Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

In this episode, we are delighted to have Megan Daum, a prolific author, journalist, and podcast host. The discussion dives into Megan's extensive work, including her podcasts 'The Unspeakable' and 'A Special Place in Hell,' as well as her new series of retreats called 'The Unspeakeasy.' These retreats, mostly for women, offer a unique space to discuss topics like gender issues, COVID-19 policies, and the impact of feminism across generations. We explore the motivations behind these retreats and the valuable conversations they foster. Additionally, Megan talks about her thoughts on anti-natalism and her book 'Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed,' which presents various perspectives on the decision not to have children.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. I am so excited today because we're joined by Megan Dom, someone who I admire on so many different fronts. She is a prolific author. She's written six books or written or edited six books. She is been also prolific journalist, very respected by many of our friends.

She now is on Substack. Plus she hosts a special place in hell with Sarah Hader, also a friend of the podcast. And before that she had the Unspeakeasy podcast, which I listened to with really great interviews with heterodox. She's kind of like the Alex Kishida of like a different sort of segment of the internet.

And more recently Megan has launched a series of retreats, which I kind of wanted to dig into now. They're it's called the unspeak easy, kind of inspired by one of her books, which is titled unspeakable. And it is a place they're mostly, sometimes they're mixed gender, but they're mostly. Female only retreats pretty small, like very, like, sort of, you, you can have a real conversation with everyone who goes, maybe 16 people or fewer negative, maybe sometimes 20, right?

Yeah. And behind closed doors, these, [00:01:00] you know, mostly all women finally get to sort of discuss what they. Want whatever that's what we want to get to is what do professional educated, you know, probably more affluent women in the United States think and say and worry about and discuss behind closed doors because I think there's this, this perception that the educated women of America are largely this progressive monolith.

They all kind of think the same thing. Like they're not very interesting. You know, then you have some like far right, you know, crazy women and like, you know, whatever, like cam girls and cat girls or whatever. Like, but then there's like just this. There's nothing, a big question mark. So we, we wanted to, you know, we might, we might get into a little bit of a, an anti natalist discussion at the end of this, but we wanted to get into what's going on behind closed doors with all these women.

Meghan Daum: Well, if I, I couldn't tell you, right. If it was really behind closed doors, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I love talking about all these. All these topics. And I will just say I, [00:02:00] I've got my hand in so many things that it gets confusing what I'm doing. So I still host the unspeakable podcast.

So I actually have two podcasts. I do a special place in hell with Sarah Hader. And I know you've, you've been on our podcast and she's been here. I, I do the unspeakable podcast, which is Sort of my flagship podcast. And that's an interview, it's a weekly interview show started it four years ago, summer of 2020 when all, when every podcast started and so, right.

So I've been doing that and yeah, so the speakeasy is it's an enterprise that has sort of, you know, arisen out of a lot of my work including. the podcast, my books, my teaching as well. I've been a teacher of writing for a really long time. So yeah, I guess, well, I guess the easiest way to kind of launch into what the unspeak easy is about is to tell you the origins of it.

And you know, that is, I've been, I've been journalists for a long time. I was Los Angeles times columnist for 12 years on the opinion page, written a bunch of books, written for every magazine, was like, you know, an [00:03:00] acceptable, celebrated arguably celebrated member of the literary community.

Simone Collins: I looked at the number of reviews your books have gotten.

Yeah. Yeah. And they used to be really

Meghan Daum: positive. Yeah.

And you know, I've always been allergic to b******t. Like that's my thing. I've never been really particularly political. I mean, obviously as a journalist, you have to write about what's going on in the news and the culture, but I just never liked virtue signaling.

Even before there was a term for that, I just got it everywhere and I was very sensitive to it and I was very. interested in why it was happening. So that's always been a theme of my work. And I've always tried to sort of look at the places, you know, in the culture and politics where like what people saying, what people were saying about the world or themselves was not matching up with.

What was actually true about the world and themselves. So, so people, you know, knew that about my work and I started doing the podcast and I would have people like [00:04:00] Sam Harris and, you know, all the sort of the heterodox, you know, I've had hundreds and hundreds of guests by now, but people sort of trying to pick apart these issues, nuanced discussions, right?

So nuanced AF is is what the merch says, right? Here's the Yes, nuanced AF. Okay, so So people would listen to the podcast. I was talking about things like gender, you know, pretty early on Sasha Iod, who's, you know, wonderful is now the co host of gender wider lens was like my fifth guest. And you know, I had Peter Moskos on really early talking about policing.

I had now John McWhorter, all, you know, all, all these sorts of people. And also a lot of literary people. Cause that that's my world. And, But I also teach writing. So I just teach, you know, personal essay, memoir, opinion, writing, that kind of thing. And I've always, I've taught at Columbia and elsewhere, but I teach private workshops.

So, you know, around, you know, 2021 or so, I [00:05:00] started noticing that the people who were coming into my workshops, many of them, women, not, not all by any means, but a lot of the women in particular We're like, not necessarily wanting to write, like they didn't necessarily want their stuff workshopped. They just wanted a place to talk about things.

And they knew that I talked about this stuff on my podcast and I wrote about it. And I had a certain approach that wasn't like, particularly partisan and that appealed to them. And they, they just wanted a place to talk about this and they would come in and say, I can't talk about this with my friends.

I've gotten kicked out of my book club. I can't talk about this with. With my, you know, I have lost relationships, families are being torn apart over politics and over, you know, wokeness, Trumpism, whatever it is. And I feel like I'm losing my mind and I feel so lonely and they were silencing themselves in a way that was.

A little bit different from the way men were silencing themselves. I mean, obviously they were having a lot of the same problems at work. [00:06:00] Like everybody wants to protect their, you know, their paycheck and their situation at work. But women were really talking about relationships a lot more and talking about how they had a lot to say and they weren't speaking up because they didn't want to get excommunicated by the group and they didn't want to hurt people's feelings.

I, so I was seeing this on like this micro level. Like people were talking about how this played out in their personal lives, normal people out in the world. And these were all kinds of women. These were women with big careers. These were stay at home moms. These were women in their twenties into their sixties, seventies, eighties.

It was like so many all over the country, all over the world. Yeah. These were not like necessarily girl bosses. These were all kinds of women. And. I was seeing this and then I was also noticing that like in our sort of podcasting content creator space, a lot of the people who are speaking up about culture war issues are men, not all by any means, but it's a very male dominated [00:07:00] space.

And I started to think, well, why is that? And the listener communities were like all men, like, you know, I went to a persuasion hangout for instance. And there was one other woman there and we were like, Whoa, what is going on? And so I said, you know, I really, need to start a heterodox women's community.

Like somebody needs to do that. And it's hilarious because I'm the last person who ever would start a woman's anything. I hate it. But I thought, you know, something is really wrong here because women are, are, are left out of the conversation in the public arena and in their private lives. And they're, they're leaving themselves out.

And I want to try to fix that and so

Malcolm Collins: I want to dive into you said the women have these conversations that they are afraid to have in public or they've gotten in trouble. What are these conversations? Like, what are the topics that you see come up again and again in this environment?

Meghan Daum: Yeah. So, gender is a big one.

School lockdown, COVID policies is another big one. It's no accident that this started to [00:08:00] emerge around COVID. You had a lot of people who were nice, normal liberals and remain so, still identify as liberals. And they were suddenly like dealing With school closures that didn't make any sense in many cases.

And then the kids were at home and then they could hear what the kids were learning on the zoom school. Like all of a sudden they knew what was like, they didn't know what was going on in the classroom and all of a sudden they're hearing it, the huge mental health crisis among kids during these years.

And they're like, what is going on here? And a lot of the gender stuff started coming up. And these are a lot of people, a lot of parents, a lot of moms who were, you know, very liberal. If my kid is gay, fine. Fantastic. No problem. Even if my kid is trans, whatever that means. Well, that must just be like gay 2.

0. Okay, fine. Like let's, that's, we're, we're liberal in this house. We believe, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then they, you know, this whole movement started to, you know, kind of mushroom before our eyes and they're [00:09:00] like, what is going on here? And if they questioned, you know, something like gender affirmation or something like that, the neighbors would say, what are you a bigot?

What are you a transphobe? You know, you can't, you can't do that. And so, you know, they were, they were really feeling like they were losing their minds. And I'm really careful about the way I talk about this stuff. And I think they, they appreciated it. So, so those are two examples, but we talk about.

Everything in the unspeak easy, like everything.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, are there others? I mean, so this is really interesting because I think one, you're sort of charting where Republicans can win white educated women. It is, that's, that's our

Meghan Daum: motto.

Malcolm Collins: That

Meghan Daum: is not our

Malcolm Collins: motto, but yes, you're right.

Meghan Daum: Yes. This is like,

Malcolm Collins: like, where did you win?

This, this, this demographic and what I'm peeling here is one I think is, is, is, is focus on. I think gender transition and children, very easy fight. And for some reason, the liberals always take it. And then two is bureaucratic overreach during [00:10:00] COVID. I think Republicans need to live in the past a little with this.

That was a good opportunity. Be like Dems will try this again. Dems will try this again. Very much the way Dems do it's like January 6th. keep going back to the COVID stuff. And, and what was happening at schools. And I also think school choice, it's like an also really easy thing, but what else are you seeing like personal life wise?

Like how did these, I guess here's the question I have, is there regret about Feminism and sort of the way it changed the expectations that were had of them. We talk about

Meghan Daum: that a lot. That's really complicated, right? Because what it's like, how are we defining feminism? What era of feminism are we talking about?

Second wave feminism, third wave, fourth wave, digital feminism, online feminism, me too. Like, what are we talking about? And again, like we have a range of ages. So we had women who were in their seventies or eighties and they came of age in the sixties and seventies and benefited enormously from, from second wave [00:11:00] feminism.

And then we have women who were in their twenties and thirties who were saying, Oh my God, like nobody told me that there's such a thing as a biological clock. And I, and I mean, you know, I'm a Gen Xer. So I grew up. You know, with every single women's magazine constantly being like, Tick tock, ladies, there's a biological clock.

So, you know, at some point along the way that, you know, being told that fertility was limited somehow became like a, you know, misogynist or something. So they stopped talking about it that way.

Simone Collins: That's so interesting. Yeah. It reminds me of like, I, when I, I grew up in like the, the, the period of feminism where we denied that there were like unspoken dating norms.

Like if, if if a guy invited you back to his hotel room that he probably expected something and literally did not believe that. So like, it's interesting to see like

Malcolm Collins: situations. Yeah.

Simone Collins: It's, it's worse than like biological clocks. Not even like being a warning sign. Maybe don't go down an alleyway at two in the morning.

The dangerous [00:12:00] neighborhood defense, you know,

Meghan Daum: right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I talk so much about this in my book, the problem with everything. I mean, this, it's like, you know, just because we wish something was true doesn't mean it is true. Yes. We wish you could get blackout drunk and pass out in an alley with your clothes half off and have nothing happen to you.

Yeah. We wish. We're true. It'd be so nice. And in a just world, it would be true, but we live in the real world. And if you're not equipping people with, with the facts about reality, then you're doing them a huge disservice. So these are the kinds of distinctions that we, that we talk about a lot. And, and yeah, but I mean, the thing with the unspeak easy is it's so, It's all about the nuanced discussions.

It's, it's not partisan. I mean, we have women who are like Bernie Sanders voters and we have women, you know, who are Trump voters. I don't think you actually

Simone Collins: show

Meghan Daum: up. What's that? Yeah, we do. But I mean, I would say it's, I mean, it's changing all the time, but I [00:13:00] mean, I would say it's mostly people who voted for Obama, people who are really excited about Obama, and then are sort of being like, wait a second, something is off here but, but having a really kind of existential crisis about it.

Malcolm Collins: One of the things that you mentioned that I'd love you to dig deeper into, because this is something we've noticed with our own fans of our podcast is. The generational change in terms of what's being hidden from people and the expectations people have. One example from our podcast is somebody was like, It's really weird to hear you guys talk about gays as a discriminated group when you were growing up.

Because in our school, like, they're the group that's not allowed to be punished. Like, there's a, they were talking about like a gay kid on their campus that like, sold weed and he wasn't punished because the school didn't want to be seen punishing a gay kid. And, and, and, and he's like, All the drug

Meghan Daum: dealers are gay now.

Malcolm Collins: I've heard this. Yeah, I've heard that this is because you just get away with it apparently. And I'm, and I'm interested in like other, like, what are the big, like, shocks to you in terms of generational change?

Meghan Daum: [00:14:00] Well, I mean, one of the things that really animated me to get, you know, much more overtly involved in culture war discourse was what I saw around like online feminism.

I mean, even before me too. So around 2012, 13, 14, there was all this stuff online that was, you know, You know, it's never been a worse time to be a woman, you know, toxic masculinity, like, you know, obsessing about being cat called on the street. You know, it's, it's so terrible. We live in a rape culture, like all, all these ideas and I was seeing it.

And in the meantime, like, it's like, actually women are doing better than. Ever before in the history of human civilization, it's never been a better time to be a woman, you know, in the West anyway. And I, it just wasn't making sense to me. And I was like, where's this coming from? Because I grew up in the seventies.

I just thought that was being a girl was great. And being a tomboy was great. Like being a girly girl was not cool. And so I really started to think a lot about [00:15:00] maybe why these changes occurred. And I actually, you know, I was I kind of had my nose outta joint, you know, I, I was rolling my eyes a lot at like, a lot of the, the, the, you know, the, the Jezebel stuff.

I mean, Jezebel used to be a man, hilarious. I remember Jezebel. Wow. It was so great. They would like, actually, you know, this was back, you know, they would like take him. Oh, magazine, yeah. JE lot. Yeah. Anna Holmes, the brilliant Anna Holmes started Jezebel and you know, sort of the early, the mid two thousands, it was like they would.

Do all these things where they showed the airbrushing and and magazine spreads and they would show like what actually happened and it was great and it was very snarky and sarcastic and very empowered and not victim y at all and just very funny. And somewhere along the lines, it really changed and it was like absolute preoccupation with, you know, male tears and it got

Simone Collins: angry.

Meghan Daum: It got, it got angry and it got just very just, just stripped of, of its agency somehow. Wow. Wow. And I used to roll my eyes at it a lot and I still do, but [00:16:00] I think that, you know, we cannot forget that the nineties came along, you know, there was still this like riot girl kind of grunge aesthetic for, for women, but then you get into like the late nineties, early 2000s.

First of all, you've got the Disney princess culture. You've got this hyper girliness that little girls are exposed to. Everybody's a princess, princess dress, glitter, fairy wings everywhere, which is fun and fine, but like very different from the seventies when everybody was really just like gender neutral.

And then you've got this ranch culture. You've got girls gone wild. You've got spring break bikini, you know, just absolute. Debauchery. And you've got, you know, pornography goes online. Pornhub comes along. We're just absolutely inundated with these hyper sexualized, very degrading images around sex and around womanhood.

It makes sense, doesn't it? That like women would resist that and be [00:17:00] very angry about it.

Simone Collins: And, and I never thought of like maybe a correlation being between honestly internet porn and, and women getting like feminism becoming angry, taking totally,

Meghan Daum: I mean, I, I wouldn't be. And I mean, cause I missed that stuff, right?

Like in my time, yeah, I don't, I, and also like. You know, the way that men think about sex and what they expect from a date or sexual encounter. I mean, you know, like women younger than me talk. I mean, Sarah and I talk about this all the time. People were obsessed. People say we're obsessed with like choking.

Okay. Like the, like the choking thing. And, you know,

Malcolm Collins: Okay. No, this is something where I have to go on a tangent. Cause we actually wanted to do like Mary Harrington also complains about this all the time. Yes. I wanted to do like Mary Harrington versus reality, because if you look at the statistics on choking.

The guys are choking the girls because all of the other girls are asking for it, right? Yeah, that's the problem. Choking is much prefer Yeah, but why are they asking for it? Girls are by being choked than guys [00:18:00] are by choking girls. Cause it's a big turn on, unfortunately. At a rate of like 2 to 1.

Meghan Daum: But is it a turn on or do they think I think it's supposed to be a turn on.

No, it's, it's, it's enough of

Simone Collins: a turn on where like auto asphyxiation is a really major, like a safety problem. Yeah. This came up in our sexuality research when we, when, when Malcolm wrote the pragmatist guide to sexuality and we had to put in all these warnings, we're like, okay, this is a big turn on for people.

Guys, don't do this. We

Malcolm Collins: need to get into our sexual theory because I think I know why you might find this weird. So we actually argue that there are the people act like the kinks and the things that turn somebody on are random. And I don't think that they are totally random. I think that there's specific polygenic sexual patterns that emerge based on the social environment.

Evolutionarily, our biology thinks that we're it. Now, if a woman In a historic context, with sleeping with tons of men. That historically basically only happened if [00:19:00] your tribe had been raided and you were a sex slave and you were doing everything you can to stay alive. I think that there is a correlation between women liking this incredibly demeaning sex and women who sleep around a ton.

I think that what's happening here is their bodies have shifted to a Oh, I'm a sex slave desperately trying to prevent my captors from killing me and I will like anything that keeps them from killing me. And so when I think a woman maybe like you or a woman who is more chaste or more like sexually reasonable engages with this, they're like, what?

I would never want that. And, and, and, or Mary Harrington or something like that. And I think that that's where there's this, this unintentional is we don't tell girls that sleeping with tons of people is going to change the type of things they find arousing.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like in other words, Malcolm saying that he thinks that that our behaviors sexually, like especially number of different partners will trigger different like arousal pathways as a sort [00:20:00] of adaptive evolved mechanism.

I, I think there could be some truth to that. I mean, I don't, yeah,

Meghan Daum: I, I'm, no, I'm not going to, because otherwise it is

Simone Collins: really weird, especially, I mean, we don't know. I mean,

Meghan Daum: sexuality is so mysterious, right? We don't know like where these things come from. I mean, where does like autogynephilia come from? Like there's, you know, so many fetishes and, and I have a hypothesis where autogynephilia

Malcolm Collins: comes from.

I haven't gotten into the episode yet, so I'm going to drop it right here. Okay. And we'll do a full episode on it, but I actually think autogynephilia It comes from a misunderstanding of human sexuality. So in our book of human sexuality, we point out that sexuality should actually be thought of a spectrum of arousal to disgust and not stopping at zero.

A lot of people are like, sex is arousal or you're not aroused. And it's like, no it's, it's arousal to disgust anything, 10 to negative 10. If you when you're aroused, what happens? Your pupils dilate, you breathe in, you look at something longer. When you're disgusted, what do you do? You look away, your eyes contract, and you hold your nose.

They're likely using the same system and we even see evidence of this from the fact that anything that arouses a large portion of the [00:21:00] population is going to disgust a small portion. Anything that disgusts a small portion is going to arouse a portion. People can be like, well, no, that's just everything.

It's like, no, you don't see this random effect in everything else. So you can look at something like fire. Fire does not like randomly arouse a portion of the population. But like, insects do. Poo does. Like, why is that? Okay, it's a mis arousal to discuss system. Well, autogynephilia, I think it's actually a misinterpretation from a lot of men which is to say that a lot of men have a very strong, much stronger than women have to female genitalia Disgust response to primary male sex characteristics.

So, specifically other male penises, other male forms, etc. It causes, like, a visceral reaction in them. I'm one of these men. I, like, find this disgusting. But do you think that's socially constructed?

Meghan Daum: Or do you think that's, like, inherent? It's probably more of, I mean, we would think it's an

Simone Collins: evolved, like, Try to screw the thing that will produce kids.

Right. Exactly. No, it's an adaptive trait.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You're a woman historically [00:22:00] you know, there were periods in history you look around the agricultural revolution for every 17 women having kids, only one male was having kids. So that means that you had long evolutionarily relevant periods where women were expected to be in relationships with lots of other women.

So it is not surprising to me that women tolerance of other female sexuality was something that was selected for. However, historically speaking, if a man let other men sleep with a woman who he was pair bonded with, or just any other woman in the community, that's a net loss to him because, you know, that's the other guy.

No, I get that. No, I get that. I get that a lot of pressures here. My guess is that what's happening with these guys is Is there like, Oh, well, when I like playing video games, I really like playing as female characters because any other male character or avatar causes this disgust reaction in them. When I like dressing up as other characters, I like always being a female and they don't realize what's driving.

This is not an arousal reaction, but a disgust reaction to other males. And then they begin to identify. They're like, well, if I always like, whenever I'm in a [00:23:00] role playing game or whenever I'm in a video game or whenever I'm a Furry playing a female character that must be because I secretly want to be a female, but it's not.

Anyway, that's my, okay,

Meghan Daum: no, I'm, I'm, I'm in no position to, to argue that getting back to the feminism and what the different, the generational differences. Yeah. I, I do think that I do think that people men and women have plenty of reason to be angry and frustrated these days. Thanks. I think that I think that women have reason and I think men have reason.

I mean, you know, I, a lot of the the, the, the ironic misandry of that digital age, you know, making fun of men you know, and I, I have a whole theory as to why that was sort of, you know, Sanction is an okay thing to do. Like, you know, all that sort of like, you know, men are toxic. What we now see with this like red pill, right wing misogyny online.

Like that is, that is a mimetic inversion, right? It is the same thing. I mean, it is absolutely mirroring it. So as much as I [00:24:00] hate to see that stuff online, it's like, well, guess what, fourth wave feminists, you created this, you made this. And now you're stuck with it or it's going to have to correct itself.

Correct. What's your, what's your

Malcolm Collins: theory?

Meghan Daum: Well, I mean, if you go around telling men that they're garbage. No, no,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, not that. But you said, I have a theory as to why this. Oh,

Meghan Daum: well. So, I mean, the thing is that around that time you started seeing this, you know, 2014 or so. Like they would, they would be horrible to men.

And I think the idea was that because men have power, you're punching up. It's okay to say terrible things to men, no matter, no matter what, no matter what like class level you are, or they are. No matter like any kind of power differential, it doesn't matter because by definition, by virtue of being men, it was assumed that they automatically have more power.

So it's okay to be terrible to them. And my thing was like, why are you assuming that? Like that is so unfeminist to just like you, you bite by assuming that you [00:25:00] are effectively handing men power that they don't necessarily have. You are putting them on a pedestal in order to punch them. Well, how about realizing that women are doing so much better than men chances are.

Any given man and any given woman, that woman is going to have a higher level of education, have more friends, better connections, just her wellbeing is going to be at a higher level across any number of metrics than any given man. So like, be careful who you're, you know, calling a piece of garbage, you know, it's, it's really lame.

And anyway, so this is what started this. And I, I was very outspoken about these things around, you know, my, my book, The Problem with Everything came out in 2019, which was all about this and, and it was really about, you know, being, it was, it was a self interrogation, like looking at the different generations, like, well, how come me, how come I, as a Gen X er, Felt empowered in a way that these millennials and Gen Zers apparently don't.

Like, what is this about? And why am I so frustrated? And why do I hate this stuff? And why am I rolling [00:26:00] my eyes and why are they mad at me and calling me an anti feminist? And you know, it's all this kind of vortex of stuff. And people got really mad at me for it. Like they just thought, Oh no, she's to the right.

She swung over to the right. Megan. And, and the funny thing is like, this is nothing different than I had said, I've been talking this way for my whole career. Yeah. The

Simone Collins: Overton window has shifted. Right. Yeah.

Meghan Daum: Suddenly it was not allowed. And so here we all are in the whatever I'll turn around, clown world, where we have be clowned ourselves.

Simone Collins: Okay. I'm dying to see how you approach this because this is something you mentioned in the origins of these retreats. And now. It's, it's kind of at the core of what I'm thinking about the, what we call like woke culture, progressive culture, we, we call it the urban monoculture. And we, we argue that its main value proposition is I will remove in the moment suffering or pain.

That's kind of like the big, like, you cannot break that rule. And it sort of connects to everything that can be [00:27:00] very damaging about the movement because, you know, it causes a lot of. Bad downturn, like downstream effects. You mentioned that many of the women who are joining on speakeasy retreats are doing it because they don't want to hurt their friends feelings.

And they're, they're, they're very much part of this. And I think it's, it's a very female on average, it skews female, that general desire to not cause conflict, to not hurt feelings. And yet I think. For a lot of these women to deal with the cognitive dissonance they're facing or to work through these problems.

Especially because you have so many differing opinions showing up at these retreats. You know, you've got the Trump voter, you've got the Bernie voter, you've got, you know, this, this varying range, there are going to be feelings that are hurt. How do you manage that? Especially among like groups of women, because I'm used to doing this and like retreats that are like primarily men.

But how do you manage it for women who. Are going there because they know it's a problem, but they also are of that culture of like, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

Meghan Daum: I mean, I, I am always aware of it. And I mean, I think we've been pretty lucky so far. So I started [00:28:00] doing the retreats and it's 2022.

We've probably done 12 by now or something. I mean, we did so many, we have done eight this year. Wow. So I try to keep it very Ideas based and concept based. So it's like, we don't have it. So, so the way the structure of the retreats, it varies. I mean, most of them, you know, they're overnights, we go out to a beautiful place and spend like three nights overnight.

Sometimes they're just like for a weekend daytime only, but you know, we'll have like, I will make a schedule and we're going to talk, you know, for 90 minutes about like, you know, why can't we talk about gender without losing our minds? Like that will be the framing of the talk as opposed to these people are horrible and crazy.

It's more like, why do we feel crazy? How, why do I feel crazy? What led to it? And I'm going to talk about my experience. I mean, I cannot say that there haven't been hurt feelings. I'm sure that there have been. And [00:29:00] we also have an online community. I mean, you know, we have a really thriving private membership based online community.

That is, you know, very affordable and, and we have. All kinds of things Is there like book clubs and guest speakers and all kinds of things. And I know that there have been blowups, I mean there have been, there are little satellite groups and people are actually forming. They're also, they're also forming, no, not satellite groups like gang up people, you know, subgroups.

There's a politics discuss, you know, there's a sort of left-leaning politics discussion group and a more center right discussion. Oh, interesting. There's a snitch and b***h one that's over there, they knit and they talk about politics. The knitting world is very, very fraught. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I've watched and reported and it's done

Simone Collins: some great, yeah, knitting world drama.

I can't control that,

Meghan Daum: but so I, you know, most of the conflict I have just stayed out of, but I think that They're really, really good, especially on the retreats. I think everybody knows we're out somewhere. We want to have a good time. [00:30:00] They've, you know, they have invested a certain amount of resources and time to come and do this.

They have, we have enough downtime that they form friendships. I mean, they have come to these places because they are lonely and they want connection. So the last thing you're going to do is, you know, deliberately get into a bad. a bad dynamic with somebody. It's, it's just not, it's not worth it. I'm not saying it never happens, but we've been really lucky.

And frankly, the fact that we're all women really makes it so that any kind of political differences that we have are just transcended by the fact that we all have this thing in common. Like it really is a, it's an incredibly effective container for all kinds of points of view. And, and, and walks of life and backgrounds and experiences.

I mean, it's, it's pretty magical actually.

Simone Collins: That sounds awesome. And I, I'm also sort of getting the impression that like going in with it being normative to disagree and like, it's okay to disagree, [00:31:00] Is just like the mere fact that that's a premise of the events probably helps. Is there's alcohol, the morning

Meghan Daum: or anything.

Sure. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But I, so I want to move to the second topic here. The the anti natalism. So why shouldn't women be obligated to have children?

Meghan Daum: Well, some people are terrible parents and make terrible parents. So if you're going to be a terrible parent, please do not force that person to to be, to become one.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, should they learn to be better? No, you can't learn that.

Meghan Daum: I mean, can you learn to be yes. I mean, the thing is, it is normative to try to learn to be a better parent. They're everything in the culture. I mean, maybe you see this differently, but again, this might be a generational thing. I mean, I.

grew up. I assumed I would have kids. It was assumed that everybody was going to have kids that everybody wanted them and that everybody would be a good parent, that it would just come naturally to you. Even if you thought you didn't want kids, the minute it's your own, it'll, everything will be different.

And the fact is that most people do want kids. I like [00:32:00] people who don't want them are outliers and I'm an outlier. But I just It's just never something that I, I wanted to do. Oh my God. I really love that. Her age of a baby. I have to say like, if I could just have that age, I know.

Malcolm Collins: Were you a single kid yourself?

No, I have a brother. He doesn't have

Meghan Daum: kids either. Okay. I mean, yeah, it's definitely, I mean, there's people, people choose not to have kids for all kinds of reasons.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, tell us about this book that you worked on about not having kids. Yeah.

Meghan Daum: Right. So the book is called Selfish, Shallow, and Self Absorbed, 16 Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.

So I wanted to do this project for a long time because it's like a pro

Malcolm Collins: natalist book, by the way, it's ironic. Yeah,

Meghan Daum: he came out in 2015 back when irony was still alive. Yeah. Those are

Simone Collins: good days. Right,

Meghan Daum: right. Before everything, everything changed. But I always thought [00:33:00] that people, you know, the sort of childless by choice, child free crowd had really bad PR because.

Instead of just saying like, Oh, I just don't want to have kids. It's not for me. They would always be like, Oh, I don't have kids because I want to have a fabulous life and take expensive vacations. Or like my child has four legs and drinks out of a bowl on the floor. Ha ha ha. My fur baby. Or my child is that boat in my driveway.

And it's like so ridiculous because. Nobody decided not to have kids so they could have a boat or expensive shoes. Like if they, if, if any, if, if, if anybody is that, that way I, I don't wanna know that person. Like, that's, oh

Malcolm Collins: my God, I love it. Absurd.

Meghan Daum: That's absurd. I can think of several people. It was, it was always amazing to me that there was such a taboo, taboo against saying, this just isn't for me.

Mm. That people would like. present themselves as selfish a******s, because [00:34:00] this was somehow better as materialistic, shallow pleasure seekers, because it was just not okay to say, Hey, I think parenthood is really important and it should only be done by people who want to do it. I mean, my position is like people who think hard about this and choose not to have kids.

They are paying the ultimate respect to parents because they're saying that this job is really hard and it should only be done by people who really want to do it.

Simone Collins: That's it. I like that. Oh, well, I, this is, it's so confusing to me though. The, the bad PR and maybe this is, it's a generational thing. I'm not sure.

I never plan on having kids. And I would tell people that. And they'd always gonna be like, F for you. And I don't know if that's like, Me personally, like, They're just like, yeah, she'd be a terrible mother. Like, my mom was definitely in that camp. I thought she was saying that about me. No, no, no, she'd look at you and she'd be like, Oh, you're gonna be such a great dad.

And then she'd look at me and she'd be like, F it. And then she kind of looked back at Malcolm. But yeah, I, I, I don't know. [00:35:00] I know that some people really feel that, and I'm so intrigued by this that like a lot of people feel that shame and feel like it's you know, whereas I, I grew up in like, you know, with the environment you know, it was the, the, the proper decision to not have kids.

And

Meghan Daum: yeah, that, you

Simone Collins: know, a lot of people were gonna be shitty parents like me, of course. Whoops. And then rat, Simone, rat Row. Oh no. What have I done? And yeah, I, I'm, I'm curious if you, if you've have come across people who celebrated or support it more normatively, or if, or maybe it's just like, if you don't want to have kids, well, where did you grow

Meghan Daum: up?

Yeah. Like, I don't know. I mean, I grew up, I grew up like, you know, my family's a little bit unusual, but I mean, I grew up in, in, you know, outside of New York city, mostly we kind of moved around a lot. I grew up in Texas and in New Jersey, but more traditional then. But yeah, I mean, I mean, look, I grew up in, I was a teenager in the eighties.

And, you know, families were way more normative than, yeah, they were normal. And then, you know, but you were also like, if you were kind of educated classes, then that the whole sort of like [00:36:00] yuppie baby boom, like women is going to go, you know, put her power suit and her running shoes on and go to the office and achieve and then like marry her equal.

And then they were going to, you know, then they would have kids and like, do it all, do it all. Like, that was the fantasy. Yeah. And I definitely thought. That was what I would do. I didn't really question it, but I always was sort of like, well, I don't really want kids, but I will want them. I'm sure like something will happen.

One day I'll wake up and you know, the biological alarm clock will have gone off and, and it just really could never get there and in an authentic way. But no, I think you're right. Because I think that You know, for the millennials, the climate stuff did affect people. I mean, I used to say that anybody who said, I mean, I probably said this like 20 years ago, that anybody who says that they didn't have kids because of, because of the environment, as they used to call it is, is lying because they're just using that as an excuse

Malcolm Collins: to say, but I

Meghan Daum: don't know now, but that was [00:37:00] before this like absolute hysteria and.

Fear of God was put into a whole generation. So, so

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I mean, it's, it's a religious thing at this point to me, to me, when I look at some people, I mean, they do seem to be a little cult like in regards to like, they don't seem to logically be thinking about the environment in any way that I would, I guess, think about the environment.

Meghan Daum: Look, people run on emotion. decouple. Their personal experience from data, really hard for people to, to decouple their, their feelings from, from facts, sorry, facts versus feelings. And you know, it takes a certain kind of person to do that. And, you know, you guys are like that and I'm like that and Sarah's like that, but like, we're kind of abnormal, you know,

Simone Collins: were there any arguments in the essays?

In the book that surprised you, like, you know, that this, you know, that's an argument that makes me feel really good about being child free.

Meghan Daum: I mean, [00:38:00] it really ranged. I mean, a lot of people spoke about their, you know, sort of trauma in their families growing up and how they didn't want to repeat that. But, you know, I have to say that.

You know, one response to traumatic upbringing is to not want to have kids, not repeated, but an even more common response is to have kids and so that you can correct it. Like, because of what happened, I want to do this, I want to, I want to do over, right? So I don't think we can, we can generalize and say like, you know, this particular kind of household causes people to feel one way or the other.

I mean, everybody's wired so differently, you know, there was a lot of, so the book came out in 2015 and. One of the criticisms, I mean, it did people were, it did so well. That's a hilarious thing. It was like, I had been pitching this idea for years and everyone in publishing was like, that's a terrible idea.

Nobody will buy that. There's no five

Simone Collins: stars, 794 reviews on Amazon

Meghan Daum: bestseller list in the, in the child care and parenting category. Cause I kept [00:39:00] saying like, no, parents are going to be fascinated by this. This isn't just like childless. People are going to buy this. Yeah. Because it's really about, it's, it's about the way we live our lives.

It's not even about like this particular decision. Like ultimately it's just sort of about what you want your, your life to be.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Meghan Daum: But there was one of the criticisms of the book and I think it's a fair one was that a lot of the writers were kind of apologizing for the way they felt. There was a lot of, well, I love kids.

But I don't hate children or anything. Oh. But wrong

Simone Collins: approach. And however, I hated kids before I had kids. Yeah.

Meghan Daum: Well, I kind of hate kids now, to be honest with you. You kids are, they're gross. I, I dunno what to say. Yeah. I hate being a kid. And I, yeah, so, so there was a lot of that. I will say, however, that in 2015 that throat clearing was probably necessary in order to make the book palatable.

I don't think we would need it now, obviously, but, I think that for whatever reason, people needed to hear [00:40:00] that because there was still a lot of like, Oh, you must, you must just hate children. If you have made the decision. I think a lot of people were like, no, I really like kids. And in fact, you know, there were people who talked about working with children and they talked about feeling really important as like an aunt or an uncle.

There were three men in the book. There were, it was 13 women and three men, because I really wanted to include some male perspectives. Cause I think men get overlooked in this discussion a lot.

Malcolm Collins: Totally. Totally. Well, that's really cool. Anyway, I, I've had a great time talking to you. You know, come on your podcast again sometime.

I you think you guys work is fantastic. And yeah.

Simone Collins: And everyone please, you can learn more about everything that Megan does at megan dom.com. That's M-E-G-H-A-M-D-A-U-M com. Yeah. And

Meghan Daum: actually a better place to go is to the outspeak easy.com or my substack. Yeah. Actually I haven't, I'm, I'm one of those people with too many websites and megan dom do.com has so much not been updated.

You go to my substack?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Megan dom.substack.com.

Meghan Daum: Yes. [00:41:00] Yeah. Or the unspeakable with, megan and Dom, you can look that up.

Malcolm Collins: I will say you are one of the only guests that we've had where I actually recreationally watch your content. Not all of it, but some of it. Oh, the show with Sarah? A lot of the time I don't.

You know, I'll have on guests where I'm like I know we're ideologically aligned but I don't actually watch their stuff.

Simone Collins: Malcolm's a fan. Malcolm's a fan. Thank you. Of both of us. But yeah. It's the usual for Malcolm. If the audience is

Malcolm Collins: wondering what to think, it's very good like urban monoculture looking at itself.

I think it's, it's, it's a good thing. No, I mean, it's like, what do you know, educated you know, successful women think of their own culture?

Meghan Daum: Yeah. Well, and we have a big age difference. I mean, we're 20 years apart. So I guess you get those different perspectives. Yeah.

Simone Collins: I love it. Oh, it's so fun. Yeah.

Especially when you want like a, like a conversational chatty show, like a lot of podcasts, like just don't have that charisma. You've got, you guys have the, as the kids say, you have the Riz,

Meghan Daum: the Riz, the Riz. The Riz is the Riz. I I am too old

Simone Collins: for

Meghan Daum: this. [00:42:00] I know. I love it. I've heard of the Riz. Yeah. Well, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. Have a spectacular day.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We hope to have you back soon. All right. Bye

Simone Collins: Megan. Bye. All right. Ending recording.

Speaker: And that's how Rubik's Cubes work? Yeah. Okay, so, what are you going to do with your Rubik's Cube once it's solved? Are you going to break it again? No. No? Well, I mean No, I'm just going to solve it. You're just going to solve it? Okay, well Hi, Toasty! You just want what, buddy? You want a Mickey Mouse bicycle?

It's not the bicycle we have, alright? You want one that has Mickey Mouse on it? You want some Mickey Mouse bicycles? We need new bikes for the kids when they're taking dogs. Oh. We just want to give them our bikes. Cause right [00:43:00] now they have two bikes, so two of them can ride down the hill. And they were doing that for an hour, but Octavian got worried, and of course he got a new dog.

Oh, that's, that's fair.

Speaker 2: So, either more fancy, because right now they're using cheap bikes at their house, so we can get them either more cheap bikes or fancy bikes. Okay, fried rice is almost done, buddy. I think we're good to go. Okay. Okay, okay.

This episode dives deep into a radical new governance model, proposing a system where an individual's civic value and vote are gauged by their economic contributions. The discussed model incorporates AI as citizens, utilizes blockchain for transparent governance, and aims to attract cutting-edge industries. It further addresses demographic challenges, proposes a tiered society, and introduces tribal-like social structures for enhanced social services. The session also critiques current democratic systems and emphasizes the need for innovative governance to handle future societal complexities.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] existing governing systems assume that every citizen has equal value when they objectively do not. Our system assumes an individual's value is correlated with their utility to the state

Malcolm Collin: Well, if your vote is based on the amount that you're paying in taxes, now there's a huge disincentive to using tax loopholes.

Simone Collins: Is the core of governance design as it should be approached by everyone going forward.

 What will incentivize people to do a thing that is good for everyone? It is about aligning incentives, period. Don't look at what was done in the past.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collin: Hello, Simone. Our country is dealing with the aftermath of the election, and yet we filmed this before the election. With that being the case, I need to say that democracy doesn't work. It is a terrible system. One person, one vote.

Speaker 12: This year we explored the failure of democracy, how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos.

Malcolm Collin: The guardian. Caught us saying this and did a piece on us recently where they aired for us [00:01:00] on our behalf, our plan for a new governance system for a charter city.

Thanks guardian. I love it. The guardian has been our biggest supporter. I feel so much when I watched them trying to deal with our raise in fame as being very much like

Speaker 2: Four! I mean five! I mean fire!

 It's

typical. Why has it done that?

I'll just put this over here with the rest of the file. 0

Malcolm Collin: . And all they can think to do to attack us is more and more articles that get our message to more and more people. And nobody like, you know, they'll do an article, like here's their horrifying system of government that they developed.

And then [00:02:00] they, they put the whole slide deck there, which shows that they're just being misleading, and it's actually a pretty nuanced and neat system of government, which is fundamentally, like, what, what is this system fundamentally elitist communism, you could call it. And I actually think when we talk about the Haven State Network that I think society is going to descend into, so a quick, Note on why charter cities are important and the direction I think society is going.

So with rapid fertility collapse, you're going to have two phenomenons. One phenomenon is many countries are going to have depopulated regions and regions that are experiencing massive brain drains, especially if there are smaller country, like the aisle of man, which is where we were gonna pitch this.

Or you know, think of something like Greece or so many countries around the world that are in otherwise relatively stable areas. But as soon as somebody gets educated, they leave, right? Like there's no reason to stay and they've got beautiful landscapes, beautiful areas that people could set up shop.

But. It [00:03:00] is. It is really hard to keep people and the best way to do that. The best way to draw educated people back is to get the types of businesses that employ educated people back. And that means the types of companies doing like cutting edge genetic research or crypto or AI. And so I created a governance model That was designed to draw all of those types of companies into the country.

One where AI can have citizenship, where cutting edge genetic research can be done, where the governance model was baked into a DAO, which is a type of a blockchain ledger, basically. Every aspect of it was designed to be as friendly to like cutting edge economic stuff as possible and as adaptable to changing things as possible.

But that's that's why I was like, okay, so I'm going to pitch this to these to these regions, but at the same time, the second effect of fertility collapse is going to be that right now, you know, you have like one elderly person for every, [00:04:00] let's say three working age people, we will reach an age where every working age person is going to be supporting like three elderly individuals.

And in addition to that. Elderly individuals will make up the majority of the electorate, and they will be able to vote more and more resources to themselves. And so, even though it's not like a viable system they're not gonna say one day, oh, we should cut Social Security. I mean, we've already seen that they're unwilling to do that.

And so, what ends up happening then? Well Um, taxes go up on the few economically productive individuals that are left. And as we pointed out, it's the economically productive regions of countries that typically have the lowest fertility rates. So if you look like was in the United States, and it would be so great if kids from poor family had just as much of a chance of being economically productive as somebody from an economically productive family.

However, that's just not true. That is not a nut that societally we have figured out how to even come close to cash. Cracking, which means in the next generation, dramatically fewer people are going to be economically productive than was in this generation, [00:05:00] which means the taxes on those individuals need to be astronomically higher.

Well, here's the problem. Things aren't region locked in the way that they used to be. to be in terms of economic models. It used to be that if I was a big CEO, I'd have a skyscraper and tons of people and hundreds of thousands of employees or I'd have oil fields that I needed to protect. And so a country could tax me and I couldn't just like leave.

They're like, Oh, well, then we'll just see the assets or the oil fields or the human talent. Right. Now with AI, this is really flipped on his head to an extent. And we've seen this with the new startups, but we've also seen this in the way that big companies are going. We're like, they're just hiring a lot fewer people and like programming and stuff like that because they just don't need it, which concentrates the wealth in fewer and fewer people, which means these smaller and smaller groups of economically productive individuals.

When the state goes after them for their money, they're just going to say, F it, I'm leaving. Especially if charter cities exist as an alternative and these charter cities are nice, Fun places with a lot of interesting people. And you're like, well, how can [00:06:00] you do that? How do you sort of work your way into it?

Well, you can start with them being vacation spots by that. What I mean is you build like yearly conferences. They're like, maybe the next iteration of like a hereticon or something like that is always happening at one charter city. So everybody goes,

Simone Collins: you also can create it as a place where people take research sabbaticals.

So some early city states have reduced regulation on biomedical research, and that's something we would certainly propose for any city state. We were involved with is like, a no holds barred, though, always with informed consent medical research area. So, then, in that case, you would create a temporary market of medical companies and researchers who will come and take a sabbatical in this area to run.

Clinical trials on something or to run a Ph. D. You know, thesis like on some experimental treatment or thing that would be really cumbersome from a regulatory standpoint to study or research or vets or validate [00:07:00] in some other country.

Malcolm Collin: And these are what we call the Haven state network. And so we'll go over a governance model for one proposed of these.

But before we get into that, I will note. Okay. Ironically, I think one of the most common governance types within the Haven State Network is likely going to be communists. And people can be like, what? Aren't these like hyper capitalists and elitists? And it's like, well, communism actually kind of works when you can kick out nonproductive individuals.

And given the level of post scarcity that these may have, like you go to something like heretic on, we don't pay for anything at heretic on because the individuals who are running it just have so, so, so much money that they're like, Oh, if I have interesting people there, that's fine. You know, people will have new ideas.

I'll get to meet new people. That's, that's what I'm there for. The people running these havens might have so much money that it's just like, Oh, you know, I, I, I pay for all the daily expenses of individuals so long as they are economically productive.

Simone Collins: [00:08:00] Yeah.

Malcolm Collin: And I think that this is where the guardian, when they were talking to me about the Haven model I set up, they were like, yeah, but what about people who aren't economically productive?

And I was like, well, my state's not really for them. I'm so sad they didn't publish that. I was like, there's plenty of other countries that can take people like that. And right now we just haven't really done that globally speaking, but I think that more states need to be like, Oh, the economically productive people who need the state to support them.

Yeah. Maybe somebody else can take care of them. When you were talking

Simone Collins: about this last night, you simply cannot have in any sustainable fashion. a country or city state that both has porous borders and generous social programs. You can have one or the other, period.

Malcolm Collin: And this is a quote from my grandfather that somebody on Twitter tried to get us to denounce him for and I was like, because he uses an

Simone Collins: out of date, not flattering, possibly slur term to refer to immigrants.

Speaker 10: And some goddamn f*****g goo [00:09:00] bags!

Malcolm Collin: But I don't think the term was considered that offensive back in his day. They're like, denounce your grandpa for saying something racist in a really poignant, forethoughtful economic point that most mainstream politicians of today still don't understand.

It's a really good point. When you hugely restrict who can come into a country and who can stay in a country, you can be incredibly socially generous. But when you are completely free for anyone to enter then you have to be incredibly socially restrictive. Eventually, any system that is socially generous and has open borders will, like osmosis, equalize with the outside environment for individuals who are not economically productive in training the state until the state is offering nothing more, and then it's just no reason to live there.

So. Let's get into the actual plan we put out here. The slide deck was titled, The Next [00:10:00] Empire. Really, really catchy there. So, on page one, and I'm actually going to read it and then we'll discuss each page. Is it possible to create a region with a high economic output and a high fertility rate?

Fertility rates are falling in every developed nation across the world, especially in technologically engaged regions with high economic output. This yields a unique opportunity to create a charter city poised to become a dominant world power in the near future. Almost every nation in the world is based on a failed experiment. Two and a half centuries ago, an ancestor of one of this project's founders, George Washington, so that's one of Simone's she is descended from He's

Simone Collins: a great, great, great, great something uncle.

Malcolm Collin: Yeah, and he didn't have any kids himself, so that would make her the closest related living pathway. Worked with a diverse team of visionaries to create a new model government. Unfortunately, the model failed to match their vision almost immediately with safeguards against things like political party formation, failing within their [00:11:00] lifetimes.

Despite this, almost every nation on the planet today has based their governing structure on the outline of the failed compromise. This group tentatively created. When creating a new governing system under which large populations will live, it makes sense to go with systems that seem relatively safe and functional while distributing as much power to stakeholders as possible to lower the odds of revolt.

Never to lest if we were to craft a world power de novo with an opt in population, they would almost certainly build something very different. These systems were built not just for computers,

 But for an agriculturally focused subsistence society without trains and planes, imagine how a system intentionally designed from the ground up could fare.

And, and I do think a lot of people forget that, that the model that the founders created was both a compromised and a failed compromise within their own lifetimes. And yet almost every democracy since then has been based on it. Yeah, it made [00:12:00] sense to do because you don't want to make up a new system if you just fought a revolution and you can't really risk that.

And you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of people living under it and you don't want to risk something falling apart. Right. But if you were creating something de novo, of course, you would want to create a completely new system.

Simone Collins: Why would an existing country secede land to this kind of experiment with rapidly collapsing and aging populations across the developed world, especially in rural areas, many countries are desperate to save their faltering economies. Why would a young person who has left a decaying rural area for college return once they are educated when almost all of our world's economic opportunities are clustered in one of a handful of dense population centers around the world?

Our project will allow us to transform a region on a downward trajectory into one of the world's future tech hubs, a center for dynamism, investment and growth. , why won't existing charter cities succeed? For a charter city to succeed, it must be appealing to the host country, generate revenue, e. g. attract companies [00:13:00] and generate citizens, e.

g. attract immigrants. Most extant charter cities are primarily concerned with realizing an ideological vision. While ideological vision can attract a small number of immigrants, it will always be fundamentally less sustainable than a persistent and obvious economic opportunity not available. Anywhere else in the world to bring the smartest, most economically productive people in the world to a place that places opportunities must be economically attractive and meaningful in a global context.

And this is what we're getting at when a lot of city states are focused on just being vacation areas. You really have to have a reason to go because there are. There's an endless number of amazing vacation areas. I'm not going to say there's a ton

Malcolm Collin: of vacation areas. They make a few big mistakes. They try to attract ideological extremists.

They're like, you agree with our ideology so much more than your host country's ideology, or wherever you were born's ideology, that you will move to where we are.

Simone Collins: Well, at a risk of [00:14:00] making it like a social club, and framing it as such like a society is well, then it's attractive to people who really care about social ties.

And what you're proposing to them is essentially socially isolating them. You're taking them away from major international cities. And you're putting them in a city state. That is the opposite. So it's like trying to select for people who are the least likely to buy into this. If they were going to take that approach, you would need to select for religious extremists who want to go off and make a compound.

Which is what we tried

Malcolm Collin: to do in the way that we structured this. Exactly. Yes, but religious extremists have multiple religious factions and you'll see how we do that. But in addition to that I will note that one that Patrick Friedman, who has been on the show before talking about charter cities, he finally got fed up and decided to just start his own.

And I really like the charter city that he's starting as a model, which is, it's in Africa and instead of focused on trying to get like white people from the United States to move there who already have like great jobs and live in a fairly stable country, it's focused on just being [00:15:00] marginally better than the other countries in Africa and focused on disproportionately getting economically productive people from the other African countries to move there.

Simone Collins: Can we actually just create Wakanda? That would be so cool.

Malcolm Collin: Oh, I don't think so. It's just supposed to be like marginally safer, marginally economically more productive marginally. And I'm like, that's great that I mean, yeah, that does sound

Simone Collins: good. And it would it would attract talent. It bothers me so much that I've met while traveling, you know, sitting around in airports or in cars, so many people who have immigrated from African countries that are unstable, who are very smart, very educated, and then they go to a country like the UK or the U.

S. and they are Uber drivers, they're cooks. What? Like, this is totally wasted talent. If they could just move to a country, In Africa, that allows them to be what they have trained to be what they're educated to be. I mean, I see the same with Venezuelan immigrants as well. And we saw this all the time in Peru.

Some guy would deliver groceries to us and be [00:16:00] like, so, like, what's your background? And they'd be like, well, actually, I'm from Venezuela. And, you know, I used to be a biomedical researcher. And here I am delivering your groceries. And I just. Hate that so much. So I love this concept, but I also wish it was so cool.

Malcolm Collin: If you look at the way that we structured this going forward, what you're going to realize is that a lot of charter cities are built to try to attract people. And we are building this to try to attract dollars which is very different. Well, and beyond that, to

Simone Collins: it, to attract intelligence.

So not just intelligent. Agentic people, but intelligent agentic AIs who can count as citizens in this city state.

Malcolm Collin: Right. But, but the larger point being is that do not think when you're building a city state, how do I get people to move here? Think how do I get cash producing assets to move here? Whether it's companies or AIs or anything

Simone Collins: else.

Well, because if there is cash there, people will show up.

Malcolm Collin: Yeah, people come when there's cash. [00:17:00] People don't necessarily bring cash, especially if they're ideological extremists.

I signed a permit allowing them to have their concert here. Their little festival should pump some money into our economy. They're hippies! They don't have any money!

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like with the EA movement, when suddenly daddy crypto box, Sam Bingman freed showed up and was like doling out those, those grants.

Everyone was an effective altruist all of a sudden. So how, how the city state will attract and create economic demand. So one, and this is probably my favorite part, although I love AI citizenship too, but number one, no holds barred medical research. Enshrine into the constitution That the only medical research not allowed is that which lacks informed consent.

This attracts both extant and cutting age businesses to develop therapies and innovations, including artificial wombs and human genetic modification that are high in demand, but nearly impossible to develop in a heavily regulated environment. This will also create a medical tourism industry. So [00:18:00] you get the vacationers coming in for the cancer treatment that the FDA won't approve, and you get the researchers who are doing their fellowships.

But, okay, AI citizenship is also super cool here. Enshrine into the Constitution citizen rights for synthetic intelligences. As AI develops, much of the world's economic opportunity will be generated by AIs themselves. However, restrictions on AI owning property or capital will make most nations difficult places to host these centers of economic production.

So I love being a safe haven for them. And then Dow operation, writing the government into blockchain allows us to make the city state's currency, literal tokens within the government. This will make the region attractive for cutting edge web three projects.

Malcolm Collin: So I think that this is, and this is the interesting thing.

is if you're thinking right now, how could you make AI a citizen? Right? Because if you go as a one person, one vote system, making AI a citizen doesn't make any sense because an AI could just clone itself and then [00:19:00] have tons and tons of votes. And you don't know, like what have an AI? It's not a well, well programmed AI and it's dramatically less competent than the average person.

You can't have AI be a citizen in that respect. So many people may hate that we have moved away from a one person, one vote system, but in a way we've actually made the system more inclusive by doing that because now we can have AI politically participate, whereas it's impossible for AI to politically participate in the one person, one vote system.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I like that. So, to move on, most importantly, the government must incentivize the creation of highly productive economic actors. To your point, Malcolm, our model achieves this by 1 creating reproductive technology due to the conditionally enshrined protection for medical innovation, which allows for the possibility of mass production of genetically selected humans and to providing an incentive systems that grant more voting power to the creators of economically productive agents, including [00:20:00] A.

I. S. And corporations. You're most excited about the governing structure, aren't you? What? You're most excited about the governing structure, aren't you? Do you want to

Malcolm Collin: talk more about it? Yeah, you can go straight to the governing structure. The, the mass production of what we should mean is what we meant by that, is government subsidized.

Genetic selection. Not that like people would be forced into genetic selection. Obviously nothing in the system causes that,

Simone Collins: but I think that becomes apparent when you look at the sort of tribal, religious, tribal based system of distributing, yeah, but we'll get to that in a second. First, let's go

Malcolm Collin: over the overall governance structure.

Simone Collins: The proposed government is run by a single executor, basically a dictator, who has full control of the government's laws and operational structure during their tenure, though, to be clear, and I'm adding this, it's not in the deck, they can't just nullify this system, for example, you know, you can't like, wish for more wishes when you get a three wish genie.

This maximizes efficiency and flexibility, while also allowing for the [00:21:00] Judicious and timely removal of an inefficient executor or one who exploits their position for personal gain. Note, executors can be AIs, and honestly, I imagine most of them will be. Once every four years, an executor must be unanimously selected by three wards.

At any time, an executor can be immediately recalled and replaced if ever two wards decide so. Executors are therefore given much more power than the head of any existing government structure. However, they are also easier and faster to recall.

So there are the three wards. that are selecting the words.

Malcolm Collin: I want to talk about the executor model and why I chose it. So it allows for like, if you look at problems in the U. S. Government right now with all the bureaucracy that's been building up and everything like that, this would allow, for example, a president to immediately just clear it all out if they wanted to.

If that was the will. Of the voters, you can completely restructure the way the state structures in between electoral cycles. You could flip [00:22:00] between a capitalist system and a communist system. You could flip between a currency based on a Dow to a currency backed by gold. You could flip from. You know, a like one type of medical system to a completely different type of medical system.

It allows for radical, radical and fast changes to happen within the government. But because you have the system where if two wards ever turn against you, you are immediately removed. You have a reason to do it. To be paying attention to what the voters actually think of the various voting bodies and you can't just run rex, you know, through everything, right?

You need to pay a lot of attention to what the actual voters are thinking of the things that you're doing because the voters have a much more direct. Lens to sort of touch you. I'd also note here that it also provides the break between the voters and who is actually running things, the executor, [00:23:00] that the founders tried to create with our governance system, with our electoral governance system.

So what the founders thought is, well, Your average citizen isn't really smart enough to know how to vote for, but they'll like know who's smart locally, so they'll vote on an elector and the elector who will be better educated because they were like a popular, smart, local person will then vote on, you know, who's the president, for example.

But the problem is, is because we ended up with so, so, so many of those. It doesn't really make sense to vote on them anymore. Now you just vote on the president directly. So you know who's going to be for people who don't know that that's how the U. S. System works. That's how the U. S. System works. I even think it's legally enshrined in some areas that they have to vote for whoever, like, I don't even know, I think in most states who I'm really voting for is my elector to vote for me for Donald Trump.

But that's the way it works. Now. This system rebuilds what the founders were trying to do is that system because there's only three words and because there is [00:24:00] three words, that means it's the discussion between the three words as to who they chooses the executor. And so it wouldn't necessarily make sense if you're running for award.

To run and say, I want this particular candidate to be the executor because then if another ward who was running on a different candidate ends up the executor, then the executor just then gets chosen by the third world, which is basically an unelected ward. We'll get to how they work. But the point being is, that would be a very bad way.

to run. It makes it so that you would never do that. So you're always actually going to be voting on a ward, not voting on the executor themselves. And because you're always voting on a ward, and it'll make sense why you would only want to vote on the ward in just a second, the wards themselves, when they get in a room and they're saying, okay, Who's the most competent person to run the country right now in line with what I told the voters that I was going to achieve for them.

They're actually having that conversation in a meaningful way and in a way that [00:25:00] the founders wanted us to have as a country, but we've never really had. So continue.

Simone Collins: So how are these words selected? Remember that companies, programs, AIs, and any other productive member of the economy counts as a citizen.

We have the word of the present, the voting power of citizens in this election is determined by their local tax contribution to the governing system, minus the amount the governing system has spent on them to determine their net utility to the state. Any salary paid to a government employee is treated the same as payouts like welfare.

If an individual If an individual wants to pay more than their share for of taxes for additional voting power title privileges They can't.

Malcolm Collin: So this is this is the first ward is elected basically by how much you pay in taxes net how much you take home and an individual could could say, well, why don't govern it workers?

Because basically, this would mean they'd be very hard to get any vote within this particular system. If you are, say, [00:26:00] a teacher paid by the government. or a doctor paid by the government if the government ends up subsidizing doctors. And this goes to something that we argue in our governance book, which is to say wards of the state should never have a vote.

If you can vote to just increase your own salary, basically, if that's one of the things that you may want, then you shouldn't have any voting power. Obviously you should be. Given a salary based on the, the desires of the people who are actually paying you, which are the reflective

Simone Collins: of the utility you offer to the state.

Malcolm Collin: Well, no, it's not reflective of the utility totally because a teacher or a police officer still has utility to the state, but in the same way, like, if you look at the United States and people are like, oh, people in D. C. don't have a vote in presidential elections. Because they can influence what's happening in Washington just through like socially what's happening in DC, which is absolutely a true thing.

It's sort of the same thing. A police officer or a teacher or a anyone who's working [00:27:00] on behalf of the government administration. Intrinsically touches and affects that administration and that administration's policies, and as such, they don't need an additional vote to have their voice heard their voices already being disproportionately heard within the governance system.

So that's the other thing here. One is, is you don't want to create the negative incentives by giving words of the state of vote. And the other is, is to say they're, they already have an ability to outsize impact the voters, but the 2nd note I'd make here with these sorts of individuals is I find it really perverse and I was, you know, telling this to the Guardian article that one person could pay like 50, 000 times as much of another person as taxes gives the state 50, 000 times as much as another person and they don't get one iota more say in how that money is spent or what's the best way to spend that money like that seems to me ridiculous and deeply unfair.

Simone Collins: I wonder if it's a cultural thing because I definitely with everything in my life. Have [00:28:00] this intuition of, well, if someone paid for it, then they get to call the shot. Like if someone paid for my vacation, then they get to decide what we do every day. If someone is paying me to do work, then they get to decide how I do that work.

And I think this should be the same way with government. I mean, if someone's paying for government, then they get to decide how the government works, right? It seems, but is that a cultural thing? Because this seems to be so foreign to other people.

Malcolm Collin: I well, whether it's a cultural thing or not, this system is sure to draw economically productive agents, whether they are.

And you see how this breaks the AI problem. No longer do you have the problem of like AI is being able to spam themselves. If an AI is being economically productive and contributing to the state, then it should have a say in what the state is doing correlatory to how much they're contributing to the state, at least within this branch of the government.

If a company is paying a bunch of taxes. That company gets a vote, and there's other places where companies get votes, by the [00:29:00] way. In London, companies get votes and companies get votes in Hong Kong. So that's not a particularly novel concept, but the vote being correlatory to how much they're paying into the state is.

Same with individual human actors. If I'm an individual with a ton of money, I can come into the state. And now, in addition to this, I am actively punishing myself by cheating my taxes or by finding tax loopholes. Because I have a lower vote, the more I take advantage of tax loopholes. So this has the additional model of sort of forcing taxes onto the table.

Simone Collins: Mm hmm. The ward of the future, a citizen's voting power in this election is determined by the net utility to the state of all citizens they have brought to the state, either by having and raising citizens, coding them in the case of AI or founding them in the case of corporations, plus half the net utility of any secondary recruits of their direct recruits brought, for example, grandchildren or spinoff AIs or companies.

Malcolm Collin: So this system is essentially meant to increase the number of people that exist within the [00:30:00] state. And you could think of it as a bit of a pyramid scheme, but that's the way society really needs to be structured population wise for people to have more people. And as you can see here, it means that me as an agent was in the state, you know, the guardian obviously wanted to frame this as the more kids you have, the more votes you have, but that's very explicitly not what it says.

If I bring an economically productive immigrant into the state, because when you immigrate to the state, you always say this person was my benefactor who brought me in that person's taxes, any taxes they end up paying, ends up contributing to this portion of my vote. However, if I bring an immigrant into the state and that immigrant is a net drain on the state, but I have like economically productive children, that immigrant's economic weight to the state ends up subtracting from the economic benefit that I produce through my children.

All right. So, I, I really love this as a system. It also means that people who found successful companies are going to have an outsized impact within this part of the system. And if you have, you know, grandchildren or an AI, you write, then creates another thing or a company you create, then creates [00:31:00] another company or creates an AI.

You also receive some benefit from that. So there's a, a, a huge reason to look into the future within this particular board.

Simone Collins: Exactly. Then, finally, there's the word of the past, and I find this uniquely fascinating because It provides a sense of continuity, but I never would have thought of it, and I think it's brilliant that you did.

And this is something you first started discussing in the Pragmatist Guide to Governance. So it's the ward of the past. This ward is elected by a vote from all past living executors. This lowers the influence of party politics and enables those with the most knowledge of being an executor to have say in who gets the job.

Actually, you know where this is also? It's in Asimov's Foundation series. Oh, he has this? Yeah, because the, the empire, although it's not a great example, because the empire is like crumbling and poorly governed, but it's, it's run by this clone of just the same person always. But there's like the old retired version of the clone.

There is the active middle aged [00:32:00] governing version of the clone. And then there's the young kid clone who's like apprenticing and learning under like the grandfather and the dad, and then like the young one. And it's kind of an interesting, I mean, it sort of creates a sense of

Malcolm Collin: how, how are there any correlation between these two systems?

Simone Collins: Well, because you have the previous ruler of the empire. Advising the current ruler of the empire in the

Malcolm Collin: system. It doesn't function that way. We talked about a system like that in the governance book, but this system explicitly isn't that

Simone Collins: they're voting. So this

Malcolm Collin: system, I'll explain it in different words and it might make more sense to you.

Okay. This system is like having a council of presidents. Mm-Hmm. , being one of the bodies that is important for electing the next president. Oh

Simone Collins: yeah. Sorry. No, no, no. Take off this, take out this whole thing. I was. I'm very sleep deprived. I was thinking of something. Yeah, this is, yeah. It's like having all past presidents choose who they're voting for, but they're not influencing this person.

They can't take them out. Well, kind of. Working with the word of the

Malcolm Collin: [00:33:00] future or the word of the present, yes. The word of the past is why you would never have party politics for. So, I'll explain why. If there are party politics that differentiate between the two words, like somebody is much more likely to win one word than the other word the two voted words, this is the word of the present and the word of the future I suspect that it will be pretty broadcast from the perspective of the ward of the past if they are going to vote for one of these two parties.

And because of that, it doesn't really make sense to do that. I. e. you would basically know whoever the ward of the past was going to support is going to be the person who wins the moment party politics ends up developing. Which is why you need party politics to not end up developing. The word of the past also has a huge benefit.

If you look in like the U S it, one of the things that's always talked about is like past presidents are usually very friendly with each other. And they always like to go golfing together and a lot of the animosity between them dissolves really quickly because [00:34:00] you know, they've experienced something unique and now they're interested in the future of the state.

Well also they have more knowledge about the job than anyone else. Right. You know, they're going to be very good at potentially choosing somebody. But in addition to all of that it means that you aren't going to have the NASA problem where you have a wild party swings where one person, because the executor can do so much to overhaul society, right?

Like just say, well, okay. We're going to build like a totally different system for our governance structure. This makes it much harder to do that unless most past presidents also think that's a good idea. Yeah. Which is a really good system to prevent radical changes. And the only case in which you could do that, in which most past presidents don't agree to it is when the general population, or at least the economically productive population vastly agrees with it.

Anyway, continue.

Simone Collins: So, why not one vote, one person? Because apparently people think this is absolutely crazy. Like, here's what I was just thinking this morning. I [00:35:00] was like, oh yeah, I mean, Because the United States started out as one man, one vote. We didn't find that to work forever because we found that there were actually other contributing members to society that maybe also deserve to say like, like maybe not white people, like maybe women.

Like there's no, why would we assume that the voting system we have today is perfect? It wasn't perfect when the founding fathers started the United States and it's not perfect now. I'm not saying that our system is applicable to the United States at all anyway, but I'm just saying like, it's funny that people are so.

Insistent that our current voting system is unimpeded. So anyway, why not one vote, one person? Our system recognized that competence is not evenly distributed among a population and rewards individuals with more control over governing decisions when they have demonstrated proven measurable competence.

Our system furthermore lowers the voice of those who have, already work within the government or receive government support [00:36:00] as they are adversely incentivized to protect their own positions and privileges. Productivity is not the only contributory factor that warrants governing power. The system must also reward those who raise or build productive elements in a society while punishing those who bring citizens into the system that are net drains on resources.

Finally, the influence of past leaders on present leadership is designed to allow for more continuity than existing systems of government, dampening the NASA problem, as you say Malcolm, in which particularly large, long term projects are severely undermined with every administrative change. But I think here's where it's even more spicy, like, because some people are like, well, well, well, maybe I can get with one, like, different kinds of voting, but this is where I think it's so fun, because why not?

Yes. And this, right? So a tiered society, existing governing systems assume that every citizen has equal value when they objectively do not. [00:37:00] Our system assumes an individual's value is correlated with their utility to the state and optimizes around these individuals with the most utility to

the state all to ensure the competent operation of a state that attracts productive immigrants. To this end, not all citizens are equal within the state. Individuals can be rewarded with titles and additional privileges determined by the executor by opting into lump sum payments or higher tax schemes.

This is akin to paying for a premium membership, but at the state level, I love that premium membership in a government

Malcolm Collin: pay for like a Lord title or a knight title that gives you access. Honestly,

Simone Collins: honestly

Malcolm Collin: though. What were

Simone Collins: lords? It original work like lords, but premium members, that's what they were. It was a premium membership.

Yeah. We just need to bring things back to a natural or buy it often. That's how it was. Yeah. That's what, what do people think Lords were? What do people think barons were? And, and I think what's funny is that we we've lost this utility in society. By getting rid of classes. And I mean, titles now are only [00:38:00] a name.

They're only inherited. There's they're, they're functionless. They aren't real anymore. A real title is one that's bought. That's it. If you are not buying your way into a title, you don't really have a title because it doesn't do anything. Anyway, the set of laws an individual has to follow is determined by their title.

EG, a person opting into paying more taxes may have a different speed limit that applies to them and have reserved parking spaces. I love this. I love this so much. I mean, obviously from a certain perspective, it's incredibly dystopian because you're thinking about this from the perspective of some comedic movie in which some loser in society can't even park to go for a job interview because he's not

Malcolm Collin: Here's what you're not thinking about is when you can create opt in mechanisms for the ultra wealthy to pay more than their fair share and be happy and excited to do so, that's a tax burden that's not going to the middle class and poor.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the flip side of that scene in which this guy is getting frustrated about not being able to park. Well, [00:39:00] yeah, but this guy also isn't paying very much in taxes. You know,

Malcolm Collin: the way I put it this way is. Am I okay with wealthy people in society having it a bit easier if they're paying like billions extra in tax dollars that I don't need to pay?

Yeah, of course. It seems dystopia until you think about it for five seconds and you realize it's perfectly rational.

Simone Collins: Well, and again, that's, that's us on the, okay, that's at least me on airplanes. You know how I am with business class. I always wish I could fly business class everywhere. But then whenever it comes to it, cause I obviously have my own discretionary income, I could spend my money on that because I, but I don't, cause it's dumb.

I don't, I don't want to, right. It doesn't matter to me. So every time I walk by business classes, I board a plane. I'm like, yeah, you know, they're sitting there and I wish I were sitting there, but also like, I don't want to pay for that. So they deserve to be here. Yeah. They're subsidizing my flight. Like that's fine.

I, this is a choice that I've made. And I think that that's what this comes down to is that. As long as people are framing things logically instead of being like, Oh, I deserve to be in business class, but I mean, I don't, I don't want to pay for it, but I [00:40:00] still deserve to be here. Well, that's not a plane that works.

That's not a plane that exists. Okay. You can either pay for business class or you can sit with the chickens. And Simone begrudgingly. And that's how it is. Anyway, I'll continue reading your slide. Words of the state. Individuals with net negative contribution scores, who are not state workers, are always treated as a separate class.

The consequences of this status are determined by the current executor. This system is designed to encourage productive immigration while also pressuring non productive citizens to leave the country. It works.

Malcolm Collin: It's a great system.

Simone Collins: If you don't want to sit in basic economy, fly on the plane. Don't fly on the plane.

Social structure for a person or entity to become a citizen. They must either start a new tribe or be accepted by an existing tribe. This is where we're getting into describing what Curtis Yarvin was the first person who was like, yeah, this sounds like the millet system. And you're like, yeah, tribes are associated with cultures and [00:41:00] cultural norms, e.

g. Catholics, Mormons, et cetera. That's where we're An individual's tribe is responsible for social services, medical care, schooling, social safety nets, et cetera. And can demand independent taxes that are collected by the state and distributed to the tribal group. An individual can switch tribes if they choose to, but only after both paying a fine and paying back their tribal group for all services rendered to them, net their tax or voluntary contributions to the group.

For example, if an individual joined the Catholic group for their good medical care, they would not be able to deconvert immediately after the medical issue was dealt with unless they paid for the tribe's net tax loss on their medical expenses. Individuals moving out of the group. from their parents homes, as well as individuals marrying for the first time, are exempt from this rule.

Tribal groups can apply any restrictions they want on joining, and can impose additional laws on their members. For example, a tribe may enforce monogamy, but are responsible for internally policing them. [00:42:00] This works well for me.

Malcolm Collin: If people struggle to understand, like, why this is so valuable is it makes it much easier for religious extremists to protect their culture and individuals with unique cultures to protect their culture, which is to say, when you move into the state, a portion of your social services and a portion of your taxes are going to your tribal group.

So when the state collects your taxes, it collects an additional amount of taxes, which can almost be thought of as like. in the United States, you have your federal taxes and your state taxes. And this, you would have your federal taxes and your, basically your religion taxes. But it might not be religion.

It might be like the urban monoculture. It might be like the hippie group. It might be like the atheist group, whatever group it is. It's like your religion slash cultural group taxes.

Simone Collins: I'm trying to think. So how would things be different for the Amish, for example, who already lived in a, In a very isolated state and sort of provide their own services to their own community.

How would it be different for them if they operated within this city state governing system versus what they [00:43:00] already operate with right

Malcolm Collin: now? The Amish. So, so in the United States, when I am choosing which state taxes I want to pay, I am. Choose which I want to live in. Okay. And then that determines which state taxes I'm going to pay.

So if I'm an Amish person, I'm paying for like the public school system, even though I'm not using the public school system, I'm paying for Medicaid and medical costs, even though I'm not using any of that, like it's very unfair to the Amish. I Anywhere in the United States, I'm often paying for things that are not things that I may culturally use.

So, for example, I may be Catholic, and I'm paying into government funded abortions, or government funded prep for gay orgies. You know, I, well, you should see our episode on that. It's absolutely wild what's happening. But in this system, I move there and instead of choosing like which state I want to be to wherever I live within the system I choose which tribe I am affiliating with which is basically like a religion And then that determines an additional part in addition to like my federal my state taxes [00:44:00] an additional tax I'm going to pay which is determined by the tribe, but The tribe also gets to distribute things like medical care, things like education, things like all sorts of different social services that might be like free psychologists, free counseling, free you know, all sorts of stuff like that that might be very valuable to me.

And so if I'm something like the Mormon church and I'm coming here, basically the 10 percent tithe would be automatically added to the taxes and then distributed to the Mormon church and the Mormon church would distribute their They're services to members, you know, whether it's billing systems, et cetera.

And this is a really great system because it means that now me as a cultural group, I need to, on a per cost basis, also appeal to people. And the reason we have the system where a person cannot opt into a group and then opt out is it prevents scamming these groups. So I couldn't, for example, join the Mormon group in name only just to get access to their like medical care and then nope out the moment my medical bills were paid, you [00:45:00] know, I'd have to pay that back.

And somebody is like, well, that could cause abusive situations, but we noted that and we allowed for loopholes for the two most likely abusive situations. Yeah, this is your,

Simone Collins: your, this is as far as you can go with porous borders and a heavy social state.

Malcolm Collin: Yeah. One is when you're married, you can pop out whenever you want, which is great.

You can pop into a new tribe whenever you want. You don't need to pay back stuff. And two is, and then this is only for first marriages. And two is. When you leave your parents household, you can pop out of any religion you want. So you're not stuck in your birth culture. Now, this is assuming another culture will have you keep in mind because you will be a burden to these cultures and you may be a burden to these cultures in terms of caring for you.

They may just say, eh, we don't want you because you're not a productive member. You don't seem sincere. You don't seem whatever. And I suspect that we're going to see a much more exclusionary view of who can join their membership. By religions that are in this system

Simone Collins: and when you even saw this when the puritans Went to the [00:46:00] colonies.

There would be all these discussions on Can you bring this servant? I don't know. Well, are they like a solid person? Are they productive? I don't know When they

Malcolm Collin: leave the indentured servant, do we actually want them being a puritan? Yeah

Simone Collins: there was there was yeah these were exclusive communities and people were very selective about who they brought in because they also knew that they were They were going to be largely dependent on each other and they couldn't afford a world in which there were deadweights.

All right, continue.

Individual bonds. This is largely inspired by Robin Hanson, right? Yeah. So hat to Robin Hanson. We love you. Every individual AI or company registered in the state, for example, every politically relevant unit. Pays two tax streams. One is paid to the state like normal taxes, while the other consisting of 25 percent of whatever the state is paid is paid to their bond holders.

The initial owner of an individual's bond is the individual's creators. For example, the child's bond would be split 50 percent [00:47:00] between their parents. Some tribes may demand a portion of this bond in exchange for membership. For example, the Mormon community may own 50 percent of this bond for every child born within their community.

The system is designed for three purposes. One, it yields a direct and large cash benefit for having a child and raising them well. This cash benefit exactly scales with the presumed economic productivity of the child. As parents can sell their children's shares, shares that will be worth less if parents do not raise the child to be economically productive.

Two, it provides an economic incentive for those with capital to invest in those without it. For example, those born into disadvantaged families. For example, if an otherwise smart kid was born into a disadvantaged family and their parents traded or sold their shares at a discount to another educational institution, that institution would be financially incentivized to educate the child and help them in any way it can.

We imagine most of the time these shares will be sold to educational institutions [00:48:00] or other types of companies that specialize in improving people's economic status is that will be in the best interest of both parents and children. Three, it provides a large economic incentive for companies, educational centers, and cultural groups to study methods for raising economically productive individuals.

This is a super fun idea.

Malcolm Collin: Yeah. So, for people who don't understand, it'd be like if Simone and I had a kid. And then that kid, 25 percent of all the federal taxes they paid, end up going to ever hold the bond on them. And so, suppose like, polygenic screening costs a lot of money, but the companies that are offering it have a really high degree of confidence that it will help these people be more productive members of society, then the polygenic screening companies can say, okay, for 10 percent of any child we creates bond, we will do the polygenic selection for free.

Or an educational institution, and this is the problem with existing educational institutions, is they have no reason to actually care about a child's outcome. And I suspect that many services, like educational institutions and polygenic screening companies, [00:49:00] will Only be able to sell for bonds because me as a parent, if one educational institution is like, I'm going to charge you X many hundred thousand dollars a year and another is like, Oh, I just want the bond.

I'm like, okay, well, one of these is actually motivated to improve the kid's economic outcomes while the other is just motivated to take my money. Obviously I'm going to choose the bond holder. So there's so many society externalities to this or like a company like Google, if they're like really convinced that we can make X.

Type of people more productive. They could go into like a whole poor community and then just buy all the bonds in that community and then increase the value of those bonds by improving the quality of life of that community. Yeah, this

Simone Collins: is the core of governance design as it should be approached by everyone going forward.

So in the past governance design was created, but based on, well, this is how we do it, maybe if I tweak it a little bit, it might be less shitty. Whereas what you really need to look at is. What will incentivize people to do a thing that is good [00:50:00] for everyone? It is about aligning incentives, period. Don't look at what was done in the past.

Don't think that that, and people hear this, this concept that we first heard of from Robin Hanson and they're like, Oh, that sounds weird. I don't know. Like selling a bond. Are you like selling that person? Just stop, stop thinking about that and think about incentives. This is brilliant.

Malcolm Collin: Yeah. But as I was saying with Google, so like, suppose.

Google does something. It makes predatory actions beneficial. So let's talk about a predatory action. Google goes into a ghetto and they buy up all of the kids bonds in that ghetto and people be like, Oh, this is so predatory. Well now what does Google have an incentive to do? It has an incentive to renovate all the playgrounds.

To renovate all the school systems, to make sure all the houses get renovations and all the lead is tested. To give

Simone Collins: scholarships to all the children, to give them tutors. That's how it maximizes

Malcolm Collin: its earnings from these bond holdings. Like that is the key to making a state. It reminds me of this scene in Dune when they're like, [00:51:00] Oh, well, the smugglers operate underground.

We can't know what they're doing. And he goes, well, then why don't we just tax the smugglers, but make it legal? And they're like, wait, I hadn't considered doing that. And it's like, yeah, if it's legal, but tax now, there's a benefit to them being above board with us, but we can also better monitor what's happening.

And this is what we mean with things like, Well, if your vote is based on the amount that you're paying in taxes, now there's a huge disincentive to using tax loopholes. And it's the same with bondholders. Now there's a huge incentive for predatory actions, which aren't predatory at all, but benefit everyone involved. All right. Well, I am so excited that we got a chance to go over this. We've been meaning to do something on this deck forever. I am so glad the Guardian published this for us. Thank you. Thank you. And their outrage.

Of

Simone Collins: the, they thought we were harboring in this or, or trying to bring in this dystopian revolution and Patrick, I loved, I loved Patrick's tweet of, he like just shared this image of this beautiful sci fi utopia and [00:52:00] he's like, this is the world that the guardian doesn't want you to bring in. This is

Malcolm Collin: the dystopian they're afraid of, our like solar fun future.

How horrible. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, no. He has the best

Simone Collins: comments, by the way. Patrick, you got it, man. I read YouTube comments just to find yours.

Malcolm Collin: Simone, were the comments weighted towards negative or positive on this one?

Simone Collins: The Guardian? People don't go to Twitter to post positive stuff. They don't, they don't go to, to X and pat you on the back and say, good job.

Malcolm Collin: People actually think that this governing system would work. What are the flaws that we haven't thought of? What are the negative externalities we haven't thought of? And yeah, I'd be very interested to hear all of that. I am honestly, I think it's a brilliant governing system. I'd be really excited to see it implemented.

And Simone and I, even this morning, we're talking about going into the Charter City business. I was saying, you know, we should really [00:53:00] look at pitching this to a few countries, see if we can get this off the ground. I think people get really excited. Let's get a few ultra religious groups in on this. I mean, I think that that's what you really need to make this happen.

And in a few. Like incredibly tech forward organizations. And then we can build the first of the future charter cities or the first of the future Haven networks.

Simone Collins: No, on a less bright note. And this is something that I'm just really coming to terms with because most countries are not willing to, or politically unable to come to terms with the fact that you cannot have both porous borders and generous social services.

They will fall apart. Yeah. And we need, we need somewhere. I'm sure most people want somewhere they can flee to. That is okay. And I think most people are going to be willing to work for it. They're going to be willing to be productive members of society. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that even most people who are heavily dependent on social services and handouts would much prefer to be independent.

citizens. It's just that once you get [00:54:00] stuck on this stuff, you get stuck in a loop and it's really hard to get out. And I think that creating this and many other haven states that have similar systems, it's not just something of like, this could be a solution. We need this because we are going to end up between this, this, this social services and poorest borders dynamic and demographic collapse.

We are heading toward civilizational collapse and we need it. We need that techno feudal system of little cities upon a hill, little city States that survived this. So yeah, maybe we do need to get into this because. There has to be something left for people to flee to.

Malcolm Collin: Well, yeah, that we do. We do.

There has to be something for people to flee to because I

Simone Collins: don't like this. I don't like thinking you think through things. I'm like the rest of society. I don't think through things. This, this is fine. I like [00:55:00] thinking this is fine. And you just showing me the flames all around us.

Malcolm Collin: If we have any ultra wealthy people who watch this and want something like this set up let us know.

We're actually competent enough to put this together, but I want to see some bites before we do because the last time we tried to do this, we got a lot of interest from people who wanted to buy into the project. This was project Eureka, but we didn't have connections with capital that was interested and we didn't have

Simone Collins: the property.

Malcolm Collin: Yeah, we had the property. We could have done the whole thing for like 10 have been so inexpensive. I was very disappointed. And this would have been right outside Manhattan, which was so frustrating. Such a good property was an old convent. But they're completely different model than the model we're describing here.

But, and I don't want to go into that model right now. That's for a different episode. But for the model we're describing here, If you buy into this early, you could end up making an astronomical amount of money if things play out the way that we predict they will play out. But you would need to buy in enough to get this off the ground.

So [00:56:00] let us know if you're interested. This is one of the things that hard EA, if we end up getting a lot of money is going to maneuver to make realistic. And I just love you to decimum.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I love you too. And I love everyone else who's working on City States because the more people working on this, the better.

I mean, we want to get involved, but that's not just s**t on the people who are trying. I admire everyone who's trying. And obviously people have done a ton of groundwork. The fact that Prospera has people living there. I mean, this is happening. It's incredible

Malcolm Collin: that Prospera is off the ground.

Simone Collins: I just can't believe what you've done.

mover in this space. I have such massive respect to all the first movers. This is to me, it just, it's so impossible to, I mean, it can be done and it has been done, but anyway, huge respect. I love you. I love them. I love that we have a shot at the future, but I'm also so scared. I'm so scared. I'm so scared.

Love you to decimum. I love you too. It's scared.

Malcolm Collin: Oh, escalators.

Speaker 5: [00:57:00] You need the sign? Let me get the sign. The sign's right here, buddy.

Speaker 6: Can I take this sign home with us? I don't know, buddy. We'll have to ask them. Okay. Come on, Mommy. Do you Know what they say right on top here? Not on the bottom.

Speaker 7: What do you think it says?

Speaker 6: You, you do it.

Speaker 7: It says Trump Vance. And

Speaker 6: what does

Speaker 7: this say?

Speaker 6: And what does this whole

Speaker 7: word say, this

Speaker 6: long word? And what, and,

Speaker 7: and, and what does these

Speaker 6: numbers make? 2024?[00:58:00]

I sold a car. So, What? We gotta put up this sign? So, so, because they gotta vote. Everybody vote! Hey, come on,

Mommy! Let's go.

Join the discussion as we delve into the economic realities of the US under Biden and Trump. Breaking down fact-checking articles, inflation rates, wage changes, and the real cost of living, we offer a comprehensive analysis of the current state and future outlook, revealing the stark differences between recent administrations. From gas prices to rent, grocery costs to home ownership, we uncover the underlying trends and dissect the implications for everyday Americans. Don't miss this deep dive into the numbers that impact your life and the upcoming election.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today is election day in the United States. You're running for office and so is Trump.

So you all get out there, vote or die

Vote or die, what the hell does that even mean? What you think it means, b***h.

Malcolm Collins: because this last four years has begun to feel. Like that scene from Oliver Twist,

Good Lord, it's good. Don't care what he looks like.

Malcolm Collins: where I just, in my mind, I wish the ad that the Trump campaign had played is what I'm putting on screen here, which is just Kamala laughing in the background, and it says, remember when your family could afford food.

Because we have seen like the Democrats will be like, oh, the economy is great under Biden and Kamala. And Kamala has said that she's not going to change much. So I wanted to go through the real inflation numbers, the real price of things under [00:01:00] the two administrations and not the, because there have been some inflation numbers that Republicans have sent around that are really massaged to look good for Trump.

Which. I think undersell things because then you're looking at them, you know, they're massaged. So, you know, this is as good as they could honestly make them look for Trump. So I'm going to start this by going over fact checker with an article titled viral posts, site misleading economic data to compare Biden and Trump presidencies.

To be taking down those ones that make Trump look really good.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: And we'll go into the numbers that they give for Biden in the various areas, because I think through seeing the most rosy possible numbers that somebody could give Biden,

Simone Collins: right,

Malcolm Collins: you would be horrified for another four years of this.

Simone Collins: Okay. Wow. More so than

Malcolm Collins: you probably think. All right. We identified the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump 2.

48 [00:02:00] under Trump.

And overall, the national gas price increased by 2. 3 percent over the course of Trump's presidency. So under Trump for gas, 2. 48 average, 2. 3 percent increase.

Simone Collins: Right off the bat, this is insane to me because I'm hearing that and I'm like, No gas in the U. S. Was never that inexpensive.

Malcolm Collins: That's impossible.

Hold on. And, and, and keep in mind, they're massaging the numbers for Biden here. , the average price of gasoline under Biden was three 50 and under Biden's presidency, they increased 46. 2%. Well, yeah, we've been paying 4 at the pump. Like recently, I know they increased 46. 2 percent and the average was three 50.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So the, the, at the end of the cycle, it's going to be higher, obviously. Yes, yes. The highest recorded price under the Biden's administration was at $5 in 1 cents. Yeah, that sounds about right. . So they went from 2 48 under Trump to $5 under [00:03:00] Biden and under Trump, they increased. 2. 3%. Under Biden, they increased 46.

2%. And keep in mind, that was a full four years of a Trump's presidency. And this is like three and a half years of a Biden presidency. All right, let's look at home ownership. All right. So if you look at Zillow's rent index for changes in Single family homes. They identified the average home rent price under the Trump administration as $1,488 as compared was $1,884 under Biden.

According to Zillow's Index, home rent prices for single bedroom houses increased 50 percent under Trump administration and 30 percent under the Biden administration. Like how do people afford this when it's increasing that much? Hold on. It's all going to get worse when we go to pay increases under the two administrations.

I think a lot of people have in the back of their heads. Well, yeah, but pay probably increased more. What pay [00:04:00] increases though? Oh my gosh. Okay. Now let's look at a different way of looking at this. The BLS also track, rent prices increased by 13. 6 percent over the entire Trump administration and by 21. 5 percent over the first three years of the Biden administration. So again, almost double there. Now let's, let's look at the NASDAQ, the stock market aggregated on a daily basis. The NASDAQ increased about 0.

14 percent per day under Trump and 0. 04 percent under Biden. So terrible terrible under biden. Okay, let's keep going here To measure grocery prices. Under trump grocery increased in price by 6. 5 Under biden by 20. 9

Simone Collins: Okay, that makes a lot of sense now I feel a lot less gaslit based on these numbers because i'm hearing a lot of discussion now Especially leading up to the election that prices aren't that different, but I keep thinking, no, I, they're

Malcolm Collins: [00:05:00] just lying to people.

It's so bad.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Speaker 11: Democrats act like this is the nineties and they're working under the old rules. The new rules are these attack, lie, don't get caught. Machiavelli wrote the Prince for the rulers.

Well, we're rewriting it for us.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, they're just lying, lying,

Simone Collins: lying. That is. Insane, but also I didn't realize just how bad it was because I know things cost more, but I think I'd forgotten at this point. I've even successfully been gas lit to the extent where when you said that gas prices were on average about 2.

5 dollars in the US under Trump. I was like, I couldn't believe it grocery prices too, but now I feel like less of an idiot because every time you and I go to a restaurant, for example, or to a grocery store, I think I can't afford this, or this, this used to be the price of a. Michelin star restaurant in the heart of Manhattan.[00:06:00]

But we are out in the boonies in Pennsylvania at like a wing bucket. You know what I mean? Like this is not.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, no, no. Seriously. They'll be like, Oh, this is like 25 for an entree at like a medium restaurant. And it's like, this was literally what Michelin star restaurants used to charge. I'd say a

Simone Collins: 25 entree was, I think I remember seeing those prices at restaurants like log runway, which was one of the most.

expensive, fancy restaurants in all of New York City that we've ever eaten that was like such a thing you dress up to go is a big deal. And what makes me so concerned about this too, is Well, you and I basically since the pandemic have stopped eating out period unless it's for a business dinner that we have to go to and we have to meet at a restaurant because otherwise we just have people come to our house and we inflict our food upon them.

We. We don't see that same change in the average American. The average American is still eating out with their [00:07:00] family on a semi regular basis, if not on a very regular basis. When I hear quote, unquote, normal people talking about their lives, they're door dashing, they're Uber eatsing. They are, so they're getting delivered restaurant food.

So not only restaurant food, but restaurant food that they're paying delivery fees for. Well,

Malcolm Collins: and it shows you how entitled people are. There was a campaign a while ago. We're after the pandemic, people were saying that DoorDash should be like a human, right? This is progressives saying that the government should pay for our DoorDash.

Because they didn't like to like that. They could get triggered if they go out in public or they could, you know,

Speaker: A few weeks back, this retard showed up with this take, comparing food delivery to vaccines and medicines, as in her view, they are all the fruits of progress that should be considered essential, despite not existing in previous eras, because times and standards have changed. , if you're against them being made into a human right, you're ableist. The discourse culminated with this furry claiming that he [00:08:00] orders DoorDash because his polycule is food insecure and too disabled to cook for themselves, even though DoorDash is really expensive, and food insecurity refers to people who are so poor they can't consistently afford food.

So this is all guy replies, some types of food are basic staples, see rice, pasta, veg, fruit, etc. Some types of food are more luxury items. Both can exist. No one has an automatic human right to be able to shop at Waitrose. It's a basic human right to afford all food. You can't pick and choose what people deserve.

The f**k is wrong with Oh my god. Listen

Malcolm Collins: people forget just how luxurious our lives are,

Simone Collins: that you, you could not get food delivered to you. There, there were certainly local pizza stores. That might do delivery rounds in a limited area, or sometimes Chinese food did delivery, but that was offered on a restaurant by restaurant basis by restaurant staff.

This was not a pervasive service available to everyone. It certainly wasn't affordable or, you know, cheap by any means. [00:09:00] Now nowadays you can literally get a TV door dash to you. You can have someone buy large electronic devices, which by the way, those are the things that have gotten less expensive, and I'm assuming.

That this is why a lot of people are able to massage the numbers and say, listen, overall, on the whole prices aren't higher. And that's because many big ticket objects, appliances, TVs that used to be 2, now are 300. There's so much less expensive. The thing is, I'm not buying a TV every week. I'm buying groceries every week.

I'm buying gas every week.

Malcolm Collins: Well, let's go over the specifics here. We so if you look at Since Biden was elected president bacon prices are 13 percent higher. Cereal and baked goods are 25. 6 percent higher.

Simone Collins: Cereal is such a scam. When you think about what you pay per calorie for cereal, it is a complete scam, by the way.

I can't afford it. There's no one can afford cereal. That's, that's [00:10:00] insane.

Malcolm Collins: Ever since

Simone Collins: college, I quit cereal when I realized how much it actually costs per calorie. It's ridiculous.

Does anyone else think that it's upsetting that food is currently considered a luxury item? That we're being told to just eat cereal on frozen dinners? I'm feeling O type away about it.

Malcolm Collins: So, non alcoholic beverages increased 21. 4%. Meat, poultry, fish, and eggs collectively increased 20. 2%. And Let's look at electricity prices here.

So under the Trump administration, electricity increased 4 percent in price. Under the Biden administration, it increased 28. 3 percent in price.

Simone Collins: Oh, and we're seeing scary things like in some states people. Being obligated, essentially, to pay for other people's electricity. Oh, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: This was in Connecticut, where now you are obligated to pay for anyone who makes under a certain price as electricity, and their electricity cost is just averaged out throughout everyone who's, like, middle class or above.

Simone Collins: Yeah, so in other words, people of [00:11:00] greater means are expected to subsidize the electricity for those of less means, but that means they

Malcolm Collins: just pay for it. And so their, their prices have jumped like a 3rd in some areas.

Simone Collins: Yeah, they get searches and then they're what they used to expect in budget for in their electricity bills are now it's just completely out of whack.

Malcolm Collins: And I also think people are like, oh, this is going to end soon.

Kamala isn't as bad as Biden. Excuse me. Kamala is the one who wanted to do price fixing on grocery store foods. You think that this isn't going to spiral further out of control? She isn't just going to continue what Biden is doing. She wants to make it work. Like you get that, right? Like you're not stupid, right?

Like, can you actually afford this? Like meaningfully, can you?

He's courting and serviloys, what makes it a question?

Malcolm Collins: But let's let's keep going here.

Simone Collins: I think what I think, though, the mindset is, and we touched on this in our last episode discussing single [00:12:00] women for Kamala, is that where the Democrat Party is moving is toward a socialist state where the government provides all of your services.

This also came out in recent job numbers where the vast majority of recent job growth has been in government jobs. And also government associated jobs. So a lot of the other job growth, it was not in explicitly government jobs was I think in healthcare, which is largely subsidized by things like Medicare and Medicaid in the U S which is our socialized version of, of Medit Medit Medit.

Like we haven't had a

Malcolm Collins: real job growth under Biden. It's just been an expansion.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It's been an expansion of government jobs and services. So in other words, the government is becoming the thing that employs us. The thing that provides us our services. And there's this expectation that, okay, well, yeah, we can't afford anything, but the government is just going to provide that to us.

And that is, that is why inflation is okay. I think there's also this, this sort of collective declaring of declaration of bankruptcy among Americans [00:13:00] who are continuing to eat out on a regular basis, are continuing to door dash, are continuing to buy electronics and put it on debt and finance it with the assumption that they're never going to pay it off, but that for some reason, they're still able to do it.

So why would they stop doing it

Malcolm Collins: right here? The difference in wages during this period, by the way, important to note when you're considering all this gross, you're like, well, you know, maybe it's because of like, price, inflation of labor. It's like, a lot of people say, well, labor costs more than it used to in the Biden administration.

Earnings increased by 1.9% under the Trump administration earnings increased by 6.8%.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: So like, four times as much. I think at least like that's absolutely wild. 400% more than they did under Biden.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I think here's the dynamic, I think as at play here during the pandemic. A lot of organizations realized that didn't need to employ as many people as they needed to employ.

And a lot of organizations [00:14:00] are now trying to offload employees very heavily. And one of the easiest ways to do so without having to pay severance packages or deal with legal issues, especially among really large companies that are subject to these risks is to just become increasingly hostile and unattractive to the employees.

So this is the equivalent of wanting to break up with your girlfriend, but not being direct with her and instead just being an a*****e to her for a long time. So that's why we're not getting raises. That's why people are expected to return to the office. Because this is a really great way to clean out your ranks and reduce your staff size without announcing layoffs, without firing people.

And so I think that that's one reason why wages are stagnant. It's not necessarily that there isn't a pressure. In terms of raising wages. And I actually think that a lot of new jobs and in hard to fill positions for skills that are rare now are paying a tons more, but that [00:15:00] most roles are kind of redundant now in the age of AI, most companies need to get rid of them.

And the reason why those rages are stagnant is because the companies are quiet, quitting on the employees. The companies are trying to get rid of them, and we should be considering ourselves lucky that these jobs even exist. I mean, we're lucky to have stagnant wages at this point and that we, we live in a legal environment that is annoyingly persnickety when it comes to firing people.

Malcolm Collins: I think a lot of people might be hearing all this and they might be thinking, well, I mean, how does this compare to previous presidents? You know, maybe these are just outliers or this is normal fluctuation between presidents. So here, I'm going to put a chart on screen that compares Biden to Trump, to Obama, to Bush, to Clinton, to first Bush, to Reagan, to Carter.

So we're getting a big thing here. And what you're going to find is consistently. Trump is one of the best and Biden is one of the worst.

In fact, [00:16:00] the only one who seems even to really tie Biden for worst is Carter. So if we look at overall inflation Biden is the single worst except for Carter. If we look at food inflation, Biden is the single worst, except for Carter.

If we look at energy inflation Biden is the worst, even worse than Carter. If we look at rent inflation Biden narrowly loses to Carter, but worse than literally every other president. I. e. Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan. All right, now let's go to Trump. How does Trump compare? Overall, he's the single lowest of every one of the presidents I just mentioned in terms of inflation.

Single lowest.

Simone Collins: They used to call it, they used to call the U. S. dollar during Jimmy Carter's reign, the Jimmy Carter peso. I guess we should call it the Biden s**t coin. That's what the U. S. dollar is. The Biden s**t

Malcolm Collins: coin? It's literally worse than the Jimmy Carter peso. Like, [00:17:00] that is wild to me. So, so, for food.

Trump, Obama was less than Trump. But Trump, Trump was the second lowest inflation. For energy Clinton was less than Trump, but Trump was the second lowest. For rent Obama, Clinton, Obama and Clinton were both better than Trump, but Trump was the third lowest, but overall Trump did best because like, for example, Obama had terrible energy inflation, 29.

9%. Not, not as bad as Biden, 37. 2%, but still bad. So I think that people can see here, that this isn't like comparing like to like or like two bad options as people often put it.

Speaker 3: Did you just say that voting is ridiculous? No, I think voting is great, but if I have to choose between a douche and a turd, I just don't see the point. You don't see the point! Oh, you young people just make me sick!

Malcolm Collins: It's comparing a genuinely exceptional option to a genuinely terrible [00:18:00] option. Well,

Simone Collins: here's, here's where things make it controversial.

You may actually want to cut this whole part out. But we'll see, because I think this inflationary period, but also the way that Americans spend money. Has come to a tipping point where I think we just need to fundamentally as a nation rethink how we spend money and get sober, essentially, we need to get sober.

We need to stop consuming like we're consuming. We need to tighten our belts. Now, 1 of our

Malcolm Collins: 1

Simone Collins: of our local friends had texted us me recently. He's like, what's all this about a trump tax? What, what, what, what's going on? And this is related to the way that Democrats are framing the tariffs that Trump proposes, which are mostly on China, but also on all imports, which would, to be fair, if enacted, raise prices on many foreign produced goods, especially those like electronics

Malcolm Collins: that are now incredibly cheap.

Keep [00:19:00] in mind, Trump put in tariffs in its first administration and achieved tremendous wage growth.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it did. It did achieve wage growth. And I think it's really important. If you look at Peter's eye hands, the end of the world is just the beginning. It's important that we start investing now more in domestic production and definitely quitting China.

I think the faster we quit China, not only because China is hostile towards us, not only because China is actively trying to Ruin us with bad TikTok algorithms and other things. But also because China is about to undergo immense instability due to demographic collapse, like we should not be, even if we loved China, it's kind of like, you know, loving a friend who's about to, you know, go through a terrible divorce and go bankrupt.

Like don't depend on them for anything, you know, that's not a safe bet. So I'm very much in favor of that, but I do think that it could increase some prices. And I think that. And a responsible voter has to be aware that voting for Trump just doesn't mean everything's suddenly going to get less expensive because it's not.

But I think that when we look at the other side and you look at what Democrats are proposing to do [00:20:00] instead.

Malcolm Collins: In Trump's first administration, okay where all those tariffs were enacted, he had the lowest inflation rate of any president since Carter and likely before that. So, everyone who's like, prices are gonna go up when he implements all these tariffs, well, he did it the first time and they didn't.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, I, I don't think it's going to be terribly bad. It can, it can cause some prices to increase. And I just, I want to be realistic about that. And I don't think that there's any way going forward where our lives aren't more expensive and where we, as, as Americans collectively have to rethink our spending.

But I also think that if we instead take the, if we dig in deeper to the Democrat approach, which is more government jobs and more government dependency. We are going to end up in a food line situation. We are going to end up in a When politicians are talking about fixing

Malcolm Collins: grocery store prices, they're preparing us for a food line.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I would note here [00:21:00] that like, here's another great, you know, I've done videos where I complain about how much it costs to build infrastructure in the United States. So here's a graph right here, a manufacturing construction between Biden and Trump and under the Trump administration, you can see it's just a perfectly flat line.

And under the Biden administration, right on up. Now. We're going to talk about, I'll put a graph on screen of inflation under Trump and Biden and people can be like, Oh, Biden's kind of getting it back under control.

Oh yeah. Right. Before he needs to run for a second election, he. Kind of starts to get it back under control, but let's look at how ridiculous the things and when we say back under control, keep in mind that a graph like this, what you're looking at is incremental increase every year. It's not like he's reversed it because the line is going down now.

Simone Collins: Listening passively to media. If I didn't have additional context in the world from you and from other sources, I'd be like, wait, I'm hearing broadly that inflation is down to 3%. Everything's [00:22:00] fine. for listening. But that doesn't, it's worded in a way of it's all undone. Everything's fine now, but one that doesn't change the fact that now we have permanently higher prices.

Yeah. And, and lower wages. Yeah. That's it. It's, it's very annoying to me that there's this argument being made, but then again, there is this. Everyone in our nation, pretty much, on at least one average, who is voting Democrat is firmly under the impression that the economy has done great under Biden. I mean, the funny thing is with the Green New Deal, aka the Inflation Reduction Act, which was this giant spending bill that led to a lot of investment in green energy infrastructure.

A lot of that did end up going to Republicans who were like very happily, like making a ton of money from the, like, I guess, subsidies that they got our tax breaks or something that they got from this program. Well at the same time, shitting on the government for wasting all [00:23:00] their money. But I mean, at least someone's making money from this.

Malcolm Collins: So I, I, I note here everything I've gone over so far was from that fact checking article or, or most of what I went over. Okay. Yeah. So

Simone Collins: from a hostile source.

Malcolm Collins: Trump. And that's how good it made Trump look. Okay. So keep that in mind. Now we're going to go into just how much they attempt to manipulate data here.

Okay. So Biden said quote, but no presidents had the run we've had in creating jobs and bringing down inflation It was nine percent when I came into office nine percent But here's the problem simone. It wasn't close to that it was actually when, when Biden came into office, 1.

4% that was January 2021. And in fact, if we even go like months back, we can be like, well, maybe he got the months wrong or something like that. Okay. October 20th, it was 1. 2%. November 20th, it was [00:24:00] 1. 3%. December 20th, it was 1. 5%. January 21st, it was 1. 4%. Then when did it hit 9%? It didn't. He just lied. It hit 9 percent in his administration.

 It hit 9 percent in June 2022. It's highest level in about five years. 40 years. And from here, the annual reach trended down for a year, reaching 3 percent in June 2023, but it has since remained above 3 and with 3. 5 percent for the 12 months ending in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And so I'll put a graph on screen here. So no, it did not. He just lied. And if we take a look at it, it, this was 18 months later when it hit the 9.1%, 18 months into his administration.

Simone Collins: Okay. So it may have had something to do with that, that

Malcolm Collins: may

Simone Collins: not have been, especially when you consider

Malcolm Collins: that under the last four months of the Trump administration, it was around 1.2 to 1.4%.

Mm-Hmm. like

Simone Collins: in the midst of

Malcolm Collins: the

Simone Collins: pandemic too.

Malcolm Collins: [00:25:00] Yeah. And then you could say, okay, okay, okay. Well, what about other numbers here? All right. So, now let's look at interest rates. The mortgage rates were 2. 9 percent when Trump left office. The mortgage interest rate right now is roughly 7%. So more than twice as high.

That means that the higher interest rates in the inflation and rents and housing prices mean that the mortgage payment on a median value home now is twice as high under Biden as it was under Trump. How about interest rates on federal borrowing? During Trump's last year in office, the 10 year Treasury bill was 0.

9 percent after 3. 5% years of Biden. Interest rates are at 4. 3%. So a four X higher, more, more than four X higher. And when we take the two COVID years, 2020 and 2021 out of Trump spending, because I think that's pretty fair. We find the average deficits under Trump were [00:26:00] roughly 750 billion which is bad.

But under Biden, it was 1. 5 trillion per year. Even adjusting for Bidenflation, deficits have been at least 50 percent higher under Biden than Trump. I'm bored. So, when you hear all of that in context, if you haven't gone out to vote yet today, and you're like, Eh, can you afford not to? Can you afford, and I guess this is the video where we, I don't know if it's, Been up in the air, whether or not we're endorsing Trump.

Everyone's doing an endorsement thing these days. Like, you know, the one that's not the newspapers we need to do, we do. We need to do a real endorsement where we say I'll get my endorsement sword to the, to the, to the polls. You gotta do the, the, go to the polls, kabla,

Speaker 5: And dying in your beds, many [00:27:00] years from now, would you be willing To trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies they'll never take our freedom!

AVADA

Malcolm Collins: Kabla!

Simone Collins: Freedom! No, he doesn't say that at a very opportune time though. Yeah. That's

Malcolm Collins: always been my family's a battle cry since we saw Braveheart. Is the, the Kala.

Good Lord. Kala. Oh boy. Anyway, I love you to decimal. Do you have final thoughts on this?

Simone Collins: I don't know what to think anymore. I feel like I've been lied to so much and told that everything's okay when everything's not okay. And it's not just the US. Government or operatives saying, no, there's no inflation. It's fine. [00:28:00] 3%. What are you complaining about? No, things aren't more expensive. Can't you look at this report?

But also, no, there's no demographic collapse. Everything's going to be fine. I just feel like all these lies are going to come

Malcolm Collins: out ahead. The real rates of demographic collapse in all these countries and then the UN's predicted demography for these countries going forward every year.

Simone Collins: Gary is coming into the pandemic.

We, we came to this period of, Oh, this, this little virus looks kind of bad. We need to shut things down for just a little bit. Everyone's like, it's going to blow over. It's going to be fine. And I

Malcolm Collins: told you going into the pandemic, I was like, just biologically, there's no way that this blows over. You called it.

Simone Collins: And that's the thing is you are the Harbinger of Of, of dooms and apocalypses. And that's why I'm concerned. What's scary is with the pandemic, people weren't, there was no agenda. To like, I know that this is happening and it's bad, but I'm going to lie to people about it, like very, very intentional. I mean, there was a little bit of lying, I think about [00:29:00] masks maybe because they wanted to keep masks for medical professionals, but what's different about now is there is an active interest.

Sort of, and it's very related, you know, in terms of the, the operatives who want there to be an increasingly socialized state to the operatives who don't want us to believe that de demo demographic collapse is real. There is a, a very powerful and very motivated contingent that wants us to just not see this coming so that they can get the outcome they desire.

And the problem is that global economic cost have the ability. To execute the outcome they desire with success. So they are, they're very effective in brokering in this transition towards socialism and toward degrowth that they want, but I don't, they don't realize how bad degrowth really is because they have, they're in this myopic.

Utopian modern bubble of the world. Now they don't realize what it's [00:30:00] like when you don't have enough food. Is not, is not, they don't know what they're signing up for. And that's what scares me is they're very well, they're going to get their way. One way or another, Malcolm. And we have to figure out how to survive in small contingencies despite that fact at this point.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I think that you're absolutely right. They, they will get their way. So you can look at something like the UN right now. And a lot of people are like, oh, they couldn't possibly be manipulating the data this much, or like, here they couldn't possibly, like their goal. Is a global economic collapse and the intention behind the goal is that they can shift the world to a system where they and the other oligarchs like the intelligentsia, deep state, whatever you want to call it essentially runs everything through a communist or socialist system.

And I know here when people hear communist or socialist. If they're dumb they think that that means sharing all the resources [00:31:00] equally. When what it actually means and what like the people working at the UN think it means is a system where they control every aspect of your life. It's the same with like the people on the Kamala Harris team and stuff like that.

And we've seen her repeatedly. What I think Communists would think of as like on the ground. Communists think of as like fascist instincts. They think that they're going to be running things or less power would go to the oligarchs of our society. Absolutely not. What we are seeing here is that transition to remove power from the everyday citizen and consolidate all the power in our society was the oligarch.

And

Simone Collins: to be fair, cause I think when people hear you say things like that, they think you're making a straw man argument because it sounds like a It's, it's very, it sounds exaggerated, but these people are doing it from a place of, I think this is they genuinely believe this is what's best for humanity.

And this comes from a place of them, knowing from their perspective that they know better and that the [00:32:00] common average person. Simply can't manage these things on their own and they need to be directed to live a certain way and they need to receive services a certain way because they can't handle it.

They're too dumb and too stupid and too ignorant. And I will just make sure that they live their lives this way and I'll give them their services this way. And I'll take away their pain this way and I'll medicate them this way and it will be fine. And they're doing this from a place. of love and empathy.

They've been taken over by the urban monoculture, the, the woke mind virus, whatever you want to talk about it or however you want to describe it, where they are completely mimetically overtaken by a viral stream that says we must take away all in the moment suffering. So these people are, they're, they believe they're saving the world.

They're very motivated to save the world. They think they're doing the right thing. And they're, they're brokering this in very well. This is not us making up some [00:33:00] fake supervillain. And this isn't, we look like supervillains to them. This isn't, these aren't people who think they're doing a bad thing.

Malcolm Collins: And they've been completely brainwashed. There's no, yeah,

Simone Collins: but there's no Doctor Evil cacophony. Cackling behind, you know, inside a volcano. And I think these are people running the UN. These are people who are trying. They're like, we have to save the starving children. We have to, they, they care and they think they're saving the world.

And there are people that we know and love who fallen into this.

Malcolm Collins: Who are, I think that what's happening at the individual level here. And I think that this is really important for people to note is I think individuals can be like. They don't actually want the global economy to collapse, to bring in the new world order, socialism, or whatever you want to call it.

Kind of, because they

Simone Collins: think the global economy causes harm and doesn't take care of people.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they, on an individual level, they see capitalism as creating things like homelessness. And they see like, like starvation, all the failing people, they're like, well,

Simone Collins: [00:34:00] capitalism has failed to save these people on the

Malcolm Collins: street.

Capitalism caused these people to opioids. And when they are thinking about, okay, what does society look like after this? Right. They are thinking about it in terms of a modern political fight. Like Trump winning versus Harris winning, not because they've been living in a capitalist system. They've been living with the luxury provided by capitalism.

And because of that, they are completely unaware of how catastrophic changes in economic systems are for people on the ground. Well, they don't know the counterfactual because it's kind of bad.

Simone Collins: The vast majority of these people. Did not grow up in anything but a hyper capitalist system or in a very wealthy socialist company country like the Nordic countries where just tons of oil revenue basically subsidized everyone's life.

And we don't have that in the entire world to depend. Yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: I think that one of the reasons why we might be more sensitive to this is because we have a lot of Latin American friends and we've lived a lot in Latin America. And I think if you have, you're not going to be [00:35:00] jumping at the idea to try to switch to a.

Socialist model or a communist model because you know just how bad it is I was saying it's it's it's stepping over your friend's bodies on the way to the grocery store type bad. It's not It's it's hoping your children don't starve to death type bad And I think that we for so long haven't lived in those systems where people are starving to death and stuff like that That we don't see that as a realistic possibility Even though it absolutely is

Simone Collins: I worry.

I don't like that. Anyway,

Malcolm Collins: love you to decimone. This was a wonderful video. Very informative, I hope. Please vote. Yeah. Vote or die. Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Vote or die. You better vote or I'll stick a knife in your eye. Thank you. That was beautiful. It's a great song. They're so great. Why should I vote if it's between a douche and a turd, you know?

Speaker 6: VOTE OR DIE MOTHERFUCKER, MOTHERFUCKER VOTE OR DIE [00:36:00] Rock the vote or else I'm gonna stick a knife through your eye Democracy is founded on one simple rule Get out there and vote or I will m***********g kill you I like it when you vote, b***h Shake them titties when you vote, b***h VOTE OR DIE MOTHERFUCKER, MOTHERFUCKER VOTE OR DIE You can't run from a 38, go ahead and drive Let your opinion be heard, you gotta make a choice

Simone Collins: Stone and Parker for president, I would be so scared. I really wish they

Malcolm Collins: would run.

Simone Collins: Right? They

Malcolm Collins: would be. They'd win in such a landslide, I think.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but we don't deserve them. You know, Curtis Yarvin made joke that, you know, we don't deserve Trump. I, I, I genuinely feel like we don't deserve Stone and Parker.

They are too good for us. I love the American people, but we have a lot of work to do before we deserve them. I love you.

Malcolm Collins: I love you too.

Simone Collins: Oh god, that has me so depressed. I'll end this recording.

[00:37:00]

Speaker 8: We are gonna go closer.

Speaker 9: Closer to the

Speaker 8: bad

Speaker 9: deer. We gonna kill

Speaker 10: the bad

Speaker 9: deer. Yeah.

Speaker 10: Kill the

deer.

In this episode, we delve into the increasing political alignment of single women with the Democratic Party and contrast it with the trends observed among married women. The discussion highlights how single women are becoming a significant voter demographic for Democrats, and explores various social aspects, including government services dependency and the evolving perception of women's roles in society. The hosts also analyze historical voting patterns, particularly in relation to Kamala Harris' rising popularity amongst single women, and ponder the societal implications of this demographic shift.

Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00] Over 70 percent of single women identify as Democrat compared to only 45 percent of married women. The number of single women in the U S has increased 55 percent since 2000.

Simone Collins: Whoa, whoa, hold on. Okay. Reaching

Malcolm Collins: 2023.

Simone Collins: That is, that is huge.

Malcolm Collins: women in society historically they would rely on a partner to help care for them and to help care for their kids. Oh, and now it's the state. Yeah. And when you disintermediate the family unit, you can use the state both to decrease the BATNA of a woman to not have a partner.

Well, also acting as the caregiver, like these women are sort of like nuns to the state. They're basically married to the state.

Simone Collins: Wow. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Nuns to the state. That is.

Malcolm Collins: And I, and I also know that this trend could explain, for example, why black females overwhelmingly vote Democrats so much, because when you look at the number of single women, 47 percent of black adults are single compared to [00:01:00] 28 percent of not white adults and 27 percent of Hispanic adults

Simone Collins: I wish we could see information on the extent to which single women are getting government services

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: The number was larger than I thought 90% of welfare recipients are single women.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about why single cat ladies are overwhelmingly voted for Kamala Harris.

Simone Collins: But they're not all cat ladies, are they?

She'll become a crazy cat lady. She only has one cat. Give her time.

Malcolm Collins: I think it is easy to underestimate one, how heavily Kamala is leading with single women. And two, how much Democrats have worked to increase the number of single women and how much that number has increased.

Over the last few election cycles to give them better margins towards victory.

Simone Collins: Wait, just with single women. So even now more single [00:02:00] women than before are voting for Democrats.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no. They have created new single women. People are worried about them shipping in voters. They are creating a demographic of voters by making a portion of women intolerable to date, which It's very smart.

So we'll go over this whole thing. Single women are actually the only major demographic where Kamala and Democrats are still actually winning, which is what's really interesting. If you look at yeah, it's wild now.

Simone Collins: So this whole turning immigrants into. Leftist voters conspiracy theory has nothing on the single.

No, no, no. I mean, if you, if you

Malcolm Collins: look at married men, if you look at unmarried men, if you look at single women, if you look at married women, the only category where Kamala wins is single women.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: So let's go into this. Now obviously a lot of this was started with JD Vance's cat lady comment, which is why I joked on that to begin with [00:03:00] specifically.

He said a bunch of childless cat ladies, who are miserable at their own lives, want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And a lot of people took that really negatively, because a lot of women framed that as personal attacks against themselves.

Speaker 6: ThEy call her the Cat Lady. People say she's crazy just because she has a few dozen cats. But can anyone who loves animals that much really be crazy?

Speaker 7: Don't let me hurt you!

Malcolm Collins: Whereas, I understand his sentiment here, obviously what he means by this is, If you don't have a personal stake in the future of the country, you are going to make decisions which don't consider the future of the country, which is something we've repeatedly seen about the exploding amount of debt, the way people are handling things like social security in obviously unsustainable manners, nothing about the way the government is run right now.

And I'd say both parties are to blame for this to an [00:04:00] extent. Has the long term future of the country in mind anymore?

Simone Collins: Yes, the government is excessively short termist.

Malcolm Collins: But I thought it was also interesting how, like, Democrat mainstays reacted to J. D. Vance's comment. Specifically Taylor Swift attempted to flip the language on the head, signing off her endorsement of Kamala Harris with quote unquote childless cat lady.

Besides a photo of Swift and her cat, here, cat's name is Benjamin Button. Megan Cain, said in a social media post that the comment displayed an, quote, insensitivity and cruelty to women, end quote. Would you say that that comment was in any way cruel to women, or?

I mean, the cruelty is to women, and we'll do a whole other episode on this, who use cats to masturbate their parenting instinct. When I say masturbate, I mean that in a very literal sense, in the same way that sex is designed to attempt to get us to procreate and rear the next generation Women also have these instincts [00:05:00] that are designed to want babies so that they want the next generation, and they masturbate these instincts through, instead of childbirth, caring for small pets, which satiates them enough that they do not, I mean, satiates them temporarily.

We all know that's why they keep getting more, because that, that's the way this works is you, you think that you have satiated this instinct, but you haven't. So you get more and more and more until you've got 20 cats and you're sad and alone and fall asleep to the sound of your own scream.

Speaker: I want to be a lawyer and a doctor, because a woman can do anything. At 24, Eleanor had graduated from Harvard Medical and Yale Law.

Speaker 4: I'm a little burnt out. So, sometimes, don't shoot me, I have a glass of wine with Buster here.

He's a real comfort. I might even get a second cap.

Malcolm Collins: Any thoughts before I go further, Simone?

Simone Collins: It is insulting to insinuate that all childless cat [00:06:00] women are miserable with their lives because not all are. I don't think Taylor Swift is miserable.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): I'm guessing it, Simone made this assumption that thinking that if she was as wealthy and famous and respected as Taylor swift. Did she would not be unhappy, but if you actually look at Taylor swift songs, first, many of them are pining after having a guy who loves and cares for her. , which she doesn't, and that's part of what her sadness comes from.

But also you can look at her songs. It's specifically talk about it like this song, antihero, which has some lines. When my depression works, the graveyard shift, talking about well being depressed. , and she in the song labyrinth talks about how her breakups triggered depressive episodes. And if you look at public statements in interviews like miss Americana, the 20, 20 Netflix documentary. She alludes to fame, making her fundamentally unhappy, which it doesn't need to.

I mean, Simone and I have gathered a great deal of fame just today. Another article in the guardian came out about us. And I guess it's presumably [00:07:00] attacking us, but they also published a.

Slide deck we did on how to make new forms of government, which got me really excited. And I guess you can choose how you react to the things around you and single cat ladies choose to react to that.

And self-indulgent ways like Taylor swift does.

Simone Collins: For example, I don't think some of our friends who Our childless and cat owners are miserable, but in general, if I were childless and I owned cats, I wouldn't be by this.

It's a joke.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it also shows sort of a victim culture on the left of like, you know, he made fun of childless cat ladies. Therefore, although, you know, They call

Simone Collins: parents breeders. I mean, just

Malcolm Collins: If you have a huge amount of cognit Yeah, I've never taken offense to that, but like, it's like, It's an attempt to dehumanize your opponents, and I get that, But like, Childless Cat Ladies is a bit different, It's not like really dehumanization, It's characterization along a stereotype, Oh, it's not dehumanization because

Simone Collins: he talks about how they're miserable with their lives, Which I think [00:08:00] many of them would argue.

Is important because mental health is a major interest also of many single cat ladies. So I think many of them would tell their therapists that they're miserable with their lives It's not an inaccurate characterization even

Malcolm Collins: yeah. All right. So let's go over the stats Single women now make up 25 percent of the electorate.

In recent polls, Harris was leading among single women by nearly 40 points. Over 70 percent of single women identify as Democrat or lean Democrat, compared to only 45 percent of married women.

Simone Collins: To what extent do you think this is because they just identify with her? A fellow tech, biologically childless career woman.

This

Malcolm Collins: was the lawyer Jackson true when Biden was running. So it's not, it's gotten more extreme recently, but no, it's the Democrats have always disproportionately appealed to the single vote.

, I really want to highlight this. Cause I think it's a, it's a critical thing to note. 45%, [00:09:00] only 45%. of married women support Democrats. 70 percent of single women do.

Simone Collins: That's, yeah, that's, and you can say, well,

Malcolm Collins: maybe it's the Democrats don't get married, but actually you typically see a change in women after they get married.

And this brings me to something that you brought up earlier that I thought was really powerful is that a lot of older people are like, Oh, well, my daughter is young. And so she's still a Democrat, but when she gets older, she'll become a Republican. And you were pointing out, no, she won't like that used to be the case.

But your daughter isn't married. And it's like, when did you become a Republican, you know, to the women who say this? And it's like, well, after I got married and it's like, yeah, well, your daughter isn't getting married and has no ability to get married right now, given the way that she views the world and the way she views the opposite gender,

Simone Collins: even just given the way that relationship markets look work, there are so many single women we know who want to be married and just can't be married because they're high achieving women.

And it's very, very difficult for them to find. [00:10:00] Uncoupled, non completely weird and ruined in some way, single men who are higher achieving than them.

Malcolm Collins: Hypothesis question, Simone. Why do you believe that when women get married, they become more Republican? I mean, you did.

Simone Collins: To a great extent, you, you allowed me to To understand that I was permitted to have non hyper progressive beliefs.

And I did basically grow up in a cultural cult where I just thought that there were certain things you weren't allowed to think or believe.

Malcolm Collins: So basically you're saying it's communalism.

Simone Collins: It could be that. And I think there's also some element of when you become very close with your partner, you start to identify with them and see the world through them.

And I think that seeing, especially in this modern environment, seeing the world through a man's eyes. Can cause you to become pretty blackmailed to progressivism in general.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah Well, I think that the the the movement [00:11:00] and I I think this is probably the bigger thing Is that typically when people are married they begin to see themselves as the combined identity?

And also many of these women once they're married have sons And I think when you see how genuinely cruel and sadistic the existing urban monoculture and progressive party is to men And how much it dehumanizes men As we pointed out in our bears video, right? Where if you said this about any other group, when women were like, Oh my God, like, I'd rather be in the woods with a bear than a man. And I, and I then put into it like a black man. I'd rather be in the woods with a bear than a random black man. And you're like, Oh my God, that is super racist. Like, how could you you know,

black

Man is scary. Um, with a bear. What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you, right? So maybe a bear.

Probably a bear. 100 percent a bear, which is like, terrifying to say, but Definitely a bear. Some

Malcolm Collins: black

men are very scary out there. I bet. Even some men are saying bear, although we could predict that [00:12:00] this man's opinion will be whatever makes women approve of him. If I were alone in the woods, would you rather me encounter a bear or a

Malcolm Collins: black

man?

I feel more like bear. I don't know, cause I feel like I would know what the outcome would be with a bear.

Malcolm Collins: but the, the things that you're saying, you're like, Oh my God, this is an incredible level of prejudice, that if it was under any other guys, you would see it, and I think that women, until they identify seriously as a man, to some extent They don't see how anti male and how bigoted the mainstream progressive forces are.

And I think that once they have a son or something like that, they wake up and they're like, Oh my God, like all his real opportunities in life are taken away. He's going to have trouble, you know, getting a job. He's going to have trouble.

Simone Collins: And it's just a lot easier to dehumanize men in general, when you don't relate to them much at all in life.

Malcolm Collins: No, I think you're absolutely right about this. And I think it's, it's also that when people get married, they form a combined identity to an extent. And they stop, for example, for me, I don't identify as my own [00:13:00] gender that much anymore. And I think that this is actually really similar to, you know, if you go back to, let's say the 60s or 70s where sometimes men would get married and then they'd be like, now I see how harshly our society has been treating women.

And they'd become more interested in women's issues. I think we're seeing the opposite now because I think anyone who is actually neutral on this sees that overwhelmingly our society is anti male at this point.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: So I'm going to go further with stats here. The number of single women in the U S has increased 55 percent since 2000.

Simone Collins: Whoa, whoa, hold on. Okay. Reaching

Malcolm Collins: 2023.

Simone Collins: That is, that is huge. But I guess that's just another angle of all the dismal dating and sex stats we've seen.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, 55 percent growth that they've, that they've, you know, grown by more than half since 2000. I don't think, I think something that we, we can forget is that in the same way the [00:14:00] left might be motivated for immigrants to come into specific districts to vote there would be even more motivated.

So to be clear among single women, they get a larger share of the vote than they do among recent immigrants, like first generation immigrants. They. Do better off to break women up and I will note single men also vote more democratically, which we'll get to in a second.

Simone Collins: You know what? This makes a lot of sense to me too, because in general, when it comes to government handouts, which typically come to be more supported or more widespread under democratic leadership.

Women are the biggest beneficiaries by far, single women, especially they're the ones who get the most in terms of food stamps and payouts and services and health care. When you look at what social services are provided on a state or federal level. So that also kind of makes sense because in terms of like, even more than immigrants, it's single women who get the most.

Malcolm Collins: Well, one theory [00:15:00] that I have heard bantered about is that women in society historically they would rely on a partner to help care for them and to help care for their kids. Oh, and now it's the state. Yeah. And when you disintermediate the family unit, you can use the state both to make it lower costs, like decrease the BATNA of a woman to not have a partner.

Well, also acting as the caregiver, like these women are sort of like nuns to the state. They're basically married to the state.

Simone Collins: Wow. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Nuns to the state. That is.

Malcolm Collins: And I, and I also know that this trend could explain, for example, why black females overwhelmingly vote Democrats so much, because when you look at the number of single women, 47 percent of black adults are single compared to 28 percent of not white adults and 27 percent of Hispanic adults.

And here, I wouldn't know if you're talking about like, oh, you know, born out of wedlock and everything like that. Hispanics have a higher marriage rate than whites. If you're like, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's more

Simone Collins: conservative. [00:16:00] Culture, especially when it comes to things like marriage and having kids. I would

Malcolm Collins: just say more because they have stronger family units right now.

Sure. Yeah, that too. So, Wow.

Simone Collins: Another

Malcolm Collins: fun thing you can see, I think part of this is, progressivism has made women undateable and unmarriable, like the modern iteration of it.

You know, if you watch that video about, like, the woman who is in the Star Wars show, twerking about how oppressed she is, like, who, like, Who would want to marry that? As we've talked about in our video about black men and how hard it is for them to find partners, this is a zombification of black culture video where they used to be an even more conservative culture than white culture in terms of like family values, where they had half the number of Children born out of wedlock as white culture.

And this was as recently as the sixties. And now obviously it's astronomically more, but if we talk about like, where is this degradation coming from? And we'll get some, like, actually in this episode, some better understanding of how they corrupted black culture, which I think is really interesting.

But the number [00:17:00] of women in gender studies degrees has increased 300 percent since the 1990s. Oh, who needs that? Where is the

Simone Collins: demand for this? Where is the gender studies industry? Do they go to the gender studies factory to produce gender studies?

Malcolm Collins: Well, here's the thing, I, I, I imagine, no, they go work for these bureaucracies, which hire them to, like, be the thought police at companies, and that's literally what they're getting a degree in, is thought policing.

Oh,

Simone Collins: boy.

Malcolm Collins: And a lot of companies, as we pointed out, the way companies end up going woke, is they Are like, okay, we need to put a few token, whatever's in our company. Let's put them somewhere where they don't need to actually do anything. So they can't damage stuff. And then they put them in HR. And then they end up filtering for everyone else and they end up corrupting the entire company super quickly.

And this has been a repeated phenomenon in companies that if you're going to clean up a company, you have to start with HR HR could be completely unwoked. Anyone, anyone who is there other than on merit needs to be removed. And this is measurable merit [00:18:00] in terms of who they're hiring the output.

Those people are showing etc now in an analysis last year from pew research center Found that one quarter of all 40 year olds in 2021 had never been married

all right single women. So let's talk about single women at the demographic single women are Older, more educated and more financially independent than they were a generation earlier, and they are more motivated to vote. In 2000, 48 percent of single women reported voting. In 2020, that jumped to 61%.

According to the data from Catalyst, single women now make up one quarter of the electorate. Single men, on the other hand, make up only 19%. So single men voted dramatically lower rates than single women. So not only are there more single women, but they're voting at a higher rate. 48 percent in 2000 to 61 percent in 2020.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: And here I'm gonna put on the screen a graph here that shows this over time. So you can see the proportion of eligible single woman and single male voters who showed up.

Simone Collins: Oh, so [00:19:00] civic engagement for single women is going up. Yes. I wish we could see information on, I don't know how to, how I would measure this, the extent to which single women in the U.

S. are also getting government services, like, or benefiting.

Malcolm Collins: I'll look it up in post.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: The number was larger than I thought 90% of welfare recipients are single women.

Malcolm Collins: That's an interesting thing. And I'd also point out here that I think that this partially, when you think about these women as fundamentally being married to the state this one explains the increase in civil engagement, but it also explains the freak out when somebody like Trump is elected.

Simone Collins: Mm. Mm. Yes. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: to them. Now this thing that was like their source of like care and like their essentially partner has been

Simone Collins: hostile.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It was something that they see as fundamentally hostile to them.

Simone Collins: That's fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: Now here's a really interesting poll that I'll go over, but also put on the screen here.

When Harris took over the ticket, her support among [00:20:00] single women swelled in June before she became the democratic nominee, less than half of single women in a YouGov poll reported a favorable impact. By September, this jumped to nearly two thirds, and her support is growing. A recent Ipsos survey found Harris leading among single women voters by nearly 40 points.

So she went from less than half supporting her to 70 percent supporting her.

Simone Collins: Gotta thank Charlie SDX for at least 30 percent of that shift, I would say. Who is Charlie? She was made cool.

Malcolm Collins: The Brat Summer one? Yeah, maybe. I mean, single women are very vibes based voters. You know, they are not exactly. Here's another interesting stat that was shown here among married women only.

So remember less than half, 45 percent of single women supported Camilla when she, before she was on the ticket, 35 percent of married women had a favorable impression of her. So very low. And then [00:21:00] at the peak of married women having a favorable opinion of her, that was August and it was still well below 40%.

Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. That's very interesting. So suddenly single women started really identifying with Kamala and yet married women.

Malcolm Collins: And when it was married women, it's now since August into September, it's gone down again. So she only has you know, hovering around maybe like 36, 37 percent compared to what was around 34 percent before she was running.

So this whole Camilla remediation campaign to like remediate her public image. It seems to have been incredibly effective among single women, basically fizzled among married women. Their impression of her now is not that different than their impression of her before she ran. I find it really fascinating.

Simone Collins: Yes. Wow. There's definitely something there. I need to think more about what that could be because the funny thing is Camilla is married. Kamala has [00:22:00] stepchildren. It's not like she should be some single woman icon, but definitely the Bratz Summer Association is more of a, an unhinged, messy, single woman mood.

And single women certainly appreciate more the sorts of Government handouts and services that I think.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I also think that they're more likely to vote with the crowd because they feel less protected than married women. I think the communalist instinct in women might be louder when they feel that they don't have a caregiver.

Because in those instances are more.

Simone Collins: There aren't. There is not another very, very strong attenuating influence in their lives that might temper their thoughts on things. So when they see something in the news or media or someone they admire, say something, there isn't some partner or friend next to them being like, I don't know, like poking holes in the arguments, [00:23:00] essentially.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. All right. Well, here is another poll. Single women overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris. And this is showing Trump Harris refused. So when you have married women, it's 46 to 46 in this particular poll. So exactly equal married men. It's 55 percent Trump to 42 percent Kamala. Never married women.

It is 65 percent Harris, 28 percent Trump. And in this particular poll, never married men actually support Harris more than Trump, 51 percent to 41%, but I've seen the opposite in other polls. So this is fascinating. So Democrats hugely benefit from breaking up marriages hugely

now. We're going to talk about some other interesting things here. So, in a Gallup 2020 survey, 21 percent of single women said they could not support a candidate who did not share their views on abortion. This year, that jumped to 35%. The [00:24:00] General Social Survey has found that Americans across the board have become increasingly supportive of access to abortion in any circumstance.

But, the shift among single women has been especially dramatic. In its 2022 survey, two thirds of single women said that abortion should be available for any reason, a view held by less than half of single women a decade earlier. So our country is becoming more pro abortion. And I think that this is one of those things where you, you have not seen this same insane rise in Europe.

And I think that a lot of this is downstream as we've talked about in other episodes. Of the view that life begins at conception, which, by the way, is not a biblical view. The Bible very clearly says life begins before conception is something that the Catholic church made up about 200 years ago with Pope Pius IX and then was chosen by the Republican Party.

The Republican Party used to be actually the pro choice party in the 70s, the Republican National Convention. They were more pro choice and anti choice, but they choose to accept it to try to bring Catholics over and it didn't even work. Catholics still vote overwhelmingly Democrats. So I don't [00:25:00] know why we keep it as a position.

It's it's. It's not a Protestant position. It's not a Christian position. It's not a, it's a one that the, the Pope who did the great castration came up with, you know, I

Simone Collins: get the impression that many American Protestants are anti abortion now, mostly because the Republican party went anti abortion. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, I, I see that.

Like they, they are unaware, like they think it's a Christian thing or like an ancient Catholic thing. And it's like, like, as we point out, St. Augustus didn't think this Thomas Aquinas didn't think this, like no great Catholic thinker in history have thought this.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I definitely get that because we've met quite a few Protestants who are very suspicious of abortion even hormonal birth control.

And

Malcolm Collins: before a nervous system has developed, which to me is just, but it's ended up destroying, I think the, the Republican's ability to earn ground share on this and things are moving further and further in the opposite direction, which is leading to more and more abortions, which is like, you're functionally like, do you want to?

Like, when do you want to lower the amount of abortions, or are you [00:26:00] okay with, so that you can masturbate to this aesthetic view towards abortion, continue losing? Yeah,

Simone Collins: this purist view of life begins exactly at conception, instead of a more moderated view of, hey, you know, it looks like, you know, you're looking at killing a human regardless, but we see it as killing a human when you decide not to have kids, so, you know, where you start is arbitrary.

I think What when it really matters that you're killing a human is when you start killing humans, that is, that will feel pain as you kill them, and then you need to look at it very differently. And that's it. If we started looking at it at 12 to 15 weeks is, hey, let's put severe controls on this. So many abortions.

could be managed very differently. And we could probably have far fewer abortions as you point out.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and you've pointed this out with people calling you, like Republicans will call you and be like, I want you to have a you know, life being at the conception stance. And you're like, well, my stance would dramatically one is more likely to pass.

Two, it would lower the number of abortions when contrasted with [00:27:00] my the person I'm running against. So they're like, no, if you won't take this stance, I'm voting for your opponent.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Meaning that they're voting for. Yeah. It's just, I think that demonstrates how illogical and And virtue signaling for

Malcolm Collins: them, they don't actually care about the children or they would do apparently

Simone Collins: not.

Yeah, because if you did, you would be very focused on anything that gets you marginally closer just to your preferences. And even if your preferences are absolutely 0 abortions ever. You would still want to vote for me, even though I only care about controls after week 12.

Malcolm Collins: Now I also know and this is important to note around all this when people are like, well, you know trump and his abortion trump has said that if elected he would veto a national abortion ban Veto, not, not, not support.

He would veto one.

So to go further here with stats for most of the, the past two decades, women felt largely content with their treatment in the U S that all [00:28:00] changed after Trump's election and the hashtag me to movement. Less than half of women in 2021, his Gallup survey said they felt satisfied about the way they were treated in American society, historic low single women were the least satisfied.

And I will,

Simone Collins: isn't that so funny that. After supposed corrections to, you know, maltreatment against women, women started feeling worse when before, when supposedly these, this mistreatment was happening unrecognized and unpunished that women were happier.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, this is something you see across the board as women get rights.

They become less happy. I'll put a graph here that shows that in the mid 1970s, women were significantly more happy than men. And that women's happiness went down, went down, went down over time as they got more right through the eighties into the nineties. And then by the early nineties, women net were unhappy with their lives.

I think this is

Simone Collins: largely what Phyllis Schlafly was famous for arguing. Basically saying, [00:29:00] why are you making us work? We don't want to work. We have, we have a good here.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I know these women are, are, well, keep in mind, even in the seventies the majority of women works Simone or when this, this trend started, I don't think that that's what this is in relation to.

I think it's in relation to a vested interest among Democrats for women to be unhappy and feel like they are victims and I think

Simone Collins: same thing they did with black culture.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And so you actually see here you know, by the 2000s and mid nineties, women were net less happy with their lives than men.

And that's been persistent since then. And it went up again, dramatically, or I guess you should say down again, dramatically with me too, and has stayed down since then. Where women, especially single women just feel very disempowered, even if it is functionally not true.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: And here I want to talk about more recent statistics.

So one statistic I found really interesting was the anxiety. What was it? U. S. based mental health days for female and male differential [00:30:00] 1993 to 2021. And you can just see it shooting up specifically after 2019. After 2019, women's mental health absolutely explodes.

Simone Collins: Hmm. What do you think happened in 2019?

Malcolm Collins: I think that this is when wokeism really began to take over mainstream culture and many women began to identify with like, this is when the wokes basically won. I mean, and I think that the black lives matter thing was like the victory lap. I

Simone Collins: think there's something more subtle too. I think this is when you saw much more pervasive use of remote therapy services.

Both through programs like better health, but also which is private pay. And through healthcare sorry, health insurance providers. So you don't administer our family's health insurance. You don't see this. But starting in [00:31:00] 2019, our health insurance provider started offering free mental health counseling as part of its benefit.

And it's not just our mental health. It's not just our health insurance provider, which is UnitedHealthcare. Aetna, which I also was on for a period in 2020 did the same or 2021. And I had never seen that before. And it was interesting to see that just as part of your default. Coverage that you'd be getting mental health services.

So I think another issue is that more people than ever we're getting therapy. And as we've discussed in countless other episodes, therapists who managed to stay in business to a great extent are those which seem to help people magnify their problems and not resolve them because of course, those are the ones that keep.

So don't lose their clients. And I think that may have something to do with it as well. I

Malcolm Collins: think we might be onto something here. I think that these could be incredibly toxic because it's

Simone Collins: an industry shift. Like it's about this availability of a product [00:32:00] that is quite toxic,

Malcolm Collins: but talk about the idea of therapists being the missionaries monoculture.

That's true. Yeah. Yeah. They are vectors that spread it. So they

Simone Collins: go hand in hand. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So like, if you're a Catholic and you send, you know, you go to your priest, right? Whereas if you are dealing with something as a far progressive or urban monoculture devotee, you go to your therapist and you go, Oh, you know, I have, I have had this sinful thought.

You know, repeat, whatever. How do I indulge further is basically not how do, how do I repent? How do I indulge even more in this sinful thought without feeling bad about it? That's really what you go to a you know, so many of these, when I see people go to their therapist, they're like, I've done this horrible thing.

Can you help me not feel bad about it?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or, or can you help me build a narrative about it? That helps me identify with it personally. Like this was something that happened to me when I was a child, I was traumatized. Now I'm going to live my entire life as this hero's journey narrative attempting to overcome this great [00:33:00] slight done to me as a child by my parents.

Malcolm Collins: I disagree. I think that this is put on them by the therapist because what they're really going to do these mental health sessions for is for somebody to tell them it's not their fault.

Speaker 5: Oh, forgive me, Tyrael, please. It wasn't my fault. Not your fault? Tell me, Malleus, how was it not your fault?

Simone Collins: No, but that's what I'm saying is it is put on them by the therapist, but the therapist is helping them weave a narrative that turns their mental problem into their identity.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's what I mean, but they don't go to a therapist saying this horrible thing happened to me in childhood. No, no, no, the therapist makes that up. The

Simone Collins: therapist is like, let's now talk about your childhood.

Malcolm Collins: They go to the therapist and say, Here's this horrible thing I did to my friends or here's this horrible thing I did to my kids or here's this horrible thing I did to whoever why is it not my fault?

You know that that's that is the role that therapists have taken on Instead of help me repent. I've done this [00:34:00] horrible thing which is a very compelling it to to convert into because it removes a lot of personal responsibility I'd also note here that you know, we we would be remiss to not point out You that the possibility of electing the first female president is important to 60 percent of single women voters was interesting.

It's not that important to married women voters.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, that makes sense. Because again, as we discussed earlier, married women aren't necessarily just defining themselves as me woman anymore. It's me family at that point, or at least me and my husband.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Have we had a female vice president yet? I feel.

Oh yeah. Camilla.

Simone Collins: No. Oh yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I guess I just don't think of her as a woman. Like that's one of the weird things about it. She doesn't like really give feminine energy. She gives more like mindless bureaucratic drone energy.

Simone Collins: I feel that way about all of us. Most politicians, so I don't [00:35:00] know, I mean, they're appealing and really came off as feminine.

Who else? What are other female? Yeah, there are plenty of female candidates who come off as feminine. So never mind.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, even Hillary, she came off as, as pitchy and conniving, but she came off as feminine nonetheless.

Simone Collins: She had mom energy having mom energy. She had mom energy.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I, I'd say a OC comes off as pretty feminine.

Yeah. I'd say most of the other, but Kamala just doesn't have an ounce of femininity in terms of her energy. And I think it's because she, I don't know. But the laugh,

Simone Collins: the, the, the smiling, the evasive answers all feel very feminine to me.

Malcolm Collins: I love you're relying on negative stereotypes of women to build this caricature.

Simone Collins: What? Smiling is not negative. Smiling and laughing is not negative. It's joy.

It was the

one thing that got Kamala a huge surge in polling was this whole, just the, the first [00:36:00] attempt at just vibes and no substance, which was all joy and laughter and happiness. Those are great attributes for her and it certainly helped her.

It's the one thing that has helped her.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, it reminds me of Camilla's laugh at the, the ad that we've done, remember where you could buy food when you could buy food and it's Camilla laughing. By the way, Simone, I was actually really confused by the Scott Alexander promotion of Camilla because it looked genuine when, when I read it.

And yet, he cited, like, David Duke supporting her, and, like, Curtis Yarvin, when Curtis Yarvin was clearly doing it as a joke, and David Duke was obviously doing it so other people wouldn't support her, like, I wonder if he was signaling that he meant it as a joke? Because David Duke, he must know, David Duke isn't actually supporting Kamala.

He's doing it to try to taint her reputation.

Simone Collins: I don't know. I really don't know. I don't know. [00:37:00] I think it was an earnest and an earnest endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Malcolm Collins: That's what I read. I will cite the people who he cited. Hold on really quickly.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And Nick Fuentes, he cited yeah, no, he, he cited, I think Nick Fuentes, I don't know if Nick Fuentes is earnestly endorsing Kamala.

I really don't know, but While that paragraph was a little bit confusing, and maybe a little bit of a flippant joke, I do think the rest of his Arguments were very earnest.

Malcolm Collins: So he said, Richard Spencer, David Duke, Nick Fuentes, and Curtis Yarvin. Now I know Curtis Yarvin cause I was just talking with him two days ago about this was joking.

Sorry, we just got back from hereticon and had a lot of fun with Curtis is actually a really fun guy. I consider him a friend. By the way, he's looking pretty fit these days. Looking very good. Yeah. Did you notice like he used to be bigger, right? Like it's not just me.

Simone Collins: I'm not really good [00:38:00] at remembering or noticing these things, but he, he looked great at Hereticon.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It looks great. But so Curtis Jarvis, I don't know, I don't know, Nick Fuentes, Richards. I actually beef with Nick Fuentes and some of the things I've written. So like, I, I strongly disagree with well specifically I very obviously given my push turds, pluralism have a problem with, um, what's it called?

Catholic integralism which is Nick Fuentes like, core political And he's

Simone Collins: also anti immigration, right? And you're super pro immig I'm pro skilled Skilled immigration.

Malcolm Collins: Anti unskilled immigration. Richard Spencer, obviously, I don't know Come on, he must He can't, he can't say heterodox thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, David Duke.

Does he think that they really support her? It

Simone Collins: could be, you know, I don't get the impression. And I think he even read about this in his post that he's not very politically involved and he doesn't really like writing about this, but he feels a need, a civic responsibility [00:39:00] to make comments and to use his platform for good.

And he genuinely doesn't think that Donald Trump is the best candidate for some valid reasons. He has, he's some valid concerns, especially if you don't know. A lot of the background. Yeah. There, there's additional No, no, no. I have no problem. I think if he did know he, he would be more in favor of Trump.

But given how skewed most information people have available about Trump is, I don't blame him. Especially if he's not interested in this stuff and he's not super tapped in. And also keep in mind, he lives in the heart of a very, very progressive area. So he, yeah. His availability to anything that isn't super biased is like.

No, sorry.

Malcolm Collins: I'm not saying I don't have any problem with this. This is, I would expect him to support Camelot. Like that would be like, what's he going to do? Right? Like he basically got a gun to his head from all directions given where he lives.

Speaker 13: Uh, a bear? I didn't know what [00:40:00] else to paint! FasTer! Ha! People of all colors agree to hold hands

Speaker 15: beneath a rainbow!

Speaker 14: That wasn't so hard, was it? Now do it again!

Malcolm Collins: He doesn't, he doesn't exactly have a choice in the matter. But

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: but the, the thing I found interesting was how he does it.

Like I can't tell if he's trying to underhandedly signal, no, I don't actually support her, but I'm going to make No,

Simone Collins: because there's arguments or two. And even his counterarguments where he's like, here's one. Like my best man,

Malcolm Collins: like it was all the arguments and counterarguments and then he's like, like Curtis Jarvin, David Duke.

I know. I know that

Simone Collins: I'm just assuming that he doesn't read deeply on that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's, that's actually almost like endearingly cute that like he sees this and he's like, yeah, they all genuinely [00:41:00] support her and aren't doing it to try to poison her by attaching their known toxic reputations to her. Anyway, I found that really fun.

So, any final thoughts, Simone?

Simone Collins: I, you have fundamentally shifted once again. I just, I love you so much. I love our conversations. You fundamentally shifted the way that I view married women in the United States. They are Like nuns, but married to the state and the state, like a partner would provides them when they need it with food, with health care, with safety, even with housing with child care support, it basically does everything a husband would do and it's stepping in to do more and more of that.

While further isolating them from any form of community or relationship that would give that to them. And this is just so indicative of what the urban monoculture does, which is atomized humans, [00:42:00] disintermediate strong communities and strong social ties that people used to rely on for help and replace that.

With government and private services that will do it instead. And while if you'd asked me before I learned more, if that's a problem, I'd be like, no, it's better, whatever market competition, you know, this, this parses everything apart from corrupted religions, but now, I mean, I've, I've seen how childcare fails.

I've seen how these services are not enough and they're not producing flourishing humans. And so it's, it's. It's very sad and toxic what's happening.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I would say my core takeaway from this, and, you know, previously I said, if Trump comes into office, one thing I'd really like to help run for the department or work on for the department is helping clean up the size of government, you know, cut it down for Republicans to win longterm, one of the most efficacious efforts they could focus on, it would be akin to them, to the unrestricted immigration that [00:43:00] Democrats are focused on.

is getting people married.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It would be good for pronatalism. It would be good for the state and it would increase their odds of winning.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So you need to do what Tokyo is doing with that dating app, but way better, way more effective. Well, I mean, I think that they can get back to my gosh. This is, so there's been all these Bridgerton balls that are failed social media scams, but people keep going to them because they just want there to be the London, really people don't know what the London season is, but they want the London season again.

They want Debbie top balls. They want to like find their man. And there actually have been, I think in Utah for a while, the governor actually organized big parties. I think in the government governor's mansion. Bringing people together, sometimes singles, but I think sometimes just old people do whatever, like all sorts of people.

But if just on a wide scale, we brought back Debbie tot balls, you would like debut to the president, you know, and then you, you bow and you get dressed and you do this whole thing and you'd be on the dating market. [00:44:00] People would fricking love that the Instagram opportunities. I actually

Malcolm Collins: think that you're right about that.

Like I hadn't considered this, but bringing back the concept of the debutante ball, people love parties.

Simone Collins: People want to dress up for stuff and people don't get to dress up for

Malcolm Collins: anything. And that is an aristocracy again, but something that they can participate in. Not

Simone Collins: just Like just having an opportunity to take photos of something and dress up for something, ready for something.

In fact, there's even this weird gen alpha trend where they're like, Oh my gosh, it's so cute. You get to put on little outfits and everything where they're like talking about how novel and cute it is to go to an office because they just get to go and like dress up and look pretty for something. We need this.

Okay. So. There's my little dream.

Malcolm Collins: I love those. And imagine in a few generations, they might be a romanticization of the days when people worked from offices. Yeah. And like

Simone Collins: power lunch and stuff like, Oh my gosh, how cute. Like, Oh my

Malcolm Collins: gosh, how quaint and historic. People

Simone Collins: can afford to eat at restaurants.

And yeah, I mean, it just, yeah. But I, I've, I [00:45:00] feel like things like that are so underrated and they'd be so inexpensive to execute. And, and yet. It's wasted all these governor's mansions, the White House, all these event spaces are wasted and now used for stupid salesforce gatherings. You know, it's just so sad that they're all just for corporate retreats now and marketing events when they could be for bringing people together.

That's what these old spaces were originally meant for ballrooms. When are ballrooms used for balls anymore? Right. I was thinking about this the other day when we were looking at hotel ballrooms and various like spaces and walking around. And I was like, there are no balls anymore. Why are you calling it a ballroom?

Like call it an event space. Give up, stop. You're embarrassing yourself. This is sad.

Malcolm Collins: Well, at, at Hereticon, we were, we were, we were at like the nicest, like, like club thing. It was insane. You know, it was like a,

Simone Collins: it was like a museum. It was like a Bond film party. No, I wasn't [00:46:00] there were ambient

Malcolm Collins: dancers where they had like people on stilts and like skimpy outfits and everything Other it's like just waving their arms yes, yes, and I Walked around and they had like, you know like figures holding like glow glowing orbs and stuff and like multiple areas where you could like look at other people dancing from like Upstairs and everything.

Simone Collins: It was

Malcolm Collins: wild but I also said it was interesting how much I took in of this is I am so appreciative that this is not my life that I am not in this like daily Silicon Valley aristocracy, which I was for a while. And they do parties like this constantly. Do you remember back in like Silicon Valley when we had to go to like all of the VC parties and stuff like that?

Cause we were like raising and it's like a thing.

Simone Collins: It's a thing. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that it's just important to, to like gut check. And I, I feel so bad that so many people don't get the opportunity to do [00:47:00] this. How much you would actually be unhappy if you were living this, like whatever lifestyle.

Simone Collins: I think it could be fun if it were about finding a partner.

Because then it's all about planning a partnership, it's

romance, it's planning with your friends, it's thinking about what your future could be. Which

Malcolm Collins: is funny because at like, okay, so like at Hereticon, you and I, I think we're friends, like good friends with all of the most eligible single girls, and like we're trying to find them partners.

And like striking out.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, guys expectations are unreasonable. And that's one of the biggest issues. And it's also really hard to find guys who are good enough for high achieving women. But that's something we've beaten on until it's.

Malcolm Collins: Or willing to settle. High achieving guys just aren't willing to settle.

Simone Collins: No, not at all. Yeah. So they're going to live alone forever.

Malcolm Collins: I love you to death, Simone. You are my absolute favorite. I gotta show you. She has fallen asleep and it is really cute.

Simone Collins: [00:48:00] She was

Malcolm Collins: just out. Oh, she was freaking out before.

Simone Collins: Well, she always gets a little fussy before she falls asleep, but then once she's out, she's out, so

Malcolm Collins: I love you.

You're amazing.

Speaker 16: You gotta see if you're tall enough. Come on over here. Yes, come on, come on. Come on! Wait.

Speaker 18: Am I tall enough? Come, come closer to me. You've got chocolate all over your face. Am I tall enough? Yes, you're too tall. I'm too tall? Okay. Yes, you're too tall. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

The video explores whether 'love at first sight' truly exists, examining historical references and scientific studies. It touches on selective memory bias, medieval concepts of love, and modern research on oxytocin and dopamine. The hosts also discuss how physical attraction plays a vital role in these instant romantic connections, the role of cultural attractors, and how AI could predict romantic compatibility. The conversation digs into the biochemical pathways involved in love and lust, historical perspectives, and culminates with reflections on genetic predispositions and societal norms regarding relationships.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I've got a question for you. Do you believe in love at first sight?

Simone Collins: I believe in lust at first sight.

Malcolm Collins: Well, around 52 to 66 percent of people in the U. S. claim to have experienced love at first sight. However, this belief may be bolstered by a selective memory bias where individuals romanticize their initial encounters over time.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: However, what I would say is we have actually seen the concept of love at first sight discussed All the way back in history. We see it in Greek stories. Oh, so you see it in like Ovid metamorphosis, the story of Pygmalion depicts a sculptor falling in love with a statue he created at first light.

Site or the greek myth of narcissus who falls in love with his own reflection Also embodies a form of instant love And they even had a mechanism of action for it in the medieval period where The eyes of the lady [00:01:00] when encountered by those of her future lover thus generated And conveyed , a bright light from her eyes to his

Simone Collins: laser.

Malcolm Collins: So, yeah, no, they thought that, like, love was something that, like, woman generated inside of them and then, like, shot at men with their eyes. This is terrifying. This is just Captured his heart. But they might've been right about that. We'll get into in a little bit, but I want to hear, well, your lust at first sight comment is really astute when they look at the data.

And we'll get into this in a second, but what they found is yes. It appears that there does. appear to be this emotional thing that people call love at first sight. But it only occurs to people you find physically attractive. People aren't falling in love at first sight with their chubby whatever husband, they are falling in love at first sight with people who are generically [00:02:00] attractive.

And when people say they love someone at first sight who is not well, arousing to them or more generically attractive. They're typically lying in a supposed fact saying Or they were

Simone Collins: looking at their Bugatti instead. They just happened to be inside it.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. One of my favorite is that medieval texts also would, would compare the gaze of a beautiful woman to the sight of a basilisk.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You've got Medusa as well that turned men to stone with her beautiful gaze. Oh, they made

Simone Collins: them rock hard. Yes. This is what

Malcolm Collins: happens. Made them rock hard, right? Yeah. This is what

Simone Collins: really, there was just something was lost in translation and we thought, Oh, you mean they, they turned into a stone.

They're like, nah, kind of. So one thing I will say that I think is interesting is that even now When I have our podcast on or something and I, I freeze it and. [00:03:00] I walk by our computer screen and I see your figure, but I don't realize it's our podcast. It's on the screen. I'm like, Oh, who's that? And then also when we're in airports and you and I are separate or you're out walking by yourself and I'm just gazing across a crowd.

And I see you and I don't know it's you. I'm all like, who's this? Who's this? And I think that that's what people are describing as love at first sight is that you're just so much my type that even when I don't realize it's you, my body is just like, Yeah, we

Malcolm Collins: definitely had that reaction when we first met where you're like, and I still

Simone Collins: have it.

I still have it when I don't realize it to you. I have a different reaction when I know it's you because it's more like my person. But when I don't know, it's you. I definitely feel this like. Spark and I can totally understand what [00:04:00] these whatever medieval writers were talking about in terms of this, like, like lasers.

So, but again, I, I, I think that's entirely physical lust. And not well, and I mean, it would

Malcolm Collins: logically have to be so I'd also like to walk back here where people act like the concept of love at first sight is a romantic concept when really I see it as an anti romantic concept. Oh, yeah, because you don't know anything about the person yet.

You don't know anything about them.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You would have to believe that In magic or the soul and that love is somehow capturing these systems Except we we understand love very well at like a psychological level. And it is not magic. It is not fairy dust uh Well, i'll read a quote here anthropologist Helen fisher who studied the brain activity of people madly in love with each other through mri scans says that romantic It says here through MRI scans, but it's wrong.[00:05:00]

It must have been through fMRI scans. But anyway says that romantic love takes a very quote unquote primitive pathway through the brain. The good feelings we experience when falling in love is driven by dopamine, the brain chemical behind our motivation to find food, water, and everything else we need for survival, and also some oxytocin, which we'll get into in a second.

It's just like the other survival mechanisms, like fear, for example, it can be triggered instantly. So, what we mean is, because we understand what love is, fundamentally, in the brain then the concept of, can it be triggered instantly, is just a concept of, Are some humans born abnormal? And yeah, of course, you know, even, even though we might be coded for like men to find women attractive and women to find men attractive, you're going to get some percentage of the population where that's not the case.

It's the same with a system like love. It was coded to only form after long periods of time. time it's going to accidentally fire sometimes when like the lust system is supposed to be firing or something like that. Well, and

Simone Collins: I think it's you're wrong to [00:06:00] use the word love when you say that yes, love at first sight exists because there are very different things that are happening hormonally between lust and love.

And also Let's say you see someone and you feel that spark and you're very attracted to them, but then you discover that they were war criminal and they have a habit of torturing people and you know that you're probably not going to love them. You know that they may be hot, but they're really bad. I disagree.

Do you know how many? Sorry, I should have. Okay. Okay. I need to use a better example for you. It turns out they're French. Okay. And then you're just like, Oh my God. Yeah. So nevermind. I'm just saying, The loving a person is very different. It involves knowing who they are, how they think. Although I will, I guess you have to add, there's this additional complication in Alexander cruel.

I think I sent you a link to this on what's up today. And we should probably include it in the description has 1 page. He put together of just all of the studies that show what AI and [00:07:00] or researchers. Can infer from just an image of someone's face so you can infer anything from mental health problems to various genetic conditions to whether they are liberal or conservative to are they happy or depressed?

And I guess against my own argument and judgment, I could argue that based on just someone's appearance alone. You could make a lot of inferences about them and perhaps know them better than the average person would like to suggest. Yeah, that might be a

Malcolm Collins: big part of this, actually. And this is something, you know, obviously the progressives don't want to talk about, or the urban monoculture people don't want to talk about, because it's like, Oh, if you can tell something by somebody's face, what you're really looking at is genetic correlates there.

And we build enough patterns to recognize, like, you can judge with a really high probability whether someone's conservative or progressive.

Simone Collins: Even criminals look different. Like even on average, people who commit crimes, they're, they're, they're amalgamated faces look [00:08:00] quite different. AI

Malcolm Collins: is going to get really good at making these sorts of judgments, which I I'm very interested to see if we can work this into the criminal system or hiring systems and stuff like that.

Cause I imagine that facial judgments made by AIs are probably going to be more accurate to personality than these big, long, like, Surveys that people fill out for like, if

Simone Collins: already AI is 60 to 70 percent accurate and judging things ranging from mental health conditions to political affiliation, it's going to only get worse.

And you're right, but I think most people, when they discover this are not going to say, oh, how great that is. They're going to say, oh, my gosh, this is, this is minority report. We're going to be arrested just because our face implies that we're going to become an ax murderer. That's not well,

Malcolm Collins: we can do a little minority report, but you know, actually, I was

Simone Collins: just looking at another study actually that was looking at sex crimes and it found that there was a really high genetic correlate.

In other words, if if your brother commits a [00:09:00] sex crime. You are much more likely like your odds of also committing one of those crimes is as much higher. And the researchers who looked into this were arguing that, you know, this is a strong basis for perhaps engaging in preventative interventions related to siblings of people who are convicted of these crimes.

Because if you do that preemptively, You could probably keep

Malcolm Collins: in mind. I mean, for the blank Slater's who are like, Oh, keep the baby when you're great. I'm not in favor of that.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: I think not abortion in the attachment to the kid because they raised the kid, but I'm just saying, like, there are.

Externalities involved here for other people that you might not be thinking about because you're

Simone Collins: choosing to also pass on the behavioral traits of a criminal who committed who committed a crime creating that human who is innocent and guilty. I mean complicated.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I will [00:10:00] also say here before we go further into the science to go over our theory of love, which we talked about in either the pragmatist guided relationships or the pragmatist guided sexuality which would actually preclude love at first sight.

So when I was looking at the concept of love, my general assumption is that love probably first evolved in mammals. And in the book, we go over a lot of evidence for this to keep us from competing, whiz, killing, eating our offspring. It was something that we needed to be able to develop so that we, you know, when we looked at an offspring where we're like, Oh yes, bonded with this.

I am going to I love this thing. Yeah. And we always say evolution is a cheap programmer. So evolution will pick up an emotional state that was created within one scenario to use in a different scenario, but it becomes highly useful. Love is very different from lust. Yeah. In that it is longer term, it leads to caring for the thing, not just wanting to pay more attention to it, and it [00:11:00] leads to admiration and veneration for the thing.

And all of these are very useful in the way you treat a spouse if we were beginning to develop as a monogamous species. As such, the love system needed to learn to trigger for spouses. Here's the problem. We don't have anything that is unique to a spouse. In terms of our daily interactions. Like, is it the person you interact with the most?

Is it the person you admire the most? Is it the person you, you know, there's just not a really, so, okay. What collection of things did it begin to collect as this is a spouse? So I will generate love emotions for them. And. It's a bit like if I'm going to word it this way, the way we can determine what the love system is measuring is by looking at when the love system breaks.

So when do we experience love when we shouldn't be experiencing [00:12:00] love? And it's a bit like was Indiana Jones. It's like, okay, this. Stone is triggered by weight, so yes, it could be triggered by a golden idol, a spouse, but it could also be, you know, triggered by a bag of sand.

Simone Collins: And if you get it

Malcolm Collins: wrong, you know, then the ball starts rolling, right?

You know, so you gotta say, okay. What is, what is the actual mechanism of action here? And when I look at when I've experienced love, other than interacting with a partner or child, it is when thinking about or meditating on really big, expansive concepts examples here would be. The vastness of the universe and how small I am in relation to it.

Or the ways that various like really complicated sciences interact with each other, like the vastness of how like neurons actually work and the brain actually works and everything like that, or. When I think about my relation to [00:13:00] something like a deity that does a very good job of that, but specifically when I am thinking about incomprehensible aspects of the deity from my own perspective, it could be things that are designed to be incomprehensible, like the trinity or a cone by the way, a cone is one of those things in Buddhist philosophy where they're like a tree fell in the woods, but then when they're, P O A N.

Simone Collins: Right? Not. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And you're like, well, I mean, it created a reverberation, whether anyone picked that up with their auditory, they slapped you. They're like, that's not what it means. And it's like, well, I mean, then you're just like gaslighting me. Like you're trying to show me that you are, are, are superior to me.

When really you asked a fairly simple question. Do you mean, did it create a vibration or was there anyone there to hear the vibration? That we interpret as sound. And because you are from a simple backwards culture, you don't think of it that way. You think of it as, as some intractable question, which maintains this hierarchy.

I am not a fan of cones. I think that they are a form of [00:14:00] abuse and within any other world, we would call them gaslighting. But anyway I'm sorry, it's just a horror meant to systemically disempower people from asking questions or trusting their own judgment. But let's not get into that. They do, they do create this love emotion.

And so when I look at that, I'm like, okay, so then what's really creating the love emotion? I think it is

anything that you think about frequently. So it's not looking at how often you interact with a person. It seems to be measuring how much you are thinking about a person or a concept. The second thing is, The vastness of that concept, like how deep is your thought about this concept, right? And this can be triggered with something that is arbitrarily incomprehensible to a human mind, like the Trinity or it can be something that is genuinely complex and deep, like the vastness of reality.

And then it looks at, do you find this thing to be comforting and safe? And if you hit all of those things, you're going to experience this love output. And I [00:15:00] think that these things aren't experienced in this love at first sight, which is really, I think, a lust output for most people, except people was like, really like broken systems.

But let's go into the research on this so we can see what's actually here. But do you have any thoughts before I go further?

Simone Collins: You had said to me just the other day that you weren't sure if you ever really felt the feeling of love or that you, you said that you don't really know what love feels like.

And I kind of agree with you on that. So that's where I, I can generate

Malcolm Collins: a feeling that appears to be the feeling that other people are calling love by meditating on complex topics. And

Simone Collins: like that doesn't resonate for, I mean, but also I don't know if this is an autistic thing. Like maybe I can't figure it out.

Remember

Malcolm Collins: my mom said that autistic people can't love. Yeah, there's like a wife who truly loves you because she's autistic.

Simone Collins: Yeah, she's so great. I love her so much. I miss her. I,

Malcolm Collins: I honestly, I prefer a wife who is infatuated with me than one who loves [00:16:00] me. That is, that is.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I mean, so there's this, I hope you can find this clip.

There's this famous clip with. I've told you about it when Prince Charles and Princess Diana were engaged and a journalist asks Diana and Charles, are you in love? And Diana says something like, yes. And he's like, whatever that means, obviously the worst thing to ever say. And that has come back to bite him a billion times, but I don't disagree, right?

Like what even is love?

Speaker: I suppose in love. Of course. Whatever in love means.

Simone Collins: Like, what are you asking me? What is this? And. It's such a kludgy thing. And another point that we make in the pragmatist guide to relationships is that Love is not useful to anyone. Abusive people love their partners. That doesn't help them. You know, creeps stalkers, murderers often love [00:17:00] their victims a lot.

So much that they just want to eat their faces, you know. Just like, love is not useful to the recipient. And there is a correlation to your point about evolution being a cheap programmer and perhaps it hijacking the love of a parent that's very, you know, hormonal for, you know, the love of a child.

And there are many correlates that are also then, I think, highly associated with last year, there's oxytocin and there's dopamine and there's serotonin, you know, all these things kind of factor in. And there, so there's like the hormonal elements of love and lust, which are all kind of. You know, they're, they're correlated, but they're not directly together.

And then there's these more complex concepts that you describe, like when you're thinking about the complexity of the universe or God or cones, and then there's this whole, like, you know, your mind gets just kind of fuzzed up and you're like, I don't know, love. So,

Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, I suspect that that love is like, if we're describing it in like a neurochemical sense, yes.

A combination of dopamine [00:18:00] and oxytocin release that forces a bond with another individual. And I say this because we know, remember I said, I think that it originally evolved for our children, post childbirth women, for example, are flooded with oxytocin, huge

Simone Collins: surge. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But you also experience it.

Women get a higher dose of oxytocin if they haven't slept with as many men and they sleep with a man, which causes a bonding.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Where we talk about and the studies on this have all been like scraped from the internet. It's really weird because it used to be, I could find it. And like I went back and tried to Google it and I couldn't find it.

But women who have had sex with lots of partners reduce, release less oxytocin every time they have sex. I'm like, that makes perfect sense because that would mean in an ancestral sense, they were probably a. slave, basically. And that, that if you were in a monogamous situation, ancestrally, yeah, it would make sense to fall in love with the first person you're having sex with.

So, you know, of course the systems would function this way. But I, you know, we see a lot of, okay, you're getting this oxytocin release. It causes you to bond to a person. Here's my question for you. You're like, I don't know if I've ever experienced love. [00:19:00] Well, what's the emotion that bonds you to the kids?

Like they haven't like, okay, little, Indie there, right? She hasn't said anything, done anything, and yet you feel a fondness for her that is undeniable. I mean, I watch the way you set her on the table when you're working and everything like that and get so excited when she's being cute. What is that emotion that you're feeling?

That is the love emotion.

Simone Collins: I mean, I, I, I feel that feeling when I look at Rain on glass, you know, when it, when it hits a window, I feel that feeling when I see autumn leaves shimmering in the sun, like, is that, that, that it's, it's not, I don't think calling that love is, is accurate,

Malcolm Collins: right? No. Okay. What you are describing here is, and I think that this is a component of love is you were describing a set of environmental stimuli that Correlates

Simone Collins: with the feeling of bliss and contentment.

Malcolm Collins: That correlate with the feeling of bliss and [00:20:00] contentment, which you feel when looking at infants that are yours. So then my question to you is, do you ever feel that feeling of bliss and contentment when looking at, say, me? Yeah, so that's especially

Simone Collins: when you oh my god when you eat and I hear the sound of like you chewing or something.

I just like

Malcolm Collins: Other women are so like

my husband likes Maxine's food. You're like, I love listening to him munch Yes, makes me so happy. Oh god.

Simone Collins: Okay for you Yeah, I I don't know. So then is is love Oh, this person or thing correlates with a feeling of contentment and bliss for me. Like that also just seems so shallow.

Malcolm Collins: And because most humans do not correlate with that for you. You don't look at most human bodies and get a feeling of blissfulness and content. You wouldn't feel that way. If a stranger at a restaurant was eating and you overheard them, you'd [00:21:00] probably be like, ew, gross.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but if, if that, if that. If other things like rain on, on glass or the pitter patter of rain on a roof, you know, can, can trigger that.

Like how does love for a human, how would love for a human be special? You know,

Malcolm Collins: what do you, what do you, what do you mean? I mean, there are other things,

Simone Collins: there are other elements in life that are non organic that can also trigger in a human. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So what you're saying is it activates the bliss and content system and not the lust system.

It's a completely different category of, of thing that is

Simone Collins: elevating

Malcolm Collins: and that's actually interesting that you are looking at an attractive man and instead of feeling a lust, you are feeling blissful contentment which is clear that you were meant to feel for children.

Simone Collins: No, that's, yeah. So that's true because we were talking about that going, when I see you in an airport, I don't realize it's you.

And then there's the separate like, [00:22:00] but I feel when I. Are you eating

Malcolm Collins: food? So I love the description of it going.

Yeah. So that's the difference here.

Simone Collins: Lust versus love. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But, but let's go further. You know, in the first few months of a relationship, your serotonin level dropped, causing cortisol, the stress hormone, to flood your body. This is why your heart beats faster and your pupils dilate, and maybe you start feeling quote unquote butterflies in your stomach.

Lower serotonin levels might also be why you are suddenly obsessed over the new person, unable to think about anything other than them. So it is a rise in cortisol and a drop in serotonin. Your body odor may play a role. part in how attractive you are to someone. Some studies have shown that during ovulation phase of the cycle, women may be more attracted to musk like pheromones that men excrete.

By the way, I don't know if you've seen this study, but there was a study where people like wore dirty t shirts and then put them in a pile and men could pick out the shirts of women who are ovulating and women could pick out the shirts of attractive men. I [00:23:00] haven't gotten a 1995 sweaty t shirt study.

Where it, it showed that women sniff t shirts that had been worn by men. No cologne, no deodorant, all natural. Results showed that they preferred the odor of men with major histone compatibility complex MHC genes that were different from their own. This would produce offspring with a stronger immune system.

Oh yeah. Okay. I've heard of this. The general like fitness and stuff. Another interesting thing is a 2019 study found that when women were in love with someone, their immune system was bolstered. Now this is the study I found most interesting.

One study found that 60 people who had never met before and found that prolonged eye contact between two people increased the romantic attraction they felt for each other. Blood pressure skyrocketed and the participants wanted to be paired with the same people again in the future. They wanted to know more about the other person.

These effects were even stronger when people allowed quote unquote mutual touch despite the fancy wording that meant holding hands. And we know that holding hands causes oxytocin [00:24:00] release. We know that long eye contact causes oxytocin release. I think that yeah, that's, that's what we're seeing here.

That's really interesting to me

One of my favorite studies on this was done by Arthur something or another and it showed that you could basically force people to fall in love. We had this idea of I like sit two people down and they look into each other's eyes and they ask a series of questions of each other that they'll fall in love and people who were in the study as random participants even ended up getting married.

That is how good it did at creating this emotion, which is to say that love systems can be hacked. And this is one of the things that really scared me away from like the early effective altruism community and early singularity community is they would do a lot of these sorts of events where you'd like sit down and stare someone in the eyes.

And I'm like, this is what cults do to brainwash people. It's also what touchy feely did at Stanford, which is a hijacks the love system.

Here's the final bit here that I found really interesting. First and foremost, they found that love at first sight didn't exist without a strong physical attraction.

Looks did matter. Also probably [00:25:00] unsurprisingly, people in long term relationships scored higher on quote unquote love tests than people who had met for the first time, but reported love at first sight. So. Yeah, it doesn't appear that's that easy to accidentally motivate the love system, but what are your thoughts and think about them and I'm gonna get a

Don't think about them too much. You are a woman. I'm gonna have to put the women

Speaker: An ordinary dinner party, the sort of occasion we all enjoy. The men are exchanging witty stories, and look at the women, aren't they pretty? But now the conversation turns to more serious matters.

Speaker 2: I wonder if the government should return to the gold standard. I think it should. Good, then we're all

Speaker: agreed. But oh dear, what's this? One of the women is about to embarrass us all.

Speaker 3: I think the government should stay off the gold standard so that the pound can reach a level that will keep our exports competitive.

Speaker: The lady has foolishly attempted to join the conversation with a wild and dangerous opinion of her own. What [00:26:00] heartbreak drivel. See how the men look at her with utter contempt.

Women, know your limits.

Malcolm Collins: The important

Simone Collins: thing is To I think understand the underpinnings and mechanics of love as well as one possibly can. Same goes for sex so that you don't pedestalize it to your detriment and trying to find a well matched partner.

Speaker: Look at the effect of education on a man and a woman's mind. Education passes into the mind of a man. See how the information is evenly and tidily stored. Now see the same thing on a woman. At first we see a similar result. But now look. Still at a reasonably low level of education, her brain suddenly overloads.

She cannot take in complicated information.

Simone Collins: And that's, I think one of the bigger problems. This is certainly not the heart of problems for forming relationships these days. There are so many other big factors that are a like the fact that [00:27:00] women want higher status men than them. But most middle class women are going to struggle to find men who can thrive more in a middle class, like bureaucratic job system than they do.

So they can't find partners and people are all waiting to have to get married until after they're completely set up with their lives. Whereas they really should be getting married as they begin building their lives. So they're obviously bigger fish to fry in the relationship world. It is nevertheless, a big problem that we still see.

And even people who understand that they need to get married early, and even people who understand all of the weird asymmetries that need to be in place to make a relationship work, they still pedestalize love and sex in a way that is incredibly stupid. And they're like, well, I have to feel this spark and I have to feel this.

Oh,

Malcolm Collins: absolutely. And, and, you know, you see this with arranged marriages, right? I'm like people like, well, shouldn't I have like the chemistry as a person? Like, no, it doesn't really matter. And, and arranged marriages after 10 years of marriage, people have the same love [00:28:00] rates. As people in, with chosen partners, but here's the thing that's not accounted for.

Arranged marriages have a dramatically lower divorce rate than non arranged marriages. So it means when you account for survivorship bias, you are actually more likely to be in love with someone in 10 years if they are chosen by people who know you well without you having much input. Then you are, if you choose someone who you already love in the moment, which just shows what a bad compass love is.

And I think we see this in the history of love. Remember all those early stories of love? Love was always seen negatively. Especially love at first sight was seen negatively in a historic context. This was understood to be a negative thing, a form of madness, depending on what culture you're looking at.

Simone Collins: Like,

Malcolm Collins: In, in, in some cultures it was just seen as like an intrinsically immoral thing, no different from lust. And I think that that's really the healthiest way to look at it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and, or it was, it was supposed to be something that was uncoupled from your marriage. So if [00:29:00] you, if you wanted to pursue love, it would be in the form of a dalliance or it would be in the form of a mistress.

It wouldn't be in the form of Marrying someone, it can even be some kind of platonic like Dante and Beatrix. Sorry, not Beatrix, Beatrice like Dante and Beatrice in the divine comedy. So there were all sorts of forms of love that were very passionate, but when they worked out, they weren't done within the capacity of.

Attempting to marry and trying to make that work was deadly like in Romeo and Juliet. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you're killing your kids by not arranged marriage by letting them just marry whoever they want like like like animals like What is this you you that's that's not the way this works No, I I really appreciate what you're saying there and I think it's a very important concept to elevate and I think that Really the only culture that [00:30:00] I'm aware of in a historical context that elevated the idea that you should marry the people you love.

This comes down to Western culture but it's not a historic component of Western culture. It certainly wasn't around in the Roman Empire. It was something that came downstream of and for people who are wondering how things worked in Rome, you had strict monogamy in Rome, i. e. you only had one real wife, but you would hook up with other people, right?

You know, and here I could, I can put the clip of Octavian reprimanding Marcus. , for sleeping with people who weren't, weren't his wife.

Speaker 9: Remember, colleague, you are talking to my wife. Your wife in name only. Still mother that performs the wifely function, is it not? Well, Octavia does the same for my good friend Agrippa. That's very convenient for all involved. DO

Speaker 10: you deny it? So What? What if it is true, eh? What are you going to do about it?

Speaker 9: I shall have this sad story told in the forum. I will have it posted in every city in [00:31:00] Italy. And you know the people are not so liberal with their wives as you are.

They will say you wear cuckold's horns. They will say your wife betrayed you with a low born pleb on my staff. You will be a figure of fun. The proles will laugh at you in the street. Your soldiers will mock you behind your back.

Malcolm Collins: But it, it, it came through the courtly love culture that was largely created by people who don't know, like they hear courtly love and they think courtesans were writing these books.

Courtesans were not writing the book. You're

Simone Collins: using the wrong word. Courtiers? Maybe you're Courtiers,

Malcolm Collins: whatever. Not, yeah, sorry. Courtiers. Court People in the royal court. It wasn't written by people in the royal court. They were predominantly written by monks. Or as we might call them today, nerdy incels.

They were writing their version of sexual fantasy comic books. There begin to become a, a, a culture of this. And this [00:32:00] is, this is what was being made fun of in stuff like Don Quixote, right? They were like, these, these, these people are ridiculous idiots. Like, this isn't the way any of this would ever actually play out.

You know, they're living these fantasy lives in order to, well, fulfill their own fantasies. You know, that's, that's the way this stuff works. And as a result of that It goes on, it goes on, it goes on. Still these incel monks are writing this, but they end up creating some genuinely amazing literature eventually.

Think of it a bit like fanfiction communities. Yeah, I mean, fanfiction is like raunchy and smutty, but eventually some of it's really good. There, there's some good fanfiction out there that I think is better than some of the best books I've read.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And as a result, when people were creating the early literary canon in the West, they relied on the tropes from these, well, basically infel comic books.

And that had the problem of creating early [00:33:00] Disney. I think is where a lot of this entered

Simone Collins: the mainstream.

Malcolm Collins: Is the idea of love at first sight and needing to love someone to marry them. I think was largely disseminated in modern Western culture into the mainstream by Disney and normalized by Disney.

And I think that that is where the rock comes from. So it's interesting that Disney rotting our culture isn't a new thing. It's, it's, it's, it's been happening since its inception in its borrowing themes from the quarterly love culture. That weren't necessarily common in American culture before this.

Simone Collins: This isn't to say that I don't think you should be. well matched with your partner. I think that what you saw, for example, in Puritan and even Quaker early colonial communities, where there were times when youth could get to know each other and, you know, they would choose to marry and they could choose to not marry.

And they, I love

Malcolm Collins: the Puritan thing of like being in [00:34:00] the bed was the person and they would tie you up in a sack.

Simone Collins: Yeah, or there was, you could be in the company of a bunch of chaperones, essentially, but they would give you a tube or a hollowed out log to talk between so you could talk privately. We should, we should,

Malcolm Collins: They actually have a scene where that's done in the Patriots. They

Simone Collins: do, and they joke about how they would. I

Malcolm Collins: hope you tie the knots better than my father did or something like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

But I, so yeah, I think you should be really stoked to marry whoever it is that you marry, but you should be looking at it as a lifelong business partner and not.

A lifelong yeah, like a lifelong entertainer, a lifelong professional friend or entourage member, or quite honestly, mother or a father. That's

Malcolm Collins: actually such a good point. And, and, and a watcher of the podcast once asked me they were thinking about bringing an additional person into their relationship and they were like, okay, you know, this is somebody who I find attractive.

My partner finds [00:35:00] attractive. Should we bring them into the relationship? And I was like, well, I mean, the first thing you want to ask is how efficient are they, how much how good are they at work? And I think that this is the thing they were thinking. Like, I like being around this person because I like having sex with them.

I like spending time with them. And what they weren't thinking was is this somebody I would want to start a business with? And that should be the first thing that you think and vet when you're choosing someone to marry or spend your life with or have kids with.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and there's this whole trope on social media of what do they call them?

Like single, single married women who just feel like their entire lives. Is taking care of their husbands. They're just doing their laundry. Like that, just their husbands kind of just married someone that they expected to do the same thing that a mother would do for a child. And that's lame. And then there's all these women who just want sugar daddies.

Like they just want a new daddy. Who's going to spoil them and pay for everything and buy them things and send them on vacations. And they just sit around and do nothing and [00:36:00] expect to be pampered. And that's equally toxic. Perhaps even a little more disgusting because I don't know. I just really hate that.

I find it gross. So. You know, both of those are really bad. So yeah, but what you're looking for again is a business partner and anything else should be seen as purely recreational on your own time with your discretionary income and nothing else,

Malcolm Collins: Your discretionary income. I don't know. I think you know, Like if I was, was, was going to hook up with someone other than you and I use my discretionary income on that, that would be quite a violation of our marriage.

Simone Collins: No, it wouldn't. Our discretionary income. That's, that's your money that you get to spend on whatever you want.

Malcolm Collins: Well, let's thank God. Neither of us have any particular makes it, it makes it very easy. That was the, the, the unfortunate thing on the, are we monogamous episode that we did ages ago where like, the core thing is like.

You have rules against sleeping with other people. I don't. I just don't see a reason to like, it's so much effort. It's so much effort. This, [00:37:00] this fantasy of, Oh, I'm going to sleep with all of these people. It's like, yeah, but what you're not thinking about is the work and the risk and the grossness and the, like, why would you?

It's so much effort and ickiness and it just makes life harder. Like I don't, I get the desire, but like, if it slows down the speed at which you actually marry someone and start having kids, like what's the point of all that, right? Like,

Simone Collins: or if it puts an existing marriage at risk, which is, I'm even in poly relationships, there's just always this very real risk that.

Yes, it goes fine until it doesn't. It goes fine until something falls apart and that that's difficult. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah, no, I hear that. And well, and this is because systems that may have been designed for a monogamous relationship end up firing in the wrong way, you know, they're like, Oh, [00:38:00] now, now this person is attached.

And keep in mind, even historically, when you had a societies that practice a polygyny where they had multiple wives. There was genetic competition between the wives. I mean, the wives not only wanted to have the maximum number of kids of the wives in, in a marriage but they wanted the kids to get more resources than the other wives, kids like that was the goal from a genetic standpoint here, I'm, I'm saying and that this was ever harmonious, I think is a, a fantasy.

There's just a strong incentive where actually women within cultures that are intergenerationally polygynous, i. e. having multiple wives, would likely be, I'd say, more spiteful and cunning towards other women than women in cultures that aren't polygynous. Because they would have been genetically rewarded for that intergenerationally speaking,

Simone Collins: Much

Malcolm Collins: more than women in cultures who aren't polygynous, like monogamous cultures, where women generally get, get [00:39:00] genetically rewarded for cooperating.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: An interesting point I hadn't considered before. I'd love to look at the data on that to see if there's data supporting that hypothesis.

Simone Collins: Yeah. The

Malcolm Collins: women from societies like in Muslim societies are women more backstabby than in two other women. I mean, than in you know, like Christian societies, like, is that a thing?

I don't know.

Simone Collins: The research I've seen of women being backstabby are in Western societies and there's no positive backstabbing. What I

Malcolm Collins: say is women are backstabby in Western societies. Yes. Like very well studied. Two other women, I mean, like women are very intersexually competitive in a way that men are not.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like the famous research that found that. If, if a woman was more attractive than her hairstylist, the hairstyle was more likely to, for example, cut her hair a little shorter than she asked.

Malcolm Collins: I like the study that was looking at bosses and like almost no woman in the study preferred a female [00:40:00] boss to a male boss.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like this idea that like women are better off cause we're promoting where women is not true. Women are much worse off for it

Simone Collins: on

Malcolm Collins: the whole.

Simone Collins: Unfortunate.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it is unfortunate. It would be great if we could genetically modify this trait out of women, which maybe we'll be able to do soon.

It's called

Simone Collins: autism, Malcolm. That's why.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's called autism. Just give all of my female

Simone Collins: friends are a little more, a little more autistic than your average there. That's

Malcolm Collins: true though. You have so many autistic female friends

Simone Collins: and you think the increase in mental health diagnosis is a bad thing.

Malcolm Collins: Hmm.

Simone Collins: I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway I love you to death Simone, you're quite a special woman and I'm really, really lucky to be married to you. And I actually wonder because you said you'd never found anyone attractive before me. What was the like emotion you felt when you first saw me? Is it not something you had felt before?

Was it something you had felt at different

Simone Collins: levels? No, I mean, I, I found people attractive before. [00:41:00] I just. Like, there was never this, this combination of like being attracted to someone and then also finding them like to be such as a person, an attractive person as well, like both physically and everything else attractive.

But no, I mean, I certainly found other people attractive before. Okay. You just happened to be very

Malcolm Collins: much my type. So it was the first time that you had both found somebody attractive and really like jived with them at like, I guess a cultural level. And then again, culturally we're very similar. People often joke that we're twins.

Apparently we're called the Cromwell twins and in fundie circles, which I'm okay with.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Oh, am I not making you dinner tonight?

Malcolm Collins: No, I didn't end up going out. I didn't have time. I had too much to do. What would you like? Grilled cheese with tomato soup. Would you like? Oh my God. Yes. Yes. Okay. Do we have any

meat left by

the way, song, [00:42:00] or

Simone Collins: I can take more out.

Do you want something with me? No, I can do more of the slow cooker

Malcolm Collins: cheese and tomato soup.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. So that's okay.

Malcolm Collins: You don't want to have a, yeah, no, two girls. She has those

Simone Collins: kebabs. I can make you an addition to the girl cheese. You're going to two kebabs, like from trader one kebab, one kebab, a bowl of grilled, sorry, a bowl of tomato soup and a girl cheese sandwich.

Two girl cheeses, two girl cheeses. Consider it done, sir.

Malcolm Collins: I love you, my beautiful, beautiful wife. I love too. You are so Cutty, kitty, kitty, kitty, and I'm just so lucky to be married to you. . What?

Simone Collins: We're intolerable. I, I hate people who are in love, you know, they're, they're gross. And I, I feel bad inflicting ourselves upon other people.

Yeah, I do. I hate

Malcolm Collins: people who are in love too, and I'm, yeah. One of the interesting things about love is a desire to signal it publicly and loudly, which of course makes it, but no one wants to

Simone Collins: see it. No one wants to see that. It's like.

Malcolm Collins: Well, right, [00:43:00] because I'm basically saying, okay, this mate is mine, just so everyone knows, like, competition will ensue if you try to compete.

I think

Simone Collins: it's more like screaming. You know, when you scream, it doesn't hurt, but when someone else screams, it hurts.

Malcolm Collins: Is, is people will say in, in like high school, in my high school, I mean, maybe people have matured out of this because they've gotten better at like how bad this looks, but early on when they'd be dating, Oh, I love X person.

I love X person. We're so in love, love, love. Why are you so perfect? They just needed to shout it to the stars. And I think like shouting it from the roof, which is a sentiment you hear historically is one of the biological reactions to the love emotion.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I do think it's interesting that this whole and then they, they got, they married and they lived happily ever after.

And there just aren't really, you don't see a whole lot of media in which people really love each other. And if you do, it's that they love each other, but for some reason they're kept apart because I think there's something about people who love each other and are successfully just in love and not having [00:44:00] problems.

People just hate it. It's just intolerable, like nails on a chalkboard. I don't want to watch it. No

Malcolm Collins: famous influencers who like actually care about each other and love each other.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah. Where they have to like make up drama or something. Yeah. Maybe because people just don't want to see it. It's gross.

It's terrible. And so they have to make something either. They have to make up something wrong about them. And make up separate drama about how they're evil and not really what they say they are. Well, you're the puppet

Malcolm Collins: master. That's what I've heard. Yeah. You control me. I've seen other people comment on us and they say that I am this dull, witless puppet of a man who's being controlled by the cruel puppet master Simone, who seduced someone out of her league is what they said.

You, you saw this video.

Simone Collins: Well, you are out of my league. I, and I guess technically I seduced you through my work ethic. And you discovered that you couldn't do better than me in terms of. You know, sheer, I, I, I basically left you with no choice. Yeah. This was not something where you really [00:45:00] had a lot of choice in the matter because I, well, how did I not have choice in the matter?

Yeah. I

Malcolm Collins: mean, yeah, I guess I didn't have choice because Yeah, you didn't have a choice. Nobody seduce you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I, I, so I did seduce you, but with work ethic. 'cause I'm obviously way below your league. So from a, an aesthetic perspective, just fortunately. You are not as sensitive to aesthetics as other men are.

You're like Mormon polygamist men, you know. I don't think that's true. Well,

Malcolm Collins: okay, so you got to do the Mormon polygamist quote here. Can you pull it up?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Mark Twain. Went when he was young to Salt Lake City at the time. I think when Brigham Young was still alive. He was vehemently against this concept of polygamy and he had a change of heart.

And here's what he wrote up after his experience in Salt Lake City. He writes, quote, I had the will to do it. With the gushing self sufficiency of youth, I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve great reform here. Until I saw the Mormon woman, then I was [00:46:00] touched. My heart was wiser than my head.

It warms toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically homely creatures. And as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, No, the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity, which entitles To the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure.

And the man that marries 60 of them has done a deed of open handed generosity. So sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.

Malcolm Collins: I love this. So this is so, but I did notice something because you were actually talking about this where I was talking to one of our Mormon fans and we were going over pictures because, you know, we were trying to identify traits, you know, that are common in the people who are having kids who aren't having kids, etc.

And at one point it was like, oh, you know, the hot one. Right. And I realized that his [00:47:00] perception of which of the hot one I go, Oh, you mean this one? And he goes, no, the hot one is this one. And I realized that, and I think you actually see this like genetically was in subpopulations. What? Is considered attractive can be radically different than what another group considers attractive.

And this is why people often naturally end up going for their own cultural group. So for like somebody like Simone and I, people are like, you guys look like twins or siblings or something like that. It's like, yeah, she's part of my esoteric cultural group. Like of course I would have found her more attractive than competing people, especially at the arbitrage level.

I either degree to which I value her type of attraction. is much higher than, for example, a random Mormon man would have valued her iteration of attractiveness. And the degree to which I would value, you know, the average Mormon woman would be much lower than the degree to which a Mormon man would value a Mormon woman.

And I think between cultures, sometimes it's differentiates a bit more. [00:48:00] Like I, I, I notice that I think what I find attractive overlaps with. Maybe surprisingly to the audience what Catholics find attractive. Like, I find often whatever the Irish are selecting foreign girls very attractive.

When I was younger, I, I loved Irish girls. So maybe, or yeah, this is another thing where I noticed where different communities have different things that they find attractive. And I don't know if I can like build a whole video on this, but it's something I mentioned in an episode that hasn't gone live yet.

So for example, with me, the women who I pursued in disproportionately had relationships with when contrasted with their percent of the population, heavily Jewish, first of all, I'd say a good 40 percent of the women I've ever dated have been Jewish. In, in ancestry, at least Irish. I found Irish women disproportionately attractive.

Outside of that, like freckles and stuff like that, like that's my thing. But again, our kids, we've [00:49:00] got like redhead and freckles. So clearly, like we're still in this tradition. So my ancestors must have felt that way too. And your ancestors must have felt that way too. The one category that I've always found surprising is the group that disproportionately pursued me the most.

Was Romani women or gypsy women like really people of that descent group up here to find whatever I'm bringing to the table like disproportionately attractive. And I remember Simone was like, well, there's almost none of them. And I'm like, and that's why it's weird that I have hooked up with so many of them.

I don't know what it is. It might be a cultural thing or it could be a genetic thing. I really don't know within these different groups that leads to these cultural pairings. Any thoughts.

Simone Collins: No, no. I mean, I just think they're, they're probably more likely to be broadly. You know, genetically close ish to you. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of travelers in the UK, tons and tons, and you were super UK, so I don't know. Yeah, but I don't find

Malcolm Collins: Scottish women attractive.

Simone Collins: In modern

Malcolm Collins: Scottish women, [00:50:00] but yeah.

Modern Scottish women look like dysgenic selection. When, but keep

Simone Collins: in mind, like a lot of the most you could argue like bit adventurous entrepreneurial, you know, capable of getting out of really dire situations. Ancestors moved to, you know, it's hate. So they're here. You wouldn't necessarily realize

Malcolm Collins: that's also true.

So you, you, you are partially Scottish descent as well. So yeah, I guess I do like Scottish women, just the ones who immigrated. It's the same with Irish women. I like the ones who, who, emigrated, e emigrated, i. e. left I don't know, I don't remember walking around Ireland and thinking people were uniquely attractive.

It was more I lived for a long time in Massachusetts and the, maybe that disproportionately colored how many Irish girls I was encountering. For people who don't know, that's for the large Irish population settled.

Simone Collins: Well, I've got to go make dinner because I've got that campaign tonight and I want to make dinner and shower the kids.

So you have it fairly easy tonight after I leave. So [00:51:00] let's get her done. I love you too. And I'll start your sandwiches, your Sammies. Love you, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: She makes the best grilled cheeses.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): To anyone who's like Malcolm, your voice has been shot in terms of recent episodes, you are feeling horribly sick or something. No. , this past week Simone and I were on vacation. So everything you thought this past week was like really prerecorded. And I was just adding those bits and final editing. , because we were at Heredic on, , where we were giving a speech. , which is such a cool experience, but every night there, they would have these parties up until like two or 3:00 AM. And, you know, Two things about me.

One, I am not the type of person who knows how to party or go to parties or nightclubs or whatever, but I'm also not the type of person who would ever turn down an opportunity to network. If it could be used to help the larger cause that we're working on. And the people at these events are so high value.

I couldn't turn it down. So I just had to stay up like yelling, to talk to people at nightclubs at like one or 2:00 AM. And I do not know how the rest of the world handles this. [00:52:00] But fortunately, we were able to make it back in time to take our kids out trick or treating and hear the video of my. You know, very obviously. What's the appropriate word here.

Neurally diverse children. , sorting their trick or treat candy. I love these kids so much with one of them. , wanting to watch us eat his candy or tried parts of it, but him not wanting to eat it himself. It is so sweet.

Speaker 14: Do

Speaker 15: you want to try it? Here, do you want me to open it for you?

Try it.

Speaker 14: Okay,

Speaker 15: well I'll see if I can find it. I think I know where that

Speaker 14: is.

Speaker 15: Here, do you want to eat it? It's very yummy.

Speaker 14: Hm. What? I follow you. Try it.

Speaker 15: I'll try it, babe. I try it. You have to promise to eat the rest, okay? Mm. I can. Here. I don't wanna, this whole thing is been here. Daddy, try it. I tried to buy it and now he won't eat it.

And then [00:53:00] I tried this. And now he won't eat it.

Speaker 16: Toasty, eat your candy! No!

Speaker 14: Eat

Speaker 16: your candy!

Speaker 14: I can't!

Speaker 16: Eat your candy! I don't want to! But it's candy, Toasty! But

Speaker 14: I want to eat food!

Speaker 16: Candy's a type of food. Try a bite.

Speaker 14: Um, hey!

Speaker 17: Toasty, what do you want to eat? I've

Speaker 14: been, I've been,

Speaker 17: I've been stopping to

Speaker 14: eat this, and this one.

Yeah, but

Speaker 17: are you going to eat it?

Speaker 14: No.

Speaker 17: You wanted a flat chocolate, Octavian, you

Speaker 14: said? Uh. Can

Speaker 17: you help me open

Speaker 14: this? Help me open

Speaker 17: this. But Toasty, you don't even want to eat it.

Speaker 15: I think you'll like this, Octavian.

Speaker 17: Why do you want to open it if you don't want to eat it?

Speaker 14: It's got a chocolate bar so you can't. Do you see it?

Let me open this by myself. Let

Speaker 15: me see, what is it? Do you know what that is? That's gum.

Speaker 14: Gum? Do you want to

Speaker 15: eat

Speaker 14: it? Um, no thanks. I want to eat gum! [00:54:00] You want to eat gum! I can't! I want gum! I want gum! Where's the

Speaker 15: gum? This is the strangest Halloween I've ever seen. This is his first year doing a real Halloween.

Speaker 14: I can't! I want gum! See, I like them

Speaker 17: on the top.

Speaker 14: I like stuff

Speaker 15: in there. Let me

Speaker 14: open it.

Speaker 15: Okay, here, do you want me

Speaker 14: to open it for you? Yes, please. I got this for you. It must be

Speaker 15: stuff. It must be stuff. Okay, let's put this in. Here, I'm going to open this for you. Oh, look, here it is. It's food. It's food? Yeah, it's food.

Let me,

Speaker 17: let me. Are you going to eat that food? What?

Speaker 15: What? Here, Torsten, look, it's food. Do you want to eat it?

Speaker 17: We're not [00:55:00] going to have you open this. It's just

Speaker 14: solid.

Speaker 17: Toasty! You better eat your Halloween candy. You better eat it until

Speaker 15: you're sick. Torsten, Daddy will take a bite to test it to make sure it's safe. I want to eat

Speaker 14: it!

Speaker 15: Do you want me to test it? You

Speaker 14: can't eat it! Well,

Speaker 17: gum is for chewing. It's such yummy food!

Speaker 14: No! Uh, you better put that back.

Simone Collins: Yes. You have to look visible and beautiful. You need it for reasons.

Malcolm Collins: I don't know why I married you.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you do though. Yeah. Yeah. It worked out well. It worked out well. I had to fight for it, but man, I got what I came for and then some. Did you

Malcolm Collins: want marriage when you first found me?

Simone Collins: No. No. You, you know what I wanted.

Malcolm Collins: When you just wanted sex you were like

Simone Collins: I didn't know I didn't want [00:56:00] I wanted to fall in love and have my heart broken and live alone forever. You know exactly what I wanted. I was so clear about it. And sex was a part of that. Sex was a part of it. Yes. Yes, and yes, you are very much my type. So,

Malcolm Collins: you were Which is actually something I want to get into in this episode.

So, I'll get started with that.

Simone Collins: Dive in.

In today's episode, we delve into recent revelations about China's drastically inflated population numbers, which have significant implications for global demographics and economic stability. Our discussion covers the impact of China's misrepresented fertility rates on stock markets and global population estimates, drawing comparisons with similar issues in Nigeria. We explore independent research on China's population, including discrepancies in birth statistics, Lunar New Year travel patterns, and salt consumption analysis. Additionally, we theorize potential dystopian solutions for China's demographic challenges and discuss parallels with historical and current geopolitical situations. Join us as we unpack these complex issues and their broader global significance.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone! I am excited to be talking to you today. Today we are going to be talking about China and recent information that has come out through multiple angles.

that leads people to believe that China's total population, a lot of people know that, their fertility rate was lower than the official figure said it was, so they did all of this. Oh, we got it wrong. We're readjusting our population numbers. We're readjusting our fertility rate numbers. Turns out that their total population is still being represented as dramatically higher than it really is.

And this has major implications because it means that one, their entire stock market might be vastly overvalued right now, even given how fragile it is. And two for people who are thinking about global population numbers right now, they might be way lower than we think they are. And this isn't just a China problem.

I'm also mentioned a lot recently. It's a [00:01:00] Nigeria problem, which is another very populated country. A lot of people don't know, but Nigeria. Gives out oil money dollars to different provinces based on their reported Population

and

There's nobody overseeing the populations that the individual provinces are reporting So there is always a huge incentive to lie in the extreme and I mean it's africa, right?

How corrupt are these numbers going to be? So

Simone Collins: this is very similar to the blue zone scandal which came out whereby they found that All these supposedly very old people that lived in countries were not actually alive. It was their family members collecting their pensions and lying about them being alive.

And here's just another issue of incentives being misaligned. People are lying about their populations because they get more money when they say that these people are there, aren't there. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that globally speaking, we may have to do a re ledgering. That's going to have people realize that the total global population is dramatically lower than anyone thinks it is.

Especially if you're looking at UN numbers, there was a case recently where somebody sent an email to the UN saying Brazil's own [00:02:00] tabulation of their population shows it's 10 million less than yours. And the UN in response, they go, why don't you update it? And they go we don't want to alarm anyone.

I'm like, and that's over a double digit off from where their fertility population actually is. Percentage, double digit percentage off. So the UN is just lying through their teeth at this point to try to hide this.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: So it turns out after recording this, this situation was astronomically worse than anyone anticipated. And this first series of graphs I'm showing you. The red line is the actual fertility rate of these countries. The blue lines is UN repeated projections of the fertility rate of these countries was interesting year.

As you can see with some like Columbia, it never even was really attached to the real fertility rate with others like Korea every year. They just expect it to stop going down anymore. Which is just well negligence. They're lying to people. If we go to this next set here, you can see what's happening throughout Latin America. The red [00:03:00] line is the real fertility rate.

And all of the other lines are UN every year saying, stop worrying about this.

This is why the world's not panicking. If the world saw these red lines projected forwards by any reasonable equation. They would be shitting themselves right now. Look at this, even in Africa.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: And the middle east

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: So here you have Tunisia and Turkey. The same thing is happening and it's not just the UN you also have

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: and I H M E every major organization is attempting to Gaslight people about the severity of this. We're going to have a different episode where we go over this, but wow. I am shocked to see this coming out in a mainstream newspaper.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: No, here. Like you to take a moment to think, okay. If the UN is lying about all these other countries, fertility rates. And these countries own governments are like, Hey, actually, you are hugely overrepresented. Our fertility rates. , imagine what's going on with China right now. When their government doesn't want [00:04:00] people to know how bad things are. And has been famously able to push around the UN.

Malcolm Collins: All so specifically China doesn't have a 1. 4 billion person population. Their population is probably below 1 billion people and fell below 1 billion people a while ago.

Speaker: See, out of all the places, this is the place that I'm worried about the most. Why? Just, the way they live, they're different. What, Chinese people? They just wreck everything, they make everything weird. That's what I'm worried about. To you? To you? Everything. Chicken. Why is it orange in Chinatown?. The way they write, the letters are weird. Their alphabet's not like ours.

Theirs is like, like someone testing out a biro. Everything's There's no logic to anything that they do. There is! Of course there's a logic to it! The way they read a book, it's all the other way round. From back to front, instead of from front to back, and up and down, and Everything that we've done, they've gone, Right, we're gonna do it weirder.

Malcolm Collins: But let's talk about this. A [00:05:00] lot of this episode, and I always want to give credit when a lot of it comes from somebody else's research, came from a show called Lei's Real Talk. Or Lee's Real Talk. Anyway, pretty decent China watcher show. It's certainly not as good for me as like China's Fat Chasers.

 But she does real solid work and she sometimes breaks stories and it's definitely a source that I think people should have in their back pocket if they are doing China stuff.

But everything that she's talking about here is data that can be independently checked. So first there's an argument that China's birth statistics are inflated as evidence by the discrepancy between reported births and the number of deaths. Of bcg vaccinations administered logic in china. The bcg vaccine is mandatory and given to newborns within 24 hours of birth Therefore the number of bcg vaccines should closely match the number of births A chinese researcher conducted a study comparing the official birth data to BCG Vaccine Administration records from 2008 to 2021.

The [00:06:00] study found each bottle of BCG Vaccine can vaccinate between 1 to 5 babies with an average of 1. 35 babies per bottle. Using this average, the calculated number of births based on BCG Vaccine usage was consistently lower than official birth statistics. Over the 14 year period from 2008 to 2021, the discrepancy totaled 58 million births.

Extrapolating this trend back to the 1980s when China's economic reforms began, the total overestimate could be as high as 178 million people. This research argues that this discrepancy suggests systematic over reporting. And I will have a link to this study in the description. It's in Mandarin.

So be aware of that. Wow. Then there's data from the Lunar New Year travel study. A significant decrease in Lunar New Year travel between 2019 and 2023 suggests a potential population decline, particularly among lower income groups. Logic. Lunar New Year is [00:07:00] the peak travel period in China with almost everyone traveling to visit family.

A large decrease in travel numbers, especially among lower income groups, could indicate population decline. Data and source official data from Zeonoon News Agency shows in 2019 2. 984 billion person trips during the 40 Day Lunar New Year period in 2023 1. 556 billion. Trips during the same period, which represents a 47 percent decrease overall.

So these might be representing very large population drafts breaking down. The data air and rail travel is typically used by more affluent travelers decreased by only 15 percent bus and road travel. Typically used by lower income groups. So the largest decrease calculation, assuming 422 million people, 30 percent of the official 1.

4 billion population didn't travel due to poverty or old age In 2019, 986 million people made 2.984 billion trips an average of three trips per [00:08:00] person in 2023, assuming 2.5 trips per person due to economic factors. This suggests a potential population decrease of 556 million people who didn't travel in 2023.

Now this something ain't right. Yeah, I'll explain what would cause this. And she's actually done a different piece where she goes into this in a lot more detail, but she argues that this unexplained decrease is due to unreported population decline. due to COVID 19 fatalities. So not only is the overall population less than they're reporting, but they're hiding a huge chunk of the population that died during COVID 19.

She has a different episode where she goes into kindergarten closures because there was a sudden increase in kindergarten closures were 20 percent closed year over year this last year. And she says, this indicates. that a lot of people were either died during COVID or something like that or etc. And they decrease in specific regions at really high levels, specifically smaller towns.

And we don't have the rural data. But she argues that the country could have lost more than 20 percent of its [00:09:00] population in COVID. And from someone simply from death. deaths from death. And some of the CCP's behavior indicates that this is the case. By that, what I mean is right now they've had a mandate to destroy records of deaths during the COVID period.

In a lot of hospitals and we'll go into more data that the COVID deaths may have been dramatically higher than they're reporting. But so not only is their overall population lower because they were lying about some stuff, but their overall population is higher. lower because of people dying and keep in mind for the flight thing.

It was the low in middle class numbers that dropped this huge amount, not the upper class numbers that didn't drop that much at all. And people

Simone Collins: who. We're uniquely hurt in a disease outbreak would be those who can't go to a private hospital, for example and get better treatment. So that could be the play.

I see.

Malcolm Collins: Or we're more likely just to be shipped to 1 of the I forgot what they call them. Not

Simone Collins: really. Yeah. Scary isolation [00:10:00] zones where you just went to a cell.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Really bad situation there. And the next is the salt consumption analysis. This was an analysis of regional salt consumption data, which suggests China's population is significantly lower than official figures.

Salt consumption per capita is relatively stable by analyzing regional salt sales data and known per capita levels. consumption rates, one can estimate the population. A Chinese researcher conducted a comprehensive study of salt consumption data from 2000 to 2022. The methodology involved collecting regional salt consumption data from various news reports over 20 years using known daily salt intake figures for different regions ranging from 8.

5 grams to 11. 5 grams per person per day. They calculated the estimated population based on salt consumption data and compared it to official census data. Findings from 2000 to 2014, calculated population was 19.29% lower than the official data in 2015 to 2022, calculated population was approximately [00:11:00] 31% lower than official data.

So again, the huge chunk disappeared there so that they've been over reporting for a while, but now they're not even reporting what happened with Covid. Applying the 31 percent discrepancy to the official 2022 population figure of 1. 4 billion yields an estimated population of 986 million. The full study will be linked to in the description.

 Was interesting here is the arguments are supporting from multiple directions. So it's not just one study. They're all showing this huge like 31 percent lower number. And then she ran a different set of math just for another set of math. You can run here where she looked at the reported fertility rate of China versus India and starting populations of the two countries.

And then showed that China showed a much higher growth than it should have an overall population when contrasting with India. And then people can be like that might be because they have better medical care. And so then what she did is she looked at, okay, what was the lifespan [00:12:00] increase between China and India during those periods?

And India had a larger lifespan increase over that period than China had. Which implied that the numbers should have favored India further, which implied we are seeing systematically wrong numbers here. Wow.

Simone Collins: What good sleuthing on her part. This just sounds, these are such amazing questions. I'd be so proud of one of our kids.

If they looked at a problem from this many different angles, I really respect her.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I really respect her as well.

Yeah. There was also a Russian and a Japanese study that put their population at around 800 million.

This specifically the Russian experts name. Was Victor McCove, and he concluded China's population is not the official, the number that's nearing 1. 5 billion.

Simone Collins: This seems like a classic China problem in terms of the way that rewards or funding is dealt out to different regions, causing.

Major problems. I recall this being [00:13:00] an issue in like the height of early communist China

Malcolm Collins: with this is really interesting. So Russians gathered Chinese urban populations, added them up, and then arrived at a total urban population at 280 million

and

assuming the rural urban populations have a one to one ratio, then China's actual population should be around 500 million.

Simone Collins: Why should they be run to one? That doesn't make sense to me.

Malcolm Collins: But if total rural. population carries a higher weight. It may not be one to one. But they said that China's total population should not exceed 800 million, but I'd expect their urban population to be higher than their rural population, China's recent push on this.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: that is fascinating. So we've got more stuff here. Here's an article. And so just, in terms of like China having a lower population than it otherwise might have had. 1 here for people are wondering how big this difference is. It could be. So they did 2 different [00:14:00] calculations here.

So what you might have is a real population. Population of, oh yeah, so this was just a 944 million and priority set. Okay. Now in terms of who is saying that more people died during covid than official numbers This is not an urban monoculture cover up. There was an article by the cdc on this topic And there was an article in nature on this topic and the Atlantic did a piece called, can a million Chinese people die?

And nobody know official statistics on COVID can't be trusted because they share Beijing's political interests. Making the dead disappear is only part of it. And then evidence of underreporting satellite imagery revealed heightened activity at crematorium centers during the outbreak , domestic footage of overwhelmed hospital wards circulated on Chinese social media before being censored.

A morning and funeral index based on online search volume for related terms indicated 712,000 excess mortalities, so nearly a million excess mortalities from December, 2022 to [00:15:00] February, 2023.

Simone Collins: Oh that's recent. That's after after the pandemic. 2022 to 2023 is. When the pandemic is very quote unquote old over.

That's

Malcolm Collins: whatever the case may be over a million more people died So basically they're just hiding their deaths. They're Fudging their births the whole chinese situation is not only a paper tiger It's a Potomkin village. It's fake. It isn't an actual economic superpower in the way that we believe that it is.

And I think that right now, another thing that she's been arguing in her recent videos, and I actually think she's right about this is when we ask, why is Xi Jinping not doing logical things to protect his economy or his people right now, given how bad things are. The answer could be that he's trying to transition into a wartime economy, and a wartime economy is not going to be driven by consumer demand.

It's going to be driven by [00:16:00] centralized production queues.

Simone Collins: Do you, are there signs that they are centralizing their production?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Keep in mind, all the billionaires have been like disappearing. They've been centralizing all their major industries. Remember when what's his face?

Alibaba guy disappeared, right? Yeah, that's very much a move to a, how

Simone Collins: does that have to do with what does that have to do with centralizing production?

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Remember how we have defined in other videos the difference between a socialist state and a fascist state? Yes Whereas a socialist state puts the state industry like the economic means of production Under the state for the purposes of distributing wealth as equally as possible Whereas a fascist state Puts the means of production under a state for the purpose of spreading a particular ideology or worldview in keeping existing oligarchs in power, i.

e. what the Democrats are doing. That's why the Democrats are fundamentally a fascist party. A lot of people don't understand this. They think I'm like exaggerating when I say that. Anyway that's what China is doing right now. It's they're transitioning. [00:17:00] To a fascist economic system where they are putting the means of production under the authority of the existing power structure to heighten the power of the existing oligarchical structure because I think that they know that an economic collapse is impossible.

Basically, the entire economy there has been. More of a Ponzi scheme than the rest of the world's economy for a while. It's like foreign investors come in, foreign investors come in, your money will always grow, look at how many people we have imagined how big this could be. And I think that, very similar to what happened in Japan in the eighties but about a thousand times worse.

Simone Collins: What are the implications of this?

If they're

transitioning to a wartime economy, do we have good reason to believe therefore that they are going to come for Taiwan faster?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I think they meant to go for Taiwan by now, but Russia's F up in Ukraine has significantly lowered their desire for [00:18:00] that particular conflict.

That's my read of it. Like all of this, I think started Before they saw what happened in Ukraine and right now there's like an ongoing conversation. Do we do it? Do we not?

Simone Collins: So I thought it's more of just a siege scenario and taiwan from an energy independent standpoint Is so screwed that all you have to do is just besiege them

Malcolm Collins: Do you know how much our gpus that we've been buying up?

Simone and I have been buying up gpus are going to be worth if taiwan gets sieged

Simone Collins: How you will look pretty good to get

Malcolm Collins: a very good resale value on those. By the way one of the things we're looking for right now is a CTO for the companies, if anyone's like a GP, GPU specialist, or a, running data center specialists, let us know we'd really be interested in, in, in working with you or has a good technical resume otherwise For a position at a startup, but yeah, so the implication could be that they're going for taiwan I don't know.

It's just such a dumb decision if they do but it could be with the goal of securing the existing administration Knowing that [00:19:00] an economic collapse of the region is not going to happen but already underway

Simone Collins: Golly. Okay. Yeah. I was reading in totally outside of, let's say someone wants to write all this off as conspiracy theorizing and they choose to not believe any of the stats presented.

I was just reading that China's getting to the point that for every child born, six people are dying. It's that bad. Wait, is that

Malcolm Collins: bad now? That's horrifying.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it, let me make sure I have that right. Okay, here we go.

Demographer warns that if China's fertility rate remains on its downward trajectory, eventually six people will die for every newborn. This was from an article called China's pro birth policy is not yet enough to counter demographic crisis. Expert warns published in the South China Morning Post. So that's mainstream.

Not question people talking about, just how bad things are, how their fertility rate dropped to 1. [00:20:00] 09 in 2022. But that's likely highly overstated. We don't have numbers for 2023 officially. And to your point about this, anything they do send to us may be very highly overstated. Even in China's, Best possible, most enthusiastic and optimistic number presentation, we're still looking at an extremely dire scenario if things are even worse and as bad as you describe and as bad as people are seeing through things like baby vaccinations and salt intake and vacation travel and morning, it's bad.

It's also very concerning that apparently excess deaths are so much higher, even between 2022 and 2023. It implies.

Malcolm Collins: Gets me on this. And I think that a lot of people, what were you going to say? It implies.

Simone Collins: It implies that it's not just a COVID thing and it's not just people being hopeless and not having kids anymore thing that [00:21:00] people that the country may also be deeply unwell in other ways that we aren't fully aware of when they're, I

Malcolm Collins: guess my takeaway from a lot of this is one.

India is likely a bigger player in the global future than we think. China has long Basically what this means is India's population is higher than China's population, and going forward for the rest of human history we can project right now will continue to be higher. But in addition to that, it just means that China is when people are predicting future events, do not over-index China's role in those events?

I guess I would say when I talk to a lot of people, I would say this is one of the, in terms of smart people who I talk to, like really smart people, consistent mistakes that they make in the single most consistent mistake I see they make. Is believing too much that China has a future seeing them trying to play out the roles and the moves that they make, 50 years from now, 100 [00:22:00] years from now, thinking that they are going to find a way to fix this quickly when.

They should have already done that. Like it's basically too late for them at this point, even if they start going on a forced birth campaign or something like that, I just wouldn't expect that much benefit from it, given that it would need to admit things that mainstream training officials just aren't admitting right now.

Keep in mind, they were one of the first countries to. Jail someone who is doing gene editing in humans. Very publicly, right? Like they made it clear. We don't do genetics here We don't believe in genetics here all humans exactly the same and that's going to make any sort of a campaign they do to try to increase fertility rate Likely create an adverse outcome.

So I just don't I do. And it also means that their existing power on the world stage might be being overstated. And a lot of China's existing power, people misunderstand that like their existing power is due to what they produce. And I'm like, [00:23:00] that is not true. Their existing power is due to the amount of money American and European investors have poured into China.

That is where their valuation comes from. Obviously, China.

Simone Collins: So you mean people buying.

Malcolm Collins: Companies putting companies in buying stock, investing in, et cetera, investing in China is why China has a high valuation. Like, when you're looking at like Chinese GDP or like the share of the global market and blah, blah, blah, a lot of this is like basically fudged numbers due to the people who have put money into that.

And that's also why. You don't get this counter narrative of actually China is not that relevant, politically speaking, because nobody benefits from this. The wealthy oligarchs who run our society, they have tons of money invested in this that they can't quickly get out. And so they're not gonna want it widely disseminated that actually China is already over.

So they don't publish it in their newspapers. [00:24:00] They don't talk about it. They don't promote people who are talking about it. It's the same with the political apparatuses in neither serves the conservatives, nor the Democrats well to say China is not particularly relevant as a power player.

Because, people want to focus on what do we do if Taiwan gets attacked?

And as I've always said, what we do if Taiwan gets attacked is nothing. Because Taiwan won't exist in 100 years at their current fertility rate. We are not saving a thing of persistent value by saving Taiwan at this point. If Taiwan can get their fertility rate up, I would commit American force to help them.

But at their current fertility rate, you are just delaying their death by a century. There is no point. This very seriously. A country with a fertility rate that's hovering around 1, halving their population every generation, why would I have our either capital or actual human beings dying to defend that?

That's insane.

Simone Collins: [00:25:00] Yeah but by that logic, are you trying to argue that we should only fight for countries with high birth rates? So if someone invades a high birth rate African country ah, defend them.

Malcolm Collins: No, it's not just based on the birth rate. It's based on their relevance in a future Earth scenario.

That's

Simone Collins: Africa. They're the ones who are going to decline last.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think that you are actually really helping that much in terms of the future trajectory of Earth by committing tons of resources to preventing random groups in Africa from attacking each other whether or not, it just all comes out in the wash there because the infrastructure and the economic infrastructure in that region is so poorly developed that you're just really not getting much of a, an outcome from that.

But if somebody was to say. Okay. Oh, would you care? Like where would you care about defending if they were attacked? What's a country where you're like, this country is going to have an outsized, a level of impact in the future. When I look at current India, no Israel.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: Israel's the big example here.

[00:26:00] Technologically, they're going to matter in 50 to a hundred years fertility white wise. They're going to matter in a 50 or a hundred years. In terms of Who is it worth investing to protect? Israel is who it's worth investing to protect. Taiwan is not particularly worth investing to protect. In terms of the Ukraine, I thought that it was worth it to just show that Russia couldn't push people around in the beginning.

I no longer think it's worth it. Now they're just fighting over land, and neither country's gonna matter much in the future either, and Russia has already expended all of their military power.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess if this were like an elimination based reality TV show and you're trying to decide to who to ally yourself with if there's someone who's just clearly tanking they lack the charisma or physical prowess or whatever the show's based on, cooking ability.

To hang in there. Yes. You really need to look at someone's ability to be there in the future. And it's not just whether you like them or whether

Malcolm Collins: I like Taiwan a lot.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I they're a

Simone Collins: [00:27:00] contender. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: they're just not a contender. It's the same with China. So keep in mind, like China and Taiwan are enemies.

I am very pro Taiwan. I am very anti CCP, but I admit that they both are dealing with this population problem and there really isn't an out for them at this point that I can see. And so when people are like, Oh, what do you think the, China's going to be doing in X many, I'm like, they're not going to be doing anything that matters.

Now this does have impacts on like semiconductor production and everything like that, but I think we'll be able to offshore Taiwan's semiconductor production at least the relevant parts before things go tits up. Keep in mind that because we've hit a Moore's law sort of ceiling now we are Entering optimal semiconductor world at this point.

Do you understand what I mean by that Simone? So historically if one company was like really ahead of other companies in semiconductor production it didn't really make sense to try to compete with them because it's you've got You, you want to try [00:28:00] to catch up with this company, but every year they're improving so much.

They're like 30 percent better every year. So even if I figure out how they're making the semiconductors they're making this year, I'm not going to be able to compete with them economically by the time I get that up because by the time I get that Fab up by the time I get all that up, it's going to be 5, 10 years from now.

And they're going to be like a generation, not one generation, like 10 generations ahead of me, right? Like I will be able to make very simple semiconductors, but nothing particularly impressive. But now the advancement in semiconductor production has lowered dramatically. You are getting very small increment because we reached the edges of what physics can do.

And so this gives other companies and countries a long time to catch up with this. And I think the next major advancement in semiconductors that we should focus on from a human civilizational perspective is how can we, one, Lateralize semiconductor production. Right now, it takes 40 different [00:29:00] countries all developing.

The lasers are developed in Norway and the plans are developed in California and the end products developed in Taiwan. How can we lateralize this process? And how can we microtize this process, i. e. I think we're going to need to focus on more modular and smaller semiconductors as global supply chains begin to break down even if they are slightly slower it's going to be equally useful given the way that cloud networks work in the way that you can just chain like GPUs together.

Simone Collins: If you were living in China right now let's say in a place like Shanghai where the birth rate is so low. Where would you move? If Shanghai's fertility, by the way, is 0. 6 as of 2023. So not even this year. Lower than I get out. I

Malcolm Collins: don't think that there is a way to to, [00:30:00] I think that China is internally burning itself.

I think that the situation in China is going to get astronomically worse than it is today. You

Simone Collins: think they're going to start blocking emigration though? I feel like they already.

Malcolm Collins: Stopped they stopped it like five years ago. They put major bans and restrictions on people out migrating. Yeah,

Simone Collins: so then that's not a realistic you're just saying figure out how to figure

Malcolm Collins: out figure out like you're running from a holocaust that's about to happen like Figure out like you don't get how bad things are going to get.

That's my read of China right now. You do not know, you cannot comprehend you. If you want to know how bad things are going to get in China in the future, ask your grandparents about the great famine. Okay. That's the scale things are going to in China right now.

Simone Collins: Yeah. What does worry me is.

Again, those excess deaths between 2022 and 2023, like we're not in the middle of the pandemic anymore. And to my knowledge, there have been no [00:31:00] immense natural disasters in China, though, okay, I'm not following the news that closely. I do wonder, especially after all these stories of people being like buildings collapses or infrastructure, not really working well.

And I guess it's just so hard to trust what you're hearing, because then when you hear from anyone who is in any way proud of China, and I think there's a lot to be proud of in China, I think the Chinese people are awesome. And I've traveled through China in a decent amount, not an amazing amount, but I've been to like Zhangjiajie and Changsha and not like your typical just Beijing and Hong Kong and Shanghai, though I've done those too.

It's an amazing place. But when you talk with anyone who has pride in China, then it's just propaganda talking points. So I don't know who to consult, right?

Malcolm Collins: This is the thing also about out migrating from China, historic. And real Chinese [00:32:00] culture is better preserved in the immigrant communities than it is preserved within CCP China.

If you like, if you're like, I want to get in touch with my Chinese traditional roots, you are better off living in one of the American Chinese immigrant communities than you are under CCP China because they often were founded by individuals from before the Cultural Revolution, and they maintain more true uninterrupted through lines.

To traditional Chinese culture.

Simone Collins: I do think that's really interesting that when in some countries you get these selective pressures where people with a certain fidelity to a certain culture, just leave on mass and then anyone who stays basically gets completely changed through those same selective pressures.

And then the original country. Is somewhere else now. And you can even see this and not necessarily in holistic cultural sets or cultural mimetic religious, whatever [00:33:00] sets, but even just an accents like I've ever argued that the true British accent of will say before the American Revolution may be more alive in some versions of American speech in like the 1900s than even the modern British accent.

Which is an interesting, yeah. Because like certain groups migrate and like things evolve, it's not like after a point of great migration, do things stay the same in the original home country? No things change. In fact, often when there is a great migration, it's because there's significant change in the home country.

So I'd like that point about cultural fidelity, maybe not even being in China. And if you really love China and if you believe in China, you maybe need to rebuild that somewhere else.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I like that way of looking at it. It can be rebuilt, but I don't think it can be rebuilt in China. Not so long as Xi Jinping is in charge.

Now, he have, and this is one area where I realize I have a [00:34:00] big difference between my friends who believe that China has a future in me, is they're like Xi Jinping, he won't be in charge for long. He's got replacements in the wing. As soon as he Fs up enough, they're gonna replace him. And my belief is, The opposite of that.

I don't think they have real replacements lined up for him. I have looked into these people's, they've said, oh, this guy is competent. I'm, I don't see it. I don't see it. I don't think that they have a good replacement for him. And if I were

Simone Collins: him, I would not want to take, or if I were anyone else, I would not want to take his place.

I would be terrified to take his place.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think that they I think that he's for a long time purged everyone competent who might take his position. I don't think that there is somebody who can competently take his position. I think when Xi Jinping falls, a lot of people think, oh, this is when things begin to fix themselves.

No, I think that's when warlords begin to take over. I think that's when things begin to fracture or they go incredibly stupid, a la Venezuela, like a bus driver taking over. I [00:35:00] think that as much as Xi Jinping is a problem, he's also the bulwark against complete idiocy. And I have intense fear around what happens when he does fall because I think people think some competent bureaucrat is going to take over and that's not the tea leaves I'm reading.

The tea leaves I'm reading is. Some idiots going to take over who, we would never have assigned power was intention. And if I'm wrong about this if the system is still working, if they still can get a competent person in there and they can get rid of Xi Jinping, China has a chance, but it's got no chance under Xi Jinping.

Or the Dowager Empress, as I call him.

Simone Collins: The Dowager Empress.

Malcolm Collins: He reminds me of the Dowager Empress in the last fall of China.

Simone Collins: The scary dragon lady. I guess everyone calls Dowager Empresses or any mean woman dragon lady. But yeah, the one with the really young son who just killed a bunch of people, that one.

Malcolm Collins: In fact, if I [00:36:00] was in office I would always call him the Dowager Empress. Because I think people need to draw this connection more to one, understand just how much he's hurting the country into two through a historic parallel into to understand just how long within the Chinese bureaucracy, somebody who is that toxic to the country's long term best interest can stay in power.

If people don't take care of them.

Simone Collins: If you were, let's say someone incredibly competent, the right person for China were suddenly installed and given autocratic power. What would you have them do? What would you encourage them to do? If they came to you and ask you

Malcolm Collins: for something you need to do is become completely transparent about all of their records their economy, their population, their part of me

Simone Collins: wonder.

So what if Xi Jinping doesn't even know the gravity of this and can't because There are so many adverse incentives at play where a province is not going to tell you because then they won't get their tax [00:37:00] revenue. I feel like there's a crisis of reality

Malcolm Collins: in place, independent departments, independent branches of government using things like AI and satellite images, all the stuff that foreigners are using.

And then they get, or commendations and wealth for finding areas where people are fudging things. All right. So let's

Simone Collins: say first thing you established the department of, and they go out and their job is to just find out what's going on.

Malcolm Collins: Department of transparency. Then you need to re institute goodwill among investors that if they invest in something, they will be able to get their money into and out of the country easily.

That's one of the big things that's going to drive down investment right now, right? As people are terrified that if they put money into China, that the money's never going to be able to come out of China. And because that's true right now, China's basically realized like it's excessive.

You need to suddenly you do that. And all of the money, a lot of the money, this is all going to cause short term pain. All that you're saying was in China's autocratic system that apparently can think long term, even though it [00:38:00] definitely can't. No,

Simone Collins: You are a long termist autocrat. You need

Malcolm Collins: to, you need to, basically all of this is around developing investor confidence.

You need to develop investor confidence, long term investor confidence with foreign investors. That is the. First core thing you need to do. So all, everything involved in that, not jailing making things. If somebody achieves a certain level of wealth, you're not just going to go after them.

You're not going to, all of that stuff. So investor competence is thing. Number one thing. Number two is fertility collapse is a national security issue right now. And I may even put it under the purview of the military focusing on artificial wombs in the lake.

Simone Collins: Oh, so just invest heavily in science.

Heavily

Malcolm Collins: in science and genetics.

Simone Collins: Right, but what good will artificial wombs do you if no one wants to have kids anyway, whether or not they get pregnant?

Malcolm Collins: You have the state raise them.

Simone Collins: Huh. So you would encourage the first ever government [00:39:00] funded human production

Malcolm Collins: plan. I think if you do those two things simultaneously and big enough.

I guess

Simone Collins: you could, would you, this is very dystopian, but would you Offer to pay women a a living wage to carry pregnancies to term. And then if they don't want to raise those children, No, but I

Malcolm Collins: wouldn't disallow anyone from a high level government position with less than four kids.

Simone Collins: So to say, I know the anti cat lady tenure policy.

I think

Malcolm Collins: you need to create,

Simone Collins: and you might need to create But that's nobody, because no one has been allowed to have a lot of kids. No, there,

Malcolm Collins: It's been long enough under the three child policy and loosen one child restrictions. What?

Simone Collins: Come on, when was the three child policy, No, when was

Malcolm Collins: one child policy loosened?

Simone Collins: No. Because it was still culturally so discouraged. They're basically no. The policy was formally passed into [00:40:00] law by the National People's Congress, the National Legislature of China on August 20th, 2021. With this one child

Malcolm Collins: policy. Simone, the one child policy was loosened in 2016. Loosened!

Simone Collins: Loosened!

Malcolm Collins: You could say this is the thing and this is where everybody gets things wrong.

They always blame us on the one child policy, but the problem is that fertility rate now in China is lower than it ever was under the one child policy. And that's a culture problem. I just, I'm not

Simone Collins: going to listen. You shouldn't penalize people for not having a lot of kids. You under Xi Jinping in China during COVID in China, would you be having kids?

No, you would be shouting. We are the last generation along with everybody else. Yes, and those people need

Malcolm Collins: to be penalized. That's the exact point I'm making, Simone. You need to penalize people who are investing in your career. No, you shouldn't penalize

Simone Collins: people who are making smart and logical decisions.

Malcolm Collins: I disagree strongly.

That's the only way you create a cultural change. In fact, I would go further. I may disallow [00:41:00] salaries above a certain amount to people who have less than a certain number of kids. I would tap your max possible salary To the number of Children you have, which will quickly create the perception that more kids means more wealth.

Simone Collins: No, I would that's a fun That's a fun concept to reconnect from just from a policy perspective in general, because the thing in the past and why people would have a lot of kids aside from, other cultural reasons was the more kids you had, the more wealthy you were. And if we just reconnect those in some way.

Either, of course, through progressive tax breaks for the more kids you have, but also just through other means. Yeah, the more kids you have, the more money you're allowed to earn or something. It's just the level of dystopian control that you have to have over a people to do that. It's too much. Aren't we too libertarian for that?

You and I

Malcolm Collins: No, but you're It's different from what I want for America. China is [00:42:00] culturally different from America. Okay

Simone Collins: so yeah, you're trying to come up with a solution that certainly doesn't fit with our cultural values, that is more coercive, that is more I'm not gonna say evil. That is just Creepy because you're like, this is going to work for them.

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: You're saying if I was in China, what would I do? Like the person who's I'd started democracy is an idiot. That is not what you would do. You need to fix the problem in a Chinese way. What's actually going to work.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. I could see a kind of China making human production army thing with artificial worms.

They could pull off the look. I feel mean saying that I, again, respect China, I was really, I was on like a five. Did I tell you about my five hour bus ride to. Zhang Xiaojie from Changsha, it's about five hours, like some [00:43:00] guy had this cell phone that constantly kept ringing and it was just children's choirs singing Christmas songs in English.

And they were chewing this thing that smelled incredibly strong, like throughout this bus that just made me want to vomit the whole time. And we're on these twisting roads. So I'm just hearing children's choirs singing Christmas songs and smelling this putrid smell of whatever it is people are chewing and spitting out on the bus.

Malcolm Collins: It's Betelgeuse, probably.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Badal nuts are an addictive stimulant that's chewed in parts of China. Particularly the Southern provinces, such as a non. A high nine

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Betelgeuse

Simone Collins: did not smell good. So they were, I've had good moments and I've had bad moments. But like good moment just before that bus drive, the taxi driver or the taxi cab driver who took me to the bus station where I took that bus was so [00:44:00] concerned about me that he got in to the bus station and helped me buy a ticket and told me where to sit because he was like, girl, what are you doing?

This is not safe. So they're really they're awesome, cool, bro people who help out total nonsense, idiot foreigners who are kind and hardworking and enterprising and creative. And it makes me so sad to think that they're under this level of threat. Damn. But I don't know. I wish there were a less dystopian way to do this.

Malcolm Collins: There are less dystopian ways to do this. But you've got to I think that the less dystopian ways of handling this are going to be handled in the immigrant communities. You can't find a new, like in the U. S. I'm like, experiment with new ways of having your family culture work, new traditions, new holidays, new ways of relating to things.

What can China do? This doesn't work in China.

Simone Collins: What can China do right [00:45:00] now that other countries can't do? So if suddenly you become transparent and you're like, okay, guys. Now I'm in charge. We're figuring out our population situation. We're going to be financially transparent. You can leave and enter the country as desired.

We'd love to welcome immigrants. We'd love to welcome industry. What would you do? Peter Zion talks about their natural resources being not great. Like they're not that energy independent. Then I'm not having that food independent. What are you going to make them like a nuclear hotspot?

Fast, like that was

Malcolm Collins: the thing I was talking about was transparency and everything like that and taking a short term hit. The big problem China has now is they got so used to that period where they were a growing power instead of a weakening power that they built this idea of will always be bigger tomorrow.

And therefore let's believe the neighboring countries, let's believe the people around us. They need to understand that they are in a position of short lived power right now and they need to be doing. Everything they can right now to build goodwill [00:46:00] among their neighbors. That nine dot line that they've drawn, that's not going to hold for 50 years.

And when it stops holding the people who they were bullying are going to be awfully mad at them. Meaningful walk back all of this stuff they've been doing to the local region. Okay.

Simone Collins: So start playing nice with others, but then, what will a Admittedly smaller going forward. China do. To build prosperity and.

They

Malcolm Collins: need to, as I said one, forcing competent people to have more kids, culturally speaking, through the way that you influence them. Okay, incentivizing,

Simone Collins: not forcing, incentivizing through cultural means.

Malcolm Collins: The state raised kids, state produced kids, that could be an option that they have access to that we don't really have access to.

And they, I think right now is something that is being understated in the investment world is how much of a problem it is that nobody trusts Chinese stock market or wants to put money onto [00:47:00] it. And it's not just because they're shrinking. It's because the government has basically said, okay, now you've put the money in, now we're going to keep it from going out.

Like we tricked

Simone Collins: you. Here's

Malcolm Collins: an interesting idea.

Simone Collins: If you create state created humans, and state raised humans, maybe China, because China also has an international reputation, I think of producing very smart, competent, hardworking people. To with your army of government creative people, like be as though we are the intellectual mercenaries of the world.

You want to hire Chinese people. You want we will build the best factories we will build and then they just start investing in all of the type of human infrastructure that will matter in a post AI world because the rest of the world is too indolent, probably to raise the sort of disciplined, smart person, practical person not hedonic [00:48:00] person.

To thrive in a post AI society and still matter in a post AI society. So maybe if China did that and they continued with the same Oh, America, you suck with your titty attainment. Like you go and enjoy your hedonism and we're going to produce our competent, hardworking, tight lipped people who we will produce and train, then maybe they can just be like the one non idiocracy.

No, that would really be cool if they could do that.

Malcolm Collins: And I'd also say that one of the core things that people get wrong when they're predicting future world events and stuff like that is how cheesed America is from so many perspectives. We are not moving into a multipolar world. We are moving into a world in which America is dramatically more dominant than it is today.

And

Simone Collins: I think a good book to start if you're interested in the subject is Peter Zeihan's book. book, the end of the world is just the beginning. He talks through in a very sort of guns, germs, and steel kind of way. Just why America has the [00:49:00] tailwinds that will give it a huge advantage in the instance of a world in which there is no more.

support for international trade.

Malcolm Collins: So one is as globalization and global economic systems begin to break down. Yes. That is part of why America will be strong is we are the most self sufficient country in the world by a dramatic margin, whether it's energy or food or any of the things that civilization needs to survive.

But in addition to that we also have A weirdly high fertility rate for our level of prosperity and output. And it's because America has what it turns out is the greatest resource any country can have in the 21st century, which is we have religion. And a lot of it, a lot more than any other developed country.

And it turns out that a lot of these countries, when they were modernizing and got rid of their religions, did a great harm to themselves. And when I look to the future, when people are like future world polarity wise, where are you looking at world [00:50:00] power centers? One, people are hugely sleeping on how much power America is going to have.

The other area that they're hugely sleeping on. Is Israel like, no matter how positive you could be about Israel, you need to be 10 X more positive than that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I guess if we were to look at any country that actually was producing some kind of hyper competent workforce, it does, that is, famous for going out and getting a lot of things done.

And it doesn't focus on hedonism over everything else. It was so weird how in your class at Stanford's graduate school of business, One of the most difficult schools to get into in the entire world. There were so many Israeli students. So many Israelis. And not only that, but So many Israelis. And they weren't just Oh, they were all having kids.

They were all having kids. They all had businesses and they were going through school. They were like so much more on top of their lives than anyone else. And even though they worked harder and even [00:51:00] though they were incredibly conscientious, they all just, they just seemed very happy. Like they didn't, they were the tortured souls at your school, but they weren't a

Malcolm Collins: lot of the American Jews were among the tortured soul category that you're talking about reform.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And actually Simone, we have an invitation to go to Israel and meet with, and live with some of these variety families for a bit. I'd like to take it up at some point.

Simone Collins: It's a really cool invitation.

Malcolm Collins: We It would involve being around people. Has invited us to stay with some of the Haraiti families in Brooklyn in the next couple of weeks because he's going to be there and he's going to be That's

Simone Collins: so cool.

I

Malcolm Collins: was like, I don't think we have time. I was like, Now the

Simone Collins: timing is not amazing, alas.

Malcolm Collins: In future years, I really want to, but not right now, unfortunately. But the yeah, people are they do not understand how much fertility rates in technophilic regions matter.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the cool things that China has the building blocks.[00:52:00]

China has the technophilia. China has this I just love how modern so many of the things there are

Malcolm Collins: another big advantage, which is they don't have the bureaucratic bloat of other regions.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it would seem,

Simone Collins: I don't know. Like October 7th seems to have been largely a product of the government not having time to do

Malcolm Collins: an episode on this, but we can just briefly mention in this now.

I have looked at their competence since October 7th in terms of essentially wiping out all of

Hezbollah In Palestine,

Simone Collins: but keep in mind those, that groundwork was laid well before October 7th.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. And the problem is Simone, which you might not be considering that groundwork was weighed. Before October 7th, they wouldn't have been able to execute on that groundwork if October 7th hadn't happened.

Why were they making plans for how they going to take out Hezbollah? Like that they obviously from a geopolitical standpoint, couldn't [00:53:00] execute on unless I, I used to think October 7th, I was like, Must have some level of impossible stupidity.

Here I am now leaning towards the, oh my God, this was all planned from the beginning.

Simone Collins: I'm leaning toward, they put so many resources into embedding devices with Hezbollah and getting intel from Hezbollah that they snoozed on Hamas. Just being like, you guys are so incompetent. Do you think

Malcolm Collins: they could have had if Hezbollah wasn't attacking 'em as aggressively as they are right now, do you think they could have had all those things explode?

Simone Collins: Oh, you mean just from a diplomatic standpoint, because there's so much hate on it. I think it was an insurance policy because keep in mind, they weren't just incendiary devices or explosive devices. They were also Intel gathering devices. So it was, I think it was about optionality to have that there.

And who knows? They knew. That Iran was probably going to get more resources at some point, Obama had started that trajectory and that's [00:54:00] about when they started doing this. So I think they knew it was going to be rising threat. I don't think they, they could have anticipated or even encouraged October 7th.

I think. I think it's more of a, just, they thought that they knew what they were doing or the, I just, it seems plausible to me that just what Hamas did was so out of.

Malcolm Collins: I'll tell you what British intelligence, they looked at this. There was an ex British intelligence guy and he was saying, I, it is shocking that Israel accomplished more.

In a year and a half that we accomplished during the entire war on terror against the Taliban. He's if we could have dismantled Taliban, the Taliban to the level that Israel dismantled Hezbollah. This would have been, this is like 99 percent more than what we did. Like it was a stunning that they were able to accomplish.

Simone Collins: Here's what we need to do. We need to get like spy novel [00:55:00] writers. In the same room as like government officials or like sci fi writers and just be like, figure it out guys, get creative, man, get drunk and then just start making

Malcolm Collins: plans. Is it was all of this in context, we should consider ourselves very fortunate of the Secret Service agencies that apparently are actively attacking us now, which is the British one that it's not.

Yeah, we should be glad that of the ones most likely to support us. It would be the competent,

Simone Collins: but here's the thing about massage. You won't know that they're out to get you until you're dead. that effective. So who knows? But yeah I guess we just did a surprise attack. We're going to talk about China.

Here's where we dunk on China. Oh, ha. We

Malcolm Collins: love Israel.

Simone Collins: Another one of those episodes.

Malcolm Collins: It's like when I'm thinking about like world players who matter.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it's literally like in my future calculations of geopolitics matters [00:56:00] to X what China matters.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the other kind of in the potential to have outsized influence, very similar in my mindscape to.

The UK or Britain, before the they became the British imperial empire. They were this sleepy backwater. Rome didn't even want to hold on to them, right? They sucked. They were gross. It was cold. No one took them seriously. They were a bunch of barbarians. Like you, you said in that other episode on our one civil, your one civilization theory.

I'm just, I identify too much with you, Malcolm, but I'm not trying to take credit for it. It's a really good theory. No, it's ours! Yeah, Royal We. Nobody really

Malcolm Collins: helped inspire it by telling me that I should think more of ancient Chinese civilization. That was really the thing that got me investigating and then I was like, no, actually they suck.

Simone Collins: Oh my god. So Poor China. I'm trying to point out things that I love about China. Szechuan food people in Szechuan province. I love Chinese

Malcolm Collins: food. I eat Chinese food almost every week. I love it. Also

Simone Collins: people in Szechuan province are [00:57:00] just genuine, genuinely awesome people and really cool.

Malcolm Collins: No, I have a lot of Chinese friends.

I think that the whole, like a lot of the Chinese people I know are some of the smartest people I know.

Simone Collins: They're crazy smart. Anyway, so yeah, we love China but I can't remember where I was going. It doesn't matter because we need to make dinner. But I'm sorry to anyone who came here just wanting to hear about China.

And there we go. It's real again, but no, no. Yeah. Great. Yeah. So yeah, no one thought, yeah, Britain was backwater. No one cared about it. Relatively small population. And yet so much influence. In the entire world. And I think it's, yeah, it's easy for people to write off Israel to be like, it is a tiny postage stamp of land within a hostile area.

They, why would they matter? Why are we trying to help them? I don't know before the rise of the British imperial empire, I would have wanted to, Now, what was going on with these guys, see how I could work with them. So I guess I see your point in that we have to look to the future and [00:58:00] look for their potential.

So yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Don't make big sacrifices to make alliances with the Ottomans. Yeah, exactly. Right now is the Ottoman. They're

Simone Collins: the Ottomans. Yeah, sadly. But I think what also gives me hope at the end of this, and I want to end with this, because it's where there's hope for China, Is that China isn't in China anymore, just like Venezuela is not in Venezuela anymore.

Yeah, I agree.

Malcolm Collins: We know through

Simone Collins: our travel agency, which works with a ton of Venezuelans, that all the Venezuelans are in Spain, they're in Peru, they're in Doral, they're in

Malcolm Collins: I should say.

Simone Collins: Yeah because they left. It was Cuban, like all

Malcolm Collins: the good Cubans, I'm sorry, not good Cubans.

Simone Collins: We are going to hell so many times over, Malcolm.

Real Cuba's in Florida. Yeah, though. And that is a theory that gives me a lot of hope. Because when I hear about new news with China's demographic collapse. I just think I weep for China and it makes me very sad and scared. But then I think about, yeah, all these amazing Chinese immigrant [00:59:00] communities throughout the world.

And you've got stuff, so yeah, people can move, populations can move and build something even better. And as we've talked about in other episodes, the more, That you evolve and move around and play jazz with other cultures and take the best from them and do it better yourself. The more you will thrive and own the future.

And

Malcolm Collins: I will say that China is not the most effed world power right now. Germany is. Germany is. And Latin

Simone Collins: America is just vaporizing and no, but

Malcolm Collins: the thing is that Latin America has cultural enclaves in other countries that have decent fertility rates. Germany has no backup plan. If I was a German that wanted to maintain German culture, there's nothing left.

Simone Collins: Gosh. Yeah. We're there. There are no, I guess you could say that Amish people are,

Malcolm Collins: but now, Oh my God, you should hear their stuff on Trump. We watched the video of them, like them talking about Trump. They are so based.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They're so based. Love the phone. I'll let you go. Bye. Okay. Ciao. Ciao. [01:00:00] Oh,

Malcolm Collins: are you going to do the

Simone Collins: Just get the kids, you get the kids, I'll stir taquitos.

And then if you just drop them off, I'll play with them while I cook food and you can wrap up work for the day. Yeah? Yeah. You ready for that?

Malcolm Collins: And let me know what we're getting for replies on this. This is a long and spicy thread with lime and stuff. Oh

Simone Collins: no.

Malcolm Collins: Have you even checked it?

Simone Collins: No, I'm just going to ignore it.

I'm very bad with Twitter. Remember, I thought that someone had closed, somehow closed their tweet to replies and I just didn't know I was blocked because I'm so old.

Malcolm Collins: Other people said then they were blocked. I don't know. But yeah they, weird.

Simone Collins: Yeah I don't understand Twitter, x. Sorry.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we're definitely at an age now where there's things that I don't understand and things I make a real hard focus on staying on top of. AI. AI is something I'm like, I gotta be up to date. Love you.

Simone Collins: I love you, too. You're seeing the thousandth time. [01:01:00] Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: so today antinatalism documentary, which I actually loved. I haven't seen it at all.

Simone Collins: That was so well done. It was the best. So well done. This guy is a true

Malcolm Collins: star. Yeah, Tim came out. I hope it does incredibly well.

Yeah. So people haven't seen it. This is the guy who's done some other like really big documentaries.

I want to, I haven't watched it all yet. I only watched the beginning. I was like, Oh my God, this is. His

Simone Collins: storytelling is top drawer like the way he, but the problem is that it includes stories of. Conditions that cause babies to die terrible deaths I, and then so of course I'm crying first thing in the morning while watching this frickin thing.

Malcolm Collins: I'm so sorry. And then the limestone thing happened today.

Simone Collins: Limestone Claymore. So yeah, that was, oh, it was so much reading. It was so much reading.

Malcolm Collins: So much reading and so much, I don't know, felt like disingenuousness he posted the thing. He's like, why are they attacking me out of nowhere? This is a guy who runs the Institute of Family Studies thing.

And we're like, he does the whole, whoa,

Simone Collins: hold on in his whole, you haven't even read the he's I don't run the Institute for Family Studies. This is just 10 percent of their [01:02:00] spending that I'm involved with. So he takes umbrage.

Malcolm Collins: He just, out of the blue he's they just attacked me out of the blue and I'm like it may have been that article that you wrote on us that was really long and compared us to Nazis and eugenicists and said that you should be running the pronatalist movement and not us and that we shouldn't even be considered pronatalists and tried to throw a that might've been, and mischaracterized everything we've ever done.

He's they're, I don't know. communitarians. Like they only care about people in their community. They're not about trying to help everyone. I'm about trying to help everyone. I'm all about freedom and I'm gonna give everyone freedom. And not only is my movement about freedom, but how dare their movement allow people to use surrogates or do genetic testing.

And I'm like, You're like contradicting yourself here MMMMMM, seething! But I'm not gonna attack him anymore, because I said I'd stop attacking him after this if he doesn't try to [01:03:00] undermine the big tent pronatalist movement again to try to take it over. We honestly could have been a lot worse to him.

I had a much meaner episode planned about him, but we ended up just talking about it in the episode where we were talking about what was it? When it is not true, because this is something he believes that more wealth doesn't lead to lower fertility rates, and I'm like, that belief continually arguing that, which he does persistently throughout all his work and he's like, why are they telling reporters not to talk to me?

I'm like, that's like an environmentalist arguing that it's an environmentalist. Like industrial logging doesn't hurt the rainforest because one person is like planting trees or like they can find this one study like broadly everyone who's saying and knows that industrial logging hurts the rainforest and other environmentalists aren't going to send reporters to talk to you like obviously if you're the pronatalist version of a flat earther, When a reporter comes to me, I'm like, yeah, don't talk to the guy who doesn't think that wealth causes lower fertility rates.

That's pretty [01:04:00] insane position when you can just Google any graph on this and you will see it as a very strong trend. But yeah, I don't want to go too deep on, on that particular thing. So what would the other thing you said? There was something else that came out today that was stressful. You read this one.

It wasn't

Simone Collins: stressful. It's more of a Swedish piece. They were so mean to us. The Swedish place that I think it was a translation, but it was like, they said the parents who beat their children. Yeah. The parents who beat their children and want everyone to have children. And then we live in a dank farmhouse.

They said we live in a dingy farmhouse. Dingy, that was the word, dingy. Oh, I wonder if there's a like, more diplomatic way that this is written in Swedish, or did they, she just like flat out call her home dingy? Was this somebody who came to

Malcolm Collins: her house, or were they writing about somebody else? Yeah, she,

Simone Collins: yeah, she's the woman who came to her house.

Her picture's at the very end of the article. Remember, she wore the bright shirt.

Malcolm Collins: Oh I like that. They included a lot of our full arguments in that piece. That's always nice. When somebody does that, we always

Simone Collins: ask someone to come at us. We're always like, be [01:05:00] controversial, but it must as villains.

And she's I'm glad she did it because it made the article more interesting. But yeah, it's always stressful reading those being like, wait, my house is dingy. I try to clean up before you. I

Malcolm Collins: broadly, I thought it was a good article. It is the type of article that I would want written.

But it's always,

Simone Collins: it's always stressful to, for anyone to talk about, like to read anything about you. It's just as stressful if it's positive. So I'm just ready to de stress. Let's talk about China as a dumpster fire. It's going to make me feel so much better. Okay. Let's do it.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Do I have any debris on me or anything like that? Ooh,

Simone Collins: yeah, let me, not that I can see, not that I can see. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: this right here.

Simone Collins: I can't, is wiping your nose on it going to make it go away? I'm trying to lick it off, but it's not that scary.[01:06:00]

Just give me the shirt to wash. I, we have a, I brought a bunch of

Malcolm Collins: shirts and pants down for you to wash.

Simone Collins: I hope you didn't put them in the clean laundry basket. I need to make things more. We need a better hamper system. We will work this out.

Malcolm Collins: I'll just change my shirt.

Simone Collins: What do you want for dinner, by the way?

Malcolm Collins: You know what would be really cool if you learned how to make, if you learned how to make taquitos.

Simone Collins: That can't be hard to do, but I would need oh my God, wait a second. No. I can use, hold on. What if I tried this? I will make corn tortilla taquitos using your slow cooker beef and keep in mind that is prime beef, the Christmas beef.

I will

try it. I don't know exactly how they're properly cooked. I'm just going to First, lightly fry corn tortillas in butter, then I'm going to roll them in the meat, which I will saute ahead of time with some pumpkin. Would you like put some of it or not? Yeah, that's a

Malcolm Collins: great idea. And [01:07:00] then

Simone Collins: I will cook them further in the air fryer.

Malcolm Collins: That's exactly what I would have suggested.

Simone Collins: All right, let's see with maybe some melted cheese on top. I don't know. I haven't gotten there yet, but we're going to see how that goes. No, no melted cheese. We're going to try dry. You can dip them in sauces. We're going to see how this works. I'm excited for it.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, the episode we did today on the spy, it got demonetized. And I think it's because we were talking about things that we aren't allowed to talk about. So just don't, no, even saying we aren't allowed to talk about something. You can't say that.

Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. Deleted

Malcolm Collins: everything else. So that must've been what flagged it.

That is so creepy. That's really dystopian. Yeah.

We live here. Have fun. The deep state is spying on us. And

Simone Collins: we can't say that.

Malcolm Collins: One of the comments that somebody had that got to me as they were like they did arrest like random women who nobody follows for questioning their school board. Do you think was your guys platform? They're not going to attack you. [01:08:00] And I was like, That makes sense.

Simone Collins: Touche. Creepy.

In this episode, we dive into the controversial topic of hereditarianism in dogs and why many progressives acknowledge it in pets but not in humans. The discussion covers the pit bull debate, including the moral implications of neutering the breed to prevent attacks on other pets and humans. We also explore the historical and societal roles dogs and cats have played, arguing for their special status and potential future alongside humanity, even in space. The script wraps up with an exploration of online backlash against the hosts and their defense of hereditarian views, followed by a personal conversation about dinner plans.

[00:00:00] Most progressives do believe in hereditarianism and dogs. And the question is why did they believe it there and not in humans?

And it is because they have raised and interacted with dogs. It is very hard to miss hereditarianism if you have actually been around young people . So what you're saying also is this is a product of the fact that they don't have human children.

I think the previous thing is what everyone's gonna freak out about in the comments. He wants to genetically modify dogs to be smarter? How dare he? But this is where things get spicy. The pit bull debate yeah. I do not think that there is a huge moral negative to neutering the pit bull population humans who love dogs, neuter dogs all the time.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: Pit bulls in the United States kill an average of 8,730 dogs per year in 2,904 cats per year. That means that if you neutered the entire us pit [00:01:00] bull population,

You would be saving one cat or dogs, a life that is somebody else's pet for every 3.8, six pit bulls. You neutered.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: Over the next hundred years.

And I will tell you the best argument for not neutering pitbulls. And then I will tell you why it doesn't even work.

Would you like to know more?

Hello Simone, I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be doing an episode that was inspired by somebody who was criticizing us. It was an article that was actually not so bad. Where was the article published? It was like The LA Review of Books. Yeah, and what's really interesting in it is when you went to look up The the writer of the article to learn more about her and her perspectives.

She was in the middle of a fight on the internet based on this article because she called out us and a few of our friends like Johnny Anomaly and diana Fleishman podcast. Yes. And so she calls out a few of our friends. And so, you know, obviously they've got supporters as well online and she's getting trashed in, [00:02:00] in Twitter.

Which is actually interesting that it happened this way because Often when people attack us. Enough of a Twitter spasmob forms, like whenever we go viral, that we are on the minority side, but when they fail to go viral, the only people who notice are the supporters of the various people who are being attacked and they end up getting s**t all over.

So, she was getting having to be defensive and somebody found and she ended up defending this position, a post where she claimed anti hereditarianism in dog breeds. So specifically. Not only does she not believe that none of a human's personality is heritable, but she doesn't believe that any of a dog's personality is heritable.

Right. So like on, on, on Twitter, I can read a bit like how some of this conversation played out because this is a very common conversation we see again and again, which is really weird. With Emily Merchant, the author of this article representing [00:03:00] the, the kind of person who is very well educated and very well meaning but also very progressive and just will not believe, will refuse to believe that, that behavioral traits, including intelligence are heritable.

So Stegosauro Benedet writes, I can't help thinking I should really be screening for the gene that makes otherwise apparently intelligent people fall for pseudoscientific nonsense like eugenics. And then. Conchabar responds, I haven't read the essay yet, but the claim that we can't select for specific traits in a population is utterly wrong.

We've been doing it with animals for millennia. To which Emily Merchant, the author of this article responds, it's much easier with animals, but a project by behavior geneticists in the 1950s to 1960s to breed an dog failed utterly. And she links to this, this study. And , someone reads it and [00:04:00] then includes a screenshot of the study saying, just skimming this, they seem to suggest that.

That it can be successful with dogs. Emily merchant responds. No, they're saying that differences between dog breeds are small, especially under similar living conditions. She continues. Scott was a member of the American eugenics society in the 1960s, and he expressed extreme skepticism about the possibility of breeding intelligence and humans on the basis of his experience, trying to do it with dogs.

So she's trying to argue that, you know, this, this dog breeder. Okay. So first of all, I should note. The other study that she's citing here, because this is going to be important in a lot of progressives who do believe like anti hereditarianism in dogs is real, will cite this it was a recent study, actually, used a giant sample size.

Showed only about a 9 percent personality difference between breeds. What they won't tell you, this reminds me of the spanking studies where huge sample sizes did not control at all in the way they were collecting data, is the personality of the dogs is based on owner's self reports. Yeah. [00:05:00] Here's the problem with that.

The owner's self report of a dog personality is going to have more to do with the owner's personality than with the dog's personality. How many owners speak of their pit bull? They're just the sweetest little things, you know, because they use their dog to augment their own self perception, which is of course, you're not going to get much correlation there.

Man, you can just look at like, just to go into pit bull statistics so people can understand how absolutely insane this position is. Pit bulls make up 5. 8 to 6. 6, nice around. Let's say 6 percent of the total dog population in the United States, okay, but they're responsible for 69 percent of fatal dog attacks.

Okay. From 2005 to 2019, they killed 346 Americans, which is 6. 5 X higher than the next closest breed. So. 650 percent higher than the next closest dog breed.

 Which only killed 51 people. And [00:06:00] pit bulls inflict nearly half of 48% of all fatal attacks on infants. Those are babies under 1-year-old, not okay. And from 2015 to 2019, 76% of the fatal attacks on children under nine years old were from pit bulls. Keep in mind, they only make up 66% of the doll population.

Mm-Hmm. So you like, well, that's the people who maybe buy pit bulls and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like what? Like, it's very obvious to me. And if you've owned a dog, and this is the other thing that gets really interesting to me in regards to this. When you were talking to this lady, you were like, or you mentioned with somebody who was like, well, try to teach a non Well, yeah, I'll read it.

I mean, first someone, James Dog on Twitter Made a very good point saying, if you're concerned that EA, cause she also writes about effective altruism is a crude measure. Perhaps you should be campaigning for researchers to be permitted to access vast existing IQ linked databases, which is something that's being quite restricted right now.

But then he continues, alternatively, try teaching a Greyhound to memorize over 1000 distinct commands [00:07:00] and use it to herd sheep. And then Kanchabar comes back in with, OP should, should prove how intelligent these, these breed variations are by raising a pack of Basset hounds and putting them through IPO.

She'd lose her mind trying to get them to IPO, probably like a, maybe like an assistance dog training. I don't know. She'd lose her mind just trying to get them to stop sniffing, let alone competing against breeds specifically bred for it. I mean, the thing It's so clear with dog braids. Wait, here I need to talk about like herding dogs, for example.

So we, I've always believed that the core difference between dogs is what they're bred for. So I think that dog personalities predominantly, if you're like, what type of dog should I get? You're looking are, are you a ratting dog, a herding dog, a hunting dog, or A fighting dog. I mean, pit bulls are fighting dogs.

Let's, Oh yeah, fighting dogs. Like, is it a dog meant to kill other dogs? Yeah. The, the typically in my experience for like what my family [00:08:00] likes, I always go herding dogs and I find herding dogs are fairly similar across herding dogs, but if you've ever had a herding dog, it will be clear to you just how much of their behavior is genetic.

So a great example is I grew up with an Australian shepherd. Today we use corgis, which are another type of herding dog. But for, for our family's primary dog. We adopt Corgis. We don't use them. Yes. Australian Shepherds, they it, when it rained when I was a kid because they need to get the sheep to high ground whenever it rains.

So they didn't drown. And clearly we didn't teach it to do this. It would nip at all of the family's heels to try to get us upstairs. That is really sweet. And also, yeah, really weird. If you don't believe things are inherited because no one taught this dog to do that. Yeah, no one taught the dog to nip at our feet to try to get us to go upstairs.

So where did it get this really specific behavior pattern tied to hurting? And, and you see this yeah, just sort of like across, it's, it's, it's, I mean, it's so wild to me that someone could [00:09:00] think this, but then it gave me this realization, which was something I hadn't realized before, which is that most progressives, I mean, you've got a few crazy ladies like this lady here who are like dog breed differences.

Aren't heritable. I mean, she's not crazy. She's the weird thing is that she's. Very sane and reasoned and tempered in most of her analysis. I don't think so. I think you need to basically be an occult to believe this, or have never interacted with dogs. But this is what they I know. Here's the way that I look at it.

Like, if we were to frame this from a perspectives point of view, there are lots of Otherwise sane reasoned people who believe in scientific inquiry, but also believe that the earth is flat and the non hereditary and people, the blank slightest, I think are similar. You know, they can, they can engage. I don't think that's true.

I think you always want to see the best in people. I think that. A lot of the people who think the earth is flat are generally stupid. I think that people who believe on hereditarianism in dogs are generally just brainwashed [00:10:00] cultists. They are not. Well, and I think the other thing that's notable of course, is that most even blank slate as progressives who insist that no traits behavioral are heritable.

Or like, Oh yeah, I'm like, of course you've got a border Collie. They're going to behave this way. I was about to make, which is to say, it made me realize that most progressives do believe in hereditarianism and dogs. Most monoculture does. And the question is why did they believe it there and not in humans?

And it is because they have raised and interacted with dogs. It is very hard to miss hereditarianism if you have actually been around young people of a specific species. So what you're saying also is this is a product of the fact that they don't have human children. And I think that's a really good point.

I was listening to a podcast called The BCC Club, which is broadly about internet drama when, you know, I run through all my blocked and reported episodes and still need some kind of [00:11:00] Gossip, please. People recommend something better than that. That's about internet gossip that I can listen to as a podcast, but basically the BCC club is two very, very progressive lesbians who talk about internet stuff.

And there was one episode where they talk about buying pets online. They talk a lot about dog breeds and behavior and dog DNA. And then, you know, they also frequently talk in their podcasts about the amounts of money that they paid for medical care for their pets and things like that. And they, 100%.

Understand and empathize with each other and talk about the, the, the grief that they feel upon losing an animal. And then they, they like literally can't empathize the same way with what it would feel like to lose a human child. And I think really seeing it, I'm seeing exactly what you're talking about here where they can't understand.

They can't, they can't even really put it on the same level of their dog, their dog parenting, which is really interesting to me. That, that, that humans wouldn't be as lovable to them as dogs. Because. Well, I think they've still [00:12:00] disconnected from their natural instincts at that point. I mean, they're not sleeping with men.

They're not, you know, engaging with people who are interested in like rational discourse more broadly. They have artificially constructed a lifestyle. That masturbates, I think mostly status for them. That seems to be the core thing that they're focused on is individual status was in the urban monoculture, which is achieved through adopting more fringe and modern lifestyle choices which leads to them no longer, I think really identifying, and I'd say they don't really identify as human anymore, but what I really mean by that is it's, they don't identify most human behavior as human anymore.

They think they're still human, but when they look at like your average rural American to them, that individual is an animal. And that's what they are thinking about when they are trying to model kids and stuff like that. I don't think that's quite it. I think they're not thinking I just I just don't think they they have that like empathetic basis to work [00:13:00] with they don't their world is their cats and their, their partners, and it's not kids, so they just can't empathize.

If you see this in people all the time who have lots of kids, is one of the things I've noticed, like, that most, when I hear people's stories where they became hereditarians and they weren't formerly hereditarians, Yeah. Is after having kids. Yeah. Like, that's the biggest debate in their life. I had kids, and then I realized, eugh.

Well, both you and I were, I think, just intuitively from our upbringing, because I think, blank slate theory, if you go through a public school system, or a mainstream private school system, Is, is going to be more or less what's tacitly hammered into you. You can learn about genetics in school, but you're still kind of raised with blank slate theory, I think subconsciously.

And so I think you and I came into parenting kind of with a blank slate mindset, and then we're blindsided. By the traits of our children They're just very obviously hereditary. Yeah, even when it's stuff that we've never shown them never [00:14:00] demonstrated They're not picking this up from us. Like we've hid it from them.

And still well And the studies on this are incredibly compelling that look at babies. For example young infant Girls, for example, if you're talking about differences between males and females, they will look at an adult much longer like I think like 10 X longer, like dramatically, dramatically longer.

They crave social attention than male babies. But if you look between for example, ethnic groups there was a study in like the 1940s on we mentioned it in a different episode, but it looked at Caucasian babies versus East Asian children younger than six months. And if you put a blanket over their heads the Caucasian ones like freak out and we'll rip it off.

Where the East Asian ones will just clear a path for themselves to breathe. And it's a very different reaction to this negative stimuli and that you can see this reliably in infants shows that there are some clustered sociological differences. But I mean, again, I think that progressives in the [00:15:00] fact that they have to deny that this is true when it is so obviously true.

End up discrediting the claim that they make that their system that they are creating for the world that this urban monoculture can actually be fair if there is any degree of genetic differences between individuals. And this is something that's really made clear to us by one individual who is like.

Well, yeah, but if you intergenerationally select for IQ in your kids, and it does work, I mean, what happens if in a few generations, they're much smarter than other people? And it was clear that she didn't have a world framework where humans that are born differently from other humans can safely coexist with other humans.

It's like, well, if one group ever did show genuine superiority to another group, they would have like a moral mandate to erase that other group. Or the other group would have a moral mandate to erase it. Like that is genuinely what the urban monoculture believes. because they don't have a system for dealing with genuine diversity.

And that is really horrifying. Yikes. [00:16:00] Yeah. Another thing to go into here is the pit bull debate because we got to go into the pit bull debate. Yeah. Here is my thing on pit bulls. Okay. I believe that humanity does have a moral obligation to dogs and cats. Actually, this is. Before I get into the pivotal thing, I need to make one thing clear.

We have a moral obligation to dogs and cats that we do not have to other species. Somebody's gonna be like, why would you think that we have a moral obligation to dogs and cats that we don't have to other species? And it's because the partnership that humanity formed with dogs and cats was not a partnership of subjugation.

Most of the other species that we have, where we have domesticated them, it was us capturing them and forcing them, they're not, like, cows don't serve us because they wanted to serve us, because at some point, some cow in distant history made the choice to work with humans. That is [00:17:00] not the case for dogs and cats.

So we can start with cats, which were actually the later domestication event, and made human civilization possible, period. Okay, why did cats make human civilization possible? Because before cats we couldn't do long term grain storage, which was critical to To the types of bureaucratic infrastructures, it was the distribution and collection of long term grains, i.

e. early taxation that allowed, specifically in the Nile in Egypt, that allowed for the first real major civilization to start, which was Egypt. But you couldn't long term maintain grain in these primitive silos because they'd get rat and mice infestations. And so the introduction of cats, which were an obligate carnivore and wouldn't eat the grain, but would eat anything else.

There is a reason that the Egyptians worshipped cats. There is a reason they had cat gods, and they mummified cats, and they because cats made their lifestyle and civilization possible in a way that people today do not appreciate. And these cats were [00:18:00] not captured cats. These cats were cats that came and made themselves at home within these grain silos.

Okay. And then some Egyptians began to live with cats. But another important thing to note about cats as well is that cats were never fully domesticated. They do not in many categories of domestication count as a fully domesticated animal. Often when cats are living with humans, it is because to an extent they have chosen to live with humans.

Now dogs are a different, and I think an animal that we have even more responsibility to than cats. So what I mean by that is if you look at the early domestication events from what we could see about the way that dogs were likely domesticated, is it appears that some canines began to lose the instinct to basically attack and kill humans or fight humans whenever they see them.

You know, before they were a social animal and their tribe would be their tribe and our tribe would be our tribe and we would fight and kill each other and hunt each other and we were enemies. But the. The group that made the first [00:19:00] Overture was the dogs, it appears. What they did is some dogs began to hang out around the refuge piles of early humans, and then over time they began to become less afraid of humans, and humans began to integrate dogs, which already had a pre coded, you know, social clan structure in them, into our societies.

And it's important to note that our current concept of dogs as pets is likely not the way that they integrated into these groups. They likely integrated as a separate sort of cast, but as an independent cast. And we can see this in some primitive African communities when anthropologists have gone to learn about them.

There's this story that I found really interesting where one anthropologist was walking around a settlement and she was talking to a person about their dog. She goes, Oh, your dog. And they go, what do you mean my dog?

And they're like your dog. And they're like, I don't know what you mean my dog. And the person was like, well, the dog that sleeps in your house. And they go, Oh, well, yeah, I mean, it sleeps in our house because it chooses to, it could sleep in any house that wanted [00:20:00] to. It's not my dog. And this is likely the way that early Humans to animals, and we even see this in modern times where you will have a town dog or a town cat.

When I was in St. Andrews, we had a few of these. Did you have any where you grew up, Simone? Yeah. I mean, I think even in houses where people have domesticated cats, sometimes people like neighbors will start feeding one of those cats and the cats sort of two times families, you know what I mean? And we'll like sleep over at the other person's house and hang out in the other person's house.

And. I think animals do that in general. I certainly saw it a lot when I was in Mexico that there would be definitely like ownerless dogs that would just be beach dogs that everyone would feed and kind of take care of and the dogs would sleep wherever, and they were healthy dogs, but no one owned them in particular, but I do find it notable that even in scenarios where humans.

own cats where, you know, you can have cats more freely move between houses. If they're outdoor cats, you still see [00:21:00] this, this phenomenon. Well, and it's important to understand why dogs were such a useful partner to our early species. Dogs can help in terms of like their capacity to sense the environment around them.

They have like, I think like 15, 000 times our sense of smell. And, and like, I think like 15 X are hearing. So they make humans, they're the first bionic add on to humans. Yes. They were humans first bionic add on. And I'd also note here, another thing that we mentioned when we write about dogs, but people should note this.

Is because dogs have been selected for their love of humans. That is one of the things we breed them for. They likely experience an emotion towards us, which is a louder form of love than any love a human is capable of experiencing. Hundred percent. And we've always said, if you really actually, if you want one unconditional love, don't find a partner.

Don't just find a dog. Get a kid. Yeah. No, you're only ever going to get unconditional love from a dog. No human can give that to you or should be expected to give it to you, [00:22:00] you know, but with all of this being the case was dogs being a voluntary and useful partner to humanity. I think as we start encountering other species out there in the universe.

Or we start building our own other sentient species, and we begin to have to form what is our relationship going to look like with species that are strictly more intelligent than us? And when do we decide, like, where these relationship boundaries go? It's gonna be important to us that we have some voluntary relation with another species that we do not factory farm, et cetera, right?

That we treat with a dignity level that is To an extent comparable to human dignity and that is something that I think we should do with dogs. And I also think that we have a moral obligation to, if not have dogs on the spaceships we use to colonize the galaxy, bring their genetics so that they can be recreated when we get to these environments.

and potentially even to genetically uplift dogs. It wouldn't be that [00:23:00] hard to do. For example, even with our existing technology, you could give a dog like pox to, and it would likely be able to understand and respond to human speech, not with speech, but with other things much higher than dogs do today from the other experiments that we've seen.

I don't know. I feel like this, this may just be social media hokum, but there are definitely people on social media who set up buttons for their dogs that actually seem to be fairly effective. Yeah, but Now the question is, what do I think of pitbulls given how much I think of dogs, right? Okay, yes, yeah, now get into the controversial stuff that lost a ton of followers.

I think the previous thing is what everyone's gonna freak out about in the comments. He wants to genetically modify dogs to be smarter? How dare he? No, I'm not saying today, I'm saying eventually, okay? But the, the, this is, this is where things get spicy. I do not think that there is a huge moral negative to neutering the pit bull population for three reasons.

One is, [00:24:00] is humans neuter dogs all the time these days? Yeah. Humans who love dogs, neuter dogs all the time. Now humans, humans, neuter humans all the time. Humans neuter themselves all the time. Yeah. But I'm talking about the neutering of another being. Yeah. The non consensual humans should be able to sterilize another human.

I don't believe that's morally okay. But should a human be able to sterilize a dog? Absolutely. It's something we do all the time as to why. There shouldn't be a moral problem with humans neutering dogs. If people are wondering, like, why do I have such a different belief around this than humans, it's because dogs breed uncontrollably, which can lead to big problems in regions where they are not neutered.

They lead to more aggregate suffering of canines and humans. And so it's strictly and obviously a good thing to do. If humans bred like that then it might make sense to consider sterilizing humans, but humans don't breed like that. So that's not [00:25:00] Well, they don't breed like that anymore. You could argue that there was a time when they did.

No, I think it was always an illusion. But the point being is You're probably right, actually. If we lived in a world where if you didn't sterilize humans, humans would exhaust their food supply and eventually start killing each other that changes the moral equation around sterilization. Even and we do live in a world and we've seen this because a lot of cultural groups like well My cultural group lauds dogs.

You want to see more about this year episode? Why don't jews own guns? It's one of our best episodes we've ever done. But some groups like jews and muslims for example are pretty anti canine historically and in a modern context and just do not historically own dogs and they're What do these cultures have in common?

They were typically urban focused cultures in the middle ages Yeah, what did the fiddler on the roof do? Playwright writer say about dogs if a man owns a dog either that dog is no dog or that Jew is no Jew So [00:26:00] so if people don't know this has been a lot of papers like I sometimes mentioned to like Jewish friends I'm like, you know Jews don't own dogs and they're like What do you mean Jews don't own dogs?

I've seen Jewish people with dogs. I'm like, look at the literature. Jews don't own dogs. . And if you look at, and we know this goes back to early settlements because we can look at settlements to the ancient, ancient Israeli period and see that dogs appear very rarely in the Jewish cemeteries.

So we can actually see exactly when this cultural practice came about. As to why the practice came about, it was because if you're an urban based population, typically. Like urban specialist cultures are typically very wary of dogs because dogs can become major problems like stray dogs in cities and you don't really need them for anything.

Why, if I'm in an urban environment, do I need to be able to hear 15 times, you know, my range and smell 15, 000 percent stronger? If you are a rural person, dogs are critical to your way of life. So rural cultures usually have a much closer relationship with dogs. If you want to get a feeling of, is your family from an urban or rural background?

Think, what was your parents perspectives on dogs? [00:27:00] That's the core answer, right? Like, are they seen as a moral necessity, or are they seen as a moral negative and just a waste? But anyway where was I going with this? The pitbull scenario. Okay, so one, neutering. There doesn't appear to be any moral negative to neutering dogs, at least within our society.

And I, I, I could see the involuntary neutering of an animal as a moral negative. If there wasn't the sort of gun to our head of, but dogs will just keep breeding until they become a problem to other dogs. Right. So that's one problem. The second problem is, is then why am I okay with neutering pit bulls specifically the, the infant murder machines that they are right.

Like again, you've got to keep in mind, dog murder machines, even if you don't like humans, that is where it gets. It gets for me and I just see no way to defend this. Pit bulls were selectively bred for their tendency to kill other dogs. Not for their love of humans, not even for their ability to kill humans.

If you love [00:28:00] dogs, you should hate pit bulls. Because even today when we talk about all of the human deaths that result from pit bulls, it is Nothing. It is a drop in the bucket when contrasted with the pet dog deaths that are due to pitbulls.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: Pit bulls kill an average of, and this is just in the United States, 8,730 dogs per year. 2,904 cats per year. And 10,250 other pets and livestock per year.

In total pit bolts are estimated to kill around 21,886 pets and livestock per year. Pit bulls were responsible for 81% of the animals killed by dogs in a documented attacks over a 10-year period.

For attacks on other dogs, specifically 90% were carried out by pit bulls.

All you need to do to top. This is neuter pitbulls. If you just neuter pit bulls. You could, within a few years save the lives of around 9,000 dogs per year, 3000 cats per year. The people who [00:29:00] don't do this are genuinely sociopath's.

Given how flippantly we neuter dogs for just about anything else.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Well, what if you're not a dog lover and you're just an animal lover in general. This report here shows that pit bulls killed 30 times more animals than human crime dead. In fact, it found that pit bulls were 500 times more deadly to other animals and humans. Then all other dog breeds combined.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: In fact pit bulls that are rehomed by shelters and rescuers killed more animals than persecuted Setas. Eve you are one of those people who's like, but my dog is so nice to me. And so sweet looking, you come off, like one of those parents of a serial killer, who was like, well, my kid was nice at home.

It's like, it doesn't matter. A dog can be the sweetest dog in the world. You know, Every hour of a year, but one where it murders a toddler. That dog was still better off, not existing that year. That's the problem. [00:30:00] If you are not weighing the statistics against your emotional connection with a specific dog.

And this statistics are reality.

Yeah. In fact, I'd go so far and say that you are probably saving one dog life for every probably hundred pitbulls that are neutered.

That seems like a safe bet. Just considering the number of people, I think if you know dog owners, you will probably know. You know, someone who at least knows someone or someone who themselves has had their dog attacked by, not necessarily killed, but attacked by, for sure, a pit bull. Yeah

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: so the breed is survey 2019 more puppies, yet fewer homes for pit bulls shows that there are around 4.5 million pit bulls in the United States. If that number is accurate. And if the above numbers are accurate, that means for every 3.86 pit bulls, you neutered, you would save the life of one cat or dog over the next hundred years. So it is neutering. [00:31:00] Less than four pit bulls for the life of every cat or dog you are saving. I just can't understand the moral equation of not neutering for dogs to save the life of one other.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: That dog who is going to die has kids who care about it. A family who cares about it. People who love it, just as much as you love your pit bull. And they're not even asking you to put down your pit bull, they're just asking you to neuter it. That is insane. The moral equation at play.

and this then gets really interesting, because, well, some pit bull owners will be like, well, But when pit bulls are well raised, they don't do this, and I'm like, then we still need to ban the breed.

And people are like, wait, why would you say we still need to ban the breed if it's a problem with the people who are buying them? I'm like, those people shouldn't be buying dogs then! So we need to ban the breed, whatever the desire is that's causing these people to go out and raise them so poorly. And you shouldn't have a breed that when it's raised poorly, Horribly murders other small, innocent dogs.[00:32:00]

Okay. I think another problem too is the, one of the big elements of this controversy is the bully XL, which sounds like a uniquely terrifying version of pit bulls, but at least as marketed in some corners as a breed of pit bull that is actually much more docile and friendly. The problem is that even though it looks really, really tough is that, you know, breeding is not an incredibly well regulated.

Realm. It's, it's a little kludgy. And so you don't necessarily know if you are getting a docile version, someone could tell you that this pit bull that they're selling to you for between one and 5, 000 or more is a bully XL and is docile and will be super nice to your kids and won't hurt a fly. But you really can't know that for sure.

It's not safe. There's a reason that of under one year olds, 48 percent of them that were killed by a dog were killed by a pit bull. You know, that's mostly the dog owner's own children. Or children that they are [00:33:00] babysitting. Like, that is horrifying that we are allowing this to happen. These are infant Murder machines.

These are toddler killing machines. That is what they do. And again, I should note here that even if the owners, and this is what really gets me with the pitbull owners, they'll go out and when people are like, look, we really shouldn't allow, like we need to, and I'm not saying we should kill pitbulls, just saying we should neuter pitbulls.

When they're like, Oh, Presumably make their sale and breeding illegal. Yeah. How dare you do this because we, we like pit bulls because they're so sweet and kind. And it's like, yeah, but I can look at the ads of the pit bull breeders and I can see that functionally that's not the case. The high value pit bulls are being sold because of their adjacency to savagery.

And some of like pit bull ads here.

They're like, This is, this is like King Cyrus, the murder machine. He can murder 10 infants in a day. No, they won't. They won't, obviously they don't mention the infant murder, but they just, you know, mention how tough and strong and savage they are [00:34:00] because individuals who buy them are using them to modify their own self image often.

That is why they will buy dogs. And this is where I'm like, okay, well maybe these people are actually of this category of it's the. It's the owner's fault because they are buying a dog. They want to make them appear like a savage, tough individual. And so they are training it to be savage and tough.

Fine. Doesn't change the fact that we shouldn't have this breed. Right. When you consider that you are literally like how many dog neuters is a human child not being horribly savaged worth, right? Like I just don't understand the moral equivalency here when you could get another kind of dog. Yeah, and that's the thing is there are so many amazing dog breeds out there and dog breeds that are super tough, too.

Yeah. You just, there are lots of hunting dogs out there. There are lion killers. You could get a Rhodesian Ridgeback. You could get all sorts of very interesting and, and tough and [00:35:00] protective, but also sweet dogs. This is not going to be a challenge for you. It just seems so unambiguous that pit bulls are a step too far.

Yeah. Very polarizing. We're definitely going to lose followers. I think this is a lot like, Korean K pop stans and Taylor Swift fans. No, no, no, no. Here, if we have somebody who disagrees with us on this, I, I need them to answer a question. Okay? So, let's, let's deal with it. Let's bring the numbers down a bit.

Yeah. So that they can understand, would they neuter one Pitbull if it saved the life of one child? And from being horribly, horribly murdered, a toddler, a three year old, horribly murdered. And then I say, okay, they're like, well, of course I neuter one pitbull if it did that. People neuter pitbulls all the time, right?

You know, for different reasons. I say, well, would you neuter ten pitbulls? To save the life of one child, one toddler. I'm like, what number, what's the number that's too high for you? What's the number of pit bulls to save the life of a three year [00:36:00] old that is too high for you? Because categorically by the data, you can save a lot of individual toddler lives by doing this and other dog lives, right?

Like at what, what, what about another dog? So I want two numbers here. How many pit bulls need to be neutered for the life of another dog that was horribly. Mutilated. Yeah. And how many for a toddler? And if you're just like, not, I wouldn't even neuter one pit bull for one child. Then we don't want you as a follower.

I guess that's Yeah, like, you, you're, there's seriously something wrong in your ethical equations of reality, given that people neuter pit bulls all the time. Get out of my pocket! It's general population control. You can see the door, walk through it. Okay, I get you. And that's, that's entirely fair. Because I, I, I need to know how they are internally constructing this argument.

Because what they do is they do, do redirect the argument. They're like, well, it's not the dog's fault. It's the owner's fault. Yeah. Or, or, well, then you should accept bully, bullies [00:37:00] XL because. They, they're docile. But then, you know, how do you differentiate? But then the question is, is then why aren't you campaigning?

If you want the bully excels to be the thing, then you need a better system for determining which ones are the bully excels and you need to work on a breeding program to make them more docile and you more than anyone should want to get rid of these other pit bulls that are giving the bully excels a bad name.

But you don't do this. I don't see the people defending Bully xls saying, but of course we need to neuter the other pit bulls. They're just, they, they're just trying to redirect attention. It's like, well, we need to neuter pit bulls. And they're like, well, but what about Bully xls? Yeah. Or it's, well, what about the bad owners?

Or this whole thing is, I think. More largely, it reminds me of arguments around abortion. It reminds me of arguments around immigration. I think that, that we have as a society become at all. Really? No, I know. Hear me out here. I think people have come to a way of dealing with ideas where it's [00:38:00] no longer about the facts.

It's about once you've established your side. Your goal is to defend your mind from any ideas that are offensive to it. And that is an outcropping of progressives. Really? Okay, why? I think that that is something that happens, however, I think that if you are talking about immigration, or you are talking about abortion, abortion, there are genuine, well intentioned people with logically sound structures for arguing on both sides of these topics.

I have my own positions on these topics. But I think that there are individuals who seriously listen to all the evidence and have seriously thought through like different positions who genuinely fall on either side of this issue. I do not believe there is a single well intentioned person who has really thought through All of the arguments on the we should not neuter pitbull side of this argument.

I do not think that there is a logical structure when you consider how [00:39:00] lightly neutering is treated in our society for not neutering pitbulls. And I will tell you the best argument for not neutering pitbulls. And then I will tell you why it doesn't even work. The single best argument that you can create for not neutering pitbulls is the don't take my gun argument.

That is to say, Well, yes, I agree that I want a pit bull instead of another dog because of the effect that the pit bull has on my personal self identity. Right? Mm-Hmm. . Like I'm, I, I need it to be who I am is a deadly weapon. Yeah. And it may be a deadly weapon, but Americans are, should be allowed to own deadly weapons.

Mm-Hmm. , right? Mm-Hmm. . And we argue that. Here's the problem. Okay? A pit bull is closer to an autonomous AI with guns set up on it. That is, that is trained to, in some instances, kill people. Do you think humans should be allowed to own kill bo, like kill drones? That. And, and I actually, I'd [00:40:00] even go so far as to say humans should be allowed to own kill drones.

But I don't think they should be allowed to own kill drones that are constantly circling their house and sometimes randomly shoot people. That's where I'd be like, obviously a human should not be allowed to own that. Are you insane? Well, or, or kill drones with any any track record. of being a public safety threat, which is to say if a kill drone were to attack civilians or civilians fill a pets, obviously those would be considered extremely dangerous and unpredictable pieces of technology that would be immediately banned.

And yet, when this happens with dogs, for some reason, it's not banned with, you know, intensity. You're absolutely right. Yeah. And this is a, but there's the secondary reason, which is to say, I don't defend people's right to keep guns because of how guns positively augment their self image. I defend that right for two core reasons, one is that in certain parts of America, [00:41:00] guns are necessary for self defense.

If you were in an extremely rural area where it takes 30 minutes for the cops to get to your house or an hour for the cops to get to your house, you need guns. I'm sorry. Well, but also, you know, guns are sort of what prevent. Takeovers of, but that's the other core reason is that guns are a part of our checks and balances system in the United States.

And people are like, no, do, do guns really help in like a drone fight? Do guns really help? Like if the U S military wanted to take over and it's like, absolutely. Yes. We, we, if you even look at like, Hamas's raid in Israel, if more of these families had been armed and the families that were armed had a very easy time fighting them off.

The, the core reason they got hit so bad was just the Jewish cultural predilection to not own guns at high rates. Another really interesting thing about these raids that a lot of people don't know is the settlements that really got brutalized were not the conservative religious settlements. They were mostly spared.

It was the loosey goosey. Kibbutzes that were sort of like [00:42:00] hippie nonsense. Like, let's get along with them. It was like the peace concert that ended up getting absolutely massacred where nobody had guns. It was not the groups that were like, Hey, we need to be worried about these people.

We really need to, you know, be harsher in these scenarios that had to deal with, with that much bloodshed because they understood the risk and they were armed. So that's important to note as well. There are externalities to guns that don't exist with pitbulls. If you can explain to me an externality that can be resolved by a pitbull that either makes you safer as a citizen.

Okay. Or that makes us safer from like a democratic standpoint. I will take that argument as well. I just haven't heard one. A pit bull is genuinely differentially not better in a military context than a Rottweiler, which already exists. Like why are you using a pit bull and not a Rottweiler if you're using it for fighting humans?

Pit bulls are just toddler murder machines. They're not really useful for [00:43:00] anything else. They're useful for that in killing dogs. Horribly. Horrifically. Anyway, any other thoughts?

Nope. We like dogs. We'll take dogs to space. But, yeah. We, we, we only, I think, you know what? Actually, this is very similar to our cultural viewpoint. Which is that we We ultimately support pluralism and human groups that play nice with other human groups. And if you can't play nice then we have no interest.

That's actually a really good point is people wonder why we're both so pluralistic, but so quick to turn our back on any group that just attacks another group and say, okay, they lost their right to exist. But that's the way that we play more broadly. Yeah, I am okay with pluralism, but if you run out and attack your neighbors the pluralistic protection that I culturally believe that every human has a right to is immediately revoked from your group.

We support human flourishing insofar as you do, you [00:44:00] are not a net drag on human flourishing.

And we promote dog flourishing insofar as it is not a net drag on dog flourishing. And it would seem that pit bulls. are broadly a net drag on canine flourishing, so. Love you to death, Simone. You are so special and amazing.

I love you so much. I just got a call from George. Can you call him back to see what he wanted? I'll call him. Would you mind getting the kids? Yes, and I'll bring my food down and make you some fried rice tonight with oyster sauce. Will do. An egg or no egg? Egg, please. We've got chicken for a reason. Spring onions, but no vegetables?

I'd actually love it if you put in some other vegetables. I got like a frozen vegetable pack that could be good for a stir fry that would go pretty well with fried rice. Okay, I'll see what I can do there. That's what I got it for. You know, it's got like baby corn and yeah. All right, we'll give it a try.

Love you. Love you, too. I'll call him.

Speaker: What? It's impossible. [00:45:00] Yes. Oh my gosh, it's a heart. Wow. You can come sit with me. That was the best thing ever. Yay! Bye!

Join us as we delve into a provocative theory that reshapes how we view the history of human civilization. Discover the 'One Civilization Theory,' which posits that the vast majority of civilizational achievements stem from a single cultural lineage. Through an engaging discussion, we explore the advancements and contributions of this 'one civilization,' its potential to transform regions it touches, and the comparative historical advancements of different cultures across the globe. This episode promises to challenge mainstream historical narratives and offer a new perspective on our shared cultural ancestry and the factors driving civilizational success.

[00:00:00]

Hello, Simone! This episode is definitely going to go in the best of category for Basecamp, because it is a theory that I came to, which completely transforms how I see the history of humanity, and it is probably the single most offensive theory that we will air on this channel, if it becomes a mainstream theory, It will almost certainly always appear.

Any video that shows it will have a little explanation at the bottom by like the UN or something about how this theory isn't accurate. So historically I had this view that I think most people have is that human civilization. basically emerged in a few different regions, and that you would have these periods of growth where sometimes one region would be ahead.

Other times, another region would be ahead. Totally. Yeah, like, oh, China's the most cutting edge right now. And, and now [00:01:00] it's Japan and now it's, you know, It's, it's Egypt and whatever, yes, totally agree.

This theory posits that that view of history is mostly downstream of what I can only call the deification of the historical narrative. And that. The vast majority of feats of civilization were created by one civilization.

Oh no. And now I'm worried. Yes. Awkward. And it came to me when I was studying ancient Rome and ancient Greece recently, because I've been on a kick watching a number of videos on ancient Rome and Greece, and one thing really hit me as I was studying these periods, whenever Rome would retreat from a region.

And the Roman Empire would fall temporarily in a region that region would fall [00:02:00] back into a period of people essentially fighting over who had the nicest mud hut. Like very little was happening in those regions during that period. And this includes the region that my ancestors were only when we were older.

under Roman colonization during the period of the Roman Empire. Did we really do anything meaningful, civilizationally speaking? Okay. So to be fair, you're not arguing that it's your own ancestors who were somehow superior from a culture. Yes. Not my own ancestors. My ancestors were mud hut people.

For example, I am pretty much British, Irish, Scottish English The British Islands. You might say, well, come on, your ancestors must have produced something. Aren't there any great ruins in ancient British Isles? I was like, well, you know, there's Unga Bunga, like Stonehenge, I wouldn't call that a great ruin.

And they go, come on, there must be some great architecture in the British Isles. And I would say, actually, there is! In the [00:03:00] seventies, eighties, there was this beautiful bath complex built in Bath . And they're like, ah, you've seen the British can do something. I go, well, unfortunately, the Romans built that.

And it was in a, a, a nowhere backwater of the Roman Empire. And Britain didn't build anything comparable for literally thousands of years. This was their equivalent of like a district like sub-district that nobody cared about. But now you might be going through your head. What led me to this thought?

So I was studying the Roman Empire, thinking of all these ruins, and I started thinking, okay, okay, okay. But what about like the other civilizations of Earth during this period, right? Like, I've traveled all over the world. I've been to something, I think it's over a hundred countries. Like done a lot, a lot of travel.

And so I started thinking, okay, what were the other major civilizations? I was like, okay, you have Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica had great ruins, right?

You know, you've got your, your Machu Picchu, for example. Um, and ancient Mayan and Aztec ruins are extremely impressive. Right, [00:04:00] but as anyone broadly knows those ruins are fairly recent like Machu Picchu was built in the 15th century and so but I gave them a i'm like, okay, that doesn't really count.

You know, they got their civilization started later but there's also like india and china In japan, right? Like they're all ancient civilizations and i've i've been to these countries before and I was like, okay, so When I was in japan I must have seen some ruins that had any sort of equivalency to even, like, Roman backwaters in, like, Spain and stuff.

I started thinking about it and I was like, what? Okay. Okay. China. I've, I've seen some hint that there was a civilization there. And then I was like, no. Oh, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I have seen an East Asian ruin impressive at the Roman ruins. There was Angkor Wat and in India there was Hampi. And then I look up the dates of those ruins, the 15th and the 14th century.

Those ruins were built. [00:05:00] Anchor Watt was built when King's College Chapel was being built in Cambridge. In 1446. Like, they were built incredibly recently. And so then I was like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. But egypt. I consider Egypt to be the ancestor of Greek civilization.

So it's one line of civilization. The Greeks considered Egypt to be the ancestor of their civilization. Do they really? In Greek literature, they would say, oh, we got our civilization from Egypt. Yeah, they're always borrowing from Egypt. So, basically the, the single line of civilization that I can track goes Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Greece really takes over the flame from Egypt, and then Rome takes over the flame from Greece, and then Charlemagne takes over the flame from, , Rome, and then Charlemagne's kingdom splits into the various distinct sort of warring kingdoms that take over the flame from that, and then the flame is taken over by the British Empire and then it's sort of seeded around the world.

But [00:06:00] to get back to the story here, I was like, okay, but works of literature. Right? I have heard about all of these great works of literature by totally disconnected cultures. Like, for example, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Or the Journey to the West. Did you know when these were written? Romance of the Three Kingdoms was written in the 14th century. Journey to the West was written in the 16th century. I was like, okay, well, what about like, Water Martyr, Martyrs, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh, or Dream of the Red Chamber, right?

I've never heard of these. The 14th and the 18th century, respectively. To give you an idea of how late these were written to works of literature that I can clear, consider just like, As somebody who has read translated works of literature, and I'm just like, this one grabs me, these two don't. Dante's mind comedy was, started writing it in 1308, and he finished writing it in 1320.

Hundreds of years before any of these works. How about the Tales of Genji? The Tales of [00:07:00] Genji. That's Japan, and that was I think even written by a woman

the 11th century, Simone. So that was written only 200 years before Dante's Divine Comedy. Did you read the Tale of Gingy? Have you read the Aeneid? Yeah, and, okay, that's a lot better. Okay, so when was the Aeneid written? Yeah, okay, admittedly, way, way, way before the Tale of Genshi. The Aeneid was written in 29 or 19 B. C. The Tales of Genshi were written literally 1, 000 years later, and were literarily less sophisticated and complex.

That's fair, yeah. It's not like it's ancient. Even close. And this is like, when I started having this, I just started going through, I was like, Oh God, this can't be real. And again, I'm not saying that there was like no Japanese civilization, that they didn't produce any art, that there was no Chinese civilization, that there was no Indian civilization.

But what I'm saying is, and you'll actually see this, is that these civilizations advanced [00:08:00] artistically, literarily, at about the speed of my own ancestors, which were the British, until the British met the Romans. And then after the British were fully colonized the British began, like as civilization spread out from Charlemagne again, they began to do some, you know, more sophisticated things.

But what I'm saying is just it's. Civilizationally, along almost every metric, they were dramatically behind the one civilization. Yeah. So there's basically what you're arguing is there is one civilizational lineage that has ever actually kicked ass. It started with Egypt. went through Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, et cetera, and sort of into Europe broadly.

And there's just kind of nothing that competes with it. And, and, and no one has spontaneously figured it out the way that this has. So everyone who is most competitive now is standing on the shoulders of that one giant. There is only one giant. There is only one giant. And every time it, Touches [00:09:00] another region, right?

Usually first they rebel, it leaves, it spins into savagery again, then they come back they, they try to set something up, And by the time they set up any sort of permanent civilizational infrastructure in the region Then that region undergoes a rapid increase in prosperity in the amount of artistic works they're producing, in the amount of industry they're producing, in the amount of science they're producing.

So it's not that it only works for one people. My people can invent this. Insofar as a culture is willing to adopt it and build upon it, they can thrive. Yes. And they can build their own iterations of it, but that no one has independently captured this civilizational dynamo. I guess you can kind of look at how Japan just started killing it after World War II, when it started embracing elements of Western culture and how they took many elements of Western culture, did it so much better.

And then the sort of unique Japanese way. So yeah, like doing jazz on it, like putting your own spin on it and being additive with it can give you a lot of power, but it is definitely [00:10:00] pulling from that one derivative. Yeah. And the other big change that has happened in my understanding of world history is my opinion of the Mesoamerican civilizations has gone up dramatically because of the one civilization theory.

Which is to say that historically, my take on Mesoamerica is Mesoamerica was largely backwards compared to most of the world, but that was only because they got a late start. Yeah, it took people a long time to get down there. Compare. India, China, and Japan and ignored the one civilization to what was happening in Mesoamerica.

Mesoamerica kind of was schooling them at various parts in its history. Fair point. And that was the other thing that really got me when I was thinking of like great ruins I visited and stuff like that. So to give you an idea of what I mean here, Simone, I want you to compare Two ruins. Now keep in mind Roman ruins, you've seen Roman ruins.

You know, most of the Roman ruins you've seen are either a hundred years pre like they're either like [00:11:00] 50 AD or 50 bc, like the Roman bass, right? Were built in 70 AD in the backwater, and also just everything in Rome itself. It is so impressive. I mean, even just. The building material that everything is made of, because, you know, Rome sort of was torn down to create what now is Rome, you know, is impressive.

Just the very building blocks of the city. Yeah, so I'm going to send you some pictures so when I was looking for ruins in Japan that were from around the period of say, which was from the 4th to the 10th century. So, you see Tikal? That's the first picture of Mesoamerican ruins there.

Gorgeous. So, when Tikal was built, that's when Japan was building what is now the Hizmura Temple ruins from the 11th to 12th century BC. So, first of all, you can see it's pretty trivial compared to what they were doing in Mesoamerica at the same time period. Yeah. Not only that, it's trivial compared to, like, Anything Rome ever did in their [00:12:00] history, it's trivial compared to the bath that were built literally , 000 years before.

So wait, what's, what is special about Hiraizumi? It's one of the only old ruins I could find in Japan. It's like one of the oldest buildings or something? Yeah, we'll go over some other buildings in Japan that are older than this, but most of them are just going to look destroyed mud huts or completely reconstructed buildings.

I feel like I visited some really old ones in Kamakura, but maybe We'll go over them. Like, there's a palace complex, but it's fairly small when contrasted with something like Tikal. Yeah, I guess the argument is they're all just very handsome wooden buildings. And your point is that when it comes to monumental architecture or stuff that really shows A level of sophistication.

Yeah. I mean, like these are, these are exquisitely built buildings, but we're still talking Lincoln logs versus like carving stone and achieving Lincoln logs versus like grand huge projects that [00:13:00] require hundreds of thousands of people, cooperation, infrastructure if giant economies so don't get us wrong because we love Japan.

We're, we're, we're, we're big Sinophiles. Okay. Yes. Weebs, as you would say in low culture. But I was disappointed and we'll go over like actual Japanese literature and compare contemporary Japanese literature to, to other literature in different parts of the world. But it's not impressive in comparison.

I'm conceding that. Okay, the next temple series you have here is Chichen Itza in Mexico. This was built in the 6th to 13th century. So again, like, that's actually really impressive for Mesoamerica. That's like Roman level stuff there, where it's like genuinely You unique in, in sort of shocking art. Now we're going to get a hostile environment.

China must've had something in the, in that period. This is the closest major ruin site I could find to like a Roman ruin site in China. [00:14:00] This was built in the 14th century. It's Guan Chang. What about that underground complex with rivers made of mercury? That seemed really impressive. We'll get to that, but that we'll get to that in the art section, because I go over that one in the art section, and it is not as impressive as you'd think.

But when contrasted was what Rome was doing and so, I asked AI this, cause I was like, this cannot be true, all right? So I was like, okay like where are the Roman like ruins in Japan, right? Like, and they're like, well, Japan has some ancient ruins. They're generally not as extensive or monumental.

It's all found in Rome, Angkor or Mesoamerica. However, Japan does have several significant historical sites that offer glimpses into its ancient past. So this is what, what AI came up with. So we had something called Nara, which was built 710. to 784. Nara's beautiful. You want to look up what the Nara ruins look like.

I've been. So consider what you're looking at [00:15:00] here. Like, consider this compared to any Roman ruin site you have ever been to. And we'll do a Yeah, we're still talking Lincoln Logs versus This is 700 years after Rome and it's Lincoln Logs. Yeah, like versus transporting obelisks. It's just This is cute.

Let's take it and move it. Okay,

then you're like, okay, okay, okay. So there's got to be other stuff. Well, this is the

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: 1000 at 300.

year old Buddhist temple, the Gongjing temple. So the Gongjing temple, I'm like, okay, okay, that's cool. This is just a building. This is not like a grand complex or anything like that. And it's like, okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. So here's one. I found one that's 14, 000 to 300 BCE. It's called the Sina Majuri Mayana site. Okay. What about it? What does it look like?

 Oh, this is mud huts. Okay, this is like similar to what I'm talking about, like Norwegian mud huts. Like it, it literally, I wouldn't know if this was in, my ancestors had built this in the UK before they met the [00:16:00] Romans or not. You know, like it is, it is mud hut style. And again, we're not just, people can be like, oh, well maybe the ground here wasn't good enough for building, right?

Like maybe it was too many natural disasters. Maybe they only had trees, right? And I'm like, yeah. Then how come nobody else did it? Okay, I can see that explaining Japan alone. Okay, it can't explain Japan, Korea, China, every, Africa, no, but that's not even an excuse because I, the point I was going to make about Mayans and Aztecs, for example, is that they're dealing in incredibly hostile jungle environments where you are fighting An aggressive environment, and they still managed to build a ton.

So I just don't feel like you have that much of a legitimate excuse when it comes to Well, same with the Romans. It's not like the Romans did big architecture when the weather was nice. Well, and they're right by corrosive oceans and waters and stuff. Yeah, mm mm. Pretty much every part of their empire had giant [00:17:00] works in it, whether it was a backwater like Britain or, you know, the, the Antioch, or in their African colonies.

Like, if you go to Tunisia, you can see giant Things like it's it wasn't like a sometimes they did it. Sometimes they didn't thing. So that excuse doesn't really hold So, okay. Now we're gonna go to China because of course China must China China Yes, and China is all about being like we're the OG civilization.

We did all this first. We invented electricity. We invented Aerial combat, it's we're gonna get to the Chinese claims of inventing a bunch of things as well because they were also less That face, that was a cute face. I, look, I don't like this is true. Like I always try to take the most pluralist understanding.

And the only way I can even say this theory is knowing that I come from a mud hut people. Okay? I am only comfortable disseminating this theory or even having these thoughts because my [00:18:00] ancestors had nothing to do with Rome or Greece and they were flinging poo at each other. Whatever. When, when they were gifted civilization through calling, yeah, your ancestors were literally the barbarians that Romans couldn't even bother to hang on to.

Cause they're like, you know what? There's really nothing much. So I'm mostly they literally just like built a wall and keep them out. This was the first wall, build a wall. Build a wall. Yeah. But by the way, by the way, literally

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: About a thousand

years before China builds the Great Wall, but we'll get to that in a second.

Speaker: It was heavily restored in both the 1950s and 1980s.

I didn't know that. Not even old bricks. Am I missing something here? So the old stuff's gone, hasn't it, really? And then it doesn't count. It shouldn't be a wonder then. You can't just build something on it and still, get all the tourists in when it's not what it says on the tin. What I'm looking at is basically a wimpy home. Bears in [00:19:00] here? What's this all about though? It's almost like they know that the wall isn't that good. It's like, what else can we give them? We've charged them like seven quid to get in to see an old wall. Well, it's not an old wall, it's from the 1980s. I've got a mate who's got some bears. Have you heard?

Stick them down at the bottom. This is the original wall, isn't it? Or is it? I don't know. Is it just badly done? This is pretty s**t, isn't it?

 Are you having a laugh?

This isn't the Great Wall, is it? You kidding me? I mean, I like the way there's no tourists and that.

But then why would there be?

Okay. So the Sunning's two ruins, I was going to do pictures of it, but it's from 4, 800 years ago and it's believed to be the remnants of the Shu Kingdom. It's yielded many bronze artifacts. Basically you just see piles of artifacts and otherwise it's a fairly flat area. There's not even anything really to show you.

Then I have the Yingzhou ruins. So this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Henan Province. Yingzhou was the ancient capital of [00:20:00] the Shang Dynasty, 16th to 11th century BC. So this was the capital of their entire civilization.

Oh, oh, sweeties. Oh, dear. Hmm. Yeah, it's very much a, oh, sweeties, that is not a civilizational capital. Crap. And I feel like, you know, as we go through this, what you're really gonna get is a It was just so convenient from like an everybody getting along standpoint that we pretended and we kept matching, I think, things that were happening thousands of years later in other parts of the world to things that like the ancient Greeks were doing.

And through not, like, putting dates on them, we were able to, in our head, have this idea that, like, different civilizations were developing sort of parallel to each other, when this just wasn't happening. Yeah, fair point. Yeah, there's just sort of the ancient [00:21:00] Japanese, and the ancient Greeks, and the ancient Chinese, and the, yeah, and the, I never thought about comparing time by time, and, I've never seen a history class do that, which is quite interesting.

So, yeah, well, and it also breaks a lot of the things because people be like, well, you should look at like, you know, why the West is winning for now. That like shows that this is all due to like geography and like accidents. And it's like, yeah, well then explain to me why, when Rome fell, the West went back to a bunch of mud hut people until somebody reignited the torch of civilization, specifically why, why is it that every time Rome left a region like Spain?

Like Spain was able to produce great art when Rome was there. They were able to produce great buildings. They had a great economy. Rome leaves. They go back to mud hut people. It's not like, no, sorry, but it's not, it's not like. Europe, it's not like it was anything special with Europe. Mm-Hmm. In fact, it didn't even start in Europe.

It really started with Egypt and Mesopotamia. Yeah. So I don't think that, like when you look at Mesopotamian ruins, which we'll get to in a second, like some of the very oldest civilizational ruins or [00:22:00] Egyptian ruins, and then you compare it to like capital of China from , it's like they're not even in the same league.

And this is now of thousands of years earlier. Yeah. So now we're gonna go to the Lru Architectural Ruins.

And note, this is an AI being exhaustive for its mate, trying to find all of the best ruins it could to impress me. .

So this is One only dating back 5, 300 years. So, you know, this is like, around when like, a little bit before Dante's Inferno was being written, and, and look at it. Well, based on what you've been saying about findings, it seems that these are people who've been more interested in clothing and accessories, and not so much grand architecture.

Well, apparently they also weren't interested in art, which we'll get to in just a second, but you can see here. The, the, the site, it's just like a flat site, like there's nothing there, it's like a few outlines of previous foundations, and that's it. Yeah, no, this looks like the beginning of a housing development that's [00:23:00] weirdly faced.

I don't know how else to describe it, but that's what I'm getting from this. It gives housing development. Yeah, and people can be like, well, you know, it was all wood or they used more wood and stuff like that. But again, like these Roman things are there, even things that used wood. And that's the really interesting thing.

You can go and look at like one civilizational areas. You can walk around. Their old buildings and in the very old churches and everything like that, you'll see wood, you'll see blah, blah, blah, you know, like you'll see stuff that is supposedly why this other stuff isn't there anymore, right? Yeah, but also I think that you should get points as a civilization for demonstrating long termist thoughts and building to last.

So when, when, when you look at ancient Mayan and Aztec I guess not that ancient, but when you look at that and, and you see these stone artifices and you see what people built, even Stonehenge, you got to admire it more because these are people who [00:24:00] are like, this has to last for thousands of years.

I'm going to build this to last instead of short term thinking. So the, the one thing that the Chinese built that was actually you know, potentially, like, equivalent in impressiveness is the Emperor Jingzong's Mausoleum, which is where the Terracotta Army is. However, the only thing that really makes it impressive is how many terracottic figurines there were.

Nothing else about the site is particularly impressive. The Rivers of Mercury were not impressive to you?

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: No, the rivers of mercury thing, we don't know if this is real. It's not like archeologists when they were excavating this area of found rivers of mercury. , a guy writing a hundred years after the tomb was constructed, created a mythologized account that there was these giant rivers of mercury sort of set up in the tomb. , but, , and, and we have detected that there is some mercury in the tomb, but it's not like we found it or anything.

So we don't know. It [00:25:00] could be a myth, could be a fairly modest thing.

I don't know. Like, so, so let me explain to you what I mean, like the terracotta army, like logistically speaking. It may be a lot of people, and we're going to go into the artistic merit of it later, to compare it with the equivalent Greek statues or, or other statues that were made around the same time period.

That, one, it artistically wasn't very sophisticated compared to what was going on in the Mediterranean region at that time period. Again, I'm not Mediterranean And it also was architecturally not particularly like it was something like it was a lot more than the later Chinese stuff. I'll give it like, I mean, the, the statues themselves had unique facial features from around 200 BC as well.

So, you know, pretty impressive. But again, and so now we're going to get to the last major architectural ruin site that it was able to find for me in China. And this was the Jihon Ruins and I will send this to you. Oh, that was the ones that we went over, like the well The housing development.

So, these [00:26:00] ruins in China yeah, they were the ones along the Silk Road, we went over them earlier, just not very impressive. Okay, so then people are like, well, what about the Great Wall? Right?

A great wall. I think other than the terracotta army, that's the one thing in East Asia I may give some credit to, but it was from the 7th century AD.

Well, and also No, sorry, 7th century Compare the To 17th century AD, I'm sorry I didn't make that clear. No, if you compare the Great Wall, which is a wall, I've walked the Great Wall, it is, it's a wall. It's, and it's not that big.

Speaker: This is pretty s**t, isn't it?

 Are you having a laugh?

To the Roman aqueducts, they, they built walls that were water. Significantly before the Great Wall.

We'll be looking at it when we go over the Roman stuff. They had heated floors! They had heated floors in bathhouses! I mean, like, there's [00:27:00] It's just, there's no comparison. There's no comparison.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: And I remind you that the, , great wall was started 700 years after the Roman aqueducts were built and it wasn't finished until 1700 years after the Roman aqueducts were built. It's just not a comparable thing. Then you have been always talking with a friend about this and they're like, give this, this can't be true.

What about.

The Sui dynasties, grand canal. That was a huge things. And since. It's from a 581 to 618 a. The problem is , it was big. It was big. It wasn't one of the things that AI primary was, and it probably should have been because it's actually fairly impressive. , in terms of, , just this. The sheer size of it. The problem is, is that the sheer size of it? , or the complexity of it, it's pretty, not big compared with the Roman road network.

, again, 500 years before this. And, uh, you know, what they're doing with the canals is they're digging pits. , [00:28:00] and then they are, , lining them and putting various buffers on them so that water can flow through them. , the problem is that the Roman roads, which were much, much, much more extensive, , did the same thing you needed to dig about, , three to five feet down and then put multiple different types of layers of rock and stone down. To create these ultra durable roads, which still exist today.

, so again, civilizationally, we're just talking about a different scale here.

Okay. So. And the people are like, but what about Africa? You can't forget Africa. Africa did some things. What about Great Zimbabwe?

Okay, okay, okay. Let's look at Great Zimbabwe. I'm not familiar with Great Zimbabwe. I'm excited for this. Okay. Ooh, I like the rounded, the rounded towers. It's interesting architecturally but it's not like particularly impressive.

It looks like a No, it looks like a fortification. Yeah, it looks like a fortification, really. But it doesn't Not a particularly large [00:29:00] fortification, I'd say it's about the size of like a starfort. Yeah, if that. It looks pretty small. Yeah, it looks pretty small. And that that's like, that's called Great Zimbabwe.

That's the one thing they got there. It is not particularly impressive. Now, again, people are like, are you saying that there was no great monumental architecture or art produced in Africa? Oh, this is a medieval city. So this is not, this is,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: The city began to construction in the 11th century and it was abandoned in the 15th century. So yeah, she's right. Medieval. , a thousand years after Rome was doing it stuff and it's. Nothing.

Compared to a Roman thing.

I'm like, no, I'm not saying that at all. I can go to Tunisia and see amazing architecture.

The problem is it was built while they were Roman colony. I can, I can, I can go and read great writings from Alexandria. The problem is that that's a descendant of Egypt and a lot of things for Britain during Greek or [00:30:00] Roman colonization. And people are like, What do you mean Greek or Roman colonization?

There's so many great Egyptian figures that aren't from the period of Greek colonization like Cleopatra The Ptolemaic Greek princess. Oh, yeah. Greek lady. That's the other thing about the way that the civilizational system works is it appears to sort of pass the torch on To sort of the next iterator on it.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah I mean you have argued to me many times and i'm obsessed with aegypt in various periods, right? I go through that great courses lecture and i'm like, oh, this is amazing. But You point out quite fairly that they do stagnate. They kind of just, they get really good at just keeping things the same.

And that's why I think your point about passing the torch and the collective iteration upon this one line is meaningful.

I know I'm going to show you the one exception to the one civilization theory. [00:31:00] And this is a few things in extra ancient India, specifically right now for architecture. And we're also going to go into literature because extra ancient India did compete with the one civilization in literature. Okay. It's almost like it almost had a civilizational explosion and then didn't.

So this is the Anjati and Elor caves. Those look amazing. BC. 10th century, second to 10th century BC. Okay, really old. We got it. We got a contender here. Absolutely. It may not compete with most Roman things, but it definitely competes with the Greeks who they were contemporaries of. If you've been to ancient Athens that is impressive.

And we'll keep seeing this in India. The most impressive monuments are often the oldest which is a little weird and we'll go over what might have happened there. It's the same with their literature. If you go to their like BCE literature, and this is sort of going to be a giveaway, you will find a flourishing of literature that definitely competes with the Greek literature of the time [00:32:00] period.

But if you then go 500 years, 10, 000 years in the future and you compare it with what's coming out of the one civilization it's just Like Popol Vuh stuff sorry, I don't mean to be, it's like, this animal did this, and this animal did this, and then there was the, you know, this, and it's like, oh, come on, you guys can do better than this, you guys wrote so many great works 10, 000 years ago, like, what is this?

Yeah, there seems to be absolutely nothing that will prevent a great culture from entering a dark age. If the selective pressures necessary to keep the torch bright aren't there.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: I will note though, that the differences between India's great works. , when contrasted with a time gait aid, great works in Europe. In the one civilization or even time lag. Great works in the, when civilization do not fall as far behind as those of China or Japan. So here, , I have on screen here, two temples, , each built [00:33:00] in.

, 12,000 CE. , and while they aren't the sorts of large complexes that were being built in Meso-America at the time or the giant giant cities and ruined structures of Rome that were built. Uh, well, 1,200 years before this, they are at least. Interesting and impressive to a degree.​

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-7: Generally speaking this one, civilization theory, new perspective I have has dramatically risen my view of ancient Indian civilization and ancient Mesopotamian civilization. And dramatically lowered my view of ancient east Asian civilization. Particularly China, which just sunk to almost nothing, in my opinion. , specifically. Because I used to think of them as like an equivalent to what was going on in Rome and stuff like that. And they just like factually weren't and people will be like, well, what about their economy?

What about their economy? Like whether their economy so big it's like, this is when [00:34:00] people act like Masa, Mussa represented some giant civilization happening in Africa at the time. , and yeah, I mean, there was a people and a culture there, but they weren't producing things equivalent to like what the ancient Greeks or Romans were producing.

Just having a lot of wealth doesn't translate into cultural production. And I think that this is in a way more damning that a culture with all this wealth, wasn't able to turn it into the types of things like, you know, the aqueducts or the Rome road network or the ruins. Everywhere you go, or the art or the literature.

This is a Mesopotamian ruin site that I'm sending you here. Okay. To give you an idea, to just contrast everything that we've been looking at right now this is the Mohenjar Dara. This is from 2, 500 BCE. Well, what we're looking at seems to be some kind of city complex. A [00:35:00] massive city complex. Yeah. Why doesn't China have a single one of these?

Why doesn't Japan have a single one of these? When we have one from an inhospitable region made with mud from 2500 BCE from the one culture. Well, it's not just mud, it's proper bricks, but yeah. Yeah. But what I mean is you can't just say we didn't have stones. Yeah. Yes. Right. To carve, et cetera. Yeah. This is an incredibly impressive site, but okay.

Let's also look at some other things just so you can remember for people who might've forgotten what Rome was doing and when were they doing it? The Colosseum of Rome. Consider that many of these that we've been looking at, were around the 10th century, right? Was made in 72 AD the Colosseum of Rome.

Like nothing that we have looked at to me comes at like one 10th, even close the Colosseum. Well, and, and most people are accustomed to seeing the Colosseum ruins and not thinking about how it was with [00:36:00] mechanical floors. You know, this, this big, underground complex, like the Colosseum literally had naval battles in the center of it, right?

Yeah, we don't presently have even stadiums that do the same level of crazy s**t that the Coliseum did. So there may be cruise ships are pretty impressive. I, I, I know they're, they're seen as so trashy, but I'm just so impressed by cruise ships. There's like these amazing spaceships. So now what I'm sending you here, this is from 80 to 212.

Okay. This is the Baths of Karkala. Okay, yeah, we've got towers, we've got complex buildings, this is an archways, yeah. Unique architectural elements, this is a buried building, yeah, alright.

So this is an aqueduct from 1 AD in an outer territory in France, okay? Point de Garde, France. This is dramatically [00:37:00] more impressive than, like, The Great Wall, for example. Yeah, huh, yes. And it's literally hundreds of years earlier, many hundreds of years earlier.

Speaker: This is the original wall, isn't it? Or is it? I don't know. Is it just badly done? This is pretty s**t, isn't it?

 Are you having a laugh?

This isn't the Great Wall, is it? You kidding me?

So, now we're gonna look at Pola Arena, and this is in Croatia, 27 BC. , but it basically looks like the Colosseum. And, okay, we're like, what about distant? Because people kept hearing me talk about Tunisia, right? Like, what was Tunisia like, okay?

This is Tunisia in 238 AD. So, like, distant colony, right? This is what Rome was putting up in Africa. Backwater. Whoa, what? It's just another, whoa! Okay, sorry, this is, it's very, it's a very impressive [00:38:00] coliseum building. Yeah, it is an impressive Coliseum building. That is so wild. And it was 238, which is way before any of the other sites that we're looking at.

Now, we haven't gotten to the art or, or, or, or literature yet, okay? But so far, because when I first brought this theory up to you, you were like, that cannot possibly be true. Yes. Are you beginning to be like, oh, this is a bit bigger than I thought it was, in terms of the scale of differences? I'm, I'm kind of already sold.

I, I'm concerned about this now, because it's going to make me. Look really bad at parties if I bring this up. Thank goodness. I don't go to parties anymore

 Those were all built later in the one civilization, let's go to the Athenian temple ruins. Okay, so these were built in 432 BC

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I always hear. It's literally better than a single set of ruins I was able to find anywhere in Japan or China. Yeah, massive columns still standing after [00:39:00] so many years. No, actually, I think the columns fell down at one point and it was rebuilt. Oh, okay. Okay. But that was recently that they fell down.

I think it was due to like bombing and like the Napoleonic campaign.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-8: It was 1687 and it was an explosion caused by Venetian bombardment that severely damaged the temple causing many of the columns to fall. So they stayed up till 1687.

I don't know. I'll have to find it. But yeah, they stood for a very, very, very, very long time. The same was Egypt. Like nothing in any of these other places comes close to Egypt. Really the only place you get close again is super ancient India and then nothing from up into modern times.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. Okay, and I'll put on screen here some pictures of, like, Roman settlements in Turkey and Spain. So you can see this isn't like an isolated thing. It's like, literally, I can't find a single thing from these other civilizations, and yet everywhere the Romans go, they're building something. So if I'm anticipating what listeners are thinking, it's, okay, fine.

Your point is made about [00:40:00] architecture. I'll believe in the one great culture or civilization theory of architecture, maybe literature, which you brought up. But, I don't know, like, the art, who cares, like, I've, I've been to so many, I don't know, like, you know, Asian art museums to, refute this, and Yes, and the reason why that refutation works in your head is because you haven't compared cross time when the Asian art you're looking at was made versus when the Greek art was made.

Okay, I'll go straight to art instead of literature. I was gonna read a bunch of literature texts, but no. We'll go straight to art, alright? So I just decided to do

so, a random search for Greek art, and this was the first picture that came up. You know, there's lots of beautiful Greek statues, ancient Greek statues. Oh, yeah. This picture came up, and this is 440 BC. Okay. 440 BC. Okay. Wow. You're looking at the statue, right? So it's so [00:41:00] realistic. For those who are only listening, we're looking at a classic Greek statue, but it's a very highly polished polished marble of a nude male with, you know, extremely realistic detail.

This could just be. A human who is painted and is naked, but you know, very small penis for whatever reason. And yeah, that's the only part of it that doesn't seem realistic. Yeah. And I had this moment where I asked Google, I go, okay, give me examples of Japanese art from 440 BC. Like, first I said statues because I wanted to compare like was like, yeah, there are no Japanese statues from 440 BC and I was like, wait, this can't be real.

So I managed to find some piece of Japanese art from this time period. Oh, dear. Oh I don't know what this is, but stylistically, but this could just be that we're biased, you know? We're looking at very dis No! No human in history, if you showed, I guarantee you, if you showed that Greek [00:42:00] statue to somebody from most of Japanese history and you prefer this or this Japanese art, they'd be that effing statue.

I know, I know. Yeah, you show that to like a Japanese person, like, and you know, I guess if you delivered that Greek statue. To someone in that same period of Japan, they would be extremely, they would prefer to have the Greek statue for sure. Yes. You want to know what my ancestors were doing during this period?

Yeah, I'm sure nothing that impressive, right? You're gonna get a kill it with fire moment here oh, what? No! That is literally the best my ancestors were able to do when the Greek were, were putting on this like Perfect physique of humanity and then the, the, the my ancestors are like

Speaker 2: Welcome [00:43:00] to Jurassic Park.

yeah, I'm getting that meme where like they begin to play John Williams, Jurassic park theme.

And then it goes to like a recorder playing it terribly. Oh yeah. The recorder playing one. Oh no, it's terrible. Oh, I need to not look at that. I need to look at the statue again, the papylic cleanser, even though it has a micro penis. Okay, okay. What about the Chinese? What did they have? Well, again, with the Chinese, I ran into one of these problems.

I was like, give me statues that the Chinese made around 440 BC. And they were like, Chinese didn't make any statues around 440 BC. And I was like, okay, so what were they making? [00:44:00] It goes, well, they were very skilled bronze crafters. So I will show you a bronze bell, and they also carved jade well. I like bells.

And a green pendant from China during this period. And you've got to click on it to open it. Pendants? Okay. Okay. I mean, yeah. It looks like it was made by a kindergartner. Yeah, it's not very impressive. The bell's fairly impressive. I mean, that requires metal forging. That requires technology. And so I admire that.

The bronze is not a difficult metal to forge, Simone. We're in the Bronze Age here. The, the, the Okay, anyway. But, but Again, like, just nothing really there, and so you can be like, Okay, the Terracotta Army, alright? Yes. It must compete with that Greek statue we looked at. No. There's two little problems here.

One, the Terracotta Army is literally 200 years after that. And two, you might not have looked at the Terracotta Army up close. No, I, yeah, no, it doesn't come, it doesn't come close. The, the, the Terracotta Army is impressive [00:45:00] in its mass customization and its scale. It is not impressive because the statues themselves are really You might forget just how unimpressive it is compared to that Greek statue.

I just sent it to you so you can compare it. No, I, I, I have a pretty good, let's see if, if memory is accurate here yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what I pictured. But okay now we're gonna get to and you always find ancient ancient india that's where you get things that come pretty close. This is india a few hundred years after those greek statues Okay. Okay. It's, it's nowhere close, but it is like in the realm of contention. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and they're, they're going for fan service here in a way I would argue kind of matches the fan serviceness of the Greek statue.

So, yeah, we've got polished stone, you know, very, very, very skilled stone work. So, yeah, this is, this is good. [00:46:00] Yeah. And you could argue Malcolm that the lack of. We'll say photorealistic accuracy is a stylistic choice here. So yeah, I'm gonna give this credit. Yeah, I'll give it credit. But again, this falls into my thing is something seemed to be happening in India, but it seemed to have died out.

And this will be more clear when we talk about literature and stuff like that. But yeah Now people will go like, ah, but China, they had so many great inventions. And so I was like, yeah, I had remembered this. I was like gunpowder. And then as I started going back to it, I was like gunpowder's doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in my brain right here.

When I'm trying to think of Chinese invention. I'm thinking flaming lanterns that have explosives. Am I getting this wrong? Gunpowder again. Gunpowder is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. So when you look at the things that China invented that the West did not invent, you do have some impressive things.

You have papermaking, second century A. D. [00:47:00] Awesome. I will point out, though, that 3000 B. C. E. papyrus was invented. Now, paper is cheaper to make, lasts longer and, and easier to, to, like, store. So just, like, strictly better. Yeah. So you got papermaking. Okay. Definitely gonna give them that. Yes. You got woodblock printing.

This is in the 6th and 7th century. And that's good. That's great. Gunpowder the 9th century. That's a good one. Okay. Then you got the compass in the 11th to 12th century That's a good one. That's awesome. Yes. Yeah. But here's the problem. When I started trying to, to, to investigate this, it's not really an invention.

That's a by product of an insect, but yeah, no, come on. Okay. So we'll count silk. So we have paper making. Printing, gunpowder, the compass, and silk, and the one civilization, you know what they invented? Literally everything else. That's the problem. Okay, whoops, [00:48:00] yeah, that's Gunpowder, and all of the things you see here are not things that require civilizational infrastructure to invent.

They're not actually particularly complex inventions, they're more like discoveries of like chemical phenomenon. Right? That's the problem with this, okay? Or, or a unique process for making something, right? I'm not saying that these regions never had, like, great individuals who would come up with these interesting ideas.

I'm just saying that whatever this civilizational infrastructure that seems to have spread through the one in civilization did, is it gave these people the ability To crank out tons, tons, tons more stuff Then you would get an equivalent great mind in one of these other civilizations And so we need to figure out why but I need to continue to go with proving my point because i'm not done with proving My point yet specifically what I mean is like if a [00:49:00] leonardo da vinci had been born in japan For whatever reason he wouldn't have had the infrastructure To be as voluminous and diverse in the things he was producing You But, sorry, I need to go to literature because you, yeah, you got me off the ball when we got to literature.

Okay,

literature. Well, as you remember, a lot of the literature that we think of as being like the definitive works of China are actually pretty late, like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Journey to the West, 14th and 16th century respectively, well after something like The Divine Comedy. You do which was written in the 13th century.

You do get some, and I don't think of, the reason I'm using the Divine Comedy here is because I think of the Divine Comedy as being a fairly modern work within the tradition of the once signatory. You know, I'm not going back to something like the Aeneid or the Odyssey for great works here. Yeah, the Divine Comedy honestly reads like fanfiction.

It reads like fanfiction, but the reason I'm using it as my benchmark [00:50:00] is, in my mind, the Divine Comedy is a modern work. And so, when I say that these works are hundreds of years after the Divine Comedy, I'm saying they are very, very modern works. Well, and there's also, like, Machiavelli's The Prince, which I think is probably a better piece of literature to refer to, because it's more product of, like, It's less derivative

that was written 1513. Okay, so that would have been written at around the same time as you know, well, a bit before the journey to the West and a bit after romance of the three kingdoms. Yeah, and I would say, as somebody who's read excerpts from all of those and actually spent a significant amount of time studying the prince, the prince.

blows their pants off in terms of its complexity and depth. It still has good advice for people today where you're like, dang, that's a good point. Where I don't, you know, read Journey to the West and I'm like, wow, that's a good point. That really changes my perspective. And how I interact with people.

Yeah, you're taking it and acting differently after reading it. That's fair. [00:51:00] But yeah, well, because it's, it's just at a level of sophistication that's like not even remotely touched in these, these other regions but okay, come on, let's, let's keep going here. So, we got the book of songs, which is ancient Chinese poetry, again, poetry, which is like fine.

Like I've read a little bit of it. It's fine. is the 11th century to 7th century BCE, which is like good, but it's like, like generic old stuff.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-9: For an example, here is a poem from it called FishHawk. The fish Hawk calls high above the water. It flies. I long for my beloved, who is far away from my side.

It doesn't really, you know, I'm not particularly impressed with it when I compare it to something like the Iliad. Right. And, you know, then you got the records of the grand historian.

This is the first century BCE, a comprehensive history of China written by Sima Quan, which is like, cool that they had historians, but like. The One Civilization doesn't have, like, the one historian. It's got, like, hundreds of historians that we rely on. Just, like, the [00:52:00] rate it produced historians was also way, way, way higher.

And then people can be like, Well, you know, what about the art of war? 5th century China.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-23: BCE.

First of all, have you read The Art of War? I've read parts of The Art of War. It's not a Yuri impressive work.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-10: If you haven't read the art of war, here's an example of some quotes from it that AI thought were particularly poignant. The quality of a decision is like a well-timed swoop of a Falcon, which enables it to strike and destroy its victim. Or. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Secondly, the reason why, I'm like, do you happen to know if a similar canon was had in The One Civilization?

And they're like, you know, I never really looked into that. And I'm like, why haven't you looked into that? And I'm like, well, because I guess it would be totally unimpressive if one did exist. I would [00:53:00] sort of expect the ancient Greeks or Romans to have a book on how to do war. And they did. They, they had who wrote it was Aeneas Tacticus.

That's where the word tactics comes from. In fact, He had a whole series of them. He had such a comprehensive series of these books that only one survives today, and it's on specifically how to survive long sieges, and it goes into detailed stuff, like how you build things in the harbors to prevent the boats from entering.. So just dramatically more detailed and practical than the art of war. And it was like a whole encyclopedia on how to do war. And it was considered so. Unimpressive within the time period when contrasted with the other works. No, they couldn't be bothered to save it.

Wow. Didn't click save. Yeah. Read it and didn't bookmark it. Whoops. Didn't bookmark it, but we can tell from the one book that it was basically an entire encyclopedia on the [00:54:00] practicalities of how to do war within that time period. Wow. That is, I mean, yeah, and you're right. It's not at all surprising that something like that would have existed.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-11: Th this is not to say that he doesn't have the short little piffy quotes similar to the art of war. So we just go through a few of these that. AI thought were relevant. And I think the judges see that the quality of them is much higher and there they come off as more profound to me. , so these are from tacticals. In war events of great importance are often the result of trivial causes.

A bad piece is even worse than a war.

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.

It belongs to human nature to hate those who you have injured. That last one, I just think is really profound. It is human nature. To decide to hate someone that you have injured. And it's something I see so often. And that's like, actually even like in a modern time, like a profound quote, that's not like a live, laugh, love sort of a quote, which unfortunately a lot of the [00:55:00] divorce stuff kind of is.

So, you got me on the literature, too. Okay, hold on. No, no, no, no, no. We're gonna give every civilization their fair shot. Oh, are you gonna dunk on Beowulf again? Because I feel like on every single episode we've done recently, you find some obscure opportunity to dunk on Beowulf. Oh, Beowulf is gonna get dunked on.

Beowulf is I don't, well, I dug on it because it's my ancestors. It's your ancestors. It was, it was written you know, so, so, so long. It's like Gilgamesh quality, right? People are like, it has themes. It has narrative through lines. It has themes. It was slightly coherent. I'm like, oh my god, just, sweetheart, you know, that it is not a product of a civilization.

It is a product of people who flung poo at each other. It is, it is not complicated. When contrasted with contemporary works produced by the one civilization before they deemed to uplift my people. But let's go to Japan here. So. Okay, okay, [00:56:00] okay. We got a good one here. We got Manayushi, the collection of 10, 000 leaves, compiled around 759.

A magnificent anthology of poetry containing around 4, 500 poems, mostly Takana and some Choka. And so I was like, oh, oh, this is great. Okay. Well, so what sort of poems were they? One of the most well known is an attribute to kantemoto A prominent poet from the 7th to early 8th sailed it. I'm just loving the pronunciation of these names Okay, the pop express is longing for a loved one and uses imagery of nature to convey emotion and I want to while we will be shitting on japanese art right now My favorite artistic production in the world is done by japan I predominantly watch anime and read manga.

I think that this is not an ethnic thing against the Japanese. I think that they produce some of the best artistic work in the world. And I said that I think the Koreans produce the best drama in the world out of the drama I've seen. [00:57:00] This is not saying that they can't produce this stuff. It's just saying that they Once they're touched by the one civilization as my ancestors needed to be, then they became able to produce this stuff.

So, the poem expresses a longing for a loved one and uses imagery of nature to convey the emotion. It's like, that is a very simplistic thing, and it's from the 7th to 8th century. Okay so, and then in another one, in this Tanaka, Hidemoto compares his feelings of longing to the rising smoke from Mount Fuji.

The imagery of smoke rising endlessly into the sky parallels the depths and persistence of the poet's emotions. I didn't know Mount Fuji was an active volcano for that long. Another famous poem from the Monoyoshi is Yamba no Ashitiko, which describes the beauty of Mount Fuji covered in snow. This poem uses vivid natural imagery to create a striking visual scene.

Hmm. Now, that is just that. I'm sorry, like, you can be like, oh, it's really touching. No, saying mountain is beautiful is not an [00:58:00] impressive feat. It's really touching, but that's, that's, that's 700 years after the Aeneid, you know, that is, that is just not particularly impressive when I look at the complexity of something like the Aeneid.

And even when the Aeneid is not like, this is the thing, when I'm looking for like Japanese work, like, it'll bring up like these, like five, like, these are the great things. In Rome, like you forget about tons of work because they just had to So many, many, many awesome things or the Greek plays that like, we don't even have any more.

Cause they were like, Oh yeah, that was a great play that was like as good as this other play we still have. But like, yeah. But like, haven't you heard of season five? It's so much better. Yeah. Okay. So the tale of Genji, which you went on about that's from the 11th century. All right. So let's, let's go into the tale of Genji here.

So keep in mind 11. over , 000 years after the Aeneid. One famous example is the Yugao chapter, which describes Genji's romance with a mysterious woman of lower rank. In this chapter, Genji disguises himself as a hunter to visit [00:59:00] Yugao in secret. The story creates a dreamlike atmosphere. It portrays their clandestine meeting and budding relationship.

What? That's like just, that's like something you would see in the Iliad. Yeah, well, yeah, and also talking about sex and relationships is not interesting. I think what also makes the Iliad really interesting, and the Odyssey as well, is that it takes the fact that men and women can be attracted to each other for granted and then talks about the way that these basal human instincts conflict with civilizational needs.

You know, it talks about a deeper theme and yeah, like, oh, you know, Paris's attraction to Helen ultimately was extremely damaging. And here's what happens when you succumb to those basal needs. And then also you elevate the, the wife of Odysseus, who, despite having every reason to believe that her husband was dead.

used her wiles and used her intelligence to [01:00:00] stave off a bunch of suitors who are basically sieging her home. And just for context here, the stories she's talking about are from 725 to 675 BCE. Yeah, yeah.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-12: The tale of dingy to contrast with written in the early 11th century. Consider how long it took them to not even surpass the one civilization in terms of what they're writing. And if you want an example of like short quotes from the tale of Genji, they're supposed to be like, Piffy regulatory things.

You can sort of connect them with what we went over from tactical. Or what we went over from Shenzhou , here are some quotes. Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams. There are as many sorts of women as there are women. No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly. And any art worth of learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it. The world.

No it not, but you autumn. I confess it. You're wind at night, fall [01:01:00] stabs deep into my heart. Life is full of uncertainties. Perhaps one day some unforeseen circumstance would bring her into this life once more.

Just as a reminder for like the type of things that you're getting from tacticals who you probably haven't even heard of because these routine is just like, Mundane within his period. , it belongs to human nature to hate those. You have injured.

And keep in mind, tacticals was writing about 1000 years before the tale of Genji was written.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-13: And I'd like to point out that if you are from one of these cultural groups and you feel deeply offended that I'm saying all of the things. Keep in mind. I am saying them from the perspective of my own culture. Did nothing until it was touched by the one true culture.

My ancestors produced nothing. They produced less than even what your ancestors produced.

I have the humility to admit this, and I think. Accepting the one civilizations theory. It's a lot about just having the humility to [01:02:00] admit that cultures that you might have personally identified ways in some way, whether it was because you lived there for awhile or whether it was because you married someone from that culture or whether it's because they represent your own ancestors, that they may not actually be. That. As impressive as you thought they were.

And that may be, we can all admit that we are children of one culture, and it's not a culture that I. Have any ownership of myself.

So I think that's really interesting. And also the fact that, Another through line through, especially in the Iliad, this obsession with lineage, you know, son of so and so, son of so and so.

There is again, this focus on long termism of this interest of anyone in their role in an unbroken chain of history, rather than their feelings in the moment, which, you know, looking at a mountain and thinking it's pretty is all about your feelings in the moment, or like being caught up in a relationship or romance.

This is about short term. [01:03:00] Hindbrain thinking and you see that like, when you look at literature of ancient Greece ancient Rome or the stories and plays, it is all about the battle between the prefrontal cortex and the hindbrain, which I see to be the height of humanity. I agree. So well, let's go to another one.

So the another piece of famous Japanese literature the pillow book, this was written around sounds so Japanese, the pillow book. So Daki Makura, early, a collection of observation essays by Sae Shagon. So this is from 10,000 years at least. They had a thing for pillows for a long time. Yeah. We may be about a thousand years after Rome. Okay. We may be about a thousand years after things like the India, but, but surely this was an incredibly sophisticated book. Let's go over some of, like, I asked for one of the most famous ones in it, right?

So you gave me an example. Or I might have just looked at it and then just chose in the first example I found, but anyway, this is what it is. A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat, duck eggs, shaved ice, [01:04:00] mixed linoleum soup, and put in a silver bowl, a rosary rock crystal, wisteria blossoms, plum blossoms covered with snow, a pretty child eating strawberries.

That, that's it. That's one of their great pieces of literature from that period. That was AI trying to impress me with the very best Was that an excerpt? Or was it trying to summarize interesting visual elements? No, it was an excerpt. That's the way it's written. It's just interesting things that somebody saw.

Isn't that interesting though, how that shows up in anime? Where like, anime just doesn't Throws in like random moments of like cherry, like blossoms falling or like a bowl and beautiful life. I'm not going to say that they didn't capture things. It just doesn't. I find it really interesting that like this still exists as this like element of the Japanese people where they like can't stop obsessing about the beauty of small moments.

I'm not saying that it doesn't have artistic merit. What I'm saying is. No, it doesn't. I'm just. And I'm not arguing that. That it's lacking either. I'm also not arguing that it's sophisticated. I just think it's really interesting that they haven't shaken this like ability [01:05:00] to appreciate in some kind of profound way.

The beauty of mundane situations, but it's not sophisticated, complex or multilayered. No. And again, it's not about this. It's not long term. It's not about the interplay between. The prefrontal cortex and the hindbrain it is it is a sort of different aesthetic thing, but it's not yeah Okay, so let's look at famous Japanese work from around the divine comedy So I can use that as a benchmark of like broadly modern stuff But before they were really interacted with by the West.

Okay. So here you have something called tether giga and there's a famous line in it. So this is an example of like what we're dealing with in terms of intellectualism and everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting and gives one feeling that there is room for growth.

I'm like, okay, like middle school or notebook thoughts. And again like it's, it's, it's competent, but you, you would have expected something like this from the Greeks. Like 000 years earlier, you would have not only [01:06:00] that early invasion like this, I feel like you would have been made fun of by anybody. So, if you're talking about, like, anything written in my people's area All you really have is King Alfred's reign, where they did some histories, and this was in 871 to 899, so like basically nothing, like one history and everybody seems to have a history down here or there, and then you've got like effing Beowulf 975, 975.

To 1025. So, Beowulf and again, is at, at a quality of literature level, like sophistication level equivalent to Gilgamesh, which was written 2,100 BC to 1,200 bc. Like, you cannot say that these two civilizations were anything alike. And then if you compare Beowulf with contemporary, like even like the Aeneid, it's, it's child like in comparison.

My ancestors [01:07:00] were unbebugging until the, the the one civilization touched them. So here is where you get the really interesting side here, which is India. Okay. Now I've, I've read some of these, so I'm familiar with their quality. I'd say that they are I'd put them in between, in terms of sophistication, Gilgamesh and the Odyssey.

They're not quite at the Odyssey level, like, their stories don't have as strong of narrative throughlines, or as strong of theming, and they're frankly not as entertaining to read. But they are definitely slightly more sophisticated than something like Gilgamesh. So this is when you're going to ancient India.

Specifically, you have the Vedas. Yes. 1500 to 500 BCE. So ex civilizationally, I think above where like Gilgamesh was during that time period.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-14: If you would like an example of text from each that could help you because I think some people could be like, well, that's like a, a judgment, right? Like that's not like an objective fact that this is sort of in between Gilgamesh and the Elliott. And I'm like, well, you think that maybe because you haven't read it in a while, or you are mythologizing what you have read. [01:08:00] So here's an example of texts from the Vedas. Ooma appeared to the gods and said, It is Brahman who. Has won this victory.

And in this victory of Brahman, you have become elated. Indra approached her and asked, who are you? She replied. I am Ooma the daughter of him event No, that it was Brahman who gave you victory in the battles you have won. It is through the power of Brahman that you have become great.

It was from her that Indra learned that the being they had encountered was indeed Brahman. Then Andrew approached Angie and Vajra and said you two seem to have known this being closely. Can you tell me more about it? They replied,

what is there to know, we too are puzzled Indra then said to them, let us all go to Brahman to gain knowledge. Now , the, this is just a random, I just asked, find a section from the Vedas to an AI. , where, , people are interacting with each other.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-15: So here's a S D a I that gave me that one. I said, find a similar section from the [01:09:00] Iliad. Achilles you coward you greedy heart. How can archaea and the soldier obey you gladly either to go on a mission or to fight in battle with all his strengths. I didn't come here to fight because of a quarrel with Trojans.

They've never done me any harm, but you mighty shameless, man. We followed you to please you to an honor from the Trojans for you, you dog face and for mentalis,

you don't look at that. You don't think about it. And now you threatened to seize my prize in person something. I worked hard for a gift from a Keon sons, Agamemnon by all means flee. If that's your heart's desire, I'm not begging you to stay on my account. I have others here who will respect me, especially all wise. Zeus. Of all God fostering Kings your, the man.

I hate the most. You always love to fight and war. So what if you're strong? That's just a gift from God.

You have the AADs, this is 800 to 200 BC [01:10:00] aad. You had AP May, which is 500 to 100 bbc. You have Mahata. This is 400 BC to 400 ce. And then you've got the bga.

Gita, this is 200 BC to 200 CE. The problem is we're going to pronunciation hall. I think I'm going to pronunciation hell. I can't do this. The problem is, is you just can't get much after that. Like, like this is all like all this BC stuff, like similar to when the Greeks were doing all this and then it just disappears and you go further and you're getting stuff.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-16: So I want to make note here that I'm not saying that in India, they stopped producing works of literature during this period. , what I'm saying is the works of literature stopped advancing in their complexity significantly. , and multilayered illness. This narrative ability to convey characters. So as an example here, if you're looking as much as I like the Iliad, the Elliot is still fairly primitive.

If you compare it to something like the Aeneid, which is just orders of [01:11:00] magnitude more sophisticated and interesting. And. , an easier fun read. , now if we go to India, And you look at something like.

We can go to the sweat Putin us. But, banana in a dream by Basa. And this is the second to fourth century. Ady and I read a quote from that. , oh, yeah. Done. What will you do? Bhagavata I shall be king of a right-size chamber man with a skill in hairdressing. Ooh, God. And what will drop high?

I do. Vasavada. I'll call myself Sarah Hedy. and again, this is just randomly chosen by an AI. So this isn't me like trying to pick something that's like boring or simplistic.

Okay, let's keep going. Let's look at the slip. Kira the story of anklet, , written in the fifth and sixth century 80. So again, I asked AI for a quote from this one.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-16: who are you? Nobel ones. Where are you headed on this difficult paths? Kaia Niki. I am Kaia Niki. Nikki. And this is my husband Cova lawn. We're traveling to . My Duryea to [01:12:00] start a new COVID line. Respected aesthetic. We seek your blessing for our, our journey. Covata the pass ahead is treacherous filled with wild bees and bandits. Are you prepared for such hardships, Kaia Niki. We have each other and our love will give us drinks.

Please guide us. Why is one.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-16: very well. I shall accompany you to the outskirts of Madara, but remember, virtue is your true protector in this world.

So I asked the same AI, right after asking you to generate the, to pick a line from the India. So keep in mind that the need would have been. What 500 years before that last one I read in 200 years before the one before that.

Dido distraught. It says imminent departure confronts him. Dido where you hoping to slip away in secret cruel one. Did you think you could leave this land and me without a word death? Her love me, nothing to you, nor the pledge we made. Do you not see my tears? And he is torn between his feelings for Dido and his divine mission [01:13:00] responds. My queen. I will never deny what you deserve, nor will I ever regret the time we shared. I did not mean to leave in secret, but the gods command me to go to Italy.

This is not my choice, but my duty. Dido. Unconvinced and heartbroken replies. Neither goddess was your mother. Nor Darius the founder of your line, you trader no, you were born of the harsh, Caucasian rocks and nursed by hurricane tigers.

So. Again, I just, there's no comparison. , and it's very interesting to me, the level of that, the level of sophistication of literature with higher in very early India. , but didn't advance. At the same rate that it was within the one culture.

Like it's, it's really shocking that you don't get this same development from here. And then if we're comparing like just time periods here, Homer's Iliad, eighth century BC, Homer Odyssey, eighth century BC. If you're looking at tragedies here, so keep in mind, it's not just like the [01:14:00] Iliad that we're going to here.

You got opiates, Rex 429 BC, you got, uh, 531 BCE. You got Ashkali's Australia Trilogy 458 BCE. And when I'm talking about like Greek tragedy again, I don't feel like the Indian stuff really compares. If you're being honest with yourself and you've read both, it just doesn't have the same narrative through lines or multi layered stories.

And then, okay, let's go to philosophy. You got Plato's Republic, 380 BCE and Aristotle's Poetics, 335 BCE. Now I want you to compare something like Aristotle's work or something like that with just to get an idea of like the civilizational distance here in terms of complexity with something like the art of war.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-17: So these would have been approximate contemporaries. If we go for the art of war, you would have all warfare is based on deception hints. When able to attack, [01:15:00] we must seem unable when using our forces, we must seem inactive.

When we are near, we must make the enemy. Believe we are far away. When far away we must make him believe we are near hold out Bates to entice the enemy. Feign disorder and crush him. Good advice, but also fairly obvious. , now let's go to Aristotle and this is on Essex. Virtue then it's a state of character concerned with choice. Lying in a mean, I eat the mean relative to us. This being determined by irrational principle and by the principle, by which man of practical wisdom would determine it.

Now it is mean between two vices. That which depends on excess and that which depends on defect. And again, it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short or of, or exceed what is right in both passions and actions while virtue, both finds and chooses that, which is immediate.

Now again, you can't be like, oh, this is because one's a translation and one's not a translation because they're both translations and bows from culture is [01:16:00] very different from my own.

But just the level of sophistication between the two cultures is quite distant.

 So, contrast something like Plato's Republic with Shenzhou's Art of War, if you're familiar with both of them.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-18: Plato's Republic and Arctic. We're also contemporaries. If you're wondering how they can be contemporary yet, you know, It needs to be. Cause we don't know exactly when the art of war was written. It was written between a period and that period covers both when Aristotle was writing. And when played out with writing. Anyway. So another quote from the art of warm. Therefore just as water retains, no constant shape. So in warfare, there are no constant conditions. He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning may be called a heaven born captain. And then here is Plato's Republic.

Just consider the depth of thought difference between these two. and this is a fairly famous one from Plato's Republic, which is, I guess, why the AI chose it. Not again, not me picking and choosing. Imagine human beings living in an underground dim which has a mouse open towards the light and reaching all along the [01:17:00] den. Here they have been from their childhood. And have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move and can only see before them being prevented by the chains from turning around their heads. Above and behind them, a fire is blazing at a distance in between the fire and the prisoners.

There is.

A raised way. And you will see if you look a low wall built along the way, like a screen, which marionette players have in front of them over which they showed the puppets.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall, carrying all sorts of vessels and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials. Which appear over the wall. Some of them are talking. They're silent. You have shown me a strange image and they are strange prisoners like ourselves.

I replied and they see only their own shadows or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave. True. He said, how could they see anything? But the shadows, if they were never allowed to move their heads [01:18:00] and of the objects, which are being carried and in a like, manner,

they would only see the shadows. Yes. He said, And if they were able to converse with another,

would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? Very true.

Yeah, that's embarrassing. Yeah, the Sun Tzu's Art of War is genuinely like at a fill us up, like vague, fairly obvious advice. And Plato's Republic is like, how do we build the perfect civilization? We could do X, but that might not work. So what if we did Y, crazy thing? And what if we do like, you know, Z, crazy thing? Like, it's just Not at the same level. And then you're like, well, you know, they must've stopped as well.

No, we'll go to like ancient Roman literature. As we go to 19 BCE. It was Virgil's Aeneids. You go to Horace's Odes, 23 You go to Ovid's Metamorphoses, that's 8 CE. You go to Marcus Aurelius Meditations, 170 BCE. to 180 CE. And again, like Marcus Aurelius's meditations, compare that to like art of war, compare [01:19:00] that to a lot of this stuff that we're seeing come out of Japan, like 800 years later.

It just isn't comparable. Now I want to show you again that this is a specifically this one chain of civilization thing. Okay.

This has, and I want to be clear here, absolutely nothing to do with Europe, European people, or European genetics. It is a specific memetic cluster. And that is made very clear by this chart. So this chart chosen notable philosophers and scholars in Europe from the 7th century BC to the 14th century AD.

Whoa. And you will note, Rome fell in the 5th century and Charlemagne rose in the 9th century. And between those two periods, they are basically mud hut people producing nothing. Wow. And I think this also shows just the height of ancient Greek civilization in terms of the sophistication of that civilization.

So, so, this is, this is just what I say here. So, what do you need for this, right? And we [01:20:00] talked for a lot about this, and we came up with some ideas. Now, I think something that tries to look at this from a, well, the climate was different, doesn't really work. Yes, you do not like the guns, germs, and steel.

Answer to this question. Yeah, because it doesn't explain why everything goes back to mud huts. When Rome goes away, it does. It does not explain that. Well, why is it that Britain can become a like civilized area when Rome is there? But when Rome goes away, they go back to hitting each other with clubs.

What, why they go back to murdering children and then bury them under bridges to is like witch spells and stuff like that. Hmm. Why, why, why, why, why, why. This is and, and, and I also, the reason why people are drawn in by these environmental explanations is. They remove the need to ask hard questions.

Okay. And I don't think that you can get a genetic answer to this, like, because clearly it worked wherever [01:21:00] Rome was. It worked when Rome was in Africa. It worked when the civilization spread to the Mesopotamian river Valley. It worked in my Unga Bunga caveman ancestors in Britain, right? Like it worked everywhere.

It was applied. That's the thing about this. It's not like a. Oh, environmental thing. So what we came to is that you need an environment where lazy rich people want to do science and, and explore the nature of reality. If you look at, it's not, so you need two things, right? You need enough civilizational infrastructure.

Like you need a meme company that can create enough civilizational infrastructure where you have trade and you have people who are like, you need, you need enough affluence to create. some opportunity for leisure. But then in that leisure time, you have to want to explore the true nature of reality and the way things actually functionally work.

And we came to the conclusion that to get to [01:22:00] that place, you need to have a certain element of varied pluralism, because if you don't have that, there will be not that much. There will be an absence of competitive forces that encourage, that enable those who are somehow correct, more correct about reality to win.

So why we think this didn't happen, for example, in Imperial China or Feudal Japan is because there was too much uniformity, meaning that there wasn't, like, competing and being really, really different. And, and more correct about reality wasn't how you were going to win. You would win through brute force by getting enough resources by Yeah, so I like the way that you, when you were explaining it to me, I thought you had a slightly more eloquent way of putting it.

Which is you need a pluralistic yet unified people proud of their differences, but they see themselves as one [01:23:00] unit against some external existential threat that they see as wholly different from them. So examples, and it appears that the one civilization does best whenever it's in those environments.

So for example, it did really well in the Greek city states where the Greek city states. Also, each other is like radically different. And, and it, but the outsiders, they were something wholly other, right? But they were also totally separate from each other and competing, or it did really well during the period of European city states competing with each other.

Yeah. You know, after the age of Charlemagne, it did really well. It did really, but all those groups, you know, they would fight each other, but when a crusade would happen, it's like, okay, everyone come together. Let's, let's go. It did really well in the Muslim, the Islamic empire, but the Islamic empire was also like that.

It was very fracturous in the way that it's different parts functioned. It did very well in the Roman empire. But again, anyone who's actually studied Roman history, the Roman empire was always dividing and then recombining and dividing and [01:24:00] recombining with a lot of factions with a lot of factions that had a degree of ideological diversity, where you would argue against.

Someone else

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-19: I will note that the one civilization. Appears to be dramatically less intellectually, , and more broadly, I guess I'd say civilizationally productive in terms of its advancement, whenever it is being housed within a more homogenous empire. So yes, Rome was fractured, but it was hardly as ideal a situation as the ancient Greek city states or the later competing European countries.

, and I think that that is why in Rome, you had a slow. Slow down of the advancement, which you can see very clearly on this graph. Yes. There was still advancement. Yes. There was still civilization, but it was much slower than under the Greek city state period or in the later multi-country multi-site plural, European.

System.

And I think that this is also why in the [01:25:00] last, I'd say 50 years or so we have seen human advancement in terms of, , artistic production and stuff like that. Really grind to a Holt, , because of the urban monoculture, removing the differences between the groups that had been seated with the one culture.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-20: So Rome can almost be thought of as this weird moment in history where the one culture solidified into a mostly uniform unit, which gave it the power needed to spread out and touch lots of parts of earth and get them ready and seated. However, , He didn't advance within that culture itself. That culture was more of a vector for its spread.

and I think that you could actually see why this leads to better philosophical outcomes and I'll note here, right? So people are like well Japanese people they were interested in like exploring the nature of reality was like a consequentialist Like this will work mindset when they got rich.

I'm like, no They weren't like if you study like actual Japanese or Chinese history What the wealthy people [01:26:00] with leisure time did is they? Measured the quality of their work by its aesthetic value over its or, or realistic. So they would sit around and write stories that were meant to be beautiful, but they weren't meant to be Functional or convey particularly deeper or more sophisticated meanings often Lee and an argument that I was also positing when we were talking about this earlier is there seems to be some kind of a benefit that you get from having a complex political system that is complex enough where there's either a very strong nobility and some form of parliament or some form of representative democracy, because in those systems actually being correct and actually being right.

gives you an edge or a benefit. So that I think has a halo effect where then you get people who are also interested in science and physics and a whole bunch of other things as, as sort of an emergent property [01:27:00] of people who are right. From a more like political strategic perspective have an edge and therefore get to rule that society and you get a lot of pushback as well.

So you get the like, you need the gentleman scientist, basically. I mean, in the Victorian period, it's called the gentleman scientist in the medieval period. It was called like, the maybe monk or something. Or in the, you know, the, the period of the Greek city states, it was your, your random thinker, right?

So like, and we're going to talk about like how Greeks figured some early stuff. Like, I think that they're the people who really collated this culture for the first thing. I think its predecessors existed in the Egypt, right? And then it went to Mesopotamia where it continued to grow slightly, but I still think it was very nascent and it was supercharged when the Greeks got it.

Like they exploded it. They were the reactor that made it something. And I think that you can see for the exploration of the Greeks, exploration of the nature of reality, sort of how it builds on itself and why this would lead to such civilizational advancement so quickly. So you'll have something like sales.

Thales of Miletus proposing that water was the [01:28:00] fundamental substance underlying all reality. He sought a single unifying principle to explain the nature of the world. So this is around what you get in terms of sophistication of other cultures. You get the first guy who asks what's the nature of the world, right?

In Greek society, it didn't stop first guy to ask what the nature of the world. Somebody else with access to his work, then you get an axomander, who argued for an indefinite boundless substance called a porian as the source of all things. This was an early attempt to conceptualize an abstract principle underlying physical reality.

Then Heraclitus taught that everything is in constant flux, famously stating, Pansa re, everything flows. He saw reality as a unity of opposites in constant tension and change. Thank you very much. Parademus took the opposite view, arguing that change is impossible, and that reality is a single, eternal, and unchanging whole.

This sparked debates about the nature of being, and non being, that influenced later metaphysics. Then all of those people came down to Plato, who's now, you know, going against [01:29:00] what all of them are saying, and he goes, He proposed the theory of forms,

 which held that there exists a realm of, Of perfect unchanging forms or ideas separate from the physical world The physical world we perceive is merely an imperfect reflection of these forms True knowledge and reality are found in the realm of forms not in the ever changing physical world Now this is an idea that while I don't agree with it could conceptually make sense to even a modern person today Like this is the beginning of what you could call like Truly modern physics or philosophy whereas the other people were just giving him enough of a people arguing that he could come in and have, I guess I'd call it like a real and sophisticated idea.

Whereas these other environments just didn't have this debate happening and, and wouldn't have a debate like this arise. And this spills over then into things like the arts. I mean, we'll explain why that happens in a second, but then you have something like Aristotle, right? So then Aristotle, he comes in and he rejects Plato's separate form.

[01:30:00] Instead, arguing that form and matter are united in individual substances. Aristotle developed the concepts of substance, essence, and accident to explain the nature of things. Clearly, this is a world. He explored causality, identifying four types of causes. Material, formal, effective, and final. So, like, He basically figured out how reality actually works, like, well, it's just a world where clearly they were rewarded in some way, like socially, or even if no one gave them a reward for it, they were raised in a culture or society that enabled them to have emotional intrinsic rewards for doing something like this.

And that I think is created, it's just, when I think about the unifying elements of. The cultures that I'm aware of that first generated this is there are varied sub tribes that are very they have a lot of internal pride and they like to s**t on the outsiders. [01:31:00] And. You even saw this in ancient Egypt, you know, it's like, Oh, those people in Alexandria.

Oh, those people in Cairo, like there, there were significant cultural differences but there was a lot of trade and interchange as well. So there was comparison. So I feel that what's the word like a certain amount of xenophobia combined with pluralism and then another sort of big bad on the outside that enables them to all say.

Okay. Hey, this is us. And we are different from those. You mean literally like the Haven Network that I want to recreate for a post fertility collapse world? Oddly convenient, but I mean, it, I feel like we see the value. I know, but that's, I think I know. And what I'm saying is it's, it seems conveniently flattering that what we're trying to design is.

Oddly reminiscent of a system that seems to have given birth to the modernization specifically designed after it. Yeah, well, I know, but I just, I think it's, it's interesting that we intuited [01:32:00] something that now when we're looking at this unified, civilization. Well, I hadn't looked at how big the differences were when you controlled for time.

But now I want to get to, to make a comparison here. So we're going to go to China. Like what was their understanding of reality? Right. So you get to Laozi and Zhangzi. They were believed to have lived between the sixth century BCE. Although some scholars state them to the fourth century BCE. So this would be around when all these Greek authors were writing.

They're credited as the authors of the Tao Te Ching. The Tao Te Ching. The foundational text of Daoism it, which included concepts of Dao the way as the source of all being, Wu Wei, non action or effortless action, the interplay of yin and yang , and simplicity and naturalness as ideals.

That's childlike when contrasted with what was going on in Greece at the same time. And I think it, but, but it, I think shows. Why Greece was able to sort of explore here. You have like two guys who sat down and they're like, [01:33:00] this is the way things are. And then you have like one other guy who pushes back like Mosey.

So this is where you get the will of heaven, the idea that the universe has a moral structure. The Heaven's Intentions provide a standard for ethics. He believed in consequentialism, so slightly better, right? Like, judging the morality of actions based on their outcomes. He believed in universalism advocating for universal love, Jiayi Ai, that does not discriminate between people rationalism and a lot of his, and Moanism, and some other things, and a lot of his stuff.

was sort of, suppressed as Confucianism grew. So, hold on. But the point being is that when you read this stuff, or when you read Confucianism, because I'm sure you guys have read some Confucianism you just, like, anyone who's being honest can tell it's not as intellectually sophisticated as something like Aristotle's work or Plato's work, which was, you know, It shows the difference between a culture where you have a bunch of people furiously arguing with each other and who in other areas of their life, whether it's economics [01:34:00] or war, actually have to know how to beat an opponent and actually have to have their ideas work.

And I think you can see this in terms of like Greek warfare, for example, like Alexander, the great figures out like a formation. That's really good in Greek warfare, . And then he applies it. to anyone other than the Greek city states that were very hard for him to unify, and it's like, free money cheat, just moving knife through butter all the way to India, where his troops are like, why are we still fighting anymore?

This is getting pointless. I mean, I think what made him really cool Was the way that he used geography to his advantage, yeah. But the point is, is that these things all bleed into each other.

It's not just the philosophy was hundreds of years ahead. It's the philosophy, and the art, and the infrastructure, and the buildings, and the everything! Everything! Ahead of my ancestors! Well, what's more interesting to me, again, is just how the incentives are aligned to do that. And you need [01:35:00] to have a pluralistic culture.

You need to have something that forces competition and and ingenuity, and I, and I think that you can see throughout history, too, and this would require a whole lot more investigation that we don't have time for right now. But I think if we looked at when civilizations collapsed, I would imagine that there's a high level of correlation between that competition falling apart and the fall of a civilization that when you no longer have this pluralistic competition, but trade and exchange.

Where you're forcing people to sort of steal from each other, iterate off each other and compete with each other, but also stay united and strong together against a larger exogenous threat or enemy or big bad, then that's when civilization starts to decline. So, maybe we should be concerned that perhaps big bads.

Like Russia and China, you know, sort of like that, these, these tensions internationally [01:36:00] will soon subside due to demographic collapse. Well, I think it's why the urban monoculture is often also stolen so much of the vitality of human civilization because it is homogenized culture. Yes. Yeah. In a, in a more perfect world, we would have these cultures riffing and doing their own thing like anime, like anime required Japan be touched by civilization to create their concepts of like video games, like Mario and stuff like that.

There are some of the greatest works of art in our lifetime. And I think in the future will be remembered that way are, are coming out, but it's out of this industrial process that married some of their ancestral traditions. And I think that this is where you get the, This mistake, right? The mistake that countries make is we can go back to our old ways and, and just update them for modern civilization and say, no, what we need to do is we need to take this one culture and put little spins on it, but not try to go back to the way things used to be.

So an example of this would be something like even China today. So this is not me as an [01:37:00] outsider, but merging China, when China says we need to go back to like Chinese science and Chinese medicine, like the Chinese government. We'll say when we're doing Chinese medicine, it's like random like herbs and stuff that like everybody knows don't work like, like they, they functionally don't work because that was the nature of that previous system in, in the, in the system of the one civilization, things actually have to work like if a natural remedy works, it will say, okay, how do I distill the chemical in it?

Oh, cool. Cool. Gnawing on that bark lowers your amount of pain. Okay, what chemical is causing that? Okay, let's mass produce that chemical. Okay, now we have aspirin. And we, we, we run into a risk of doing this in the West as well.

I mean, the urban monoculture, because of its love of weakness, you can see our video on that particular topic. It tries to venerate it, their own ancestors, the witches, the druids, the pagans. You know, you get that I'm queer, you should not venerate that. [01:38:00] Right? These people were monstrous.

They sacrificed children. They were not civilized man. They, they needed to be uplifted. Thank God that the Romans colonized. My ancestors and saved them from the depravity that they were living in.

Speaker 17: What makes me special?

Speaker 18: Do you know, do you know what makes me special? I'm a queer. What?!

Speaker 22: She looks angry. Yeah.

Speaker 23: A face like that, I'd be angry too.

You

Speaker 25: shut up.

And I think that, and this is the thing, and I think that, that, that [01:39:00] civilized man, wherever he is whatever he looks like, whatever ethnicity he is, the cool thing about this theory is it's kind of unifying.

Because the truth is Is it the originators of this civilization? One, they never hold the torch for long. They often pass it on, you know, whether it's Egypt to Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome. But they also mostly don't exist anymore as an ethnic group. Like the ancient Greeks, I can look at ancient Greek statues.

They don't look like modern Greek people. Like that ethnic group isn't my ethnic group, but it's also, you know, when you're talking about it. And I think that, that Italians and the Greek people. Do undersell themselves when they say they're not they're probably like 80 percent related to them would be my guess there's probably like a few immigration waves, but like I think that they deserve some credit for that But they're not the groups that are on top of the world right now, you know So it doesn't argue for this idea of a dominant cultural group what it argues for is an idea of a global shared cultural history That none of us really own.

That [01:40:00] we all are beneficiaries of whatever our backgrounds are. And we all deserve you know, when I look back to my history, when I named my kids, like Octavian, one of the names that we're looking for for one of our next years, it's going to be Constantine. You know, I am looking to the great figures of Rome.

And. One show that I would really recommend people watch if you haven't watched it you, you absolutely must watch it. It's called Rome, an unbiased history. I would watch it chronologically. If you like this show, you are going to love Roman unbiased history. It's by Dabba Hadi. He is, I think.

Like, one of the great creators of our age, in terms of like, memefied content. I don't think he has nearly as many subscribers as he could, but it's just because he hasn't done enough videos. But he does a thorough memefied history of Rome, from the perspective of being ultra, I'd say like, jingoistic.

Like, when he's describing my [01:41:00] ancestors, he'll always have them come on ahead with like the, you know, the meme of the guy with the head that's caved in, and like the face paint on them, and just you know, unable to do anything, or they'll have like sharp teeth whenever they're coming on stage, and I just love it!

Speaker 11: All that there would be, even though, there was so much we didn't know yet. Fighting under the sun. , my skin is glistening from sweat dripping down as time will pass,

I love it! Because it's, it's I think the way that the chads from around the world are able to look at history and not look at the witches and see their ancestors, but all together look to the shared cultural ancestry and say, that's the fire that left human civilization. And I don't need to have an ethnic.

Claim to that, to admire it and to learn from it and to build on it. I think that's really fair. Yeah,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-21: [01:42:00] And I note that all our cultures had their witches. You know, it's not just that the Celts who had witches, who, some people today delusional. , rise up despite them being child murderers. , but you had them in the African cultures, you had them in ancient China. You had them in a.

Ancient Scandinavia and the ancient roofs had them. All around the world, we had our witches. So the question is, are you able to, with humility, swallow, the pride you have in either the culture that is your own genetically or the one that you have drawn, some sort of weird Weebo attachment to. And admit that we all, our greatness all comes from the descendants of. One culture. And a culture that's not yours.

And that is a culture that brought us. It's a Judeo-Christian tree of religions that helped save us from our witches.

Speaker 6: Your [01:43:00] move, time to d d d

Speaker 7: d d

d d

and I think the difficult thing is that normally when people are advocating for a culture, it's their own and it helps that this isn't ours. I'm so relieved. I'm so relieved that we do not have Greek or Roman ancestry.

Yeah, otherwise this would be such a bad look, but I, I think that and I also argue that this is what created the modern Jew and Christian in another episode, which is to say when the one true religion crashed with civilization, it like a particle collider [01:44:00] exploded and created the civilized religions, whether that's post second temple Judaism.

And as we argue in track eight, I do not think. Pre Second Temple Judaism was one of the civilized religions. They were ripping apart animals. They were doing blood sacrifices. They were doing blood magic. They were worshiping multiple gods in the temple. I think that it was through the destruction of that, that they were freed from this.

And if you look at their art from those previous periods, it's nothing special. Their civilization, nothing particularly special. Even the parts of the Bible that were written before that period, while I think they're divinely inspired, they're certainly not. Particularly sophisticated when contrasted with like ancient greek work.

And actually some individuals argue that the bible is particularly the moses stories are actually downstream of hellenistic works and there's some compelling evidence there that we can get to that. They were heavily influenced post fact by those.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-22: Specifically, the argument that I found most compelling is just the theme of the story. A group of people being kicked out of a Homeland, then looking for a new Homeland, [01:45:00] then founding a city. Then having that city grow into a great city. , it feels very much like, you know, the founding story of Rome or like many ancient Greek myths have this. , theming.

, whereas it's basically unheard of in the, , Mesopotamian region.

But we, we won't get into that too much in this particular episode.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-24: Something I note about this theory that I want to develop further is the idea that the one civilization, when it blooms within a region appears to exhaust that region after a golden age, making it hard for civilization to appear there again, and they then fall into what I can only describe as.

Sort of a non-violent slumber. , that where they don't produce much in terms of artistic output or civilizational advancement was the only, , counter example to this being the Italian Renaissance. After the period of the Roman empire was over. , so what I mean by this is it [01:46:00] starts in Egypt. Then Egypt never really rises again.

Then it goes to Mesopotamia, the NEF. They retain me as sort of becomes irrelevant and it goes to Greece and Greece sort of become the relevant. Then it goes to Rome. Then Rome sort of becomes irrelevant. Then it, you know, breathe, digging in France. , through the Charlotte minium empire, and then that sort of becomes irrelevant.

And then it goes into England. , which has increasingly become irrelevant. , and so the question is, , how can you create a sustainable version of this culture in why does it burn these populations and make them if beat and bureaucratic after a while? , and that is a theory that we will explore later. But it also means, interestingly, that it's especially hard for any group to claim themselves special because they carried the torch of civilization for a period because the church of civilization seems to always burn the group that carries it and make them lesser than the people around them, rather than more than the people around them.

Gotta get the kids now, but hold on the point of all this is. Is that we [01:47:00] have a shared cultural ancestry that none of us have ownership over and that cultural ancestry, the height of it is when you have collaborative pluralism and that's what we should be fighting for. That's the greatness that was Rome.

Oh, and by the way, if you also haven't seen it and I've recommended it in another show and you still need to watch it is the Rome mini series. From HBO again, haven't seen that must watch it and we haven't seen the first gladiator again, a must watch. Well, and also I want to emphasize not just collaborative pluralism, but collaborative competitive pluralism.

Exactly. There is a healthy, friendly trash talking the other side element of this. And I think a lot of Our critics or people who want to frame us as enemies misread that when we're like, yeah, like, you know, on the

other side, but you should also be allying and working with the other side. You should both compete. I mean, that is the [01:48:00] beauty of sports teams. Anyone who can understand baseball fans who can, who can trash talk each other about their teams, but then, you know, bond over the sport. Is like, they get it, this should not be a complex subject, but I, I do feel that we get heat for this because people try to make that out about like, oh, you're about hate.

You're about, you know, you trash talk this other group. Therefore you're a supremacist for your own group. Like, you're, you're totally missing the point and you are smart enough to know that that is not true. So cool. All right, let's go get love. You have a good day. Bye bye bye. Ciao ciao. You're amazing. You know, Maxine Lott, who we are fans of he, on his sub stack ran, I think he's running guests posts, giving a a rational argument for why people should vote for Kamala Harris. And there's another one for why people should vote for Donald Trump.

And I'm still [01:49:00] reading the Kamala Harris one, but there's this one part of it where the person. argues that the economy is doing well and look at GDP and look at unemployment rates and how Kamala Harris has a plan to make things even better. But then they write, many Americans have the mistaken perception that the economy is not doing well in part because of the cost of groceries, housing, consumer goods and services and energy are all higher than four years ago and wage growth has not offset these high costs.

Like, I'm sorry. So you're arguing that the economy is doing well. And then we're just complaining that it, we're not happy because our lives are materially worse and economically speaking, but the economy is doing well, so we should vote for it. I love that so much. This like, I mean, so the costs that matter to normal people are.

Are [01:50:00] up. And I mean, their wages haven't improved in line with that, but I mean, the economy is doing well, you know, you, you, you mentioned to me that like people will always say the economy is doing well when their parties in office. What he's really just saying is my party's in office. And therefore I can find some numbers to indicate that the economy is in shambles, but my party is in office.

Therefore, things are good. Okay? Shut up. I just thought that was very entertaining.

Speaker 12: There was a dream that was real. It shall be realized. These are the wishes of Marcus Aurelius.

Speaker 8: [01:51:00] Torsten, out of the way! Out of the way!

Speaker 9: What are you doing? You nutjob!

Join us as we delve into the multifaceted legacy of Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister. This video explores Abe's significant political impact through his pronatalist policies, military reforms, and deep ties to the Unification Church. We'll analyze his efforts to foster women's participation in the workforce, reinterpret Japan's pacifist constitution, and strengthen alliances through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Additionally, we discuss Abe's influence on Japanese media and culture, including anime. The video also covers Abe's relationship with Donald Trump, the complex history with the Unification Church, and the circumstances surrounding his assassination. Engaging and insightful, this is a comprehensive look at Shinzo Abe's celebrated and criticized legacy.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today occasionally I will go down a rabbit hole and I'll be like, this is something I really wish I could find a good succinct video on because now it's a topic that interests me.

And this topic is The Harambee of pronatalism, Shinzo Abe. I have just seen so many pronatalist Shinzo Abe memes of him trying to promote fertility. And then after the recent thing happened, which we'll go into where people in Japan became convinced that Shinzo Abe from the dead had told Trump to move to avoid being assassinated.

And it's just amazing. So first I'm going to bring the audience along with me. On a journey through some memes about Shinzo Abe. Then we're going to go into who he actually was, like what did he accomplish in his life? How pronatalist was he really? And then we're going to go into the assassination.

And then we're going to go into the, what [00:01:00] led to the assassination.

Simone Collins: All right,

Malcolm Collins: then. So we're starting with meme number one of Shinzo Abe here, which is him holding a gun out. And what does it say, Simone?

Simone Collins: . It says, stop watching VTubers, you stinky neets. Do your duty, have sex. I'm no longer asking. I

Malcolm Collins: love this.

The next one I love, and this is something that as I first started, like, going into Shinzo Abe, I really realized how well liked he was within like, meme community. So here's one that's a political compass that shows a former Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe shot dead, and it shows people on all sides of the political compass sad about this, but then the next political compass one, which I think is more true, shows everybody horrified except for the authoritarian lefties who are Hooray, death to Japan.

I'm coming. It says, and it shows from China News, like from one of their main sources. And all of the, you know, far, far [00:02:00] commies, they're being like you know, don't be stunned, celebrate stuff like that. So horrified. But I think what this shows is that the only people who were really happy that he died were the Was the crazy like pro china people which again if you're not pro china should make you love him even more And this was something that a lot of people were saying the analysis of him that made me want to learn more about him Is that one longest serving pm in the history?

I think of japan so very very popular person and people were like they don't understand like Japan losing him and some of the analysis I saw they said could significantly hurt the country because he was so effective at everything he did. For the next meme here this takes place in the friend universe.

And it starts with the character saying

Elves may live a long time. Oh, that's good! But across the board, we lack romantic feelings and reproductive instincts.

Wait, hold on.

We're quietly going extinct.

Huh?

Last time [00:03:00] I met a fellow elf was more than 400 years ago.

Sigh.

Perhaps we're closer to the end than I thought.

We're too late this time. You doing a girl voice, by the way, is so out of character for you. Here, do the next meme.

Simone Collins: Well, I read that a boy and a girl can create new life by joining their bodies together. Can create new life by joining their bodies together

Malcolm Collins: She's

Simone Collins: like

yes It's

Malcolm Collins: korobo and mitsubo are having their fourth and then it shows senzuabe My job here is done. And then this is one of my favorite where this was after the assassination and it shows a picture of like the scenery of Japan with Shinzo Abe's face fading out.

And it just says have sex in big letters. And then on the, the, the bottom, right. It says see you space cowboy,

Simone Collins: which was the outro from cowboy bebop.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, which was really got to [00:04:00] me So now I'm going to talk a bit about the the really funny thing that happened. Well, not funny, but I guess touching and there's memes about like women, like I cry at the Titanic men don't cry over anything.

And it shows the band like crying over memes of Shinzo Abe protecting Trump from the assassination. But this makes sense. They were, they did have a very, very strong relationship and we'll get into why this was the case in just a second.

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: don't know. But here in a Japanese Twitter post, it says during his speech, Trump heard Shinzo Abe's voice calling him to attention in his ear.

When he tilted his head to listen to the voice, he heard the sound of a bullet cutting through the air and the bullet penetrated Trump's right ear. And he heard a gunshot. If Trump had not tried to listen to Abe's voice, he would have been killed by the bullet. And for people who are like, wait, why would a lot of people in Japan actually believe this?

Well, a big group of that liked Shinzo Abe was extremist Christians, specifically the Unification Church, specifically the Moonies, who would have believed something like this was possible. And people were memeing about this in the [00:05:00] West, and they thought it was serious. Well, apparently that was

Simone Collins: why Shinzo Abe was shot, right?

It was this, the guy who shot him was Yeah, it was the Unification Church. It was against the church. And I

Malcolm Collins: mean, in light of all these memes, you can think, Oh, these memes are so silly, etc. One of my favorites has always been the what I watched, which it shows Franks and it goes what I expected, which is Gurren Lagann and then it's a gif of what I got.

It's Shinzo Abe's face pointing at the screen and occasionally it flashes, have sex.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: My very favorite Shinzo, Abe meme. I found after we recorded this episode.

It shows a post from our Reddit, which is verse the patriarchy,

some other witches have mentioned that doing spells directly against Trump are not as effective as we might hope. And he seems to have some kind of protection around him. And then they brought quote, unquote, some kind of protection around him and it shows Cynthia Bobby's face in the background.

Malcolm Collins: And here's a great one, which is a political compass one, which shows why Shinzo Abe was so well liked [00:06:00] show. It shows you know, people being shocked at his death and it shows people at every side of the political compass sad, but shows why they're sad.

So the authoritarian left, he oversaw 15 percent real increase in minimum wage while dropping unemployment to under 3%. That was left the authoritarian. righty authoritarian. He worked to ensure Japan could stand with America and protect democracy in Taiwan when the day comes. And then because he rebuilt Japan's military and then at the libertarian right, it just shows the economy going up under his leadership.

And then in the Libertarian left. It shows his policies open the door to ensure millions of women were able to join the workforce. And I just think that that's really cool. This, this guy who is so universally liked and I wanted to understand, and I will say that when I dug on him deeper, I didn't necessarily come away universally liking him.

Interesting. Well,

Simone Collins: that's what I was just going to ask you. Was he universally liked because he was shot because he was assassinated? No,

Malcolm Collins: it was universally liked before that, [00:07:00] but unfortunately his reputation took a hit in the investigation of the person who shot him. Because the person who shot him had, he didn't have no point.

He should, he

Simone Collins: should have written a sternly worded letter, you're saying, maybe a

Malcolm Collins: sternly worded letter, but Shinzo Abe may have facilitated a cult that destroyed a lot of people's lives and used the cult to stay in power, really. Yes. Now whether you consider it a cult or a religion, I mean, it could be like people saying, well, you guys do the same with like, I don't know, you know, being overly positive about Mormons, people who are like really anti Mormon and think of it as a cult,

and I'd be like, one, I don't think we're that overly positive Mormon, but like if they became like a major voting block for us and we were running and then they blamed us, like I could see, I don't know. Because I don't think the, the unification church is a much more culty cult than the, the Mormons, but we'll get into them in a second.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well then it would have to be if Tom Cruise was president, but then someone assassinated him because, you know, [00:08:00]

Malcolm Collins: Well, he wasn't in the unification church.

Simone Collins: I know. Oh, he wasn't. Oh, okay. The

Malcolm Collins: unification church. Okay. So I'll go quickly into this right now,

Simone Collins: please. Yes. I don't know this before

Malcolm Collins: he was ever in his party, actually during the age of his dad who helped the unification church a lot, get established in Japan.

They began South Korean, right? Yeah. Which is a South Korean. cult or religion. They began to help the party a lot with local organizational stuff. And when he took over the party, he didn't like clear them out of the party and they still had a big role in helping with, you know, like flyers and door knocking and all of that in a very, very big way.

And people think that the party wouldn't have as much power as they had if they didn't have this free resource of human

Simone Collins: labor. Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So his pronatalist initiatives. So womanomics in 2013, Abe called for a society in which all women can shine, setting a target that 30 percent of leadership positions should be held by women by [00:09:00] 2020.

This was a conservative, by the way. This policy aimed to increase women's participation in the workforce, which Abe believed could potentially improve both Japan's GDP and fertility rate. And so, right away, when we've gone into other countries fertility rates, and we've, like, laughed at their, like, extended maternity leave and stuff like that.

And he's like, get them to work! This is the first time I've heard one where I'm, like, one, counterintuitive, and two, probably right. And I will note, what is Shinzo Abe's legacy? The by far highest fertility rate in the region is Japan. So I mean, he was kind of right. Yeah. Women working does help fertility rates.

Childcare expansion, Abe planned to spend 2 trillion yen, approximately 17. 6 billion on education and child care. This included promises of free preschool for children aged 3 to 5, free child care for children aged 2 and younger from low income households. He did labor reforms.

He attempted to break down Japan's two tier employment system, which often excluded temporary workers [00:10:00] from the regular workforce. These reforms were aimed at creating a more flexible labor market that could better accommodate working parents. And then Abenomics and Abenomics 2. 0 in September, 2015. The first one is called Abenomics.

This is Abenomics 2. 0. ABE announced an updated platform that centered on raising the birth rate and expanding social security. This included creating new cabinet positions dedicated to reversing Japanese demographic decline

Simone Collins: Abe, huh?

Malcolm Collins: Now, a lot of people think that he sponsored anime that had pronatalist themes. Right. And I have

Simone Collins: wondered that, when we've watched recently released anime, I don't know if you only watch pronatalist anime shows? No, I mean, the studio

Malcolm Collins: that did, for example, Frank's, which is seen as having hugely pronatalist message,

Speaker: Yeah, I'm gonna find another female partner. Fine then! What?! You think in the real world your perfect girl will just come falling out of the sky Hey, you. Wanna help me bang this robot? You mean pilot this robot? I know what I said.

Speaker 2: Never! Time to fight [00:11:00] some monsters! So no one besides me thinks this control scheme's a bit weird. Why would anything about this be weird? Now spank me hard and I'll shout out Daddy to get the engine started. Does anyone not have a partner to ride? Fair enough. You see, I've always thought of you as a brother.

You mean like the normal kind or the anime kind? The anime kind. Aw, eww, eww! Don't you have anyone else that likes you anyway? Well, now that you mention it I do! I wanna make a baby! Uh, how do we do the That was amazing! Yeah! What's child support? I'd like to declare that we're getting married! BAKAKAKAKAKA

Malcolm Collins: is also the studio that did Gurren Lagann, which came out a long time before anyone was freaking out about demographic collapse.

And Gurren Lagann's very antinatalist. Or at least an anti But,

Simone Collins: wasn't, I mean, Gurren

Malcolm Collins: Lagann was Well, that was Gurren Lagann talking about it with the same team.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, no, yeah, Gurren Lagann is, yeah, but no, sorry, but they were [00:12:00] also sorry, they were also Evangelion, which is Antinatalist, and Evangelion was pre Abe.

I think Gurren Lagann, did that overlap with Shinzo Abe? That was pre Abe.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): So I was rolling on this one, Shinzo RV. First served as prime minister of Japan in 2006 to 2007. Then again from 2012 to 2020, well, his 2006 to 2007 run, that is when Garan log-in was released. Garan log-in was released in 2007. Not that there is any chance that he influenced its development, but,

Yes, the motor was right on this one, weirdly.

Malcolm Collins: Gurren Lagann is old and then they did a, um, like other, you know, pronatalist anime that I've shown on here, like the one about old people and stuff like that. It's not that the Japanese government never sponsors anime or manga, but they're typically one off projects and not full series.

And it was doing that before Abe and it doesn't appear that there's any documented evidence of like super pronatalist stuff being pushed. It appears that most of the pronatalist anime was just created because people love their country and love [00:13:00] their culture. And I think that that shows in part why Japan has been more resistant to fertility collapse than other countries in the region.

Is that there's just much more pride in the Japanese identity than there is, um You know, and ask somebody who spent time in Japan and Korea, for example, there is simply more pride in the Japanese identity than there is in the Korean identity. And I suspect it's you know, people just pushing this into their own media in an attempt to save their culture.

And I think it's sad that we don't see more of this in U. S. Media. But I think it's because in U. S. Media there's Very few actual conservatives because the far left in the urban monoculture sort of acts as a cabal, keeping them out of positions, whereas in Japan you don't have the same extent of conservatives just not appearing in media, which didn't used to be as extreme in the U.

S. as it is today. Now let's talk about other big things he did. Constitutional reinterpretation in 2014, Abe's government reinterpreted Article 9 of Japan's pacifist [00:14:00] constitution to allow for collectivist self defense, enabling Japan to come to the aid of its allies under attack. Now, this is really big.

He really, really began to turn Japan into a military power again, to put it on a military footing. And I think that as an American, this is something I am really glad that he did because he also pretty much unilaterally rebuilt quad or the quadrilateral, quadrilateral. Security dialogue which is an alliance between Japan, U.

S. India and Australia. And if you're wondering who would those four countries be allied against specifically, this would be against China. They really only kick into action against China, but it would be incredibly damaging to China. Especially if you had the U. S. and Japan plus Australia and India involved in any sort of a boycott because China imports around.

I think it last I checked was 83 percent of their energy needs and something like 86 percent of that is coming through the Strait of [00:15:00] Malacca, which basically means past India. So like there's very little they could do. They could take it into the deep ocean, but then they need to go all the way around Australia.

But if you go all the way around Australia well now you need to get through the island chain that Japan and the U. S. control. So there's really no way to supply China by water if there was ever a blockade and the Quadrilateral Alliance was at play. And he increased military spending to one to 2 percent of GDP.

And he also pushed through controversial security laws that allowed the Japanese self defense force to deploy overseas and engage in combat to defend allies when it used to be defense only. And the ally in contest here is very obviously Taiwan. Any thoughts before I go further? Simone, will you like this guy so far, or he's sounding.

Simone Collins: I mean, for any elected politician, he sounds pretty solid. And also, just the fact that he made some pretty meaningful changes, too.

Malcolm Collins: Mm

Simone Collins: hmm.

Malcolm Collins: No, he's a I mean, in terms of He's a man of action. Yeah, he's one of those characters where, like, the way he got elected may have been [00:16:00] shady. But as a politician, he was God tier and really only did good.

A good example of this in the United States would be Nixon. And Nixon is generally considered one of the best presidents in American history by people who like know their presidential history stuff. Building our current relationship with China and building. Globalization was really important in securing peace and making America as prosperous today as it is,

However you know, he did cheat intellectual cycle.

Well, basically cheated. And to give you an idea of how well like Nixon is in the U. S. Stephen Colbert, you know, far lefty Stephen Colbert. He said that out of all American presidents, Nixon is his favorite. So that should show you that he really does appeal across the aisle. So another thing to note here is he did a very good job building a relationship with Trump.

And he had a close personal friendship with Trump from what we've seen, you know, with Trump saying after he died, something along the lines of, No one will ever [00:17:00] understand how much Japan has lost, you know, with Abe's passing. You know, like, he knew more from his position to know just how important he was, which is probably true.

From the position of President of the U. S., you have more information than other people have.

Simone Collins: Well, but I think Abe also demonstrated the first time Trump Flew out to have a major meeting with him, just how much he wanted to invest in a good relationship with Trump. And that, what did they do? First thing after they land, go golfing.

What did they do? They eat American beef burgers. They, he had special hats made, played on the make America great again, slogan, but it had something to do with like their partnership. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: And he gave Trump a golf cart. That was the gift that he gave to him. And he was the first person to call Trump of world leaders.

And I'll, I'll be a parent to genuinely like golfing as well. So, you know, Trump always loves just golfing all the time.

Simone Collins: Like Trump really works well for the Japanese mindset. [00:18:00] Cause he's a larger than life character and they really like characters that, that ham, you know, what's that? What, how do you use the term?

Oh,

Malcolm Collins: I love it. He also gave Trump a gold colored driver. That's perfect. Let's see. He gets

Simone Collins: it. It's Trump. And he, he, he spoke with Trump and Trump words. And that is.

Malcolm Collins: And he kept the meetings private, which was another thing that he did to build. People were always trying to like Trump's foreign policy team was always trying to protect him from forming too close a personal relationship with people because that's what he would always go for.

He'd get their personal phone numbers. He just called them up. Yeah. Yeah. And H. R.

Simone Collins: McMaster's biography or autobiography keeps talking about how Trump would say things like, stop by the White House and everyone's freaking out like, no, no, no, that doesn't mean you've just received an official foreign like visit invite.

And he'd be like, here's my number. Like he'd just give people his cell phone number and they'd stop by. Freak out about that too, because they needed to monitor all the calls or something.

Malcolm Collins: He also didn't, one of the interesting things is, you know, how Trump loved trying to play like hard mall with these deals [00:19:00] that he would make with countries.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Japan didn't really push back and basically took one of Trump's like fairly one sided deals to flatter his ego, which was probably the right thing to do. It's also so

Simone Collins: Japanese. Like it is the proper thing to do at this point, you know, out of courtesy, we will do this.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think it showed an understanding of Japan's relation with the United States today and the importance on having it be incredibly strong.

And that is what he was able to accomplish.

Now the downside was Trump is one of Shinzo Abe's things was the TPP and Trump did still torpedo that. So he wasn't like always going along with what Abe wanted, but broadly speaking, Oh, by the way, for people who don't know my thoughts on the TPP. I actually think Trump's torpedoing the TPP turned out for the best, and a lot of people are very surprised by this.

Because they're like, oh no, it was an Obama era thing that could have like, built this great relationship and caused us to be an economic superpower [00:20:00] in the region. But it was very, very, very heavy handed. It was just

Simone Collins: bloated regulation or something. And what was it? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: IP regulations. A lot of it was like Hollywood lobbying to try to make the IP regulations super strong around pirated stuff and things like that.

And it led to something that could have, so let's. See, because we do know what happened to post TPP blowing up and we can talk about what ended up happening in the region post TTPP blowing up China at first looked like they had gained all of the strings. They started really forming a tight relationship with the Philippines.

They started really forming fixing relationships with Vietnam. They started. Really expanding their influence. Well, then what happened? Because the U. S. wasn't there to act as a counter influence, China immediately began to overplay their hand massively and began to really push this nine dot line thing.

Basically just claiming huge, huge swaths of territory from like the Philippines and [00:21:00] Vietnam. And All of the people who they had just made friends with and then began to basically threaten Taiwan. Well, what did this do? Is it basically pissed off that basically because we didn't have this economic fenced in area in the region, China immediately overplayed their hand and turned, the Philippines right now has an extremely pro US head, who grew up in Hawaii.

You know, Vietnam is becoming increasingly pro us to the point where both countries, I guess you could say are basically in our pocket at this point. Same was the only country they've really made any headway was this maybe South Korea, but not even really there in Japan has become increasingly pro us because they don't like the moves that China is making around Taiwan.

Basically, It ended up making the entire geopolitical region extremely strong allies of the United States from goading China into overplaying their hand with economic sanctions and land grabs. [00:22:00] But I, I think that here you see like with the Trump thing, just an incredible amount of strategy and charisma in terms of building the relations he needed to build.

Now let's talk about the assassination because this is something, anything you want to talk about before we get to the assassination.

Simone Collins: No, let's dive into it.

Malcolm Collins: Shinzo Abe was shot twice from behind with a homemade shotgun while giving a campaign speech near Yamato Saidaijya Station, Nara, Japan. The attack occurred around 11.

30, hitting Abe in the chest and neck. Despite being rushed to a local hospital, Abe was pronounced dead at five, five o'clock, just five hours after the shooting. So the gun that was used was like a homemade thing that somebody, he learned to put together actually from YouTube videos. And people said even somebody without a lot of knowledge could learn to make one of these.

It used a battery for the ignition and some wires attached to the battery. And then 2 tubes for the barrels and likely some sort of. bought propellant [00:23:00] in the region or something like that. It was all over the table, showing the factlessness of laws against guns and, and the complacency it can cause.

The suspect, the shooter identified as Tetsu Yamanagi was immediately arrested at the scene. Yamanagi is a 41 year old former member of the Maritime Self Defense Force, admitted to shooting after his arrest. He was formally charged with the murder, violating gun control laws. And motive his motive was that his mom had donated tons of money to the Moonies or the Unification Church.

And this led to his family being in poverty and his brothers unaliving himself. He blamed all this. Well, I mean, cults could do this. They can be incredibly like, we're going to take all your money. We're going to take everything you own. We don't care about you at all. Sure. The moonies as a community are kind of known for that in the United States, by the way, if you don't know who the moonies are, if you've ever seen a cult in like a 70s movie or stereotype where everybody went to work at a plantation [00:24:00] and then was like tricked and kept hostage.

Those were moonies. That was what the moonies were famous for. was these big plantations were like yuppie college kids would go thinking like, Oh, I'm going to learn to live off the land. And then they'd spend a extremely long hours working fields. They would be sleep deprived and when they were doing that, they were exposed to constant messaging.

Wow. Are you, are you familiar with these cults? Like, did you hear about them or?

Simone Collins: I'm not, I think in media I've seen references to creepy cults that involve agricultural work, but I didn't know that was a Mooney's thing. So yeah,

Malcolm Collins: they don't do that as much anymore. They do other things now, but there is still an incredibly high demand religion.

The unification church's relationship with the Japanese conservative politicians dates back to the 1960s when Abe's grandfather, sorry, I said, dad, grandfather, former prime minister Naboke Kisha helped the church establish itself in Japan. This connection was based on shared anti communist ideologies during the cold war.

The Unification Church provided [00:25:00] valuable political support to LDP politicians, this was the party of Abe, dispatching believers to volunteer in election campaigns, mediating organizational votes for LDP candidates, and providing a volunteer army of campaign workers. In return, many LDP lawmakers, including Abe, gave speeches at church meetings and related organizations, effectively acting as promoters of the church.

The scale of the church's influence in Japanese politics was revealed on a After Abe's assassination, almost half of the LDP's 379 diet members, Congress members basically, admitted to some form of contact with the Unification Church. At least 180 of 379 LDP lawmakers in Japan's national diet were found to have ties with the church.

