Based Camp - Being Bullied for Profit： The Man Who Lived as a Fictional Character for a Decade

00:00:00.000 The online environment has become a disintermediated set of social interaction in which I have a conversation with you, the audience.

00:00:10.740 While you lose the interactive portion of the conversation, what you gain is the ability to, instead of being limited by the types of people you could actually get to spend time conversing with you, you can get anyone to converse with you.

00:00:27.900 Yeah.

00:00:28.140 Okay, so I'll explain this using a porn analogy, right? 0.95

00:00:31.560 In the real world, you are limited to sexual partners, like you would have a conversation partner, who would actually deign to have sex with you.

00:00:40.360 But what we need to talk about here is the role that Nick Avocado ended up playing in this disintermediated social contract. 0.99

00:00:47.580 He had become, for a lot of the internet, that fat, pathetic kid. 0.99

00:00:53.020 Yeah. 1.00

00:00:53.520 Where you engage with him for the emotional context you get for picking on the fat, pathetic kid in school. 0.99

00:01:00.600 He filled that niche. 1.00

00:01:02.540 Stupid dude. 1.00

00:01:04.020 Ha ha ha ha. 1.00

00:01:06.620 He filled that niche.

00:01:08.200 And he had been saying for years that when he turned 30, he was going to lose all the weight and then just go back to a normal life.

00:01:16.740 So I am.

00:01:18.360 The point being is that Nick Avocado, people should have known this about him.

00:01:25.620 This guy went to Juilliard.

00:01:27.300 I got a full ride scholarship to my school.

00:01:29.860 Could you, could you share at school?

00:01:31.180 He, he was a concert level violinist.

00:01:35.900 No way!

00:01:37.440 A YouTuber named Violin Mechanic also watched all of Nick's violin videos, concluding he was near professional.

00:01:44.380 It goes to show though, there's, what are the career prospects?

00:01:47.660 Well, and that's the point to all of this.

00:01:50.060 This was an incredibly talented actor, a diligent individual, who understood the new social contract of the internet.

00:01:59.400 And used it to make enough money that he never needed to do anything again by playing the fat kid.

00:02:06.820 Would you like to know more?

00:02:08.200 Hello, Simone! 1.00

00:02:09.320 I am excited to be here with you today.

00:02:11.020 Today, we are going to be discussing a number of recent viral online phenomenon and moments that I think are, you know, there was a post Elon had not long ago.

00:02:24.340 And he's like, when you are trying to determine between multiple things happening on the world stage, choose what would be the most interesting thing to happen.

00:02:32.520 And that's the one that's going to happen.

00:02:34.900 You know, like, when people were discussing Elon buying Twitter, it was like, is that going to happen?

00:02:39.060 Will it be more interesting if it happens?

00:02:40.900 So, yes.

00:02:41.620 Is Trump going to win the first election cycle?

00:02:43.440 I guess it'd be more interesting if it did.

00:02:44.960 So, yes.

00:02:45.960 You know, like, is Biden going to randomly drop out and instead of hosting a primary, they're just going to dictatorially choose his...

00:02:52.940 Well, then that would mean that Trump's going to win.

00:02:55.580 It would mean that Trump's going to win, which is what I believe.

00:02:59.140 There was a very long off-topic section here where Simone and I debated who was going to win the presidential election that I have moved to the end of the video.

00:03:06.240 But anyway, so, sorry.

00:03:07.880 That's too much of an aside.

00:03:09.540 Let's get back to the weird...

00:03:11.320 So, basically, we are in clown world timeline, which means that the quantum direction of tiny fluctuations that tip the scales of reality will move in clown world direction.

00:03:23.200 Not in clown world direction.

00:03:24.720 It will...

00:03:25.120 We, right now, for anyone who saw that episode of South Park, where it turns out we're a show and we have to keep from getting canceled, we're in that timeline.

00:03:34.940 We're a production company.

00:03:36.380 We make intergalactic television programs that the whole universe watches.

00:03:41.160 Television?

00:03:42.320 We started with great shows like Who Wants to Marry a Galgamec and Antares Six Millionaire. 0.97

00:03:47.420 But then, of course, there's our signature show.

00:03:51.160 Earth?

00:03:52.480 A few billion years ago, we realized, what if we took species from all different planets in the universe and put them together on the same planet?

00:04:00.080 Great TV, right?

00:04:01.340 Asians, Jews, and Hispanics all trying to live side by side on one planet.

00:04:05.160 It's great!

00:04:06.440 We put them all together on Earth and the whole universe tunes in to watch the fun!

00:04:11.200 Please don't cancel us.

00:04:12.720 Please!

00:04:13.360 Oh, I'm sorry, Earthlings, but you have to realize the universe is a business. 0.96

00:04:17.100 A show should never go past a hundred episodes or else it starts to get stale with ridiculously stupid plot lines and settings. 0.63

00:04:24.060 But, sirs, we think our show is just getting good. 0.95

00:04:26.800 I mean, we're just now starting to see people get really pissed off at each other.

00:04:30.280 We are a live-action show, and they are wanting to.

00:04:33.360 Show me what you got.

00:04:35.740 Show me what you got.

00:04:38.660 Show me what you got.

00:04:40.500 I want to see what you got.

00:04:43.380 Hmm.

00:04:43.820 I like what you got.

00:04:47.360 Good job.

00:04:49.720 Goodbye.

00:04:51.420 This is a different show, obviously, but yeah.

00:04:53.580 Yeah, different show.

00:04:54.220 But one of the big, big, big things that happened recently and was shocking to me as a terminally online person is Nick Avocado.

00:05:04.800 Nick Avocado.

00:05:05.600 Nick Avocado.

00:05:06.340 Nick Avocado did something that was completely wild and unexpected, and I think it highlights the new social contract that we socially operate under as a society online.

00:05:18.260 So what happened was, is for those who haven't heard of this yet, and we'll get into my bigger thoughts on this, Nick Avocado was a very widely viewed mukbanger who basically made mukbang famous within the United States.

00:05:34.140 A mukbang is when you eat a lot of food in front of a camera and people parasocially eat along with you.

00:05:40.400 And when I say widely viewed, I mean across his platforms, he had over a billion views.

00:05:45.540 Gosh.

00:05:46.400 So across his various channels and everything like that, he is highly widely viewed.

00:05:51.020 That puts him above, like, mainstream TV shows from our childhood, if you're wondering, like, what that means in terms of views.

00:05:59.120 Yeah.

00:05:59.400 So, very mainstream figure, and what he was mainstream for was being fat, having no shame.

00:06:08.680 He didn't start out as fat.

00:06:10.140 He, audience captured his way to obesity.

00:06:13.440 Yeah.

00:06:13.800 Not exactly.

00:06:14.640 We'll talk about that in just a second.

00:06:16.040 Okay, okay, okay.

00:06:17.220 No spoilers.

00:06:18.320 Okay.

00:06:18.640 He was known for just being this really sad human being.

00:06:22.840 And he was essentially, one of the things that we have talked about is that the online environment has become a disintermediated set of social interaction in which I have a conversation with you, the audience, but I'm basically having a conversation at you through my wife, right?

00:06:42.500 And then you are choosing to listen to this conversation very much the same way that somebody historically would have had a conversation with an interesting person.

00:06:53.500 They would be like, oh, I know I can go to this event because interesting people go to this event.

00:06:57.180 And they would have approached somebody because the conversations they have with those people are intellectually stimulating.

00:07:01.900 But now you, in an online environment, while you lose the interactive portion of the conversation, what you gain is the ability to, what's the word I'm looking for here, is the ability to, instead of being limited by the types of people you could actually get to spend time conversing with you, you can get anyone to converse with you.

00:07:26.300 Yeah.

00:07:26.720 Okay, so I'll explain this using a porn analogy, right? 0.95

00:07:29.560 In the real world, you are limited to sexual partners, like you would have a conversation partner, who would actually deign to have sex with you.

00:07:38.780 But in the online environment, where that is disintermediated, while you might not get to actually have sex with these people, you can see the highest tier of highest tier people having sex, who you could never secure yourself.

