https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92

In this insightful discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore Japan's government-backed dating app initiative aimed at boosting the country's birth rate. They analyze the app's unique features, such as income verification and relationship status documentation, and compare it to other dating platforms. The couple delves into the evolution of dating apps, the challenges of modern matchmaking, and the potential impact of government intervention in the dating sphere. They also share personal experiences, discuss the pros and cons of various dating methods, and offer suggestions for improving dating app design. This video provides a comprehensive look at the intersection of technology, government policy, and demographic challenges in Japan and beyond.

Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00] Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone, and we are excited to be talking to you today about a topic of grave pronatalist interest. Specifically, the country of Japan is making a government backed dating app. Now, I know very little about this topic, other than that it exists, and apparently it's a paid app, which sort of seems to defeat the purpose.

But Simone is gonna tell us more.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: So, let's start.

Simone Collins: Yeah, so it's it's actually not live yet. Only a beta version has really been live, but I'm quite intrigued by this. I think it's a great idea for the government to launch a dating app personally, you know, someone's got to make this work and the way that market it.

Based dynamics work. You're not going to see people actually get married based on dating apps as they are dating apps as they are meant for keeping audiences occupied. They're meant for lots of in app purchases.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This actually reminds me a lot of people. So when we bemoan the fall of dating apps what we're typically before [00:01:00] bemoaning, it's not that dating apps exist.

They used to be quite good. Simone and I met on a dating app. Okay. Cupid was good. Fantastic for meeting nerdy people. But the way that dating apps worked is you would have these full profiles. And you would search by like keywords in the profile or by matching in terms of like answering tons of questions.

And there were different sites that did this in different ways. Then Tik TOK was invented, which brought in the invite of whatever word I'm looking for here of swipe based dating apps. The advent of swipe based dating it. And then all of the apps started to move to this swipe based system. And originally I had thought that this was sort of a malevolent push, right?

So when Tinder got really big and Match Group moved to swipe based dating and then Match Group bought OkCupid and they moved OkCupid to swipe based dating. And I thought they had done that in order to kill OkCupid. So to understand why swipe based dating is so much worse than the old systems dating websites [00:02:00] are environments in which guys are intrinsically on the back foot.

Mm-Hmm. dating websites are environments where guys sell themselves to women. Fundamentally, that's how dating websites work because the vast majority of dating website users, that's like 80% on Tinder and stuff like that are males. Right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, here's the problem where you can get differential advantage for males and not just have all of the women sort to the top 20 percent of males.

It's when males are being judged on multiple metrics. Yeah. All right. So because you know, you may not be the highest looking guy, but maybe you have a good career or maybe you're witty or maybe you have a hobby that overlaps with this woman's hobby. Multiple

Simone Collins: dimensions on which you can compete.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So,

Simone Collins: and by the way, I used that dynamic on OkCupid as well. I did not compete based on my photos, even though I did have photos of myself in film grade stormtrooper armor. [00:03:00] I competed based on these weird questions that OkCupid used to prominently feature in a feed so you could camp out in the questions on OkCupid and give really provocative and weird responses and show up in people's feed and engage them really easily.

So you can, I was able to compete based on how my, how hold up sporky I was. I'm not saying it was great. You got lots of

Malcolm Collins: high profile people. I

Simone Collins: did. Yeah. And that's the thing is, is that I not being the most beautiful person in the world was able to still compete on that. I've said that there was that

Malcolm Collins: YouTuber who was criticizing us recently, who was like, Oh, that guy's way out of her league.

You are out of my league. But I, I I thought that was really funny because I'm like, well, I guess she did pretty well using her mechanism of female outreach on dating apps. But hold on. So the point I was getting to is that when you move to a swipe based dating app it intrinsically, Means that you are just judging people based on how they look, which one interestingly is the thing that women care least about except for random sexual partners.

Right? So [00:04:00] you are basically having the dating app replace the nightclub, which we've actually seen in the United States. Nightclub attendance has been like crashing. They are just used for like regular sex now. Like that is the point of, of the swipe based dating apps. But they prevent men like a diversity of men.

From really competing within this environment because they can't compete on any metric other than how they look and the women can't really use them for anything other than random sex and worse because all the women are now sorting to the same few men. Those men don't really invest in those women.