23 of 54 members appointed as vice ministers and parliamentary secretaries in second Kishida cabinet had connections to the church. So 23 out of 53.

So,

Yamaniga alluded to the assassination before the incident posting on his blog, [00:26:00] Mr. Abe was one of the most influential unification church sympathizers.

And yeah. Now, what about Abe's role? Abe was alleged to have overseen LDP's relationship with the Unification Church, using it to help the party win office and yeah.

Simone Collins: That just sounds like they were a major donor block and he treated them like he would treat any other major donor block.

What's shady here? That's

Malcolm Collins: basically, I don't feel like he did anything wrong. Like, even as a politician, would I have done that? If a religion, like, suppose, like, Jehovah's Witnesses. I think Jehovah's Witnesses do some shady things, but like, if I became the presidential candidate for like the US Republican Party and the Jehovah's Witnesses were like always behind me a hundred percent, am I going to advocate for their policy positions?

Yeah. I mean, that's called a democracy, right?

Simone Collins: Well, but yeah, that's what happens with politicians and unions, with politicians and corporations, with politicians and any big supporter. That's,

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. And people think that they might be influencing the [00:27:00] policy that his government did, specifically that Japanese still hasn't legalized same sex marriage could be downstream of this church.

But I mean, come on, the Mormons have pushed for that in the U. S. for a long time, right? Like, And I don't think that somebody deserves to be assassinated over that. And the church's name change to the family federation for world peace and unification in 2015 was approved by the government during Abe's tenure.

And this is why, by the way, it was our name

Simone Collins: change. Wait, why is that notable?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I think a normal government would have said, we're not going to call you the organization for world peace and unification. But I think that also when people look at our religious, beliefs in the unique religion we're creating.

One of the things I really appreciate about it is that it isn't pro unification, unification which sounds really nice on paper, world peace and unification, you know, the Baha'is are also about this and they think that like we have similarities to them. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Simone Collins: no, no, no, no, no no, I just think of unity from freaking Morty unification is not.

Malcolm Collins: [00:28:00] It's not a good

Simone Collins: thing.

Speaker 8: Where I was better able to focus on my passion for unification. You mean stealing people's bodies? Summer, rude. , this world will be invited into the Galactic Federation. . From there I'll have access to countless planets and species. One by one, I will unify them.

 And I will be what the single minded once called a god. Oh, that's pretty sexy. Where can we get a drink around here? Recreational substances were phased out here. There's no need for escape from the self when your world is one. Unity, unity, who am I talking to?

Simone Collins: No, it's not. It's a creepy thing. It's a pod person thing. It's a homogenizing thing. We do not want. But,

Malcolm Collins: but I will say that also if I get myself in the mind of the, the Moonies acid, right? So think about him, you know, you grow up, your brother has unalives themselves, your family grew up in poverty.

You feel like they were scammed out of everything. And who do you blame the most? You know that the Unification [00:29:00] Church played a large role in this. You can ask, well, who has done the most to aid the Unification Church's agenda in the country?

Simone Collins: Hardly, though, no.

Malcolm Collins: He needs to

Simone Collins: blame the members of the church who give the church the money, who donate to political campaigns.

No, this is in the hands of the, of the church itself.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I would agree with that. He

Simone Collins: made a wrong, he shot the wrong guy. Abe should be with us here today.

Malcolm Collins: Very sad very much Harambe situation of pronatalism. I really like that he has been seen as sort of the face of pronatalism because the, the memes are really sweet, I would say, like, they do a good job of conveying a positive sentiment in a way where, like, suppose we became the meme face of pronatalism.

We're known as, like, the pronatalist people who speak on the topic all the time, but we've never had many memes of us. around perinatalism. And I really appreciate that because [00:30:00] I think they'd come off like the Eliezer memes around AI apocalypticism. Are there

Simone Collins: Eliezer memes around?

Malcolm Collins: They just make the movement look like deranged to like a bunch of fat neckbeards.

Whereas Abe comes across as very sincere and worried about his people.

Simone Collins: That's how they chose to frame them. They could have framed him very differently, but they chose to frame him that way.

Malcolm Collins: Any final thoughts Simone?

Simone Collins: Japan is great, isn't it great? I love Japan. People

Malcolm Collins: who don't know, she was born in Japan and her middle name is Haruko because she was named after well, being born in Japan.

So

Simone Collins: named after being Yeah, we don't want to go into why, why Haruko's my name.

Malcolm Collins: Hey, there's a lot of great anime characters with the name Haruko.

Simone Collins: Just from Fooly Cooly, wait, who else's name Hutter Girl?

Malcolm Collins: The character from the show where, I'm pretty sure it's this one, where the main character is a god.

It's a really interesting [00:31:00] show, actually. So, the main character is a female girl who is a god. And she doesn't know she's a god. But she creates the world around her in the world that everyone is in. Oh, no. So it's so she's

Simone Collins: living in the simulation.

Malcolm Collins: She's living in a simulation that she's creating around herself of being a high school character.

What's interesting about the show is that her best friends who are created as members of the simulation begin to realize this as the show goes on and they begin to realize how dangerous their situation is. Like, If she gets on to some conspiracy, that conspiracy will start happening. Like if she thinks, gets into anime girls and anime girls start appearing, if she thinks that there's like robots replacing people, robots start replacing people.

And so like one of her friends will turn out to be a robot or something like [00:32:00] that. And so her friends have to constantly guard this girl who is otherwise. Very much. I almost want to say like a manic pixie dream girl type character, like change her hair color every day. Like really wants to believe all these crazy things they have to constantly be trying to ground her because if they don't, it fundamentally breaks the nature of their reality.

Speaker 4: Maybe this isn't the old world anymore. Maybe this world is a new one that Haruhi created. And if that's the case, how would I go about confirming it?

Simone Collins: That's man. Why are anime plots? I don't

Malcolm Collins: like it, but it's a classic.

Simone Collins: I feel like with anime and manga, they nail the premise, they nail the aesthetics and then execution is 25 to 30 percent of the time. Okay. 7 percent of the time, God tier, but the rest,

Malcolm Collins: I'm actually gonna maybe be controversial here, but I think with [00:33:00] anime, what I've noticed is almost always when the theme and ideas are interesting, the execution is mid When the theme and ideas are boring, the execution is really good.

Okay. Let's play this out.

Well, here's examples. No food wars,

Simone Collins: food wars, which is one of our favorites. Pretty lame concept.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Excellent. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Something like darling with Franks, which I think is a really interesting concept of mid execution. Dears, which I've mentioned before is a really interesting anime mid execution.

Like. Yeah, usually when the ideas are good, the exit goblin slayer, right? Actually kind of a boring concept. What about the one that you really

Simone Collins: like? That's depressing. With the, that everyone's very smart,

Malcolm Collins: grandma and grandpa turned young again, again, very, very boring, but great execution. The one that you're thinking of is code.

Yes. Code. Yes. Might be one of the rare instances [00:34:00] of, well, okay. I'd say could Geass is. Interesting, very interesting ideas. Okay, execution, but I wouldn't say it's like in terms of like execution and flow of a show one of the better shows I've seen where I just like love all the characters or anything like that.

If anything, it just like holds me kind of. Oh, here's another example. God to your execution would be high school of the dead. Very mid theme. Generic zombie world.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, you would think, what's, what's the point? Okay, well then, so in, you, you kind of get Japanese culture. You've traveled a little bit there, and you've watched a lot of anime.

Malcolm Collins: I've met with a lot of heads of companies there, and I've met Yeah, if

Simone Collins: you, if you were working with the Japanese government on pronatalist policy, Where would you take things? Because I would say the solution that works best for the United States, say, or France or Germany, [00:35:00] very different from what I think would work in Japan.

Oh, I've

Malcolm Collins: got a solution for Japan. I've got a solution. I think what Japan needs to do is if you look at like latent parts of Japanese culture, which make it unique when contrasted with other culture,

Simone Collins: pronatalist

Malcolm Collins: animes do well in Japan. In Japan, a lot of people act like spy wars has been like pushed by the Japanese government.

No, not spy wars. What's the word I'm saying? Spy. Spy family. Grandpa

Simone Collins: and Oh, spy Family. Yeah. Spy What? Grandpa and grandma turned young Again. That just felt,

Malcolm Collins: no, that's a good anime, but it's not like super famous, like Spy Family is like one piece level famous now in Japan. Oh wow. That's good. Like on every billboard, it's like I go to Walmart in the US and it's a quarter of the manga.

And it's a very pronatalist. It's like about the joys of being a family basically. And then it tries to spice it up a little, but that's, that's the core idea of it, wholesome family. I think that the market in Japan loves wholesome family. The other thing that goes really popular in Japan is.

Is [00:36:00] animes that are about how awesome the Japanese military is God, a great one. I want to say is something portal. I'll put a clip from it here, but I love it as well, where they open a portal to the like a fantasy world in the middle of Tokyo and then the Japanese military goes in and starts, like, Cleaning up dragons and stuff like that, you know, cause of course they would.

Speaker 5: Do your best and fight! If you don't want to do it, then

Malcolm Collins: And they get to like nerd out about all the weapons. And I don't feel that Japan has ever lost its order focused, imperialist focused identity at its core among my like Japanese friends who are really patriotic. I think that Japan needs to combine the wholesomeness that it has at the core of its culture with the militarism and imperialism that it [00:37:00] had historically to build, I'd say, almost a militarized iteration of pronatalism.

Maybe something like units that are dedicated to cultural Basically build an infrastructure for cultural warriors

Simone Collins: to

Malcolm Collins: protect the culture, to meet with other people, to dress in little uniforms. These are things that Japanese people love to have their kids dress in. You know, uniforms go to events, maybe create like scouts, but make it a bit more military, make it a bit more ordered, get the parents more involved and more focused on the number of kids you can have getting you specific badges, military awards for parents who have a certain number of kids.

I think that's the direction Japan needs to go. If it's going to hyper ignite the existing Japanese cultural core and people like me, like, well, that's not going to work for [00:38:00] everyone in Japan. Yeah, but it'll work for the most Japanese people in Japan, and I think it would do a good job of creating One of the unique cultural solutions that might make it through the valley of the lotus eaters But what is your thought simone?

Simone Collins: No, I could I am actually doing that a lot

Yeah, I I think I think going I I would say a part of it culturally speaking would be to Make it feel like They're going back to tradition, but really they're switching out an improved version of tradition with the context of modern technology and greater gender equality. But make it seem very traditional.

Well, kind of like putting it to my Yorkism

Malcolm Collins: not focus on it being tradition, but to focus on it being pro Japanese.

Simone Collins: And I think that sort of, yeah, well, but what I'm saying is I'm thinking about, for example, office culture in Japan. I'm thinking about how marriages treated in Japan. And there is a much more [00:39:00] the, the, the, the.

Issues that are dealing with are not as toxic as the, the inter gender issues that we're seeing in South Korea, for example, but there are, there is some mismatch and there's, there are different expectations between men and women that. I don't think you can just say, okay, well now we're going to completely ignore them and they don't exist anymore.

La la la la la. Instead you have to lean into them, but redirect in a way that makes it. Is

Malcolm Collins: you make it something like a man's, like in one of these units, duty. To treat women with I'd say honor, not IE, I'm going to be like a simp for women, like Western feminism, but like an extremified version of manners in terms of women in the workplace and bringing women into the workplace.

And I think that this in the same way that Abe was like, Oh, well, You know, it is actually conservative to want to promote women because, you know, it helps Japan. It helps our economy. It [00:40:00] helps our nation, right to have these organizations not focused on old ways. And Japan has actually been very good at modernizing historically and while maintaining its unique identity.

I mean, look at anime, right? Like is anything more modernized, but culturally unique. And so one of the things that I think that they need to fight against is the stoji. We have to keep things the way they were people, I. E. Whether it's gender roles or things like in Japan now, they still do like whale meat in school because people are like, it's our culture.

It's our culture. You can't take it out. Which is just horrible. Like they should not be doing this. And so I think that fighting against inefficiencies for the goal of preserving into, or until we become an intergalactic civilization, Japanese culture to ensure that they are one of the cultures that are part of this alliance.

And I also think turning Japanese culture, if you want to make this easier to fight for into. [00:41:00] A unique cultural avatar was in the ecosystem we're going into, but a cultural avatar that is pluralistic. I think that that when I say pluralistic, what I mean is they are fighting to preserve an advanced Japan, i.

e. for Japanese people in the Japanese island, and no one else was in that environment, but alongside people like the Americans, alongside people like the Koreans, when they can. build into their honor system, protecting global pluralism as one of their duties, which is something that America did a fairly good job of historically.

It's not like it doesn't work. I think that that can do a very good job in terms of this redirection.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's interesting. I do have this hopeful feeling that Japan can pull through. But I don't know how delusional that is.

Malcolm Collins: I think of the East Asian countries, it's by far the most likely to pull through because they have the best fertility rates right now.

And this all happened to it earlier. Like it basically went into the collapse that China hasn't even gone [00:42:00] into yet. You know, a few decades ago and it got to deal with that before things got as bad as they are right now. So that's one reason why Japan's in a really strong position. The other reason is that they've been a very, very successful cultural exporter.

Which is in the grand scheme of thing going to earn them a lot of friends that want them to pull through and friends in high places specifically their cultural exports So this is what makes japan as a cultural exporter very different from korea as a cultural exporter So korea has been as successful as japan as a cultural exporter.

Yeah, korea has disproportionately hit Well, basically dumb commie high school girls in the U. S. And it's disproportionately hit countries where American media is partially banned, like Pakistan, like a lot of countries in Africa, like a lot of the Middle East. I think Ibrahim has a lot of Korean stuff.

Really?

Simone Collins: Interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Korea does really well in Islamic countries that partially ban US media. So they've done really well in [00:43:00] these environments, but none of these people really matter. Japan, on the other hand if you, for example, were to take a polling of the people who work to develop things like open AI's model and topics model and ask how many of them are big anime fans, I bet the number is 90.

Maybe even like 95%? Oh,

Simone Collins: nah, no, there's, there's a lot of bro ish people in Silicon Valley now, but it's high. It's higher. Yeah, if you look

Malcolm Collins: at those companies You have friends who work at these companies, right? Like you remember from the events, like these are not Silicon Valley bro people. These are Silicon Valley nerd people.

Simone Collins: Thank goodness. Thank goodness.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you to decimone. This has been a fun conversation. And I think Japan can pull through. We've actually looking at holding a conference in Japan, tied to perinatalism that's going to focus on like the U S Japanese and maybe the rest of the quad Alliance.

In, in, in the ways that they are fighting [00:44:00] fertility collapse, mostly just to dunk on China because I think it can create a lot of good press and China will get very angry when we talk about, okay, what are we going to do with China when they're no longer here? You know, maybe have a picture on the screen was like a divided map of a depopulated China.

Like the, the Paris Accord. What, what, you think that's too much? It could cause

Simone Collins: major diplomatic incidents, like, so much for us hosting that

Malcolm Collins: conference. That's my goal. That's my goal to get, get people free. Cause I think that would get a lot of Americans excited. When you could turn this into a national defense issue and a patriotic issue.

I think that's when a lot of people are like, hell yeah. Hell yeah.

Simone Collins: I could see it. Yeah. Well, you know, I honestly could see pronatalism becoming the new space race. Once demographic collapse really starts to hit in. It's kind of the, the national signal of

Malcolm Collins: vitality [00:45:00] on this, the pronatal space race.

Simone Collins: There's something there because I know how much the space race and especially this whole Russia us thing really captured the public imagination. And I feel like this is one of those things that would be even more powerful because every individual family could be involved. It's a whole, I doing, I'm doing my part thing.

Could be pretty great.

Malcolm Collins: I love that, and I love you. Have a good day, Simone.

Simone Collins: Bye bye. By the way, am I making you pizza

Malcolm Collins: tonight, or what? Oh, yo, do I have any meat left? I guess pizza.

Simone Collins: I, so I can get from the freezer and quickly thaw out. One smaller packet

Malcolm Collins: of actually kind of in the mood for pizza

Simone Collins: No, I feel like the kids are in the mood for pizza.

So pizza it is pizza friday. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah All

Malcolm Collins: right. Oh, yeah I don't have any pernatal [00:46:00] Hold on, I'm sending you some stuff on WhatsApp.

Simone Collins: Looks like, oh, you have a bunch of your curtains down, don't you?

Let's see if I do Alexa, first plug on. Does that help? Maybe a little.

Maybe if I

It's a little chilly, you see. Sorry, you feel that way? Oh, are you kidding me? The cold, our children. I love the cold. So when I, when I make her shower warm, not hot, mind you warm, she says too hot, and then she insists that I give her like what I would consider cold shower, cold

Malcolm Collins: shower. Yeah. All of our kids.

And I love the news. It's like, they [00:47:00] deprive them of even the warmth in the, I'm like, no. And this is why I'm about to go to a sci fi podcast. So to talk about sci fi, Frostpunk. Is the genre, is the, the, the post collapse world I most want to wake up in.

Simone Collins: As long as you're well dressed. As one of our friends would say to us, there's no such thing as being cold.

There's just being poorly dressed. So, bundle up, I guess. Speaking of, of being dressed. Everyone makes one of our glasses, Malcolm. Cutler and Gross, who makes these glasses, they had two actors in the Kingsman Secret Service wearing Cutler and Gross glasses.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they did?

Simone Collins: Yeah, Colin Firth's character, and then also Samuel L.

Jackson's character were wearing Cutler and Gross glasses, because they're awesome.

Malcolm Collins: So, we are going to start with go down to the [00:48:00] first of the,

Simone Collins: Sorry, I just saw, like, the latest meme thing. You just sent me, like, a wall of

Malcolm Collins: memes.

Speaker 9: I'm gonna go. I don't like it! I don't like it! It's a battle! It's a battle! Ahhh! Here you go! And then I push it against them real deep! Get me! Get me! I feel! I [00:49:00] feel! I can't get them. I can't get them! I can't get them!

In this insightful episode, we explore the evolving political affiliations among ethnic minorities, focusing on Black, Arab, and Hispanic voter groups. From the increasing support for the Republican Party among Black and Hispanic voters to the influence of fiscal conservatism and social policies, we unpack the reasons behind these shifts. We also touch on media portrayals, self-empowerment, and economic aspirations influencing these communities. Additionally, the discussion covers Kamala Harris' policies towards Black entrepreneurs, her controversial political moves, and how these developments shape the future of U.S. politics. Join us as we delve into these critical voter trends and their significant impact on the American political landscape.

[00:00:00]

Simone Collins: Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about a phenomenon this election cycle where Ethnic minorities have been moving very quickly more and more to voting Republican in the changeover from the Biden running for office to the Kamala running for office, which is really interesting to me because I think a lot of people would assume, Oh, now we've got a, you know, a multiracial, a black Indian woman who's, yeah, yeah.

for office. Like obviously she'll get more like Obama did more of the black vote to show up than historically did. And in yet we are seeing the exact opposite and not just the black vote, but basically across the board.

Speaker: Wasn't that the turn for our polling station?

Speaker 2: we know A, , shorter route to your, to our Democratic polling station. You know how us Democrats like a shortcut, like government spending to prop up the economy. Nothing more we love than those, , federal programs. You two

Speaker: are [00:01:00] Democrats, aren't you?

What? .

Speaker 2: Of course we are. You see the color of our skin, don't you? How could we not? Blindly vote democratic.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So we are one going to go over the numbers for each ethnic group. We're going to go over what might be causing this, and we are going to go over what this means for the future of American politics.

That is so cool. Let's do this.

So in the 2020 election, Biden won approximately 92 percent of the black vote. Only 8 percent of the black vote didn't vote for Biden.

That's insane. That, that is very impressive.

Yeah. Current polling shows Kamala leading Trump 78 percent to 15 percent among black voters.

Huge difference. Um, 26 percent of black men aged 18 to 40 said they would vote for Trump in the latest gen forward poll compared to 12 percent of black women in the same age group. This represents a major shift from 2020. And if you look at the polls that I sent you, [00:02:00] so this is mostly happening in young Black men, we see a really interesting phenomenon,

Speaker 4: Sir. Now people think that black voters are a monolith.

No, we're not.

Speaker 5: In fact, black Republicans alone are an extremely diverse group of people.

Simone Collins: Which is that with Black voters, unlike pretty much any other voter demographic you're going to look at, the younger they are, And it's proportional to their age, the more pro Republican they are.

And it is increasing with each generation here. So here we can look at two different polls. One is looking at different age groups. And it asks them, please assess your feelings towards Donald Trump on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is cold and 10 is very warm. And you see of the very warm category if you look at black voters over 65, it's only 4%.

If you look at black voters, 18 to 29, it's [00:03:00] 29%. What is going on? And just so people can get an idea of what this looks like in sort of a tiered way. It's 4% for the 65 plus to the 45, 64, it's 10%. For the 30 44, it's 19%. And then, you know, for the last group it's 29%. And you see the same thing in terms of the number who feel neutral to him.

It's significantly increasing over time. With the young age group, it's. 41 percent feel neutral to him only 7 percent in the oldest age group and in the youngest age group only 20, only 28 percent have a cold opinion of him, while 87 percent of the oldest age group do. Isn't that wild? And this is increasing still with every generation, so I would expect it to be more the next generation, more the next generation, more the next generation.

Yeah, which

is tempered, I guess, by young voter turnout [00:04:00] being lower. Yeah. But that, that's still very impressive.

Well, it does mean a permanent political shift. And, let's go to this next poll here. How welcoming, how welcoming do you think the Republican Party is to Black people? And again, you have the exact same thing.

If you're looking at not welcoming at all, it's 57 percent of the 65 plus group, but of the under 29 group, that's only 17 percent who have that perception. And if you look at the extremely welcoming category, 3 percent of the over 65 group, 11 percent of the 18 to 29 group.

Wow.

That's great. Yeah, well, and if you look at somewhat welcoming in the old age group, it's only 7 percent In the young age group, it's 31%.

Well, I mean, is this part of the whole youth political divide between women and men, whereby men are just getting increasingly conservative and women are getting conservative? And is it, could it be that women to a certain extent are even just [00:05:00] shoving men into a more conservative position through their mental and cultural toxicity?

I think it is. So I watched a bunch of interviews with black individuals on why they're voting for Trump. So I could say, you know, from my perception, I'd say, well, I assume that the racist way that Democrats keep talking about ethnic minorities is probably a pretty big play here. Like when. Hope not hate was talking to us.

They go, you say you support exceptional people having more kids in secret, but on your website, you say you support Hispanics having more kids. And I was like, I don't see a contradiction there. Why do you see a contradiction there? Or Obama's recent thing when black voters He goes, he's like, well, we have a huge problem with young male black voters and it's because they won't vote for a woman.

You know, they're very misogynistic. And I was like, that seems like a very racist opinion and not at all what I've seen anyone say. And so I think part of it is this [00:06:00] increasingly racist attitude that, you don't vote for me, you ain't black. Like this stealing of the black identity. And then. Removing anyone, like imagine you felt that way.

Like people said to you, you couldn't identify as whatever your core, like ethic or whatever identity was because you didn't hold ex political positions, which is what they're always saying. Like whenever, you know, there's a famous black Republican or something like that. They're like, well, they don't really count as black culturally speaking.

Here's what's so interesting though, is that I'm picking up on this for another episode right now I'm trying to do research on. What black lives matter as an organization raised and what they did with that money and one of the things that I'm seeing they did in 2020 sort of at their height when they got the most attention was create a pack and try to influence the vote and they decided that one of the most important areas where they needed to exert pressure was on black male voters.

Because they felt that they had the lowest turnout and the lowest [00:07:00] engagement. So their work really focused on engaging them and getting them to vote. But I feel like this very fact that there is this perception and I guess, acknowledgement of lower black male voter engagement for obviously Democratic voters.

Candidates and causes maybe kind of indicates like, guys, maybe they aren't really on your side. Like, maybe they're not really Democrats. Maybe that you're something you're, you're pitching to them isn't resonating. Maybe this whole, like, you know, trans free housing thing and like community work thing isn't really a game.

What they're into right now. Well, so

historically, when older black voters would vote Republican, the thing that drove them to do it was two things. One is, is it, it didn't feel like the policies were actually supporting the black community. You know, this is what you have was like clarence Thomas, , and you know, he's very anti things like affirmative action because he felt it hurt the black community, right? And a lot of older [00:08:00] blacks would side with Republicans sometimes because they agreed with them on social issues.

Whether it was, you know, Being more resistant to LGBT stuff whether it was which the black community is generally not very pro when contrasted with white voters whether it was being more conservative on abortion whether it was being more conservative It was on social issues What's very interesting is the shift in the black community now among young blacks to being more republican is not about Being more conservative on social issues.

It appears to be predominantly Two fold One, or I'd say threefold. One, they feel like we've been trying this Democrat thing forever. They don't actually seem to care about us. They never actually seem to do anything for us. And it appears that the Republicans actually try when they get in office for us.

And so that was one thing. The, the second thing was they appear to be more fiscally conservative than previous generations. And I'll run through some quotes here that seem to [00:09:00] indicate this to me, but it appears that they're mostly voting. For Republicans, despite more conservative social policies, because they do not believe in what the Democrats have done to the economy or what the Democrats have given them opportunities.

And then the, the final category here that we see is They are voting more Republican because I can't remember the final point I had, but you were going to say

something? Well, I think the thing is that black men aren't interested in being someone's b***h. They're interested in succeeding and excelling and being exceptional.

And the problem is that even now, As a Democrat parties trying to cater to their interests. They're like, Oh, don't worry. We'll give you handouts and special treatment and you'll be, you know, it's okay. You know, just like, but they're being very condescending. And I think. That's not, that's not how these people are done.

Like these are, these are people who want yeah, they, they want to start businesses. [00:10:00] And I think that, that, you know, there's some attempt to cater to that, but they're like, Oh, you know, we'll give you loans that will forgive. Cause we know you can't pay them. Off like, it's just so insulting. It is deeply insulting.

Like I agree. So like crypto, don't worry, we'll support it. Whereas like over here, Donald Trump's like, here's my mean, cool. I'm like, I'm going to like pump and dump it. No, it's like, yeah, Trump, you do you, you know, like there's just a very different, Trump gets it also. Like when I look at Like a lot of.

really popular like primarily black cast TV shows, or like, I guess you could say like black demographic targeting targeted TV shows. I guess like some of them are like looking at, at, at lower economic rungs to society, but a lot of them are just looking at extreme levels of wealth. Like it's aspirational.

And I think the other problem is that when the Democrat party party caters to black voters. They're all about like, oh, poverty. And that's not aspirational. Like no one wants to vote for that. And a lot of people [00:11:00] complain about, oh, well, you know, poor uneducated people vote for Republicans and vote for low taxes because they expect to be rich someday.

How pathetic. But I think that's where a lot of us are.

The Biden gaffe where he's like, well, I want this policy to work for both rich people and black people. Come on! He did not! Oh my Yeah, that was one of his gasps.

Speaker 6: We have this notion that somehow if you're poor, you cannot do it. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.

Simone Collins: That's what a slip! I mean, that just shows, like, how they see. How they see. And I think this goes back to our episode on how the like leftists and Democrats in America decided suddenly to hijack black identity and be like, black identity is now victim identity.

And we're going to save you and we're going to take care of you. Whereas black identity before it was enterprising, it was wealthy. And yes, it was often subject to insane bias. and riots and their whole communities being burnt down. But why [00:12:00] were their communities being burnt down? Because white people were jealous of their economic flourishing.

Okay, that's what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And this whole, this whole concept of black people are poor, black people can't pay back their loans, black people need social handouts is so deeply insulting. And I think that there's this, this undercurrent. Especially among black men who get it, who are not buying into that narrative who are like,

yeah, like, screw that.

Let's, let's read some quotes from various black people here when they were being asked, why are they voting for Trump? And I think what you'll see is we, here's one, right? We want prosperity and we want secure borders and we want the American dream. Maxwell said, and only the Republican party is speaking to this message because they have the policies in terms of limited government drill, baby drill.

And, and very, I mean, that's.

Someone who's speaking as an American. And I think that's the other thing is that it's, it's someone who's not captured by identity politics, which is refreshing.

Well, very interesting. The drill baby [00:13:00] drills slogan seems to be really popular among black conservatives. I haven't heard any white conservative use this slogan, this election cycle.

I heard it multiple times when I was watching videos of black conservatives of speaking on the issues that they cared

about. Drill baby drill. I like see Sarah Palin. I don't like that. I think what

it speaks to is this idea that regulations are keeping their communities in poverty and that if you just went out and, and did like exploit our environment for resources, people would have jobs again.

Then another one well, and what a lot of them were saying is I can't afford to another thing that a lot of them were saying when they were being interviewed is basically I can't afford another four years of this. Like that is not realistic at all. But here's another one. Now, this is somebody who.

is a 20 year old who is voting for Democrats, but she was noticing that a lot of her friends are voting for Republicans. And so in explaining, even as an uncharitable [00:14:00] person, why her friends are voting for Republicans, she says, the thing that I hear a lot of is if a person is really conservative, they really like the president.

How the economics are handled by Republicans, usually with social issues, they tend to be more liberal, at least like my friends who maybe are in the middle or leaning conservative, they'll be more liberal on social issues and more conservative with economics. Which is an inverse of the reason why Blacks flipped parties before.

And I find that to be very, very interesting. That's fascinating. I think it does come down to what you're saying here, which is the self empowerment thing. But now, let's talk about other ethnic groups, because it is across the board here. Yeah,

so, Rainy Center, which we're a fan of. Had the biggest surprise for me on the front of other demographics when they came out and September of this year with survey data indicating that 30 percent of Muslims in America.

Planned on voting for trump.

Oh, then the numbers have changed since then. I haven't gotten to those numbers yet. But actually now in [00:15:00] 2020 biden won arab americans by a 24 point margin current polling shows trump having tied with harris among arab americans. It's both 40

Wow, okay. So it's wow that's and so that's good one thing that I hear Savvy political commentators talk about a lot is it doesn't you don't learn a whole lot by seeing what the static poll numbers are What matters more is what direction are things going in and if that's happening what is going on?

That's a

huge shift No, we're gonna now simone Actually before we go further you had some stuff you wanted to talk about with the black lives matter Thing like nobody watched their video or like they didn't have that much cultural reach Yeah, I think

Well, I just, I need to get to the bottom of this more.

This is for research. I'm doing that, that other Black Lives Matter episode, but one of the big things when they. Raised a ton of money in 2020 was, Oh my gosh, there's an election this year. We have to change the outcome of the election. We're going to raise money for a super PAC. And in addition [00:16:00] to trying to increase black male voter turnout and engagement, they, they commissioned a TV commercial, which they ran apparently they paid to run ads on it.

On social media, in addition to on TV, but then I checked their YouTube channel, which has all of 6 subscribers. And it has 1. 1 K views. And I'm like, how is this even happening? I mean, I watched the video and it just,

I sometimes wonder if that movement wasn't more astroturfed than the public believes.

Yeah,

there's, there's a lot I want to dig into there for sure. I mean, they regranted a lot, so I don't blame them for not necessarily doing a ton internally with their own program, like fundraising, but they raised a lot for their pack and they raised in 2020 over 90 million. And 23 percent of their assets, which is a lot for the industry, which typically regrants about 5 to 8%.

I think probably because they normally do stuff in house, but yeah, even [00:17:00] having raised 90 million and regranted 23%, you would expect them to do more. And. Well, didn't they just spend it all on mansions? Okay. So like a lot of that happened and we'll get to that in the episode. But what I was surprised with was just like the work they were doing.

They did get some admirable door knocking volunteer turnout. And I think that's because there was so much energy in 2020 of people just saying, I want to do something. Like, I am really frustrated with the way that black Americans experience America right now. I'm not happy with it. And so they got a lot of help there, but I was surprised by how flat their, their ad felt.

Just how flat it fell and, and how little engagement they seem to be getting.

Interesting. Oh, okay. Now, by the way, to the Arab American things that we were talking about, how did it go? From winning with a 24 point margin to equal votes. Well, yeah,

and apparently from 30 percent now to 40%. This is, you know, things are changing.

[00:18:00] So the

first thing appears to be that they are very, very dissatisfied with how the Israeli Palestine issue is being handled by the Biden administration. And they don't think that Harris has significantly distanced her stance from the administration. Yeah. And it's, it's for, for 29 percent of them, it's the primary issue.

Now, I think a lot of people are surprised then that they would move to Trump, who might be seen as being even more pro Israel than the Biden administration. Right. But I think it's because they believe that Trump can actually get things done. In terms of creating some kind of a peaceful resolution because he's actually willing to try and do stuff.

Also, like, look at how Trump is super chill and bro y with a lot of, like, Different islamic and yeah, he's

very good at dealing with muslim individuals. Yeah, he's he's

like he's he's super persian and has aesthetic. So I don't know. I kind of feel there. I have I'm of two minds. One is Okay, there's Israel and he's, he's, he's down with Israel, right?

But also he got more done in terms of [00:19:00] Middle Eastern peace relations working in concert. You know

why I think he does so well with that audience. And I think it's something that a lot of people are discounting when they see Trump is that he, when he meets with these Arab Kings often who have all this money and all these fancy palaces and all these cool gadgets.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Is genuinely impressed. He loves that sort of stuff and gets excited about it.

Malcolm Collins: And for

Simone Collins: these types of individuals, that is the highest compliment they can get to be showing the U S president around. And the U S president is giddy at every new stupid gadget. They show him. Every new, are you picturing the

Malcolm Collins: globe, the globe image

Simone Collins: globe where he's like,

Oh, this is so cool.

You're all touching it. I feel like they're just all having this moment where they're like, guys, let's take a group picture. You can just see they're like girls at a sleepover. It's amazing.

Yeah. And I don't think that that's something that Biden [00:20:00] or Kamala has been able to connect with them on because they're too.

Reserved and trying to play whatever 4d game.

No, it's not even that they're like They're they're they're prejudiced. They're elitist. They're I don't know like racist or ff What's the ethnic version of racist or like cultural version of racist, but they kind of cultural supremacist. They they Like these people

are lesser than me

my like anglo waspie background and yes I am calling kamala more anglo waspie because she she grew up in freaking berkeley like yeah, he's a white npr listening You Like she might as well be in a white NPR listening reform Jew.

I don't know how else to put it, but like, that's kind of the look, you know, of like that Bay Area, Berkeley kind of person. And those people go to places like the Middle East and they look down upon those cultures and Trump goes there and he's like, God, I wish we could do that here. Like, man, you guys pull it out.

He

said that once or something and everyone's like, what? You can't say that. Yeah,

so that is one thing. I think the other [00:21:00] thing though, and this is something that I'm seeing as a candidate for state rep on a more local level is that there are some people who are so vehemently passionate about an image, an issue that if they feel like the person who should be their ally is not fully 100 percent in conforming in conformity with their desires that they will vote for the other person out of spite.

So on the position, for example, of abortion. The fact that I have this middle ground means that out of spite, some Republicans who are very, very, very anti abortion are going to vote for my Democratic opponent who is even more pro abortion than I

the restrict abortion access.

Yes. It's not as much as they want.

Yes. So because I'm not as restrictive as they want me to be, they're going to vote for my opponent out of spite. Yes. My opponent, who is not in favor of more restrictions, whereas I am, and I think that that might be the other thing [00:22:00] that's going on, is just the fact that the would be Palestinian ally is not sufficiently saying that we have to, you know, from the river to the sea, and she's not saying this every time she stands in front of an audience after giving her land acknowledgements, that that means That they're not going to vote for her.

I, that honestly, it's the weirdest thing. It does not make any sense, but I do think that it is happening because I am seeing it myself.

Yeah, I could a hundred percent see that. I will know when people are like, how pro Israel is Trump. If you forgot when I was in Israel, the last time I was there, it was during the Trump administration.

And there were all these threats because Trump had moved the US embassy back into Jerusalem. Jerusalem, right? Yeah. And everyone was like, Oh my God, you can't do that. Like we were supposed to have removed our embassy. He's like, no, I'm going to do it. Build an embassy. And Kushner

got more done in the, in the Middle East than

anyone, anyone, everyone knows they were incredibly successful there.

So, and then the, the, to understand how much Israel loves [00:23:00] Trump. I remember when I'd walk around the city at night there were big like skyscrapers that had Trump's face projected on them. That was how, how in love Israel was with Trump during at least the period when I was walking around there.

Wow. So they are, Trump likes them and they like him and yet the Middle Easterners are like, yeah, I just won't. I also think the other thing that you mentioned there, and I've mentioned this before, I think culturally he connects with them. A lot of the Arab Americans are like Persian Arab Americans and Persians are like Trump culturally is much more Persian than he is waspy.

He's not even a yeah, I mean,

he's only waspy and so far as he wears like American flag

colored if you look at if you look at like his house Like it would be considered garish by most like waspy americans the only houses i've ever seen look like that are either maybe Persian Americans maybe Armenian Americans, but mostly it's like [00:24:00] more Persian y.

But again, similar regions there. All right. So next group we're going to be talking about here the Hispanic American voter.

So

these individuals in 2020, Biden won about 63 percent of Hispanic voters. By the way, I don't think Which is

surprising to me. In 2020, I would expect fewer because so many of our Hispanic friends were like really, really, really angry about the democratic party's treatment of many Latino neighborhoods during all the protests.

That's not that much. 63 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Come on. That's still too much.

They act like it's a locked down thing. That's almost. And now where are we? Kamala is leading. Trump was. 56%.

Okay. So again, that, that direction directionality is, is definitely in favor of Republican part parties.

And, and 44% of Latino men, 18 to 40 said they would vote for Trump up from 38% in 2020.

So you're seeing it a, a dramatic rise here. And Pew Research Center found that [00:25:00] Trump gained 10 percentage points among Hispanic voters from 2016 to 2020. So it's a continuing trend as well. So when we're going from 2020 to 2024 that to me is, I think, the biggest thing. And that's how Florida, if anyone's been looking at like maps recently of like where states are likely to go.

That's why Florida's not a swing state anymore.

Malcolm Collins: Florida became

Simone Collins: a solid red state because the Hispanic vote moved to a split. As to why it moved to a split, again, this is the ethnic community that we are closest with, which is why I was most offended by the Hope Not Hate's incredibly racist accusation that there's no exceptional Hispanic people.

But I cannot believe. But anyways, yeah, we're very close with hispanic people in hispanic culture and they engage with information. I've mentioned this before, so I'll be fairly quick about it. Very different from other cultural groups in America. Meaning they mostly exchange information through family networks and not through like news sites and stuff like that.

That they'll see with more [00:26:00] suspicion. A lot of hispanic individuals are business owners, and it was their businesses that were disproportionately torched during the BLM riots because they were the ones on the outskirts of those black communities. And when the government, when the Democrats did nothing, when they didn't denounce the riots, when they didn't When they, you know, like, Tim Waltz's wife who opened the window to smell the businesses burning during the BLM riots, those were mostly Hispanic minority owned businesses that were burning that she wasn't going to smell.

You're also missing a really, or I think we should address a really key issue as well, which is a very hot topic in the United States and so many other nations right now, immigration. And I think. A lot of Democrats are like, well, of course Hispanics want open borders. No, they don't. They, you know, those who immigrated or first generation immigrants went through so much s**t to get into the country.

They busted their asses. They paid thousands and thousands of dollars to immigration lawyers. [00:27:00] They spent years on wait lists. They went through tons of bureaucratic hoops and suddenly all these people are coming through this porous border and getting a like random support and get out of jail free cards.

They're pissed. It's not just

that, but Hispanics don't see themselves like if you actually are friends with real Hispanics and not this insane, like if you're not going to say something offensive like Latin X, which of course is usually offensive to most Hispanic communities. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You would know that Hispanics don't see themselves as a unified ethnic group.

They see themselves as you know, as Mexican or as Brazilian or as Peruvian or as Costa Rican. And many of these groups have an incredible amount of, I don't know, of racism is the right word, but a degree of prejudice against other Hispanic groups. You know, a, a me Hispanic, Mexican, for example, is going to often think very disparagingly about for example, maybe a, a [00:28:00] Venezuelan immigrant or something like that, right?

And so when Democrats think because they are supporting immigration, that they are earning good will across the Hispanic community, they're just wrong about that. You look next, certainly treat with

a monolith. Yeah. Well, and also like treating. You know, first generation, second generation and third generation immigrants from Central or South America as though they're the same as like potential refugees or something who are coming into the, it's just, it's insane.

It's unhinged and I think it would, it would majorly piss me off. I can understand why it would alienate many other voters. That said, we do have. Plenty of like broadly Latin American friends who are huge supporters of Kamala Harris. So it's

not, you know, what's interesting to me is when they are supporters of Kamala Harris, they are not supporters of her.

In the, I support her because she supports immigration way. They're supporters of [00:29:00] her. We sell travel to various ethnic groups and we have a lot of travel sales in Latin America. One of the things that sells very well to the Latin American audience, I'd say is. The cliche beach Instagram picture vacation which is the vacation that gets you on a nice looking beach where you can take Instagram pictures with pretty ladies and post that.

And this to me as a vacation is mortified. This style of vacation does not sell well, often within white ethnic groups, unless you're talking like college kids or something. I think that their support of Kamala makes, feels very much to me like the classic beach vacation package. Because it's like, what you're supposed to support if you're like a you know, I don't know.

Yeah, if you're a good, cool person on your social media. Just basically saying

anyone who's basic or who's more conformist in broad America mainstream media culture is [00:30:00] probably going to be more. Yeah, because, because you are evil per mainstream American culture. Actually, I would argue the trend that I see more commonly is just culturally if you're a more empathetic person.

That is to say that, you know, things pull at your heartstrings more. You, you are more likely to vote for Kamala and have a really difficult time stomaching Trump.

I, I think that there is a portion of the Hispanic community that is aspirationally basic. And I think that that is where the Dems have the best.

You're

going to say that the live, laugh, love Latinos are voting for

live, laugh, love Latinos. That is the category. Voting for Kamala. Well, no, I mean, among especially Latino women, that's a big category. It's not like, a small group. But basically over time I expect some degree of democrat erosion within the Latino community However, I think something that's really important to remember, if you look at the El Norte cultural region of the U S which [00:31:00] is the high immigrant cultural region, it's actually the key voter base of the current democratic party, not the Northeast, as many people assume.

If you look at voting patterns in the same way that the greater Appalachia is a key voter base of Trump.

And I think that, and not in the deep South, like many people presume. And I think that. We will, you know, previously I was like before I looked at the catholic statistics, I was like, I think that we will eventually convert the hispanic population to being more conservative leaning now.

I no longer think that if you look at the percent catholic of a district in the United States, that. Is one of the highest correlates we have found to how likely they are to be democratic voting. Catholic, they're just very democratic voting. It's sort of like the party of Catholics. And so, so long as they stay Catholic, I don't think we're going to be able to ever really flip those districts that they're disproportionately immigrating into.

That said, we have seen a lot of conversions to Protestantism was in the first generation [00:32:00] Latin American community.

Really? I.

Yeah, it's been a huge thing in the data. Yeah, huge. They're converting. I think it's like the number one source of new evangelicals.

Catholic

Church, get your act together. Well, it's, it's the fun side.

It's like, in Madagascar.

Catholicism can be fun. Catholicism can be so fun. You get to sin and then just confess. You know what I mean? Like, come on.

All right. So next group, Asian Americans in 2020, 54 percent of Asian American voters intended to vote for Joe Biden. Well, in 2024, 46 percent said they were inclined to vote for Harris.

Malcolm Collins: So you had about

Simone Collins: a 10 percent loss, 8 percentage point decrease. Emerging. Biden won Asian American voters by a margin of 72 to 28 percent current polling shows Harris at 66 to 28%. So just huge loss across the [00:33:00] board in every ethnic group. And I think that there's different reasons for each group, but I think that we will continue to see this shift as time goes on.

I think the one, the one place where Harris is incredibly strong. Is just white women and well, I think

love is the only community that she's and

they are very conscientious voter base. So I think that it's not, it wouldn't be a bad one to have in the bag, but even when I look, for example at the Kamala Harris opportunity agenda for black men.

When I reviewed that again, I'm like, this isn't, this isn't for black men. This is for white women. Tell me

what it is. What did, what did they offer?

So the, the opportunity agenda for black men is a policy initiative aimed at addressing economic and social challenges faced by black men in the United States.

Just that framing [00:34:00] alone, like in the sort of premise of presenting this is emasculating and insulting to black men in America. Like you need extra help. Don't you? But I think it's really there for dealing. So in terms of economic empowerment, and this is also where it just gets so ridiculous and insulting it, the, the agenda proposes to provide up to 1, 000, 000 forgivable loans up to 20, 000 each for black entrepreneurs who have, you know, historically, I

love the dims that are like, Elon Musk is giving out money to people like this is a, you can't do that.

And meanwhile, Kamala Harris is like, yeah, I'm going to give out money if I win. Well,

I mean, but legal experts argue that policies distributing, distributing resources based on race could face significant constitutional challenges and, and programs that provide preferences based on race have been struck down in court previously, like disaster release programs, relief programs.

So the problem here too, and I think any, like, if I were black, [00:35:00] business owner who could potentially benefit from one of these loans. I'd be like, okay, great. But you're just going to waste my time on a loan application. That's going to take forever to process. And then it's going to be rejected and seen as constitutionally illegitimate because it is.

Like, you can't just give away a whole bunch of money to a group based on their racial identity. That's insane.

This was actually really interesting when I heard some black people explaining why they're not going to vote for Kamala, they were really annoyed by her plan to give out like free money for housing.

That like their first, first time homeowners, they were like, okay, either this just isn't going to happen. And even if it does happen, how is this fair? Like, So what this

is, is you're referring to the element of this initiative where by the administration would offer 25, 000 in down payment assistance to first time home buyers.

Yeah. They're like, we've heard this lie before. And even [00:36:00] if it goes through, I own my home. What about me? Are they going to give me 20,

Yeah. It's kind of like student loan forgiveness. We're like, Oh, so I, I paid off my student loan. F**k me, I guess. Like, sorry for being conscientious. It just sends so many bad messages.

It's

like, it's sort of, it's like, we're a party that helps parasites. If you live your life as parasitically as possible, then we will benefit you more.

But I also, I just, I feel like it's really insulting and, and I don't know, like a common element that I see among. Like, it just will stay like black characters in media who I see receiving widespread admiration is that these are proud, very strong, very competent people and this image of black men that is being painted by the Harris administration.

Is of needy, incompetent

victims. What the hell? In Obama, it's like savage [00:37:00] men who can like barely contain Yeah, insecure,

like backwards, savage, incompetent victims. Like just the worst, but it's

like when the FAA said, well, we need to hire black, more, more black people, but we can't explicitly do it. So we'll just put on tests that will hire people who have problems with authority.

Hate science was their least favorite class in school. And don't take directions. Well, it's like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah,

Simone Collins: they literally think of black people in these racial stereotypes.

Well, yeah. Also, I mean, back to the, the, the agenda that people have. Part of that, that specific agenda for black men, not just for Americans, but for black men specifically is proposing a legalization of marijuana at the federal level because, you know, weed's a black person thing.

Like, there's just, there's so

many things that are wrong when BLM was like, Oh, well, don't, you know, that. We need to support the dissolution of the [00:38:00] nuclear family because that's a black person thing. And then we point out that if you go to the 1960s black families actually had much stronger marriage relationships.

You can watch our black episode on this. And actually had black women were less than half as likely as white women to be out of wedlock. And they had children out of wedlock at less than half the rate of white people. Now it's, what is it, 70 percent of black kids are born out of wedlock, I think, at this point.

But it used to be less than half the white rate. Although, how

many, I mean, I feel like across all demographics, more kids are born out of wedlock these days.

Yeah, they are, but now it's much more in the black community.

No, I, honestly, if someone told me that was the same with white populations, I wouldn't be remotely surprised.

It's

not. I mean, look

at Sweden. I mean, no one gets

married anymore. Well, that's a different cultural structure. It's not that they don't have two parents, it's that people just choose to live together and they don't do the official marriage ceremony.

Oh, that doesn't mean that black, [00:39:00] that black families that are having kids.

In America right now many black children are being raised not knowing who their fathers are. Like that's a totally different phenomenon.

Okay. That, that is different. But yeah, I just, I did, I just, wow. How, how can all of this hold and how can, how can black men not be overwhelmingly like at least not for Kamala Harris.

I, I just, even if I wanted handouts, I would be so dubious of the likelihood of these handouts coming to me. That I, I would be deeply concerned just doesn't seem like. Well, I

think that's the way a lot of the community feels. They just don't trust Democrats anymore.

Well, and yet, and yet still, I mean, isn't it that the majority of, of black voters, broadly speaking, plan on voting.

Right, but it keeps

changing. Yeah. It's changing, and I wouldn't be, and I think it's very interesting that Kamala was the one who initiated this change, a presumably [00:40:00] the person who at least identifies as a black American.

I don't know, Trump has argued that she didn't identify as a black American until it was expedient.

And before that, maybe she was Indian, maybe she was mixed race or whatever, but I don't blame her for that. If I had multiple potential. Racial backgrounds that I could identify with. I would chameleon my way around the world too. Like,

yeah, it benefited me. But then, you know, I, I do think that he is accurate in that attack of her and Democrats would be like, Oh, how dare he do that?

I'm like, yeah, but like when they were like shocked that he called her the DEI candidate,

but he like literally was, because I think at some point during his candidacy for, President Biden had said, I promise I will choose. It was like either like a, a, a, like non white vice president. Yeah. He applied to have a DEI candidate and then he got one.

And now it's like, Oh, but how dare you say that? [00:41:00] That's

Malcolm Collins: what it is. Cause

Simone Collins: it's the DEI candidate. Yeah. And I'd also note here that, I mean, she never won any major election. Like when in the primaries, when the Biden season, she was doing super poorly.

I don't think she made it to Iowa. Yeah. Which is the

default candidate is insane.

And you know, obviously the final thing, and we've mentioned this before, but it's worse if you don't know this, you know, she did jail, a bunch of innocent black people thousands, literally during her tenure, she didn't release them when they were supposed to be released in order to win an election.

She used them for free labor when it would have been cheaper to pay them. She's just everything that black lives matter said. It was campaigning against. She has called herself the top cop of California. And, and when she says that she means in the corrupt, slimy racist way. But anyway, you can watch our camel as video for more on that.

I hope you have a wonderful night, Simone.

Malcolm Collins: And,

Simone Collins: I'm so disappointed. [00:42:00] There's a Elon Trump rally right next to our house tonight. And

tonight

it's Tuesday, right?

I don't know. I don't even know if it's happening anymore. I haven't seen it. It's not

happening because I haven't figured out how to sign up for it.

And that's kind of surprising to me.

I don't think it's, I can't find news coverage of it anymore. I feel like things were taken down and it was canceled. So don't worry about it.

All right. Well, for tonight, I really love those taquitos you made yesterday. Can you make more of something like that?

There were leftover ones of that.

Oh, you don't want leftovers. I can do leftover taquitos with pumpkin ravioli and pesto.

Oh yeah. Do you need to eat some pumpkin ravioli and pesto? Yeah, that works for me.

Because then if you don't like the taquitos, there's pumpkin ravioli and pesto. Gotta

like the taquitos. You're going to use the air fryer, which will make them extra crispy, right?

Yeah, and I might like sprinkle a little more butter on top of or something or maybe do you want me to put cheddar cheese on top? No, that makes them soggy. I don't know.

No, I actually do want I was actually thinking they need cheese Okay, so some

[00:43:00] melted cheddar cheese on top. Yeah

melted cheddar cheese. I don't want to eat it How many how many do we have left

three?

Yeah, that's a full meal Give me the three melted cheddar cheese on top

and then no pumpkin ravioli

No pumpkin ravioli. We'll do that tomorrow.

Okay.

Oh not cheddar cheese. American cheese. Okay, cheddar cheese.

I mean, I, I'm, like, we can do American cheese for, like, grilled cheese. Like, there are places for it.

This is not, this is not the place. You don't want gelatin. You don't put gelatin on top of taquitos. Can

you, are they, are they in a way where you couldn't put anything else inside them?

Yeah, they're, they're like melded together.

Okay, great. I know I was thinking about the scallions, scallions. Yeah.

Putting it, putting some, no scallions, what are those shallots, shallots. I

can chop up the shallots, shine, finely, put them in a dipping dish and you can dip.[00:44:00]

I don't know.

Maybe. Do

you want me to take it

out? I think it's fine the way it is, but the cheddar is a good idea.

We'll do that. And I love you.

I love you too, Simone. You are a great wife. And if you wanted to give me something a little extra some tomato soup.

Oh, that's good because we did open it and oh, you can dip it.

Taquitos with penang. She's

taquitos with penang and pumpkin dipped in

Yeah, she makes it with a pumpkin puree and then it's a slow cooked meat mix made with penang.

What kind of fusion is that? You got your, you got your American Mexican with tequila. Oh, new

Americana. I, I, if I ever am president, I'm going to mess with the chefs at the White House so much.

You got your indigenous America with pumpkin. You've got, where's tomato soup come from? I don't know. France? It comes from the 1950s. I feel like it's [00:45:00] French. And then you've got cheddar cheese, which is from the cheddar gorge. Which we visited. Yes. We've visited a fine place in England.

Malcolm Collins: It's Somerset. All right.

I love you Simone. Have a good day. Gorgeous. Take care. I hope you enjoyed our conversation today. I

Simone Collins: did

Malcolm Collins: though.

Simone Collins: Well you get the kids when it, when the time comes. Thank you. All right. Love you. Did did you send Octavian to school wearing a key, like a lanyard today?

Malcolm Collins: I might have.

Simone Collins: Because apparently he identified on the school yard attempting to choke children with it upon not being given the toy that he wanted them to share.

That's the great thing about public school. You can't be kicked out.

Give it time, Malcolm. I'm receiving calls at this point. [00:46:00] His teacher's like, he understands that he needs to ask to share things and to encourage people to share, but if they proceed to not share with him, he will use force. He punches, he kicks, and most recently he chokes with lanyards.

So.

That's delightful.

Malcolm Collins: God

Simone Collins: bless you, man. He fights for what he wants. Yeah. That's why we recently showed him the original Mortal Kombat. So that he and his brother, because he and his brother wanted to fight. And I was like, Oh my gosh. What could possibly go wrong? There's this movie you guys have to see.

It defined my childhood.

Yeah, now he's going from punching and kicking to I guess, like, windmill punching and

Malcolm Collins: sideways leap kicking. That's the goal of sharing this stuff with them. I remember there

Simone Collins: was something else that I wanted to, Oh yeah, well, The Guardian's coming tomorrow, and I love that we [00:47:00] still take The Guardian.

The Guardian. Reporters at our house after the ump team's hit piece. I wonder what this one's got I really hope it's a follow up to the hope not hate stuff because that could be

that's well She reached out to us immediately after that hit piece came out and was like I would like to Shadow you as you campaign and then I had a call with her and I was telling her how we were Our goal was to try all these unconventional tactics and make it possible for her you know, competent employed people who don't want to spend all their time raising money or all their time campaigning to actually get elected into office and make a positive difference.

And she just seemed kind of jarred by it. Like, oh, I wasn't aware of that. Like, she, she was, I felt like she had blinders on. I'm just like, I'm going to. Look at this freakish enemy. Well, I know, and I think running for office

elitist. Right? So she probably expected you to have an ultra elitist attitude towards all of this,

Malcolm Collins: I [00:48:00] guess.

And

Simone Collins: what I might tell her is. Our attitudes are elitist insofar as we have disdain for the existing power structure and see it as beneath us, but we don't have disdain for the, the, the average American and see them as beneath us. Yeah, we

have disdain for those who choose not to show up in whatever capacity that might be.

Yeah, so yeah, I mean, we may have a great deal of disdain for your average political candidate or political consultant or pollster. But we would have very little for the average American, which is what they were trying to frame that as. And I'm like, it doesn't work that way. All right, we're about ready to go.

Let me assume the position.

Oh, hold on. I'll also send you something that we can go over.

And let's see, is your shirt okay? Is your hair okay? Is your mic on?

Oh, make sure for the reporter that you do wash my clothes tonight.

They're in the dryer.

Speaker 7: [00:49:00] What flag is that, buddy? It's a flag of 22. Uh, it's um, Teddy is giving us flags again. Oh. Because he likes the flag. Do you like the flag too? Yeah. Why do you like it? Because Teddy likes it. Well, we want it, and I'll buy it for him as a present. Okay.