Based Camp - The Ubermensch For Manic Pixie Dream Girls： Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

00:00:00.000 He basically tried to combine the Uberminge with the aesthetics of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

00:00:06.280 I like to listen to songs in my head.

00:00:12.640 I'm sorry.

00:00:13.620 I paid the cab driver in buttons.

00:00:15.680 When did you first suspect you were dating a Manic Pixie Dream Girl? 0.96

00:00:18.560 On our first date, she said she wanted pancakes for dinner.

00:00:22.880 I felt alive.

00:00:24.120 But then after a few months, she can't feed herself.

00:00:27.740 She can't pay bills. 1.00

00:00:29.140 She just wonders at the marvel of every moment.

00:00:31.940 We got married in a bouncy castle.

00:00:35.400 Do you think it's possible to ever be truly in the moment?

00:00:41.000 The Native Americans believe everything is alive. 0.99

00:00:43.220 I told him the best place to see the night sky is laying in the middle of the street.

00:00:48.340 It's the flattest place there is.

00:00:50.620 She does seem happy.

00:00:52.340 Happy as she can be, I suppose.

00:00:55.840 Maslow flips this.

00:00:56.960 Self-actualization is achievable through education, therapy, supportive environments, and personal effort, not a heroic struggle alone.

00:01:06.920 So note what is actually said here.

00:01:10.280 It's saying the Uberminge is elitist.

00:01:13.140 Because to become an Uberminge, an individual has to overcome suffering.

00:01:20.700 Who has the potential to be self-actualized if self-actualization requires the fulfillment of all of the lower states of the hierarchy of needs?

00:01:28.860 Only the elite.

00:01:31.320 And the fun thing about Laszlo's system is it's a system that makes everyone who is wealthy and sees a therapist think that they're already at the top of it.

00:01:42.420 And it explains to the rich progressive who doesn't want to think about why the poor have different world frameworks in them.

00:01:53.260 It helps them not think about it.

00:01:54.880 Would you like to know more?

00:01:56.240 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:01:57.180 I'm excited to be here with you today.

00:01:58.460 Today, we are going to be talking about the links between the Uberminge, as developed and defined by Nietzsche, and the rebranding of the term self-actualization into its modern definition, which was done by Abraham Maslow of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs fame.

00:02:17.360 And you're referring to Nietzsche.

00:02:19.220 He's just going to call him Nietzsche.

00:02:21.260 Go with it, guys.

00:02:22.300 I don't think these foreign words have no place on this American tongue, okay?

00:02:29.220 They would dirty my mouth. 0.97

00:02:31.020 Anyway, we have another episode if you want to understand how Maslow rebranded the term self-actualization and how his rebranding was so toxic and largely destroyed the field of psychology and is the seedbed of the urban monoculture.

00:02:46.940 That is not what we're going to be focusing on in this episode.

00:02:49.280 What we're going to be focusing on in this episode is Maslow was pretty explicit in this in some of his works.

00:02:56.240 Self-actualization was a rebranding, an explicit rebranding, of the concept of the Uberminge.

00:03:03.860 But it was rebranded to be palatable to a broadly progressive urban monoculture cultural perspective.

00:03:13.740 And through the rebranding, in a way, it became an inversion of itself.

00:03:19.280 I think he thought he was just making little tweaks to it and not realizing that he was actually retooling the core of what it meant.

00:03:31.140 Now, broadly speaking, I'm going to go over what these two mean, and then we're going to go over how they contrast with each other in understanding and what we as individuals can take away from this contrast to understand how we can live meaningful lives.

00:03:49.540 So it is so crazy.

00:03:51.160 Can you imagine when they first introduced this to you, like in your college psychology class, they're like, oh, yeah, like there's Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

00:03:58.300 And at the top, it's basically Nietzsche's Uberminge.

00:04:00.440 But let's not talk about that.

00:04:01.880 I'm not going to talk about that.

00:04:02.940 The good thing about Nietzsche's Uberminge, one of the best things to contrast it with the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization is that the definition, when you boil it down, is actually pretty clear.

00:04:16.560 And it's not like vague, just a bunch of positive things.

00:04:20.440 You are an Uberminge if you do not get your morality from your culture.

00:04:32.120 Oh, so you're not like, okay.

00:04:33.620 Society.

00:04:34.460 If you pick up what you think is right and wrong because other people told you this is what's right and this is what's wrong, you are not an Uberminge.

00:04:45.460 If you develop what is right versus wrong because you personally sat down and saw it through.

00:04:53.140 Now, it's not saying that you reject morality or you embrace nihilism.

00:04:57.700 It's actually a specific refutation of that.

00:05:00.720 Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has.

00:05:04.120 Use that freedom.

00:05:05.580 Make up your own mind.

00:05:06.480 There is a way to say society is wrong or society isn't necessarily right.

00:05:12.360 As we see in the Pragmatist Guide to Life, we do not live at the moral nexus of history.

00:05:16.800 You cannot assume that just because there's a moral understanding today, and this is true of all people in the past, wherever you look in the past, there is going to be something that they did that today we consider absolutely mortifyingly amoral.

00:05:31.660 Yeah.

00:05:31.920 And there are going to be things that we do today that people in the future might find mortifyingly amoral.

00:05:38.700 Like eat meat.

00:05:39.460 That's the most common conclusion.

00:05:40.700 That's the easy one I can think of, right?

00:05:42.900 Especially once lab-grown meat is really easy to do.

00:05:46.120 Yeah.

00:05:46.260 Future people are going to be like, how were you able to swallow that?

00:05:50.140 Whereas we see bacon cooking and we're like, hmm.

00:05:54.060 So, yeah.

00:05:54.920 So, I – and people can be like, well, no, morality moves in like one direction.

00:06:01.360 And I'm like, okay, well, suppose you are of this progressive mindset and you think that.

00:06:05.400 There have been periods in history where, you know, I go to, let's say, slave owner in the South or something like that, right?

00:06:14.920 And I point to earlier periods of European history where, like, same-sex relationships were more acceptable.

00:06:21.620 And they're like, well, those people were clearly evil.

00:06:23.940 Look, society is always moving towards progress.

00:06:26.240 And yet today the things that had been normalized in the slave-owning South but were less normalized during that period but more normalized during earlier parts of European history.

00:06:34.900 And note, I'm not saying here that same-sex relationships were ever totally normalized, like them being totally normalized in Rome or Greece is just inaccurate.

00:06:43.780 But there were forms of same-sex relationships that were more normalized.

00:06:47.260 Right.

00:06:47.540 Than during the high end of slave-owning South. 0.89

00:06:49.640 That they would say, like, okay, well, then maybe it goes in like a wave or something.

00:06:54.220 It's like, no, you just need to – there are going to be things that are normal today that people in the future are going to find mortified.

00:06:59.580 So, Nietzsche says, you have a responsibility to not just accept morality, which is, I think, interesting in that it goes against a lot of modern rightist philosophy.

00:07:14.140 And that a lot of modern rightist philosophy says, learn from your ancestors, embrace your culture, where Nietzsche says, no, learn from and evolve that culture into something better.

00:07:29.580 That is – yeah.

00:07:30.920 Okay.

00:07:31.420 It's important to start with because I think a lot of people get the Ubermensch wrong.

00:07:34.560 They think it's some weird racial hierarchy something or – I do not know what they think it is.

00:07:39.860 I think they think it's like a genetically engineered person.

00:07:42.340 I sort of see this – or the height of, like, German blood perfection. 0.92

00:07:46.420 And it's like, no, that never had anything to do with it.

00:07:48.920 If I broadly were to model the leftist commentators that I constantly listen to online, I think what they would vaguely conjure in their minds is a proto-edgelord.

00:08:01.340 And that is what an Ubermensch is.

00:08:02.880 And there's no such thing as someone who's actually, like, advanced.

00:08:06.220 It's just someone who, like, actively acts edgelordy or they would call themselves heterodox, if that makes sense.