Simone Collins: Well, and

Malcolm Collins: both sides

Simone Collins: are developing wildly unrealistic expectations. That is to say a woman who's a four expects that not only because she can sleep with an eight, she can marry. And it, but also a man who's an eight just gets so flooded with women that he's just never going to ever want to marry even an eight or a nine or 10.

Malcolm Collins: San Francisco. And this woman was like, yeah, I mean, it's a huge problem to find a guy who's not polyamorous, who's like in my [00:05:00] league. And I'm here thinking, I'm like, Well, did you consider that the men who are polyamorous are out of your league and that like, she thinks like, well, I just need a guy who's like this guy who's sleeping with me, but polyamorous, but who's not polyamorous.

Like it's just one weird court. It's like, no, this guy is sharing like 10 women. Like he will clearly date below his league because of that. You shouldn't be benchmarking yourself on the polyamorous guys. You could get to sleep with you, but it's worse than that.

Simone Collins: It's worse than that. Because I think that this shift to image based.

Signaling is now creating this proliferation of filters that is completely like you, you, I have no idea, honestly, what people look like online anymore because they're, they're such heavy filter use that they all look incredible and I'll never forget, like by mistake on an app once I turned a filter on my own face and, oh my God, like I could look genuinely.

Okay. It's, it is, it is astounding. You are

Malcolm Collins: Puritan

Simone Collins: hotness. Yeah, husband goggles. There is, [00:06:00] like, I'm now realizing that all these people online that are so beautiful, I can now kind of tell all the filters they're using. And I think this is just creating this rampant dishonesty too. So I think this is another thing is that when any relationship that you could have is immediately beginning with some level of disappointment because now you're seeing the person without the filters for the first time, so your first in person impression of them.

It's a letdown.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, and what people say online, like, when people are like, oh, you know, you guys are mid or whatever. It's like, bro, like I have, I have been in public. Like we just got out of the airport. Like, it is rare. Walking through an entire airport multiple times. We're not overweight. At least we're not overweight.

gives us a slight bump up. Even being sorted for by you know, economic status. I'm like, no, you, you, you have been distorted in what attractive is because you assume that like subconsciously your social environment is the TV shows you watch. And then in Instagram and social media, where everyone's Instagram and social media, which isn't the real world.

You want to [00:07:00] learn how real people look, go to an airport and walk around. Okay. That's what I know. Airports. Also

Simone Collins: select for people who can afford to fly.

Malcolm Collins: But I'm, I'm using airport because it's even a selected environment for wealthier people. But hold on, I gotta get to the secret information I actually have access to here. I actually was, was mentioning that I had thought that match grape had intentionally destroyed.

Okay. Cupid at a party once. And I thought that's what they did. Yeah. Best selling book on relationships, blah, blah, blah. And I got scolded because actually at that party was the person at okay. Cupid who made the decision to do the switch. Did you punch him in the face? I mean, No, everybody's going to be like, Oh, I was spreading misinformation and I didn't know what I was talking about because and he said, and I, I was wrong, clearly he's like, no, it's what the users wanted.

We could see it in the data. I mean, yeah, it leads to more engagement. Let's be clear as to what he's really saying when he says that when they switch to swipe based systems, because keep in mind, the majority of users are men they are getting more user [00:08:00] interaction and more regular user interaction.

. The guy, you know, he turned out to have been the guy who made this decision. And the reason he gave for making the decision was the data. So what they were really finding in this data was just that they could make the men, their primary audience, more addicted.

And that is why all of the apps have made this change so much. So I thought that in a recent Scott Alexander grant thing or not recent, this was a few years ago. One of the proposals that like a nonprofit should do is to remake the old okay. Cupid. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Actually optimize around finding a partner who you want to marry instead of just Getting people addicted to the platform.

So Japan has the opportunity to do something like that here.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And it's not economically incentive. It's not, it's not trying to keep people on an app. It's not. So I think this idea of a government backed dating app, fantastic. And I've already seen people tweeting about this. Oh, it's just, Oh, can you believe, you know, governments are forcing people to get married?