00:07:53.220 And it created a disintermediated sexual marketplace. 1.00

00:07:56.500 However, I think from a conversational perspective, it's actually more effective than from a sexual perspective.

00:08:02.880 Because I think that the quality of sex, as somebody who has had sex with top, top tier people, the difference in sexual quality between like a, I'd say top 30% person and a top 1% person is, you know, probably about a 30% bump in quality.

00:08:28.100 I'd give it, I'd give it that maybe even, maybe even twice as good, even on the extreme three times as good.

00:08:34.540 Okay, but the difference in conversational quality between a top 30% and a top 1% is 100x difference.

00:08:45.480 Oh, oh, okay. So you're saying the returns on sex improvement are not nearly as good as the returns on conversational improvement, which all furthermore justifies parasocial relationships.

00:08:58.900 Like it's really worth it to just maintain a high caliber friend group in the form of parasocial relationships, even though it means they don't know you necessarily.

00:09:07.880 Well, it's interesting. Even when I am really friends with someone, I consume, often as my primary way of interacting with them, their online content over their in-person content.

00:09:24.380 I prefer to interact with my real friends who would like know me and be like, oh yeah, Malcolm, he's like an acquaintance of mine.

00:09:33.240 Like, I don't agree with everything he says. I think he's a weirdo, but like, I like hanging out occasionally.

00:09:38.480 So, you know, like for example, who are people who we have these sorts of relationships with, like Zvi and like Scott Alexander.

00:09:45.680 Like I would prefer to read one of Scott Alexander's blog posts than take that time talking to Scott Alexander.

00:09:53.160 And I'm sure it's one of these individuals and they're consuming.

00:09:56.240 And I'm sure like a lot of these people, I imagine, enjoy writing more than they enjoy talking to their friends.

00:10:04.320 Well, it's true. So consider the content that you're getting with us, right?

00:10:07.720 You're getting something that's been pre-researched that every, that every pause, that every time we stop to research something is cut out of the video, right?

00:10:15.060 Getting a form of social interaction that is called a supernormal stimuli.

00:10:19.860 We've talked about this before, but it's worth briefly going over.

00:10:22.120 These are stimuli in your environment that are beyond what you could ever achieve in a real world scenario.

00:10:27.900 So, for example, if I put a giant blue ball next to a bird that evolved to sit on blue eggs, it will sit on the blue ball more than the egg

00:10:35.700 because it never had any evolutionary reason to not learn to sit on the very biggest blue thing near it.

00:10:41.100 In many ways, pornography can be considered a supernormal stimuli.

00:10:43.720 In many ways, what you are getting with this could be considered a supernormal conversational stimuli.

00:10:49.180 But not all supernormal stimuli are intrinsically negative.

00:10:52.380 And I think that this is a thing where people can think of, oh, you've disintermediated conversations.

00:10:56.180 Yeah, but a lot of the conversations people used to have sucked, okay?

00:10:59.720 Well, and why did humans evolve speech?

00:11:01.660 It was, in many ways, often to condense and make more efficient communicating important concepts that otherwise would take a lot longer to demonstrate in person.

00:11:12.280 This is all about making it faster than showing something IRL.

00:11:16.520 I don't know what to say.

00:11:17.660 When I am, for example, the reason why I was like, you know, if I'm consuming Zvi's writings or like Scott's writings,

00:11:26.560 if I'm talking to one of these individuals, it's just like whatever they can think and remember off the cuff in their head, right?

00:11:32.500 If I'm consuming their writing, this is something that they researched.

00:11:36.280 They went over multiple times.

00:11:38.040 They tried to include as much information as possible.

00:11:41.880 You know, I'm not...

00:11:42.800 They're really fun to talk with.

00:11:44.340 I'll say the one person or the one time when I feel like it's just as fun to interact with someone directly as to read their stuff.

00:11:51.700 Ayla.

00:11:52.500 Yeah, Ayla. 0.95

00:11:53.560 No, I'd say Ayla is more fun to talk to in person than it is to read her content.

00:11:57.280 I know.

00:11:57.720 I love her content.

00:11:58.460 But the thing that Ayla does is she'll surprise you with her response to things and see things in very novel ways.

00:12:06.100 So, like, in real time, she'll have great insights that you can't get not talking about.

00:12:11.800 She also builds a very, very quick and strong social connection when you're talking to her.

00:12:17.400 Like, she's very good at generating chemistry. 0.99

00:12:19.880 And I don't...

00:12:20.600 Other people I know who are, like, good online content creators aren't good at doing that.

00:12:25.180 If anything, they sort of have an anti-chemistry often.

00:12:28.800 Yeah, no, I mean, she's very charismatic, but I don't care about that.

00:12:33.320 Like, charisma makes me uncomfortable.

00:12:34.780 I don't mean charismatic.

00:12:36.060 There's a difference between a person being charismatic and having presence and generating chemistry where you feel like they're your friend.

00:12:42.920 Like, you feel a personal connection with them, which is very different from just general charisma.

00:12:48.500 I can talk to somebody who has charisma and be like, oh, well, he was charismatic.

00:12:52.920 For example, when I talk about forms of charisma, I have a form of charisma called presence that people talk about.

00:12:58.100 Yes, where they otherwise will accuse you of sucking all the air out of the room, but that's because they're just angry with your presence.

00:13:04.340 Yeah, I had a person, like, actually start screaming at me in an office.

00:13:08.000 Like, what?

00:13:08.500 Yeah, I had barely interacted with them at all.

00:13:12.520 This was when I was working as an intern at UT Southwestern in the translational neuroscience lab.

00:13:19.960 And I was a college intern, and this other person was, like, a postdoc.

00:13:23.140 And they started yelling that everyone was always focused on me.

00:13:25.920 And, like, every time I was in a room, like, it was always, like, the Malcolm show.

00:13:29.480 And they're like, and you're just an intern.

00:13:32.240 But I'd been interning there for, like, a number of years at that point.

00:13:34.780 And they had just transferred in.

00:13:36.160 So, like, I don't know what they were thinking.

00:13:37.620 She just didn't, you're just saying she didn't understand that you were just a big dell.

00:13:42.380 But there was that other time where we were at a conference, and one of the people pulled you aside and was like, you need to stop being, she said that you sucked all the air out of the room.

00:13:51.960 She was basically saying you needed to stop providing such interesting insights to conversations.

00:13:56.320 Yeah, she's like, well, like, just don't show up when I'm around.

00:13:59.820 Yeah, yeah, just, like, stop being interesting anyway.

00:14:04.060 No, no, no, it's not interesting, exactly.

00:14:07.880 Stop being, yeah, stop having a presence.

00:14:10.100 Stop speaking as loud as you do.

00:14:11.980 Stop with the hi, how's it going?

00:14:13.460 Stop with...

00:14:15.000 It's not that.

00:14:16.240 It's about where attention is focused within group environments.

00:14:22.000 But anyway, it doesn't necessarily overlap with other types of charisma.

00:14:25.580 Like, there's charisma that makes people like you.

00:14:27.240 There's charisma that, what I was saying about Ayla, she has the type of charisma where when you talk to her, you feel like you've been friends forever in a very short period of time.

00:14:36.460 I'm terrified when I talk to Ayla, because I just really respect her a lot.

00:14:39.780 And I feel like when people, when I respect people, I think they hate me.

00:14:42.480 But what we need to talk about here is the role that Nick Avocado ended up playing in this disintermediated social contract. 0.98

00:14:50.540 He had become, for a lot of the internet, that fat, pathetic kid. 0.99

00:14:56.940 Yeah. 1.00

00:14:57.200 Where you engage with him for the emotional context you get for picking on the fat, pathetic kid in school. 0.99

00:15:04.300 He filled that niche. 1.00

00:15:05.300 Uh, it's the cauliflower. 1.00

00:15:09.660 Stupid noodles. 1.00

00:15:15.020 Stupid noodles. 1.00

00:15:32.240 There's your video. 1.00

00:15:33.480 And for those who think that this was ever his real personality, you know, I'm not saying that he didn't take on some aspect of this personality.