00:08:12.280 Well, it's funny because they're actually kind of right.

00:08:15.160 It's about somebody who defines their own moral truths because that's the only – if you're following a form of morality, like, obviously you're better than the pure nihilist if you follow some moral framework.

00:08:26.720 But if you follow that moral framework only because somebody else told you this is what's right and wrong, you're patently lower on a global moral hierarchy than somebody who developed their own moral norms by putting thought into it, right?

00:08:41.680 Yeah, and to be fair, Malcolm and I are very, very passionate about this.

00:08:45.780 Before we knew what Nietzsche's philosophy was all about because we just didn't study it.

00:08:50.300 I knew he was an edgelord.

00:08:51.560 And then I saw it.

00:08:52.160 I was like, that's actually a really good definition.

00:08:54.680 Well, this was after we published our first book called The Pragmatist Guide to Life, which is 100% about this.

00:09:00.200 It is saying, I don't care what you optimize for in life morally and logistically.

00:09:04.640 I just care that you show your work.

00:09:06.260 And here's a guide to thinking, like, thought experiments around common potential things you may want to optimize, be it hedonism or serving God or any variety of other things.

00:09:18.960 And we just want people to actually take ownership of that thought process.

00:09:22.240 So we 100% respect what he's doing here and we like it.

00:09:26.520 So, okay, I like this so far.

00:09:27.980 So you're, I mean, I don't see then how Maslow's hierarchy of needs is so bad, if that's kind of the end goal.

00:09:32.620 Well, because he took all that out of it.

00:09:35.560 What?

00:09:36.100 Yes, he took it.

00:09:37.220 So he's like, I like this concept, but...

00:09:40.280 But he liked the concept of, like, the elite philosophical form of human, right?

00:09:46.280 Okay, okay.

00:09:46.960 Some degree of self-ownership.

00:09:48.760 He just didn't like the actual self-ownership part.

00:09:51.080 And so, okay.

00:09:55.360 I think if I'm going to view Maslow's hierarchy of needs and self-actualization as he handles it disfavorably, I would say what it really is is just self-acceptance.

00:10:06.180 Just sort of, like, you are okay with your place in the world, which you can definitionally be at any point, right?

00:10:12.700 But he's like, no, you have to have all this lower stuff.

00:10:16.040 See our other video on this.

00:10:17.440 And then once you have all that, then you can be okay with where you are in the world and what you have in the world.

00:10:22.920 And that is it.

00:10:24.820 It's self-acceptance, self-satisfaction.

00:10:26.980 Now, if you're going to then take the counter perspective to this and actually know it's more sophisticated than that, let's look at what, I'll take an AI's sort of rebuttal on this so you can get an understanding of how somebody might steel man his position against that.

00:10:43.500 They would say that that's actually more about esteem needs level four and not self-actualization level five, where esteem needs involve feelings of accomplishment, confidence, independence, respect for others, and a stable positive self-image.

00:10:59.560 This can include pride in achievement or feeling valued.

00:11:02.580 And it's more about elevation of the self, e.g., I like who I am because I've succeeded.

00:11:08.400 And I say here, well, yeah, but there's different types of self-acceptance, and that wasn't the type that I would be talking about here.

00:11:15.440 But let's look at what they would say as a counter self-actualization is at the intended of just general self-acceptance, right?

00:11:23.140 Maslow defined it as a, quote-unquote, desire to become more and more than one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming, which you can see, one, how that builds on the concept of the Ubermage.

00:11:38.220 Like, clearly, he liked, oh, you know, you're building yourself, but he removes the concrete definition.

00:11:45.480 The substance.

00:11:46.640 There's no point in building yourself if it's not to something meaningful, but he just took that away.

00:11:50.720 Yeah, and just makes it self-advocate.

00:11:52.040 It's a road to nowhere. 1.00

00:11:53.620 It's so stupid. 1.00

00:11:55.260 About a sort of perpetual self-improvement without any definition as to what better is. 0.99

00:12:00.660 Although I feel like that's so, maybe it makes sense that this just seems so much like the path that people take.

00:12:09.200 Like, I remember so many of the classmates that you had at Stanford's business school, which this is one of the hardest to get into schools in the entire world.

00:12:17.740 These are incredibly competent, smart, well-connected, lucky, and well-resourced people.

00:12:22.580 And so many of them really didn't seem to have any moral framework or set of values that they really cared about.

00:12:30.060 That actually shocked me when I hit the halls of power in society.

00:12:33.600 There were some Israelis and Mormons, I'm going to say, who actually did.

00:12:36.900 I mean, they weren't, I would say, like, Nietzschean or Ubermensch-y in their, because this was their default culture.

00:12:43.120 Maybe they thought through it and come to own it themselves as well.

00:12:45.440 Still, their big thing was just, I'm doing the best thing.

00:12:49.700 I'm doing the correct thing.

00:12:50.760 No, no, no, this is such a brutal optimization.

00:12:52.780 You think, like, this means intelligence, that the Ubermensch means intelligence.

00:12:57.400 It does not.

00:12:58.600 So, you know, Simone got her graduate degree at Cambridge.

00:13:00.640 I got mine at Stanford.

00:13:02.420 You know, we've been in sort of the halls of power in society and the, you know, Peter Thiel secret societies and everything like that, right?

00:13:10.480 Like, and so I've encountered the best and brightest of what the institutions that are generally thought of as accumulating the best and brightest bring.

00:13:21.820 My first question, and this is, Simone knows this from me, from our first date, to somebody who's always like, okay, like, what are you about?

00:13:29.500 Like, what are you attempting to do with your life?

00:13:31.080 What's your purpose?

00:13:32.080 Like, what are you here for?

00:13:33.060 Because I need to know how I can align my goals and their goals and if there's a useful alignment or if there's not a useful alignment.

00:13:38.480 The number of people who sputter and start outputting platitudes when you put that question to them, which I think should be the number one question any individual considers, is astonishingly high in these halls of power.

00:13:54.060 I'd say if you're talking about an institution like a Stanford MBA, because that's, you know, the most exclusive of the institutes that we've been talking about here, maybe one in 20 people who go through have thought through what their purpose in life is and why they exist.

00:14:14.160 The rest is just optimization.

00:14:16.140 I'm going to be the best.

00:14:17.160 So I need to go to the best school, get the best grades, earn the most money with superlatives all the way down, but there's no point to it.

00:14:24.660 It's just whatever is the most prestigious or seen as the highest achieving, then that's what they'll do, you know, climb up to the highest rank of whatever organization.

00:14:33.180 And then if that organization gets capped out, well, then I guess I have to run for political office.

00:14:37.720 And then because the government is a big organization, I guess I'll do that.

00:14:41.020 And then after that, who knows what, you know, I'll be a philanthropist and basically pull the strings of multiple organizations by being their primary source of funding.

00:14:48.780 It just keeps going.

00:14:51.000 Yeah.

00:14:51.320 And this is how people in positions of power get so easily captured by mimetic contagions, like the urban monoculture, that you as a, I don't know if you watching this have thought through your own value system, 0.98

00:15:04.120 but you as a potential ubermensch may look at them and say, wait, but can't they see how stupid and self-contradictory this value system is? 0.93

00:15:14.360 Like, can't they see the long-term consequences of adhering to this value system? 0.98

00:15:18.720 Have they not had a single iota of internal self-reflection about what matters in life and what they live for?

00:15:28.260 And the real answer is, and I say this very unfortunately, it's no, they have not.

00:15:32.440 They may even find the concept of doing that offensive because it implies, you know, sort of self-ownership, which the urban monoculture teaches you is bad because if it can teach you that, then you don't end up reflecting on these ideas.

00:15:48.900 The next point I make about the ubermensch before I go further here, which is important in this world, is you might be like, oh, that's quite arrogant to call yourself the ubermensch.

00:15:55.420 No, the ubermensch is a simply defined thing.

00:15:57.820 Did you build your own moral framework or did you take it from an outside source?