No, [00:09:00] they're not. Okay. So I would ever be like, suggest marriage to someone. They were like, you're forcing me. You're

Malcolm Collins: forcing me. It's

Simone Collins: like, Oh, no, I, I honestly. Malcolm, I think it's a fetish thing. There was also this, I think it was in the Netherlands, a bunch of women dressed up in those handmaid's tale, like bonnet red cape dress things.

They're like, Oh, cause they had some like pro they were discussing pronatalist policies. And this is just like policies to help parents. You know, this is not like, we're going to take away female reproductive rights. It was just like, you know, this is the Netherlands. Okay. This is not China. Okay. And, and, and, and they show up in force wearing the handmaid's tale.

I think they just wanted to cosplay at it as it, I think they all have to, Some are fantasies going on sexually. No, no, no. I, I,

Malcolm Collins: okay. Okay. Maybe, but here's what I think is going on. I think that when you even suggest the idea that they should do something that they know they need to do, it's a bit like, or that they would be better off doing.

When you tell a fat person, you know, you probably shouldn't eat that. They like the anger that you're going to get is like really disproportional to what you just said, [00:10:00] even though it would be in their best interest if they did that. Yeah. Because they know that they shouldn't eat that. These women know that they would be happier if they found contented long term partners who cared about them.

And if they had kids but they haven't made the sacrifices in the same way that, you know, the fat person reaching for the donut is unwilling to make the sacrifices and that. Dissonance, cognitive dissonance causes them to say, and you know, fat people will do this, you're telling me I need to lose weight, you're trying to genocide fat people.

And it's like, no, I just said that maybe you should, you want to get rid of all people like me. And they immediately go to these places because it's the only way that they can logically, because they don't want to think like internally, wow, I'm being super illogical and insane right now. Right. They want to believe that they're being the good guy, logical.

So they Take this position where it is a, an attack to even mention like, Hey, you know, if you do think you can have kids, it would be useful to you know, civilization. If you [00:11:00] did we're not pressuring, you we're just letting you know it's on the table and that you're not, then they wouldn't need to wear those costumes.

Not doing it. They wouldn't need to per, they're like, you, you might as well be holding them to the floor with a gun against their head. They're like, it's fascism, it's fascism.

Simone Collins: I think there's something going on there. But so anyway, there are some spicy things The

Malcolm Collins: weigh in on this.

Simone Collins: Yeah do do these people have a fetish like simone says which they totally do because otherwise it wouldn't cosplay as people or

Malcolm Collins: Quick note here before you go further.

We never Edit or censor the comments if ever the comments are weirdly youtube doing it automatically We, one, it goes against our philosophical beliefs to do that. We do not have time for that. We don't have time for that. So we're a small channel. Like we're editing videos every day. You think I also have time to like be editing the comments section?

Simone Collins: We have day jobs. So anyway, spicy things about the app, which I actually think are fantastic. And no, these aren't course of things. They're just. Cool policies. So users, [00:12:00] oh, by the way for those who want to read more about this, I'm looking at Japan today. com. The article's called Tokyo government to launch dating app to boost birth rate.

So. Users will be required to submit documentation proving they are legally single and sign a letter stating that they are willing to get married. I think that's great. Setting like a standard there. You're willing

Malcolm Collins: to actually I don't know if you're familiar with these there's like subreddits tied to this.

Like, are we dating the same guy? And like Manhattan, remember I said that all the women are matching to the same guys. The really interesting thing that this is creating, the quote unquote legally single category, means that they are creating a sub marriage threshold of relationship commitment, or an individual is registering with the government that they are dating somebody else.

No, I

Simone Collins: think, I think they're just saying they're not married. No,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no. I think it means you're not dating someone else. I think it's a subcategory that they're creating here, which is actually a really powerful [00:13:00] thing to do. Because it helps pipeline people to engagement much faster to have this incremental stage between we used to have this when I was younger, it's called being Facebook official.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was hard to cheat on someone if you were a Facebook official because people didn't easily find that. You know that Facebook isn't like the primary social platform where people can make excuses about why they don't have one. Facebook official doesn't exist anymore, which made it very hard to cheat during the period where Facebook was that common.

So continue. Yeah,

Simone Collins: because you're

Malcolm Collins: in a relationship

Simone Collins: with someone on Facebook. Yes, I think that's absolutely brilliant. Also stating one's income is common on Japanese dating apps, but Tokyo, which is, this is the, the office it's announcing this dating app will require a tax certificate slip to prove the annual salary.

I also think that that's absolutely brilliant. That if you are. If you want to front about something, you actually have to provide receipts, like literal receipts. Because another thing that you see [00:14:00] happening on dating apps a lot is people, and of course social media in general, people signal wealth.

And especially in the United States, they signal it and they're actually in massive amounts of debt. It's not wealth at all. Like you, you think that you are possibly dating into maybe even marrying into financial security. And you, in the end, are not, I

Malcolm Collins: feel like it's such a flex on the new app, to show that you actually have a lot of wealth, but to not live the lifestyle of, like, not dress super wealthy.

Yeah. You know, you're dating somebody who has financial security, which is Hot or somebody who's been wasting all their money on those trading card games that they have in Japan. So, you know, one or the other.

Simone Collins: Yeah, 100%. So this is actually the first app that that the government has organized, but also they have been organizing or municipalities within Tokyo, at least have been organizing matchmaking events for a while now, which is really interesting.

And I am dying. Maybe in the future we can do an episode on this. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: sort of like different. So Singapore has had a matchmaking program for a while. [00:15:00] And in China, you can go to the parks in China.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but that's parents. That's parents self organizing, which is great. Parents are a major under discussed factor.

In matchmaking and they used to play historically a huge role in matchmaking.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I think most of these parents, I don't think that many, from what I've heard, that many actual relationships don't come out. I think they

Simone Collins: just go to there to complain or brag. Honestly.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So your, your hypothetical match was, my son isn't good enough.

You know, your hypothetical match with my daughter isn't good enough. And then they find one that's good enough. And the kids like, what are you doing? What? Sorry. You said, what are you doing? I. No, no, I was talking about the parents, not you.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Sorry, you confused me. I was like, I don't, I don't know. So, so The One thing I found interesting about the dating app was how little they had invested in it.

It did not sound like enough to make a functional app. Yeah,

Simone Collins: well, and the other thing is and this is actually one of the reasons [00:16:00] that they made for just, that they presented justifying the app's creation, whereas I feel like it's actually reason To be skeptical, but this should be made at all the official said, quote, we learned that 70 percent of people who want to get married aren't actively joining events or apps to look for a partner, unquote and then they, they continued.

We want to give them a gentle push to find one. But that isn't like creating an app for which there may be don't demand isn't going to solve the problem. I do think that the fact that this app exists and has some controls in it, and it's not just the controls I mentioned. Also an interview will be required to confirm.

Everyone's identity as part of the registration process. Which is pretty cool because then you're not going to have fake people or people just kind of, you know, I don't know. What's the word tourists. You won't have tourists on the app as much. You can't, it appears use filters and stuff, right? You know, it doesn't state that, and I'm a little bit concerned about that because then, you know, we still have that problem.

But it [00:17:00] sounds like the kind of app where this would not be permitted, although it would be terrible if everyone had just like a government ID photo, dating app photo it would be slightly suboptimal. But yeah, I am a little skeptical that people will use this, and I think that's one of the biggest problems.

But I, I also remember when you and I were in the period of dating, OkCupid was kind of the place to go to meet interesting people. Tinder and some other apps are the place to go if you wanted sex. And then if you actually wanted to get married, you would go on match. com. And I do think that having a place to go where it's kind of, at least at the time, socially understood that if you're there, you're looking to close a deal it would be really helpful.

And I remember when I was dating with peers and we were doing our whole competitive dating ring in the office all of us were on OkCupid except for one. And she immediately found a very well matched partner. They were engaged within a couple of months and then they got married just like that. And it was so weird to see because no one else was really thinking about getting married, but both of them were in their late twenties and they were just like [00:18:00] ready to close the deal.

And, and I actually, at the time, there were even older people. I knew like in their early forties who also went on match. We're very like brass tacks. Like this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'm not looking for. Got married just like that. And it'd be really cool if this app could sort of be like that.