00:16:02.740 Playing the role for so long.

00:16:05.340 I ask you to study his facial expressions and emotions while he is acting.

00:16:10.980 And I think it's pretty clear that he is playing a character in the same way that, like, Ali G is a character. 0.95

00:16:16.900 It's just that this character, instead of being designed to make us laugh, is designed to masturbate the feelings that we get from the type of, you know, fat kid we would have made fun of in school. 0.56

00:16:30.300 But presenting a super normal stimuli version of that fat kid, Nick Avocado, was to the emotions that fat kid in school that people picked on.

00:16:42.580 And I'm not saying everybody did this.

00:16:44.020 But, like, obviously there's a portion of the population that has an impulse to pick on the fat kid at school.

00:16:49.500 He fulfills that impulse for that portion of the population as a super normal stimuli in the same way that the super hot porn star fulfills that stimulus when contrasted with the cheerleader or whatever.

00:17:06.040 The attractive girl that you had a crush on at your local school.

00:17:09.120 The porn star is likely even more attractive than the real life person that you had a crush on.

00:17:17.400 Because everyone can consume her, sexually speaking, at once.

00:17:22.940 In the same way everyone can at once pick on this Nick Avocado character.

00:17:28.800 And again, remember when you're watching this clip, study, is this somebody acting?

00:17:32.520 Or is this his real emotional state?

00:17:34.560 Me and Matt Stoney have a lot in common, we're very beautiful, but the difference between, well, he's basically skinnier, more attractive, richer, more popular.

00:17:44.420 I mean, where do you want to start?

00:17:46.120 The only thing you have in common with him is maybe that you're human.

00:17:48.840 And I highly doubt that you're human because I think you identify as a hippo. 0.94

00:17:53.600 Get away, get away, get away. 1.00

00:17:55.420 I pooped myself!

00:17:57.420 I woke up in a pile of poop! 0.59

00:17:59.740 He filled that niche.

00:18:01.020 And he had been saying for years that this was all part of a social experiment and that when he turned 30, he was going to lose all the weight and then just go back to a normal life.

00:18:11.000 Right? 0.97

00:18:11.640 But the character he was playing was a character that was supposed to be genuinely pathetic. 0.97

00:18:16.360 The type of character that would have these delusions.

00:18:18.560 And I'm giving it away here a bit.

00:18:20.460 Which is to say that when he turned 30, he's 32 now, so a few years late.

00:18:24.640 Oh, I forgot.

00:18:27.900 Okay, so what he did recently is he removed a mask from his head.

00:18:32.340 He had this panda mask in a video and he was skinny.

00:18:35.180 Not like, like, skinny, like, oh.

00:18:38.720 He lost 100 pounds.

00:18:39.980 More like he lost 300 pounds.

00:18:41.720 No, 250 pounds.

00:18:43.040 Jesus.

00:18:43.660 Yeah, okay.

00:18:44.220 Okay.

00:18:44.340 So I am the villain because I've made myself one.

00:18:54.820 And just a few days ago, people had been doing videos about how he might be close to suicide now.

00:19:00.560 How, like, sorry.

00:19:01.860 Well, he hadn't posted for...

00:19:03.600 Hold on, listen.

00:19:04.600 How he might be close to unaliving himself now.

00:19:07.160 Sorry, you were saying?

00:19:08.120 He had not posted for seven months.

00:19:10.260 So I think people thought he'd just gone off the...

00:19:12.320 No, he had posted a video, I think, fairly recently.

00:19:14.580 Well, I just looked at his YouTube, which this video where he takes off the panda mask is still...

00:19:20.020 It went out on September 6th.

00:19:22.240 We're recording on September 9th.

00:19:23.640 It's still number three on trending on YouTube with 31 million views, almost 32 million.

00:19:30.360 And the previous video that was posted before this under latest was seven months ago.

00:19:36.880 Okay, well, so what he had done is he had...

00:19:39.140 The thing is, is that another very large YouTube was, like, millions of views on this video.

00:19:44.180 A few days before he posted this video, did a video about how Nick Avocado was, like, having a breakdown and, like, nothing was going to come of him.

00:19:50.680 And everyone wonders why I'm posting less.

00:19:53.700 I'm not happy.

00:19:54.980 I don't like what I've done.

00:19:56.160 I don't like what I've become.

00:19:57.380 I don't like what I look like.

00:19:58.700 Nick Avocado's recent video is so incredibly tragic, it makes all of his previous breakdowns seem like they were happy moments.

00:20:08.680 Simply titled Bye, Nick Avocado talks about deeply regretting his time on YouTube, in the process admitting to financial ruin, and the ways in which fame destroyed his life completely.

00:20:19.580 The 41-minute video begins on terrible footing, as after only 24 seconds, Nick's already almost on the verge of tears.

00:20:28.500 And he had it pre-recorded, it turned out, for two years.

00:20:32.340 Just tons and tons and tons of videos.

00:20:35.240 Oh, so he did start when he was 30.

00:20:37.580 So he started when he was 30, and then for two years was pre-recorded videos he kept all his channels.

00:20:42.440 He's got, like, three channels running.

00:20:45.580 Wow.

00:20:46.060 And he lost the weight.

00:20:49.560 And it's not like he's covered in, like, flabby skin and everything like that.

00:20:52.940 Like, it appears he probably, I don't see scars from surgery.

00:20:56.080 So my read is he might have been using lotions and, like, you know, he's wealthy because he's getting this many views.

00:21:01.420 Oh, yeah, you have to have the skin removed.

00:21:03.900 No, no, no, no, I don't think he did that.

00:21:05.420 I think he found, well, maybe he did, I don't know.

00:21:07.520 The point being is that Nick Avocado, people should have known this about him.

00:21:14.460 And I think that this is one of the things that people don't realize when they're interacting with people in online environments, right?

00:21:22.600 This guy went to Juilliard.

00:21:24.680 Juilliard is, like, you know, the Stanford of the art world.

00:21:28.860 Yeah, but the Harvard of art.

00:21:31.160 Well, no, the Harvard of performing arts.

00:21:34.320 Nothing anymore.

00:21:35.180 Okay, sorry, the Stanford, the St. Andrews of performing arts.

00:21:39.040 Thank you.

00:21:39.440 Just like RISD is the Stanford slash St. Andrews of visual arts.

00:21:44.240 But anyway, hold on, hold on, hold on.

00:21:46.180 For the reason I say that, well, I'll get to the reason I say that in a minute.

00:21:49.160 He was a concert-level violinist.

00:21:53.620 No way!

00:21:55.220 Yeah, there's been, like, violinist experts who have reviewed his violin playing, and they're like, this guy is literally A-tier, like, as high-tier as you can get.

00:22:04.720 Like, equivalent to the best violinist in the world.

00:22:07.400 I was very good.

00:22:09.360 I got a full-ride scholarship to my school.

00:22:11.880 Could you shred?

00:22:12.740 Juilliard school, have you known about it?

00:22:14.260 I went to the Juilliard for two years.

00:22:15.360 I don't know what that is.

00:22:15.920 With Juilliard being the world's most prestigious music school, a user on Reddit found Nick's full list of violin achievements, of which there were certainly many, and it therefore makes sense that he was good enough to teach.

00:22:27.720 A YouTuber named Violin Mechanic also watched all of Nick's violin videos, concluding he was near professional.

00:22:34.540 Right from the bat, I can tell that this guy plays fantastically in tune.

00:22:38.280 And it seemed this respect from other people was what Nick missed more than anything else.

00:22:43.220 Quick side note here, but I want you to watch this clip.

00:22:47.560 While knowing what Juilliard really is, a school that is incredibly hard to get into, this is somebody who got a full-ride scholarship into this school.

00:22:57.360 And tell me that this is not an act.

00:23:00.100 I was very good.

00:23:01.800 I got a full-ride scholarship to my school.

00:23:04.340 Could you shred?

00:23:05.260 Could you shred school?

00:23:05.720 Have you known about it?

00:23:06.700 I went to the Juilliard for two years.

00:23:07.760 It goes to show, though, what are the career prospects?

00:23:11.080 You know, how much is he going to make as a concert?

00:23:12.680 Well, and that's the point to all of this.

00:23:15.060 This was an incredibly talented actor, a diligent individual who understood the new social contract of the internet and used it to make enough money that he never needed to do anything again by playing the fat kid, by playing the kid who everyone picked on.

00:23:34.500 Oh, that's so sad.

00:23:35.120 But it was an act designed for this modern audience, this modern disintermediate.

00:23:44.200 How is it?

00:23:44.940 It's better than the alternative.

00:23:46.620 I mean, consider who the internet focused picking on before you had characters who were intentional acts of otherwise, you know, competent, sound people to make money.

00:24:00.240 It was people like Christian, right? 1.00

00:24:02.880 Where the entire internet is treating him as sort of a super normal stimuli.

00:24:07.440 I mean, you're not going to get somebody as pick on a bowl as Christian and it just destroys this actually mentally disabled person's life and completely warps their character into something, you know, evil and bizarre. 0.98

00:24:20.020 Although I would say I do really want to see, like, in the next couple weeks, Christian come out talking normal, looking totally normal, lost all the way.

00:24:29.880 It was like, oh yeah, it was all an act.

00:24:31.440 All these years, all an act.

00:24:33.000 That would break me.

00:24:35.080 I mean, he described it as waking up from a dream, right?

00:24:38.460 And living these last eight years is a horrible dream.

00:24:41.080 And that's what it was for him to an extent.

00:24:43.660 But again, what's the alternative?

00:24:46.120 Be a concert violinist? 1.00

00:24:47.860 His life would suck. 1.00

00:24:49.720 God, like professional. 0.99

00:24:52.080 No, professional violinists do not have good lives.

00:24:55.700 You get maybe two in the world that make it to a tier where they have any level of financial comfort.

00:25:03.880 Okay?

00:25:05.900 Yeah, I guess we're talking purely finances.

00:25:09.000 You know me.

00:25:09.740 I'm a little body dysmorphic.

00:25:11.380 Like, I would kind of rather be scraping by than not, than overweight.

00:25:18.380 Because I'm bad at it.

00:25:19.620 I understand, mom.

00:25:20.480 You and I have, and I do have this, and I will admit this.

00:25:23.560 We have problems.

00:25:24.240 I cannot easily empathize as to what it would feel like to be racist because I genuinely do not have any sort of instinctual reaction.

00:25:33.280 When I look at people of different estho groups.

00:25:36.040 But I do have an instinctive negative reaction when I look at people who are overweight.

00:25:41.220 And we correct for this.

00:25:42.860 And I have lots of people that we respect and love who are inclined to retentities. 1.00

00:25:47.760 But we have problems.

00:25:50.200 Like, instinctual problems.

00:25:52.160 Like, we can't help any problems.

00:25:53.760 It's instinctually very, yeah, it causes me to see these people differently.

00:26:00.740 And I'm not, it's not a good thing that it does, but it does.

00:26:04.340 And I think that this is, like, the true racism that people talk about sometimes.

00:26:07.920 Well, no, and then fat activists talk about this all the time.

00:26:10.740 They're subject to it.

00:26:11.440 It's a really big problem.

00:26:12.500 Like, it's really, like, doctors treat them differently.

00:26:16.280 Everyone treats, like, well, not everyone.

00:26:18.180 But a lot of people treat them differently because I think that instinctual reaction is there.

00:26:22.420 Yeah.

00:26:23.040 And this is, the reason I was making the Stanford joke earlier is because a lot of people forget this, right?

00:26:29.860 Like, the people you interact with online that may be fulfilling in part some persona, which is definitely something that Simone and I do to an extent, is we have trolls on our videos and stuff like that, right?

00:26:44.160 Who are, like, these people are just crazy.

00:26:47.580 Like, you know, can't you see that they're just insane, like, fringe weirdos and stuff like that? 0.84

00:26:53.760 Because on our school, like, launch video, the little short commercial for it, one of the comments, actually the one with the most upvotes.

00:26:58.680 It must have a ton of downvotes because it's at the bottom of all the video, the comments too.

00:27:01.940 But it's also the one with the most upvotes is, like, this is proof that these people are insane and weirdos and blah, blah, blah, and completely delusional.

00:27:09.980 Because we launched a school.

00:27:10.920 I don't see how you got that from the school launch.

00:27:13.400 That seems like a terrible thing.

00:27:13.920 Yeah, that should have gone on, like, your defense of child's verbal punishment.

00:27:18.940 Yeah, like, we're.

00:27:20.260 Like, realistically, our background?

00:27:24.600 Like, I am a Stanford MBA.

00:27:27.840 And for people who don't know what that is, that's literally the hardest degree to get in the world that I'm aware of.

00:27:33.620 I know this is somebody who is going to get a PhD, and a Stanford MBA is generally considered dramatically harder to get into, specifically Stanford and Harvard MBAs.

00:27:41.780 But Stanford more so, because Stanford is dramatically harder to get into than the Harvard MBA program.

00:27:45.580 So it's, like, top tier in terms of the degrees that grant you never have to work again at a day job types of access, if you want it, right?

00:27:56.780 I undergrad, St. Andrews Neuroscience degree.

00:28:00.480 For people who don't know, at least last I checked, like, by the Guardian rankings, St. Andrews beats Oxford and Cambridge in the UK for university rankings.

00:28:08.040 And I have a degree there in neuroscience.

00:28:10.540 I have a degree there in biology.

00:28:11.920 I have a degree there in psychology.

00:28:13.520 I have exhibits on display in human evolution stuff at the Smithsonian.

00:28:17.800 Simone has a graduate degree in technology policy from Cambridge.

00:28:21.380 Like, in terms of, we've gone through 500 startups, which is one of the harder to get into startup accelerators.

00:28:26.540 In terms of the, like, objective real-world success things, this idea that somebody, if you are looking at someone who has, like, hit it out of the park with, like, every major real-world success indicator, and you're like, why do they appear so weird online?

00:28:46.760 Why do they have this persona online that I don't understand, right?

00:28:51.520 Chances are, they are doing something that is simply above your pay grade, like Nick Avocado, Nick Avocado Avocado was doing. 0.99

00:29:02.120 And I think this is also true with people like Musk, when people are like, oh, Musk is just an idiot in everything he's doing. 1.00

00:29:07.060 He's completely unhinged. 0.99

00:29:09.700 Musk is not unhinged.

00:29:11.240 He's just a, he's a super genius who likes puns and dad jokes.

00:29:16.200 Is it that hard, like?

00:29:18.460 Well, it's not just that.

00:29:19.800 For being the wealthiest man in the world, people are going to have a negative association with you.

00:29:24.580 They are going to interact with you.

00:29:25.980 No matter what you do.

00:29:27.040 Negatively.

00:29:27.780 It is very hard to cut through that and achieve any degree of positive public image.

00:29:33.700 And you're like, well, what if you just, like, gave the money to charity?

00:29:36.260 It's like, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg friggin' tried that.

00:29:39.260 Yeah, how did that go for him?

00:29:41.080 He tried that. 0.98

00:29:41.980 You know, in terms of positive public image, of the ultra-wealthy, Elon Musk is fucking, like, weaning hard. 0.98

00:29:52.300 I know, I know. 0.98

00:29:52.840 Facebook has a marketing department.

00:29:55.040 Musk's companies just have Elon Musk.

00:29:58.480 Yeah, I love it when people pretend like he doesn't know what he's doing.

00:30:01.040 And this is one of, actually, an interesting thing with me in social environments is I have, like, really developed mirror neurons.

00:30:08.000 We talked about this in another episode, which means I, like, can't help but feel pain when other people feel pain.

00:30:12.760 You're, like, hyper-developed mirror neurons.

00:30:15.000 In other words, you're very, very sensitive.