00:16:03.540 Yeah, and it doesn't matter if you are the wealthiest person in the world or impoverished, right?

00:16:07.240 This has nothing to do with wealth. 0.85

00:16:08.480 It doesn't matter if you're a genius or like literally mentally handicapped. 0.98

00:16:13.180 You can be an ubermensch.

00:16:15.360 So that's really important.

00:16:17.360 There's nothing elitist about it at all, actually.

00:16:19.840 Or it's not even like, I mean, it absolutely can come from a place of superiority.

00:16:24.820 There's something elitist about it, and it's elitist in our conception of it, and it was elitist in Nietzsche's conception of it.

00:16:31.140 Ubermensch are morally superior to non-ubermensch, which is, I think, just an objectively and obviously true thing as soon as you think through it.

00:16:40.420 Somebody who has taken ownership and saw it through a value system, even if it's exactly the same as somebody else's value system, is doing something of a higher moral caliber by following that value system than the person who's just following what everyone else says is right and wrong.

00:16:55.240 Because they've taken on this additional layer of moral verification.

00:17:02.700 Somebody could be like, well, why was that moral verification necessary?

00:17:05.600 Wasn't that just like self-masturbatory work if it ended up at the same place as society's value?

00:17:10.600 And it's like, no, it wasn't, because it may not have.

00:17:14.440 And if it didn't, it would lead to a completely different trajectory of this in person's entire moral prism through which they see reality.

00:17:21.980 So it is elitist in that it does rank people into a scale of moral hierarchy.

00:17:28.660 But it isn't elitist in that only the mentally superior can engage with it.

00:17:34.280 It's more like the mentally superior in terms of, I don't know, being willing to be critical of society or being self-critical that puts you in that category, not IQ.

00:17:43.760 So back to what it's saying self-actualization is here.

00:17:46.680 It is less about feeling good about yourself in a static way and more about growth, authenticity, and actualizing innate potentials.

00:17:56.940 It includes traits like realistic and accurate perception of reality, including oneself without illusions or denial, self-acceptance, accepting flaws without shame or defensiveness, but not complacency, autonomy and independence from external approval, creativity, spontaneity, and quote-unquote peak experiences, moments of profound joy, insight, or transcendence.

00:18:22.120 Now, note here what you'll see in some of these.

00:18:25.200 Some of these carry parts of the Ubermich within them, right?

00:18:31.120 Autonomy and independence from external approval is sort of key to building your own moral framework, right?

00:18:37.780 But then other of them are just completely like cucked urban monoculture, creativity, spontaneity, and peak experiences.

00:18:50.220 What does that have to do with actualization, right?

00:18:54.380 Like what?

00:18:56.140 What does that have to do with like living as good?

00:19:00.340 That has to do with being a manic pixie dream girl. 0.94

00:19:02.760 He basically tried to combine the Ubermich with the aesthetics of the manic pixie dream girl. 0.73

00:19:09.140 Yeah, what do you think he was going for there?

00:19:11.180 Just hedonism or something else?

00:19:13.260 Some kind of aesthetic or some kind of cultural trend at the time?

00:19:16.400 So I think what he was trying to go with this was to say this Ubermich concept has a lot of baggage,

00:19:25.720 but I want to create because people love creating a categoried framework of society.

00:19:31.480 Let's create a categoried framework of society.

00:19:33.980 If you'd like to see some of ours, you can check out like our life stages and stuff like that videos.

00:19:38.620 If you have this categoried framework of society and you have something at the top of it,

00:19:43.640 you then look to other systems that have similar things.

00:19:47.040 And the two systems that he very obviously pulled pretty hard from to the point of plagiarization is combining the Ubermich twisted through a progressive lens with the Buddha.

00:20:00.960 And we talked about that a lot in the last episode.

00:20:03.720 There's clearly a lot of Buddhist inspiration in the modern concept of self-actualization.

00:20:09.920 It's just this thing that is definitionally the best and that if you have to ask how it's qualitatively or quantitatively different from other states,

00:20:19.880 that's just proof that you don't have it.

00:20:22.140 And when you have it, then you'll know.

00:20:23.740 But because you're asking about it, then you don't know.

00:20:26.060 I hate that so much.

00:20:27.080 The, oh, as long as you want it, you can never have it.

00:20:29.500 You have to let go completely.

00:20:32.000 No, I won't even say that.

00:20:33.400 It's one of those, like in our video where we talk about like the lie of love,

00:20:36.500 we point out that like romantic love, as people describe it, probably doesn't exist.

00:20:41.420 But like normal people can't get away with saying that because then people will be like,

00:20:46.340 well, then you live in a loveless marriage.

00:20:47.840 Like, ha ha, look at you, right?

00:20:49.460 So you've got to pretend that love, this separate romantic attachment as an emotional set rather than as a commitment exists.

00:20:57.640 And I think that people pointed out when we said that very accurately, that the Bible understood that, right?

00:21:05.720 Like, love is about a choice, not an involuntary emotional state that's just so much more awesome than other emotions.

00:21:12.900 Like, when they say love your neighbor as yourself, you know, they're not telling them to have this emotion towards your neighbor.

00:21:19.000 They're telling you to treat them in a certain way.

00:21:21.520 And when somebody commits to love and honor their wife, love is the same kind of word as honor in that sense, right?

00:21:29.040 It means perform a duty to the person, not feel a way about the person.

00:21:35.180 But to continue here with traits that the self-actualized man has.

00:21:39.800 Problem-centered focus, tracking issues effectively rather than ego protection.

00:21:47.180 I just love that.

00:21:48.440 Sounds so Karen.

00:21:49.680 And deep, meaningful relationships without possessiveness.

00:21:52.580 Which, again, seems like you see how we go from there to the world of polyamory, right?

00:21:58.640 Like, if you get jealous when your partner sleeps with other people, which is giving them happiness and you love them, right?

00:22:08.740 Why are you saying that they can't do that then, right?

00:22:12.120 They would say, right?

00:22:12.860 Like, you're not self-actualized in that sense.

00:22:15.740 You prove to yourself your self-actualization by getting cut, by allowing your partner to sleep with other people, right?

00:22:25.900 And I think –

00:22:27.480 Where are they going with that?

00:22:28.420 The point being is you can see how it's melding these ideas together.

00:22:33.180 But – and I'll note here that an area of overlap is that Maslow also says that self-actualization involves accurate self-knowledge and humility.

00:22:42.220 All right.

00:22:42.520 So, to continue – and I'll note here, this is coming from Maslow himself because a lot of people are like, well, that just sounds like you're describing a narcissist, right?

00:22:51.660 Like a really self-centered narcissist.

00:22:54.220 And so, he had to have, you know, his boilerplate argument about why this isn't just an entire world framing about how to be a better narcissist, right?

00:23:03.060 And he emphasized that self-actualized people were actually not narcissistic.

00:23:08.260 They have a strong sense of reality, testing, humility, and resistance to self-deception.

00:23:15.260 Narcissism, by contrast, involved distorted self-perception and a fragmented ego defensiveness, which are antithetical to self-actualization.

00:23:25.960 On selfishness, Maslow noted that someone self-actualizing often fuses selflessness and usefulness into a higher utility.

00:23:36.160 They pursue personal growth, but this naturally leads to good for others.

00:23:41.780 In later frameworks, he added transcendence as a level beyond humanity slash nature slash the universe, getting very Buddhism influenced here, and helping others grow to explicitly counter any self-only interpretation.

00:23:57.740 Thoughts?

00:23:58.380 This just seems so pointless.

00:24:03.100 Like, on what basis did he choose to add these?

00:24:06.300 I feel like this is one of those things similar to all of these childhood well-being studies focusing on measures like self-esteem.

00:24:17.040 Why self-esteem?

00:24:18.660 Does that correlate with better health, longer lifespan, signs of flourishing like rates of marriage or wealth creation or family formation, the number of kids they have?

00:24:30.580 Like, I just don't see what this correlates with and why he would choose it as a desired outcome.

00:24:35.600 Because I don't see it as being correlated with, particularly correlated with any sort of desired outcome.

00:24:43.520 Yeah, I know.

00:24:44.620 I see that.

00:24:45.740 And I think that we can see that this is the case by the way that he developed his theory.

00:24:50.840 He just looked at a bunch of people that mainstream society respects and then boiled that down, and what he got was a system of values that looks a lot like mainstream society's value systems.

00:25:03.760 But, surprise, surprise, that is more palatable to an average person in mainstream society because they don't need to adapt, right?

00:25:13.100 They're like, oh, yeah, this works.

00:25:15.180 Anyway, to continue here.

00:25:16.860 Sorry, I'm feeling a little lightheaded.

00:25:18.320 I don't know what's going on.

00:25:18.980 You're not sleeping enough.

00:25:21.600 That's probably part of it.

00:25:24.000 Oh, but I got to get work done.

00:25:26.480 Yeah, maybe, maybe they'll, maybe.

00:25:30.040 There's a reason nobody else does fully edited daily podcasts that involve independent research instead of watching somebody else's dream.

00:25:37.480 Well, that and, you know, the other full-time projects you have and also.

00:25:42.300 Oh, yeah, Reality Fabricator is really coming along.

00:25:44.700 The agents.

00:25:45.460 I mean, it's, it's, as far as I know, working pretty bugless now, except for like a problem with real computers, which is very exciting.

00:25:54.620 Very exciting, too.

00:25:55.700 And the advertisements are starting and yay, yay, yay.

00:25:58.720 And the audio feature is really cool.

00:26:00.260 If you haven't tried it, it's really fun to do inexpensive AI chats because we're not actually have it read by the AI itself.

00:26:05.940 It's read by a separate AI system, so you can do it in multiple languages really well, too.

00:26:10.420 Here, we're going to go into a deeper dive into the concept of the Ubermage, okay?

00:26:14.300 And then we'll contrast the two and see how they, they relate to each other and are, in a way, inversions to each other.

00:26:20.860 If they were a dark side and a light side of the force, they almost feel like, to me, right?

00:26:25.740 Me, too.

00:26:26.280 Except the Nietzsche one is the dark side, which is the good side in this analogy. 1.00

00:26:31.020 I mean, I think in most analogies.

00:26:32.800 Because they're actually, I mean, I think, actually, I almost want to do a reworking of how the force is interpreted to show that the light side of the force is actually evil.

00:26:44.560 Oh, that's going to make a great episode.

00:26:46.140 And the dark side is actually good.

00:26:47.960 It's just that the way it's interpreted in Star Wars always sort of forces darksiders to take on these horrible actions.

00:26:54.960 But if you look at it completely pragmatically, to say a person decided to use the force against the force's own will for whatever was good for evolving humanity and moving civilization forward.

00:27:08.100 That person would be a darksider because they would be not obeying the will of a, what, a non-democratically elected god entity that gets to tell an independent branch of, like, ninjas who just kill people on the streets, like, what is moral and what is not moral?

00:27:29.500 That doesn't, that doesn't sound, that sounds like slave morality to me, man.

00:27:33.420 Yeah, on whose authority does the force get to govern all humans?

00:27:38.760 Right?

00:27:39.420 But who voted for this?

00:27:41.160 Who says the force is intrinsically good?

00:27:43.700 Yeah.

00:27:44.120 Right?

00:27:44.400 Seriously.

00:27:45.140 I mean, the only force that we know to be universal in our universe is entropy.

00:27:49.080 Is that inherently good?

00:27:50.340 I don't know, man.

00:27:51.780 It's not.

00:27:52.540 It's, it's, it's, it's pure evil.

00:27:54.400 And yeah.

00:27:54.960 That the mitochlorians, I, I also love that because we know that the force is controlled by, like, living organisms that are symbiotes with humans and live in ourselves.

00:28:03.820 So, humanity who follows the light side is literally slaves to the hive mind of a parasitic organism.

00:28:13.320 Yeah, I guess the analogy is to be like, well, my gut microbiome tells me to, this, the toxoplasmosis I'm subject to.

00:28:20.260 They're literally obeyed the toxoplasmosis.

00:28:25.300 Yeah.

00:28:25.920 They need to get their horse dewormer, you know?

00:28:30.560 The Jedi need ivermectin.

00:28:32.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:28:35.800 Oh, my God.

00:28:36.800 Anyway, continuing here.

00:28:38.200 So, he introduced the concept of the uvermectin in his 1883 to 1885 philosophical novel, Thus Spoke Zoroaster.

00:28:47.460 It's a central idea in philosophy representing the idea that a human who transcends traditional morality, societal norms, and human weaknesses to create new values and affirm life fully.

00:28:56.680 Now, note here how this definition sounds a lot squidgier than the definition I gave, but that's because this is how it is commonly interpreted by people, even though that's not how it's actually laid out.

00:29:06.720 Because he's like, once you define your own morality, all of these other positive things come to you.

00:29:11.480 And I agree with that as well.

00:29:12.540 You do get a lot of positive things from taking complete ownership over your own moral framework.

00:29:17.940 But, yeah, but he, I think, especially the people who have built on him, went a little mystical with what those nice things are afterwards, right?

00:29:29.860 Like, you then become an axiomatically good person.

00:29:32.620 Where, no, there's a lot of people who have defined their own moral framework and were still really, they came up with horrible moral frameworks, right?

00:29:39.420 Yeah, yeah, actually.

00:29:40.740 A lot of the people who have read our book, The Pragmatist Guide to Life, and reported back to us have come up with conclusions that we wouldn't come to.

00:29:49.580 But we're actually glad, because it means that the book is not biased.

00:29:52.940 Yes, which was our goal.

00:29:54.100 Can you believe it was every time in my life where I strove to be unbiased?

00:29:57.480 It's what you tried to go for with the first four books, so.

00:30:02.680 Yeah, four books out there that you could read, written by Simone and Malcolm, that are like a dollar.

00:30:07.400 It doesn't have an ideological agenda, aside from just trying to make you more equipped and informed.

00:30:11.800 Can you imagine?

00:30:14.540 Those are the days.

00:30:15.420 So the Ubermensch emerged in a world where God is dead, as Nish said.

00:30:20.660 Traditional religious and moral foundations have collapsed, requiring individuals to overcome nihilism through self-mastery and creativity and the will to power,

00:30:29.440 an innate drive to grow, dominate, and shape one's existence.

00:30:33.480 Nishay contextualized it as an evolutionary leap, not a biological Superman, but a psychological and cultural one that embraces eternal recurrence,

00:30:45.680 living as if one's life repeats forever, rejects herd mentality, slave morality, and embodies the idea of fati, love of fate.

00:30:54.720 You know, this is interesting, the idea that your life repeats forever and you should live as if that.

00:31:00.920 We argue for something similar, but different, where we say that because the timeline has already played out, we believe,

00:31:10.600 like time is just like distance or anything like that, another framework, and the future is predestined,

00:31:16.940 or all possible futures are predestined.

00:31:18.840 Because of that, every moment in time is infinite, and therefore you have infinite moral responsibility for how you choose to burn every moment.

00:31:30.560 And the most important decision you can make is the framework you use and how you build the framework you use for making those individual choices,

00:31:39.640 which was the point of the book that we mentioned, The Pragmatist Guide to Life.

00:31:42.200 Also, it's an audiobook.

00:31:43.260 If you get the e-book for free, you can just download the audiobook.

00:31:45.740 So normally, when you're talking about the ubermensch, the key traits would be radical individualism and self-overcoming,

00:31:52.360 rejection of pity, equality, and conventional ethics in favor of aristocratic values.

00:31:57.940 You can already tell this is getting the MAGA people excited here, right?

00:32:00.560 You know, joyful affirmation of life's chaos, suffering, and impermanence, and then creativity as a form of power.