Malcolm Collins: Different dating apps right now in the current environment. Is that you're always going to have different social sort of circles that become self sustaining within different apps because you need like a certain. Amount of people of a certain sociological and social profile to be on an app.

And then it becomes like the cluster you go to for that sort of person. Oh, yeah. It can actually differ between cities. You know, it's, it's some cities like, okay, Cupid might not be quite as nerdy as other cities. Yeah. But when we did it like, okay, Cupid was like the nerd, like it was the nerd app. And that's why I was on it.

I wanted to meet a nerdy wife. Like, I was like, okay that doesn't seem to be as much of a thing anymore. This disintermediation, although I've been listening to a [00:19:00] lot of you know, LGBT YouTubers talk about, you know, dating in the current environment. And one of the things I found really interesting is lesbians trying to find apps where you don't have tons of really aggressive trans women, because, you know, obviously these women used to date as men.

And so they're used to being one, you know, really aggressive on apps the way men are. And lesbians on apps are apparently very similar to women on normal dating apps, which is just not, you know, outreaching that much.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So where do they go?

Malcolm Collins: If you join an app that doesn't filter against that, and you can, you know, get in so much trouble for, for even requesting, like, I only want to I only want to date.

You know cis lesbians, right? So, because you can't, you can't ask that. Like the apps will not allow you to filter this. Even lesbian only apps like Which is so

Simone Collins: funny because on other apps, well, pretty much on every app, you as a woman or man, but typically women, you can be like, well, I'm not going to date anyone who's below six feet.

And male, right? So you can discriminate against height. You can discriminate against [00:20:00] so many other factors, age, but you cannot discriminate against

Malcolm Collins: even, even ethnicity on a lot of these apps, but not against. You, you know, a sister trans, which is a pretty big morphological difference. Yeah, I would say it's probably bigger than I've heard.

The most common is that they actually find Facebook dating. Yeah. To be the place was the way is, is there a

Simone Collins: dating app on Facebook? Apparently there is. So there's like Facebook marketplace and there's Facebook dating. Yeah. Let's see. I've heard that it's LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the place where at least like higher earners go to date.

I've heard that as well. Yeah. Well, it is something

Malcolm Collins: because you're going to get higher agency people there that actually like know what they want and reach out and Well, and

Simone Collins: we knew couples and parents who met on Twitter.

Malcolm Collins: On Twitter? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a hard place to meet, but

Simone Collins: No, I think it's, it's more common.

I mean, I don't know. I don't know anyone personally who [00:21:00] married. Based on LinkedIn, only dated, but I do know people who married based on Twitter. That's something. Yeah. Yeah. But, but see, again, Twitter is a place where you can compete based on image, based on like prestige, you know, follower count based on just how clever and witty your ideas are and the people that we, that we know I'm thinking of one couple, especially who like even now have a kid together.

Malcolm Collins: Is it public that you can say this?

Simone Collins: I don't know if they were public about meeting there, but they don't have a ton of followers. Like they just were intellectually very engaged. Oh, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: that is interesting. Yeah. Intellectually they're very much like in the same Twitter circle.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So if you were

Simone Collins: to design a dating app as a government, what would you

Malcolm Collins: do? I would First, you have to have a lot of pictures because only with a lot of pictures can you determine what somebody really looks like. So you want like 30 or 40 pictures minimum.

Simone Collins: Ooh. Oh, but I have an idea is the photos have to come from your personal network.

None of them can come from you. [00:22:00]

Malcolm Collins: That would be incredibly hard to source. That's.

Simone Collins: I don't know if they just, you know, like letters of recommendation for college applications come from third parties.

Malcolm Collins: So 30 to 40 photos and which photo gets shown to people is random among those photos. So you can't have like the, your good side photo.

Yeah. Then you also need a long form profile that talks about a lot of stuff so that you, the primary thing you're putting forwards is your sort of bio maybe even a swipe based system, but the swipes show individual portions of somebody's profile, not their picture.

Simone Collins: Okay. So people are not. It photos are not the first and foremost thing, but there are tons of photos.

Would you gate access to photos until after people send a message and a kind of love is blind kind of thing?

