Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Malcolm argues conservatives have been falsely portrayed as more racist than liberals. He analyzes poll data showing white Democrats were more opposed to a black president and living in mixed neighborhoods than Republicans until recently. Malcolm argues the stereotype comes from progressive elites being disconnected from their base and extremist views getting amplified online. He makes the case that real racism today comes more from progressives self-segregating and conservatives actually having more diverse friend groups. Overall he argues both parties have racist factions, so neither should claim moral superiority.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] the guy who wrote Rich Men , north of Richmond, said, we are the melting pot of the world. And that's what makes us strong, our diversity. And we need to learn to harness that and appreciate it . And progressives was like, Oh, now he's going to get beaten up by all the conservatives because they hate that talk. And it hasn't really happened. where did this idea that there's like a conservative racist come from, .

Malcolm: I am going to send Simone a poll. By 538. So they did a series of polls on this. Okay. And you grew up in the democratic movement. So you grew up being inundated with this lie that the conservatives are the racist party in this country.

Malcolm: Oh, totally. So let's see, you see the actual statistics here. Just sent you the

Simone: first one. Whites who say they would not vote for a black president.

Malcolm: Democrats were higher at this until Obama became president.

Simone: Yeah. Between 15 and 7%. Of white Democrats said that they would not vote for a black president, whereas by comparison, only 5% of [00:01:00] white Republicans reported that they would not vote for a black president.

Malcolm: So, this isn't like hidden racism. A lot of the time when conservatives say Democrats are racist, they mean like affirmative action is a fundamentally racist policy in many ways. Right. But there's sort of , twisting things around a bit. I mean, just like actually blatantly normally in the normalist sense of the term, the democratic base is about as.

Malcolm: Racist in the most traditional sense as the Republican base. There was never this grand flip.

Malcolm: but hold on, I'm going to show you more stats here.

Malcolm: So now I'm gonna get to the spicy take here Okay. When I look at the conservative intellectual sphere, where do I see the actual like loud racists, right? . I call them in like the Nick Fuentes sphere. I think when you think through the ideology, you realize it's almost so stupid that no one could actually hold it. And it's so incongruous with actual right wing ideology that there is no way that these individuals could [00:02:00] have real large followings within the right wing sphere, which leads me to believe they might be plants either by the CIA or a foreign government.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Oh, Malcolm, how long has it been since we've spoken?

Malcolm: It has been too long. There's been this song that went viral in.

Malcolm: First conservative circles and then progressives freaked out about it, which was Rich Men , north of Richmond which started out, which I love very appealing to like progressive audiences. Like the first half of the song is like how hard it is to be a working man in today's society. And then it starts talking about, you know, welfare queens and you know, protecting minors.

Malcolm: And they are, obviously they have a meltdown about this, but what's been very interesting is the followup to this, which liberals are being very. Smug amount, which is the guy who wrote the song, then said, we are the melting pot of the world. And that's what makes us strong, our diversity. And we need to learn to harness that [00:03:00] and appreciate it and not use it as a political tool.

Malcolm: To keep everyone separate from it. And progressives was like, Oh, now he's going to get beaten up by all the conservatives because they hate that talk. And it hasn't really happened. There have been a few, like your typical, like crazy racist who have gotten mad at him. But in general, his base still really likes like.

Malcolm: If you actually hang out with the conservative base, if you hang out with like real conservative voters in this country, you would intuitively know this is what most of them think. And this is really interesting for me because it's, it's, it got me thinking a few questions. One, where did this idea that there's like a conservative racist come from, which, you know, historically the Democrats were the party of the Klan.

Malcolm: , yes, parties, quote unquote, switched at one period, but not exactly. They [00:04:00] switched about as much as they did when Trump was president. And by that, what I mean, you know, when Trump was president, now all of a sudden the right is more protectionist, the right is more anti war, the right, you know, it just, it just, a lot of things switched, but not everything switched.

Malcolm: So how did, how did one party go from being the party of the Klan to then the other one being the racist party? And what I'm going to argue is that never actually happened. Oh, Republicans were never actually the racist party. And we're going to go over a lot of stats here. But also some, some.

Malcolm: Narrative stuff but first, the, the, the first way that this perception has happened that I want to dig into, because I find it very fascinating and it's something that you've definitely seen as well, is we know a lot of the political elite of the conservative party. You know, I've had presidents, there were people who would be president or past presidents.

Malcolm: I've been to house parties that they're hosted and stuff like that. I know the type of people that they're associating with and the vast majority are progressives. And the question is why this is the fun thing, so [00:05:00] Simone, for example, she was managing director of Dialogue, which was a secret society that was originally founded by Peter Thiel and Aron Hoffman, so you know, very conservative founding, you could say, right?

Malcolm: And yet they had to institute an affirmative action, a policy for getting in if you were conservative because so few people of the type of people that they're admitting you know, leaders in, in, you know, fortune 500 companies, major tech companies, stuff like that were like out conservatives.

Malcolm: And this is something you see across the political sphere is that typically the ultra wealthy who live in cities in our society and control a lot of the wealth, there's just not many conservatives than those groups. And so when the politicians are associating with people who they see as their peers, the truth is, is they interact with very few actual conservatives, very few actual people in their base.

Malcolm: And so when they are constructing an image of who their base is. They often rely more on the stereotypes [00:06:00] progressives have of their base than on their actual base. Wow. And an open secret in, in D. C. and Simone, you've had these conversations with people before as well we talk with, , conservatives in D.

Malcolm: C. and they're like, it is an open secret that a lot of the campaign staffers of the major, you know, Senate campaigns and stuff like that presidential campaigns who are in the conservative group are actually just Democrats who are holding their nose. And the reason for this is, is there are very few people with the right degrees to hold these positions who are also willing to be mindless bureaucrats to like a giant bureaucratic machines.

Malcolm: Who also have a conservative ideology. So not only within the political class in this country, if you're talking about conservatives is, is their friend network often really, really progressive in their mindset, but their staffers who, when they're asking, you know, what does my base think and because there's become some, you know, don't, don't.[00:07:00]

Malcolm: poll that was seen as sort of an overly Democrat thing to do to do all this polling. So they use their intuition and their intuition is often the intuition of a progressive based on the stereotypes progressives have of conservatives. And so it has created a picture for a lot of politicians, which can lead them to act in ways which genuinely seem like they're trying to pander.

Malcolm: To a racist demographic that I will go further to argue doesn't really exist.

Simone: But really interesting. I've never heard this theory before. I'm loving it. Okay.

Malcolm: You're loving it. But hold on. Here is where it's going to get really fun. Okay. So I decided to go out there and try to find I was like, okay, what percentage of conservatives are actually racist, right?

Malcolm: So I was looking through statistics and I could find news articles being like, okay, a lot of conservatives are racist. Look at the way they answer these questions. So I'll go over the questions that they were saying proved that they were racist. [00:08:00] Okay. God granted the United States a special role in human history.

Malcolm: 64% of Republicans said yes, 32% of Democrats did. That just seems obvious to me if you believe in God. I mean, the U. S. has a very important role in, in the world.

Simone: And if God makes everything happen, then therefore God did that.

Malcolm: That, that is an intuitively true thing and obviously not a racist thing. Right. So the next one would be, this is spooky conservatives when asked has America become too soft and feminine, uh, 63% of Republicans agreed and 24% of Democrats did.

Malcolm: Would you say that's just intuitively true? I think most sane people would say that.

Simone: I mean, I think that progressives. It's a very feminized political affiliation, whereas the conservative political affiliation is more masculine. I did see a really interesting set of stats showing that actually the male to the [00:09:00] female gap between conservatism and progressivism in some nations are actually like very low.

Simone: So it's

Malcolm: hard to say. I will pull up this stat on the screen. It's really interesting. So there's a few countries, U. S. is actually unique. Not totally unique, but it's not a truism that in every country, the more conservative faction is more male. And the, the more progressive affection is more feminine.

Simone: Exactly. But I would say at least in the United States, that is true. So while it isn't universally true, it does seem to be somewhat of a truism that in, in the United States, it's, it is a, a cracy the, the

Malcolm: progressive. Okay. But it's certainly not a racist. It's like they're not proving any racism there.

Malcolm: No. That, that only

Simone: has to do with being like, I guess more male oriented versus

Malcolm: female, I guess. Guess they thought it made conservatives look bad or something. Oh, here was the one where they really thought they had gotten them. Okay. 57% of Republicans believed that whites face, quote unquote, a lot of discrimination.

Malcolm: Well, just [00:10:00] 52% believe blacks do. And among Democrats, 13% said whites do, and 92% said blacks do. So keep in mind, for Republicans about the same number believed that whites face discrimination as black space discrimination. Mm-hmm. , that seems. Intuitively true to me, and certainly not a racist

Simone: claim. Well, I mean, you could argue that everyone faces discrimination because everyone has views about different groups, whether they want to admit it or not.

Malcolm: Oh, here's another statistic I found, right? Yeah. Okay. When respondents were asked whether they approved of the teaching of critical race theory, 78% of Republicans disapproved with only 16% said they were in favor of the practice and 75% of Democrats said that they approved of teaching it while only 15% disapproved.

Malcolm: Critical race theory isn't like about racism.

Simone: I mean, it's, it is one theory around how to view systemic racism that started in the legal profession, as I understand it, yeah, it's, it's not [00:11:00] necessarily a, a, an endorsement of being anti racist. I think it's interesting because a lot of the differentiation is on.

Simone: Certain specific performative anti racist views that are really held strongly by one group. And then another group that I guess just isn't that interested in having all those conversations and I think is more in through its actions anti racist. Yeah.

Malcolm: So I'm going to keep going through statistics here.

Malcolm: I actually collected a lot more statistics to go through. Wow. Okay. I don't want to bore before I get to the, the fun part. Okay. What's the fun part? . So, I am going to send Simone a poll. So this was done by 538. So they did a series of polls on this. Okay. And you grew up in the democratic movement. So you grew up being inundated with this lie that the conservatives are the racist party in this country.

Malcolm: Oh, totally. Yeah. And so, and so you totally believe this going into this, right? Yes. Okay. [00:12:00] So let's see, you see the actual statistics here. Just sent you the

Simone: first one. All right. Whites who say they would not vote for a black president. We have white Republicans versus white Democrats, and they're basically neck and neck until...

Malcolm: Except Democrats were higher at this until Obama became president.

Simone: Yeah, like basically in, in 96 white Republicans hit an all time low where only 5% of Republicans who are white said they wouldn't vote.

Malcolm: Well, I guess our podcast listeners can't see what's happening. Yeah. So up until Obama, more Democrats said they would not vote for a black president than

Simone: Republicans.

Simone: Yeah. Between 15 and 7%. Of white Democrats said that they would not vote for a black president, whereas by comparison, only 5% of white Republicans reported that they would not vote for a black president. So that's very interesting. This is from the general

Malcolm: social survey. Did that you, given what you grew up

Simone: [00:13:00] hearing?

Simone: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, I do, I do get the impression that a lot of white Democrats or white progressives in general are a lot. More racist because they're like, to a certain extent, I think they're overthinking race, like it, just to the point of them ending up being really racist or like even avoiding other races.

Simone: The

Malcolm: recent poll that I saw that I think explains it. Really? Okay. What is this poll of both Republicans and Democrats, how many black friends they had, white ones? Republicans had more

Simone: black friends. No, that, that makes sense. But that's, that's my point is I think that because white progressives are way, way, way more sensitive about racism and like all the performative things they're supposed to do around racism and that they just, they're supposed to feel really bad about racism and they're the bad guy.

Simone: Like it's frankly just too stressful to have friends outside your own race. And when you actually look at,

Malcolm: when you look at the progressive would tell themselves, but I think it's a, it's a lie. [00:14:00] The truth is, is that Republicans are just less racist. The Democrat, look, you saw the statistics that you're, you're acting like, oh, they're just too sensitive.

Malcolm: They literally said they would not vote for a black person for president more than Republicans until Obama became. Simone, and this is 538. This is like a completely nonpartisan polling thing that is known for very good polling data, right? And, and you're here being like, oh no, it's just that they care so much.

Malcolm: No, the truth is, is that they are actually racist. And they have a lot of racists in their party. And that, and no, no, and the truth is, and when you, when you hang out with you know, we, we have a lot of black friends, right? And of the, the, and this is where I, where I think it's actually going, going on here of the black friends.

Malcolm: I know the ones who are most comfortable hanging out with a lot of non black people are typically more conservative. And I think that's a big part of it, right? Like it's the people who [00:15:00] just don't care about race, who are often going to end up sorting into these more Republican circles, largely because I think.

Malcolm: If you are, if you let go of all this racial identity politics, which you really need. So for example, they'll say Oh, Republicans are racist because they want to keep out immigrants. Right. Right. And what they really mean is they, because even Trump wanted a skilled immigrants like policy plan to let in skilled immigrants, like we have proposed.

Malcolm: What they wanted to do was keep out like a flood of unskilled immigrants. And that's not like a racial issue, that's just like sane economic policy. And, but hold on, I'm going to show you more stats here.

Simone: Okay, but let me just, let me just argue though that I think ultimately the progressive Perspective on race is actually for group separation.

Simone: Like Robin D'Angelo and many of her seminars that she would, she would lead. She's the one who wrote white fragility would actually encourage employees at companies to create race [00:16:00] affinity groups, like the white people group. So they could talk about their experiences. Stop acting like the

Malcolm: Klan.

Malcolm: They just took off their hood.

Simone: Well, that's, that's why the Klan, I think also the Klan has gotten along so well with some leaders of the nation of Islam, for example, because both groups are like, yeah, you stay in your group. I'm going to stay in my group. We do not mix. We do not hang out with each other.

Simone: We just agree to not like each other.

Malcolm: Hold on, hold on. I'm going to continue to send you more statistics. Okay. So here's the next poll that they ran. All

Malcolm: Whites who say blacks are more unintelligent than intelligent. Again, you can see here that the lines, sometimes Republicans are at the top, sometimes Democrats are at the top of

Simone: this. No, no, no. Hold on. So they've been pretty much neck and neck always, however, white Republicans up until about 2009.

Simone: We're a slightly more racist on this front than white Democrats. And then

Malcolm: this is not the perception you're getting in the media. If I was a politician and I was pandering to a racist base, and these are the polls I was seeing, it would [00:17:00] not make sense for a Republican to pander to racism any more than it would make sense for a Democrat to

Simone: pander to three percentage points with this graph.

Simone: This graph is showing that like the rates peaked in. Like maybe the late eighties at, for Republicans, maybe 43% and then for, sorry, 33% and for Democrats around 30%. So that's 30 versus 33%. It's still a minority and it's still, yeah, very, very close. So I, I see, I see what you're saying. This is

Malcolm: interesting.

Malcolm: Okay. Okay. So next one, right? Okay. This one is whites who oppose living in a half black neighborhood.

Simone: .

Simone: Wow. Okay. So these are like genuinely, I mean, maybe one percentage point apart in the late eighties, but they're neck and neck through 96 and they start to diverge. Yeah.

Malcolm: But even with Democrats, even still, it's 20%, you know?

Simone: Yeah. They're, they're, they're again, extremely close. I'm making with

Malcolm: these. Is it, there is not a clear, like racist Republican faction and clear, like non racist Democrat

Simone: faction.

Simone: [00:18:00] Yeah, no, this is a, this is really interesting because you definitely, if you'd asked me to predict what are the differences on these things, you know, would, would not vote for a black president who would not want to live in a half black neighborhood, like I would have thought. That there would be at least a 20 percentage point difference.

Simone: And here we're seeing like two to three percentage points different. And in some cases, sorry, Democrats being more racist than Republicans, which is

Malcolm: wild.. So, this isn't like hidden racism. Like I think a lot of the time when conservatives say like Democrats are racist, they mean like affirmative action is a fundamentally racist policy in many ways. Right. But there's sort of like, you know, twisting things around a bit. I mean, just like actually blatantly normally in the normalist sense of the term, the democratic base is about as.

Malcolm: Racist in the most traditional sense as the Republican base. There was never this grand flip. And there is a great article that actually goes over the history of this and how this [00:19:00] lie sort of started and how it was propagated. So the article I suggest, and I can link to it is the myth of the racist Republicans, the truth about the Southern strategy, and basically what it points out is this was all a lot more nuanced and it's very similar you know, to calling somebody who's against affirmative action or somebody who is, you know, against unrestricted immigration racist.

Malcolm: Okay. We're like, yes, I suppose somebody could be motivated by race to believe those things, but the vast majority of people who are against these things are not motivated by racist reasons. And so then this gets me to a really interesting point. So there's, there's a few things here. Where is actual racism in the U.

Malcolm: S.? Like where is this coming from if it's not coming from the Republican actual base? If this guy who wrote this song you know, Richmond, North, North of Richmond. I, I think very much represents the actual concerns of the Republican base. Where's it coming from? One is this misunderstanding of what Republicans think [00:20:00] that is taken on by politicians, but I also think that this misunderstanding is taken on by a lot of young.

Malcolm: Like firebrand conservatives who don't actually have real conservative friends like rising intellectual class. This guy at Harvard decides he wants to be a dissident or whatever. And so he's well, I guess I'm a conservative and I need to appeal to other conservatives. And so I'm going to go out there and act racist.

Simone: The acts, the caricature of a conservative. So all, all of these views, you think. Are people acting like they think

Malcolm: Republicans? Yeah, I think that that's a huge part of it. I think another big part of it is coming from what we call the tyranny of the unemployed problem. And this is to say within any online community, the most interaction you're going to see, if it's like a completely unfiltered, like just based on how much they comment or how much they upvote or something like that.

Malcolm: People who have disproportionately been kicked out of society for being like a turd or like annoying or a twerp. They are going to disproportionately comment in these environments, right?[00:21:00] And so, and they are going to disproportionately upvote stuff. They are going to disproportionately interact with stuff, right?

Malcolm: And this is what you see on Reddit. This is what you see on YouTube comments often. Although we have the best audience, so we don't see it. But you see it in other environments. And it can create a perception of, for people that this is actually the mainstream view within this person's fan base or within the, the, the, the base of people who consume this content when it's actually not.

Malcolm: And so I do think that there are a lot of right now, like unemployed people who have an extremely, you know, external locus of control. So these are like slovenly white people who just blame all of their problems on other, you know, on. Whether it's women or black people or something like that and they feel like when they're looking and they say who do I identify with, which political party has my back they think the conservative party is going to have their back. So they're like, okay, I'm going to go online. I'm going to engage with, with these people, but their actual ideology does not really align with a [00:22:00] cohesive right wing intellectual theory or view of the world.

Malcolm: They are just. Random whiners that really have almost nothing to do with real conservative politics. They just appear in online circles a lot. A final thing that I think is really interesting is when we talk about the media coverage around this How far the left has to go?

Malcolm: To paint a picture that the right is racist. Remember how I was going through all those leading survey questions? Yeah. Something like the Proud Boys, for example. The guy who runs the Proud Boys. Or at least he's not white. I don't know what ethnicity he identifies with, but he's, he's far from white.

Malcolm: And I think black and it's wild. Is it, so when the left is trying to categorize this Republican movement as racist, they will go out. And I saw a documentary that was trying to show that the Plowboys were racist and like the best they could do. It was like random. Okay. Hand signs from like nobodies who happened to be at the rallies, [00:23:00] right?

Malcolm: Uhhuh, . You could go to any rally. I, I have imagine them filming, being like, s**t, we're not getting anything racist here. Hey you, Jim, can you go stand in that crowd and flash some okay. Signs? Oh God, I, I, I saw on 4 Chan that that's how racists communicate with each other. Now, anybody who doesn't know, it was actually a fake thing on four chan.

Malcolm: They were originally trying to show. that the news had just gone insane and would see anything as a racist sign. So they pretended the okay sign was an actual racist sign. Now some racists have picked it up, but I don't, I think that this is more just like internet idiots who didn't know, who didn't know that it was a joke to begin with.

Malcolm: When you're talking about like actual racists, you're typically talking about like the lowest common denominator, intellectually speaking. But anyway. So, so then where, where are, so I talked about the lowest common denominator intellectually speaking. So now I'm gonna get to the spicy take here.

Malcolm: Okay. When I look at the conservative intellectual sphere, where do I see the actual like loud [00:24:00] racists, right? I am predominantly seeing them. I call them in like the Nick Fuentes sphere. This is the Catholic integralist sphere. And yet the more I think about it, like I talked about how stupid this ideology is before.

Malcolm: But I'm actually going to go into it because I think when you think through the ideology, you realize it's almost so stupid that no one could actually hold it. And it's so incongruous with actual right wing ideology that there is no way that these individuals could have real large followings within the right wing sphere, which leads me to believe they might be plants either by the CIA or a foreign government.

Malcolm: I love this theory. All right. It's time to go into it. What Catholic integralists want from the world, right, is they want a world in which the entire world is ruled under a single Catholic monarchy. They, they want sort of a Catholic caliphate to rule the entire world. However, they're also like anti immigrant [00:25:00] and racist, which makes no sense.

Malcolm: The majority of the immigrants coming to the U. S. are Catholic, right? Presumably if you thought that the whole world could have... operate under a Catholic caliphate interculturalism within our country, in which that interculturalism is represented by a larger Catholic voting bloc, should not be a concern at all.

Malcolm: Second, Catholicism more broadly is, I think, one of the least racist religions on the planet. Yeah, seriously. Let's talk about what I mean when I say that. And it's the only religion I know of in the planet You, within other religions, saints would be essentially demigods. So you have whatever you want.

Malcolm: They have miraculous powers given to them by the one true God. They are the only religion I'm aware of that has saints of like literally every ethnic group. They have many Hispanic saints. They have a Hispanic. Pope! They what are you, this does not make sense that this [00:26:00] is an anti Hispanic group, or that they would have this big anti Hispanic contingent.

Malcolm: They have many black saints, you know? But it, it gets more insane to this. Then what you're saying is that this ideology is popular among U. S. conservatives who are predominantly Protestant and predominantly anti globalist. That this globalist ideology, like super globalist ideology, has somewhile taken over, no, no, no, no, no it's, it's almost a Looney Tunes villain esque ideology, I want to rule the entire world, and I am also racist, and I want to, but when you put it all together, it like doesn't hold together, it falls apart, it is the The, the insane ramblings of the worst that progressives assume of conservatives.

Malcolm: Well,

Simone: yeah, because something has to not be true. Either the, the caliphate, the Catholic caliphate is not an actual end goal or because there's no, there's no other explanation as [00:27:00] to how it's really going to effectively take place unless like the Catholic populations are. able to coalesce and unite and move more freely in a way that helps them create strong coalitions of power.

Malcolm: Yeah, and it's not that there aren't Catholics that do eventually want to convert everyone. I mean, Catholicism is at the end of the day a dominating religious group. But Catholicism as a dominating religious group is incredibly intercultural. They are just incredibly intercultural. And in fact, they're even structured in a way, the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church is really useful in for, because all people are intrinsically racist to some extent when they meet a group that they're not familiar with, or they're around another group, and that hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church has historically allowed them to say.

Malcolm: Hey, you know, you colonizers are going a little far right now, you need to tone this down, you know, even though the popular zeitgeist is saying do this stuff, you need to not do this stuff, you need to stop, you know, you need to stop having [00:28:00] unconsensual sex with, with, with people you're meeting, you need to start doing nice things for them, you need to start setting up schools for them.

Malcolm: That has been the core of Catholic doctrine for a long time. And so, yes, there are some Catholics that want the entire world under, you know, a Catholic state, but they are also intrinsically some of the least racist people in terms of how they view this. You know, Well, you have to be,

Simone: I guess, if you have a dominating thing.

Simone: Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting, right? I could argue that both a dominating and symbiotic cultures are racist, but in very different ways, and they're inclusive in very different ways, right?

Malcolm: But, but, but Consolacism is not. How is a dominating culture often racist? I, I am aware of almost no dominating culture that's racist.

Simone: They're well, so I would argue that they're racist and they're not allowing differences in the end, like dic, but that's

Malcolm: not about

Simone: race. Yeah, I guess, yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess, yeah. They don't require like everyone to, they, [00:29:00] they're culturalists,

Malcolm: they're cultural supremacists. Yeah. But they're almost never racial supremacists.

Malcolm: Yeah,

Simone: that's that's fair. Yeah.

Malcolm: That's fair. And, and, and this is, It's really important because it means that this ideology. So where could this ideology be coming from if it's not a CIA plant job, which I still think it might be. Why?

Simone: What would be the benefit of that? To paint one party is like the racist

Malcolm: party.

Malcolm: Okay. Well, so this is actually interesting. So the deep, the Republicans are not wrong when they say the deep state, you and I know a lot of people in DC. Okay. We know a lot of high profile people in DC Democrats and people with progressive leanings, as well as this, frankly, culturalist, racist, whatever you want to call it, view of urban Americans are the dominant cultural faction there.

Malcolm: Okay. They do not want, when Trump was coming into power, they saw that as an existential threat.

Simone: I guess you could argue that like DC is run by elitist technocrats who typically come from progressive backgrounds. So they're not representative of the [00:30:00] rural disenfranchised. They're not representative of The

Malcolm: CIA literally, like they have been caught in these cases having lied.

Malcolm: Or might've been the FBI. I can't remember which one trying to get Trump indicted, you know, these communications, Oh, you know, you don't know the text chains that came out. Like we have to get Trump. We have to, Oh, really? Oh yeah, it was a guy talking with his girlfriend who was also in the institution.

Malcolm: And Oh dear. I'll try to put the chains, but they were like, yeah, obviously Trump can't happen. We need to make sure that doesn't happen. So we sat in

Simone: rooms where people said that to people with a lot of power and influence in

Malcolm: the Republican party as well.

Simone: Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know, it was like everyone's saying that,

Malcolm: but no, but the point I'm making is this was actually felt within like there are large, I'd say near unanimous factions of major government security organizations who believe this.

Malcolm: And I, and I think that anyone who's pretending that's not true okay, the deep state might be a kind of in, you know, you can say it's a conspiratorial concept, but I think [00:31:00] anybody who actually has a lot of friends in government does know that they are predominantly Democrat leaning even in the intelligence services these days.

Malcolm: And this idea that they wouldn't like, this is an impossible thing to happen. I think is almost a fever dream. Of course, of course they might think this could be a threat to our country. Of course they might think, oh, we need to discredit this party. Of course they may think, oh, we can use this as a honeypot to discredit people.

Simone: Right? Yeah. It's not, not a crazy idea. I mean, I

Malcolm: think. No, but hold on, hold on. I'm not done. Okay. I'm not done. So what I was going to say is, okay, but let's say realistically, how could people come to this? Suppose they're not like, not realistically, but like, how could people come to this if this wasn't a plant job?

Malcolm: Like this insane ideology, right? Okay. Because you here were telling me, you know, trad cath is trending these days, et cetera. What's actually going on here. Yeah. So what I think is actually going on here. Is there might be a small portion of people out there because I think this [00:32:00] is how these, these plant jobs often work is they wait for some idiot individual to come to this ideology on their own, and then they'll manipulate algorithms or stuff to promote that individual to make them seem like they're a bigger deal or have a bigger audience than they actually have.

Malcolm: So, there's these, these it's just so an individual is out there and he's he just has a very hierarchical mindset. A very sort of like, everything must be hierarchical. Everything must go back to the origin. I'm going to be as traditionalist as possible. And so they accept the aesthetic of traditionalism.

Malcolm: That has been taught to them by progressive culture, right? Yeah. So they, they ask themselves, what are the way that people used to be? Oh, they used to be racist. Oh, what are the way people used to treat women? Or they used to be, you know, misogynist. Oh, what was the oldest iteration of Christianity? Oh, it's Catholicism.

Malcolm: But here's the thing. They were actually an intellectual. I think very few. Okay. So again, I know we have a lot of Catholic viewers here and I say very positive things about Catholicism. However, [00:33:00] I think from an outsider's perspective and from every Christian traditions perspective, they're the original iteration of that Christian tradition.

Malcolm: From an outsider's perspective, Catholicism is not the oldest iteration of Christianity. Orthodoxy has a slightly better claim to that, although I can see how the claim could go either way. For people who aren't really familiar with what happened Originally Christianity, and you can see this from the early, you know, Christian letters, mostly due to how hard it was to communicate and Christianity was just like this.

Malcolm: group that was just trying to do anything to convert people in the early days. It was run by essentially you would have a collection of cities and then within each city you would have a sort of a local patriarch, like a person who was known as like the most important Christian in the city. It's actually.

Malcolm: Very similar to modern Judaism, but a bit more hierarchical. And then and of course it would be similar, it came out of Judaism, right? And then after Constantine and Rome was made the official head of of, of Christianity because the Roman Empire became officially Christian, [00:34:00] right?

Malcolm: And so the, the Roman patriarch became much more important than the other patriarchs. Then you had the division of Rome between the East and the West and, and, Obviously, that began to build tensions because for a long time, there was a reason for the Roman Patriarch to be the Patriarch in charge, right?

Malcolm: But after a while, this began to get on other Patriarchs nerves, especially the other really important Patriarch, which was the Byzantine Patriarch, because they were the other capital of this major Christian empire. And these two people got in a head it was over really silly stuff like whether or not it was acceptable to use unleavened bread in the sacrament of communion. And things like the explicit wording of the Nicene Creed so really like detailed, nuanced stuff. It wasn't really over a matter of faith.

Malcolm: It was over a personality conflict. And the Orthodox group you know, I'm not saying that they weren't at fault for this personality conflict. But they said, okay, well, let's go back to this [00:35:00] system where it's a council of sort of equal patriarchs. And the, the Roman group said, no, let's keep this hierarchical system.

Malcolm: But what that means, very interestingly,

Malcolm: Is that Catholicism has always been unusually hierarchical in its power structures.

Malcolm: And so if you have an individual. And this is actually something that was a problem for, so Simone has a lot of friends who are nuns and you were talking to one and they were talking, can you tell that story about this, having to screen people?

Simone: Oh yeah, no we, a good family friend is a Carmelite nun, now she's a, like a mother, like she's, she's head of the order, and she spoke to us about how they really need to screen.

Simone: Novices who want to join the order because many of them are just joining because of mental health problems, not because they're really dedicated to

Malcolm: that particular. Specifically, they wanted a very structured life.

Simone: It's well, yeah, and this is, I mean, Carmelite nuns live a uniquely structured life.

Malcolm: So, but what I'm saying is, as a religious unit, it's very appealing to people who crave sort of [00:36:00] structure.

Malcolm: And that's 100% hierarchy. I want a structured world order. And so if you get a sort of it's some sort of pseudo educated individual who intensely craves structure and traditionalism and isn't more like broadly educated on, on, on what Catholicism actually means, which is, I, again, I've said before, more than anything else, Catholicism as a system is defined by inclusivity, and they just wouldn't get that because they're not culturally Catholic. And so they come at this tradition thinking of it more okay, I'm this new sort of version of a neo Nazi.

Malcolm: What is the most hierarchical and structured system I can choose without understanding the heart behind this, this older tradition. And so that's the way I could see it happening, but I want to give these people more credit than that. And so I'm going to say that there are CIA

Simone: plants. Well, so I, I would argue though, that maybe this is just kind of a market forces thing.

Simone: Like we found personally that when. [00:37:00] Frankly, inaccurate caricatures of us end up in the media, we get a lot more attention and growth. And so it could be that to your point earlier about like young educated college students just kind of want to be a major conservative figure. It's like an audience capture thing where they just keep leaning in.

Simone: to this caricature because it causes the most controversy and hate and hate is what draws the most attention. So, of course, it would be the racism that comes out. It would be the bigotry and the misogyny that comes out because that drives more shares and that ultimately drives more followers.

Malcolm: Yeah, no, I think you might be right.

Malcolm: And so they may just be about capturing public mindset instead of capturing, you know, legitimate followers.

Simone: Yeah, like nuanced views that most reasonable people hold, while that resonates with people, it's not something that drives clicks and shares. Whereas the, the really racist, misogynist, crazy, whatever views.

Malcolm: So here's where it gets really [00:38:00] interesting. So I'm going to go on another tangent here because we do have a lot of You know, black for actually something I wanted to mention because we were talking about the black thing friends things where, you know, conservatives have more black friends and progressives this is why progressives have to constantly parrot having black friends.

Malcolm: Does it make you not racist? Because

Simone: that's like a point like that. Robin DiAngelo makes saying you have a black friend or that your best friend is black is like a super racist thing to do. And that's, of course, do that. Yeah.

Malcolm: Because so many Democrats don't actually have any black friends or know any black people.

Malcolm: And it was a great thing where they were calling somebody racist for saying, my wife and kids are black. You know, that frequently happens. I married a black woman. I have black children. Obviously I'm not racist. And they're like, that's the most racist thing you could say. And the reason they need to say this is because they need to control what the word racism means to not meaning I don't negatively judge black people.

Malcolm: I mean. Obviously, if you have a black wife and kids, you don't negatively judge black people but to meaning, I agree with your [00:39:00] ideology. I am a slave to your ideological group. And so the only way you can get categorized as not racist is being a slave to this ideological group. But here I'm going to get into something that's, that's actually we'll, we'll save it for another video.

Malcolm: This video was, was really interesting. Have I convinced you, you know, you who grew up in progressive sphere that it was always sort of a lie that the conservative base was racist or more racist than the democratic base and that this is just sort of a narrative Democrats tell themselves to justify their othering and dehumanizing of the rural poor, really.

Simone: Yeah, I guess having, after having met you and moving out of the Bay Area. I do definitely feel like we've met a ton more conservatives and they are. So it really depends on how racism is defined, of course, but I think functionally, when it comes to befriending, working with, respecting, you know, et cetera people of different [00:40:00] racial backgrounds, conservatives are less racist um, 100%.

Simone: Like, They, they seem Mm hmm. But, but, but I think many progressives would be like, but how dare you because they'll tell racist jokes and they will acknowledge differences between groups and that is like the core of racism. So I think it's really the difference between performative. anti racism or, you know, performative non racism versus like genuine demonstrated lack of racism.

Simone: Like obviously progressives win when it comes to performative anti racism. You know, they're like so careful about what they say. No politically incorrect jokes. There are zero differences between racial groups. And then you have this other group that's actually They have a diverse friend group, they actually employ and work with and, and vote for a diverse range of people.

Simone: But they will make racist jokes. They will make, and also, you know, we have to admit also like among the conservatives we know who make the most racist jokes, they are definitely not white. So,

Malcolm: yeah, no, it's funny. You actually say this one of my favorite jokes and I know I'm probably going to get in trouble one [00:41:00] day for saying this jokes, but it was, it was about me.

Malcolm: So, I have a friend and they come to a number of events that we've hosted. And they were like Malcolm, why do you have so few white friends? And one of my friends was like, oh, he's way too racist to have white friends.

Malcolm: Um, And I thought that was really funny because I know because there's this acceptance within, I think you know, genuinely multi ethnic communities. Yeah, we are different and we talk about it and it's fun and it's interesting to explore the ways that we're different. And progressives call that racism being like, Oh, you people do this.

Malcolm: Why do you do things this way? We do things this way. That's really interesting. And that's sort of the whole point of this channel and stuff like that. So that's what they meant by that. Not like I have negative views, but that I, I, I do see race. I thought that was really funny because it's, it's, you know, we have in our episode about comedy.

Malcolm: What is comedy? It's surprising, but it's true in context. Yeah, I could see how that might scare away white people from being [00:42:00] his friends, but not, you know, a multi ethnic group. Yeah. Anyway.

Simone: That's really interesting. Yeah. Very

Malcolm: interesting. And yeah, and I, I actually think that, that progressives would become less of an insane party if they actually went out there and did realize that, yeah, not having any black friends probably does make you racist.

Malcolm: And yeah, you should go out and, and meet, not like. You know, your other rich is similar socioeconomic group, similar cultural group, black people, but like actual black communities and you might learn that they're very different than you think. Um, I think

Simone: that the number one, driver. The number one driver of racism is isolationism.

Simone: If you are not exposed to other people, if you're not living with them, befriending with them, like watching their content, like working with them, whatever, right? If you're not exposed, you're going to be kind of afraid because they're an unknown quantity and you don't really have a lot of good information to run on.

Simone: And if you can't predict someone, Or a group, you cannot trust them. Just period. If you can't model something, you're going to be nervous because you can't [00:43:00] trust it. Like

Malcolm: positively or negatively. This is something that we see. I mean, I'd say that the things that progressives would be most surprised about if they actually engaged with other ethnic and cultural groups.

Malcolm: is one, how much the Hispanics hate wokeism. They, they do not like you guys. Um, uh, No, broadly Hispanic, they might think that you are useful politically in the short term, but broadly, you are not a long term ally to these communities. Even that, I don't know. And, and how anti Semitic Black communities are.

Malcolm: But that is a different video. Just so people know that I'm not like... Making up something here and the 1970s there was a poll where 73% of blacks in their 20s were high in the index of anti Semitism. 42% of blacks, this is 1984, versus 20% of whites agrees that Jews have too much power in the United States.

Malcolm: In 2021 42% of black liberals versus 15% of white liberals endorsed antisemitic views. And I, and this is one of those things where they see Kanye come out and they're like, where did this come from? This is wild. And it's like [00:44:00] these views are not that unusual if you actually went out there and engaged with these communities instead of just viewed them through your stereotypical lens of who they are they, they actually have very nuanced views of the world.

Malcolm: And, and some of them might be justified, you know, based on history. I'm, I'm not saying that antisemitism is justified, but within the black community, like. We can explain where it comes from. It's, it's very interesting but a different video. Yeah. Interesting stuff. I love you, Simone. And I love that you're able to dig into these concepts and I'm able to even shock you still by shaking some of these stereotypes that you grew

Simone: up with.

Simone: Yeah, man. Every day coming out with new surprises for me. I love it. I love it. Yeah. Can't wait to my next conversation. Love you.

Malcolm explains his concept of "evolutionary vortexes" - how cultures create bottlenecks selecting for certain sociological profiles over generations. He analyzes examples like Calvinists' happiness, Jewish mysticism, and Catholic anti-nepotism norms. Simone questions why this isn't more obvious. They discuss how technology will let intentional cultural selection rapidly shape future minds.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] So a great example of this that I'd always say, is when I talk to people and I'm like, yeah, you know, what do you think of Cubans? You talk to a Florida, you're like, what do you think of Cuban? They go, yeah, Cubans. There's the typical Cuban sociological profile.

Malcolm: They're very conservative. They're really good at business. They're really educated. And it's that's not the profile of Cubans more broadly. That's the profile of the Cubans that were differentially sorted into trying to escape a communist dictatorship and move to the United States You know, to an extent within any immigrant population depending on how the, the sorting worked, you're often going to get a very specific sociological profile that may not be the dominant sociological profile of the mainland population.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: So Malcolm, you know, how. Someone in our family once called me a vortex of failure.

Malcolm: Yes, somebody did! They're like, Simone is a vortex of failure, Malcolm, and she is pulling you down. [00:01:00] Well,

Simone: there are other types of vortexes that I think you find very interesting, and I have failed to understand why they're so interesting.

Simone: So can you please explain your concept of evolutionary vortexes with this old vortex of failure?

Malcolm: Yes, well, so this is a very interesting thing for us. So a lot of people know that we don't believe that there are persistent, meaningful genetic differences between things that we, in our society, view as things like ethnic groups and stuff like that.

Malcolm: And a lot of people view

Simone: that The concept of racism or race supremacy as being, like, pretty frickin dumb, because, like I don't know given

Malcolm: the evolutionary... Why is it dumb? It's dumb because small groups, family groups, religious groups local environmental groups, it's not because we don't believe that genetic differences don't exist between populations.

Malcolm: We just believe that they change way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way faster than this, like... You know, 100, 000 year difference that defines ethnic groups. Exactly. [00:02:00] So a great example of this is like San Francisco, right? When you look at San Francisco, you had this environment where during the gold rush, you basically had a siren call to people from a diversity of , ethnic and cultural backgrounds that said, anybody who uniquely is drawn to high risk High reward, economic opportunities move to this area.

Malcolm: Okay. That's what the gold rush was. And people would die for these opportunities. I mean, the Donner party, et cetera. Right. And then is it a surprise that, you know, a century later, Silicon Valley starts there, which, which was really driven because the venture capital industry started there where you had.

Malcolm: High risk, high reward opportunities explode as like a way to generate wealth and ruin people all over again. And this is what a vortex does. Because there was the first event that caused a genetic [00:03:00] predilection within that environment, that then made it more likely that the second event would happen, which then further...

Malcolm: condensed that genetic predilection by again, sending out this, this signal all over the world for people like that. Right. Yeah. To the extent where you see things like really high rates of things like, because then what was the other thing that was really being selected for by that cultural vortex, it was.

Malcolm: High knowledge of like engineering and math. And this is why you had such high rates of autism in Silicon Valley, some of the highest rates in the world. And that is wild, but you also see this on a cultural level.

Malcolm: So our cultures essentially co evolve. with us. And they alter our brains so that if you think of humans as like the biological firmware and cultures as this set of software that's co evolving on top of them, they co evolve together synergistically. So an example of this could be our we have a secular friend who's from the Quaker [00:04:00] tradition.

Malcolm: And she feels like she regularly hears voices talking to her to an extent, right? Saying, okay, well, she,

Simone: she essentially like she talks with God. Like she, she searches for the truth from within. Right.

Malcolm: She talks, well, she's talking was so, so auditory hallucinations are actually much more common than people think about a quarter of the population experiences and at some point in their lives.

Malcolm: But Quaker culture would massively reward an individual for having auditory hallucinations. Whereas other cultural groups like the Calvinist cultural group, which lived alongside them geographically massively would punish auditory hallucinations. So. So everyone from the Calvinist cultural group who experienced them would have gone to the Quaker cultural group and people in the Quaker cultural group who didn't experience them might think God wasn't talking to them or like they didn't get why people were doing this in their cultural group and they would leave at a higher rate.

Malcolm: And so you're going to end up with more auditory hallucinations within people who come from this Quaker cultural group. Now this gets really interesting. Interesting. Because what it [00:05:00] means is that not all software packages, not all cultures are going to fit well. on all individuals, all biologies.

Malcolm: So one of the places where I've heard this, where it was really most meaningful to me is you know, I was talking with somebody who was like involved, I think it was like the JN community in the San Francisco area. And they were talking about. How high the, the suicide rate was among people of a broadly European ethnic background who converted to Jainism.

Malcolm: Yeah. And I, and I suspect you'd likely see this more broadly. If you look at. Europeans who convert to not like the fake American form of Buddhism, but like real Buddhism I'd imagine you're going to see a pretty high suicide rate. And I, this makes a lot of sense to me. If a cultural group has co evolved with a cultural software, For thousands of years, you can't just plug it on top of another cultural [00:06:00] group and expect them to work together really well.

Malcolm: And this is why when we say our goal is genuinely people are like, are you trying to recruit people into your weird secular Calvinist thing? I'm like, no, I do not think most people would really thrive in an environment where it is constantly reinforced how sinful Happiness, music, fun, is, right?

Malcolm: And again, this is something that people don't get, so people can say oh, then why do you do things that are sinful? Why do you do things like, you know, drink alcohol, for example, right? There's no efficaciousness behind that. And, and the, the, the Calvinism as a, as a cultural understanding is, is mankind is wretched.

Malcolm: You know, we are, completely morally destitute. And it's through recognizing that destitution, we can begin to try to improve ourselves. And so it is very important to [00:07:00] be able to say, yes, I will still sin because I am man. I am like, my soul is a maggot covered loaf of barely edible, , sailor bread.

Malcolm: But at the very least, what I shouldn't do is try to glorify my sin, try to act like my engagement with self masturbatory behaviors, whether it is exercise for the point of physical vanity, or music, or drinking, or anything pretend that that is a positive trait instead of what it is, a moral failing.

Malcolm: Now this cultural group Is something that most people, I, I just don't think would like really mentally thrive in engaging with, whereas you and me, we really mentally thrive when engaging with this cultural group. And this is also why I'm broadly against people who preach like stoicism more broadly. I do not think stoicism works for the [00:08:00] average person.

Malcolm: And I think that pretend cause causes. Spiral and become, you know, drug addict and barely function. Right? Like it's, it's not a good thing. And, and that it's more important to look to your ancestral, the way that your, your ancestral traditions work and try to reform them for a modern environment to be strong for a modern environment without, going into these, , cool sounding like manly sounding movements, right? Well,

Simone: because again, you're, you're like evolved mental landscape probably isn't designed to thrive with non native. mindscapes.

Malcolm: Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's why in the, the pronatalist movement, we are not about trying to convert people to our way of thinking.

Malcolm: Cause I don't think our way of thinking is compatible with most human biologies. But this leads to another really interesting thing, which is when a cultural software group is really, really, really, really, really, really [00:09:00] good against defending against a specific type of mindset or sociological profile.

Malcolm: It can lead to that sociological profile existing within populations under that cultural group at much higher rates than they do in other populations. So, let me explain this in different words. If a culture is really good against defending against a specific type of thing or preventing that thing for leading the individual to spiral out of control or not breed for some reason, you will see that thing at higher rates within that cultural group.

Malcolm: So if you're talking about Calvinists, traditionally, one thing that's always known about Calvinists is they're like unusually happy. They have like Really high happiness at points and unusually energetic to the extent where like some of the quotes and if you look at I'll be in seed, you know, that the Calvinists invented the rocking chair just so [00:10:00] that they would never have to stop moving or that people would mark when they go to these territories that people would run everywhere they were going.

Malcolm: And this is something I actually did in high school. I remember wondering why anyone ever walked when they were alone. When you could always run up to a place and get it done faster and more efficiently and a normal cultural group is actually likely going to select against. like this level of happiness because people who like are overly happy may just be content with their lives or may not breed or may spiral out of control in some way.

Malcolm: This is also probably why Calvinist groups drink as much as they do. So that's another thing. One of the, so where I'm from in Texas, there's a saying. Which is that what is it? Jews deny the divinity of Jesus. Protestants deny the Pope and Baptists deny knowing each other at the liquor store.

Malcolm: And when they say Baptist here, they're talking about primitive Baptist, which is the type of Baptist, which is most common where I'm from, which is [00:11:00] a Calvinist group. And it's because they had this cultural software that was like. Good at preventing people from drinking to an extent but, but when people began to, like, when it began to soften, when the rule stopped people who had this intrinsic drive to drink at this high a level in most other cultural groups were just removed from the gene pool because they drank themselves to death.

Malcolm: Whereas in this cultural group, there was enough of a protected pressure on that that didn't happen. And so you get really high rates of alcoholism was in Calvinist populations, and you also get stupidly high rates of happiness. You also get stupid. So the things that a culture tells you not to do, you will begin to see as a vice was in that culture as the cultural waterline receives.

Malcolm: So let's talk about a few of these because they're really interesting to me. Okay, so, probably the, the, the biggest one that we've mentioned before, but I just can't mention enough because it's so glaringly obvious to anyone who could see it, is Catholicism as a cultural group [00:12:00] is really, really good at guarding against familial nepotism.

Malcolm: By that what I mean is because the Catholic group is one, a hierarchical cultural group, you know, I, you have this priest caste, right? Which, which is this almost like governing body. And because priests aren't allowed to have wives what that did is it created a, You can say like an ethically sourced eunuch, we often call them, right?

Malcolm: And we do mention in a lot of videos that actually this is why, this is how the Catholic cultural group handled same sex attraction. And, and why it's so common, and you can look up the Wikipedia article on this, there's a lot of studies on this, why a lot of people in the Catholic clergy are actually just same sex people.

Malcolm: Attractive people who were born in the Catholic culture and it sourced them into these positions of power. But also you get heterosexual people who don't choose to have a partner and end up within this hierarchy. Well, within both of those groups, you're creating an environment in which these people don't have kids.

Malcolm: So you don't have intergenerational nepotism, [00:13:00] right? Right. And historically was in many of these. These Catholic cultural groups, a lot of stuff was run by the church, so they never really needed to guard against what is called amoral familial nepotism. Now if you look today around the world, pretty much everywhere in the world where a Catholic group is dominant, you know, whether you're talking about Italy or most countries in South America or, you know, et cetera you have extremely high rates of amoral familial nepotism.

Malcolm: And by that, what I mean is individuals promoting members of their own family over more competent individuals who aren't in their family. And so, if you're not from a group who understands amoral familial nepotism, that can seem really unethical to you to promote your brother just because they're your brother instead of because they're competent, whereas to a cultural group that doesn't have protections against amoral familial nepotism, cultural protections they're [00:14:00] going to be, like, it would almost be immoral to not promote your brother.

Malcolm: Because like he's family, of course, you're going to promote, of course, you're going to hire family first, of course, you're going to promote family first. What are you thinking? And, and this is something that their, their culture had gotten so good at protecting against that the secular cultures that sort of evolved underneath it, as well as sociological profiles that evolved underneath it became a really, really susceptible to this.

Malcolm: I think. From the perspective of other cultures, it would be a vice, but from their culture, it's not, you know, in Jewish culture, a great example is it's a soft sophicism or, or sophistry and mysticism. So, we've said that Kabbalism Jewish mysticism is sort of like a fly trap for people with a sociological. profile that is susceptible to mystical thinking or who's really good at mystical thinking. So if you watch our video on how garden gnomes are destroying academia, we [00:15:00] talk about this, how some individuals can have a really, really high level of verbal intelligence, but a really low level of general intelligence or other types of intelligence.

Malcolm: And these individuals can be incredibly dangerous to any group that they're in. Because people will, you know, when somebody is like really good at engineering, but not good at anything else, nobody thinks they're like a good at other things, but if somebody is really good at sophistry, but not good at anything else, it's very easy to misjudge that and believe that they are broadly competent and begin to take advice from them and then begin to fail as a cultural group.

Malcolm: But the Jewish cultural group, it has this really great defense mechanism against these individuals, which is Kabbalah, which is sort of like a fly trap for these people. They get engaged in it, and they go really deep in it, but in a way that can't be that damaging to the broader society or cultural group.

Malcolm: What it means... And if you look at studies on this, this is a great thing. We might do a video on [00:16:00] this because we write a lot on it in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion. Is this belief that Jewish groups are like much higher IQ than other groups? But that's actually not true if you look at any of the research.

Malcolm: They just have much higher verbal intelligence than other groups. And, and that's why you have this whereas other groups would select against that. So you always have some sort of parody of verbal intelligence and other types of intelligences. Hmm.

Simone: So my question to you is, I mean, you're able to look at how a culture essentially creates a certain type of person.

Simone: What could people who are crafting culture, what could cultural entrepreneurs be working into their cultures, their cultural technologies and amenities that would create people who have, I guess, specific advantages and more what we're interested in, right, which is, is, is building the future, you know, being the people to build the infrastructure, the technology and the governing societies of the future.[00:17:00]

Malcolm: Yeah, so there's two broad answers to this question, right? One is, let's assume genetic technologies didn't exist. And the most important takeaway of genetic technologies don't exist is the thing that your culture is best at protecting against is going to be the thing that was in the biology of people under your culture sort of spirals out of control as a predilection.

Malcolm: So, you know, if Calvinist culture is uniquely good at protecting against hedonism, then extremely high rates of happiness are going to appear biologically within that cultural group. So, extremely high energy and giddiness rates, right? And so be aware of that, because sometimes people can be like, this is a problem we want to do a very good job of building a culture that protects against amoral familialism, and then through protecting against that, you end up.

Malcolm: With really high rates of amoral familialism, just I guess naturally form underneath that culture. However, I think that this trend is not relevant into the future. [00:18:00] Okay. And here's what I mean in the future, because we can begin to intentionally through polygenic screening, select individuals for specific sociological profiles, right in traits the cultural groups that engage with this technology I hate to be the one to say it, but they're the only ones who are going to matter in the future, because if you just run the math.

Malcolm: A family or cultural group that engages within this within 75 years, because it looks within 75 years, the general population is probably going to decrease in IQ by about one standard deviation. If you engage with this technology, you're probably going to increase in IQ by 2. 5 standard deviations.

Malcolm: So you're just going to be like astronomically higher IQ and other things that you're

Simone: also like probably healthier and happier. Yeah, also

Malcolm: healthier, lower rates of cancer, lower rates of all sorts of stuff. And then when you begin to get to human CRISPR, you get into a whole other thing where like you can, you can move really quickly.

Malcolm: But then, so within the cultural groups that are making these selections you're just going to see really high rates of things. So like a cultural [00:19:00] group that says, I value happiness, I am going to select for happiness, or I value creativity, I am going to select for creativity, much more so than cultural practices affected the human genome in the past.

Malcolm: Cultural choices and values and the status signals are going to, to impact the human genome. And so cultural groups that really care about things like generic attractiveness, you know, like height and stuff like that. I mean, they might get huge in the near future, right? But they're likely going to be less and less economically relevant.

Simone: Yeah, it's going to be an interesting future then.

Malcolm: Well, I want to know why you thought this wasn't an interesting topic. Because you're like, Malcolm, this seems like a really boring topic. I guess,

Simone: maybe because we talk about it so much to me it's obvious. It's well, duh. If you create through your culture your own set of evolutionary bottlenecks, of course you're going to shape who you create.

Simone: Huh, you know, if we all live in a desert environment, maybe we're going to deal better with heat and you know, hydration and we're going to turn into camels. [00:20:00] I don't know it just seems well, thanks. You know, I'm glad

Malcolm: something you see. So like people who live in really high, like mountain environments.

Malcolm: They become more barrel chested, they develop more

Simone: They, yeah, they tend to be smaller and have larger and larger capacity.

Malcolm: Yeah humans, all

Simone: species respond to evolutionary pressures. Of course, if you create a culture that has

Malcolm: evolutionary pressures, humans will

Simone: respond. It's just okay, well, thank you for letting me know that studies show that when you drop something, it falls to the ground.

Simone: Okay.

Malcolm: No one else is talking about this.

Simone: Yeah, but that's because I think people, and this is, this is something that's interesting, which is that culture is a highly underrated tool. I mean, I would say that China understands this and the fact that it's like trying to, Outlaw certain cultures.

Simone: Like just this morning, I was watching one YouTube commentator discuss how China has tried to outlaw like hyper feminine males, and it's trying to, you know, create this like new standard for masculinity, which is a [00:21:00] more macho kind of male, and also a male who shows a huge amount of devotion to his nation.

Simone: Right? So, so China does understand this.

Malcolm: That's like a virgin man trying to unhook a broad types of cultural engagement.

Simone: Well, so, well, but yeah, China may not be getting it tactically, right. But at least I respect that China is one of the very few nations that appears to understand the importance and impact like Georgia also understands that.

Simone: But I think that's more just a product, product of it being a more religious nation. So I do think that that's important.

Malcolm: Offering to be people's, what, what was it? God, the

Simone: patriarch of the church. Yeah. Authoring to either baptize or become the godfather of anyone who was, yeah.

Malcolm: Yeah. Simone, I guess what I, the reason why I think this is interesting or might be interesting to people is if you look at the two groups in the world today, there's one group, which is like this progressive monoculture, which is like, there is no difference in human populations.

Malcolm: And then there's this [00:22:00] other group, which is like this scientific racism community, which is like all the difference that matters is, is like black versus white versus Native American versus Hispanic. And, and because everyone's so ideological motivated, they can't see the, to me, what, which is the.

Malcolm: Groups that matter are your cultural groups and your recent family decisions. Like families that you know, live in Texas usually regardless of their, their ethnic background, you know, they are people who migrated to the U S once and then felt the need to migrate again, at least once, which is why they're so outgoing and okay let's move, let's do something new.

Malcolm: Let's, you know. They represent a multiple migration mindset, which you may not see in other environments. So, so even little things like that can really impact a person. Yeah,

Simone: I mean, I would also argue even now Texas selects for pretty practical and [00:23:00] resourceful people because people don't usually move to Texas because they're like, oh, yeah this is my easy way out, right?

Simone: They move there because there are job opportunities and because cost of living is low. This is something

Malcolm: we saw in Dallas, right? Versus like Miami or San Francisco. San Francisco, you might move to San Francisco because you wanted to be part of the next big thing, you know, you might move to Miami because it augmented your personal status.

Malcolm: If you moved to Dallas, it was because of job opportunities and cost of living, which is selecting for a very specific sociological profile.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it is interesting. This is interesting insofar as people are not... I'm not really aware of how powerful culture is as a long term mechanism of power and influence.

Simone: However, it's just so freaking obvious that, at least internally, I'm just like,

Malcolm: Do we have to? No, well, so, I mean, I think if genetic technology wasn't beginning to bubble up now, [00:24:00] which it is, which sort of changes everything about how this, this works. If you said no genetic technology at all. You would begin to see really big, much bigger than any potential ethnic differences between population groups differences in people living in different cities in just the next, you know, 100 years or so, because air airplanes make it so easy to relocate that you are getting it around the world today.

Malcolm: And I think this is often having was in countries incredibly powerful, assortative sorting. Of people based on their sociological profiles into specific cities and geographic regions, which I think is why, you know, today, if you look at the progressive regions becoming more progressive and the conservative regions becoming more conservative, you know, there's been great like twin studies on this.

Malcolm: The way you vote is what I think around 80% genetic. No, 60%. It was

Simone: 60%. It's not that high, but it is highly

Malcolm: heritable. Yeah. It is highly. So, so you're beginning to actually get this sort of [00:25:00] concentrated where if you are a conservative leaning person like yourself living in San Francisco, you leave.

Malcolm: And you go move to like rural Pennsylvania, which is where we live now. Right. So, I, I think that you are seeing an incredibly high level of like assortative sorting.

Simone: Yeah. And, and, you know, that's, that's interesting.

Malcolm: It's interesting that in 200 years, you will have like the Detroit or Dallas or Miami or San Francisco, like genetic sociological profile.

Malcolm: And this is something that people, I mean, unless they're just like. Religiously oblivious to it, like the progressives are now, will be really obvious to everyone. Yeah, but

Simone: somewhat depressingly I guess the other reason is, is one, it's super obvious. Two, pretty much no one is acting on it. And three...

Simone: You know, no, no one is going to do anything about it or they'll flub it. Like China's flubbing it or China appears to be flubbing it at least. So you know, if it's that kind of thing will, will it matter? You know, [00:26:00] because no one's going to pull it off. Like

Malcolm: it matters in terms of how you look at it.

Malcolm: So a great example of this that I'd always say, is when I talk to people and I'm like, yeah, you know, what do you think of Cubans? You talk to a Florida, you're like, what do you think of Cuban? They go, yeah, Cubans. They're all, you know, they, there's the typical Cuban sociological profile.

Malcolm: They're very conservative. They're really good at business. They're really educated. And it's that's not the profile of Cubans more broadly. That's the profile of the Cubans that were differentially sorted into trying to escape a communist dictatorship and move to the United States. And to some extent, this is what you see with the Taiwanese sesquiculture.

Malcolm: Like why is Taiwan able to have all these advanced semiconductor plants that nowhere else in the world seems to be able to run at a large scale? Taiwan is like China's Cuba. There was a period where It's a little different because it was actually founded by a dictatorial regime, but that dictatorial regime, when they were fleeing the Chinese mainland, they did something really [00:27:00] weirdly foresightful, which is they tried to take all of the high trained, like high intelligence people with them in as part of their exodus.

Malcolm: So it's, it's, it's

Simone: like. Well, Cuban immigrants then, you know, but not, not. Yes, it's like

Malcolm: Cuban immigrants. Like Taiwan is Cuban Floridians are to Cuban people as Taiwanese are to Chinese people. Yeah. Yeah. But it is, it is really, or what's also interesting is American Chinese immigrants are to Chinese people.

Malcolm: You know, to an extent within any immigrant population depending on how the, the sorting worked, you're often going to get a very specific sociological profile that may not be the dominant sociological profile of the mainland population.

Simone: Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe this video will make a difference.

Simone: Maybe this video will make people actually do something with cultural technology, I think more intentionally. [00:28:00] Humans are not great at like thinking in terms of generations. It's more like right now. What do I get? But we'll see, Malcolm. Let's see if this vortex of failure continues to fail.

Malcolm: I, you are not a vortex.

Malcolm: You are a vortex of success pulling me to higher highs.

Simone: Well, now let's look more meta. I think that, that success.

Simone: And the only way you will ever achieve success is by marrying a vortex of failures who builds that mountain. Because that's what we're studying. Yes.

Malcolm: You make life so hard for

Simone: me. Yeah. So the secret was they were right, but that's what we're doing.

Malcolm: Here's one question before we leave. Are there any cultural groups that I missed that you feel have had a big impact on individuals living under them?

Simone: I mean, yeah, like every culture has had a big impact on individuals living under them. And I think what's interesting, what you haven't discussed a lot, but this is really more for another conversation is how. Emergent properties or changing environments or [00:29:00] technologies have caused these to crash and burn sometimes and not like the cultural evolutionary pressures that may exist in one, one time series, one climate, one technological environment will totally fail in another.

Simone: And so I think a lot of good cultural entrepreneurship and crafting has to involve anticipate anticipation of what we're going to be facing in the future.

Malcolm: So for example, what she's talking about here are Mormons. Mormons used to be a really successful cultural group and now their fertility rates just absolutely, they're below replacement rate and I think well below replacement rate at this point.

Malcolm: So they fared very poorly in the age of

Simone: Yeah. And so I think anyone doing good culture crafting now has to think a lot about the effect of AI on economies, on people, on mental health, and if you're not factoring that in, it really doesn't matter what pressures you create, because if they don't factor that in, they're not factoring in what reality is going to be.

Simone: But anyway, this is fun. I admire your

Malcolm: perspective, Simone, and [00:30:00] I'm so glad to have married a, gender bent version of myself. And this is something that people often miss about us. They're like, you guys seem to think exactly the same and you look exactly the same. And, and it's just almost like a racist thing to say.

Malcolm: It's like they're seeing somebody of a rarer cultural group that they haven't seen much. I don't know, for the first time, they're meeting two like really Jewish people. And they're like, you guys look like weirdly similar. Are you brother and sister? Yeah. Are you brother and sister? It's no, we're just from the same ethno cultural group.

Malcolm: Not a common one these days. Anyway, I love you, Simone.

Simone: I love you too, Malcolm.

Description: Malcolm and Simone have a fascinating discussion on the evolutionary origins and cultural purposes of music. They analyze how music builds in-group cohesion, signaling identity, glorifying values, and shaping emotions. From military marching songs to religious chanting to teenage subcultures, music plays a key role in cultural programming and bonding. But they argue overusing music can be indulgent and dulling. An insightful talk on the sociology and psychology of music!

Malcolm: [00:00:00] Speech is a very effective person to person communication device. It allows one person to communicate with one other person. Or one person to communicate with a large group of people. Music is different. Music is a many to many cultural communication device. And that's where music gets really interesting.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, Simone.

Malcolm: I am excited for today's topic. It's actually based on a user comment because they were asking about music and culture and how cultures can use music to intergenerationally retain people, to augment people's. Brains and the way people relate to their environment, especially in the context of hearing that we are so anti art, anti music, right?

Malcolm: So this is one of those interesting things. Where I can say our culture does not do something [00:01:00] and may have led to perhaps even a genetic thing, but more broadly, I think cultures should do that thing and here's why. So first, a little background here. Calvinist culture traditionally is very antagonistic to music or art.

Malcolm: Or any sort of frivolous pleasure that was either not evocationist or not evocatist. A great example is Geneva banned music for almost a century when they were predominantly Calvinist. It was, so it wasn't all music. It was any music that was either not that used words. Or was that like explicitly spiritual, I think.

Malcolm: But it was mostly any music that used words. And, and I can understand that sentiment, actually, when I was a kid, I felt the same way. I remember when I was very young, telling my parents that any music was words, wasn't real music. What? Yeah, I, I'm trying to remember why I felt this [00:02:00] instinctually so strong.

Malcolm: I think it was because... I, I thought that music that utilized anything other than sound to manipulate an individual's emotional state was like cheating or relying on, on an externality that it shouldn't rely on as a vanity. I don't, it was very interesting, but, but what I would say.

Malcolm: And so historically we from, come from a cultural group that as one of its core motivations is this idea that positive and negative emotional states you know, most cultures, it's only positive emotional states you would, you would go after that are pursued for their own sake, whether it's from emotion comes from music or sexuality or anything like that are always evil.

Malcolm: Yeah. That actions should always be dedicated to what's efficacious. And so I understand why my culture did this. And one of the things we'll talk about in a different culture is cultures can go evolve with a person's [00:03:00] genetics. By that what I mean is individuals with a sociological profile that were like really into music would have left this Cultural system much faster than those who didn't and people living adjacent to these sort of cultural groups who naturally were uninterested in music, but have been much more likely to join these cultural groups.

Malcolm: And also the extent to which our cultural groups feel is I remember I did not get my first CD was music on it until I was 12 and I went to a store and what I bought. Was a single because it was the cheapest thing in the store. But it was this weird, like I put it on a thing to see what it was like.

Malcolm: Okay. Why, why do people listen to this? Why did they spend money on this? I did not understand now, but let's talk about why groups use music and the value of music. So, I

Simone: mean, I feel you know, you're missing the big thing. I mean, aside from the fact that music. can really give you this almost transcendent experience, [00:04:00] right?

Simone: When you're doing it, it really helps to create this group of cohesion, this shared moment, but that interestingly secular music to me is a really interesting form of worship that is practiced even when people lose their religion. And it's like a worship to their culture and it's a worship to this is who I am.

Simone: And it reminds you so and this is how music has been used for millennia, right? Like music has usually been used for, for worship and for practice. And it helps you like

Malcolm: why it does that,

Simone: right? Well, I mean, one, it binds you to a group too. It often includes lore or canon for your culture, right?

Simone: These are our characters. We, these are our values. This is what we're into. And it, what to me is so interesting is the way that. Post religion music still does that. Look at country music and it's like keyword stuffed with this is what I value. These are the people that matter to me. So it's like back roads, hard work.

Simone: I love my mom. I love my dad. I [00:05:00] love my kids.

Malcolm: That's our favorite type of music. We don't listen to much music, but we do prefer country music.

Simone: Yeah. But it is very religious, like in nature, right? It's like

Malcolm: it's secular, but let's talk about why that's the case. Okay. So if you talk about the evolutionary pressures that led to the development of speech versus the development of music, it's really interesting.

Malcolm: Speech is a very effective person to person communication device. It allows one person to communicate with one other person. Or one person to communicate with a large group of people. Music is different. Music is a many to many cultural communication device. And that's where music gets really interesting.

Malcolm: So there's some great studies that have been done on this, which show, for example people who joined various clubs within a school, if it was a music club, they felt friendship with that group and camaraderie with that group much faster than other clubs. That makes sense. What is interesting [00:06:00] is that they, they did not have a higher ceiling to the camaraderie they felt.

Malcolm: They just felt camaraderie faster. So if you, accelerant. It's an accelerant, right? And there was another one that had two groups of students that would do running and one would do it to like a march step, like music and the other group would do it without that. And the group that was doing it to the music felt much more bonded to each other.

Malcolm: And this is why, so you can look at Military traditions. So military traditions evolve to an extent where the military traditions that outcompete other military traditions on the battlefield end up being the military traditions that other people try to copy, right? So there are evolutionary pressures within military traditions.

Malcolm: And this is how military traditions found out to do things like the, I don't know, but I've been told, you know, when they're like running. Even though nobody ever told them to do this like they didn't understand psychologically what they were doing, but just the groups that ran to music seemed to [00:07:00] outcompete other groups.

Malcolm: And it was because of the acting social accelerant.

Simone: Well, then why? Okay. Why is music not used more in dating then? If that's how it works, if it builds cohesion faster? What do you

Malcolm: think nightclubs are? Oh, I guess. So to us, you and me, nightclubs are this perplexing, insane environment where we're like, why would you?

Malcolm: Go and look for a partner in an environment where you can't talk to somebody because you know, our cultural biases are so strong there that we see the idea of dancing with a stranger to music. It's like really gross. Like even when I was a kid, I'd go to nightclubs and I'd be like, I do not get what's going on here.

Malcolm: Yeah. For cultures that have this strong musical predilection, that's what's going on there. They're using music as a communication device within a dating ecosystem. So very good question with a very good answer. Another interesting way that music can change people is music can activate and things that are done to music can activate many of the same systems that are activated [00:08:00] with like hallucinogens.

Malcolm: And other so one of the things that we often talk about is humans did not evolve to feel profundity tied to actual profundity. So by that what I mean is nothing in our evolutionary environment caused people to accurately gauge the profundity of a thing to survive more than people who didn't, right?

Malcolm: And to actually have an emotional state. set associated with that. So our emotional subset that feels profundity is actually most commonly hijacked with drugs, typically hallucinogens. However like it can be induced to feel this. However, music. Group chanting and group stomping can also cause this effect.

Malcolm: And so, religions or cultural practices that are trying to force convert people get new members can induce this state of profundity, which can lead to somebody being more interested in joining a cultural group than they otherwise would have. And then. rituals. [00:09:00] Interesting. I mean, what are your thoughts on music?

Malcolm: I've talked a little too much in this one, so I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on this.

Simone: I mean, I'm, I'm more interested in the, in the ways that. Secular music is being used intentionally and non intentionally now and how it's being left behind. I mean, I even think about like campaign music and how people are so obsessed with how, you know, like which campaign songs they're using, what that communicates.

Simone: Maybe it's just really underrated how, how much music matters in terms of setting a tone about like your value. Let's,

Malcolm: let's, let's dig into what you were talking about there. Okay. What's going on with campaign music? So, when I was younger, there was this thing called MySpace, right? And you'd write a bunch of stuff about yourself on MySpace, but you'd also have a song that played automatically when somebody went to the page, and you might be able to list your favorite artists, you know?

Malcolm: And people do that on Facebook still, to an extent, and stuff like that. What are you doing when you're listing those individuals? You are telling [00:10:00] people... This is who I am as an individual, you, other people, you have something that you associate with these artists, whether it's cultural things or character, you know, when somebody says.

Malcolm: I'm a Slipknot fan, or something like that, often. They're not saying I actually like the music of Slipknot, like they might. But, usually when somebody's saying that, what they're actually saying is, Here are character traits that I want to communicate to the people around me. When people are choosing campaign songs or music to play at campaign rallies, that's what they're doing.

Malcolm: They are conveying traits about them through bundled packages of beliefs about people who like X or Y that we have as a society.

Simone: So why do you think that teenagers feel the need to do this more? Is it just because they're much more socially like? I

Malcolm: think it's because they're less aware of who they are.

Malcolm: And so they're much more interested because they're so teenagers, what happens when you're a teenager, you [00:11:00] have just moved from the stage where your parents define who you are, to some extent, to you get to define who you are. And if you are dumb, sorry, I don't mean to say that about people who define themselves by music.

Malcolm: If you are, you know, less sophisticated in terms of how you think about yourself, great way to define yourself. Is from especially in a really glorifying way because music often Is glorifying to the individual that's listening to it, you could say you define yourself with the music you listen to.

Simone: So it's kind of like, being very lazy about how you define yourself and using someone who is a whole lot more poetic and eloquent than you to make your life seem and your identity seem more epic, thoughtful and profound than it really is.

Malcolm: And cohesive than it really is. Hmm. Mm. This is who I am.

Malcolm: I'm somebody who likes, I mean, and this is why I think when I was dating, you know, if somebody ever was like, oh, I really am into, you know, music and it wasn't like their own music, but other people's music, like if [00:12:00] somebody was really into their own music, I don't know, I, I would find that interesting like music that they were making.

Malcolm: But if it was other people's music, I was immediately like, oh, so like you don't have an identity, like your identity, so,

Simone: Okay, what also, though, about the, the phenomenon of the hot guy who plays guitar in high school? Yeah, so what's going on there? Is it just a social proof thing? Is, is it, is it the fact that he plays music that matters?

Simone: I mean, one thing is, first off, it's not like the guy who plays the oboe who gets all the women. It's the guy who plays the guitar. Is this a cultural

Malcolm: thing? What's going on? Well, I think that, that, that, that answers the question for you. It's not the music. That is turning on the women. It's that these are most often the guys in like a high school environment, like in high school, guys aren't making speeches that rooms of people are listening to often, right?

Malcolm: That's not a thing that's happening, at least in a cool way, like they might as like a science and they're talking to old people, but not like peers that a girl's going to respect. Right? But music, yeah, you can have a guy play music who's a teenager and a bunch of other cool teenage people [00:13:00] listening to that person playing music.

Malcolm: So what's happening there is a phenomenon you see, we've talked about it in other videos, which is when women see other women or men interested in a male their attraction rating for that male dramatically increases.

Simone: So the social proof effect, essentially,

Malcolm: it's the social proof effect. That's what you're seeing there.

Malcolm: And so. That being the case, if I was a guy who found some other way to communicate to cool people in mass within a high school context, I would probably get the same amount of people interested in me. And I did. And I did. So I know it works. I mean, I, I was captain of my debate team, right?

Malcolm: And I, in many environments would talk, you know, one to many within a high school environment. I also did a lot of speeches, like ran campaigns and stuff like that. And I did really well in terms of the, the, now this was interesting. My specialty was in high school. It was not the people in my high school, but the people in the surrounding town.

Malcolm: I think

Simone: you [00:14:00] completely ignored your own local market, right? When it came to Yeah, I just

Malcolm: completely ignored my own local market because my own local market required, and this is also really interesting about high school, playing the high school dominance hierarchy instead of just being the most attractive.

Malcolm: Person of the people that this person had, had engaged with which meant that I was playing a very different game and a much easier game to play in isolation. Yeah.

Simone: Yeah. Well, so what about I don't know how to put this, but like weirder or more esoteric music. I mean, do you think that like the, the more mature person who enjoys going to Baroque concerts is being just as social signaling?

Simone: about Baroque music as a teenager who goes to a popular music concert. Or do

Malcolm: you, you know, I feel this, I often criticize people when I think they're listening into classical music to try to look sophisticated.

Simone: Well, what about me though? Do you think, do you think I listened to, to Baroque music because [00:15:00] I, I think

Malcolm: music is able to manipulate an individual's emotional state.

Malcolm: And I think that some people, and this is my approved use of music and music as a tool for manipulating your emotional state, I think is very valuable. Now, obviously I would view that tool as completely indulgent if you're using it to modify your emotional state in a negative. Date. Yeah. So that you can feel extra sorry for yourself, which some people do.

Malcolm: I find that pretty indulgent,

Simone: but so so essentially doesn't break sad breakup songs when someone dumps you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Malcolm: yeah. But because they're just completely indulging in this negative emotional state, which is lowering the overall efficiency and efficacy. Sure. However, while we do not value like happiness, right.

Malcolm: I do believe that people are more efficient when they're happy. And so I do see the value of listening to music that can augment your, your level of happiness or create other emotional states. So

Simone: what I can say about that, just like really quick is in terms of at least music and focus the, the research is pretty mixed, but what I [00:16:00] have from like the gist of it after reading a bunch of them is if you like the music and you think that it will help you focus.

Simone: It will help you focus basically. So there is no like type of music that is like necessarily proven to help you focus. It's more if this is your focus music, it will help you. So just to that point.

Malcolm: Yeah. And this is where I think, you know, I was going to mention workout music, right? Which I think is very similar, right?

Malcolm: Some music can be used to augment your mental state into an environment where. You find something more fun than you would otherwise find it. So the point of workout music is for whatever reason, it modifies your mental experience of working out to make that experience more enjoyable than it is when you are not listening to workout music.

Malcolm: So,

Simone: so on that front I want to get what you do with music. Cause actually you are. For someone who doesn't, doesn't respect music that much, right? You are whenever doing something on your own, [00:17:00] doing a task that doesn't necessarily require a lot of focus. If you're unloading the car, you have an AMV playing and AMVs are anime music videos.

Simone: So this is not just music. It is music set to like remixed clips of anime shows or movies. So what are you doing there? What are you doing with your state and how do you choose what songs and, you know, like

Malcolm: what does this mean to you? Tasks and environments where I benefit from some level of mental dulling.

Malcolm: You know, whether that's alcohol or having music or an A and B on in the background or something like that. So are you

Simone: saying that music has the same effect as of like mentally dulling you? Like it just distracts you

Malcolm: a little. Well, so you know that I get my most productive work done often at 2 AM to, you know, 6 AM.

Malcolm: When you're

Simone: kind of half asleep, but

Malcolm: also not interrupted. Yeah, I try to wake up and be in that sort of half asleep state. I just am much more productive when my brain is not fully functioning. And I'm much less productive when my brain is on all cylinders. So I generally [00:18:00] try to do when I am, when I am doing something productive, but that is otherwise like mentally grinding, like going through emails, which is the majority of work I'm doing, or, you know, writing something that isn't fully mentally stimulating.

Malcolm: Trying to distract a part of my brain that might otherwise distract the rest of my brain with aberrant thoughts. Oh, why don't you go do this? Why don't you go do that? And when I was younger and I would take things like, you know, Ritalin or something like that to focus, right? I did not listen to music when I was working because it dulled my mind enough that I was able Work.

Malcolm: So that's why I relate to music in that way. Now we can talk a bit about the evolution of music because, but I think it's very interesting. I, in a previous video, I, I wanted do on this where I was showing that like a, a, if you play music for some birds that can speak, they'll start dancing very similar to the way that we start dancing, right?

Malcolm: They, they clearly, really enjoy it and jive was it. [00:19:00] And then I realized I couldn't put any of those videos in 'cause they all had popular songs playing. So you just have to. YouTube them yourself. But what we can see is that in a pre speech animal that has a lot of mental processing dedicated to vocalizations you are going to have the ability to essentially massage that part of its brain in the same way you might massage somebody with like your fingertips and your hands, where like you are subtly touching like a large portion of them in a way.

Malcolm: That creates like a pleasant stimulation and then specific historic religious groups began to utilize this for many to many communication and group bonding rituals, which are obviously a thing of utility. And so evolution being a cheap programmer, as we always say, evolution is a cheap programmer, basically hijacked this system and said, okay, yeah, let's cause people to create these quick emotional bonds through this system.

Malcolm: How evolution, because the [00:20:00] groups of humans that were able to create these faster bonds when undergoing this mini to mini communication ceremony or, or types of ceremonies ended up out competing likely, you know, martially and, and in other ways other groups of humans.

Simone: That checks out. Yeah. Well, so, okay.

Simone: What about the future of music? How do you think it could be used weaponized? I mean, there's also the weaponization of music, right? Like music has been used in like Guantanamo Bay to quote unquote, like torture people. Right. So how do you think that for better or for good or for evil music should or can be used in the future?

Simone: Well,

Malcolm: so I think the really sad thing is the way music is weaponized. Best can happen organically within a cultural group and that music can be used to completely destroy the value system of a cultural group. So I'm not going to name names here, but you know, we were talking about country music.

Malcolm: Country music, I think, is, is actually really reinforcing for the [00:21:00] cultural groups that listen to it. If you look at the themes of country music, it's typically you know, I really respect and love my wife.

Simone: Hard work, family values, and appreciating what you have, which is not

Malcolm: a lot. Yeah. And when it's, and when it's negative, it's typically you cheated on me.

Malcolm: So I fucked up your car or killed you or you know, you abused your wife. And so your wife killed you. You know, those are like the more negative country music themes. However. They still, at the end, portray a positive value, which is don't, you know, f**k around and find out, right? However when I look at other music clusters and the value systems that they portray to, and this is a cross, I'm not like talking about just one group, right?

Malcolm: They often are really toxic,

Simone: Yeah, like either, either super materialistic, super focused on very unsustainable relationship formats. [00:22:00] Like even when I think about and not to like hate on Taylor Swift songs, but like when I hear a lot of her songs, which I enjoy like listening to in a certain mood, like I'm like, Oh man, this is.

Simone: This is encouraging a really toxic relationship. Whatcha doing? Whatcha thinking

Malcolm: of, I can't, I can't model what you're thinking of here 'cause I don't know the

Simone: song. I, I don't know the names of her songs. I just hear the, the lyrics of just you know, we're, we're dangerous or bad for each other, you know, but we're gonna do it anyway.

Simone: Or and, you know, also just like other really fun, playful songs or like I love Katy Perry songs. A lot of them are just more about like partying and stuff, which, you know, Yeah.

Malcolm: Okay. So let's take it up here because that's, that's a music that's not going to get us in trouble. Like a song like what's the song where she's talking about being Japanese y or whatever, or

Simone: this is how we do. Oh, that's my... Yeah, this is how we do.

Malcolm: This is how we do, right? I mean, what's the, what's the song teaching people to value? Partying all day, being so irresponsible.

Simone: This one goes to the kids out late at the club and it's Tuesday. Yeah. This is the ones who are playing for bottle service with your rent money.

Simone: I love that song, but yeah, like not [00:23:00]

Malcolm: the best. Very engaging song in that I think it emotionally uplifts your mood. But if you're like, it is, it is a cultural toxin in terms of the value system that is glorified in that music. And so these sort of musical, I don't know what you can call them musical bombs or musical toxins can be induced into a cultural group and used to keep that cultural group you know, mentally addled in an adversarial relationship with like police, for example in all sorts of negative things.

Malcolm: That, you know, just organically evolved. So when we talk about where music is the most toxic, it's actually music that just organically evolves and that the only thing you can really do to fight that is, is if you're within the cultural group and you're just like. Hey, I put you, you, you, you're not going to be able to change society as a whole, but you can, within your family say, we don't listen to [00:24:00] music like this,

Simone: right?

Simone: There are many like conservative Christian cultures, which are like, Oh, we don't listen to that. That's the devil's music or see, I don't mean I'm just modeling a really bad caricature here,

Malcolm: yes. But the devil's music, when people are like, oh, that's the devil's music. We might look at that as like backwards and a weird thing to say, but people say it because it matters.

Malcolm: Yeah. And as a final point on music. This was actually a chapter that we ended up deleting from our book to an extent. But basically we say that, that groups that really know, like conservative groups that really seem to engage in fun parties seem to have higher fertility rates than their neighbors, which don't seem to engage in fun parties.

Malcolm: And a great example here would be. Jews conservative Jewish groups seem to have some of the most quote unquote fun parties where we look at the cultural groups that I think I feel more instinctual kinship with the Anabaptist cultural groups, you know, Amish and Mennonites, you know, when I look at their [00:25:00] parties, it's stuff like let's build a house and all the wives will go and make food for us that we'll get to eat and then we'll lift the barn and carry the barn.

Malcolm: And I see that, I go, that looks like a good time.

Malcolm: But actually, and this is just like a personal thing. Like I am not passing a societal judgment. I am almost like instinctually repelled when I see some of these like Jewish people. Parties where I can tell everyone is having like a lot of fun, but I just noticed like the people touching other people without asking And it's hot

Simone: Sweaty and

Malcolm: like it probably smells bad in like they're not talking like they're not engaging with ideas. They're there. They're Having fun for fun's sake. And I think that this is where something comes to where I can say, I think that those events help their culture outcompete other cultures, but this is also why, and this should be another video we should probably do, that people begin to almost genetically specialize for their [00:26:00] cultural group.

Malcolm: And we get what we call like an evolutionary vortex where the group draws people in. Who would thrive in a group like that and kicks people out who wouldn't thrive in a group like that and just me This sort of music party environment is something that when I look at it I'm just like, Oh my God, the floor is probably sticky.

Malcolm: And people are touching me without asking me first. Oh my God, when somebody tried to kiss me. No, no. Yeah. No, but you you I mean, Simone, would you say you feel the same way? Like when you see these videos? Or?

Simone: Oh, totally. Yeah. Like the only way I would be remotely okay. Like mentally with the situations in the moment is if I'm so sloshed, I'm probably blackout drunk.

Simone: If we're being totally

Malcolm: honest. Oh God. And what if somebody tried to hug you? No, it's a brotherly hug. It's I don't care if it's a sexual hug or not get your hands off me. I want a five foot bubble [00:27:00] of personal space and you can stay out of it. Okay. And I want silence. I want to think I went to one concert in my entire life.

Malcolm: And the only, it was, it was BlizzCon. So I went to BlizzCon and they had a Foo Fighters play. So that's my conference. It was actually a video game. It was a video game conference. And they had a band come, but I got to see the concert experience and it was miserable. It was loud. It was painful. My only takeaway is if I ever go to a concert again, I'm going to need earplugs.

Malcolm: I, I do not, it did not look to me like people were like jumping up and down, but having fun in this kind of totally mindless way that I just cannot mentally

Simone: engage with. Nope. Nope. Nope. Just no, but yeah, Hey, I'm, I'm glad that I'm married to someone who does not drag me to concerts. Thank you very much,

Malcolm: Malcolm.

Malcolm: Well, I'm assortative meeting here, right? This could even be seen as behavioral isolation, [00:28:00] people like you and me, we find each other in our weird and no music environments where most people are not looking for partners. And a, we can say our, our. Final point on music is it is probably the optimum cultural group probably uses music.

Malcolm: That is not our cultural.

Simone: So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Yes. I love you, Malcolm.

Journalist Katherine Dee joins Simone and Malcolm for a deep dive on mediated relationships. They discuss intimacy via screens, "real" internet friends, social media personas, roleplaying communities, and lessons from Katherine's experiences with online dating.

Katherine Dee: [00:00:00] In the kind of environment we live in, either you have no friends and only very perfunctory relationships, or you have, or you're, like, isolate, you're physically isolated but you have these deep internet relationships.

Katherine Dee: Um, and I think that's sort of like an interesting, like what is the value of someone who like you don't really go deep with but like you have a lot of physical experiences with? Like you're both, you know, like you're maybe You always see them at church or like you play basketball with them or something and you have that kind of like regularity and the relationship is less based on this confessional sort of thing that millennials love so much, um, and more, more based on like physical movement somehow, or like involvement in a project that's bigger than oneself.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, everyone. We are very excited to be joined today by Catherine Dee, AKA Default Friend, one of the world's preeminent internet experts and historians in internet culture. She is absolutely insightful.

Simone: She is a journalist who contributes to quite a few different [00:01:00] outlets. She's a blogger. She's just. Very insightful and fun to talk with and she suggested something that really piqued our interest when we were scheduling this podcast, the durability of mediated relationships. Catherine, what do you have in mind here?

Katherine Dee: Yeah, this is something I think about a lot. Like how much intimacy. can be fostered just completely over a screen or on the phone? Um, and it's sort of an open ended question, but it's something that I think about a lot. I guess, maybe a more fun way to ask is, like, how real are internet friends?

Simone: It's such a good

Malcolm: question. Which is to say that I think that the different contexts in which we communicate with somebody Access different parts of our brain, and to an extent, you are literally communicating with a different person. So in a way, a multimedia friendship can be much deeper than a non multimedia friendship.

Malcolm: By this, what I mean is the person who talks [00:02:00] with Simone over the phone. Versus the person who talks with Simone in person, versus the person who writes emails to Simone, versus the person who writes, you know, one way we used to communicate when we were apart from each other was through journal posts. So Simone would write eight pages of journals about her day and then I would like annotate that afterwards as like a, oh, you did this, this is interesting.

Malcolm: And each one of those I feel is talking with. A slightly different person living in the same person's head. Yeah,

Simone: actually. So there's, there's a, and people think we're really crazy for doing this. Um, those who watch video of our podcast, because Malcolm and I are in the same house, but we, we always do podcasts from different rooms and that's actually like very much a good illustration of how for us, we, we will actively mediate our relationship through a video call.

Simone: Um, just to get into a certain different mind state. Um, because. I, for example, think very differently when I'm alone in a room than when I'm in a, in a room with a person, even if it's Malcolm, who might as well just be me because we're [00:03:00] the same person. So I think that's, that's really interesting.

Simone: What are your thoughts

Malcolm: on all this?

Katherine Dee: Um, I, I think that you can actually get closer, um, in, in mediated relationships than you can, um, in physical world ones. I mean, part of that is just that you act you know, you actually can spend more time with the person, even though it's a different type of time, right?

Katherine Dee: Um, and there's, I, I think, actually you could be more deceptive in real life than in cyberspace. In cyberspace, you could lie about Right? Like your profession or your hair color or things like that. Um, but you, there's the, you can't really lie emotionally as much, especially after you hit a certain amount of time with someone.

Katherine Dee: And I feel like with a lot of like digital relationships for really, if you have a high volume of communication, which a lot do because we're always sort of ambiently on our phones or ambiently online. Um. You could actually start to merge with the other [00:04:00] person and I don't know if that's healthy, that could be actually very toxic, but I do think um, if not like durable, like you actually can get closer.

Katherine Dee: Um, and yeah, I just think, I just think about that a lot and like what happens to relationships where you have that like closeness and then you bring it into the physical world. Does it change?

Malcolm: Well, so something that, that, you know, we've talked about in other places and we might do a full episode on this.

Malcolm: is the way that online environments are structured changes the type of interactions and views that will be espoused in them. Because it naturally leads to specific types of status hierarchies within those communities. So you take a something like Reddit, right? Where the most average liked opinion is the most likely to be seen.

Malcolm: Meaning you're going to get very normie, inoffensive, sort of left leaning opinions. Whereas you take something like, um, 4chan, where it's the most stimulating opinion is the most likely to be seen. So you're likely to get the most offensive opinions rising to [00:05:00] the top. Or you can contrast that with something like Twitter, um, where you know, for something I wrote to be seen.

Malcolm: It actually helps more if somebody disagrees with it and, and, and ratios me, you know, retweets me, um, than if they like it in terms of getting it in front of other people, so you end up with, you know, pointlessly offensive takes often in that community, um, in a different way than they're pointlessly offensive on 4chan, where they're just meant to be mentally stimulating unfortunate, like the maximum emotional response instead of the maximum disagreement or, um, and so within these different communities, I wonder how you think about different environments, how they change, whether it's romantic or friendships that form in those environments.

Katherine Dee: Yeah, that's actually, this is like an interesting point because I think like when there's like the public facing. Expression right on the Twitter timeline versus in the Twitter DMS, and then there's 1 on 1 DMS, and then there's group chats, right? And in all of those situations, there's different incentives, but I think it's I [00:06:00] think we could think about it in the same way as, um, you know, the difference in an office versus someone you meet at you know, through a club or hobby, right? Because you're, there's, there's, you have to bring a different piece of yourself to that environment. Um, when I think about like online relationships, I guess I've like often, and even when I've written about it, I think about it in like the, like one on one, right?

Katherine Dee: Um, and. Somehow carrying someone with you everywhere. But I haven't thought about it as much, um, in these sort of more public environments. And that's a, that's a really, it's a really good point because then you're constructing a character and maybe actually you can't form deep relationships in certain public venues in the same way you can't necessarily in a Goldman Sachs office, right?

Malcolm: Well, I mean, is there some particular experience that you experience that is particularly evocative around this question?

Simone: Um,

Katherine Dee: yeah, I mean, and this, this, it's interesting [00:07:00] because like I've, I've read a lot about like other people experiencing this too um, like talking to someone so much that like you almost, um, hallucinate their presence or like being on a phone call where like you feel like you're in the same physical space.

Katherine Dee: Um, and it's, it's funny, there's one study that I bring up a lot and I can't seem to, I was looking for it today. But there's, um, three different women, it was an Israeli study, who were in these digital relationships, and they started hallucinating the presence of their lover and, um, the, their touch, and it was considered a psychotic symptom.

Katherine Dee: But I, but when I read this, I always thought is it a psychotic symptom, or is there something about Filling in the blanks in our head or something, right? There's another study that was done where in game, like eye contact, um, affects people the same way as like real life eye contact or like eye contact is like subday, like whatever would represent eye [00:08:00] contact in like the particular game, which I thought it was like really interesting, right?

Katherine Dee: There is some physical, like physiological thing happening there.

Simone: I, one thing that I'm also thinking about here that's like this, this conversation is changing the way that I think about catfishing. Um, like part of me is well, you know, as long as people never meet in person, you know, is catfishing really that bad of a thing?

Simone: Because I think that the emotional connection that many people are building is very real, even if I think I'm talking to a 24 year old. You know, 5'9 gorgeous woman.

Malcolm: So there's this great catfishing case, I love true crime internet stuff, um, where a guy was dating this, this with catfishing this young girl.

Malcolm: So he was pretending to be a young, you know, sniper in the military. Um, and then he got in a fight with another guy who wasn't catfishing the girl, but he knew in person. And so then she goes and he kills the other guy in, in, in real life. So he can have this girl who he's catfishing, [00:09:00] even though she thinks that he's 30 years younger than he is.

Malcolm: And then he finds out that actually she was. Like an old woman and, and had been catfishing him the whole time. Um, and so it can hurt people, Simone. Um,

Katherine Dee: but I think that's, that's a good, but I, I agree with you, Simone. Like I, I, this is something I've written a lot about. I actually think lying has is different in certain online social contexts, um, because it's can be expressing like a greater emotional truth that you can't express because you don't have body language.

Katherine Dee: And so maybe there's certain kinds of lies that are done because they're like. Social expedient, or you want clout or whatever, but then there's lies that you have to tell because it, it, there's some sort of shared narrative, or there's some sort of shared world building that's inherent in not having a physical space with someone.

Katherine Dee: Hmm,

Simone: yeah. I also like speaking of the physical barrier here, like whether or not, you know, the problem is that you're actually, you know, a 72 year old male or whether the problem is you are an [00:10:00] AI, like one thing that Malcolm and I talk about a lot because we really want our kids to be exposed to ambitious, smart, really well informed friends is we're sort of thinking, okay, well, you know, should we just set up our kids with AI friends that are like really smart, really ambitious, like their peer network.

Simone: Yeah. Just that you know, a lot of their friends that we try to set them up with are like literal AI's that they just develop close friendships with that. We'll tell them that they're AI's, but. Honestly, from various like simulated boyfriend, girlfriend scenarios that seem to be out there now, maybe

Malcolm: that doesn't shame those types of relationships if they won't see them as lesser.

Malcolm: But the question is, if they don't see them as lesser, would they still be motivated to form real connections to people and build real relationships?

Simone: Right. But I'm curious to get your thoughts, Catherine, on like how mediated relationships where there isn't even like the ability to ever meet a carbon based consciousness.

Katherine Dee: I, I'm on the fence about it because I don't really think it's [00:11:00] that different than the attachments people have to like fictional characters. Um. And, you know, there's a lot of, a lot is probably a stretch, but there are people who have, um, romantic attachments to fictional characters, enough that there's such a thing called fictosexuality, which is distinct from robot fetishism, right, which is people who fall in love with their real dolls or whatever.

Katherine Dee: Um, right. It's like its own thing. Um, and it's that's, I mean, maybe in that case, like the AI is, it's better, you know, like if it's, if it's something in us that causes us to have these relationships anyway, um, I mean, here's a really corny like terrible thing, but you know, what if Dante had a Beatrice AI, right?

Katherine Dee: You know what well, he

Simone: practically did. I mean, he, he wrote so much fan fiction about her basically.

Katherine Dee: Exactly. I, to me there's no, there's no difference between like his sort of obsession with this woman he saw twice. Yeah. Um, and then someone sort [00:12:00] of like. Quote unquote, like falling in love with an anime character, Harry Potter character.

Katherine Dee: Oh my god, I love

Simone: that you just drew that comparison. Yes, because there is no difference, and that would absolutely destroy so many of my fancy literature friends. So, thank you.

Malcolm: So, something I'm wondering if you've ever dug into in terms of internet history around this sort of stuff, when I hear these stories...

Malcolm: A community that I used to really love to dig into when I was younger, and I don't know how young you are, but I think I might be a bit older than you, was the Second Life community and their relationships that they were forming in that, in that environment. Um, and so many of the wild stories of that community just seemed to mirror.

Malcolm: What people think is like a new internet phenomenon,

Simone: like the meta stuff, right? I remember one

Malcolm: story of this group, a couple met on second life and they got married and then they realized they didn't like each other in person, but they stayed married living in the same house, but would only talk through their computers.

Malcolm: Um, [00:13:00] and, but this sounds like a

Simone: modern No, that sounds so romantic to me. Are you kidding me?

Malcolm: Yeah, it might have been World of Warcraft. And there's one of the two. That's where like all the weird online stuff used to

Katherine Dee: happen. Yeah, it's, it's, and it wasn't even really new then because like people would do the same kind of stuff on multi user dungeons.

Katherine Dee: Um, which is, again, they're, they're, they're role, they're basically role playing games, but they're text based. Um, no, I, I'm Can you talk about those and the culture that was in them? Yeah, um, it was a, a lot of, some of them were, there was like gameplay, but a lot of them were like, Sort of like chat rooms or like chat rooms that have a collaborative story telling element to them.

Katherine Dee: Um, and there's, you know, the very similar story that I like, I return to all the time because I think it's so interesting and I think it's still applicable today. Um, It's in either Life on the Screen or The Second Self by Sherry Turkle. This, [00:14:00] um, couple falls in love, or so they think, over a multi user dungeon.

Katherine Dee: So in this sort of role playing chat room. And they meet in person. There's no chemistry. And then, when they're interviewing the male half, he says, you know, Well, I looked through our chat logs, and I had projected connection and romance that wasn't there. And it and there's something like he had interpreted, he'd misinterpreted the text.

Katherine Dee: Um, and I just to I know that sort of sounds like contradictory to everything I just said about e romance and like digital friendships. But I think because we're so toxically plugged in, that actually prevents that kind of. Misreading, um, or at least ideally it will, it would prevent prevent that, but I thought it was just so interesting.

Katherine Dee: Like we are, it is like interpreting people and text based medium is really just like interpreting. Literature, um, people will have radically different ideas about a [00:15:00] poem or even a short story and see things that aren't there. And it's especially reflected in fandom when it's people will see a whole homoerotic romance hidden in the text, and you're like, well, what, what are you talking, like, where'd you get that?

Katherine Dee: But they really believe it and they'll give, they'll have receipts at the wazoo.

Simone: Well, I think that's one of the special things about mediated relationships is depending on how you're coming into them, you can take the most generous, charitable, inspiring, whatever interpretation of someone. And I think it's a lot harder to.

Simone: Um, take a pessimist, a more pessimistic approach, whereas in person, I think that like people end up taking more pessimistic interpretations and also people's what we would call overlay states can more easily pollute the situation, like if you're hot or tired or hungry and you're together in person, like it's more likely to lead to negative interactions, whereas if you're interacting asynchronously with someone via it.

Simone: email or even just text or whatever, like you're probably not going to be interacting with them when you're at this like really low point with your mood. So [00:16:00] also the interactions you have are probably more likely to be like a little bit more mentally sound and stable than if you guys were together in person, I'm thinking, but maybe that's not the case.

Simone: I also imagine like we live in an age in which people have. some serious anxiety problems, um, that I'm like, I'm, I'm one of these people, like it's, it's hard to go outside or it's hard to make friends and interact with people. And so I also imagine that mediated relationships are kind of a solution for a generation of people that suffers from more mental health issues than previous generations.

Simone: The

Malcolm: ability to access mediated relationships is what causes those anxiety problems because you are allowed to indulge in that.

Katherine Dee: I think that's partially true. And I also think like Um, there's, in, in person, there's sort of like, you can have a lot of shallow connections that are, like, satisfying and serve a purpose, um, whereas in the kind of environment we live in, either you have no friends and only very [00:17:00] perfunctory relationships, or you have, or you're, like, isolate, you're physically isolated but you have these deep internet relationships.

Katherine Dee: Um, and I think that's sort of like an interesting, like what is the value of someone who like you don't really go deep with but like you have a lot of physical experiences with? Like you're both, you know, like you're maybe You always see them at church or like you play basketball with them or something and you have that kind of like regularity and the relationship is less based on this confessional sort of thing that millennials love so much, um, and more, more based on like physical movement somehow, or like involvement in a project that's bigger than oneself.

Simone: I'm also I'm thinking about mediated relationships in the past and I'm thinking like my, um, My maternal grandparents met once at a USO ball in Paris right as the, as World War II was ending. My grandmother was French, my grandfather was Inoki, and they Not French, Russian. Sorry, well, yeah, she was Russian who had yeah, fled to [00:18:00] She called herself French.

Simone: She wanted to be French so bad. So you're disgracing her memory here. How dare you. Um, but anyway, so like after they met, um, they exchanged letters for a long time and then eventually they just decided to get married. Based on these letters alone. This is a totally mediated relationship. My grandmother moved sight unseen.

Simone: To a, an outhouse, one bedroom farmhouse full of a family of people. And my grandfather to marry him in Oklahoma. And it was a very rough ride for both of them, I think, but they stayed married throughout their entire lifetimes and had a pretty successful marriage. And one thing I'm wondering is tactically speaking, could mediated relationships be a solution to some market failures in the dating world where if, if, if we, if more people committed to.

Simone: Developing a strong connection and aligned incentives and goals via a mediated relationship and committed to marriage, like before ever meeting in person, because it seems like the visual emphasis [00:19:00] seems to be what kills people's ability to connect right now especially if they want to get married because they're so focused on visuals and like instant am I super hot for this person?

Simone: No. Okay. I'm not even going to consider them even if everything else on paper is perfect. And we'd be actually really good long term partners. I'm wondering if forced commitment based on a mediated relationship that. does work really well, can produce good long term relationships. What do you think?

Katherine Dee: Um, so I actually did this. I married an internet stranger after very little time. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm actually in my second marriage right now, which is more, a better, I don't want to say better, a different situation. But the reason that my first marriage didn't work was because. There wasn't, we, you know, we experienced not to air my, my dirty laundry on a podcast, but we had some personal tragedies that were like insurmountable that I think would have been surmountable if we had more community support and were more grounded in a culture and community.

Katherine Dee: Um, and. So, I think what, you know, the [00:20:00] failure of relationships, it's so much of that is your environment we I think we, we lasted a very long time, you know, for, especially for the strangeness and unique circumstances, but it just couldn't, it just couldn't work because we were, like, on an island, right, and we both have very good relationships with our family, but, But you know, he was from a different country, we were living in a state that I didn't grow up in, so like my community there was not as strong.

Katherine Dee: Which of

Malcolm: the relationships was the one that was the short online relationship first?

Katherine Dee: My, my first, my first marriage, um, and yeah, yeah, um, sorry about that, but, but my, yeah, my second, now I'm on my second marriage and it's formed much more traditionally, like certainly more like in person time and like more integrating into one another's You know, real world lives and it's, I don't think that it was that I met what ruined, ruined or ended my first, my first relationship wasn't the, that [00:21:00] it started as a mediated relationship, rather, we weren't part of a broader cultural fabric.

Katherine Dee: And there's certain problems that like, I mean, it's total amicable, totally amicable split. Right. But it just, there's some things you really need help. And if you don't have that help, or like the role models, it's so, it's, it can be really hard.

Malcolm: Well, how did you try to address that with the second relationship?

Katherine Dee: Well, with the second relationship, I, it's now there's like more of an emphasis of making sure that we're grounded in a community and that we're not, so we're not like, you know, striking out on our own in a city where neither one of us has family or connections. There's I think all of those things.

Katherine Dee: Become really important. Um, as you get deeper into a relationship and as you mature into a relationship, um, just just being part of. Something, right, is, it, it helps a lot, um, but yeah, I think just being, we were, like, we, [00:22:00] we didn't really know our neighbors, we weren't really in a city it was just, we were just so isolated, and it was, it was, I think, more problematic, um, than either one of us expected.

Simone: What I like there is you're saying, it doesn't not work, and that if you were maybe to combine people starting relationships in this mediated way. But then when they physically come together, being supported by a broader, culturally aligned community, it actually could work pretty well. Um, yeah.

Katherine Dee: But that would change how people date period.

Katherine Dee: I think um, there's just something where it's like, things are too like piecemeal almost. Um, where I think like it, it could just, it's just really. It's just really hard to navigate the world as a single unit that's kind of floating in this ether of you don't really know where you belong.

Katherine Dee: And I think, not, that's, that won't kill every relationship, but that will put stress on a relationship, especially if you encounter [00:23:00] things that are outside of your control.

Simone: That's fair. Huh. Any other thoughts, Malcolm?

Malcolm: On, on, well, okay, I mean, a direction we could go is this. is pseudonymous relationships that are seen in things like the furry community.

Malcolm: I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Katherine Dee: Oh, that's, that's interesting where it's like, they don't, they only know one another through their persona. Yeah. And I

Malcolm: think they, well, there are, they originally meet through that. And I think you see this in many fan communities. Where people will engage through fan characters, you know, My Little Pony, they might have a, I don't know what they would have called them, pony sonas or something.

Malcolm: Um, and, and, and that's how they would have interacted with each other. Because I think even in the furry community, you probably find out pretty quickly who these people are. Like, I doubt there's as much mystery. Whereas I think in some of these fan communities, another great one is that, that fan community around that book about cats.

Malcolm: Um, where a lot of people would [00:24:00] identify as like a, a, a cat Sona thing. Um, there's some YouTubers who, who talk on this stuff, but yeah.

Katherine Dee: Yeah. So that's, that's interesting. I'm, I'm trying to think back to my own experiences. I was really into text based role playing. Um, so it's not quite the same, but it's, it's, it's similar.

Katherine Dee: And I would do like historical role plays. You know, I'm really interested in the 1780s, you know, this week. So I'm going to create a world around that. Awesome. There would be, like, romance elements sometimes, um, and even I'm trying to think of ones that, like, when sometimes these, these role plays will go on for years, right, and you'll be in these narrative relationships, and it, but it doesn't really impact your physical, physical life, and it's I don't think I was, Whatever affection I myself had, not my character had, is not for the person controlling the avatar, it's for...

Katherine Dee: It's for the, the writing and the character they've [00:25:00] constructed and what I've projected into that character in, and that, that world. And I would guess that our fursonas may be similar because there's some element of separation and it's, there's some sort of role playing element there. And it feels, it feels like it's kind of separate, whereas the difference between something like that.

Katherine Dee: And Second Life, it tends to be more like your avatar in Second Life is actually more like your username on Twitter. Um, and there can be a separation there, but it's not as often as there is in like something that's consciously a roleplay. Um, so maybe it, and I guess I am not in the furry community and I haven't talked to people in the furry community, so I guess it could actually go either way.

Katherine Dee: It could, it depends on how they're using the fursona.

Malcolm: Yeah, so this, this roleplaying thing that you're talking about is very... Interesting. Um, so how do you choose the people that are in these persistent communities? Or can people just drop in and you engage with them based on the quality of their writing?

Katherine Dee: Yeah, um, I haven't done it in a really long time. I think the [00:26:00] last time I like Actively was role playing was 2007, but people would just, it was pretty, um, it was a pretty small community. Um, so people just find like forums and then there would be some sort of like gatekeeping or like hazing that would happen and you, you know, you would get accepted in the community or filtered out.

Katherine Dee: Um, and then. People would like gravitate towards one another if they have compatible writing styles and there's usually like a start like a Universal style guide for whatever forum or if you maybe chat room and dependent, you know, you could do it on different platforms and then every if it was like a literary roleplay everyone would write as though they're writing a story and it could be Published in a book and then there's other types of roleplay where like actions are an asterisk or parentheses And usually those are quicker moving.

Katherine Dee: They're probably more likely to be in a chat room. Um, yeah. And it's just, it's just a chemistry thing. Um, sometimes, you know, sometimes you have chemistry with people. Sometimes you don't.

Malcolm: Did you ever meet [00:27:00] any of these people in person or were these relationships always pseudonymous?

Katherine Dee: Yeah. I met one woman in person.

Katherine Dee: I met her when I was like. And, um, then I, I lived in, um, her city very briefly and we, we met up in person and then we were friends until I was like, I don't know, like 25. And then I just stopped using Facebook. And so then we stopped being friends.

Simone: That is actually really, I think it's, it's an underrated element of a friendship.

Simone: Um, that there are some people that you can only be friends with through certain channels. And this doesn't, this is not exclusive to mediated relationships where you like, primarily you had started out there, but there are literal in person friends that I can think of who, because I refuse to use like iMessage after I changed my phone number and I.

Simone: can really access like iMessage, they just refuse to communicate with me on any other channel. So we're just not going to be friends anymore. And I feel like there are some people who can only be contacted through very, very specific platforms. And that's, [00:28:00] it's an interesting thing. It's they don't exist outside of them.

Simone: Um, and it's weird to live in an age where things kind of work that way.

Katherine Dee: I, it, it is weird, but also I wonder like, how different is it from you know, a work friend who like can't make the transition to a different kind of, right? Like you're my, you're my Facebook friend and just whatever. I, I don't like talking to you on iMessage.

Katherine Dee: So that's the, that's that.

Simone: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Oh, gosh. Okay. This was really, really interesting and really, really fun. And I know we're running out of time, so we will let you get back to your life. But Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. We would love to have you back on at some point.

Simone: You are absolutely brilliant. Um, and I hope we can talk again soon and everyone else please tell, tell us all where we should find your work.

Katherine Dee: Um, you can find me on Twitter at D or X at default underscore friend, or my blog is just default dot blog. Great.

Katherine Dee: Thank you very [00:29:00] much. Yeah. Thanks.

Malcolm and Simone have an insightful discussion about the paradoxes in progressive culture's view of diversity. They analyze how progressivism claims to value diversity yet enforces ideological conformity, and how "minority status" is defined in strange ways. Malcolm argues progressivism commits cultural genocide, while Simone provides nuance on progressives' motivations. Their dialogue highlights the clashing worldviews underlying today's culture wars.

Malcolm: , [00:00:00] you've got to understand how literally insane it sounds to be a cultural group that says diversity is a thing of value and everyone's actually the same.

Malcolm: What they mean by diversity, and this is very important, is that we are open to recruiting people into our cultural group from any other cultural group. They don't really value diversity. What they value is diversity in

Simone: victims. Well, I don't know. See, yeah, I was, I was going to say I think the difference here is, is the, the role that intersectionality plays in progressive culture, but so I think that that's what we're missing is cultural outsiders intersectionality.

Simone: It, it is, it is victimhood status And that's one, that's one view. And you know, I, progressive culture is not a monolith it is a monolith.

Malcolm: I'm sorry, in what way is it not a monolith? Explain. Well,

Simone: because I do think that there are many people who identify as progressives who don't agree with [00:01:00] every element of it.

Malcolm: Yeah, but you're just on the outside. This is what your cultural group actually believes at the highest levels, and this is what your cultural group will try to enforce on the surrounding cultural groups, regardless of whether or not it's something that you...

Malcolm: personally identify with and I think that that's, that's really, this is like you go to a Nazi and he's like, well, I'm not antisemitic.

Simone: Malcolm, you're not being Fair.

Malcolm: why are you

Simone: so unwilling? I, I, anyway. Why am I

Malcolm: so unwilling to morally compromise? If you're okay with a cultural group that's out there that's using our school system to systematically erase everyone who thinks differently than them , and if it was literally any group other than yours doing that, you'd be like, Oh, this is like the most evil thing anyone can do.

Malcolm: I, I'd really, you know, encourage some self reflection.

Simone: Your arguments and your wording are not going to engage people.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm: The progressive party, like it talks about diversity a lot. [00:02:00] Like it says diversity is important. And yet in, in two ways, it seems to have a systemic hatred.

Malcolm: In denial of diversity. So, way number one is it says different groups are not actually different. Different cultural groups are different. Different ethnic groups aren't different. Different, nobody's different. Everyone's actually exactly the same.

Simone: Oh, like there's not even, you know, men and women are exactly the same.

Simone: Yeah, men and women are

Malcolm: exactly the same. Not different at all. But, but it's also super important that you respect people when they decide that they're a different gender. Why would any of this matter if we're all exactly the same? This is so interesting and it's such an incongruous part of this sort of progressive world perspective, which is,

Malcolm: I don't know, it's very difficult for me to like really grok, because it's [00:03:00] so astronomically simple.

Simone: Stupid. Well, I think that it's interesting because progressivism in general, as it exists today is full of paradoxes and it's not just about diversity. It's also about freedom. Like I grew up thinking, you know, and I, and living in a very progressive culture that progressivism was all about freedom, freedom to choose what partner you wanted, freedom to choose.

Simone: how you dressed, what you said, how you acted, who you could become, you know, you can be anyone you want, any gender you want, anything, anything, whatever, you know, you are free to choose. And what I find to be really interesting is the extent to which it's actually quite the opposite there. Like it's actually pretty coercive and that no, actually you can't.

Simone: You can't do things that offend these groups, you can't, actually I was just listening to a podcast covering an element of the furry community and the furry community was talking about how it's super, super not okay to watch, I think what they referred to as, as feral erotic material, we're [00:04:00] gonna say.

Simone: You know, like I guess video footage or illustrations of animals banging each other. Because that's, you know, coercive, which, which is weird because if you're a furry, you might be like more likely to be turned on by something like that.

But

Malcolm: just interesting. Okay. So I, I will word this cause I think that our viewers may not understand what you just said.

Malcolm: And it's really interesting. It immediately makes sense to me. What they're saying is that in the furry community. These are people who like to dress up as animals and hit on other people, dress up like animals. They say it's not a sexual

Simone: thing. And there's a subset, of course, that also is species dim dysmorphic, meaning that they actually feel like they're really a fox or they really Or like a dog, right?

Simone: Yes, yes. So there's, that's a subset, a small subset, but yeah, anyway. It is considered

Malcolm: immoral to watch videos of the animal that you identify with. Having sex with that same animal, but the reason it's considered immoral, this is what's fascinating. The reason it's considered immoral is because there [00:05:00] wasn't consent.

Malcolm: There wasn't consent when those two animals decided to have sex with each other. It's not because you're watching an animal have sex, that's not what they find disgusting. It's because there wasn't consent when the animals decided to have sex. That's fascinating.

Simone: Continue. I guess, yeah, I guess that's the issue at hand.

Simone: But yeah, I just find it so interesting that I would think that the furry community, for example that to me is like a really big bastion of progressivism in general, right? Like a very, very small proportion of the community identifies as right, let alone hard right, right? This is, this is supposed to be a very, you know, Yeah.

Simone: I was like in, in, in a blocked and reported podcast, I was just listening about that. They, they talked about a survey in that, in that space. And so it's also it's one of those things where you have to be really comfortable with being, you know, seen as weird. To dress up in an anthropomorphized costume and dance around and do all that stuff.

Simone: Right. So it's just so interesting to me that in a community like that, where you would think that it is like the epitome of being accepting of accepting differences of accepting [00:06:00] deviance from what is normative and most people just. I think that's pretty weird. And in fact, I was listening to another podcast called Ruthless, which is more like a conservative political podcast.

Simone: And they were basically just saying if it's a furry arrest them immediately. Charge them, book them. So, this is clearly something that's not accepted. And yet, and yet, this community is still shaming people. For being aroused by things that, frankly, they, it's not a reflection of their morals.

Simone: It's not a reflection of, and there are people, there are TikToks that were shared in this podcast of people basically saying you know, you either need to get help or you need to be like eliminated, like basically die. And that's, you know, people in this kind of community can say that. I think that's just, it really exemplifies the many paradoxes.

Malcolm: So we should also talk about why conservatives think it's so disgusting to have sex with animals, because this is a really interesting thing to me. The reason why conservatives, so when we're talking about conservatives, what are conservatives as we define them? They're people who want their cultural group to survive intergenerationally and into the future, and most of them come from some form of traditional [00:07:00] cultural group, most of the traditional cultural groups that have been successful are the ones that sort of outbred their, their nearby rivals.

Malcolm: And one of the ways that they've done this. is by shaming sex with animals. This was not an animal welfare thing. You know, if you're talking to somebody 2000 years ago and they're like, don't do the person who has sex with a sheep is disgusting.

Simone: They're also slaughtering the sheep. So, you know, it's not like the worst thing you're going to do.

Malcolm: Yeah, no, they didn't evolve this cultural belief because they cared about the sheep. They evolved this cultural belief because people had sex with sheep. You know, put less time into their partners, finding a partner. They got more diseases. They introduced more diseases to the community. It was, it was completely about fertility and health.

Malcolm: And in a way that is why it was in today's culture. If you are trying to determine what should we see as like a cultural group, what should we see as, as disgusting? As having sex with a sheep, what we should see is that, you know, [00:08:00] we apply the same evolutionary pressures, is people who treat pets like they're kids. If somebody says this is my child's dog, you know, what they are saying is I am using this dog to masturbate my instinct to have kids And through that lowering my fertility rate and and I guess what i'm saying is in the future you know assuming genetic technology didn't exist which sort of changes all the rules of the game But if genetic technology didn't exist within 500 years We would see claiming that a dog or a cat is your child in any context is, is literally as disgusting and as socially isolatable as having sex with a dog

Simone: or a cat.

Simone: But let's go back to diversity. So it does blow my mind because like I, I did, you know, it, it's so interesting that, that beneath and you've, you've said this many times, right? Like when you look at. Progressive groups of all the different colors of the rainbow, you [00:09:00] know, Jewish progressive groups and Christian and Muslim and all the other progressive groups, they basically all hold the same general values.

Simone: Everyone goes to heaven. Everything's going to be okay. You know, whatever you like, all these sort of things there, there just isn't a lot of difference. And then when you look at conservative cultures, there is a lot of diversity. And like, how could that possibly be when supposedly diversity. is a value of progressive.

Simone: I think that the secret here is that it never was, that progressivism never was

Malcolm: about diversity. What they mean by diversity, and this is very important, is that we are open to recruiting people into our cultural group from any other cultural group.

Simone: Oh, so that's interesting, and that's So that's really a sign of, if we're using terminology from the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, it is a, a dominating culture.

Simone: Right. So it's goal is that, you know, the world isn't okay until everyone is saved. We have to save and we have to convert everyone. So until, you know, basically the world is a caliphate of our religion.

Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, we don't care if you're gay, or straight, or black, or white[00:10:00] or, or Jewish, or, or Muslim, you can join us.

Malcolm: And think

Simone: just like us. Being super straight is not. Okay, in all progressive circles, but sure we don't care where you're

Malcolm: starting. Interesting idea there, right? So super straight is something that was like a fad online, I think for a bit, which was basically saying, I am only attracted to people who were born the gender that I'm attracted to.

Malcolm: I, I am not attracted to trans people. And yeah, I, I think again, They don't really mean that you can have any sexuality you want to have when, when, when they're telling you what they mean is that you need to see sexuality in the way they see sexuality, which they see is consistent with maximum choice around sexuality.

Simone: More importantly, what you're saying is, is it doesn't. They want everyone to convert. It doesn't matter who you are or where you're starting from, but you do need to convert and you do need to hold our values. So it may not matter if you start off as super straight, as long as [00:11:00] you end up like part of the Yeah,

Malcolm: as long as you eventually, .

Malcolm: It doesn't matter where you started, as long as you end up Submissive to their cultural

Simone: group. But I think, yeah, that's, I think that really helps to explain it to me because I did feel confused as to like why progressive culture could be so homogenous and really essentially anti diversity because they're anti any culture that doesn't hold their values, right?

Simone: They feel like they need to be reformed. They need to be saved. But you're right. It's, it's more just that everyone needs to join, which kind of implies, well, I guess, yeah, now that I compare it to all the other dominating cultures that also believe everyone should be converted. Right. It's, it's no different.

Simone: They also think that those people like in, let's say, you know, a, a dominating culture that thinks that homosexuality is bad. Right. So then, you know, it's, it's, you can, of course, gay people should join and they should also turn straight. It's that simple. Or we'll throw you off a building, but whatever.

Simone: Right. And so, yeah. And actually that I look at it that way. Or they should transform into women,

Malcolm: depending on what gender you're talking about. [00:12:00] Some Muslim groups, they would accept gay people as well, but they would say, but you need to undergo forced gender conversion.

Malcolm: But I guess the point here that we're making Is this is something that, that progressives really seem to misunderstand about conservative groups is they have many ways of dealing with gender, sexuality, stuff like that, right?

Malcolm: If you're a same sex attracted people within one conservative cultural group, they may say, well, you should sublimate that. Within another cultural group, they may say, Oh, we'll put you in a priesthood, like a celibate priesthood class. I was just talking about Catholics right there, but then the Muslim cultural group, they'll say, Oh, well, you should undergo gender conversion, there's lots of ways that people, it's not that these groups deny that same sex attracted people exist, there's just different cultural solutions to it.

We bring up this point so frequently. For two core reasons. One. Is that? We actually agree like our cultural group, that one, that Simona and I live within actually agrees that the progressive solution. To [00:13:00] same-sex attracted people to let them marry and date people of the same gender. Is the solution that we practice that are, we would practice for our kids. But just because we believe that doesn't mean that we have the right. To try to erase the perspective of other cultures. And when you as a progressive or someone like me, Goes into these other cultures. And I say, well, your solutions are less efficient. It ends up hurting people. You know, how is that any different than going out and telling a, you know, a Jewish person you can't. , Circumcise your kids. You know that th that, that, that hurts the kids. And that therefore, that is child abuse and you shouldn't be allowed to do that. And, you know, we will use the government to prevent you from doing this. , which is actually something that some progressive groups are doing right now. , It's very easy to justify. If you can say, oh, this group is hurting. Its its citizens. Right by taking this cultural perspective. Then, therefore we [00:14:00] have the right to stamp that out. The problem is, is that if any of these other cultural groups was in power right now, you know, whether it's today would be considered a conservative Christian group or conservative Jewish group or conservative in any group. Right. They would say that you were hurting people through like the trans surgeries or through even gay marriages that they would say that, that like morally hurts people. Right? So you can't just say I get to stamp this out because it hurts people. Right because anyone can use that justification. The evil people have always used that justification.

The ethical way to allow situations like this, to resolve that doesn't allow your own cultural bias to justify genocide against another cultural group or genocide of a particular cultural practice. Is to say. .

We will create an environment in which kids who grew up within that cultural group can leave that cultural group or choose not to carry on those practices. If they don't like them or don't think they're efficacious. So let's go back to the Jewish example, even a [00:15:00] kid who was circumcised. Ends up believing that circumcision was bad and hurt them. Then they won't do that to their own kids, or they might even decide that they have so much animosity towards the cultural group that allowed that to happen to them, the Jewish, cultural group that they just leave that cultural group. However, it's important to note here that even if the plurality of people from a cultural group end up saying, okay, I'm not going to end up practicing circumcision anymore because that hurt me. If it turns out that that has perfect overlap with the portion of the group that is unable to motivate reproduction within themselves, it's unable to say, okay, I'm going to go out there and have kids. Um, and, and raise them within this new cultural context I'm creating. Well, I think you've shown that thing that we think. Was, you know, evil or bad in some way, must've had some utility because it was what enabled the intergenerational transfer of in a cultural system.

And in some way was tied to whatever led some [00:16:00] people of that cultural group. To make the enormous investment, which is child-rearing at above reproductive rate. Uh, you know, raising four or five kids is an enormous financial and emotional burden. And it may turn out that, that. Somehow these practices, which some people in the cultural group felt hurt them were actually really key in motivating that. So there, there is a way of dealing with this outside of going out in, in stamping out cultural groups. It's just to create an environment in which kids are free to leave those cultural groups. And the second point that we're really trying to make here. Is there is this perspective that there is a progressive view on same-sex attracted people. And then there's this homogenous conservative view, which isn't true. Progressive. They're just one of like a bunch of different ways that cultural groups. Relate to same-sex attracted individuals. And.

We believe those individuals should be protected, whatever cultural solution they choose for themselves. You know, once they're no longer relying on their [00:17:00] parents for financial support. However.

Right now. If we look at the way things are being taught within like our education system or was in popular media, it's very clear that it is taught. This is the right way to be a same-sex attracted individual. And in all of these other panoply of different cultural. Ways of relating to same sex attracted individuals that conservative people have is the evil way of relating to this and the wrong way of relating to this.

And it is for this reason. And primarily for this reason. That we are justified in wiping out these cultural groups. That's why we keep coming back to sexuality because it's the core thing that progressive to use to justify, , their superiority to other cultural groups, because they believe that it's just such a superior solution. The one that they have. And that it justifies them utilizing things like the educational system. To attempt to wipe out these other cultural groups because these groups are evil, but it's important to remember. That nobody in the history. Of any form of cultural [00:18:00] genocide has ever said. Oh, we're trying to wipe out like a weak group or a group that's in any way equal to us. They always see them as evil. They always see the cultural group that they're wiping out as somehow a threat to them. And somehow actually controlling all of society. As somehow. This, this big boogeyman. Uh, that's the way cultural genocides work. And again, we actually our cultural group then that Simone and I are part of actually agree with the progressive way of relating to same-sex attracted individuals.

But we also recognize that our culture is just one hypothesis about the way that human should live. And we don't judge the righteousness of another culture by how close to us they are in their beliefs, but by whether or not they believe that those beliefs give them the justification to erase other cultural groups.

Malcolm: And to Simone's point, what we're saying there is that when you look at a progressive Jew, or a progressive Muslim, or a progressive Catholic, or a progressive Calvinist, right?

Malcolm: [00:19:00] Not that those exist really, but if you look at them they hypothetically existed you know, they have broadly the same views on gender, on sexuality, on the way we should relate to the environment, on what a human's future should be, on what a moral versus immoral action is on when life starts, on They have everything.

Malcolm: They have, they have basically the same views on everything. They are one culture wearing the aesthetic shell of other cultures. Where when you're looking at conservative iterations of all those traditions, they have a really, really, really different views on those things.

Simone: And Well, but I think, here's the, here's the interesting thing, though, is that the, the common factor really is the dominating element of it.

Simone: And the only thing that really makes progressivism feel But not act very different from a very conservative dominating religious culture is that it's people wear different costumes within it. Right? Like they're, they're

Malcolm: saying yeah, yeah, [00:20:00] yeah. But I think that this is again why. The cultural group, because to a non progressive, you if you are somebody who's in that cultural group and you're watching something that makes sense to you, you've got to understand how literally insane it sounds to be a cultural group that says diversity is a thing of value and everyone's actually the same.

Malcolm: There are no differences between groups of people in any way.

Malcolm: There's no ethnic differences between cultures of people. There's no cultural differences. It is, it is sinful to say that for example, isn't it odd that Jews win Nobel prizes at a rate like A 10, 000% higher when contrasted with their population isn't it, you know, the Catholics get Supreme Court positions at a really higher rate, isn't it?

Malcolm: You're not allowed to even voice these things because to them, equality means that nobody's different, [00:21:00] but, but then Why is diversity a thing of value?

Malcolm: If we are not different, if people are not different, then diversity is just an aesthetic choice. It's like the colors you're using on a palette or something. And. The answer, again, should be obvious given where the conversation has gone before. It's because they don't really value diversity. What they value is diversity in

Simone: victims.

Simone: Well, I don't know. See, yeah, I was, I was going to say I think the difference here is, is the, the role that intersectionality plays in progressive culture, where in progressive culture dominance hierarchies. Like the, the extent to which you can play the intersectionality Olympics can determine your status within the community, but it seems reasonable.

Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah. Well, but interestingly, it determines your status within the community, not based on any special abilities it grants you, [00:22:00] right? So if you look at our worldview, you know, we see different cultures as having. Different specialties or things they might be better at than other cultural groups?

Simone: Well, that, that's a value judgment, Malcolm. I think that, that for many people that the degree of their,

Malcolm: it's not a value, it's an objective

Simone: fact. No, well, no, no. It's objective

Malcolm: fact that some cultural groups outcompete other cultural groups.

Simone: That's, yeah, but that's, that's not a, that's not a value in progressive culture because what, what they're looking at is, is systemic bias that someone has endured EL elevates their.

Simone: Their social status in a way that may be like in Catholicism, the extent of your martyrdom, like the amount, the amount that you suffered for God will elevate your status because they're

Malcolm: not looking for efficacy. They,

Simone: right. But that's, that's, and that's fine. Like some cultures don't care about efficacy the way that we do.

Simone: So I'm just saying like you're making,

Malcolm: but the point being is where you're saying that there are differences in the way progressives relate to different cultures, they relate to different cultures in a way. Where they value cultures that can [00:23:00] argue to have endured more suffering or be more you know, systemically unstable in any way like endure ongoing suffering, I guess you could say.

Malcolm: more than cultural groups that don't. And they, they achieve a position within their status hierarchy. And this is because it's a status hierarchy that is based around the idea that every human's goal should be to remove all pain from the world.

Simone: Yeah. And once to those who have experienced more pain, either personally or systemically.

Simone: Historically you know, deserve to to be in a position of elevation to have accelerated pain removal.

Malcolm: Yeah, they, they, they get higher in the line for the pain removal surgery.

Simone: But so I think that that's what we're missing is cultural outsiders intersectionality.

Simone: It, it is, it is victimhood status which, which often correlates very highly with minority community status historically or presently. Okay. And, [00:24:00] and with the way that you and I view diversity is But

Malcolm: hold on, I would say that's not true. Okay, go on. Okay. So, there's, there's two answers to the word minority in the populations that small society.

Malcolm: But that's not the way progressives often use it. When they say minority, they mean black people. There's many groups that are much more discriminated against in much smaller portions of the population in the U. S. than black people that progressives policy wise, seem to not really give a s**t about.

Malcolm: And I think that that's important to know, that when they say minority, and this is actually when we're talking about fertility rates. We see this all the time, right? So I talk to progressives about fertility rates. And they go, is it affecting minority populations? And I'm like, yes, look at the U.

Malcolm: S. Right? Native American populations have one of the lowest fertility rates of any group. And they're like, sorry, but people in Africa are still having lots of kids. And I'm like, I don't see what that f*****g has to do with Native Americans. [00:25:00] And they're like, no, minorities are fine. I'm like, oh, when you say minority.

Malcolm: You mean only black people, you don't care about anything that's affecting any, I

Simone: don't, I don't know, I'm, I'm going to push back a little bit. I don't know to what extent that's true. I think that that people in progressive circles very much care about Native American populations. I just think that they.

Simone: have less cultural capital and, and less of a currently elevated narrative and therefore suffering as a result and people, you know, like what's right in front of them. And it's just, but no, I, I disagree. I

Malcolm: think, I disagree with you there. I think that they would tell themselves they care about Native American populations.

Malcolm: I have not seen a major progressive campaign. If you look at the plight of many Native American children in

Simone: the U. S. Because the incentives aren't there. There isn't a large voting base, like to your point, right? Their populations are dwindling. And that is the point,

Malcolm: right? If minority to you means only the [00:26:00] populations that are useful in winning the next election cycle, then you don't actually care about minorities.

Simone: Again, I really question you're saying, remember, like, when we even talk about demographics, right? Like Native American populations are ballooning. Why is that? Because a ton of people. In the name of intersectionality, but also you know, all the benefits.

Malcolm: We should clarify what she means here.

Malcolm: The native American fertility rates are going way, way, way, way down. Right now,

Simone: the more people are identifying as native American because they're like one 25th native American. Because if you say that you've native American heritage, then you can get a bunch of benefits, both like from a cultural intersectionality standpoint, but also in terms of like college admissions, financial aid, et cetera.

Simone: So I'm just saying I don't. Like if, if that were the case, that like Native Americans had no cachet in progressive circles, there wouldn't be ballooning numbers of Native Americans.

Malcolm: Okay. Okay. Then I'll use another group that may make my argument more strong. Okay. Which group [00:27:00] is one of the smallest distinct cultural groups in the United States right now that progressives.

Malcolm: increasingly care less and less about, it's Jews. Jews are a if you're talking minority, they are much more a minority than any of the groups we're talking about right now. They're, they're an incredibly small percent of the population, and they underwent a very... Recent event, which shows that the the world is is

Simone: incredibly intersectionality standpoint.

Simone: They don't matter. Why? Because they historically have been in positions of financial empowerment influence historically even genocided. Yeah, but you know, I think as soon as you have some people in a position of power and a position of wealth, you lose your like victim status. It's considered as deserved.

Simone: So because they have all these like wealth coins, they're genocide coins you know,

Malcolm: and also. Okay. So the, well, no, I actually think it's more than what you're saying. [00:28:00] They, and I've, and I've seen this within progressive circles. I've seen increasing Holocaust denial. There is a belief that it is impossible for a group to boast.

Malcolm: Um, Economically outcompete, if it turns out that all of the differences between groups in the world. So if you believe that everyone's actually exactly the same, if, if Jews and everyone else is exactly the same, like there's no differences between groups, then any economic differences between groups must be ill earned.

Malcolm: They must be earned through mischievous means. And so when they see Jews as a cultural group out earning other cultural groups or out achieving, you know, academic success when contrasted with other groups, it is proof to them that they are not discriminated against because it is impossible in a world in which everyone is equal.

Malcolm: To out compete other groups if you are discriminated against. If the primary differences between cultural groups are [00:29:00] discrimination resultant.

Simone: And that's one, that's one view. And you know, I, progressive culture is not a monolith as much as we say that it's, it's pretty homogenizing. It is a monolith.

Malcolm: I'm sorry, in what way is it not a monolith? Explain. Well,

Simone: because I do think that there are many people who identify as progressives who don't agree with every element of it. I, you know, most people who identify as progressives are a lot more reasonable and wouldn't say that, you know, you should be obligated to sleep with...

Simone: Trans woman, if you're not like really turned on by that, you know, like I think most people are reasonable and many people are progressives and they are. I

Malcolm: would argue that you're, you're being naive here. So, just, you are telling the truth. There are people who identify. So there's, there's people who you know, identify with Mormonism, right?

Malcolm: Who will go out there and claim that Mormons don't believe that everyone eventually inherits a planet, right? And takes over a planet and becomes a god themselves, right? There's actual Mormon apologists who will say that right now. When Joseph Smith said this, when Brigham Young [00:30:00] said this, when the current prophets have said this.

Malcolm: And so it's well, why are they saying this? It's in there well, I was never taught this in church, right? And it's yeah, but you're just on the outside. This is what your cultural group actually believes at the highest levels, and this is what your cultural group will try to enforce on the surrounding cultural groups, regardless of whether or not it's something that you...

Malcolm: personally identify with and I think that that's, that's really, this is like you go to a Nazi and he's like, well, I'm not antisemitic. It's yeah, but you there, the, the, the, the, the camps, yeah, you personally not being an antisemitic Nazi doesn't mean that supporting the Nazi movement doesn't lead to antisemitism being advanced in the world.

Simone: Yeah,

Malcolm: I do agree with you. There were, there were, there were many Nazis that were not anti Semitic. I will agree with that statement [00:31:00] as well. I don't think it means that Nazism broadly was, was not anti Semitic.

Simone: I hear your point. Yeah. Yeah, this conversation has been pretty helpful to me in helping me understand what diversity really means in progressive culture. And just to acknowledge that progressive culture. Is a dominating culture, which is to say that it will not rest. It will not be comfortable with the existence of groups that do not hold its doctrine.

Simone: All, all Appistates have to be converted. And, and no one can really rest until everyone has been saved. And that really like just helps to explain the diversity problem and also that diversity really is intersectionality, which is just part of the status and virtue signaling and hierarchy of this particular culture.

Simone: So this has been actually, I was surprised. This has been pretty good. Oh,

Malcolm: you thought I was going to suck?

Simone: Well, I just, you know, I, I, I've struggled with this a lot, so I wouldn't think that I wouldn't have thought that we could get to the [00:32:00] bottom of it. But I, I feel, personally, at least we, I have a.

Simone: An imperfect, but still functional for me now, model that works a lot better than what I had before, which was,

Malcolm: oh. Well, yeah, when I feel in the same way that, you know, progressives, the way that conservatives frame progressives, the way progressives can frame conservatives can lead to some conservatives to not understanding what conservatism is actually about.

Malcolm: You know, . So often I see, especially young conservatives, think that conservatism is about their cultural group dominating others. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. You're just a progressive. You just are in a cultural group that's not winning right now. The, the, the real conservative movement is, and always has been within the U.

Malcolm: S., about creating an environment that is stable for multiple cultural groups trying to exist intergenerationally with fidelity. Not about erasing the people who think differently than you that the cultural genocide and this is something that really, you know, people are like, why are you so mean to progressives?

Malcolm: And I hear this over and [00:33:00] over again, right? Like, why can't you just be nice? And it's you expect me to be okay with cultural genocide. Like their actual goal is to erase everyone. Who doesn't think like them to take their kids to convince those kids that their parents are evil and bad people. And again, this is what happened with the residential school program in Canada.

Malcolm: Like cultural genocide has happened many times and these genocide deniers. And that's what they are. They are genocide deniers when they're like, Oh, my group isn't doing that. When you are a Nazi and you're like, I like Jews, Nazis definitely aren't erasing the Jews from the world. It's yeah, but they f*****g are.

Malcolm: Okay. And the cultural group that you are supporting. F*****g is. Its core goal is to take the children of the people who disagree with it and ensure that they have the correct views on gender, sexuality, our relationship to the environment, the future of the human species, what's moral and what's immoral.

Malcolm: If that's not cultural genocide I [00:34:00] literally don't know how you're defining the term. It is cultural genocide, and, and, and, and just because you deny it does not mean you're not culpable for it happening in the world. Well,

Simone: cultural genocide is a necessary process of any dominating culture, essentially, because everyone has to be converted to their ways.

Malcolm: Yeah, well, yes, necessary, but it's also evil and it must be stopped.

Simone: It's evil for our values, but if you literally believe that non believers will go to hell, it is your moral

Malcolm: imperative to hell. They're just doing it for s***s and giggles because they think that these other

Simone: groups

 Are intrinsically inferior to them.

Simone: No, they think that, they think that non believers are both experiencing pain and causing pain, and that pain and suffering are terrible and bad things.

Simone: Malcolm, you're not being Fair. Well, no. Okay. Okay.

Malcolm: Okay. So they literally shouldn't exist. I I don't think you're being fair or you're not fully comprehended.

Simone: No, I, I think, no, I think it's very wrong. I think we're, we're very [00:35:00] against coercion. But you can't just straw man your enemies. You know, I, I think you have to understand.

Simone: No, no, no. I

Malcolm: understand why they, they're committing genocide. I understand why they're committing genocide. Right. It's because they think that they're removing pain from the people who are living under these cultural groups. Yes. I think that through saying, well, this is why they're committing genocide, you to some extent are, you know, you're like one of those people who are like, well, the Jews weren't perfect when you're talking about why the Nazis did what they did, right? You know, and that's not

Simone: an excuse. People do very evil things for very stupid reasons. I'm not saying it's, it's not a stupid reason and I'm not saying that they're right to do it. I'm just saying that you can't just make up a, if you make a dumb straw man reason for why people do it, you're not going to be able to fight them or convert people to your views effectively.

Malcolm: Because you just think that there are reasons are more nuanced and justified than I have given them [00:36:00] credit for it.

Simone: I don't think that their reasons are justified. I think that their reasons are In many ways, logically consistent, but easy to tear down when you, when you provide a little bit more nuance and color to suffering and what actually causes suffering.

Simone: And that, that while progressive causes and cultures. are very against suffering, their interventions exacerbate it and make it worse. So, I think it's, it's possible to take the very progressive argument, to take the deepest progressive values and, and use them like an Aikido against progressive culture itself.

Simone: But I don't think that an open ignorance toward progressive values, a refusal to engage with them is going to enable you to use its energy against it.

Malcolm: You're, you're right. And I, I, I, I think that's a very good you know, what's the word here? Steel man? No, it's a good steel man. And I, and I, and I think that you know, I, [00:37:00] I appreciate that.

Malcolm: And I think any of the genocide deniers that watch our program will appreciate. Uh, You're sorry, that's what I think of them as, you know, if you're okay with a cultural group that's out there that's using our school system to systematically erase everyone who thinks differently than them and, and, and, and if it was literally any group other than yours doing that, you'd be like, Oh, this is like the most evil thing anyone can do.

Malcolm: I, I'd really, you know, encourage some self reflection.

Simone: Your arguments and your wording are not going to engage people. I'm sorry, but that's just like a failed move.

Malcolm: Yeah. You can't tell somebody commit you're saying, I can't tell someone who's committing genocide. They're committing genocide.

Simone: The way that minds are changed is you develop a connection with someone, you understand what their values and motivations are.

Simone: You get them to trust you and you come to trust them and care about them. And then you help them to find more nuance in their beliefs and help them to really. Think about what you're saying and what instead you do with your attacts of progressives and with [00:38:00] your attacts of people that you disagree with, which I think is very dangerous, is you essentially immediately say, Hey, I'm your enemy, stab, stab, stab.

Simone: And they put up their walls and they never listened to you again. Okay. That's not going to work. The way that you change minds is very different. It's a Trojan horse approach.

Malcolm: I, I really appreciate your ability to stay calm in the face of such immeasurable evil, to the extent where you can communicate with people who, to me, I have trouble even communicating with.

Simone: . Malcolm, our culture holds that all humans are inherently wretched. I don't know how obviously No, I, I,

Malcolm: I hold that as well, and my ancestors who held that started the, you know, the Free State of Jones, right?

Malcolm: So why are you

Simone: so unwilling? I, I, anyway. Why am I

Malcolm: so unwilling to morally compromise?

Simone: No, I'm not asking you to morally compromise, I'm asking you to be effective. And you're not even willing to try to be effective. You're just like, I'm going to straw man my enemies. I'm just going to make them hate me. I'm not even going to try to engage with them.

Simone: [00:39:00] And I think that that's very sad because we have a culture that believes in efficacy. We have a culture that believes in engaging with offensive ideas. And you're not willing to engage with them. You just want to other them. You just want to make them enemies. And that's okay. Like othering is, is a part of an effective cultural technology as well.

Simone: But if you actually care about addressing issues that

Malcolm: we're really. I think that you suspect that they are a much larger cultural group than they actually are. Yes. I think that they are a, they are a cultural group that everyone is afraid of within elite circles. But I think if you asked the majority of Americans, if they're actually okay with what's happening, 90% of them would say no.

Malcolm: Well, I

Simone: mean, I think if, if you looked at Nazi Germany, if we're going to go back there. The, the majority of people would not be really cool with what's going on. And a lot of it comes down to which minority is in power. How do

Malcolm: you stop it? You don't say in a nice way Nazis are bad and here's our nuanced take.

Malcolm: It's, [00:40:00] do you not see the camps? Do you not see what is happening? That is how, because the truth is. Is that your average person living under a Nazi government, 90% of them, your average person living in America right now, 90% of them, they're not actually okay with what's happening. They just haven't had it told to them in a way where they can understand and contextualize how evil it is.

Malcolm: And that's what we're trying to do. And so I think what you're wrong here is you think my goal. Is to convert the dyed in the wool progressive, whereas my goal is to convince your average American who knows what they're doing is wrong, but doesn't actually have a word for it. It's a forgetting before remembering phenomenon that you have in psychology.

Malcolm: So forgetting before remembering in psychology is this phenomenon where somebody will go oh, it turns out I had like erase this

Great.

Malcolm: from my life, right? Like I had been

Great.

Malcolm: to the kid and [00:41:00] people are like. No, you didn't forget it, you just used other words to describe it. You were like, my uncle touched me in ways that were weird and that felt funny and I I thought it was really silly and uncomfortable at the time.

Malcolm: And then, one day in like your fifties, you were like, GASP That was a

Grape.

Malcolm: oh my God, that's what happened! And I think that for a large part of the American population, right now what we need to do is just wake them up and be like, This is a genocide! That's what's happening right now! Do you think that's bad?

Malcolm: If so

Simone: No, I'm not against galvanizing opponents against genuinely, you know, harmful things that are happening. That's fine, and that's important. But I'm just saying it is also possible. To, to change people's minds and

Malcolm: convert the died in the woods, extremist, progressive side in the woods, you can get through to them.

Simone: Well, I know you have no

Malcolm: confidence and I'm glad there's [00:42:00] two of us. There's one of us that can be the nice one. And one of us can

Simone: be the main one. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You'd be bad cop. I'd be good cop. And I love you very much, Malcolm.

Malcolm and Simone have a thought-provoking discussion on the origins and psychology behind sexy nurse and teacher fetishes. They argue these tropes became popular because those were some of the only roles where men were expected to submit to women in a caring yet dominant context. This fulfilled an innate need for submission among many men that society doesn't provide outlets for. They trace how dominance displays evolved through sexuality due to evolution "borrowing code." The conversation covers daddy/daughter fetishes, male sexuality, confidence as the ultimate dominance signal, and more.

Simone: [00:00:00] Hey, Malcolm. Did you watch like Looney Tunes when you were a kid?

Malcolm: Yes, but you're not thinking of Looney Tunes.

Simone: No, I am. I think I'm thinking about like little scenes in which a Bugs Bunny dressed up like a sexy nurse.

Malcolm: Oh, you are. Oh, I was thinking of the sign. Hello nurse from Animaniacs.

Simone: Yeah, I mean, I think that it's interesting in like several generations of children's cartoons and we're talking about cartoons that probably like a huge segment of our viewers like have no exposure to, but like that in, in children's programming, there's this concept of a sexy nurse and it's like, wait a second, like you're putting up, you're putting a fetish In a kid's cartoon.

Simone: What is going on?

Malcolm: What is going on here? Where did this fetish? Well, I mean, the other one you have is like the disciplinarian teacher which is another or the nun,

Simone: the sexy nun, but there's this whole like, yeah, like Bugs Bunny is a sexy nurse. Other like this. This trope, I, it's interesting. Cause like when I saw this as a kid, I just assumed that like, [00:01:00] like nurses had special powers.

Simone: Like, I mean, cause I didn't like, how are you going to understand this as a kid? It's just the weirdest

Malcolm: thing. What's interesting is that this has been a part of human sexuality for a while. So in the Regency era, something developed that was called the English Vice. And it was a tendency, from the perspective of the French at least, that English people seem to disproportionately have a fetish around being spanked by people dressed as teachers and paddled with like these big paddle things.

Malcolm: And they believed that the reason for this was because that was the way kids were punished at the elite English schools, like, you know, Eaton or whatever. No, it turns out that's not really the way sexuality works. And we can get deeper into that. But what it shows is that this. Cluster of fetishes has existed for a long time.

Malcolm: And the question is why it seems very odd that fetishes would [00:02:00] cluster around specific professions. So what's happening here well, actually, sorry, before I get into why it is, I'm going to give another. Fetish that comes from the same region.

Malcolm: Why are daddy daughter little girl fetishes so common? AKA DDLG. DDLG, which is basically a fetish for girls where they like acting like the daughter of the guy that they are sleeping with and will Sort of infantilize themselves to an extent.

Simone: Again, something that shows up in popular media in for example, Gentleman Prefer Blondes with Marilyn Monroe, her character in that, in that movie with her primary love interest, she calls him daddy.

Simone: Like, yeah,

Malcolm: it's What's going on here? And it's all the same thing. And it all is unfortunately fairly simple.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm: It's that dominance and submission are a very important part of human sexuality. In fact, in our studies in women, they are the dominant [00:03:00] factor in human sexuality. The field of sexuality, we argue, had been invented by women.

Malcolm: Like if the early researchers had been women and not men. We may, instead of the primary access of sexuality being predominant attraction to male or females, the, the primary access of sexuality would be predominant attraction to submission or dominance. Because in women, that matters more. To the average woman, obviously this isn't true for all women, but to the average woman submission arousal.

Malcolm: than the gender of the person they're engaging with and specifically gendered features. So they might, like, psychologically care about the gender, but they would be more turned on by submission or dominance than they would be by seeing either the naked female or male form which is really fascinating.

Malcolm: So it's a very, very big part, but also for males it's a big part of sexuality. The

Simone: problem we have Yeah, I have this right, I remember it correctly. More men would prefer to be submissive than [00:04:00] dominant. And of course, like, men who are city dwellers are more likely to tend toward submissive, and men who are, who grew up in rural environments are more likely to tend toward dominance.

Simone: But still, even more men than women would prefer

Malcolm: to take a submissive role. No, not more men than women. Women prefer to

Simone: be submissive. No, no, I mean, sorry but more, more men... So basically, like, it's something like more than 50% of men. I think that might be

Malcolm: But I'd have to go to the book again. Yeah.

Malcolm: But the number of men who prefer to be submissive is large. Yeah, like, surprisingly,

Simone: like, we would expect most women to prefer dominance, but we wouldn't expect most men to prefer dominance. But I, I, I'm pretty sure, because I looked at this fairly recently, Yeah, well,

Malcolm: so we can talk about why that's the case, right?

Malcolm: Why did dominance evolve as a thing that mattered at all? It, it, it, it was because evolution is a cheap programmer and it borrows other things. So, when humans were evolving, if you look at other social mammals. They often use sexual displays where the more submissive gender display is used [00:05:00] to signal submission within intergroup conflicts or intergroup dominance things.

Malcolm: So this would be like a dog showing it's submissive to another dog by presenting it. Whether it's male or female, right? And the reason I made clear that it matters what gender is in control of that society is spotted hyenas where females are dominant but also have a pseudo penis. You get into that an erection is a sign of submission.

Malcolm: And, and this is because evolution when it's looking for, it's like, Oh, I need a system to signal to other people of my tribe, right? That I am submissive or dominant to them. It's just going to borrow pre existing code. It's basically going to Substack and looking for pre existing code. And one of the code types that makes the most natural sense to use is the sexuality system.

Malcolm: Because it's already there most things. Now, I've got to explain a little bit how evolution works for people to understand why it would do this. Evolution is going to pull on, you know, [00:06:00] slight mutations that might happen within an individual that can then sort of cause positive feedback loops. And a slight mutation is much more likely to happen within a pre existing system than with a entirely new system.

Malcolm: So almost every time. Communal mammals have developed intergroup dominance displays. It has been through utilizing the sexuality system. And males if you look at the social structure of early humans only one male was often in charge of the pack males. The majority of males needed to learn to be submissive to one male and.

Malcolm: dominant to other other males and, and females. But submissiveness needed to be part of male, this, this system that most males had from the beginning. Now there are some males that just will not. Engage with submissiveness at all. But these males would be closer to males in the stage of life was in like great apes that we would call the roaming bachelor [00:07:00] phase which are basically like teenage males who get kicked out of groups.

Malcolm: And they'll form like a group of other males. And they will go around looking for a new community or like a community to raid and take over as the new sort of male leaders of that community. It is ironically not a sign of success. And then you have the one alpha male in groups. But that alpha male is not the way that alpha males sort of depict themselves.

Malcolm: You know, first of all, alpha as a concept was first defined in wolves. Alphas don't really exist within wolves in the way that the initial studies show they did. However, it turns out that alphas... Like, there is a male at the top of most chimpanzee hierarchies not bonobos exactly. They have females at the top, but they're really horrifying, and we'll get into a bonobo.

Malcolm: Like, people are like, oh, if women were in charge a behavior that is seen in bonobos where, where women are at the top of the hierarchy is like a woman will take the infant of another woman and like, hold it [00:08:00] like, I will break its neck if you don't go down on me. And, and use the infant's life to, to force this other woman to sexually satisfy her.

Malcolm: They're horrifying. They're horrifying. If women were in charge, things would not be better. Anyway we know this from nature. But anyway, so, it, it, it, it, The point being is that the actual dominant male is often what we call like the Matt the the astronaut Mike Dexter Archetype and not the Chad archetype, which is to say they are the type of guy who's captain of the football team But also really nice and a bro and like helps you out because in human social groups and in Chimpanzee social groups.

Malcolm: The way you become dominant is by building an alliance of other mostly dominant males who are still okay with taking orders from one male. Anyway, but the way this expresses in sexuality is what this means is that for a lot of males, you're going to have this submissive aspect to their sexuality.

Malcolm: I mean, the vast majority of human males throughout history were in the bottom 50% of the local social status hierarchy. And if they acted like [00:09:00] they were in the top percent, Okay. when they obviously weren't, they'd be killed. So it makes sense that you get that. But anyway, what does this have to do with nurses?

Malcolm: What does this have to do with teachers? What does this have to do with, right?

Simone: Well, I think what, yeah, what's interesting about those characters in particular is, is these are some of the few areas, especially for men, because like, again, it's, it's not typically the sexy male teacher. That's like women are hot for, I mean, sometimes.

Simone: But usually it's more like a very high power, like rich, whatever, man, you know, like a Prince or a whatever. So why nurses and why teachers for men? And I think that's because it's one of those few areas where there's a societally condoned place where men. where all men are expected to surrender their agency to a certain extent.

Simone: Like when you're going under anesthesia, like you are losing control of every, like almost everything, you know, your mind included and yet it's necessary and okay. And no one's going to judge you negatively because of that. So it's one of the few places where you can even still [00:10:00] see yourself as like a kind of dominant male and, and a desirable male but still totally surrender in a way that's super satisfying.

Malcolm: So what? Yeah. And what's really interesting is we and our society do not have healthy understandings of what dominance actually looks like when we think about dominance in a broad sense outside of social roles. We often think of it as violence as putting someone down. As you know, we've mentioned Andrew Tate in a few videos, the way that Andrew Tate treats women, right?

Malcolm: That is not the way teachers treat their students. And that is not the way nurses treat their

Simone: patients. Yeah, no, it's, it's a caring, it's well, typically it's a caring, if maybe sometimes stern or

Malcolm: controlling. The type of dominance that most men and women now, now they're not mostly women, but there's actually a lot of women who like really violent dominance and we'll get to that.

Malcolm: That's a different thing. But people who want, like, caring dominance, like the type of dominance you would have in a natural status hierarchy is one that we have very few social [00:11:00] contexts for. Nurses and teachers for males are often the only social roles where they have been systemically and with social permission.

Malcolm: Submissive to a female and that's why they move towards that same as women and daddy daughter stuff Yeah, you really blew

Simone: my mind with this like I really admire you for pointing this out because I just didn't I didn't get it like From like I think you know incest For most people, like, really raises hackles, right?

Simone: So, like, this dynamic at first seems like it just doesn't make sense, because while incest does arouse, like, a lot of people, we think it's more of a, like, disgust reaction that's been inverted, right? Whereas, like, this is way more popular than that. But what I really admire about what you had explained to me on this is that this is one of the few...

Simone: Loving but dominant relationships that most women will be exposed to. So, most women will have had a father figure in [00:12:00] their lives who was very much the dominant character but who cared about them, who taught them things, who took care of them, and who really made them feel safe and supported. And, and so I can get why that has, has become sort of like a very popular de facto dynamic, or like, sexual, like role play interest.

Malcolm: Well, and, and, and the other place where you see in women this, this unusual like, like a weird role that you keep seeing recurring in fetish communities is like being a dog or being a pony, like puppy play or and what's going on there. That's another of the very few examples we have in our society of caring, protective dominance.

Malcolm: And so when they are trying to get in the mindset of, I am a thing that has this caring, protective, dominant entity out there, like, protecting me. What is that thing like there? There's just not that many social roles they can model. They've got like [00:13:00] pony puppy daughter, right? And this is to a large part of the fault of our society.

Malcolm: Like if we had a healthier society wouldn't be like, Oh, that's the way a husband treats her wife. I want to be a trad wife, right? Yet. You know, when we think about trad wives, I think a lot of people, their evoked set is often more around this kind of degrading submission. Closer to like the, the French maid archetype, which is again about a form of degrading submission, which a lot of people do like.

Malcolm: So, women who like, and this is another thing that we talked about, a lot of women also like really degrading submission, right? Which comes from a likely different sort of evolutionary pathway, which is. Women who fought back when their communities were being raided because remember I mentioned these roaming bachelor situations, it appears throughout history and in the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, we go into a lot of data for this that human tribes likely had outside groups of males [00:14:00] come into them, kill the males and take the females either to expand one existing tribal group or in this sort of roving male scenario, similar to what happened to chimp sometimes.

Malcolm: And when this happened, the women who fought back, who were not able to find any sort of like pre programmed biological reason. To not fight back died at disproportionate rates which led some women, but, but a lot more than most people would suspect there's this great book that shows violent porn searches are actually coming from women.

Malcolm: It's called Google, so I'll, I'll put up the name of the book on the screen and for YouTube. But yeah, it's, it's absolutely, I think, shocking to a lot of people, but it makes evolutionary sense that that would happen. And there was this great study that we mentioned in the pragmatist guide to sexuality, that showed a really interesting thing, which is when you are playing a competitive game and it looks like your team is losing males begin to feel more camaraderie with their teammates.

Malcolm: [00:15:00] Whereas women begin to feel more camaraderie with the opposing team. And that makes immediate sentence from like an evolutionary perspective. Of course, the males really have to double down in that moment and the women are going to survive at a higher rate if they switch sides, which is, I think, really, really just a fascinating phenomenon.

Malcolm: And some men online, like they use this to. Sort of degrade women to be like, you can't really trust.

Simone: Right. Because they'll bandy and bend in you as soon as you're like on your back foot. That's also

Malcolm: Wrong. Because you know, if I have like five or six kids with Simone and she's like 35, 40, she's not going to have more kids.

Malcolm: So even from an evolutionary perspective, the pressure would have been on supporting her community. And what does the mean? Submissive and breedable. This is like a meme these days where you're looking for submissive, breedable, I don't know wives or femboys or something like that. I'll find some quotes about this.

Malcolm: I don't know where it [00:16:00] comes from, but I thought it's a very interesting we might do a whole episode on that. That'd be a good episode.

Simone: Yeah, because I have not heard of this and I don't really know what it means. But I did want to ask you sort of in the context of sexy nurses and sexy teachers, right?

Simone: Like the, well, the DDLG. And like genre, essentially, these are all nurturing, caring relationships. And you, you just discussed the non caring relationships that women are sometimes interested in from like a sexual scenario standpoint, that they find it arousing. They don't necessarily, usually they don't endorse it.

Simone: And they certainly don't morally support it. And that's a really important distinction that we make. What turns you on is not what you think is morally good or Or what you want to happen to you. Exactly. So like A lot of people are turned on by non consensual intercourse. That does not mean that they want it to happen to them.

Simone: They support it, that they think it's okay. So just to make that really clear. But then, so you have dominatrices, I guess that's the plural for a dominatrix. These are not so [00:17:00] nurturing archetypes, right? What do you think is going on there with men who are, you know, supposedly into Ha, like to dominatrices.

Simone: I'm probably butchering

Malcolm: this.

Malcolm: Okay. So let's talk about dominatrices. So these fall outside of my model.

Malcolm: So I actually think. That every human different humans have different parts of their sexuality, has sort of two sexual representations within, inside them, and this isn't something we often talk about. One is a long term partner based sexuality, and the other is a rating tribal mechanic sexuality. By that, what I mean is the sexual optimization in males that would cause you to be successful with a long term partner, i.

Malcolm: e. have lots of offspring. It's possible for that to coexist with a separate sexuality, which is optimized around non consensually taking as many people as possible when you raid a village or conquer a city. Same with women, you know, they can have these two systems operating [00:18:00] within them. One, that's like, the way that their sexuality expresses when they're with.

Malcolm: Their long term partner and another when there was a guy that they don't really know or pornography or something like that, which might be much more brutal and hardcore because those are the environments where they were most likely to encounter individuals like that in a historic context. Now, dominatrixes, I think, are just for masturbating the emotional set in guys who really want.

Malcolm: Just sort of pure social domination and and to an extent sexuality can even be removed from these. And this thing comes back to the initial theory I had here, which is that the reason why these dominant submission systems were chosen was specifically for intergroup. Dominance displays, and so what you're getting with a dominatrix is sort of a kabuki theater of dominance displays happening over and over again.

Malcolm: Think of it like a gorilla signaling to another gorilla over and over and over again, [00:19:00] I'm stronger than you, but he's actually doing it to like himself in a mirror. Like, he doesn't, you know, he's totally outside of his evolutionary context. That's what's happening with that. One of the things that we were really interested in when we wrote our book, Is what causes males to sort into these different types of sexuality?

Malcolm: Is it something that happens to them before puberty? Is it like their family background? Like if they grow up thinking they're from a powerful family, they're more likely to be dominant. Is it like, we're going through all sorts of things trying to figure it out. , it turns out it's actually what would be most evolutionarily advantageous, which is as an adult, the amount of power you think you have typically correlates with.

Malcolm: What you want in the bedroom. So men who feel more powerful in their careers, in their lives are typically more turned on by being dominant themselves. Whereas men that feel more disempowered are more turned on by taking on submissive roles. And actually the same is true for women, women who [00:20:00] feel they have more control of their lives are more turned on by being dominant themselves.

Malcolm: But what's also interesting is these men who have more power and are more turned on by being dominant. Actually get more arousal for being dominant to somebody else who wants to be dominant.

Simone: And I think this, this is, we're not the only ones to say, and you found this in your research findings, which I think is helpful, but also there, there are many other people who've said, yeah, like this concept that like super high powered men want to surrender in the bedroom.

Simone: It's just not that common, right?

Malcolm: It's not, it's not backed by the data. Yeah, it is. It is. An interesting outlier that sometimes exists in our society, except what I find very interesting is that when people point to men who are actually doing this in the real world, they're usually like powerful, but government bureaucrats which actually means that they're submissive to somebody else in their daily life, even though they may be thought of as high status within society.

Malcolm: Which isn't, isn't the same. And then they wouldn't make sense why they're, they're interested in this sort of [00:21:00] thing, because they do feel very disempowered in their daily lives. It is not you know, as much something you see was like tech CEOs and stuff like that. And again, you and I know many tech CEOs that date, we've written books on sexuality.

Malcolm: We've talked to them. Most of them are, they're male, incredibly dominant. And if they're female, incredibly dominant. That's another interesting thing that as women become wealthier, they sort of, act more masculine. But wealthy men seem to prefer that. Yeah. So there you go. Which is interesting.

Malcolm: Well, well, it makes sense if, if their thing is dominating the dominant. If that seems to be like wealthy sexuality, now keep in mind, sexuality doesn't change that much as an adult, but it, but it seems to change a little, like here we're talking about maybe like a 20% change or 30% change depending on an individual's wealth, not and, and perceived power.

Malcolm: Now it's not actual wealth. That's just what we were using to measure as a proxy perceived power. But we also did perceive power. It was in the study and they both correlated really well. We couldn't find out which correlated better. So [00:22:00] it's, it doesn't matter, but interesting. Well, Simone, do you have any more thoughts on this?

Simone: I just find myself wondering, you know, as society shifts, what the new tropes are going to be, right? Like, as you were saying, it wasn't until, you say, the Regency era that the school teacher meme, and that's sort of like really the beginning of the industrial school system. So that makes sense. And then, you know, as nurses starting to say, I'm...

Simone: And of course, I think nuns for an even longer time, of course, fell into this trope. So like, what is the next version? And I don't know, like, I think our society is moving toward a sort of post gender world. So maybe it's just going to stay like in the medical profession and just, I think the bigger

Malcolm: change you're going to have is more and more people are going to want to be submissive.

Malcolm: More and more men are feeling disempowered and are going to take on this submissive role within their sexuality. Yeah. But an interesting differentiator we've had was that. Recently is if you're looking at what's being broadcasted like from the [00:23:00] rooftops is male, status is determined by how dominant you are sexually.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. . So I think that , a lot of these men who are really disempowered and thus more likely to fall towards this submissive side of male sexuality where they're turned on by acting submissive they gain the perception from social media that male status is determined by how dominant they prefer being in sexual situations and therefore present it.

Malcolm: And act in terms of building their own self narratives more sexually dominant than they really are and that they can really maximize their personal gratification off of that may be useful in, in getting, you know, satisfying a female partner, but it is sad that we might be entering that world where.

Malcolm: Faking asexuality you don't have is an important sort of status symbol for, for, for some, you know, and I think especially, you know, men who would fall into this category, some really insecure men. And I mean, I, I think I see it when I [00:24:00] see these, these men online who are constantly talking about being dominant all the time.

Malcolm: That's not the type of thing that somebody who's naturally inclined towards dominance

Simone: does. Yeah. Yeah. It's more of a show. Don't tell kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that's the funny thing about you is a lot of people like online will make fun of you for being a soy boy and you like, you don't try to front about being dominant, but like.

Simone: In person is just so obvious that you'd tell me so yeah and then I think probably the vast majority of the people who are attacking you for being a soy boy online are like, you know, if we were all in a room together, it probably wouldn't play out the same way, but,

Malcolm: Well, and I think that this is something people who more actively engage with the BDSM community, it's common knowledge in the community, is that men who, who day to day act, quote unquote, really dominant, like all the time.

Malcolm: They're usually really bad at being doms because they aren't naturally dominant as part of an act. Whereas men who are just much more comfortable with [00:25:00] themselves day to day and don't put on this big dominance act all the time are generally better or known as better doms within the

Simone: union.

Simone: And I think that that's why confidence is so attractive to women and to men is because confidence is a more high fidelity signal of genuine dominance. Then any sort of aggression display or dominance display, because anyone, regardless of their actual, like alpha status or, you know, like inherent dominance can, can a, a dominance display.

Simone: However, only those who genuinely feel dominant inside, you know, where that, that feeling of dominance comes from a very, very strong framing and self confidence, you know, they're just going to look comfortable in their own skin and not really give a s**t. Cause they just don't care what you think because they're dominant.

Simone: So there you go.

Malcolm: I love this conversation. I think you're right. And you know, hello nurse. You got to do that. Can you do the, the whole, I don't, [00:26:00]

Simone: I have, I just I don't even remember which care. Oh, and it was the brother, it was the brother of dot. It was, it was Dot's brother. Oh, so it was one of them.

Simone: Yeah. But yeah, he was the one who'd say hello nurse. But I don't remember. He would just say it to like, sexy women, I think. But again, like, it's so weird watching these cartoons as a kid. Like, you don't get this in joke. So, you just assume that like, Oh, I guess adults, like, Oh, I thought

Malcolm: a lot of cartoons were really like, there was the wolf, that like, it would see the woman in red, and like, its tongue would roll out and stuff.

Malcolm: And like, They're

Simone: really you just assume that like adults really respect nurses and, and really defer to them and that some, some male species have an allergic reaction around women.

Malcolm: It was supposed to be like a sexual thing. Like it was supposed to be an attraction thing, but it was like cartoon sexuality.

Malcolm: Like it didn't feel in any way perverse to me as a kid, partially because our society didn't code it as perverse. It was just like, this is a normal thing. Adults. [00:27:00] really care about this weird thing that doesn't matter

Simone: to you. Yes. Yes.

Malcolm: Anyway, I got that. But today the way we, we engage our kids with sexuality is like actually sexualized.

Malcolm: And I think ways that are pretty gross to me, but that's just me. Love you. Gotta go handle the kids soon.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] And I was like, oh, brain computer interface. That's the next big thing. And I really invested my early career in brain computer interface.

Malcolm: It's what I did my thesis on in college. It's what my first job was. It's, you know, I, I did a lot of stuff in the space.

Malcolm: people think you'll have this like super fast communication system that communicates with your brain as easily as your brain can think.

Malcolm: And that is just not what you're going to get.

Malcolm: They are imagining like a computer feeding them facts in a way where they are aware that the computer is feeding them facts and they are asking for those facts.

Malcolm: That is not what's happening. A computer is overriding your consciousness because your brain can't tell the difference between what's coming from the computer and what's coming from, you know, that's what's actually happening. And you're not getting that much benefit from it when compared with just checking the internet or something.

Simone: Hello, Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. I am excited for this topic because it involves my old job and my actual specialization. [00:01:00] So when I was younger and I was trying to chart out what would be the big technology of the future that I should try to get on top of before everyone else. You know, I saw it like, okay, imagine I saw computers coming down the pipeline and I want to become a computer scientist before anyone's into computers.

Malcolm: That was how I saw the way I planned for my career, which seems like a very Malcolm thing to do. And I was like, oh, brain computer interface. That's the next big thing. And I made a big mistake by overinvesting my early career in this, but I really invested my early career in brain computer interface.

Malcolm: It's what I did my thesis on in college. It's what my first job was. It's, you know, I, I did a lot of stuff in the space. I actually, I worked as , the R& D marketing lead of the first commercially successful brain computer interface company, which was called NeuroSky which created these little headsets.

Malcolm: So Nekamimi was one of our big projects, which was like a little headset and it would control like cat ears on your head. And then another, like a lot of people used it for various things that like went. Memetically viral. And essentially what it was, was a really, [00:02:00] really simplistic EEG system that was using capacitive sensors.

Malcolm: So EEG stands for an electrocephalograph. It was really simple. The things it was reading in your brain just think of it like, it's, it's, it's an ear listening to the room of a party trying to catch the general vibe of what's going on. Is this a fun party or a funeral? Is this a, you know, but you can't really determine much more than that.

Malcolm: And the other thing is, is that whenever the sensor moved around, and so this is a big problem with any of these sensors that are like actually wearable. It would make a ton of noise. So the electricity, like the static electricity that's generated by like your hair moving or like a sensor moving just a little bit is so much louder than anything generated by your brain.

Malcolm: But even louder than that, but just. If you, the, the electricity generated by muscle. So if I like blink my eyes, that's like an explosion going off. So this is

Simone: an [00:03:00] incredibly noisy system. Like it's basically, you're saying it's picking up not just the sound of the party, but also a bunch of instruction outside and a football game that's playing in the background and all the commercials.

Malcolm: What I'm saying is it's imprecise. It's actually doing what it says it's doing. But it is wildly imprecise, but another thing to note here is it's functioning in a way that your brain is not really meant to function. So when you're communicating with an EEG using your brain you are communicating with that EEG in a way that's I mean, that's just not the way your brain evolved to communicate with things, right?

Malcolm: You're, you're, you're causing tons of neurons to fire at once in a way they weren't really meant to fire at once. And we don't know the effects of this really, not long term. And, and that's a potential problem because, you know, fire together, wire together. I, okay, what I'm talking about. So the way that your brain forms connections is when neurons Fire at around the same time or in around the same region of the brain, they begin to wire together.

Malcolm: That's how [00:04:00] like I do. That's the fundamentals of how the brain works. It's way more complicated than that, but that's a broad scope of it. Okay. For reasons that like you're using your prefrontal cortex, which is like not at all meant for external communication and firing it all at the same time. I don't know.

Malcolm: I would, I don't want to say anything on record, but I'd say it's probably not the best, but this actually becomes really interesting when you're then talking about The existing brain computer interface systems, because a lot of people, they look at brain computer interface technology and they think, oh, this is going to be like really, really, really transformative in the way that we engage with technology and it might not be and a lot of the systems we're using now might not be the systems that end up becoming popular.

Malcolm: They might be like those you know, I dunno, people from our generations, we had VR in our generations, but it was like ridiculous, [00:05:00] big machines that you would go to it like Epcot or like it's special centers. And they don't function at all the way our existing VR works. Or we had, you know, three day movies, but you would wear like colored glasses.

Malcolm: It was functioning in an entirely different way than the current movies. Right. So I'll get into more. What I mean was this, when I talk about the current. Field of brain computer interface. So first, let's talk about why the field stalled. So I was wrong. I made a bad gamble at the beginning of my career.

Malcolm: It didn't take off. And that's why I left the field. And instead of doing a PhD, got a business degree instead and went into a boring

Malcolm: I mean, I've always stayed interested in neuroscience, but I realized pretty quickly that it was a bad bet for the rest of my career because the field was moving slowly. Why was the field moving slowly? Is moving slowly due to astrocytic scar formation. So, an individual's immune system does not go into our brains because of the blood brain barrier.

Malcolm: A lot of people know that, right? They're like, oh yes, the blood brain barrier protects the brain from bacteria and viruses. [00:06:00] This is why if you get like a bacteria or virus in your brain, it's really bad. That doesn't mean your brain doesn't have cells to deal with that. They're just modified neurons called glial cells.

Malcolm: And Galil cells can have all sorts of support functions in your brain, but one is something very similar to white blood cells, where they like surround intruders or build scar tissue or something like that. It's, it's very interesting. Like our brains basically evolved like all of the support cells that the rest of the body has, but they're modified neurons.

Malcolm: It's, it's like independently evolved them. Very interesting. Anyway, back to Galil cells. Astrocytic scar formation is a type of scar formation that's created by glial cells, astrocytes when you insert something into the brain. So when there's a forward body in the brain, right? And so these early neural interfaces that go into the brain and it would incite an immune response.

Malcolm: And astrocytic scar tissue would begin to build around the, you know, inserted probe, [00:07:00] right? And this probe would become less and less good at what it was doing over time and therefore it would need to become louder and louder to communicate with the brain and the brain would have to become louder and louder to communicate with it, which of course caused more and more astrocytic scars.

Malcolm: scar formation. Yeah. The way you would prevent this is with immunosuppressants. Now this is not something that you can do long term, like how long it works in a human is variable. And if we're in a chimpanzee where a lot of these studies were done is variable. And do you really want to do that for some sort of recreational implant?

Malcolm: Right? No, you don't. You don't immunosuppressants. I don't know if I need to say that's a terrible idea to be on long term immunosuppressants for a recreational or productivity enhancing

Simone: product. Unless you want to be like a bubble boy. Yeah, yeah. So a lot

Malcolm: of people get these because look, people get dumb, you know, surgeries for little like aesthetic things.

Malcolm: Of course, they'll get surgeries for this, but they're not thinking about the cost. Anyway, so, all that's the case. Now, the [00:08:00] field has moved on from there. If you look at what Neuralink is doing, they have found a way around the astrocytic scar formation problem, and someone was pointing out that, I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it, but they, they have a way around it.

Malcolm: It's not a problem for them. However I have always thought that even if you were able to build this into a person's brain, you are likely to not get all of the benefits that people think you're going to get. And the core reason is, is people think you'll have this like super fast communication system that communicates with your brain as easily as your brain can think.

Malcolm: And that is just not what you're going to get. So if you think of a transformer model, we've talked a lot about AIs and stuff like that. Imagine trying to communicate with an AI at random parts of the code instead of the input output part of the code. That's not gonna work very well.

Malcolm: Your brain did not evolve to communicate using random parts of your brain. It evolved to condense the information and send it out. through [00:09:00] very specific pathways. Okay. And these pathways that were your central nervous system is meeting your peripheral nervous system, which means that you might actually be slower at communicating with your central nervous system than your peripheral nervous system.

Malcolm: And almost certainly won't be faster at communicating. If you're plugging directly into your central nervous system, you might be able to passively get ideas from a person. So this is what we've seen in some studies. We're like fMRI data, and this means that you can probably do this with an invasive system as well.

Malcolm: fMRI, by the way, probably the most brilliant machine ever invented. So what it does, is it like, puts this strong magnetic field into your body. And that means because all of your blood cells have iron in them and they're, they're all magnetic to an extent. And when you put this magnetic field, they all align, right?

Malcolm: They're all facing the same direction because they're facing the same direction as a magnetic field. And then the magnetic field turns off and this is when you're in a firmware area, boom. Boom, boom. That's this magnetic field turning on and off. And every time it [00:10:00] turns off, they go back to their original positions, right?

Malcolm: Think of it like an elastic thing. Like they've been forced into one position, but they're really naturally at another position. When they do that, it releases a form of energy, which you can measure with the fMRI machine, which allows us to see where blood is in a human. And with more advanced MRIs, we can even tell where oxygenated versus deoxygenated blood is.

Malcolm: So with the original fMRIs, you could tell where brain activity was happening. Because blood would be sent to that area after a thought had happened because you would just have oxygen in that blood and you needed to compensate for that. But the modern fMRI machines, fMRI meaning Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is doing it real time.

Malcolm: MRIs are doing it like a picture. Anyway we can actually see the brain beginning to take the oxygen out. You know, as it's using it to replenish the electromagnetic potential of action potentials in your brain. I'm not going to get into that right now. You don't need to know that. But what you do need to know is that there isn't a strong reason.

Malcolm: So, so we can quickly tell now you [00:11:00] can tell what song a person is thinking about, or tell what movie they're watching by combining AIs. With the output from these MRI systems and analysis of what's going on my brain. So you want to be able to tell really quickly what they're thinking as like an AI or using this AI layer, but you're unable to be able to have this like bilateral communication bilateral communication will almost always be done better by a.

Malcolm: Peripheral nervous system brain computer interface, which is interesting because those systems have been stable for a really long time. Communicating directly with my peripheral nervous system is actually much easier to do because you're not dealing with as much as much. And we've been able to do this with stuff like amputees and their arms and stuff for a while, like direct interfaces.

Malcolm: So I don't know the reason why those haven't taken off is because they're just not very good, which again, at like fast communication. Which again, leads me to believe we're just not going to get that much of a benefit in terms of communication speed [00:12:00] from the systems. Now there are ways we could be wrong about this.

Malcolm: So ECOG, which is like an EEG. EEG is the thing I was talking about that goes on the top of your head, except it goes under your skull and over your dura matter, which means. That you're not getting the low pass filter that your skull is acting as. So what's the low pass filter basically means only low frequency waves can get through it.

Malcolm: Low frequency waves are very imprecise. And if you're talking about targeting so anyway, so I'm boring you. What, what do you, what do you want to ask? What

Simone: does this mean? Functionally like right now I'm reading things AI changes everything. What do you expect we're going to see in the next 10 to 50 years in terms of what brain computer interface will enable either from I don't know, computers being able to see what we're thinking to like us using this in therapeutic technologies to us using this for entertainment, like, where do you think this is going to end up?

Simone: Are humans going to get chipped? Are we going to be able to just no. And then, okay. So tell me what do

Malcolm: you see? Right. People are [00:13:00] just way okay. So people in the industry. So I'm one of the few people that has no stake in the industry, but actually understands all the technology. And, and so most people in the industry, they need to tell you for their sake of their job that we can do this.

Malcolm: But I just, I don't think that it's doable. And I don't think it'll give us that much of an advantage. And I don't think that we're going in that direction as a species. I think you could genetically modify human brains to be more compatible with these systems. That's interesting. There was some great stuff that was done that showed that we could use bioluminescence and actually create neurons that release bioluminescence when they have an action potential, which will allow them to communicate with these systems even better than existing neurons.

Malcolm: So you can modify genetically modified future humans to better integrate with these systems, which is something I guess we could do with our kids if we were going to CRISPR them with like jellyfish DNA. But again, the, the efficiency gains are just, I don't. Think high. [00:14:00] I think that max, you may be able to communicate with a computer 50% faster than you can type, but.

Malcolm: Not much more than that. And I do think that a computer might be able to get a faster shot of what you're thinking, but you are not going to be able to intentionally communicate with the computer much faster. And this is the big problem. Do you really want your computer to have a better understanding of what you're thinking, like an advanced AI, but not what you want the computer to know you're thinking?

Malcolm: Well, so, but

Simone: isn't this. Cool. Because couldn't this mean that instead of being tortured, people will just be scanned

Malcolm: for information? Well, and another thing to remember, and this is really important. And we talked about this in our, you're probably not sentient video, which I'd strongly suggest you watch.

Malcolm: It's one of my favorite videos I've ever made. Really high, high, high praise for this video. is that humans essentially will pretend their brain is very good at pretending that it consciously came up with any idea whether or not they consciously came up with it. [00:15:00] So you can induce an idea to people by doing these experiments where you know, you're, you are like.

Malcolm: Oh, which girl do you find most attractive? And then you're like, oh you, you do a little sleight of hand and you go, why did you find this girl most attractive? But it wasn't the girl they picked. And like a big portion of them will be like, oh, I found her most attractive for these complicated set of reasons.

Malcolm: Or you look at brain patients, you know, you can talk to one part of their brain without talking to the other. And you can tell one part of their brain by covering one of their eyes, which only communicates with, with one side. It's as if the corpus callosum had to sever in it. And so you're talking with the other side of their brain and you're saying You know, pick up, pick up a Rubik's cube.

Malcolm: So they'll pick it up and you ask the other side, but why did you do that? And they're like, Oh I've always, I've always wanted to try to solve one of these. They don't know what they did. They're making up like their consciousness will take credit for things that we know it didn't do during open brain surgery.

Malcolm: If you stimulate a part of the brain, you can get a person like, raise a hand. And you're like, why did you do that? And they're like, Oh, I felt like doing it. They won't say that like they were forced to do it. Well, this means that if you integrated an AI directly with a [00:16:00] person's. You know, prefrontal cortex, for example they are going to believe that everything that the AI is telling them is something that they are thinking, and their brain will just naturally believe that they came up with all these ideas.

Malcolm: So if the AI is feeding them ideas, or if the AI is You know, drawing for them. If you plugged a person into like Dolly, they would think that they had created that art 100% believe it. And this is any human, you know, this is just the way our brains function because our brains have to synthesize a lot of pretty distinct.

Malcolm: Like we are not actually like singular entities. We're actually a bunch of distinct systems in the brains, which are then conflated to be a single entity by this system that essentially has to lie to us. To create what we perceive as our consciousness. Again, the sentience video, we'll go into this in a lot more detail, but other questions, Simone.

Simone: So basically you just think that nothing interesting is going to happen with brain computer interface and

Malcolm: some things interesting will eventually happen, but it will be at a level of technology that is far above where we are today. And I think that the really interesting work now, the real work that's going to [00:17:00] change the future of humanity is the genetics work.

Malcolm: It's genetics and AI are the most, I mean, eventually we're going to need to get brain computer interface good. So I'm glad that people like Elon are working on it. Why do we need to get it good? Because AI is continuing to develop. And if we can't figure out a way to integrate with AI, to create entities that are both biological and synthetic then we are almost intrinsically antagonistic towards AI, and we might end up in a future where only the synthetic or only the biological exists, and both of those futures are going to be pretty horrifying if we continue advancing, but it's, it's, I guess the combined future is pretty horrifying to some as well but it's, it's less horrifying because at least humanity continues to survive.

Malcolm: Or something that looks, you know, that broadly like a descendant of current humanity surrise.

Simone: Yeah. In in the culture series that, that I love by Ian Banks there's this technology called a neural lace which is what it sounds like basically it's, it's something that starts really, [00:18:00] really small, I guess, like a piece of biosynthetic material that goes into your brain, goes past the blood brain barrier, and grows into your brain and integrates with it. And then over time creates a backup of your consciousness because it's, it's just being really possible. Yeah. So like keeping an eye on everything that's possible.

Simone: And I think it's really interesting because Ian Banks, you know, wrote about all this stuff, like well before the technology was there well before, you know, people had, had even gotten close to developing technologies like this. And I find it really interesting. That, you know, that, that exists. But yeah, it's it's, it's, it, once it grows to its full size in this science fiction universe, it's thousands of years in the future the theoretical future that I like love and want to live in so bad.

Simone: You know, if the thing, if you like incinerate a human, like you could hold this really fine, like netting. This lace in your hand, you know, and it's just about the size of a brain. And I think that's yeah, that, that seems doable. But I guess what you're saying is that until we [00:19:00] develop technology that can literally grow into a brain and then transmit,

Malcolm: we develop that technology.

Malcolm: Yes. We'll be able to do things like back up the brain, but the core promise that people have right now is seamless integration with the brain in a way that we can consciously control. And that is not possible with near future technology. They are imagining like a computer feeding them facts in a way where they are aware that the computer is feeding them facts and they are asking for those facts.

Malcolm: That is not what's happening. A computer is overriding your consciousness because your brain can't tell the difference between what's coming from the computer and what's coming from, you know, that's what's actually happening. And you're not getting that much benefit from it when compared with just checking the internet or something.

Malcolm: Right,

Simone: right.

Malcolm: Yeah. Because your brain, evolved to deal with like optic information, auditory information, and you could create a brain that's optimized for this type of interface, but that would likely require genetic manipulation. So what I really hear

Simone: you saying then is that this is a lot like the flying cars [00:20:00] issue, where like forever, you know, people were told, were promised, they like to say, they would have flying cars and it would be so amazing and so cool, blah, blah, blah.

Simone: And that we actually can make flying cars. There was a flying car company out there, but just like from a practicality standpoint, like flying cars, aren't terribly energy efficient. We don't exactly have infrastructure that accommodates their landing and takeoff. You know, just, they'd be really expensive.

Simone: So okay, no one has flying cars because there's just no reason. For the they're not that good. They're not that affordable. There's no reason to have flying cars when we already have good enough technology that does everything else. We basically, we have Uber instead, like we got Uber instead of flying cars.

Simone: So you're saying that this is roughly the same, but yeah, I mean, theoretically we could do it, but it's, it's actual utility, given what we're going to be able to achieve and given the cost is going to be pretty limited. Right. And it's just going to be a flying

Malcolm: car. Eventually it'll be an important part of where our species goes.

Malcolm: Crucial part. It's just not one of the [00:21:00] technologies to be watching right now. And I really like eventually humans will primarily travel in flying vehicles. I absolutely believe that to be the case when we are like an interstellar species, right? And when human cities may look different and stuff like that, right?

Malcolm: But there's no reason for us to do it with current levels of technology. And yeah, I really appreciate how smart you are and how good you are at communicating this stuff.

Simone: I'm not the one who just explained in great detail the problems of neuroscience. So let's put that back to you. And I just, no, no,

Malcolm: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Malcolm: I'm sure you could explain something to me. What did you get your degree in?

Simone: Business and technology policy that, you know, it's not that. Why did

Malcolm: I allow that? I'm joking.

Malcolm: You know, I harass her at undergrad in business, I'm like, that is not a big brain thing

Simone: to do. It was [00:22:00] my point of shame. Yeah. But I think that you also

Malcolm: I screwed up too. I got a pointless degree, but it makes me look smart. It helps with this sort of narrative of Malcolm's a smart guy, even if he doesn't Yeah.

Malcolm: You

Simone: had told me that, like Oh, what are the list of the top degrees that are often taken by like a high class students at universities when it was like philosophy and neuroscience.

Malcolm: No, it is true. Students from yeah, the higher socioeconomic backgrounds, they disproportionately

Simone: take that. You notice that at university that like of, of the students that were getting those degrees, like a lot of because they're seen

Malcolm: as high status degrees was in certain groups.

Malcolm: It wasn't philosophy. It was actually specifically. You would get a degree in classics with one that drew a lot, right, which was almost a flex because of how pointless it was, or art history, which is also a flex because of how pointless it was, or if they went into the biological fields, it was typically neuroscience or genetics.

Malcolm: And that was like a flex because of how technically difficult it was. [00:23:00] Oh, but

Simone: genetics is what we'd actually be thrilled that our kids got into for sure. Yeah.

Malcolm: So I love you, Simone. So let's, let's make these kids high status individuals.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Well, status in the future is going to be super interesting.

Simone: So there's

Malcolm: an interesting thing about neuroscience degrees. And this is something I noticed in my department, which I, I, I tell people to look at. They were disproportionately the most attractive people in the biology or psychology schools.

Simone: So if you're looking for someone that's hot, go onto LinkedIn, check has graduate degree in neuroscience and then you don't even have to look at their picture.

Malcolm: You're like, no, no, no. Women with degrees in neuroscience. Now this might be because of attractiveness. Correlates with intelligence. And so that's what's causing it. But I don't know, but yeah, if you were to look around like our biology or psychology classes, then you're like, okay, who are the top 10 hottest women?

Malcolm: They were almost all in the neuroscience class.

Simone: Good night. Well, I love it. I love you. Have a fun one. You too.[00:24:00]

Sandman, a leading figure in the MGTOW community, joins Simone and Malcolm to discuss high-tech reproductive strategies. They explore surrogacy, genetic selection, artificial wombs, sexbots, and more ways men can have children without partners. Other topics include all-male vs all-female societies, economics, and virtual intimacy technologies.

Sandman: [00:00:00] a lot of guys are also looking for, they want loverbots or sexbots because they're trying to, you're trying to compartmentalize every aspect of what you would get from a woman and take technology and replace everything. And this is something that a lot of women that I've spoken to, they get really oppity because it's, it makes, it creates obsolescence, right?

Sandman: Why would they choose a real life woman versus using the technology.

Simone: Yeah. And I, I do, I thought that's one of my favorite arguments that I see like within MGTOW, just Hey, listen, when you look at.

Simone: The difference between a suboptimal relationship with a spouse where you're paying a lot extra for everything versus like getting everything piecemeal. It really is crazy that people would choose to have a suboptimal relationship with a spouse to do all this.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm: hello. It is so wonderful to be here with you today, Simone. We have a wonderful guest today. So actually [00:01:00] before he reached out to us, he was on an email list for us to reach out to, because we were interested in reaching out to the people in the MGTOW community. And I was like, okay, so who are the top MGTOW people these days?

Malcolm: And I looked and the first name was Sandman. who they called the Mount Rushmore of the MGTOW community. And so I was like, wow, he's already, that's amazing. IDs travel in similar circles. So for people who aren't familiar with the MGTOW community this stands for Men Going Their Own Way which is a cultural response to the raw deal.

Malcolm: Many men feel they're getting a society today and you can correct me if I said anything wrong there, but what is our topic today, Simone?

Simone: We are going to talk about something way beyond the basics of MGTOW, which is reproductive strategy, because just because you may be opting out of like traditional relationships with women doesn't mean that you don't want to have.

Simone: Kids, so it doesn't

Malcolm: mean that you don't want your cultural group to survive into the future.

Simone: Exactly. So what do, how can we use technology and different [00:02:00] strategies?

Malcolm: How can we make MGTOW an intergenerationally durable cultural group? Okay. So

Sandman: The first thing when I started my channel back in end of 2013, the first thing that came to mind was I don't want to get married, but I still want to have children. So how am I going to pull this off? And the first thing I looked at was gestational surrogacy. And you can go and buy eggs for five, 6, 000 on the open market.

Sandman: And then you can go and pay for a surrogate in another country and then you can reproduce and you can have all the children you want. And so when I put that video out, I got a good response, but a lot of women were very upset because they said you're depriving the children of a mother. They said, you're, yes, this is the argument that was being thrown around.

Sandman: It's not fair for you to deprive. The child, and I'm thinking to myself, but what about all the single mothers out there that are depriving their children of fathers?

Malcolm: Just to add to this, because the audience might not be familiar with this statistic, is that there's been a lot of studies on this, and while coming from a [00:03:00] single mother household has a lot of negative implications on children.

Malcolm: Long term single father households actually don't have that many negative implications. Sick birth of mothers. There's alternative reasons why this might be the case. It might be that they typically because courts so disproportionately favor women, divorce courts do, that really the only time that when people get a divorce or In the relationship for some sort of bad reason, the kids are going to the mother.

Malcolm: But if one of the parents dies, then it's going to the father. That could be what's causing this in the data. But it is just a true thing in most of the data that being a single father has much better implications than being a single mother. Continue.

Sandman: So about five or ten different guys over the years have contacted me and they've told me that they've tried gestational surrogacy either in Ukraine.

Sandman: Or in Africa or in Mexico when I first saw what was going on, I thought, okay, I'm going to do India because India seemed to be the most cost effective at the time you could get for 12, 000. Roughly. You could basically have a child. Yeah. You're looking at the cost is very low. [00:04:00] It's not just that it's also to do with genetic selection.

Sandman: I know you guys are very involved in genetic selection, when you go through. You can pick through all the different surrogates. So if you're a five foot five short man lit you're not going to get many women to date you and have reproduced reproduction with you. So what you want to do is you want to go and find someone that's, five foot, nine, five foot, 10, six feet tall.

Sandman: Blonde hair. Sorry. Yeah. Blonde hair blue eyes. And then you can basically up your value, up the value of your children and get them higher in the sexual marketplace that way.

Simone: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But you could

Malcolm: really spam that using, college and our score

Simone: selection. Yeah,

Malcolm: so you want to talk about the cost of that, Simone, just so yeah,

Simone: First, if we're talking about the cost of surrogacy it's typically well over a hundred thousand dollars in the United States.

Malcolm: I'm asking is what would be the marginal cost if he was able to do this in India to do the polygenic risk score selection?

Simone: It's non trivial now, and hopefully it will be a lot less expensive in the future. So right [00:05:00] now, I think genomic prediction, which is the gold standard of like your typical getting it started, polygenic risk score selection, I think is around like 400 per embryo with a sort of minimum

Malcolm: fee.

Malcolm: But that would allow you to look at things like height for every one of those embryos? No.

Simone: Not exactly. They don't tell you that? They don't tell you height. Genomic prediction only tells you a series of politically correct health

Malcolm: scores. So you need to export the data and send it to other people? Yeah,

Simone: so you need to export it and then upload it to other platforms.

Simone: Self decode being one that's more affordable and also like publicly open about yes, we'll accept genomic prediction exports. Yes, we have a variety of scores. I don't know if currently they have one for height though. So there are other groups

Malcolm: that do. Yeah,

Simone: It's just, it is not cheap.

Sandman: Okay India banned banned everything about, I think it was about 10 or 11 years ago. So just as I was looking at, yes, they did. So it was banned for foreigners and was banned for single individuals. So they, yeah they're, the discrimination is getting pretty [00:06:00] crazy. You can look at places like Mexico, a lot of people are doing Africa now.

Sandman: So that seems to be Ukraine was always a possibility for a while, obviously not anymore right now. So that was what was going on. And then over time, I thought to myself, this is a good reproductive strategy, but I came upon some health issues. So I decided, okay that's not going to really work for me.

Sandman: So what could, what else, what other health strategies, what other reproductive strategies could I implement? And so I look at Elon Musk and I look at his reproductive strategy as. What I would like to call spray and pray right? So he's just going out there and reproducing with as many women as he can. I think he's up to 11, 12, 13 children right now.

Sandman: And but he doesn't have the, he does not implementing a cultural strategy. And this is something that Malcolm brought up. It's not, it's 1 thing to pass your genes down to the next generation. But how do you ensure 345 generations down the road. And that's something that I didn't really think [00:07:00] about.

Sandman: And so my idea was, when I get older, when I'm standing in my 60s or 70s, I pay for a bunch of surrogates. I have 10 different children. I put them up for adoption. With different, different people who have, they're financially successful and I can put them up in different parts of the world, which increases the possibility of survival in case there's like a thermonuclear war or something ridiculous, right?

Sandman: So that was the strategy. So now I'm thinking that's not going to work. So now I'm looking at. other strategies, which, if in the next few years, if I get my autoimmune issues under control and, Bitcoin does what it's supposed to, then I'm thinking probably within, five, six years, I might.

Sandman: implement the surrogacy strategy. So that's where I'm at right now.

Simone: Yeah. What I would say is it doesn't even matter how many kids you immediately have. If you're thinking about the long term impact culturally, whatever that you would have through children, it doesn't matter how many kids you have.

Simone: It matters how many grandkids you have and how many, kids, they haven't [00:08:00] turned. So like someone could have 10 kids, someone could have 30 kids. And if those kids all hate you and either don't have kids at all, or don't pass on anything related to you, then like you might as well have done

Malcolm: nothing.

Malcolm: So we've also got to keep in mind that MGTOW cultural strategies are going to become more viable in the future. Artificial womb technology is getting nearer and nearer to viable. And that could make having kids without a partner. Very inexpensive. It could even make yeah, different types of genetic

Sandman: recombination possible.

Sandman: But as you guys know it's not just the cost of reproduction. It's the cost of daycare and all the other stuff. It's probably way more in the end. Like what a lot of people have been thinking about in terms of reproduction for MGTOW is, there's a holy, there's a few holy grail technologies that will allow these things to happen.

Sandman: So one of those is artificial wombs. Yes. But a lot of guys are also looking for, they want loverbots or sexbots because they're trying to, you're trying to compartmentalize every aspect of what you would get from a woman [00:09:00] and take technology and replace everything. And this is something that a lot of women that I've spoken to, they get really oppity because it's, it makes, it creates obsolescence, right?

Sandman: In certain ways, and all of a sudden it limits their ability to mate select because if all of a sudden you have 70, 80, 90% of the male population that can gain access to these technologies, then why would they choose a real life woman versus using the technology.

Simone: Yeah. And I, I do, I thought that's one of my favorite arguments that I see like within MGTOW, just Hey, listen, when you look at.

Simone: The difference between a suboptimal relationship with a spouse where you're paying a lot extra for everything versus like getting everything piecemeal. It really is crazy that people would choose to have a suboptimal relationship with a spouse to do all this.

Simone: So like it's exciting and yes, with IVG. In the future. And who knows, like how far Malcolm, what's your estimate on like where we will be with [00:10:00] artificial wombs and in future, I think

Malcolm: our kids will almost certainly 99% probability have access to them when they decide to have kids.

Simone: What about people today watching this?

Simone: You just I don't know,

Malcolm: 10 years could be 20 years. It's difficult to say exactly and the problem is that a lot of this stuff has to be done in secret because, the public mores are so against it right now. And I think that's a really interesting thing that's talked about a lot in the MGTOW community, which I don't think the general public is as aware of.

Malcolm: So I, I want to talk about this subject a little. The way that feminist groups really freak out. about stuff like sex bots in a way that like, okay, obviously, so the perception often within the MGTOW community around this is they cognizantly understand how this lowers their power on sexual marketplaces.

Malcolm: And that's why they're reacting this way. But I don't feel like they're thinking about it. Like

Simone: does it even lower their power? Like

Sandman: They feel like it lowers their power versus anything. So for example, I was okay. So [00:11:00] I've been working on my own version of a. I wouldn't call it a sex bot.

Sandman: I would call it more like a virtual sex system. The way it works is it projects a real life woman into the sex doll. So that you interact with the real woman, and you're stimulating the technology, but there's this technology on the other end that's stimulating her. So you're actually able to have sex, we're digitizing everything.

Sandman: We're digitizing

Malcolm: Teladildonics is what this field is called, by the way.

Simone: Wait, is that an actual word?

Malcolm: Yes. Yeah. I looked into it for a while. I thought there were some interesting opportunities in

Sandman: the field. Why

Simone: not just in AI though? Like why involve a woman at all?

Sandman: Okay. So when I first introduced the technology to a couple women, they got very hostile.

Sandman: So my instinct, my, for my white knighting instinct was activated. Okay. And I thought like, how could I make this woman feel more comfortable about what I was saying? Oh, and I, my subconscious just said, I'm not going to just replace women with an AI. I'm going to, I'm going to allow you to interact with the man through the technology.

Sandman: And all of [00:12:00] a sudden the mood and the hostility just disappeared because all of a sudden the hamster in her head started running and the hamster figured out, okay. If I can use this technology, then I can have a new way to exploit the simpish population over the internet. It's the next OnlyFans.

Sandman: Yes, because with the way the technology, like the way I've developed the technology, like I've got, like I can show you guys crude pieces of prototypes. The first thing is it uses a sex doll, right? So the sex doll, but you take the head, the sex doll heads are like. removable. So you can unscrew the sex doll head.

Sandman: Then what you do is you put a plastic see through transparent plastic head on there. And then you put an ultra short throw projector in the back. So it projects the person out. And then the dolls have a vaginal insert. So you take the vaginal insert out and you put one in with sensors. So that literally picks up all your thrusts.

Sandman: And so digitizes your thrusts. She can see you through the through the [00:13:00] face and she can interact with you. And then on her end, there's technology that's capturing her face in real time. And there's also the teledildonics that are thrusting in and out. You can use all kinds of different

Simone: technologies.

Simone: I'm sorry, I'm like so seven years old. This is so funny, teledildonics. I just, I don't know. I feel like I would, as a guy, as a girl, I would prefer like my waifu slash husbando to do this. That's like not a human. You'd like a complete AI. But no, I

Malcolm: mean, so I so one thing he said that I thought was really interesting, that I think is interesting is the economics of this.

Malcolm: Yeah. Look at current ways that women can. I don't know. What did you want to say? Exploit or whatever. Get money from men on the internet. They are typically one to many approaches. Yeah. Which mean that the very best women just completely mop up. This is, whether it's OnlyFans, Or sex chat, chatting websites or something like that.

Malcolm: What makes this technology unique is that it monopolizes a woman's time with one guy for a longer period of time. So it's actually much more [00:14:00] democratizing of women's ability to make money in online environments, which in many ways. Yeah, that's interesting.

Simone: This is so not where I thought the conversation was going to go, Sandman, when you mentioned I want to figure out how to also, replace the elements of a female presence in the home.

Simone: I'm picturing Mother from the Umbrella Academy, which I'm not sure if you've watched that show, but there's just Yes. Yes. Yeah this robotic 1950s trad wife.

Sandman: In terms of replacing, there's technologies like they're creating robot shops and you can, I've got like a vacuum that kind of just does its own thing and all that kind of stuff.

Sandman: Those are just appliances that kind of do that. But to have a, you have to think about this technology. We can't get to a full Android within the next. 50 100. Like it's going to take a long time. So you have to look at all the intermediate steps between like full android and where we are today and how you have to push the technology forward.

Sandman: You have to start working on those intermediate steps and making them good, right? [00:15:00] So because if you create, if I create My virtual sex system, then people will see the possibility and they'll start adding more things to it, right? So all of a sudden there'll be sensors built into the doll so you can touch it and there's all there's already cloth that women can wear That'll actually transmit like the feel of somebody else from it from a distance So

Malcolm: this is something that's really interesting.

Malcolm: So I'm thinking You know, when you were talking about the mother system, okay, let's talk 50 100 years in the future, right? You would be able to easily likely have an AI that is shared between both your sexual release mechanisms and the mothering figure in the household, right? So it's the same personality to many extent but like different aspects of it for different environments.

Malcolm: So you can have the best of all worlds, But once you do that, and, women could do something similar, and once you don't need somebody of the opposite gender to have a kid or opposite sex, is more politically correct to say. I don't know which one's more politically correct these days.

Malcolm: Once you don't need someone of the opposite [00:16:00] sex to have a kid that then how many people, if we're talking about the percentage of durable cultural groups that survive, how many of them will actually keep up this male female dynamic versus how many of them will be just totally male cultures with simulated female partners and totally female cultures with simulated male partners.

Sandman: We also have to think about the advantage of having a society where it's. 90, 90 plus percent males versus more females because the males are going to pay more tax. The males are going to work more, but again, AI could make all of that irrelevant. So we don't know, there's so many unknowns at this point.

Sandman: But I'm definitely thinking. In terms of so let's say you got, you take 90% males and say they choose to reproduce. We don't know if people are, would even reproduce if you gave them these options. Like we're getting to this point where society is atomizing so much that I don't know.

Sandman: Like we're looking for solutions. It's almost like you have to [00:17:00] cater to people's narcissism, and that's another one of the things I was going to bring up in terms of reproduction. There's a show I mentioned to Malcolm called Foundation. Uh, Yes. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. And, And there's the Kleon dynasty, genetic dynasty.

Sandman: And every single version of Kleon is a clone. So if you create... Like a lineage where you're passing your clone down, you're going from one generation to the next, then it, what your aptitudes are, what your strengths and weaknesses are. So you can, you're more likely to guide the clone forward.

Sandman: And also a clone would be technically your brother. And you would be the father at the same time because Go ahead. Yeah. No.

Malcolm: What I liked about this and we talked about this and we're talking about on the call is it would allow for culture to become a lot weirder and a lot more specialized.

Malcolm: Right now we talk about to, to some extent cultures co evolve with different groups, right? Because each the culture is putting a pressure on the genetics and the genetics is putting a pressure on the culture. But if you had a, a pure breeding, like a, that means that you have the same genetics within each generation.

Malcolm: [00:18:00] It's what you talk about in mice or something like that, like bred pure. It doesn't mean like pure as in like ethnically. Anyway, if you have a pure breeding, like same genes, every generation. Individual and then a culture that's adapting itself within that group, I think it would become pretty radically different than anything we see in society today to the point that you were making, because you could know exactly not just what strengths and weaknesses your kid is going to have, but what strengths and weaknesses your great grandkid is going to have.

Malcolm: Yes. Which changes a lot. Also, if you don't need to prime somebody to look for a partner, that changes a lot of how they, they structure their lives, for example.

Simone: How do you think so let's say that there is like this isolated male society, where it's really just men. How do you think culture would be different, especially when like women are no longer a point of stress or strife?

Sandman: I've crawled over, I've gone through most of the old west. I've gone through all ghost towns and I've seen, you get. Yeah, that was that world, right? Yeah, because you get 80, 90% males and you get 10%, [00:19:00] 15% females. It's really interesting because.

Sandman: The jobs for women are usually prostitute and barmaid and, it's it's limited,

Simone: They're not really part of society. They really almost are more like sex dolls in that world, right? Because they're not even really just citizens. They're there to provide a service, right?

Simone: Yeah,

Sandman: exactly. And there's this one town called Castle Dome. It's in Arizona, just outside of Yuma. And when I went down there there's this bathtub that these prostitutes would haul from town to bathe the Johns because they didn't want to, they wanted to make sure they were clean, as clean as possible, yeah. You're seeing, you're going to see If you have a mostly male society, like I said, it would out compete societies that were more 50 50 or societies that had more females in them, simply because... Males spend more time working and paying taxes. So there's a New Zealand study that shows that men pay 150, 000 more in their lifetimes to tax in New Zealand than they actually take out.

Sandman: So it's so yeah, [00:20:00] and to

Malcolm: be clear, he's saying that they would outcompete economically speaking. They likely in current scenarios wouldn't outcompete in terms of fertility rates, but new technology. Could unlock that and if people are wondering to Simone's question What does an all male versus all female society look like a fun now keep in mind This has some staging to it and stuff like that But if you want to get a feel for the differences, there was a survivor season Where they separated people into an all male and all female group.

Malcolm: It wasn't really Yeah, and they created very different intra group cultures, and I think the intra group cultures they created. It explains to me why it is so prevalent among the friend groups. I know to be like of women, right? We'll have kids. We can have kids without men, and then we'll create a group where it's all of us.

Malcolm: Single moms working together to raise our kids. And yet none of these groups has ever survived more than six months that I'm aware of. And I think that episode shows why.

Sandman: Not that episode sees it or whatever. I also think that a male, all male society would be hot, more highly disagreeable.

Sandman: If you look at the Old West, it's obviously like they're [00:21:00] shootings and there's lootings all over the place. It has to do with just men not, getting angry, getting on each other's nerves and figuring out ways to relieve the violence with, relieve the anger with violence.

Sandman: So that's another thing.

Simone: One of my questions, though, is don't, isn't one of the reasons why, for example, men on average contribute more in tax dollars is because when they have children, their female partners are often participating in that in a way that doesn't show up in, The modern economy, like uncompensated labor because women on average just prefer to do that work.

Simone: So they pick it up there's, there must be some numbers that are off there, right?

Malcolm: It's

Sandman: the whole, the whole gender pay gap argument, and the gender pay gap argument, women's, they take more time off for raising the young. So that's going to affect their earnings potential down the road.

Sandman: It's going to affect their earnings potential immediately. Men also typically work. More overtime hours, so that, so when a man is in love, he's more likely to put more effort into this [00:22:00] family and put more effort into things. I've seen this, you've seen this, we've all looked at that.

Sandman: But my

Simone: concern is that if men now are solely responsible for raising kids, like also theoretically, that they're. Contribution to GDP will take a hit or at least their contribution to measured financial GDP will take a hit. The

Malcolm: other thing to keep in mind, Simone, is that if you look at low skill jobs that pay a lot, they are disproportionately male held jobs.

Malcolm: Yeah. You're looking at like high danger jobs, high, et cetera. But here's what I think we can forget about this. If you had a society that was only men would also have to sort into the low skilled jobs that are disproportionately female today that are lower paying, like teacher, et cetera.

Sandman: Yeah, it's Malcolm is bringing up the it's, the three Ds, dangerous, difficult, and dirty jobs. Those are the jobs that men typically will do.

Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah, they'd be forced to take the jobs that women are also taking now in an all male society. So you might have a [00:23:00] less of an inherent GDP gain unless you could show that within equivalent jobs that men led to more efficient outcomes.

Malcolm: I don't know if there's data on

Sandman: that. I'd be open to it, but things are changing. If you're looking at earnings potential women in their twenties are now way out earning men in their twenties. So it's starting to flip. It's starting to go the

Malcolm: other way. Oh

Simone: yeah. Yeah.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm: Yeah. Sorry? Education. Women graduate with college degrees at such a dramatically higher rate than men do.

Sandman: Yeah. And education, the problem with education is you're starting to see more verbal, like the reason girls are doing so much better is because education is becoming more verbal as opposed to visual.

Sandman: And a lot of these jobs, the, a lot of these manual labor jobs require visual thinking as opposed to verbal thinking and like they're pulling out, my old middle school, I just looked up the number of teachers, male versus female, and there's only two male teachers, right? Back when I was a kid, it was like 50 50.

Sandman: They also pulled out the shop class. That's gone. So they're just, they're a minute and they replaced it [00:24:00] with feminist, right? music class. You're right. So they're teaching like Black Lives Matter hymns. I'm like, wow, this is a skill that's going to help civilization continue. So I'm

Simone: also thinking actually, when I'm thinking about what would a society that's primarily male look like?

Simone: This is imperfect obviously, because women did actually play a pretty big role. In the Spartan world, but like that was a world in which to a great extent, it seemed like child care was pooled. So it was managed at scale. It wasn't really so much that like women did all the child rearing as much as.

Simone: In other societies, at least, like the kids weren't always in the home, they were often training collectively, so like I could see an all male society in which you have all the children training collectively more or less at scale, like in a really efficient manner that also creates pretty successful humans and

Sandman: I've looked at Sparta and the problem with Sparta, it was very matriarchal but what happened was It didn't last very long.

Sandman: It only lasted like a few generations compared to societies like Athens that were more [00:25:00] patriarchal. So if you look at Sparta versus Athens, it's more matriarchal versus patriarchal than anything else. Was Sparta that

Simone: matriarchal? Like women were property managers, but they weren't really, were they that involved in politics and ruling?

Sandman: I'm not 100% sure, but I know that they were involved in the economy. So that was the thing. Yeah my

Simone: understanding was like, they would stay at home and they would run the farm, but like in any modern economy. So if we're looking at like the MGTOW Sparta, it would, that would just be good, like automated property management and stuff would not be something that anyone needed to do, like in the modern age, the role that women played in Sparta.

Simone: Is not necessary at all. Yeah. So you would just more look at what we would see. Neither is the

Malcolm: role that men played. Slave manager is not a big job in today's society.

Simone: Men didn't manage the slaves. Men like trained and were like, what

Malcolm: were they training to do? Put down slave rebels.

Simone: I mean, I'm sure they can do something else.

Simone: You know, They did what the nation needed in order to gain wealth, so theoretically they [00:26:00] would train to do really awesome stuff.

Malcolm: It's a little bit more.

Sandman: They did gain wealth, but you notice in that culture, like if you look at the ruins of Athens versus the ruins of Sparta, It's there's nothing in Sparta.

Sandman: There's no great art. There's no architect, like architect. It's all not the level is not there.

Simone: They weren't so effete though. I mean, you know, they, They got s**t done. I don't know. They

Malcolm: weren't interested in art. So you see, yeah, they

Simone: weren't, they weren't girly men. I don't know what to tell you.

Malcolm: Cultural framework. So, And I love that you're so like, California tradition. Art. Disgusting. What a sign of degeneracy. Um, And this is actually genuinely something we believe, I think, puts us at odds with a lot of like, the uh, Manosphere right now, where they're like, look at the old artist. And Simone's looking at that, and she's like, I don't know.

Malcolm: That looks kind of girly. Statues. True

Simone: story. Nerds. Maybe. Anyway.

Malcolm: Anyway. I have loved this conversation. Let's do another one. People should [00:27:00] check out his YouTube. You could just look up Sandman on YouTube. Yep. And we'll have a link here. Sandman MIG towel. Yeah. And is there anything else they should check out?

Malcolm: Oh, but what about this doll? Can they buy this?

Sandman: No, this is still on, this is still on the development concept stage, so you can buy the dolls. There's actually I've been selling dolls for many years. But in terms of buying the technology, not yet.

Simone: What do they look like compared to real dolls?

Simone: Like what are we picturing

Sandman: here? You take a real doll, but you remove the head and you remove the vaginal insert and you, those things are technological, but the rest of the doll is pretty much a real doll. Oh, sweet.

Malcolm: Okay, cool. So it's

Sandman: off the shelf technology. So you're not inventing new technology.

Sandman: Go ahead. Oh, no, I was just

Malcolm: describing what you said earlier. He explained this earlier. Yeah, with the head.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. I was just wondering, I like, I, I wasn't sure where the picture like blow up doll for bachelor parties or like real doll with

Malcolm: no, it

Sandman: would be silicone, like a steel steel frame with silicone

Malcolm: over it.

Malcolm: Yeah. Okay. Sweet. Sweet. Sweet. Yeah.

Simone: That's way better. Okay. Cool.

Malcolm: Is that what we're selling on our channel now is. [00:28:00] I love it.

Simone: I'm sorry. Real dolls are like, great. I don't, I'm just like, I, I want to know what the foundation is. These things matter to me. Cool. Yes. I

Malcolm: think there are very interesting technological innovation in terms of society right now.

Malcolm: And they change a lot of potential social structures, I think in pretty big ways that I'm really excited. And your technology is very interesting because it would. Create a completely new economy and a completely new relationship dynamic and a huge amount of social fallout from that would be very fun to observe.

Sandman: You like the chaos, right?

Malcolm: I like the way groups adapt to new things because it's interesting and I would be annoyed by the groups that just reflexively yell at you for doing something new, but. That they'd exist too, right?

Sandman: Yeah, totally. No, it's, it, the technology would basically my whole thing with the technology was it allows intimacy.

Sandman: It creates an intimacy. So say two partners are on either side of [00:29:00] the world, they can have a sexual intimate relationship without being in physical contact with each other, but still be able to, get each other off.

Simone: I like that. I'm excited. The future is here.

In this candid discussion, we explore the nuances around polyamory and open relationships. We look at how polygyny historically existed among elites, the market forces leading more high-value men to pursue open relationships today, and the differences between cheating vs consensual non-monogamy. We share our own open relationship dynamics and how radical honesty helps us maintain a strong marriage.

Simone: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. Today, we are going to discuss an interesting topic, which is polyamory. We have discussed it in the past. But we didn't really go too deep on the topic. Yeah. And I think it deserves a deeper dive. One, because it's becoming increasingly common. Within especially the urban monoculture, like the, the, the urban populations and the progressive movement.

Malcolm: But I've also seen it among many of our more successful conservative friends for a different reason. And we can get into why we're seeing it in those circles as well. Hmm.

Simone: That sounds good to me,

Would you like to know more?​

Malcolm: but first we should do a little history lesson because I think that there's this perception.

Malcolm: That we, you know, if you're talking about the Western tradition more broadly has been historically a [00:01:00] monogamous tradition. And that is true to the extent that most people have been monogamous. Yeah. I thought you were going to

Simone: say, this is true for poor people.

Malcolm: It's true for poor people.

Malcolm: When a culture is polygynous, one man, many women, there's actually been no stable culture in history with anything close to what we call polyamory in our society. Usually, when you have a multiple partner culture, you have polygyny, which is one man, many women. However, there has been one case I know of, of many men to one woman and this was like in Tibet, like it was in a high resource, scarce region

Simone: of the mountains.

Simone: But, and it's also, I think, commonly with brothers. Yeah, it was basically

Malcolm: only done with brothers. And, and it makes sense why that would work because then the guy knows that the kids are related to him. And it was meant as a form of population control was in those cultures. So that's, that's how it ended up developing and being intergenerationally successful.

Malcolm: It was also cultures that didn't need to worry about neighbors raiding them because they [00:02:00] lived in extremely like they were not competing with their surrounding cultures. They were more competing with their environment. Which is why it was able to become stable, but certainly no culture that's ever really spread.

Malcolm: But why this is relevant. So if you talk about long lived Stable polygynous cultures. There's some Jewish groups that fall into this. There's some groups in Africa that fall into this. Some Muslim groups fall into this. You're typically looking at around 5% of the population will have multiple wives.

Malcolm: People assume it's much more now. Historically, there has been short lived polygynous societies like the Mormon population group where this number was higher at the, the height of, of that part of Mormon history, I think around 20% to 23% of men had multiple wives but it was still the vast minority.

Malcolm: Now where this gets interesting is if I look within our existing culture right now, like the various cultural groups, probably one of the ones I'd say is, is most pro what [00:03:00] we'd call monogamy is the Catholic group, right? However, if you look historically speaking, so we're looking to traditional Catholicism.

Malcolm: You're looking at like the monarchies of Louis the 14th, right? And so when you were saying he would write a book about all of the mistresses he had that everyone knew he

Simone: had. Yeah. Antonia Fraser wrote a great book called Love and Louis the 14th, where she like, it's a long book and it just details all of his lovers.

Simone: And this isn't just secret affairs on the side. This is, you know, people who were titled people. I mean, like it was, it was very well known. Now the Catholic church didn't like it. And they kept saying don't do this. And one of his lovers may have been rumored to actually marry him in the end secretly, though.

Simone: That's not like historically officially documented. So there's interplay and like the Catholic church definitely has. A, a relationship with not being cool with it, like officially, but sort of in practice they're like, I mean, for example, with getting home [00:04:00] with the eighth, right? Like they were, I think they probably would have annulled his marriage and allowed him to jump from one marriage to the next for convenience.

Simone: If there was not a familiar tie with his first wife and the Pope. Yeah, the Catholic Church, I would say in practice. And

Malcolm: they regularly, you know, allowed it. So keep in mind, you know, Louis was king via divine that is what gave him the right to monarchy within his cultural context. When he's saying, why am I king?

Malcolm: I am king because of the church. And, and you know, that did not, the, him having multiple partners and everyone knowing and the extent to which everyone knew, I really can be sort of understated or cannot be overstated. Like the mistresses, who he was choosing as a mistress at the time would determine fashion within like the, the, the court culture.

Simone: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, even to the point where some types of, of court dress like the, the style of disabillé, which basically means sort of like undress we're, we're, we're [00:05:00] said to have been developed. When mistress, like certain certain mistress was pregnant just so like it was a little bit less corseted so she could have her kind of belly like stick out.

Simone: I get better, yeah. Yeah, so like literally that is how pervasive it was and open it was. And now I mean like. This is France. France was really like, you know, known for that kind of thing. You're

Malcolm: acting like it's the only monarchy where it happened. I chose France because it's one of the most famous in, in, in pop culture well documented ones.

Malcolm: And also you write a book about all his mistresses that you would be well aware of. It's such a good book. Talk to the topic. But I think even within our modern society, so if you look at America today let's say America 10 years ago or something, people could say, oh, this was a predominantly monogamous society and there was a great South Park episode on this and the, the central joke of the episode Is a bunch of males on like TV and scientists were trying to figure out why rich men kept cheating on their wives.

Malcolm: And obviously the joke [00:06:00] was every man knew, but they had to pretend like it was very confusing why men kept cheating on women when they became super famous and wealthy. And this was framed around the Tiger Woods controversy and then some other controversies and they would give a monkey a bunch of money and it would go out and cheat on his wife and they were like, this is such a bizarre phenomenon.

Malcolm: But, but the joke being. It's it's obvious why this happens. However, I, I think it's not obvious why it happens and that's what I want to dig into.

Simone: Yeah, I think everyone's trying to say the quiet part quietly and we would rather say the quiet part out loud, right?

Malcolm: Yes, well, so let's talk about some things which is just not why it happens, okay?

Malcolm: One is people say it happens because biology. There's a lot of biological instincts that humans have that we are able to sublimate. So it's, it's not, I don't think it's just because of biology at least. And we don't see the mirror phenomenon. We do not see, you know, wealthy women cheating on their husbands at really high rates or, or [00:07:00] having these like basically open relationships.

Malcolm: So what, what's actually going on here is it's market pressures. Hypergamy is the reason this is happening. The same market pressures that lead to your average woman, like average attractiveness, average wealth, average, like if you're just marking women on a scale of zero to a hundred and like your average woman is a 50 your average woman has much, much, much more dating market power than your average man.

Malcolm: Everyone knows it's like the famous Twitter, sorry, the famous Tinder study where they found that your average man, like if you rank them in, so your mean, I'm sorry, so your median man is liked. On tinder by less than 1% of women. That's so incredibly like low power. Whereas your average woman, I forgot what it was.

Malcolm: I think it might've been around 50% of men like your average woman on tinder. Which is just shows this huge disparity in market. [00:08:00] And because most guys like fall into this average territory in their world, this is what they're focused on, the unfair market dynamics here. However, if you're sort of around like the ultra wealthy or elite society, you're going to notice much more the opposite problem, which is a top 1% man has dramatically more market value than a top 1% woman.

Malcolm: It's, it's astronomically more. A top 1% man is. is much more desirable than a top 1% women than a average woman is to an average man. And so the question is why, why is it that like, if you're talking about like literally the most desirable male in the world today, they'd be astronomically more desirable than the most desirable female.

Malcolm: And it's for the same problem. So if all women, because you know, men broadly know this are pairing with the top 20 or so percent of men. [00:09:00] And disproportionately with the ones at the very top of that 20%, the top 1, 2, 3%, that means that any guy who's at sort of the top of the desirability hierarchy is going to have a choice that the women who are trying to date him are not just competing with women of their level of desirability, they're competing with him.

Malcolm: Every, basically every woman in the world and what's worse for, from the perspective of that woman is these other women can augment their desirability to that male by altering aspects of the relationship contract that they are presenting that male with. So when we've talked about this before, the example I've used is you might pay more for an apartment if that apartment allows you to have dogs in the apartment, right?

Malcolm: Because it nothing has changed about the apartment itself, but it is more desirable to your average person on the market, a woman coming to a man and saying, I don't mind if you sleep around, this can [00:10:00] increase her desirability pretty dramatically to the man. And then

Simone: I think it's, it's notable also because we've, we've seen a lot of people's requirements for partners.

Simone: It's extremely rare for a woman to say that. Like just period. Yeah.

Malcolm: Yeah. A woman who is, you know. Top 10% can out compete a top 1% woman with some of these guys just by saying that. Yeah. Or, or additional caveats, like I will bring you other people to sleep with. And this creates an environment where men who are in this top 1% of the dating market, and, and we have seen this within the communities that we're in, it is actually, I think, pretty rare in those communities for women to not allow them to sleep around.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. , and we're talking about within modern America, conservative male circles. And I think that this really surprises people, but here's another thing that people get wrong about this. Okay, so they hear this and they say, yeah, but my [00:11:00] perception has been historically right that when I see people do this polygenous thing allow their partner to sleep around it in the extent or do the polyamory thing, it always leads to the death of the marriage.

Malcolm: Right, or the death of the relationship. And this is really interesting, but I would unfortunately say this is the bad to pay phenomenon because what you are actually noticing where if you have friends where they so so there's a few ways that relationship can be open. And a few ways that relationship can be closed.

Malcolm: So first I, I need to be clear here. We're specifically talking about polygyny and not poly. Poly is pretty rare among these circles for a man to allow his wife to sleep with other people is actually incredibly rare for these exact same market phenomenon when you're talking within these circles. Now, while most of these men are actually allowed to sleep around when you're talking about these ultra wealthy men[00:12:00] the strength of their relationship.

Malcolm: is often outwardsly publicly visible by how much they actually choose to. And this is the thing that people miss. For example, if you look at our relationship, if you're asking the question, are we in a, are we like poly or polygynous or whatever the answer is very interesting. Because we are in so far as...

Malcolm: I do not have a rule saying I can't sleep with other people. Whereas you have a rule saying you can't sleep with other people in our relationship contract. However, if you're asking, are we polygynous in practice? No, because you make a point of fulfilling all my needs. And, , the contract point that says you are allowed to sleep with other people says you are allowed to sleep with other people after you have notified me, this is the needs that aren't being met.

Malcolm: Can you meet these needs?

Simone: Now? Well, I mean, as one [00:13:00] person who's much older than us and much, much more old fashion said to us at one point was like, well, if I can't have. I'm going to get hamburger in the streets. And like that, I don't know, sounded fairly accurate for, I think, how many husbands feel.

Simone: And I think how the arrangement often works is in many long term marriages, like after a while, a wife may become. Less interested in sex. That happens often, you know, like she just isn't that interested in it. And, or one of the partners becomes less attractive, making it not as fun for the other partner to get intimate.

Simone: And that can go both ways, not just with wives, but with husbands too. Like sometimes husbands just become a lot less appealing. So it's actually really nice solution to just have. That solution met outside the relationship. Like it makes a

Malcolm: lot of sense. Yeah. Well, and, and, and some women prefer that, but that does lower their ability to maintain a partner potentially, if they're allowing him to source these things outside the relationship, but it could [00:14:00] but the really, the, the, the larger point that I'm making here is when people say, are you guys polygynous?

Malcolm: They, they think what they're asking is, are you sleeping outside of your marriage? The answer there is no. But what they're asking is, are you allowed to sleep outside of your marriage? Where the answer would be yes. And that's a very interesting distinction where there are multiple ways a woman who is married to a very high value male can keep that male monogamous to them.

Malcolm: But one way... Is to say you are not allowed to sleep outside of our relationship. The other way is to say, I will ensure that you have all of your needs fulfilled to a level where even with the Coolidge effect of being in place, you will not have a desire to sleep with women outside the relationship.

Simone: Yeah. And I, I think it, it, it's worth [00:15:00] noting too, that just because you have a rule against someone sleeping outside of a marriage doesn't mean they're not going to sleep outside of marriage. And the, there's plenty of research showing rates of cheating in marriages over time.

Simone: And it happens. And it also appears to happen when you look at Ayla's research on this more than both male and female partners think it's happening. So it's it's a worse than we imagined. So part of this also is well, would you, I mean, I think a lot of people, and we see this also with genetic information, sequenced because they're like, well, if I have a higher risk of getting cancer, I don't want to know.

Simone: Which. You know, to us is like bizarre because obviously if you have a like bigger risk of heart attacks or cancer or whatever, you should get screened for that, you know, like you should know about it so you can prepare and reduce odds of that biting you in the ass. However, I think many people have a sort of avoidant response to things like cheating or like health risks.

Simone: And they would just rather not know. So I think there's sort of this subtle in like forced monogamy marriages, this subtle [00:16:00] undercurrent of. Yeah. If you need to cheat on me, just do it and don't get caught. Like I'd rather not know, whereas there's this other sort of mindset of no, I mean, yeah, like we may not I cannot promise that I'm always going to be super attracted to you or super attractive myself.

Simone: And if that happens, I'd rather have it happen in a way that doesn't kill our marriage or that doesn't hurt me or hurt you. And so we just think it's personally, we think it's a better approach, but I think it's also something that requires a huge level of emotional maturity. And a huge level of mutual commitment to something bigger than just each other's feelings or one's own feelings.

Simone: Also, it's, it's really helpful to have this in general because if you do decide to sleep with someone outside our marriage it, it is like a warning sign to me that oh, maybe you're not totally happy.

Simone: Maybe, you know, we need to reevaluate or talk about, you know, how things are going.

Malcolm: Yeah, and that's the point where I think the person is noticing here when they're like I've seen people who are like Aggressively Polly or whatever are sleeping [00:17:00] around a lot outside their marriage That's a warning sign regardless of what the rules are within your relationship Yeah regardless of whether or not a person is allowed to sleep outside their marriage the fact that they feel the need to Regularly is a sign That there is something systemic that they are not getting from their partner.

Malcolm: Now, for some individuals, they might be able to stably source that from another person. However, I am not sure, and I personally haven't seen proof that relationships like that are actually stable. Probably people will pretend like it's a long term solution. Oh, he's not getting something from his partner.

Malcolm: Therefore, he's sourcing it from somebody else. And this is a stable solution. However, I don't, yeah, I don't know if I have ever seen that be really stable where the man actually felt the need to constantly get that from other people where, where I seen this be much more [00:18:00] stable in relationships is the woman's look, I'm not going to leave you or anything.

Malcolm: If you, if you sleep around outside the relationship, however, I prefer if you tell me and you try to let me. Solve these needs before you feel the need to go outside the relationship and the level to which this increases the stability of the relationship really can't be overstated because one, the woman has much more information in terms of the guys no longer satisfied with her.

Malcolm: She learns that at a lower threshold and begin to get a true measure of, like, how does she solve for that? And 2. The, the guy can not in the marriage or it's much harder for the guy to in the marriage just because he wants sex, right? Because with sex with other people, right? And, and this is actually really important because a lot of people, when they're creating sort of the rules of their relationship, there is this implicit understanding that if one partner breaks the rules, then the relationship is over.

Malcolm: However, what is true. A lot of the time. Now, this is not true for men. [00:19:00] Generally, when a woman treats, cheats to most men, they would rather be outside of the relationship. There was an interesting study that or not a study with a Twitter poll that somebody did where they're like, would you rather sleep with a hundred people other than your wife or allow your wife to sleep with 90% like, no, I would rather she not sleep with one other person.

Malcolm: So for guys, they're actually usually willing to, or Fairly frequently willing to pull the trigger if the woman sleeps outside of their relationship. And that is for biological reasons. They're imprinted to be really worried about the paternity of the kid. Because historically speaking What is this, actually?

Malcolm: I want to look this up.

Malcolm: I can't find the study right now, but I seem to remember a study saying it was something like 25% of kids or 20% of kids. So it's really, really high, the number of kids born by, and that's a huge cost to a guy if that happens. That's terrifying. Now, for women, The number of women who would actually end a high valued relationship because their partner is sleeping with other women is generally pretty [00:20:00] low unless it's like a point of pride thing or something like that.

Malcolm: And then this creates a really dangerous Phenomenon, because as soon as they catch the guy cheating, right? But there was this implicit understanding in the relationship. They would leave him if he did that, but then they don't leave him. Well, then that begins to break all of the other rules in the relationship because now all of a sudden, none of the rules in the relationship matter.

Malcolm: Worse, there was the reason for this dishonesty. And I think that that's another thing that this brings in, which is really valuable, which is there's a lack of a reason for me to be. I would I have, I don't know with you sleeping with other men, it's an interesting question because I just, you wouldn't.

Simone: I wouldn't. It's disgusting.

Malcolm: Yeah. Like the idea, I mean, you've never slept with anyone before me. Like it's just not an

Simone: issue that would come up.

Malcolm: Yeah. So it's, it's not like there would be a desire there, but, but I do feel that there is a level of truth where this is something I would never need to lie to you about where [00:21:00] you get that information and we are able to deal with it.

Malcolm: Internally as a couple. So I guess what we're saying here, and this is an interesting nuance that I think a lot of people don't get is we do think it is a problem when somebody sleeps around a lot outside their marriage. However, I also think that marriages that are built was a rule where the reason that the guy isn't sleeping around is because there is a rule against sleeping around instead of.

Malcolm: All of my needs are filled in. We're perfectly honest with each other. I think that actually the second type of marriage is probably going to be stronger in terms of within this current market context, where there's like women throwing themselves at me all the time.

Simone: Yeah. Um, I, I will add that , I started out sort of insecure in our relationship because Malcolm actually is like quite desirable as a partner and had, gets hit on a lot.

Simone: Like he got hit on a lot before we were not open about him sleeping outside of our marriage. And then he got hit on a lot [00:22:00] after that. And it took me a long time to become okay with that. I mean, especially when there's a lot of competition for your husband, like You know, I, I felt before I felt like I really had it, like I brought a lot to the table, you know, and I'd earned my, my position that I really couldn't deal with that insecurity.

Simone: And I do think that you have to have a pretty secure aligned marriage for something like this to work. Especially when you're with a really desirable partner. Now, I think if you have a relatively low value partner, it's, it's, I think it's really easy to feel like, of course you can, cause I mean, good luck.

Simone: But the big risk is really for that small portion of the population like you, Malcolm. And I think this really surprises a lot of people because they like love calling you a soy boy, but I don't think they realize a lot of women are super into whatever it is you're serving. But yeah, like for, for that portion of the population they're the ones who are going to be really interested in it because one, they.

Simone: Can get away with the demand is there. The opportunity is actually there. But it, you need a really secure and aligned marriage for that to work as well. [00:23:00] Because you know, if this does happen and the wife isn't secure, it could cause just a lot of. Mental discomfort and suffering that isn't exactly ideal.

Malcolm: Well, this is actually a really important point. The fact that you know that you have allowed me to sleep with these women and I am choosing not to sleep with them, not because I'm not allowed to, but because I actually do not desire to, given what you are giving me, Likely makes you feel much more confident about our relationship than you would if I was not sleeping with him because you had placed some rule against me sleeping with him.

Simone: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, I, I think it would be pretty crappy to be in a marriage where you know that your, your husband isn't, isn't sleeping with people because just 100% he's not allowed to. That's pretty

Malcolm: bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Simone: And the impression I get isn't actually, I mean, and I think that the key is a [00:24:00] lot if the, if the husband's sleeping out of, out of the marriage a lot, because I think when most people cheat and I don't have the stats on this exactly, but this is the impression I get for most of the reading I've done about it.

Simone: It's not a lot. You know, it's you know, someone meets a high school friend on a business trip, you know, like stuff happens. And I think it's really helpful to have that flexibility. I think where it's a problem especially is where someone's sleeping outside of the marriage quite regularly. Because usually when we've seen that happen, usually the person that the man is sleeping with.

Simone: Is more or less interested in becoming the primary partner. I think it's very unusual for a man to sleep with a woman outside of a relationship regularly for that person to not expect significant resources in return, and that undermines the marriage. So I think that's more like the, the big issue.

Malcolm: Open about this helps undermine that possibility because it does. If, so suppose I was to find a [00:25:00] person who I was regularly sleeping with outside of the marriage, right? You would just be able to say, I am no longer, I'm not okay with that. Yeah. Even the way that this is structured. And that lowers any, any like hook that this person was getting.

Malcolm: So because we were, we would be being honest in this situation and I would be telling you that this was happening. You would be able to much more reasonably than saying, I am not okay with you sleeping with any other women say, I am not okay with you sleeping with that woman because she's trying to disrupt the dynamics of our relationship.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. And there's always the risk, I think both with that, like permission and without permission that ultimately like the connection between the guy and the woman that he's sleeping with outside of the marriage is going to be stronger than the marriage itself. And that the marriage falls apart, like that's always a possibility, but I don't, I think it's actually less, it's, it's less possible or less likely outs when, when, when it's not cheating when it's, when it's permitted [00:26:00] within the

Malcolm: marriage.

Malcolm: Well, and also because the woman would know that the spouse knows about this and has okayed it, so they know that through sleeping with you, because this is actually a really dangerous thing about this way of breaking up a marriage, is through sleeping with the husband, she is doing something that she also knows could destroy the marriage.

Malcolm: Could drive a wedge between him and his wife in a way that breaks up the marriage. So she is getting a one two punch in through this act, which would be a lot harder when you structure the relationship differently. And, I think another thing that's really telling here.

Malcolm: Is a woman asking herself, which is just not done in many marriages these days, which is really sad where you have these total monogamy rules. How do I ensure that my husband is fully satisfied? There is no pressure to ensure that, which is why I think you get many of [00:27:00] these stereotypes, like women getting fat after they get married or women in other ways becoming undesirable.

Malcolm: So

Simone: you think there's a problem of entitlement is really what you're saying here. Yeah, like

Malcolm: you don't feel that you are like, you work really hard to stay very desirable to me because you know that if you did not I, I would have other options, but because you do

Simone: also, I just didn't want to look disgusting

Malcolm: , I would find the idea of going out and sourcing other women or allowing other women who hit on me to sleep with me.

Malcolm: Really personally disgusting as I've talked to you, the idea, because I have this emotional attachment to you, that you have worked to build through being an amazing wife because you have engendered that Even even though I'm allowed to, even though I regularly get very attractive women, you know, sort of throwing themselves at me turning them down is very, very easy for me.

Malcolm: And, and, and natural, not like I'm [00:28:00] turning them down because I'm giving something up. I'm turning them down because the idea of strange is disgusting. Well, no, it's interesting and it's something that I think is hard for somebody who's never been in a long term loving relationship to understand. As a male is that male sexuality does sort of transform when you begin to see a partner is like your primary and you began to think of other women as, as like a gross.

Simone: Well, and I find this interesting because I mean, I think part of that's that you just. Like your life isn't built around hedonism, so you're not exactly the best sample for like how a male is going to behave when given these types of rules. However, people that we know who do sleep outside of their marriages a lot and have like insanely, maybe even like clinically unhealthy levels, like maybe like literal sex addict addictions often are still very dedicated to their marriages and, and are often sleeping outside of their marriages [00:29:00] because their wives have no physical affection for them.

Simone: Well, I

Malcolm: think this is with older couples a lot. Yeah.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I just, but I think that that there's something to be said there that even there is some. It's, it's not just right to assume that a man is just going to want to take on infinite wives and not be very attached to them.

Simone: Even Louis the 14th had really just one primary mistress at a time. You know, it wasn't like he had five, he didn't have a harem. It's really more like he was a serial. Monogamous like person, but he had a couple dalliances here and there, but he was mostly dedicated to one one after another.

Simone: And I think many men are like that. They want to be romantically devoted to someone. They want the connection. So

Malcolm: yeah, I think that this is the difference between the way our society frames men. our society is based around young male sexuality.

Simone: Which is really

Malcolm: The more the merrier.

Malcolm: Young men really would like to sleep often with five different women a week or something like that, right? [00:30:00] But when you talk about the ideal sexual relationship for an older man or a middle aged man, Most of them are going to say, Oh, yes. It's a single woman every day. Like in movies, they treat this like it's some, some sort of horrifying thing.

Malcolm: Whereas I think if you ask most like mid thirties men, what is your ideal relationship? Even if they are like a really sexually open person, it's yeah, one partner who I really care for. And who I, you know, do something with you know, have kids, work with in some way, and, and every day for the rest of my life.

Malcolm: And, and that's where I think our biology is also different from what many people anticipate, even when you have the Coolidge effect. So the Coolidge effect, I referenced it before. It's the idea that to a man, a new partner, like all other things being equal, will be more sexually interesting to him than an existing partner or a partner he slept with before.

Simone: Well, and to give the backstory allegedly, this is apocryphal, Calvin Coolidge, when [00:31:00] president toured some kind of chicken farm or something. And it was mentioned. To his wife as she was touring, I guess, a little bit ahead of him that like, oh, well, this one rooster will, will have sex with, you know, this, you know, like this many times a day.

Simone: And apparently she wasn't seeing a whole lot of action and she wasn't exactly thrilled about that. And so she told that to Mr. Coolidge you know, this rooster has, you know, sex this many times a day. And he asked. with the same chicken. And that's, you know, the Coolidge effect. His point being, obviously, that novelty is a huge portion of

Malcolm: male sexuality.

Malcolm: And the research bears this out, but I think what we're seeing here is, yes, it increases arousal like pure sexual arousal. However, it is It is very low in terms of what I would want my daily life to be like. Yeah. Yeah, the things can arouse me and can arouse a man that are not things he actually wants to do in the real world because it would be inconvenient or gross [00:32:00] or...

Malcolm: Otherwise, you know, a waste of time.

Malcolm: So anyway, I, I've really liked this discussion because for me, just, just the biggest misunderstanding is the difference between there's sort of four types of relationships, right?

Malcolm: One in which one of . The partner is sleeping around and they were allowed to sleep around. The other is the partner is sleeping around. They aren't allowed to sleep around. Another is the partner isn't sleeping around, but they are allowed to sleep around.

Malcolm: And then the final one is the partner isn't sleeping around and they aren't allowed to sleep. Sleep around, right? For me sometimes when people talk about polygyny or polyamory, they're not really considering the situations in which the partner is allowed to sleep around, but they're not sleeping around.

Malcolm: And, and, and they're also within the way the relationship is contextualized. You're both partners, not really supposed to sleep around. Versus and also the relationship type, you know, is a couple actually Polly, I guess you would say not if they're not allowed to sleep around, but they are sleeping around.

Malcolm: So I guess people would, [00:33:00] if you wouldn't call a relationship in which somebody is cheating on their partner, but not allowed to yeah, I don't know. It's interesting. And if, if, if people are wondering why this has gotten so big in the big cities, the one point I really make is for the high valued men and women, what you typically see happening.

Malcolm: is many women to one man, like many women are going after one man, but when you're dealing with the lower value poly individuals a lot of men, you know, big tower, whatever men complain Oh, there's just no woman who wants to date an average guy. And this is, this is true. Like it's, it's very rare.

Malcolm: And monogamy used to solve this, but the way they're now solving it in these ultra progressive cities. And I've seen this in like group houses and stuff like that is that some dumpy kind of obese average woman will have five guys who she's dating, like one guy isn't good enough for her, but five guys.

Malcolm: Yeah, that's okay. So what, what often really ends up happening in the quote unquote polyamory community is that you [00:34:00] actually have a polygyny when, when you're dealing with the, the wealthy people, whereas one male, many females. And then the, the opposite of that I want to say, I forget what it's called.

Malcolm: One woman, many men. Holly Diney? I don't know. Polygyny. Yeah. When you're dealing with the like, middle income males because often that's how a male's value is, is, is judged. And then it's women who are, I mean, that's what's, what's happening on OnlyFans and stuff like that to an extent. Yeah.

Simone: I mean, yeah.

Malcolm: So there's a difference between the aspiration and what actually happens. But anyway, Simone, I have loved talking with you about this and I do feel really blessed that you have created an environment where even though, you know, you would there's no rule against me going with other women, I have no desire to, just because you are such a great wife.

Malcolm: And, and so people would be like, [00:35:00] Oh, I haven't seen relationships where people say, yeah, relationships don't, but I, I, I just, I definitely don't have any. You,

Simone: you, you give me too much credit. I think literally you just had so many sexual partners before you got married. You're like, I don't need this anymore.

Malcolm: I think you put yourself on hard mode in the relationship. You're like, yes, I want you to only sleep with me, but I want you to only sleep with me because you are choosing to only sleep with me. Not because I have created some rule system against you sleeping with other people. Yeah,

Simone: it's, it's our, it's our philosophy in general, right?

Simone: Like with the travel business that we run, like we really don't like getting contractual clients. We like clients who work with us, not because we've signed some kind of contract and they have to be With us. Mm-hmm. , we want clients to work with us because we provided such a great service that they wanna come back.

Simone: Like it sucks to work with someone who has to work with you. And, and in general, I think our philosophy is against coercion and for a free choice, you know, that, that people should have the ability to choose the culture that works [00:36:00] best for them to choose the businesses that works. best for them to choose the nation or home or whatever that works best for them.

Simone: And I think that falls down to like our relationship philosophy as well, that partners should have the freedom to choose whatever sort of partner works best for them. Now, I mean, I think the same goes for women and yeah, so technically we have a rule where I can't sleep with anyone, but that's more because I really don't want to sleep with anyone.

Malcolm: If you really want, I want you to tell me, because it would mean that our relationship is over if I can't. Fix whatever was causing you to want to do that.

Simone: But also you know, it's, we're perfectly in support of women sleeping outside of marriages too. They just have to be aware of the costs that are associated with that.

Simone: Like everything, like free market dynamics, you know, allow people to make choices and pay the price for making those choices. That's fine.

Malcolm: Yeah. Well, but I think it's, it's, it's sort of like a balls on the table thing. Like a business that says. Oh, you want to sign a recurring contract? I don't need a recurring contract, because I know you'll only choose me after you've tasted this.

Malcolm: So what is it? One [00:37:00] Simone, always Simone? I don't know what the saying would be here, but that is, that is quite a, a, a balls out contract, right? Like just... Slapping your balls on the table. This is how good I know I am that you won't want anything else if you're in a relationship with me.

Simone: Well, we shall see, right?

Simone: You never know where we're going to be in 10 years.

Malcolm: So we've been together for 10 years at this point. I don't think something crazy is going

Simone: to change. You know, I mean, there's

Malcolm: a lot of years ahead of us. Let's you have 10 more kids.

Simone: Like men tend to age better than women. Let's be honest about this. Yeah.

Simone: Well, so

Malcolm: if I was, and this is where I think this really falls apart, is if you were married to the types of cretin that's I want a 24 year old woman over a, you know, I, I don't know. It's part of me find sleep. The idea of sleeping with much younger women, like really disgusting. I, I've, I've, and, and Simone knows this, you know, I've had a lot of younger women.

Malcolm: Who have worked around us hit on me, [00:38:00] babysitters and the type. Yeah, it's a little weird. It's a little weird. And I just find it, I guess like visually I can be like, Oh like I can look at a younger woman and be like, yes, younger women are more attractive than older women. But like the actual idea of sleeping with them as an older man is I don't know, it's repellent for some, you

Simone: know, keep in mind that's not the norm.

Simone: So just I do

Malcolm: think it's the norm. I do think it's the norm. And I think some of the guys who are doing this are, are really outside the norm because I think you know, when you look at the relationships, we know like these ultra wealthy men, I actually don't see them sleeping with that many younger women.

Malcolm: Unless they're in like weird relationships where they're like actually cheating on their partner. When the wife knows, it's typically not somebody dramatically younger. Would you say that's true or not?

Simone: I think it really depends. I think there's a lot of variation. So it's, you know, it's hard to say. I wouldn't say that you're, you're normative.

Simone: I mean, it's very unusual [00:39:00] for a man to have the high partner count that you've had. I think it's very unusual for a man to not find you know, like 20 something women to be more attractive.

Malcolm: Well, no, I, I, I can see them more physically attractive, but I think there's, there's, yeah, well, I guess this is my thing about status, right?

Malcolm: Where I, I guess I'd find a lower, like sleeping with a lower status woman, really repellent the idea.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everyone's different, but yeah, I do think that this is the kind of discussion that's not being had out loud a lot. I'm glad we're talking about, I'm curious to see like in the comments, if other people have, have given this a try.

Simone: I mean, I think it's pretty unusual. I mean, the thing is, I think it's super common, but not. Not where people talk about it, I guess. So yeah, I'm curious to see what people say.

Malcolm: But what would you call it if you were going to come up with a name for it?

Simone: Dread Game Monogamy. Dread Game Monogamy? Yeah, I mean, the red pill uses, or at least used, like back when I read a bunch [00:40:00] of it. They'd be like, yeah, the dread game is where you, you as a man, if you're spinning plates, like if the woman knows that she has competition.

Simone: That's the dread game, but it's also considered an incentive. The female partner is going to be incentivized to be a good female partner because she knows that she has no exclusive contract essentially.

Simone: Well, I'm glad we had this conversation. It's always fun. I like really look forward to these now. It's like my unwinding time. So it

Malcolm: is, it is really fun. What do you call it? Like weird base conversations about things. Yeah,

Simone: that's the point of the meeting

Malcolm: that the idea is that no one's allowed to have.

Malcolm: We, we are okay with, with, with polyamory, but it's also bad to sleep with someone who's not your primary partner.

Simone: So there you go. Everyone was that statement. Yup. Yup. And now everyone hates us. But you know what? I love you, Malcolm. So at least that,

Simone: okay.

Economist Bryan Caplan joins Simone and Malcolm to discuss ways to boost declining fertility rates. They analyze the role of education, long vs short time preferences, and winning over analytical men. Other topics include immigration policy levers, using AI for politics, Ron Paul's electoral success, and more ways to cultivate leaders.

Simone: [00:00:00] You're really good at being evil,

Malcolm: Simone. Thank you, Malcolm. How can we use an AI to win a local election? Yeah, this

Simone: is, this is the question that we're going to have to figure out in the coming years. And of course,

Bryan Caplan: in equilibrium, the problem is other people are going to be using it too.

Malcolm: I agree with you. So the goal Is to use a short term advantage to get into the political system, then become president and then change us out of this abysmal voting system we have now. You know, as you have pointed out, democracies are just not very efficient.

Bryan Caplan: Oh God..

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello again. We are very excited to have Brian Kaplan joining us for this episode of Basecamp in addition to being a New York times bestselling author of.

Simone: Quite a few really awesome books. Many of which are on some of our favorite topics. Brian Kaplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and extremely well informed about the positions he holds. Whereas I don't know, sometimes we just like to be a lot more

Malcolm: philosophically. If you want to go over some of the topics he writes on pronatalism advocate for.

Malcolm: Feminism [00:01:00] causing societal problems being more pro open borders government systems not working, and education systems becoming more broken.

Simone: Yeah, you're our kind of guy. We're big fans, Brian. So what we'd like to discuss today, which I think really interests me because you're at a nuanced nexus between these things is the impact of education and how to actually create a delta.

Simone: So we, we recently hosted a dinner at which people discussed fostering genius, creating world leaders who would change the trajectory of society, you know, can it be done? Can you do it? And one of the big themes that came up during that dinner was, well, you know, you can't necessarily like great man theory of history.

Simone: A lot of people were really critical of it, but they thought, well, one thing that people can do is maybe accelerate the speed at which. Really awesome things happen, you know, like maybe many things are going to happen anyway. But if you can cultivate the right kind of leader or give people the right ideas, they may do it sooner for society than rather than later.

Simone: And I thought about this as I was watching an interview with [00:02:00] you. And you said basically that you didn't expect open borders to happen in your lifetime, but that you hoped through the book that you have co published called Open Borders, the Science and Ethics of Immigration, that maybe a generation would read this book.

Simone: You know, help to nudge things in a good direction. And you know, you've also written a book about, you know, the case against education which is more about why the traditional education system is not. necessarily worth all the money we throw into it and the time we threw into it.

Bryan Caplan: Delete the word necessarily. It's not worth it.

Simone: Shots fired from the professor at a university. But yes, no, totally. And so, you know, there's this sort of weird. Like nuanced area that I want to walk around with you in this discussion about well, so we can maybe nudge people in a good direction.

Simone: We can maybe speed up the rate at which really awesome things happen, which could really max out in a much more [00:03:00] meaningful way, human productivity and flourishing.

Simone: So I'm curious, Brian, what you think interventions are not necessarily traditional education interventions, but interventions in youth and in development that actually are worth investing in are effective and might actually help people either change the trajectory of society or just actively change the trajectory of people and society.

Bryan Caplan: Let's see. I'm definitely pro vocational education. Obviously, it's got, you know, there's a lot of problems too, but at least at the end, if it works, you know how to do something and are able to actually contribute more society. Whereas my big read, you can normal education is that it mostly pays just by giving you extra stamps in the forehead, which is great for an individual, but at the level society generates credential inflation, such that you need more degrees just to get the same job as your parents, grandparents, in terms of the things that can be done that work well.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Well, let's [00:04:00] see. I mean, there's the easy answers, things like vaccines or whatever. I think that the evidence for those is really good. In turn, I mean, I guess I would say that the one that matters the most is one that's near and dear to all of us, which is just having kids. So, you know, if you have a kid, I just say, look, you know that you have done something that almost certainly has great value to that person.

Bryan Caplan: The person is going to contribute to the world as well. Yes, there's a small chance that you've given worth of the next Charles Manson, but almost certainly not just the fact that if you look around the world, it's not on fire shows that most people are net contributors. They are not net destroyers.

Bryan Caplan: So, you know, in terms of what advice you can give to any one individual about how to improve the world, I would just say, have another kid, and that is a large value in terms of my own work. The only thing that I've done that I'm convinced has yielded. A large absolute value to humanity is my pronatalism stuff, because I do know hundreds of people who have had extra kids because of it.

Bryan Caplan: If you just use a standard economist 10 million value of life, [00:05:00] then that book generated billions of dollars worth of value. It still doesn't put me in Elon's territory, but still compared to my other stuff where it's not clear that it's changed anything in terms of policy, I feel very pleased with that.

Bryan Caplan: If you were to step back and say, yeah, but like causing the birth of hundreds of people that's like 0. 01% of the harm done by the one child policy. It's yeah, but that's what I've been able to pull off. It's something. I mean, at least I made things better instead of worse. So there's that.

Simone: So how much do you have that of the success that you saw through your pronatalist work was like, do you think was presenting logical arguments versus just showing people that it could be cool, that it's like desirable?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, I know you guys are more to the coolness. Honestly, I'll say out of the people I persuade, they're very argument focused. I'm not claiming this is how most humans are like, this is just the people that listen to me are like that. The cases where it's most clear that I'd causally change things is when [00:06:00] there's a pre existing mom who already wanted to have a kid, there's a dad who liked me who was blocking it, and then I convinced him to stop blocking it.

Bryan Caplan: That's basically the profile of when I caused a person to exist and where it's totally clear that I did it.

Simone: You're the caulk unblocker. That's great. Wow. All right.

Bryan Caplan: That's really interesting. I'm not going to put that into my signature file or anything, but I'll tell you. It's a shame. Okay. But honestly closely related is that when you go into the statistics of what determines ultimate number of ultimate fertility Basically, the patterns or the signs are the same for men and women, but the absolute value of the magnitudes are almost always much larger for women than men.

Bryan Caplan: It fits with the simple story of women are just more opinionated. Men are more like, oh, you want to have one kid? Great, we'll have one kid. You want to have three kids? Fine, we'll have three kids. You want to have no kids? Okay, fine. Right. It's something that's more like that. So the men [00:07:00] do matter. It's not like it's purely something that women decided unilaterally.

Bryan Caplan: But nevertheless, it does look like women's characteristics are more decisive for the outcome such that man. This is just an area where they are. Less set in their ways and more subject to suasion. If you are a needless woman, this is good news for you. It means that you probably doesn't, it is doable to go and change the guy's mind.

Bryan Caplan: If you're a guy, then I'd say mostly you got to work on selection. You got to find someone that agrees with you beforehand. Because it is just harder to go and change women's minds about these things. Yeah,

Simone: women really do seem to be a major bottleneck. And one thing I wonder is in a lot of discussions of prenatalism is there's this like undertone of, well, the solution is for women to stop getting educations.

Simone: Cause that's, what's ruining everything. And I mean, one of our big beefs in this space is we really want to prove that women can get. High levels of education, if they want it, like [00:08:00] not necessary, but there's freedom to choose that. And you can still have high levels of you know,

Bryan Caplan: mostly just thinking about you've got to decouple the half baked pseudo philosophy of most educators from the stuff they actually know and are teaching.

Bryan Caplan: And those are two completely different things. The actual knowledge of the facts of history combined with a totally ad hoc philosophy that gets superimposed onto the facts with variable thought. You know what I mean? Even at the level of the philosophy of a typical physicist is basically some watered down, woke hodgepodge.

Bryan Caplan: They don't really think about it very much. They're just repeating this, just like other people in their culture. Their subculture, rather. But on the other hand, the physics, they actually know something, and they probably know it forwards and backwards. So just realizing that when this authority is speaking, sometimes they have incredible knowledge.

Bryan Caplan: And sometimes they're just making it up as they go along, or just repeating it like a parrot, really, [00:09:00] and just be aware of the difference between those two things. One thing that is really striking is it does take an enormous amount of steely. In a steely self discipline to just hear the same propaganda every day and not believe it.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, true. Well, I mean, I think if you watch the news every day, you really have to be a Vulcan to watch it, watch an hour of this stuff every day for three years straight and not start to actually think the world is falling apart and everything is terrible. Yeah. I mean, you know, so, so few people can do it.

Bryan Caplan: But for the most part, when you choose to watch that, you are choosing to become whatever they are spewing. And you're saying, look, I'm just too smart for mere repetition to change my mind. It's look, it's not just a matter of being smart. It's a matter of I will resist what they are saying over and over again.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm a huge fan of philosopher Michael Humer. One of my very favorite posts of his. Is one where he says, imagine there's a school where [00:10:00] all they do every day is teach you true things that are true bad things that Jews have done. Every single fact is and then there was a Jew murdered a child.

Bryan Caplan: Let's tell you let's give you every detail of the murder. And then there were some Jews that did another bad thing. And then someone says, Hey, this is an anti semitic school. And they say, how could you possibly say that everything we say is true? It's yes, you're teaching an extremely selected slanted set of facts.

Bryan Caplan: And you're using that to pretend that you are not promoting anti semitism. That's exactly what you're doing. One of this thought experiment is this is what the media is doing. It all every day. They just tell you something bad that happened on earth. And it's we're just reporting facts. No, you are trying to go and get a bullhorn and then say something and then talk about the most terrible thing that happened on earth, which inevitably produces a certain worldview among your listeners [00:11:00] of thinking that the end is nigh and the world's collapsing.

Bryan Caplan: So you're not telling me that you're not promoting a philosophy or that this is just facts. It is a highly selected, deeply biased worldview that you're promoting. It can be completely true and yet totally misleading at the same time, and it is.

Simone: So do you think that the this undertone belief that the problem is that women are getting educated is just a selection thing?

Simone: Like people are cherry picking data that suggests that? Or do you think that

Bryan Caplan: there's... No, so, you know, I think that it's true that if you just look at Western education systems, they are strongly predictive of reduced female fertility. So I think that does make sense. You know, this is not mean that it is normal for schools to go and say, girls never have babies.

Bryan Caplan: Babies are disgusting. It's just one where you only talk about other great things that people can do. And you never mentioned having kids as something that's worthwhile. It's crowded out by omission.

Simone: [00:12:00] Yeah. So in other words, it's not necessarily education at play. It's the education that exists now.

Simone: It is the industrial

Bryan Caplan: education. It is the unmistakable slant of the education. Yeah. We can see this when you look at ultra Orthodox Jews there. Oh, totally. Yeah. Because their slant is the opposite slant. It's super important. God wants you to be having tons of kids. Yeah, of

Simone: course. Yeah, and there's a ton of education.

Simone: There's

Bryan Caplan: one where women are having tons of kids, and they also offer the only ones in the family with a paying job. Yeah, that's a really good point. Supported by his wife to argue about theology all day.

Bryan Caplan: Well, so this is wow, you could knock people in anything. Yeah.

Malcolm: Okay. What you're seeing here is this a sort of urban monoculture that primarily it's like a mimetic set that is both sterilizing and because it's sterilizing its primary means of reproduction is through converting people. And that means that it has had a disproportionate motivation to gain control of the [00:13:00] means of information transfer.

Malcolm: whether that is the media or the education system. And it largely controls both right now. And so what's really interesting is there's two ways you can fight this. You know, you can have women not engaged with the education system, and then they're not, you know, forced through this grinder, which is entirely designed to grind out anything that's deviant, i.

Malcolm: e. unique or diverse. about their cultural group, or you can try to update cultural groups or create new cultural groups that can learn the utility, the efficacious things from the education system while not having what makes them deviant in some way ground out of them. But that requires just completely new invention of cultural groups because the old cultural groups didn't evolve in a context where they had to be resistant to something like this.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. I really don't think that any of these ideologies are anti natal ideologies that are actually in the real world or notable are [00:14:00] engineered or designed in any sense to accomplish any of this stuff. I think it's a byproduct, you know, there's anti natalism, there's David Benatar. Now that's an engineered system, right?

Bryan Caplan: But that's something that I think is influencing a very small number of people. Whereas what you call the urban monoculture, that's one that is. It's not engineered. I think that's too conspiratorial. No. I don't think

Malcolm: it's engineered either. I think the iterations of it that focused on educational systems out competed the iterations of it that focused on other systems.

Malcolm: I think it's just completely evolution. Yeah,

Simone: The thing that grows best, cultural

Bryan Caplan: evolution, not yeah, cultural

Malcolm: evolution.

Simone: Yeah, exactly.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, it does cooperate with the, what I think of as a medium term time horizon. Yes. So, I mean, here's the thing is, you know, it's really, it really is true if all, if a human being just has a very short time horizon.

Bryan Caplan: Then at least if she's a woman, she will have a ton of kids. Right. If you, that's just [00:15:00] how evolution works, right? Yeah. If you just said, Hey, this feels good right now, I'm gonna do it. You will have a lot of kids. I've also argued that if you have a very long time horizon, you will have a lot of kids. A lot of what schools do is they try to promote a higher time horizon, but they're only able to get it up from short to media.

Bryan Caplan: So basically we're able to get it to the level of, you don't want to have to deal with a bunch of crying kids, do you? But not to the level of, you'd like to retire, when you retire, to have a whole bunch of grandkids. That is a higher level, which we really don't see school even trying to promote. It's more of, well, you know, we've got to run before we can walk.

Bryan Caplan: We're just going to try to talk teenagers into using contraception. But it's well, but at the same time, you're talking them into delaying having kids, maybe until they're in their thirties or forties when it's not even possible. Yeah. And you know, it is a case where if there is, you know, if you get, if you don't have a linear or a monotonic response function, if the sensible thing to do, if you believe, if you have the medium point of view is different from [00:16:00] both the short and the long, then you can actually make things worse by going and promoting.

Bryan Caplan: A high intermediate increase in your time horizons. And I think that's a lot of what's going

Simone: on. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it ties in with the infantilization of humans that we really see like intrinsic in the current education system where like part of it is infantilization. Another part of it's credentialism.

Simone: Oh, you're not ready to do that yet because you're not, you know, you haven't learned this thing. You have to do all this stuff first before you're allowed to have a family

Bryan Caplan: job degrees yet. Yes, actually barely even relevant, right? Yes. No. And so yeah, over time as schools abandoned any sense of intellectual standards.

Simone: Yeah, no, exactly. Well, so here's one thing I really want to dig a little bit deeper on, because I think it's fascinating that you appear to have found where sort of your inflection point was with your pronatalist work, which is that like the change that you were making was this unblockage of.

Simone: Men who are kind of less interested in having more kids. And I'm wondering, [00:17:00] like, when it comes to open borders policy, like there may be some weird subset, like that's involved in the chain of making policy decisions that can be unblocked more easily than other parts of it, like clearly women are harder to convince on this, right?

Simone: So you weren't necessarily changing women's minds, but you were changing analytical men's minds. Like who, who that can be reached. By someone's message. Yours are someone else's on open borders. Do you think would be most likely to be the person to cave in the chain of open borders that like actually is worth targeting?

Bryan Caplan: Right. I actually have a very specific answer to this question. So there is a chapter on keel solutions. This idea of if there's, you have a complaint about immigration, narrowly tailor remedy for that exact complaint, rather than just saying no. All the things that I've said, that is the argument that I've gotten the most people emailing me saying, you changed my mind with that.

Bryan Caplan: Wow. So, you know, like for example, if you really are worried about the effect of immigrants on the welfare state, then how [00:18:00] about let them in, but limit their eligibility for benefits. Yeah. Worried about them voting poorly. How about let them in, but increased the delay for them to vote. If you're worried about them.

Bryan Caplan: How about let them in, but with an admission fee and then use that money to go and compensate natives in terms of the number of people said, this is a specific argument that I hadn't thought about before. And when I read it, it clicked and it changed my mind. Now, I'm also painfully aware that. Once again, there's only a certain narrow personality type that finds this argument convincing.

Bryan Caplan: Basically, these people tend to be on the autistic spectrum. Oh, s**t. Yes. That's a fairly large number of people. It keeps growing. It's okay, I had an argument. You answer my argument. So I changed my mind.

Simone: Honestly, Brian, this is how I had kids. This is why I had kids. I was like, I'm not having kids and Malcolm's yeah, but what if he didn't have to give up your career?

Simone: And I'm like, I'm having kids. That was it. It was that simple.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. I think like they'll say [00:19:00] like the number of times that people on social media have said, you know, Brian with his ridiculous aspiness. I also have actually gone and done the aspie thing of surveying people know me in real life and say like how aspie am I really?

Bryan Caplan: The answer is among people that know me well, there's an enormous range of opinion from not at all to totally. I don't even know how to deal with that. But the main thing that I said here is for this, it is really unfair to neurotypicals to act as if they are incapable of having their minds changed by arguments.

Bryan Caplan: It is not like people on the spectrum have a monopoly on listening to arguments and changing their minds. They may be better at it, but there's, but it's really. Just selling everyone else short to think that you can't be neurotypical and be persuaded by an argument. I mean, if that were all that being neuroatypical were about, it's gee, what a wonderful thing to have.

Bryan Caplan: What about neurotypical

Malcolm: women?[00:20:00]

Simone: Well, but here's what I worry about, though, is I worry that specifically in politics, so like policymakers, maybe not like the actual like wonks that are writing policy, but like certainly the ones that are passing the bills, like the selective pressures to actually get elected are such that it's really hard for Aspie people to to get elected.

Simone: And so the people that you need to convince most are the people that are most immune to these types of logical arguments. And we even have seen this with our own policy work. Wonks within people's administrations will email us and be like, Hey, on the down low, I want to work with you. I'm going to try to inject pronatalist policy into something.

Simone: But tell no one. My representative politician can never know. So, I mean, how, what

Bryan Caplan: But there's one thing that gives me doubt, which is, if you actually watch C SPAN, you will see what incredibly low charisma most successful politicians have. No!

Simone: Isn't it just because they don't think anyone's watching? [00:21:00]

Bryan Caplan: They're super boring. They're ugly. They're troglodytes. I mean, I've talked to people who are in politics and say, like, how does this happen?

Bryan Caplan: Why isn't Hollywood taking over politics long ago? Good question. And they don't really have any good answer. The union isn't as good, probably that we have this geographically based electoral system. So it's a lot more important to be really well socially connected in some small part of the country story about how Ron Paul kept winning his district in Texas, despite having these wildly unpopular views.

Bryan Caplan: Wait, what? So Ron Paul, remember? Yeah. He kept waiting. He only remember he, that guy won multiple elections for Congress, having some views that are really out there. And the best story I've ever heard about it is, look, this guy is an obstetrician. He delivered a large share of the babies in that district.

Bryan Caplan: And it's huh, now I think it makes sense. It's like most of the people voting for Ron Paul. We're not voting [00:22:00] for crazy libertarian Ron Paul, they're voting for nice Dr. Paul that delivered my baby.

Simone: Yeah, that lovely

Bryan Caplan: gentleman. Great phrase, that lovely gentleman who delivered all my babies. And often they probably don't know anything more about him than that.

Bryan Caplan: So, you know, like you realize that you don't, like in a rural area, you don't deliver that many babies before you are the person that has delivered a large share of the babies in that district. If you don't know him, you know somebody knows him. So there is that going on.

Simone: Yeah, that's really, yeah, that would explain a lot.

Simone: It leaves me even more lost though, than I was at the beginning of okay, well, where's the pressure point I can apply here? Cause then the question is, well, how do the obstetricians, the car dealers, like the people with high name recognition in these small districts that are getting elected.

Simone: Like what we'll get through to them. I mean, theoretically, what gets through to them is like repeated harassment from their constituents and especially their donors, but like those don't wrap [00:23:00]

Bryan Caplan: up. So I am a big fan of Dale Carnegie's classic, how to win friends and influence people. Okay. It both basically begins with this truism.

Bryan Caplan: Nobody cares what you know, until they know that you care. We have the best way to persuade people is just to become their friend without any agenda. And then once you are sympathetic with each other and they like you, that's where you can have a conversation where they're listening because you are someone that they care about, someone that they feel cares about them.

Bryan Caplan: So I say that's a really big part. You know, often people have said, how can we improve our arguments? And I'll say I think the arguments are really quite good. Yeah. There's people, but the share of people that will listen to arguments purely on the basis, on that basis is really low. We've got to go and improve our marketing, improve our presentation, improve likeability.

Bryan Caplan: I don't say this because i'm so awesome at any of these things. I say this because I know that I am bad. But I've improved a lot and other people can improve too. Yeah, Simone, [00:24:00] you've got a fantastic smile. So like you are ahead of it.

Malcolm: I mask really well. We're running her for office.

Simone: I've caught in flack because in our podcast episodes, I'm always smiling because I mask.

Simone: Malcolm knows that my normal face is like completely blank, but like I do this because I've

Bryan Caplan: learned. Well, it's totally credible. But. Not in the, you know, in the same practiced way. And again, I say this just because I know I'm not great. I try to improve. So, you know, let it, let us learn from Simone.

Bryan Caplan: Great one.

Malcolm: Oh, I just keep thinking,

Bryan Caplan: there are those that are better. That's the kind of, that's the kind of negativity we do not need. I mean, honestly, you got somebody better. Show me somebody who's better, but don't go. And. Make fun of someone who's doing good.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Because sucking is the first step at getting kind of good at something as wise people have said.

Simone: But I'm also just thinking like, [00:25:00] how can I create AI's that, you know, use all the tricks. I'll just train them on how to win friends and influence people and then pretend that they're real people and have them call politicians, like just spam them, like spam their offices using all this.

Malcolm: That's an interesting idea.

Malcolm: Using AI's to change people. Policy through calling

Simone: politicians. Yeah. But like through social manipulation and like being nice and repeating their names a lot and acting really interested in them personally, you know, I'm just trying to think like, how can I be empathetic toward people without actually interacting with them?

Simone: I think this is the key, you know, we have to figure this out and bring it to scale. You're really good at being evil,

Malcolm: Simone. Thank you, Malcolm. How can we use an AI to win a local election? Yeah, this

Simone: is, this is the question that we're going to have to figure out in the coming years. And of course,

Bryan Caplan: in equilibrium, the problem is other people are going to be using it too.

Bryan Caplan: Well, not if we use it first. We can't get behind, we'll get crushed even worse than we're getting. It's you might say no, we've got the comparative advantage here. So we're going to do well here. It comes down to the problem is that. Normies are going to have the money to go and hire the people that will help them to do what they want to do.

Bryan Caplan: So Ah, [00:26:00] but in the

Bryan Caplan: long run Unfortunately, I hope i'm wrong No,

Malcolm: I agree with you. So the goal Is to use a short term advantage to get into the political system, then become president and then change us out of this abysmal voting system we have now. You know, as you have pointed out, democracies are just not very efficient.

Bryan Caplan: Oh God. Yes. I mean, I will say when you were talking about how can we go and cultivate leaders. You know, there are, there's a few kinds of leaders where again, some of its arguments, but a lot of it is ethos, classical Greek phrase. So, for example, I think that. What's the pro immigration people really need is some very flamboyant Venezuelan American politicians who take socialism, who also are pro immigration, and they can get up there and when AOC starts talking about [00:27:00] socialism, they can say, you know, I have seen socialism, I have lived under socialism, I have fled from socialism, and I will say that it is this great country which has given haven to me, like something like that.

Bryan Caplan: Yes, I mean, we those kinds of colorful personalities that Undermine negative stereotypes and that are able to go and cross group boundaries. That's the kind of thing that we need. Yes. So,

Malcolm: or I mean, our stance on immigration, we need to use immigration policy more aggressively and martially by that.

Malcolm: What I mean is when a country pisses us off, like when China does that, that BS they pulled with Hong Kong. We say, okay, everyone in Hong Kong was over a million dollars, gets an easy path to citizenship. When Russia does something that pisses us off, we say everyone in Russia was over this much money, gets an easy path to citizenship to the US.

Malcolm: And then you just remove like the entire educated class from that country, because this is one of the huge [00:28:00] advantages we have is we are a desirable place to move and we can siphon off their, a huge portion of their tax base.

Bryan Caplan: It's so smart. And yet, if we look at all actual refugee programs, none of the really big ones look anything like that.

Bryan Caplan: They go, they're based much more on, we really like these people and their suffering. So you know, so with Ukraine, there's no income cut off. It's just you know, if you're Ukrainian and your own government is not shooting you when you try to flee the country, you're totally welcome here.

Bryan Caplan: It's true for the whole EU, but also the US has no entry cap on Ukrainians. I mean, this is especially bizarre because They've already got the European Union. So like the marginal gain for Ukrainians for EU versus the U. S. is fairly modest. A lot of really, when you think about it, the main gain they have is, okay, if they already know English, they don't have to learn a new language.

Bryan Caplan: And they don't have to live in Ireland. Yeah. Also,

Malcolm: why take in Ukrainians? Who do we want them to win? I say block Ukrainians, take Russians. You hurt Russia and then [00:29:00] these people go back to the Ukraine. You make the Ukrainian visa

Bryan Caplan: short. Yeah, the problem is that it is very unusual for any country to view, to basically look at another country with anything other than a model of total collective guilt.

Bryan Caplan: It is really hard to get in the mindset of, we love the people of this country, but we're just fighting its government. This wasn't a Cold War mantra, and there was some of this attitude during the Cold War, but it is abnormal. The much more normal idea is the people and the government of a country are the same.

Bryan Caplan: And no matter how obviously wrong this is, it's really hard to go and talk people into this, no matter how strategically wise it would be. I mean, obviously what you're saying makes perfect sense. The only real objection is if you tried it, then they would re you know, the countries that you don't like would re institute emigration restrictions.

Bryan Caplan: But that is maybe not. Let's give it a whirl. See what happens. Yeah, but

Malcolm: when they start freaking out hard to get people to listen, that's when you know, you win when they forgot, you know what I would say to people [00:30:00] in the U S is if you met a Cuban, like an American Cuban, these are the most capitalistic Republican safe voting block you will ever see in America.

Malcolm: And we see this in other countries as well. Like A lot of people, you know, they're like Taiwan, like why are they able to create all these semiconductors and stuff that like no other country seems to be able to create at those levels. And I'm like, they are Chinese Cubans. And by that, what I mean is China had this period where basically they kicked out everyone who is capitalistic or smart or educated, and they all went to one little island and it became like this.

Malcolm: And that we can be that for the entire world, we can drain them of all their productive capacity.

Bryan Caplan: Now, as far as I know, Taiwan is not open to mainland Chinese immigration. No. It was at a time. I know, but striking that even Taiwan isn't trying. I mean, you think these are like, Hey, you got to get your population up people.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. More than anyone. Population growing like gangbusters. And yet, [00:31:00] of course I don't think they're doing that. I mean, I'm pretty sure some mainland Chinese can get into Taiwan to work, but I bet that it's a pain in the neck.

Simone: Yeah. Well, I mean, as you know, all too intimately, perhaps more intimately than you know, the vast majority of the human population, nations are idiots when it comes to immigration policy, but you've given me some really great hope and inspiration and some ideas to get around that.

Simone: Like maybe there will be changes in your lifetime that will, you know, surprise you. Right.

Bryan Caplan: I mean, you know, the actual changes that are happening are generally at the level of details that are too boring for most people to even think about. Yeah. So if you look at the details of Biden's refugee programs, there are some major loopholes in there that some people I know are trying to go and take advantage of for the whether the, whether Biden even understood what he was doing is not clear.

Bryan Caplan: He did go with the original 1965 immigration liberalization. That it was not actually [00:32:00] their intent to go and increase immigration in the U. S. They just bungled it and did something great as a result of their

Simone: accident. Well, maybe that's the key or maybe that was just, you know, a secret, you know, Aspie, you know, person writing in a little, wasn't there someone on the DeSantis like campaign who like put like a Nazi symbol and like his ad and that, I mean, he got fired later, but there are lots of embedded people who would do all sorts of crazy things within politicians campaigns and work.

Simone: So who knows? Maybe we'll get some embedded supporters who

Bryan Caplan: will do amazing things with us. I still am a big believer in the don't chalk up to conspiracy. What can be attributed to stupidity?

Simone: Fair point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe it's dumb luck as they say. But I will count on that. If that's what we have to take, I will take it.

Simone: But. I don't know. I think, yeah, you've given me some ideas on, I mean, between education reform and novel experimentation in the world of policy and politics, bring more colorful figures in, leverage Dale Carnegie's timeless advice, maybe something can happen here. We [00:33:00] can do this, guys.

Malcolm: I'll put for our listeners, our video on immigration policy so they can get our positions on this.

Malcolm: And I really encourage them to go check out the rest of your books.

Simone: Yeah. Brian's books are amazing. The most recent. Yeah, the Yes.

Bryan Caplan: Free books on Amazon. They're cheap. They're easy. Get them.

Simone: And buy them. And also leave a review. They really help with expanding reach. So please leave a review.

Malcolm: Or, you know, you don't even need to buy the books.

Malcolm: Just leave lots of reviews on his books. Really positive reviews. This is the best thing I've ever read. It changed my life. Amazon doesn't check that you bought the product.

Simone: It gives extra weight, I think, but like still, yeah, this is what we live and die by

Bryan Caplan: as authors. If the Amazon spies are watching, always be honest.

Bryan Caplan: Yes. Only we have to read every

Malcolm: page. That was a joke. This is all comedic.

Simone: 100%. Yeah. Brian, thank you so much for joining us. We have had such a blast talking and hopefully we'll have you back on another day in the future. And for now, Godspeed finishing up your next book.

Bryan Caplan: My pleasure. Thank you guys very much.

Malcolm: All [00:34:00] right.