00:32:09.200 The ubermensch legislates values for themselves and potentially others.

00:32:14.420 So you can see this is very psychologically helpful compared to this other framing.

00:32:19.880 It's much more about personal responsibility without adding in all of these additional wiggle room.

00:32:27.540 Definitionally, you should feel good about yourself if you indulge in X or Y, you know, extremist self-image, right?

00:32:35.760 Like, it seems like this is mostly about being effective at whatever matters to you.

00:32:42.040 And caveat, whatever matters to you is something that you personally take ownership of.

00:32:46.740 You're not doing what anyone else told you to do.

00:32:49.200 You decided what's best, and you're doing that.

00:32:51.620 That sounds so good.

00:32:53.060 I want that for everyone.

00:32:54.160 All right.

00:32:55.640 So how are they actually different from each other?

00:32:58.420 And where would people, like, where would Maslow be like, oh my god, this needed to be rethought because this comes downstream of Nietzschean philosophy, right?

00:33:07.020 If I'm going to package this for the positive psychology community.

00:33:11.180 Elitism versus inclusivity.

00:33:13.140 And I'd argue that in actuality, the ubermensch is more inclusive and less elitist than self-actualization.

00:33:22.220 But we'll get to how in a second.

00:33:25.440 But what an outsider would say is Nietzsche's ubermensch is rare, aristocratic, and anti-egalitarian, reserved for the strong-willed few who can endure isolation, create new values, and potentially scorn or lead the herd.

00:33:41.820 The last men, complacent masses. 0.97

00:33:45.700 It's forged in crisis, suffering, and radical self-overcoming, often with contemptuous edge towards ordinary humanity.

00:33:54.680 Maslow flips this.

00:33:56.020 Self-actualization is a universal human potential achievable by anyone once basic needs are met.

00:34:03.060 He estimated 1% to 2% fully reach it.

00:34:05.200 But the pathway is open through education, therapy, supportive environments, and personal efforts, not a heroic struggle alone.

00:34:14.060 It's for the democratic age.

00:34:16.180 I think teachers, therapists, managers, and everyday people pursuing growing.

00:34:21.940 And I'd like to point out how twisted this understanding actually is.

00:34:26.400 So note what is actually said here.

00:34:30.200 It's saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:34:33.080 You see, the ubermensch is elitist.

00:34:34.740 Because to become an ubermensch, an individual has to overcome suffering.

00:34:42.100 They have to overcome trials.

00:34:44.840 They have to live a privileged existence.

00:34:47.340 To be self-actualized, all you need is an elite education and having all of your needs met.

00:34:54.300 All of your needs.

00:34:54.820 Oh, don't forget seeing a therapist.

00:34:58.140 Even for really well-resourced, like, okay, wealthy people we know, seeing a therapist is really expensive.

00:35:05.320 So, that.

00:35:07.160 But what's ironic is as soon as you put it like that, you realize, oh, the huddled masses is who have the potential to become the ubermensch.

00:35:18.020 Who has the potential to be self-actualized if self-actualization requires the fulfillment of all of the lower states of the hierarchy of needs?

00:35:27.120 Only the elite.

00:35:29.580 Self-actualization within Maslow's system is definitionally reserved for the elite.

00:35:36.080 And then gated through elitist institutions like therapy and elite education.

00:35:44.900 I also find it interesting that the one thing I would think all humans have access to, while not everyone is born equally intelligent, I think all men have access to or should be judged by their lack of access to their own personal willpower.

00:36:02.320 Right?

00:36:02.840 It says it's reserved for the strong-willed few.

00:36:08.020 Being strong-willed, if it is genetic, like, let's assume it is genetic, it is still worth me scorning the individual who is not strong-willed because they will take actions that are immoral at a higher rate.

00:36:22.140 And scorn is used to prevent them gaining power, which they will use to take immoral actions.

00:36:28.860 When we make the concept of recognizing, which you can see here in this AI is doing, of recognizing, and I think Maslow did from the perspective of the urban monoculture, that strong will is a negative trait.

00:36:45.300 To say, if I recognize strong will in others, and I laud them for that, that is a negative thing for me to do.

00:36:54.360 Right?

00:36:55.360 Right?

00:36:56.360 Ranking humanity on the amount of self-responsibility that they are taking in terms of building their own moral frameworks versus ranking humanity by, and I love the entire hierarchy of needs pyramid is meant to sort of hand wave that this is being done.

00:37:14.540 Ranking humanity by wealth, which is fundamentally what the hierarchy of needs does, because it monetizes the things that you need.

00:37:24.760 It creates a food period of basically stuff you need to buy, experiences, friendships, dating, romance, sex, everything like that.

00:37:37.280 Whereas what the Ubermensch does is it says, no, you can just go straight in and get this stuff yourself.

00:37:44.760 You can learn to control all of these other needs while building a moral framework and living your life around that framework.

00:37:53.520 Thoughts before I go further here, Simone?

00:37:56.980 Nothing in particular, but what you're saying makes sense.

00:38:00.840 Just shocked by all of this still.

00:38:03.880 I also like how it's like, no, no, no, no, anyone can be a self-actualized.

00:38:10.520 They just need therapy.

00:38:12.200 Just go to therapy, right?

00:38:13.660 Just go to therapy.

00:38:14.380 I really, the whole, you need therapy in order to be a functional or acceptable human thing is so disturbing to me.

00:38:23.340 Look at our videos where we talk about how modern therapy has become a cult.

00:38:26.620 I used to be a trained psychologist.

00:38:29.700 I am very familiar with the field.

00:38:31.100 Everything they do now is stuff we were told, do not do this.

00:38:35.520 Like this will cause dependence.

00:38:37.980 A lot of this, you can understand why this is the case when you look at incentives.

00:38:41.700 Therapists who systematically are very, very good at getting people who have problems what they need and helping them get to a good place mentally, go out of business.

00:38:52.940 Therapists, therapists who create codependency, do really well.

00:38:56.400 Who are going to be the therapists left after 20, 30, 40, 50 years of that?

00:39:00.980 The ones who create codependency and maintain your problems or better yet, make them worse so you have to up your hours.

00:39:08.880 It's just obvious that it would end up like this.

00:39:11.940 And then what you get, and this is why the urban monoculture as an evolving sort of organic entity is so important.

00:39:17.360 Then you can see how a profession like this could co-evolve with a mimetic set where the profession helps put more people in a mental state where they're willing to accept and then dedicate their time, life, and resources to proliferating this mimetic set.

00:39:35.820 Where that mimetic set also funnels people in to this profession.

00:39:42.740 So they are symbiotic. 0.98

00:39:45.220 And we talk about how you can also see this with parasites. 0.57

00:39:47.920 We talk about all the parasites that can alter people's sexuality and why we cannot talk about this right now.

00:39:52.940 We cannot talk about how we know now from the research that there is a form of toxoplasmosis that alters people's sexual proclivities.

00:40:01.200 And that's how it appears to be spreading.

00:40:02.720 It's going direct human to human now instead of through cats.

00:40:04.760 And it makes people, for example, more attracted to the same sex.

00:40:09.540 And it's not the only thing that might be doing that.

00:40:11.580 And that if you talk about something like toxoplasmosis, that toxoplasmosis might be literally co-evolving with the urban monoculture.

00:40:18.180 It reduces threat detection.

00:40:21.380 Reducing threat detection is important if you're going to join a culture where your own people are systematically going extinct and you are importing a hostile foreign group. 0.99

00:40:30.160 A normal person would say, well, this seems like a big mistake.

00:40:34.300 But if you have the thing in your brain that is telling mice to go where the cats are and do a little dance so they can eat you, it's easy to see how it adopted the same circuitry.

00:40:44.160 To get the progressive to say, yeah, let's bring the knife wielding man to my country who is actively saying he wants to kill anyone who is like me, which they often will.