Malcolm Collins: No, but what I would do is I would create hidden categories based on either ia or human So we do ratings [00:23:00] of everyone based on their attractiveness to create leagues kind of like keeper ai does

Simone Collins: Were they the actually ,

Malcolm Collins: okay.

Cupid used to do this as well. And so you don't remember, you could get your league

Simone Collins: graded? I don't remember league ratings, but I do remember that it would would tell you if you were hot. Right.

Malcolm Collins: They call it hot outreaches you got, but I think. Yeah, just create leagues. And then have people only be sorting within their league in terms of the, the, the text chunks that they're choosing to swipe or not swipe.

And then I like that test

Simone Collins: text

Malcolm Collins: chunks. You also need. A system where if they say they're dating somebody there's some sort of a cost to that. Like they can't go back on the app for a year or something like that or half a year, you know?

Simone Collins: Well, but then people are just going to lie.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. The idea is, is that dating somebody like going to this, I am in a relationship stage is an actual commitment.

With a cost. So you can't get back on the app. Okay. We'll say at least a quarter, maybe not half a [00:24:00] year, a quarter of a year. Okay. After you break up before you can get back on the app again. So you can't just tell somebody, Oh yeah, I'll date you officially register with the app and then break up a week later.

You know, this, you need switching costs. That's one of the core problems in our society right now is low switching costs.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I agree that you have to create higher switching costs. I. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how to design that in a way

Malcolm Collins: I make on this is a lot of people, you know, you're talking about like using LinkedIn, using Twitter, etc.

People like, I'll just meet my partner naturally, right? Like, I hear this all the time.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You know, they're like, like people used to

Simone Collins: people used

Malcolm Collins: to just like, do you go out to a bar? And they're like, no. And I'm like, that's how people used to meet. Like they used to

Simone Collins: meet. No, they used to meet in high school.

Malcolm Collins: That was kind of the high school. You meet in college, but you were meeting in environments where you were regularly socializing people who are not going to clubs or bars or other social [00:25:00] events, continue to say, I will meet someone in the old way. to Without remembering that the old way was contingent on them going out there and actively socializing.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that that's really important to elevate, which is to say you, like a partner is not just going to come to you by like osmosis. Okay. I know it happens to some people, right? In the same way, you know, it reminds me of somebody like saying, I'm not going to apply to jobs. I'll just like get one randomly, right?

I'll wait till the job comes to me. And I'm like, why would you think that would work? And they're like, well, my buddy, Brandon, you know, his dad got him a connection or something and I'm like, yeah, but you must understand that's an incredibly rare phenomenon. You, you, you. If you actually want to end up with a job, you need to start applying.

And they're like, but I really hate rejection. Really hate it when they say no or don't follow up or something awkward happens in an [00:26:00] interview. And I'm like, well now of course men these days are also dealing with Russian roulette in terms of women who either, you know, can get themselves pregnant and then force a man to pay child support by like, you got to card those used condoms or they can just randomly accuse him of grape.

And it's, it's a very tough environment to be a guy. But in a way, you know, the genetic bottlenecks are species that facing have become more intense. The question I have for you, men. Out there is can you weather this bottleneck or will you be part of the faction that gets churned by it? Because at the end of the day we can't do that much about this particular bottleneck We're going through the species All we can do is try to get right through it and then raise a better generation for the next next iteration of society and that's what we're doing with our kids.

We arranged marriage plans and all that weirdness so yeah, I I think it's in the right place. It would be terrible if it turns out to just be a swipe based app. I'd be very disappointed in [00:27:00] them. It doesn't say when I said it didn't seem like they raised much money. If I remember correctly, it was like 1.

5 million USD was raised to build this app. And I'm like, that is not,

Simone Collins: I don't know. I mean, if you're lean about it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I, I, yeah, if you're leaning, not exactly, the problem is, is that government things always cost more money and are always jankier than public sector, private sector things. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Maybe not in Japan.

I mean, you know, there are some, some governments where it is genuinely impressive what their online services are like and I would, you know, Japan is Japan. Let's not forget that. Okay. You know, you go to the airport and anime girls are everywhere greeting you to the nation, right? Super cute little mascots.