00:30:17.380 Yes.

00:30:17.740 So, like, if I see somebody else's knee hurt, my knee will start hurting.

00:30:20.500 But it causes other problems.

00:30:22.300 One of the problems people note in the Piers Morgan interview of me, where you and I are talking, and when you're speaking, people get through my mouth saying the same words.

00:30:32.060 That is how-

00:30:32.540 And they're, like, he's some kind of puppet master.

00:30:35.260 Is he controlling her remotely?

00:30:36.960 What's really happening is as I'm thinking of her saying something, because the mirror neuron on my pathway is so hypersensitized, I can't help but move the muscles that would be involved with me saying the thing that I am thinking about her saying.

00:30:50.660 And it looks so bad.

00:30:52.560 It looks so bad.

00:30:53.680 But if I'm, like, really nervous, that's just the way I act.

00:30:56.360 But it also means I'm very, very, very good at reading people.

00:31:00.420 As we've seen, Simone.

00:31:01.420 Like, you've seen me be around people.

00:31:03.100 This isn't, like, a boast.

00:31:04.000 I'm just genuinely, it's one of my strong talents.

00:31:06.960 And I have fear deficiency in some areas.

00:31:09.820 Like, people think, you know, when we gauge intelligence as all being, like, one thing, I am probably, I would argue, in the bottom 2% to 5% of the population, an ability to learn languages or music.

00:31:21.340 True story.

00:31:22.960 What can you say in Spanish?

00:31:26.580 Aside from hello?

00:31:28.240 Can you say one sentence?

00:31:29.540 I know, like, no hablo espanol.

00:31:32.320 That's not really a sentence.

00:31:34.600 I mean.

00:31:36.960 Technically, it is.

00:31:37.960 I literally don't know anything.

00:31:38.860 I can maybe think of a few words.

00:31:40.260 And how many years of Spanish did you take?

00:31:42.260 How insane it is that I can't do that?

00:31:44.360 You had Spanish-speaking names as a kid.

00:31:46.980 Yeah.

00:31:47.120 I had Spanish-speaking names.

00:31:49.120 My family sent me out to live with a Spanish family in Mexico for a month.

00:31:53.820 I did multiple summer jobs for months in Spanish-speaking countries.

00:31:57.480 Costa Rica.

00:31:58.280 Well, Brazil, not Spanish-speaking, but okay, whatever.

00:32:00.380 Costa Rica, I lived for a month and I lived in Mexico for a month.

00:32:02.720 I didn't graduate Spanish 1, which I took every year from elementary school until college until I was going from my junior to my senior year of high school.

00:32:19.420 I failed one class like 20 times in a row.

00:32:25.260 To say I am bad at languages is the biggest understatement of the century.

00:32:30.720 I am very, very bad at coding languages, too, for example.

00:32:35.300 I've tried to learn them multiple times.

00:32:37.280 I just haven't been able to.

00:32:39.500 And this is something that's important to know.

00:32:40.700 When you're dealing with people who are high-end within certain types of intelligences, there's a really high degree of variability.

00:32:46.880 And this is actually not uncommon for an individual. 0.79

00:32:49.400 So they're like a retard in some places and they're a genius in others. 1.00

00:32:53.540 Yes. 0.95

00:32:53.920 And so I'm just saying one of the areas I happen to be uniquely gifted is in reading people.

00:32:58.860 And people are like, but then why are you so dislikable so much of the time, right?

00:33:04.520 Oh, like, well, yeah, because a lot of people are like, oh, man, he just doesn't know how to read people.

00:33:08.020 He's so tone deaf.

00:33:08.700 The thing is, it's not that he can't read them.

00:33:11.300 It's that he doesn't care.

00:33:13.280 He doesn't care what they think.

00:33:14.860 What's not that I don't care?

00:33:15.840 It's that they assume that the optimal pathway through every interactive conversational environment is one designed to get the person to like you.

00:33:27.540 Yeah.

00:33:28.000 Or to cause maximum positive emotional states in the individual that you are engaging with.

00:33:34.260 When that is just objectively not true.

00:33:37.140 In truth, if I am trying to achieve specific outcomes from conversations, I'd say half of the time about, it's not the optimal pathway to focus on getting them to like me.

00:33:49.120 And this is, from a disintermediated social perspective, what Nick Ocato Avocado realized.

00:33:55.460 Yeah.

00:33:55.900 Yeah.

00:33:56.180 He did not try to be liked.

00:33:57.680 He did not try to be respected.

00:33:59.120 He did not try to look good.

00:34:00.360 He did not try to look dignified.

00:34:02.100 I mean, all of it.

00:34:03.060 Yeah, that's true.

00:34:03.840 When you are playing sort of 4D chess in terms of outcomes, it's not about always trying to get people enamored with you, right?

00:34:15.420 It's about achieving the particular outcome that you are interested in.

00:34:19.740 And so I think that he shows that was in this online environment, but also we show that.

00:34:26.700 That's something we show.

00:34:27.980 If you want to see our video on media baiting and stuff like that, trying to appear as generic, broadly likable people was in an online environment, it's a very bad idea.

00:34:39.740 Yeah.

00:34:40.080 People will hate you.

00:34:41.480 The Hillary Clinton effect.

00:34:44.740 It does not work.

00:34:46.760 You have to be, well, spiky in some way, right?

00:34:52.360 And that's what people see of as weird.

00:34:54.800 And in the same way that when you are a mime, right?

00:34:58.040 Like a mime, because you're dealing with less communication venues, will over-exaggerate every one of their emotions and every one of their actions. 0.99

00:35:06.620 It's the same with an online personality.

00:35:08.640 And you want to over-exaggerate to really reach your target audience.

00:35:13.220 But more so than that, when we talk about this transition to this new social model, some people have gotten it and some people haven't gotten it.

00:35:22.020 We've moved from theater to movies.

00:35:26.920 If you go back and you look at movies from like the 70s or 60s, you will see many elements of them that look more like a stage play than what you would think of as modern cinema.

00:35:37.280 Well, you actually see this like from the early, earliest forms of cinema.

00:35:42.640 Everything went from like minstrel show style to like Broadway stage play style.

00:35:48.680 And it was really driven by the stage.

00:35:50.240 And now like increasingly things are becoming based on optimization native to that media.

00:35:56.900 Exactly.

00:35:57.420 Well, when things moved to the online environment, the same thing happened.

00:36:02.980 A lot of people tried to recreate specific genres that they were aware of from the old TV days, right?

00:36:13.980 And so two really carried over.

00:36:16.060 One was the more cinematic style skit comedy and stuff like this.

00:36:20.780 Remember like college humor and stuff like that?

00:36:22.780 And you just don't see stuff like that anymore.

00:36:25.400 Yeah, like Saturday Night Live style skits.

00:36:28.280 Yeah.

00:36:29.540 And then the other was like trying to create Jackass, but was in an online environment.

00:36:33.400 A lot of the early stuff was.

00:36:34.900 It was like random pranks and like acting a fool and stuff like that.

00:36:39.640 Yeah.

00:36:39.980 And gradually it became clear to people that what it was really about was this disintermediated social relationship.

00:36:46.580 And I think a great example of this recently was a famous gun YouTuber recently became number two in trending was just a video that said, I died.

00:36:53.980 And he had died and he had pre-recorded a video for when he died.

00:36:57.420 He was old.

00:36:58.180 He knew he was going to die.

00:36:59.060 He had cancer, pancreatic cancer.

00:37:00.840 And, you know, that is the relationship that people have with this audience now.

00:37:05.920 This audience may not be friends in whatever friends meant in the traditional use of the word.

00:37:11.920 I mean, if you're playing yourself and that's important, right?

00:37:15.420 Or at least a facsimile of yourself.

00:37:17.940 Everyone's playing an act even when they're meeting with friends.

00:37:20.700 Let's be clear.

00:37:22.040 You know, you're always in people who are like, no, I'm not.

00:37:25.280 Then I'm like, you're probably exceptionally boring if you have no like intentional aspect to your character.

00:37:29.460 Or they're just so lost in trying to meet this identity they have for themselves that they've forgotten their method acting.

00:37:37.400 If you know what I mean?

00:37:38.180 Like their objective function is to satisfy that particular character sheet they built for themselves.

00:37:44.100 And I think with Nikakato Avocado, if you watch his recent video, he like tries to play this villain character or something like that.

00:37:50.260 And he's doing this.

00:37:51.440 It's obvious to me it's very a form of emotional defense for him to try to like regain control of who he is and his identity.

00:37:58.740 Because when he was playing that character, I genuinely believe there were moments where he was wondering, am I really this person now?

00:38:10.300 Like, is this who I am?

00:38:11.720 And the belief that I'm not this person is the lie.

00:38:16.000 Scary.

00:38:17.120 Yeah.

00:38:18.080 You know, because, you know, he's a smart guy.

00:38:20.440 He probably thought so many people were like this.

00:38:22.840 So many people, you know, delusional people probably think, you know.

00:38:26.880 Yeah, I can just start tomorrow.

00:38:29.320 It's fine.

00:38:29.540 Yeah, I'm going to start tomorrow.

00:38:30.800 You know, and you can look at somebody like us and people can be like, well, I mean, does that mean that you are a character in the way that you're portraying yourself?

00:38:38.740 And it's like, well, sort of.

00:38:40.580 I mean, I've chosen a character to be my identity and I live as that character because I think it's optimized for achieving my particular goals in the world.

00:38:49.000 But I don't differentiate myself terribly from that character, which we've talked about in other videos, I think is why we have a good relationship with our fans, where I've noticed that some famous people have a very negative relationship with their fans.

00:39:01.800 And these are famous people we know privately, you know, who we've had conversations with.

00:39:05.740 And these are individuals where their fans perceive them as a character that is highly incongruent with who they see themselves as and who they are in private.

00:39:14.840 Whereas for us, while we are presenting a character, it's also the character that you will meet if you go to a dinner party with us or something like that, you know.

00:39:22.960 And I would say, is it that distant from who I am when I'm just alone with you, Simone?

00:39:29.500 I mean, it is to an extent, I guess.

00:39:32.080 No.

00:39:33.580 No.

00:39:34.220 Not really.

00:39:34.880 These are the conversations we have.

00:39:37.280 I'm not putting on an act because I don't have the mental bandwidth to do that right now.

00:39:43.900 And I don't know, you just be you.

00:39:46.220 I've never seen you act like anyone but you.

00:39:48.640 And I don't, I mean, you certainly have things that you say in public that you don't say in private, but, you know.

00:39:58.080 Yeah.

00:39:58.540 Well, I love when everyone is like, who didn't actually follow us before is like, oh, he disciplined his child.

00:40:03.780 Like he hit his kid, like mask off moment.

00:40:05.900 We had a video early in our channel.

00:40:07.880 This was the Jordan Peterson is raising kids to be Sims video if people want to see it.

00:40:11.580 Where not only did we talk about bopping, but we talked about how it works, why we do it, et cetera, long before that big, ooh, expose happened.

00:40:20.420 Newspapers just watched our episode.

00:40:22.360 We'd be in big trouble.

00:40:23.740 But.

00:40:24.300 You'd think that.

00:40:25.300 But like I'm running for office and I was told that before becoming a politician in the United States, you know, clear everything on social media.

00:40:35.060 They'll dig through all your dirt and find everything. 0.99

00:40:37.900 And you'll find them throwing every little stupid detail thing you've said at you. 0.98

00:40:43.120 And other people who've run for small offices in our district, in our county have just said really inconsequential things to other people on social media and ended their campaigns based on criticism around that. 0.96

00:40:57.420 And yet nothing has come out with this campaign.

00:41:01.520 And what's more interesting is we have been attacked for things, but they're not real.

00:41:07.180 The attacks we get are fictional.

00:41:10.040 Like what?

00:41:10.600 I'm, I'm like, I abuse you.

00:41:15.480 I am disrespectful to you.

00:41:17.600 I, one of us must have cheated on the same space, the Twitter account.

00:41:22.540 Oh, that one of us must have cheated on the other.

00:41:25.340 Yeah.

00:41:26.100 Again, if they just watched our videos, they would understand our internal policies around who gets to sleep around.

00:41:32.340 Like, I just, yeah.

00:41:34.440 Rather than have people dig through our backlog to find out what she is alluding to here, the point she is making is that one of us cheating on the other would be a virtually impossible thing to have happen because, well, Simone just wouldn't cheat on me at all.

00:41:52.160 It's, it's not something that she has a desire for.

00:41:55.540 She's basically completely asexual other than me. 0.66

00:41:58.920 I.e.

00:41:59.720 She never really experienced arousal before interacting with me.

00:42:02.840 I mean, you've got to keep in mind just how negatively she reacts to any physical contact with anyone other than me or the kids.

00:42:10.160 Where if she has interacted with somebody, it's like scrubbing her hands for like, you know, five minutes afterwards, you know, really vigorously before she can go on with her day.

00:42:21.420 She finds human contact really repugnant.

00:42:25.100 Keep in mind that even with me, where she does have exceptions, she still wants to have our podcast record in different rooms.

00:42:32.700 It's still too much of a distraction for her.

00:42:35.660 And then from my perspective, I'm allowed to sleep with other people if I want to.

00:42:39.380 I just choose not to.

00:42:40.800 But if I did, it wouldn't be cheating on her because it's something I'm allowed to do.

00:42:44.580 It's not part of our understanding and our relationship that I wouldn't be sleeping with other people.

00:42:49.880 So, like, cheating is an impossibility given the way, given our characters and the way our relationship is structured.

00:42:57.020 Also, for those who might be like, well, if your wife lets you sleep with other people, then why don't you?

00:43:02.340 It's like, well, a number of reasons.

00:43:04.080 One, ew.

00:43:05.740 Two, when I say ew, I mean, just the idea for whatever reason kind of grosses me out.

00:43:11.200 You know, I have a wife who's really dedicated to me.

00:43:14.780 There are few people who I would rather choose to take time to seduce or sleep with other than her. 1.00

00:43:23.120 But in addition to that, it's a huge amount of emotional and mental effort.

00:43:29.040 And in addition to that, like, what's the benefit to us or our mission if I was to do that?

00:43:34.780 If I thought that there was some marginal benefit to our family by sleeping with someone, fine.

00:43:40.420 You know, that's something that I might consider.

00:43:42.760 But if not, then why would I do that?

00:43:45.160 Why would I take the time to do that for hedonistic reasons?

00:43:48.380 Because it feels good?

00:43:49.520 I mean, think about the effort that you are putting in to get somebody else to sleep with you in a safe context.

00:43:59.080 And contrast that with the momentary pleasure you get from the actual sexual act.

00:44:04.860 Just the equation makes no sense there.

00:44:08.180 They make stuff up.

00:44:11.280 The controversies that are public about us are fictional.

00:44:14.000 But, like, when people who watched us or knew us were like, oh, would he discipline his kid or discipline his kid in front of a reporter?

00:44:21.220 They're like, yeah, that's exactly the type of thing Malcolm would do.

00:44:23.500 What did one of your family members say about running for office?

00:44:26.300 Like, all the bad things they say about you won't be real.

00:44:29.380 Yeah, so my uncle used to be head of the Fed in Texas, and he ran for Senate in Texas.

00:44:34.360 My granddad was a congressman in Texas and ran for Senate as well.

00:44:37.400 So I've got, like, a lot of politicians in the family.

00:44:39.660 But anyway, this came from my uncle and not my grandfather.

00:44:41.780 So my uncle said, the weird thing about running for politics is you will be attacked for so many things, and none of it will be true.

00:44:50.260 Like, but he's like, it's not just that.

00:44:51.940 The reasons people like you, that also won't be true.

00:44:55.680 They will like and hate a fictional representation of yourself.

00:45:00.660 And when you fall into the cliches of thinking these cliche things about Donald Trump or thinking these cliche things about Elon Musk, and don't remember that this is, like, Elon Musk is just an autistic dad, okay?

00:45:13.380 Like, you can see him however you want, but at the end of the day, Elon Musk is just an autistic dad.

00:45:19.900 And when you remember that, a lot of this false framing can begin to dissolve.

00:45:25.220 Trump is an insecure guy who always wanted to fit in with the rich kids and never really got to, and now he's having his moment in the sun.

00:45:33.260 And all of his behavior makes sense within that context.

00:45:37.540 He was also stuck in an echo chamber of yes men, which is not great.

00:45:42.000 Not anymore.

00:45:42.740 Not as much.

00:45:43.260 He's got, yeah, he has more, yeah, he has a lot of surrounding competent people, but he, at least in the first administration, was surrounded by a bunch of yes men who made things difficult.

00:45:54.140 But what I'm saying, yeah, first administration, but that hasn't been true for, like, 10 years.

00:45:58.160 Yeah, no, now he's got some great people.

00:45:59.600 I'm super excited about it.

00:46:00.660 But, you know, we'll see.

00:46:01.840 But what we have to talk about here, very interesting, is just remember, like, the point of this, the point of all of this, from the perspective of the audience, is remember that in this age of disintermediated parasocial relationships, one, in a big part, and I would commit this to other creators, the relationships you have with your audience, the fact that it's parasocial doesn't mean it's not real.

00:46:26.960 Okay?

00:46:28.040 You have chosen to play a social role within their lives, and it's important that you own the role that you have chosen to play, right?

00:46:37.440 And you don't have animosity at them for viewing you the way you have sold yourself to them.

00:46:43.760 But in addition to that, there are going to be people who find ways to exploit the worst of human instincts.

00:46:53.420 And not all of these people will be bad.

00:46:55.900 Some of them will just be smart entertainers who are like – and I respect Nikocado Avocado endlessly for doing this.

00:47:02.640 I have – like, I'd love to have him on the channel.

00:47:05.280 Not that we'd ever get somebody that famous on the channel, but we'll see.

00:47:08.220 I mean, is Ayla not fulfilling one of these roles, right, of the ultra-educated, you know, educationally controversial – what's a nice way to say it?

00:47:21.240 And woman who sleeps with men as a profession, this is something that we've seen historically over and over again. 1.00

00:47:28.240 It's like a trope our culture has, whether it's – what are the two ones that you always mention?

00:47:31.940 I can't remember their names.

00:47:33.100 Aspasia.

00:47:34.320 Aspasia.

00:47:34.900 And Madame de Pompidou.

00:47:36.580 Yeah.

00:47:36.960 Among the famous ones, yeah.

00:47:38.500 Among the famous ones.

00:47:39.400 But it's a common role that we have sort of in the background of our minds, especially people who are educated in history.

00:47:45.220 And let's be honest, her audience is like a fairly educated audience, and they like that she plays that parasocial role for them.

00:47:51.900 You know, she's their aspasia, right? 1.00

00:47:54.060 And then there's idiots who have no education and are just like, she's a prostitute, and prostitutes are always low class. 1.00

00:48:00.920 And I'm like, that is objectively not true from a historic context. 1.00

00:48:04.480 In fact, historically speaking, until the modern age, I want to say maybe until the last 200 years, generally the most respected women in most societies in history were women who you paid for sex. 0.97

00:48:16.460 This is why people like Aspasia were able to achieve the rank that they had. 0.90

00:48:20.440 As to why that's the case, it's because those were the only women who – now, keep in mind that women of the night fell into two classes here. 1.00

00:48:26.980 You'd have the ones for the lower classes, and you'd have the ones for the upper classes.

00:48:30.080 They were the women who the upper class men were having intellectual conversations with. 0.94

00:48:33.720 Yeah, they weren't stuck in the back of a household.

00:48:36.280 Yes, and so that's how they achieved the highest ranks in many of these historic societies.

00:48:40.160 For women, not for anyone. 1.00

00:48:42.360 Anyway, I love you to death, Simone.

00:48:44.520 You are amazing.

00:48:45.760 I am so happy to be married to you.

00:48:47.600 You are just a wonderful mother.

00:48:49.740 I am so glad you have allowed me.

00:48:51.720 You know, we recently passed that the over 100 people are watching us at any given moment, day or night, at this point.

00:48:57.340 I can't believe it.

00:48:58.240 It's just wild to think about.

00:49:01.300 If we were a megachurch, we would be getting – what was it recently where I ran the numbers?

00:49:05.900 We'd be getting – yeah, so we're now at, for watch hours in a 28-day period, 67.9 thousand.

00:49:13.380 And what that means is that on any given day, we have – if we were giving an hour lecture or an hour sermon, so suppose we were like a preacher who ran a megachurch and gave an hour sermon every day, we'd have 2,425 people show up to that sermon.

00:49:30.920 That's insane.

00:49:33.600 It means that at any given time, day or night, we have 101 people watching us.

00:49:39.300 It means that if I woke up every day and for 16 hours I was preaching on a side corner, this includes weekends, we would have an average of 151.6 people in that crowd.

00:49:50.680 That is just wild to me to think about.

00:49:54.460 And this is just YouTube, not our other channels.

00:49:56.940 Anyway, but that's what I talk about.

00:49:59.800 It's like a parasocial, disintermediated, connected network that we have been able to achieve this.

00:50:04.280 I've only achieved it thanks to you, Simone.

00:50:05.820 I could never do this without you, and you know that 100%.

00:50:08.660 You are the key to everything for me.

00:50:12.900 I'd never do anything interesting without you.

00:50:14.800 I love you so much.

00:50:17.040 All right.

00:50:17.480 Love you too.

00:50:17.960 Bye.

00:50:20.520 All right.

00:50:21.220 What?

00:50:22.500 I don't.

00:50:23.140 By the way, guys, everyone, Malcolm has placed his bet on Kamala.

00:50:27.760 By the way, so people know the logic behind my bet.

00:50:31.100 I don't know a single.

00:50:33.000 Sorry.

00:50:33.620 Malcolm has placed his bet on Trump.

00:50:35.240 I placed my bet on Kamala.

00:50:37.160 Yeah.

00:50:37.700 I don't know a single person who moved between the last election cycle and this election cycle from a Democrat voter to a Republican voter.

00:50:47.300 But I know lots of people who have moved from, sorry, I don't know a single person who has moved from a Republican voter to a Democrat voter.

00:50:55.600 And I do because I went door knocking.

00:50:58.240 Yes.

00:50:58.760 We'll talk about your counter argument, but I do know lots of people who have moved from Republican to Democrat.

00:51:04.280 Simone's core counter argument.

00:51:05.520 No, no, no.

00:51:05.960 Malcolm, Malcolm, you said that the wrong way.

00:51:08.260 You know a lot of people who were Democrats and are now voting Republican.

00:51:11.980 Okay.

00:51:12.160 I know a lot of people who were Democrats and are now voting Republican.

00:51:15.900 Between these last two cycles specifically, it's like this giant new audience.

00:51:20.860 But, I mean, consider like Elon, for example, right?

00:51:24.120 Like mainstream figures have moved pretty dramatically.

00:51:28.480 But Simone, when you're knocking, and she's like, you wouldn't believe how many people are going to be voting just because of the abortion law change.

00:51:38.460 Hey, it's a big thing.

00:51:40.560 Like, even if you're a family that's otherwise conservative but wants the optionality of doing IVF because maybe one of you has fertility problems but you still care about having kids that are biologically yours, you may feel motivated.

00:51:54.680 Like, it's the responsible thing to do to vote Democrat just to make sure that your right to IVF is protected, right?

00:52:03.100 If you're a conservative male who sleeps around a lot, I guess there aren't any of them.

00:52:06.520 If you're looking to the actual candidate policies, you would know how ludicrous that is.

00:52:09.100 Yeah, but again, when I listen to certain media slants, like certain algo dives, because I'm trying to see what normal other people who aren't necessarily conservative-coded are listening to,

00:52:23.300 they just, they make it sound like an inevitable thing that your right to abortion and birth control and everything will be taken away if Trump wins.

00:52:36.060 They're just like, Project 2025, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah.

00:52:38.700 Which Trump hates.

00:52:40.020 I know, which he hates.

00:52:41.240 Yeah, it's very annoying.

00:52:43.520 And honestly, I think that they'd be better to lean on Trump derangement syndrome and just keep pointing to his face, because it seems to drive people nuts, instead of talking about a project with which he has zero affiliation, but whatever.

00:52:54.980 In regard to the episode on where is the woke audience, someone on Twitter sent to us a YouGov America poll saying Americans overestimate the size of minority groups and underestimate the size of most majority groups.

00:53:13.420 And it shows a true proportion and estimated proportion, for example, have a household income over 1 million, true proportion, 0%.

00:53:27.460 I mean, because I'm sure it's like 0.00, whatever, estimated proportion, 20%.

00:53:32.420 What?

00:53:33.900 Our transgender, what?

00:53:38.460 Okay, our transgender, true proportion, 1%. 0.93

00:53:41.980 Estimated proportion, 21%.

00:53:45.260 Who is filling out these polls?

00:53:47.700 No, and I'm wondering for the people, because there might be a lot of people who are like, oh, it's probably like 5% or 3% or something.

00:53:52.500 Yes.

00:53:52.680 I wonder if there's other people being like 50%.

00:53:55.120 Yeah, but maybe they're like, they're, I mean, one, this is presumably like people on the internet with too much time.

00:54:00.360 So they're like terminally online and maybe then, you know, you're kind of surrounded by like trans people and you think everyone's trans.

00:54:09.300 Have a household income over 500,000, true proportion, 1%.

00:54:14.320 Estimated proportion, 26%.

00:54:17.520 Our Muslim, true proportion, 1%. 1.00

00:54:20.080 Estimated proportion, 27%.

00:54:23.360 This is, this is 27%.

00:54:27.500 This is how these girls get out there and they're like, oh, I'm going to get a guy who's making six figures and like, yeah, I'm going to get a guy who's making like 300K or something in his early 20s. 1.00

00:54:37.340 And it's like, they have a completely misunderstanding of reality.

00:54:42.800 It's the understanding the average person has is just out of whack, out of whack.

00:54:46.840 You know, it's interesting though, is there are some where it's actually spot on.

00:54:49.600 And here are the ones where it's almost the same, have at least one child, people estimated 57%, sorry, real is 57%.

00:54:59.060 The collective estimation was 58%.

00:55:01.760 So very close.

00:55:03.480 Voted in the 2020 election, real 61%, estimated 62%.

00:55:08.460 So there's some that were actually like, they're not 100% delusional, but man, that, that millionaire gap, pretty crazy.

00:55:17.940 And then basically there are huge gaps of about 30% for our Muslim, our Native American, our Jewish live in New York City.

00:55:27.680 30% estimated that Americans live in New York.

00:55:31.860 So 30%.

00:55:32.460 What percent do they think are Jewish?

00:55:33.900 They, they thought around 30% are Jewish.

00:55:37.660 30% of Americans are Jewish? 0.99

00:55:39.580 I mean, so basically anyone who's a dick or who, who, who's like their manager is probably gonna be Jewish. 1.00

00:55:46.160 1.5%, right? 0.99

00:55:47.680 2% in, in this.

00:55:49.800 I live in New York City, 3%, estimated 30%.

00:55:52.820 Are gay or lesbian, 3%, estimated 30%.

00:55:55.960 Are atheist, 3%, estimated 33%.

00:55:59.700 Yeah, these, these are terminally all in people.

00:56:01.980 Bisexual, estimated 4%.

00:56:03.820 Real, 29%.

00:56:05.640 I would, we would actually argue probably slightly over 50%.

00:56:09.480 Because, wait, hold on, listen.

00:56:11.360 Yeah, they, they think really only 4% of people are bisexual.

00:56:14.580 Whereas we would argue probably almost all women.

00:56:17.040 But the real number of bisexuals in this poll was 29%.

00:56:19.660 No, it was 4%.

00:56:20.900 Oh, okay.

00:56:22.120 Yeah.

00:56:22.840 You said 29% for whatever.

00:56:24.700 29% is what they thought.

00:56:26.600 But we would say.

00:56:27.260 Okay, yeah, you got those numbers backwards.

00:56:28.620 We would think that it was a little over 50%.

00:56:31.380 Are vegan or vegetarian.

00:56:33.760 5%.

00:56:34.160 I know, of, of females, potentially. 1.00

00:56:36.380 Yeah, females. 1.00

00:56:37.420 No, I'm pretty sure, like.

00:56:40.140 Males are basically never bisexual.

00:56:42.680 Like, almost never.

00:56:43.920 I know, but you, that's, I feel like that's the 4%, though. 0.98

00:56:47.720 That, like, think they're bisexual.

00:56:49.280 And, which really means that they're, like, gay, but they can have low standards sometimes. 0.95

00:56:53.360 Gay with low standards sometimes. 0.99

00:56:54.840 Gay, which is, like, sometimes I just. 0.92

00:56:56.960 I don't know how low the standards are when it's different. 1.00

00:56:59.140 A petty fuck, Malcolm. 0.99

00:57:00.320 You know, they have a friend who's, like, no one will sleep with me. 1.00

00:57:03.700 I'm sure we don't.

00:57:04.000 Simone, I have been to a DMV, okay?

00:57:06.000 I know what, like, your average American looks like.

00:57:08.740 And I'm, like, how does this population breed?

00:57:12.080 And, you know, the joke from, people were posting this to Seinfeld.

00:57:15.340 The joke was, well, alcohol.

00:57:16.900 But here I'm thinking, I'm, like, you know, if you're willing to drop your standards to sleep

00:57:21.400 with, like, the average type of looking person you see at the DMV, you're probably willing

00:57:25.540 to drop your standards to a different set of genitals in your preference.

00:57:28.820 At that point, you're just, like, is this thing warm and, like, adjacent to something living?

00:57:34.920 I don't think you understand the desperation of any people, so that's not fair.

00:57:38.900 Okay, okay.

00:57:39.660 Well, that's exactly, I think I do understand the desperation of some people.

00:57:43.620 That's the point I'm making, okay?

00:57:45.360 This is a factor of standards at that point.

00:57:48.180 Well, here's one that I would have misestimated, no, poorly estimated, that a lot of other

00:57:56.160 people did, too.

00:57:57.300 Most people, like, sorry, the collective estimation for having a driver's license in the United

00:58:02.840 States is 83%.

00:58:04.440 What do you think?

00:58:05.220 What would you guess it is?

00:58:07.700 60%?

00:58:08.580 Yeah, 68%.

00:58:09.760 I don't know.

00:58:10.780 That's, like, a lot of people who aren't technically allowed to drive. 1.00

00:58:13.700 It's because you haven't been around stupid people, Simone. 0.99

00:58:15.900 No, you work in a company that has, you work with, like, middle intelligence people, but, 0.99

00:58:22.660 like, I, growing up, for reasons I don't want to get into because people would say, well, 0.99

00:58:27.440 you're stereotyping certain groups here associated with more, like, actual stupid people during 0.67

00:58:32.040 parts of my life, and not having driver's license was actually pretty common in those 0.97

00:58:36.400 communities.

00:58:37.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:58:40.360 Okay, we're going to get started with the episode.

00:58:42.260 We're going to have a long end amble on this one.

00:58:44.800 Sorry.

00:58:45.200 But thank you to, wait, who sent this to us?

00:58:48.700 I sent you a link.

00:58:49.520 Thank you to, thank you to Question Assumptions for sending us this graph on Twitter.

00:58:56.960 Really appreciate it.

00:58:58.200 At QA underscore NJ.

00:59:00.820 Thanks.

Based Camp - September 11, 2024

Being Bullied for Profit： The Man Who Lived as a Fictional Character for a Decade

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