00:40:54.720 There was a case recently in the UK where the government in charge, like Stalmer's government, was cheering, saying we want a major civil rights victory, bringing this guy back to the UK and freeing him from Egypt. 0.96

00:41:06.220 And he'd gotten arrested in Egypt. 0.98

00:41:07.500 And he had multiple tweets saying that he wanted all white people to die. 0.99

00:41:11.340 He genuinely hated all white people, especially the English and the Dutch. 0.99

00:41:14.300 Like they are cheering for bringing somebody into their country who actively is a genocide supporter of their people. 0.96

00:41:21.820 But, and this is bringing the cat into your country, right? 1.00

00:41:25.120 Like this is stupid. 0.98

00:41:26.360 But, but the, the next inversion here that it sees, but I find that first inversion very interesting because they're trying to hide from you the truths of inclusivity. 0.95

00:41:37.100 And the reason why this can make sense to it from an elitist perspective, whether that's AI that is often trained on elitist data or to the type of person who you're going to read because they have reach, i.e. they're writing books or they're writing the New York Times.

00:41:51.000 These are wealthy white women often. 1.00

00:41:53.280 And so they have all their needs met.

00:41:56.800 So, and everyone they know has all their needs met.

00:41:59.380 So when they go out there and they say, well, self-actualization is available to everyone, whereas having willpower is not, what they mean is everyone in their evoked set of friends.

00:42:10.740 They know that if they told their set of friends, hey, you have to take responsibility for the things you're doing and saying, you have to take more responsibility for your own system.

00:42:18.940 They wouldn't do that.

00:42:19.860 And so they're like, well, then this is an inegalitarian thing because my friends wouldn't engage with this.

00:42:25.780 They don't consider if I'm actually talking about somebody who's struggling in life and in a disadvantaged position, which system is more accessible to them?

00:42:36.240 Because they just genuinely don't think about those people.

00:42:39.520 And I think that this is also really important to understand when they're talking about being a fem cell, when they're talking about being a, you know, oh, you know, guys just don't get it when I, you know, hit on them or whatever.

00:42:50.240 It's so hard to date when they're a girl. 0.99

00:42:52.160 And what are you guys talking about when they're saying all this?

00:42:56.140 It makes perfect sense in their head.

00:42:59.960 Genuinely do not see guys.

00:43:02.200 They do not want to bone as human.

00:43:03.920 If they do not look at a guy and think, I want to bone that, that person does not clock as meaningfully human.

00:43:09.660 The guy who bags her food at the grocery store, they are never considering that person when they're talking about guys just don't date me, right?

00:43:19.840 Like they know that that person would date them, right?

00:43:22.520 They're saying this.

00:43:24.420 I guess the more implied statement is eight out of tens don't date me.

00:43:30.100 Yeah, and I think the, but it's more that morality and moral frameworks do not worry in terms of how they apply to anyone below the eight out of ten.

00:43:41.040 Because I simply don't consider them in anything I do in my life.

00:43:44.600 So a great example of this is incels versus gays, right? 1.00

00:43:49.600 So these women, right, they're our gays. 1.00

00:43:53.300 They may want to bone, right? 0.96

00:43:54.560 Like a lot of women, look at our Yowie episode, right? 1.00

00:43:57.580 Where we talk about this phenomenon, right?

00:43:59.280 And so when you say to them something like, well, I do not think that it is good to normalize that people who are same-sex attracted, that the default pathway for them or the only pathway available for them is going into same-sex relationships. 0.81

00:44:17.500 And to which they would gasp and say, but if they don't go into same-sex relationships, how are they going to be able to masturbate their arousal system? 0.90

00:44:26.680 How are they going to be able to have sex with somebody that they want to have sex with, right? 0.98

00:44:32.320 And they'll say it's about love, but we all know that you can love people who you're not attracted to. 0.84

00:44:39.420 People love their dogs.

00:44:41.420 Not everybody who loves their dogs wants to F their dog, okay, right?

00:44:44.880 It's not about love. 0.99

00:44:46.020 What they're really mortified at is the idea that the gay men that they want to F wouldn't be able to sleep with whoever they want to sleep with, wouldn't be able to masturbate their arousal system, would be inconvenienced or challenged. 0.99

00:44:59.260 Now, you talk about the incel, who has the same struggle. 0.99

00:45:05.460 They are not able to masturbate their arousal system in the way that they want to masturbate it. 0.96

00:45:09.740 And they say, well, their plight deserves not just no concern, but active scorn. 0.96

00:45:20.960 I am annoyed and angry that you have inconvenienced me with suffering that is ironically of a form that I view as so absolutely societally existential to protect in the form of gay normalization. 1.00

00:45:39.740 Right?

00:45:41.300 And this, I mean, they are morally irrelevant to women. 1.00

00:45:46.460 Now, to continue here.

00:45:48.400 Any thoughts, Simone?

00:45:49.620 You seem very annoyed at women.

00:45:52.260 It's just, it's very frustrating.

00:45:55.360 I feel frustrated with myself, too, because I grew up around this mindset and never questioned it.

00:46:00.720 So that makes me mad at myself. 0.97

00:46:03.400 Yeah, the person who's like, of course we have to do everything we can to normalize gays being able to masturbate. 1.00

00:46:09.740 They're arousal system. 1.00

00:46:11.400 But that incels can't. 0.59

00:46:14.160 And people would be like, well, it's that gays, you know, it's two consenting adults or whatever.

00:46:20.940 And it's like, okay, great.

00:46:22.440 Two consenting adults.

00:46:23.540 I get that.

00:46:24.340 But why is it so blindingly existential that you solve that normalization problem and yet the incel problem is worthy of score?

00:46:33.100 Why is that the case?

00:46:37.120 Why is the incel asking for sympathy around something you see as absolutely socially existential in this other context now worthy of score?

00:46:46.520 The polarization of the difference of these views.

00:46:51.080 And I used to have this view, too.

00:46:52.900 I did.

00:46:54.000 I absolutely did.

00:46:55.580 And now I see how repulsive it is because Ubermensch value system.

00:47:00.320 I thought through it for myself.

00:47:02.280 That's hopefully what the channel helps you do.

00:47:03.780 That's what an episode like this.

00:47:05.320 Like, I don't think an episode like this is going to do great in the algo.

00:47:07.300 But somebody was like, you need to reintroduce a pragmatist, a guide to life ideas.

00:47:10.860 You need to reintroduce how to build your own value system.

00:47:13.700 Please check out that book.

00:47:15.220 If you are like, I want to go on this adventure.

00:47:18.460 It's basically free.

00:47:19.960 If you're a subscriber, we'll just send it to you for free.

00:47:22.660 Like, we do not care, right?

00:47:23.860 Like, we just want as many people as possible to get this information, right?

00:47:28.220 Yeah.

00:47:28.520 In other words, also, just as a note, if you are, you really, really, really don't want to pay for the book.

00:47:35.520 Should I say this?

00:47:36.380 You can email us.

00:47:37.400 You can just email us and we'll send it to you.

00:47:39.020 We don't care.

00:47:40.360 Anyway, give us a good review or something on it.

00:47:42.660 You know, we really appreciate that.

00:47:44.580 Yeah.

00:47:44.880 Like, yeah.

00:47:45.700 And in general, if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, if you happen to have an iPhone, because we don't even have one, it would mean a lot to us.

00:47:54.120 We know people look at that for whatever reason.

00:47:56.380 And we, I do not know why the Apple Podcasts reviews matter.

00:48:00.060 But anyway, I want to, I want to go to the, actually, do you want to say what our Apple Podcasts review is right now?

00:48:04.320 I think we're at like 130 or something, 140.

00:48:08.980 See, we don't have that many because we're very YouTube first podcast.

00:48:14.680 So, yeah.

00:48:16.360 If anyone's up for that, it would mean a great deal to us.

00:48:20.640 Huge thanks to everyone who is a paid subscriber on Patreon and Substack.

00:48:26.220 It is incredibly generous of you and just wanted to say.

00:48:28.860 Okay, that's over, that's over, that's over.

00:48:32.140 Okay, so continue here.

00:48:33.680 A, so this is another difference that something like an AI would see in this, which I think is good because it's getting sort of the average societal opinion of how these concepts are different.

00:48:40.980 Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:48:41.820 Amoral slash value creating versus inherently ethical and pro-social.

00:48:48.400 So, it's interesting here that it is assigning Nietzsche's system as being amoral slash value creating and Laszlo's system is inherently ethical and pro-social.

00:48:58.040 Where I actually think the inversion is true.

00:49:00.500 I think that the Laszlo's system is amoral and value creating and the Nietzsche system is inherently ethical and pro-social.

00:49:07.340 But let's continue.

00:49:08.160 The ubermensch transcends slave morality, Christianity, pity, equality, resentment, to invert their own values, which could be noble, ruthless, or experimental, not guarantees of kindness.

00:49:21.000 Nietzsche warns against pity as weakening and celebrates amor fati, loving fate, as triumphant self-assertion.

00:49:29.500 Maslow and since self-actualized people are automatically ethical, creative, just, loving, and reality-oriented.

00:49:38.980 Automatically ethnical. 0.66

00:49:40.240 That's when you know that you're dealing with an incredibly unethical framework.

00:49:44.400 Because whenever you can self-define your actions as ethical, well, I did it.

00:49:49.400 And you see this in your red monocles for so much.

00:49:51.240 Therefore, it must have been the ethical thing to do because I'm a good person and I did it.

00:49:55.100 And you see so many people like this.

00:49:57.320 Yeah, huge yikes.

00:50:00.900 No good, no good.

00:50:02.500 They exhibit B values, being values like truth, beauty, wholeness, justice, and often move towards transcendence, helping others self-actualize.

00:50:15.600 He explicitly rejects Nietzschean, quote-unquote, rampaging egotism or callousness as pathological, not sublime.

00:50:26.440 It's Nietzsche light, the perks of harmonious descent, not the barbaric joy of conquest.

00:50:32.940 Or I would say the acceptance that, because really what this is all about and what the big fear you see in the contrast of the two system is,

00:50:40.980 is, again, Nietzsche's system requires self-ownership, right?

00:50:46.500 It requires, because as soon as you take the self-ownership, then you can say, well, then why don't I just not act on those intrusive thoughts?

00:50:53.660 Like, why isn't that the goal instead of satiating the intrusive thoughts, right?

00:50:59.280 Yeah.

00:51:01.200 But thoughts on these wider frameworks here?

00:51:06.820 It seems like this isn't something unique to what Abraham Maslow did.

00:51:11.640 What I see happening with so many philosophers is people will take the original source material and be like,

00:51:18.300 okay, but I don't really want to do that, or I don't want to do that work, or I just don't feel like it,

00:51:24.080 and therefore I am going to reinterpret it as this new system, taking a lot of the originally compelling points

00:51:33.820 that I guess sold well or marketed well, just manipulating them in a way that both makes them appealing to people,

00:51:42.040 but also strips away all the substance.

00:51:46.240 No, I think what you see, if you want to get an idea of why I think the last list of arguments did so well,

00:51:51.400 is one, it gave people charts.

00:51:54.960 People love sorting hats.

00:51:56.820 Any sorting hat, people go crazy for it.

00:51:59.120 Whether it's a quiz about what character you are from Friends, or whether it's a, you know,

00:52:03.780 this on OkCupid used to be one of the big things, all the quizzes.

00:52:07.900 In Asia, you've got your blood types, and here you've got your INTJs. 1.00

00:52:14.660 Everyone's an INTJ, so it doesn't matter.

00:52:17.520 All the autists, right? 1.00

00:52:18.800 You've got your, you know, I mean, they want to know where they are in a system.

00:52:24.840 And the fun thing about Laszlo's system is it's a system that makes everyone who is wealthy and sees a therapist

00:52:32.360 think that they're already at the top of it.

00:52:34.860 And it explains to the rich, progressive, who doesn't want to think about why the urban poor or rural poor have different world frameworks in them.

00:52:48.440 It helps them not think about it.

00:52:50.020 They say, oh, the Iranians act in X way, or the Gazans act in X way when they're throwing a gay person off the truth, 0.95

00:52:59.140 because they don't have all their needs met. 0.72

00:53:01.360 Off of a rooftop, you mean.

00:53:03.760 I also just see, has Maslow's hierarchy of needs as being a means of justifying basically any form of indulgence?

00:53:11.380 Like, oh, well, I need to go out and treat myself to X because I just don't feel shored up in this part of my pyramid,

00:53:20.080 and I can't do the more important stuff unless this is addressed.

00:53:24.340 Except, as I mentioned when we were talking about this before,

00:53:27.780 every rung in this period or every level of this pyramid of needs is insatiable.

00:53:34.400 There is no level at which someone can say, okay, I have enough.

00:53:39.860 The enough part of it really has to do with whether or not you care or how much you care or how you choose to interpret your situation.

00:53:48.260 And someone, for example, with very little actual physical or mental safety could feel safe just depending on how they interpret the world.

00:53:57.060 Whereas someone who is maybe even a paid security team who lives in a gated community and who's one of the more safe people in the entire world may feel deeply unsafe

00:54:08.760 because that's how they've chosen to interpret their surroundings and their circumstances.

00:54:12.720 So I think maybe one of the reasons, one, like, why he was compelled to create this in the first place,

00:54:18.880 but also why people glom onto it, is that it's a very indulgent and a very compelling tool to justify indulgence.

00:54:26.960 Just like the concept of self-care really caught on maybe, what, 10 or 15 years ago,

00:54:33.360 and everyone was talking about how important it is to engage in self-care.

00:54:37.380 Maybe that was a pandemic thing.

00:54:38.840 Self-care is the worst thing you can do.

00:54:40.240 I know, but Maslow's hierarchy of needs was like the proto-self-care.

00:54:43.960 Like, well, I have to do this because if I don't feel safe, I can't self-actualize.

00:54:49.240 If I don't feel socially validated, I can't self-actualize.

00:54:53.500 And then self-actualize is this hand-wavy, vague, indulgent thing with a bunch of caveats and exceptions

00:54:59.800 and not really anything meaningful or hard to achieve.

00:55:03.380 So it really becomes just a get-out-of-jail-free thing for feeling guilty about spending way too much money on a therapist

00:55:11.960 and way too much money on indulgent foods and way too much money on stuff that makes you feel safe.

00:55:17.820 And people love that.

00:55:18.880 People love having an excuse.

00:55:20.880 And we make fun of it.

00:55:22.200 We use it, too.

00:55:23.600 We talk about things being shop opportunities because we get that it's a very human thing to want these excuses.

00:55:30.320 But we need to understand what I think is important is Laszlo's hierarchy of need normalizes sin.

00:55:37.020 I think it's important from the moral framework that we push, whenever you are doing something out of alignment with your objective function.

00:55:46.440 Now, your objective function may be hedonism.

00:55:48.640 Yeah.

00:55:49.220 If it is, then hedonism, Max, buddy.

00:55:51.680 Like, whatever that looks like for you, right?

00:55:53.220 But when you're doing something outside your objective function, that is sin, right?

00:55:57.600 And so it tries to normalize all of the things that we know are distracting us from, and I think very few people who watch this are probably hedonists.

00:56:08.400 They're like, I want to move human civilization forward.

00:56:11.000 I think that's the easiest thing that a lot of people are attempting to do.

00:56:14.160 When I'm doing something that doesn't do that, I am sinning.

00:56:18.760 And Laszlo's hierarchy of needs is just a giant pyramid of all that.

00:56:24.580 It's a pyramid of sin.

00:56:25.980 The pyramid of sin.

00:56:30.260 Yes.

00:56:31.820 That's what we should call it.

00:56:32.920 Laszlo's hierarchy of needs, the pyramid of sin.

00:56:35.000 Anyway, love you, Simone.

00:56:36.900 I love you, too.

00:56:37.720 What are we doing for dinner tonight?

00:56:39.520 More of the rendang with cream.

00:56:42.320 Oh, yes.

00:56:42.700 Let's do half of the rendang that was there, and we'll do it with the cream.

00:56:47.140 And do you want to do another recording today, or do you want to do early dinner?

00:56:50.260 It's not a super long recording, is it?

00:56:55.500 No, not that long.

00:56:56.400 Let's just jump to it.

00:56:57.200 Okay.

00:56:57.420 Let's do it.

00:56:58.020 Yeah.

00:56:58.920 I like talking with you.

00:57:00.340 That's my problem.

00:57:02.200 Can you blame me?

00:57:03.340 You're so wonderful.

00:57:05.480 You really feel it.

00:57:06.900 You feel it good.

00:57:09.380 There's a bite.

00:57:10.460 There's a bite to the great outdoors right now.

00:57:12.400 I've opened the door for the chickens, and I've been watching them as I look out the window

00:57:19.480 every now and then so that they can wander into the yard, and they'll step out for just

00:57:24.220 a second because that's where I dropped leftovers that the kids had from the previous

00:57:29.400 night, and they love snacking on them leftovers.

00:57:32.380 They take one step out, and they're like, nope.

00:57:34.660 Nope.

00:57:35.020 They even shovel the area so they can scratch the leaves and stuff, as is their delight.

00:57:39.900 But no, you're like, no, thank you.

00:57:44.280 What really surprises me is that the professor likes playing in the snow as much as we have.

00:57:48.320 So instead of hanging out in her nice heated room that I've set up, she's like, oh, no,

00:57:54.480 I want to play outside.

00:57:55.560 I'm a snow dog.

00:57:57.120 But I mean, I'm saying a professor is a happy dog, which is.

00:58:01.260 She actually is, though.

00:58:02.600 And she created it so clearly to me that she did not want to be locked inside.

00:58:08.760 And I'm glad that that forced me to really properly set up her room.

00:58:14.260 By vomiting and pooping all over the floor?

00:58:16.700 Yeah.

00:58:17.600 Anyway, you are such an intense mom.

00:58:20.740 Nobody knows.

00:58:21.680 Nobody knows.

00:58:23.180 Anything fun from the comments today?

00:58:25.300 Did anyone comment on the pomegranate juice?

00:58:28.260 They did.

00:58:29.520 Someone also helpfully pointed out, just in terms of, if future things ferment, there are

00:58:34.900 okay alcohols and there are not so okay alcohols.

00:58:37.680 And you don't know what that was.

00:58:39.080 So better.

00:58:40.240 Okay, fine, sir.

00:58:41.300 I will.

00:58:41.820 Better not drink it because I'm just.

00:58:43.620 Better safe than sorry.

00:58:44.720 You don't know what's going on there.

00:58:47.480 Whatever that was.

00:58:48.720 It went down the drain right away when I found it.

00:58:52.040 Oh, sir.

00:58:55.180 After the episode.

00:58:56.000 You are intense, Simone.

00:58:58.080 Yeah, I wasn't drinking fermented pomegranate juice.

00:59:02.820 It tasted really good, actually.

00:59:05.820 I think it must have been an acquired taste.

00:59:07.680 Because at first you're like, this is off.

00:59:09.400 Well, I guess you just kept drinking it.

00:59:10.740 You like never drink.

00:59:11.680 You'll smell milk that is not even close to off yet.

00:59:16.580 And you're like, this is milk.

00:59:19.500 Simone, it's disgusting.

00:59:20.920 Fermented pomegranate, because the pomegranate is already such a strong flavor, it heavily

00:59:26.600 covered up anything else.

00:59:28.700 So it was like, I mean, for an alcohol mixer, pomegranate juice is actually really good.

00:59:33.520 Because it's going to cover up the alcohol.

00:59:36.400 And whatever alcohol was being formed in it tasted sort of wine-like, I would say.

00:59:41.080 So they worked pretty well together in terms of covering up if there was any alcohol I could

00:59:46.500 taste until I felt it hit my head.

00:59:48.560 And I was like, whoa.

00:59:49.260 So that was, that was hot, heavy.

00:59:52.520 Oh my gosh.

00:59:54.140 They liked the bear song.

00:59:55.500 Simone Sipes was the bear community.

00:59:57.680 They liked the bear song.

00:59:59.540 They liked that we were just chill, I guess.

01:00:03.680 It was, it was just a good hangout episode to some people.

01:00:07.300 So there you go.

01:00:09.040 Hangout.

01:00:09.520 Yeah.

01:00:12.080 Hangout.

01:00:13.160 But also a lot of people expressed, I mean, what we, what we talked about resonated with

01:00:20.800 them in the sense that they had just been gaslit for so long.

01:00:26.300 And about men, like actually, like the, the point being is that scientists lie regularly

01:00:32.500 was data.

01:00:33.120 Well, but also several people referred to their experiences from schooling onward, even

01:00:40.040 people who went to school in the seventies and eighties, like as early as then they were

01:00:45.600 steeped in this.

01:00:46.620 And now there are some, some realized it right away.

01:00:49.940 Others, it took them a long time to realize, hold on.

01:00:53.080 I'm, I appear to be actually subject to discrimination here.

01:00:56.780 One person described this amazing experience.

01:00:59.600 I think at a UK based school in the seventies or eighties, where there was a debate, I think

01:01:05.760 maybe around the patriarchy.

01:01:07.320 And this person was like, listen, our queen is a woman.

01:01:11.000 Our prime minister is a woman. 0.60

01:01:12.460 Cause it was during Mark Margaret Thatcher's reign and our, our school headmistress is a

01:01:17.800 woman and all the teachers are women. 1.00

01:01:19.760 And you're trying to tell me that we live in a patriarchy and like, and they, he, he

01:01:26.500 still lost the debate, which was judged exclusively by teachers who were all women when he still

01:01:32.940 recall seeing their faces when he was making his point.

01:01:36.200 And he feel, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, he probably knew at that point that he had won.

01:01:41.700 Yeah.

01:01:42.120 Right.

01:01:42.340 Like, Oh, you're not allowed to make these points too accurately.

01:01:45.880 Right.

01:01:46.760 Oh my God.

01:01:47.620 Crazy world.

01:01:49.260 We live in guys.

01:01:50.640 Really?

01:01:51.360 Surely.

01:01:53.860 He was so naughty.

01:01:55.460 That's what happens.

01:01:57.500 What did I get into? 0.98

01:02:01.580 But why did he suck in the boy? 0.99

01:02:04.460 Cause he was naughty too. 0.99

01:02:05.980 He was hanging out.

01:02:06.920 It was naughty people.

01:02:08.060 That man blocked at the door.

01:02:10.080 So guys, are you going to be naughty?

01:02:12.180 Oh, no.

01:02:14.180 Oh, no. 0.99

01:02:15.920 It's a clown. 0.97

01:02:17.640 I'm not going to be naughty. 0.94

01:02:18.740 It's okay.

01:02:19.800 Oh, no.

01:02:20.620 He got stuck in the bed.

01:02:21.940 Oh, no.

01:02:22.360 That happened.

01:02:23.100 He got dead.

01:02:25.180 Oh, no.

01:02:27.660 He got in water.

01:02:29.600 Oh, my God.

01:02:30.820 The water goes.

01:02:34.100 Poltergeist.

01:02:34.720 That's how you teach children.

01:02:35.700 Yeah.

01:02:36.060 So did I tell you?

01:02:49.160 So you guys know why not to be mad, right?

01:02:51.320 Bad, right?

01:02:52.500 Yeah.

01:02:53.480 When they filmed the scene with the swing.

01:02:59.180 He gets real bones.

01:03:00.340 Yeah.

01:03:01.460 Excuse me.

01:03:02.380 Can you believe that?

01:03:04.240 Yes.

Based Camp - March 06, 2026

The Ubermensch For Manic Pixie Dream Girls： Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

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