It's wonderful, right? So if anyone can do it, hopefully Japan can. But I'm keen to see how it plays out and I hope it works. And it's great. I just wanted you to, to learn about the fun elements of it.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I love our little date talking and I have so much fun being with you.

Simone Collins: [00:28:00] Same. I love you so much. I'm glad we met when OkCupid was cool.

Last chopper out of NOM, Malcolm. Woo!

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, all the things in my life. I get all this hatred online, and I'm like, well, you know I suppose this is not what I deserve, but it's for having such a good life at home, you know, every day I owe it. To our reality to the future police, whatever term I want to say to deal with all of this because somebody has to be saying the things that we're saying, somebody has to be getting canceled in the way that we're getting canceled.

Or, or civilization is, is hurtling towards a cliff right now. And nobody, nobody has a. Since the steering wheel to turn it. So you know, we're just trying to

Simone Collins: give like the, those smart enough in society, a really cool, like base jumping parachute. So instead of just completely crashing, they can look in a bad ass way, like saving themselves last minute.

And I think it can happen. Some people they're getting a parachute, man.

Malcolm Collins: I feel like you and the [00:29:00] life that you have given me being this amazing wife are just such an enormous reward that I still haven't earned.

Simone Collins: No, that's really romantic. I want to point out that it's also a big, big thing for people who are still on dating apps to remember.

That you should not try to find someone who's perfect out of the box. And that when Malcolm found me and he's very happy, look, he's just said he was really happy. He's totally not a hostage. I promise. But that he married below his league and he created the life that he wanted. And if you want to create your own happiness, you have to fight for it.

Tooth and nail, you have to build it. Your f*****g self. It's just, it's like with having friends, you're not going to have friends unless you organize everything. You host the dinners, you invite everyone, you remind them all.

Malcolm Collins: You think, Oh, I'll reach X threshold and then I'll go find a partner. Yeah, no,

Simone Collins: no.

Malcolm Collins: You're going to have to brute force this.

Simone Collins: It's going to suck. It's not going to be [00:30:00] fun.

Malcolm Collins: How much do you, should I value attractiveness? And I'm like, bro, attractiveness, when you bank in attractiveness, you are trading something else because you can get higher quality. So if you go down in attractiveness, you know, you can get higher IQ, higher diligence, higher income, higher mental stability.

Because you know, your value to those women is higher than the men they would normally get whatever your state is. So people forget that all of these are variables you're trading for other variables.

Simone Collins: Yeah, exactly. So thanks for choosing your Ugga wife.

Malcolm Collins: That's apparently what the internet has decided recently, which I'm very surprised about.

Simone Collins: It's okay. As long as you can tolerate me without vomiting, I'll take it. I love you so much.

Malcolm Collins: I love you too. Have a good one.

Simone Collins: And you can stop and comment and Oh, no, no. I'm on the wrong side, sir. I get it, what's it called? It manifest. We got more of the, how [00:31:00] f*****g dare you have Simone and Malcolm on the wrong side. Do you understand how this is

Malcolm Collins: even in person? Now we need to be on the right side when we're talking.

Simone Collins: No, no, no, no.

Just in the podcast. But that, you know, a couple of times recently we've thought

Malcolm Collins: we got, we got a ton of, was make more tracks, make more tracks. I'm surprised. Like every single person who came up to us was like, why did you need to keep doing that? So we'll get back to it. All right. You want to bring us in? Bring us in with what? I don't, you hate my intros. Okay, yes, I'll do an intro. Okay.

Did she just throw up everywhere?

Simone Collins: No, she just like every she extruded something very stinky. Let's keep going. It's all right. It's fine. You know what? Life, life is, life is poop. I'll let you go get the No, poop is life. Let's

Malcolm Collins: keep going. Okay. So the point I was going to make was that I actually was, was mentioning that I had thought that match grape had intentionally destroyed. And I believe it's because you really

Simone Collins: don't keep going. Keep going. Keep going. It's fine. [00:32:00]

Malcolm Collins: Simone, we've got 20 minutes left of this. This is not a good idea.

Simone Collins: No, no, no. Okay. Just give me a second. Sorry. It's good that I waited the first time because more came out,

you little troublemaker. How I love you, but you poop like it's 1999.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, we're good now. Hello! I am back. Okay, so

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe