divide conservatives often favor intuitive heuristic thinking quick gut level decisions rooted in tradition or group norms again This might have changed. I don't know. Progressives are more likely. I mean, it seems to me that now progressives make the gut level decisions It's interesting in looking at this research.You can see how much What aligned people with conservatism has changed over time? It was do you actually like are you doing this because of the tradition or are you doing? Like with progressives, are you doing this because you're part of the urban monoculture because there used to be an alliance with like elitist, intellectual culture and fighting back against the system, which, you know, you could say started with the hippies, right?Are you actually fighting for individual freedom or are you fighting with the ultimate goal of imposing your values on everyone else?And that, that sort [00:27:00] of split, you know, was now the progressives that are left are just the ones who want to impose their values on other people. Yeah. Cognition is another divide. Conservatives often favor intuitive heurists. Yes, sorry I said that. Progressives are more likely to engage in analytical reasoning. It seems to be one of your studies of like, trying to make progressives sound smart. Absolutely. Questioning assumptions and weighing abstract systems according to work by psychologist John This can make progressives seem overthinky to conservatives, while conservatives might strike progressives as rigid or simplistic.It's interesting, I'm pretty sure of this flip. Because when I talk to progressives now one person has noted, and I think I have a question, is why do conservatives have like, if you look at like 8 of the 10 long form podcasts, why are they conservatives? And as somebody was saying when they were on the long form podcast, that Gazam Newsom has now done, where he talks with conservative thinkers.Oh, God, and peopleSimone Collins: loveMalcolm Collins: that. I want to get, you know, it's got a review of like 2. 5 or something on, on what's the progressives bombing it? Like, why are you giving these people? OhSimone Collins: my gosh. How sad is that? But conservatives are [00:28:00] loving it though. They're like, wow, he actually listens. Just this idea of a progressive actually listening to conservatives is mind blowing.But the pointMalcolm Collins: being is the reason why conservatives have all this long form interview content and stuff like that and long form talking content like this show is you couldn't do this as a progressive, like I couldn't every day go over for like 45 minutes something that is interesting without updating my beliefs, just be telling you what you're supposed to believe.And most progressives already know what they're supposed to believe. So they don't need to be told again, you know, there, there, there is no. curiosity about digging into these subjects because if you dig into things like human sexuality or arousal or transness, you're bound to accidentally cross the line somewhere.ISimone Collins: don't know. No, I, I listened to a decent amount of long form progressive content, but it's mostly just building a case as to why something is something. So it doesn't need to lead to a changing of minds. So I don't really know what it is.Malcolm Collins: That is [00:29:00] fundamentally, I think, you know, like what ContraPoints does and stuff like that.Yeah. Like one long form progressive area where they do like broad philosophy, but they do it fairly rarely. My X is Y. I, I don't know any that are regular shows, like Philosophy Tube, ContraPoints, all of that stuff is like. Once youSimone Collins: mean just like philosophical discussion, or do you mean discussion about current regularMalcolm Collins: podcasts?If we're looking at regular podcasts, eight of the top 10 are conservative, like daily podcasts or weekly podcasts. I don't know, like the one I can think of that's progressive is Hassan, but Hassan is mostly done in a short form context. And without really engaging with people who have different beliefs or attempting to update his view of the world.Which makes it, you know, less interesting unless you're just there for the shock jock stuff, which Hassan does very well. I mean, I do think that that's how you make progressive. Content interesting is be shocking in how extreme you are, which is one reason why the progressives who have done that and white progressives do well on platforms like tick tock.And [00:30:00] originally on systems like Twitch before, you know, I wonder if that was moderation, like Is it the only reason progressives seem to do well in any platform, whether it's Twitch, because the Chinese are trying to destroy us, or old Twitter, because they are very good at controlling bureaucracies and then putting their finger on the, on the scales.Once the finger is removed from the scales, they end up fleeing like we've seen with TikTok.Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe. I don't, I don't know. I don't know. Like, I don't spend enough time on TikTok to be a good judge of any of this. I wonder if blue sky is still growing. I do too. I really do.Hmm.Malcolm Collins: You're looking it up? Yeah, looking it up. It says its growth has slowed significantly.Simone Collins: I mean, it would. Yeah. And you get the initial boost, then itMalcolm Collins: slows. Actually, even the, the articles about it slowing are mostly pretty old at this point. So, oops. That, I mean, it could, could continue to grow. I mean, it's, it's astronomically small when compared with two other platforms.So,Simone Collins: yeah,Malcolm Collins: well, any takeaways you've had from this[00:31:00]Simone Collins: that perhaps this isn't just a story of polarization. When we talk about very difficult to cross political divides, perhaps it's also a story of a fundamental way of relating to the world. And perhaps part of the reason why it can be so difficult for conservatives and progressives to relate to each other and effectively communicate is because they have such a different contextualization of self and a different contextualization of that which we must protect.So when people are talking about protecting good things, or, you know, we have to do this, it's just. It's it's difficult to have a debate when your definitions are so different whenMalcolm Collins: I disagree pretty strongly. Yeah, I think that this is what progressives tell themselves when they're trying to look like they're they're seeing both sides of the issue.But I think the core thing is that conservatives, when they look at what they want to protect and [00:32:00] grow. It's typically realistic things. Like it is a real system that could potentially work and improve the world. Whereas a lot of the progressive stuff, like shutting down nuclear power plants and stuff like that, it's not realistic stuff.It's stuff that is based around personal signaling.I think that that's the core difference is the conservative is okay with. Doing what actually makes the world a better place, even if it makes them look like a villain. Whereas the progressive cares more about looking like the good guy than doing good.And we've seen this from conservative icons throughout history, like Ayn Rand, for example, like famously leaned into that. And I think that we're seeing it even more within the new right, the acceptance of Do the right thing, even if it makes you, I mean, what is the pronatalist movement, but that what is hard EA.org, but that,Simone Collins: yeah,Malcolm Collins: I love you to that Simone. I love you too.Simone Collins: You're perfect.What are weMalcolm Collins: doing for dinner tonight?Simone Collins: You can have [00:33:00] potstickers or you can have green curry with coconut rice.Malcolm Collins: Green curry!Simone Collins: Green curry.Malcolm Collins: Green curry is really good.Simone Collins: Well, then that is what you shall have, my love.Speaker 2: Egg Tower! Go ahead, take a bite, Octavian. It's ready for you. Woah, woah, woah! I put a ton of salt on already. Yeah, you can taste it by taking a bite. Right, Titan? Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe