In this eye-opening episode, we dive deep into the world of internet personas, viral phenomena, and the shocking truth behind Nikocado Avocado's recent transformation. We explore the concept of disintermediated social interactions in the online world and how content creators like Nikocado capitalize on human psychology to build their audience.
Key topics covered:
Nikocado Avocado's dramatic weight loss reveal and its implications
The psychology behind parasocial relationships in the digital age
How internet personalities craft their personas for maximum engagement
The role of supernormal stimuli in online content creation
Insights into Elon Musk's public persona and social media strategy
Discussion on Trump's 2024 campaign and proposed Government Efficiency Commission
Analysis of public misconceptions about demographic statistics
Personal anecdotes and insights from the hosts' experiences as content creators
Whether you're a content creator, a social media enthusiast, or simply curious about the psychology behind internet fame, this video offers valuable insights into the complex world of online personas and audience engagement.
[00:00:00] the online environment has become a disintermediated set of social interactions in which I have a conversation with you, the audience, while you lose the interactive portion of the conversation, what you gain is the ability to, instead of being limited by the types of people you could actually get to spend time conversing with you, you can get anyone to converse with you. So I'll explain this using a porn analogy, right? In the real world, you are limited to sexual partners, like you would have a conversation partner, who would actually deign to have sex with you.
But what we need to talk about here is the role that Nick Avocado ended up playing in this disintermediated social contract. He had become, for a lot of the internet, that fat, pathetic kid. Yeah. You engage with him for the emotional context you get for picking on the fat, pathetic kid [00:01:00] in school. He filled that niche.
Speaker 7: Stupid noodles!
He filled
that niche and he had been saying for years that when he turned 30, he was gonna lose all the weight and then just go back to a normal life,
So I am
The point being is that Nick Acato, Avocado, people should have known this about him. This guy went to Juilliard.
Speaker 12: I got a full ride scholarship to my school. Could you, could you show us? The Juilliard School .
He, he was a concert level violinist. No way.
Speaker 13: A YouTuber named Violin Mechanic also watched all of Nick's violin videos, concluding he was near professional.
It goes to show though, there's, what are the career prospects?
Well, and that's the point to all of this. This was an incredibly talented actor, a diligent individual who, Understood the new social contract of the internet [00:02:00] and used it to make enough money that he never needed to do anything again by playing the fat kid
Would you like to know more?
Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today. We are going to be discussing a number of recent viral online phenomenon and moments that I think are you know, there was a post Elon had not long ago when he's like, when you are trying to determine between multiple things happening on the world stage, what would be the most interesting thing to happen?
And that's the one that's going to happen. And he's like. When people were discussing Elon buying Twitter, it was like, is that going to happen? Will it be more interesting if it happens? So yes. Is Trump going to win the first election cycle? Well, I guess it'd be more interesting if it did. So yes. You know, like, is, is Biden going to randomly drop out and instead of hosting a primary, they're just going to dictatorially choose?
Well, then that, that would mean that Trump's going to win. It would mean that Trump's going to win, which is what I believe.
There was a very [00:03:00] long off topic section here where Simone and I debated, who is going to win the presidential election.
That I have moved to the end of the video, . But anyway, so, sorry, that, that's, that's too much of an aside. Let's get back to the weird. So basically we are in clown world timeline, which means that the quantum direction of tiny fluctuations that tip the scales of reality will move in clown world direction. Not in Clown World direction, it will, it will, we right now, for anyone who saw that episode of South Park, where it turns out we're a show and we have to keep from getting cancelled we're in that timeline.
Ahhhh.
Speaker: We're a production company. We make intergalactic television programs that the whole universe watches. Television?
We Started with great shows like Who Wants to Marry a Galgamek and Antares 6 Millionaire. But then of course there's our signature show. Earth A few billion years ago, we realized, what if we took species from all different planets in the universe and put them together on the same planet. [00:04:00] Great tv, right? Asians, Jews, and Hispanics, all trying to live side by side on one planet. It's great. We put them all together on Earth, and the whole universe tunes in to watch the fun!
Speaker 3: Please don't cancel us. Oh, I'm sorry, Earthlings, but you have to realize the universe is a business. a shOw should never go past 100 episodes, or else it starts to get stale with ridiculously stupid plotlines and settings.
But, sirs, we think our show is just getting good. I mean, we're just now starting to see people get really pissed off at each other.
We are a live action show and they are wanting to, and Show me what you got!
Speaker 5: Show me what you got! Show me what you got! I want to see what you got! Hmm I like what you got. Good job!
Goodbye!
This is a different show, obviously, but yeah. Yeah, different show, but one of the big, big, big things, that happened recently and was shocking to me as a [00:05:00] totally online person is Nick Avocado, Nick Avocado, Avocado, Nick Avocado, Avocado did something that was completely wild and unexpected.
And I think it highlights the new social contract that we socially operate under as a society online. So what happened was is, for those who haven't heard of this yet, and we'll get into, like, bigger thoughts on this Nikocado was a very widely viewed mukbanger who basically made mukbang famous within the United States.
Mukbang is when you eat a lot of food in front of a camera and people parasocially eat along with you. And when I say widely viewed, I mean across his platforms, he had over a billion views. Gosh. So, across his various channels and everything like that. He is highly widely viewed. That puts him above, like, mainstream TV shows from our childhood.
If you're wondering, like, what that means in terms of views. Yeah. [00:06:00] So, very mainstream figure. And what he was mainstream for was being. fat having no shame. He didn't start out as fat. He, he, audience captured his way to obesity. Yeah, not exactly. We'll talk about that in just a second. Okay. Okay. Okay.
No spoilers. Okay. Or just being this really sad human being. And he was essentially one of the things that we. Have talked about is that the online environment has become a disintermediated set of social interactions in which I have a conversation with you, the audience, but I'm basically having a conversation at you through Through my wife, right?
And then you are choosing to listen to this conversation very much the same way that somebody historically would have had a conversation with an interesting person. They would be like, oh, I know I can go to this event because interesting people go to this and they would have approached somebody because the conversations they have with those [00:07:00] people are interesting.
Intellectually stimulating, but now you in an online environment, while you lose the interactive portion of the conversation, what you gain is the ability to what's the word I'm looking for here is the ability to, instead of being limited by the types of people you could actually get to spend time conversing with you, you can get anyone to converse with you. So I'll explain this using a porn analogy, right? In the real world, you are limited to sexual partners, like you would have a conversation partner, who would actually deign to have sex with you.
But in the online environment, where that is disintermediated, while you might not get to actually have sex with these people, you can see The highest tier of highest tier people having sex who you could never secure yourself. And it created a disintermediated sexual marketplace. However, I think from a conversational perspective [00:08:00] it's actually more effective than from a sexual perspective.
Because I think that the quality of sex as somebody who has had sex with top Um, the, the uh, uh, difference in sexual quality between like a, I'd say top 30 percent person and a top 1 percent person is you know, probably about a 30 percent bump in quality. I, I give it that maybe even, maybe even twice as good.
Even on the extreme three times as good. Okay. But the difference in conversational quality between a top 30 percent and a top 1 percent is A hundred X difference. Oh, oh, okay. So you're saying the, the returns on sex improvement are not nearly as good as the returns on conversational improvement, which all furthermore justifies parasocial relationships.
Like it's really worth [00:09:00] it to just maintain a high caliber friend group in the form of parasocial relationships, even though it means they don't know you necessarily. Well, it's interesting. Even when I am really friends with someone. I consume, often as my primary way of interacting with them, their online content, over their in person content.
I prefer to interact with my real friends, who would like, know me and be like, Oh yeah, Malcolm, he's like an acquaintance of mine. Like, I don't agree with everything he says, I think he's a weirdo, but like, I like hanging out occasionally. So. So, you know, like, for example, who are people who we have these sorts of relationships with, like, Zvi, and like, Scott Alexander, like, I would prefer to read one of Scott Alexander's blog posts than take that time talking to Scott Alexander.
And I'm sure it's one of these individuals and they're consuming. I'm sure like a lot of these people, I [00:10:00] imagine enjoy writing more than they enjoy talking to their friends. It's true. So content that you're getting with us, right? You're getting something that's been pre researched that every that every pause that every time we stop to research something is cut out of the video, right?
Getting a form of social interaction that is called a super normal stimuli. We've talked about this before, but it's worth briefly going over. These are stimuli in your environment that are beyond what you could ever achieve in a real world scenario. So for example, if I put a giant blue ball next to a bird that evolved to sit on blue eggs, it will sit on the blue ball more than the egg because it never had any evolutionary reason to not learn to sit on the very biggest blue thing near it.
In many ways, pornography can be considered a supernormal stimuli. In many ways what you are getting with this could be considered a supernormal conversational stimuli. But not all supernormal stimuli are intrinsically negative. And I think that this is a thing where people can think of, oh, you've disintermediated conversations.
Yeah, but a lot of the conversations people used to have sucked. Okay. Well, and [00:11:00] why did humans evolve speech? It was in many ways often to condense and, and make more efficient communicating important concepts that otherwise would take a lot longer to demonstrate in person. This is all about making it faster than showing something IRL.
I don't know what to say. When I when I am, for example, the reason why I was like, yeah, yeah, if I'm consuming these conver writings or like, Scott's writings. If I'm talking to one of these individuals, it's just like whatever they can think and remember off the cuff in their head, right? If I'm continuing their writing, this is something that they researched, they went over multiple times, they tried to include as much information as possible.
You know, I'm not Then they're really fun to talk with. I'll, I'll say the one person or the one time when I feel like it's just as fun to interact with someone is to read their stuff. Yeah, Ayla. No, I'd say Ayla is more fun to talk to in person than it is to read her content. No, I love her content, but the thing that Ayla does [00:12:00] is she'll surprise you with her response to things and see things in very novel ways.
So like, in real time, she'll have great insights that you can't get. She also builds a very, very quick and strong social connection when you're talking to her. Like she's very good at generating chemistry, and I don't other people I know who are like good online content creators aren't good at doing that.
If anything, they sort of have an anti chemistry often. Yeah, no, I mean, she's very Charismatic, but that I don't care about that. Like, charisma makes me uncomfortable. I don't mean charismatic. There's a difference between a person being charismatic and having presence and generating chemistry where you feel like they're your friend.
Like you feel a personal connection with them, which is very different from just general charisma. I can talk to somebody who has charisma. And be like, Oh, well, he was charismatic. For example, when I talk about forms of charisma, I have a form of charisma called presence that people talk about.
Yes. Where they otherwise [00:13:00] will accuse you of sucking all the air out of the room, but that's because they're just angry. I kind of person like actually start screaming in an office. Yeah, I had barely interacted with them at all. This was when I was working as an intern at UT Southwestern in the translational neuroscience lab.
And this and I was a college intern and this other person was like a postdoc. And they started yelling that everyone was always focused on me. And like, every time I was in a room, like, it was always like the Malcolm show. And they're like, and you're, you're just a. Intern. But I've been interning there for like a number of years at that point.
And they had just transferred in. So like, I don't know what they were thinking. You're just saying she didn't understand that you were just a big Dell, but there was that other time where we were at a conference and one of the people pulled you aside and was like, you need to stop being, she said that you sucked all the air out of the room.
She was basically saying you needed to stop providing such interesting insights to conversations. And yeah, she's like, well, like, just don't show up when I'm around. [00:14:00] Yeah. Yeah, it's just like, stop being interested. Anyway. No, no, no, it's not interesting, exactly. It's a, stop being, yeah. Stop having a present.
Stop speaking as loud as you do. Stop with the, hi, how's it going? Stop with, it's not that it's, it's a, it's a, it's about where attention is focused within group environments. But anyway, it doesn't necessarily overlap with other types of charisma. Like there's charisma that makes people like you.
There's charisma that what I was saying about Ayla, she has the type of charisma where when you talk to her, you feel like you've been friends forever in a very short period of time. Terrified when I talked to Ayla, cause I just really respect her a lot. And I feel like when people, when I respect people, I think they hate me.
But what we need to talk about here is the role that Nick Avocado ended up playing in this disintermediated social contract. He had become, for a lot of the internet, that fat, pathetic kid. Yeah. You engage with him for the [00:15:00] emotional context you get for picking on the fat, pathetic kid in school. He filled that niche.
Speaker 7: It's the cauliflower! Ah!
Stupid noodles!
There's your video.
Speaker 9: There's your video.
Speaker 8: Mmmmmmm! Mmmm! Haha.
And for those who think that this was ever his real personality. No, I'm not saying that he [00:16:00] didn't. Take on this, some aspect of this personality. Playing the role for so long, I ask you to study his facial expressions and emotions while he is acting. And I think it's pretty clear that he is playing a character in the same way that like Allie G at the character, it's just that this character, instead of being designed to make us laugh. Is designed to masturbate. The feeling that we get from the type of, you know, fat kid, we would have made fun of in school, but presenting an, , super normal stimuli version of that fat kid. Nick avocado was to the emotions that fat kid in school that people picked on. And I'm not saying everybody did this, but like, obviously there's a portion of the population that has an impulse to pick on the fat kid at school. He fulfills that impulse for that portion of the population as a supernormal stimuli in the same way that the super hot. Porn star [00:17:00] fulfills that stimulus. , when contrasted with the cheerleader, whatever, the attractive girl that you had a crush on at your local school.
The porn star is likely even more attractive than the real life person that you had a crush on because everyone can consume her. The sexually speaking at once in the same way everyone can at once pick on this Nick avocado character. And again, remember when you're watching this clip study, is this somebody acting or is this his real emotional state?
Speaker 6: Me and Matt Stonie have a lot in common. We're very beautiful, but the difference between, well,
Speaker 9: he's basically Skinnier, more attractive, richer, more popular I mean, where do you want to start? The only thing you have in common with him is maybe that you're human. And I highly doubt that you're human because I think you identify as a hippo.
Get away!
Speaker 6: Get away! Get away!
Speaker 7: I pooped myself! I woke up in a pile of poop!
He [00:18:00] filled
that niche and he had been saying for years that this was all part of a social experiment and that when he turned 30, he was gonna lose all the weight and then just go back to a normal life, right? But the character he was playing was a character that was supposed to be genuinely pathetic, the type of character that would have these delusions and I'm giving it away here a bit, which is to say that.
When he turned 30, he's 32 now, so a few years late. Oh, I forgot. Okay, so what he did recently is he reviewed, removed a mask from his head. He had this panda mask in a, in a video and he was skinny. Not like, like skinny, like, oh. He lost a hundred pounds. More like he lost 300 pounds. 250 pounds. Yeah. Okay.
So I am the villain, because I've made myself one.
And, and.
Just a few days ago, people had been doing videos about how he might be close to suicide [00:19:00] now, how, like, sorry, well, he hadn't posted for how he might be close to unaliving himself. Now. I'm sorry. You were saying he had not posted for 7 months. So I think people thought he'd just gone off. No, he posted a video.
I think. I, well, I just looked at his YouTube which this video where he takes off the panda mask is still it's, it went out on September 6th for recording on September 9th, it's still number three on trending on YouTube with 31 million views, almost 32 million. And the, the previous video that was posted before this under latest was seven months ago.
Okay. Well, so what he had done is he had the thing is, is that another very large YouTube was like millions of views on this video a few days before he posted this video, did a video about how Nick Avocado was like having a breakdown and like nothing was going to come of him and,
Speaker 10: And everyone wonders why I'm posting less. I'm not happy. I don't like what I've done. I don't like what I've become. I don't like what I look like. [00:20:00] Nicocado's recent video is so incredibly tragic, it makes all of his previous breakdowns seem like they were happy moments. Simply titled, BYE, Nicocado talks about deeply regretting his time on YouTube, in the process admitting to financial ruin, and the ways in which fame destroyed his life completely.
Speaker 11: The 41 minute video begins on terrible footing, as after only 24 seconds, Nick's already almost on the verge of tears.
and he had pre recorded, it turned out, for two years, just tons and tons and tons of videos.
Oh, so he did start when he was 30. So he started when he was 30 and then for two years was pre recorded videos. He kept all his his channels He's got like three channels running
And he lost the weight and it it's not like he's covered in like flabby skin and everything like that Like it appears he probably I don't see scars from surgery So my read is he might have been using lotions and like, you know, he's wealthy [00:21:00] because he's getting this many views Oh, yeah, you have to have the skin removed no, no, no, no.
I don't think he did that. I think he, he found, well, maybe he did. I don't know. The point being is that Nick Acato, Avocado, people should have known this about him. And I think that this is one of the things that people don't realize when they're interacting with people in online environments, right? This guy went to Juilliard.
Juilliard is like, you know, the Stanford of the art world. Yeah, the Harvard of art. Well, no, the Harvard, sorry, the Harvard of performing arts. Nothing anymore. Okay. Sorry. The Stanford, the St. Andrews of performing arts. Just like RISD is the Stanford slash St. Andrews. But anyway, hold on, hold on, hold on. For the reason I say that I'll, I'll get to the reason I say that in a minute.
He, he was a concert level violinist. No way. Yeah, there's been like violinist experts who have reviewed his violin playing and they're like, this [00:22:00] guy is literally A tier, like as high tier as you can get, like equivalent to the best violinist in the world.
Speaker 13: I was very good. I got a full ride scholarship to my school. Could you, could you show us? The Juilliard School. Have you known about it? I went to the Juilliard for two years. I don't know what that is. With Juilliard being the world's most prestigious music school, a user on Reddit found Nick's full list of violin achievements, of which there were certainly many, and it therefore makes sense that he was good enough to teach.
A YouTuber named Violin Mechanic also watched all of Nick's violin videos, concluding he was near professional. Right from the bat, I can tell that this guy plays fantastically in tune.
Quick side note here, but I want you to watch this clip while knowing what Juilliard really is a school that is incredibly hard to get into. This is somebody who got a full ride scholarship into this school. And tell me that this is not an [00:23:00] act.
Speaker 13: I was very good. I got a full ride scholarship to my school. Could you, could you show us? The Juilliard School. Have you known about it? I went to the Juilliard for two years.
It goes to show though, there's, what are the career prospects?
You know, how much is he going to make as a concert violinist? Well, and that's the point to all of this. This was an incredibly talented actor, a diligent individual who, Understood the new social contract of the internet and used it to make enough money that he never needed to do anything again by playing the fat kid.
By playing the kid who everyone picked on. What an act designed for this modern audience. This modern disintermediate. How is it? It's better than the alternative.
Mean, consider who the internet focused picking on before you had characters who were intentional acts of otherwise, you know, competent sound people to make [00:24:00] money. It was people like. Christian. Right where the entire internet is reading him as sort of a super normal stimuli. I mean, you're not going to get somebody as pick on a bull as Christian. And it just destroys this actually mentally disabled person's life. And completely warps their character into something, you know, evil and bizarre.
Although I would say, I do really want to see, like, in the next couple of weeks, Chris Chan come out, talking normal, looking totally normal, lost all the way. It was like, oh yeah, it was all an act all these years, all an act that would, that would break me.
I mean, he described it as waking up from a dream. Right? And living these last eight years as a horrible dream. And that's what it was for him to an extent.
But again, what's the alternative? Be a concert violinist. His life would suck. God, like professional? No, professional violinists do not have good lives. You get maybe two in the [00:25:00] world that make it to a tier where they have any level of financial comfort. OK, so. Yeah, I guess when we're talking purely finances, you know me, I'm, I'm a little body dysmorphic.
Like I would kind of rather be scraping by than not been overweight. You and I have, and I do have this and I will admit this. We have problems. I cannot easily empathize as what it would feel like to be racist because I genuinely do not have any sort of instinctual reaction when I look at people of different ethno groups, but I do have an instinctive negative reaction when I look at people who are overweight.
And we correct for this and we have lots of people that we respect and love who are inclined to retentities, but we have problems, like instinctual problems. Like we can't help it. Instinctually very yeah, it causes me to see these people [00:26:00] differently and I'm not, it's, it's not a good thing that it does, but it does.
And I think that this is like the true racism that people talk about sometimes. Well, no, and then fat activists talk about this all the time. They're subject to it. It's a really big problem. Like they, it's really like doctors treat them differently, service, everyone treats like, well, not everyone, but a lot of people treat them differently because I think that instinctual reaction is there.
Yeah. And. This is the reason I was, I was making the Stanford joke earlier is because a lot of people forget this, right? Like the people you interact with online that may be fulfilling impart some persona, which is definitely something that Simone and I do to an extent is we have trolls on our videos and stuff like that.
Right. Who are like, these people are just crazy. Like, you know, can't you see that they're just insane, like, fringe weirdos and stuff like that? Because on our school, like, launch video, the little short commercial for it, one of the comments, actually the one with the most upvotes, must have a ton of downvotes [00:27:00] because at the bottom of all the video, the comments too, but it's also the one with the most upvotes, is like, this is proof that these people are insane and, and weirdos and blah, blah, blah, and completely delusional, but I don't see how you got that from the school.
Yeah, that should have gone on, like, your defense of child corporal punishment. Yeah, like, we're like, realistically Our background? Like, I, I'm, I, I am a Stanford MBA, and for people who don't know what that is, that's literally the hardest degree to get in the world that I'm aware of. I know this is somebody who is going to get a PhD, and a Stanford MBA is generally considered dramatically harder to get into, specifically Stanford and Harvard MBAs, but Stanford more so, because Stanford's dramatically harder to get into than the Harvard MBA program.
So it's like, top tier in terms of the degrees that grant you never have to work again at a day job types of access. If, if you want it, right. I undergrad St. Andrew's [00:28:00] neuroscience degree for people who don't know at least last I checked, like by the guardian ranking, , St. Andrew's beats Oxford and Cambridge in the UK for university rankings. And I have a degree there in neuroscience. I have a degree there in biology. I have a degree there in psychology.
I have exhibits on display in human evolution stuff at the Smithsonian. Simone has a graduate degree in technology policy from Cambridge. Like in terms of, we we've gone through 500 startups, which is one of the harder to get into startup accelerators in terms of the like. Objective real world success things.
This idea that somebody, if you are looking at someone who has like, hit it out of the park with like every major real world success indicator, and you're like, why do they appear so weird online? Why do they have this persona online that I don't understand? Right? Chances are they are doing something that is simply above your pay grade.
Like Nick [00:29:00] Avocado. Nick Avocado was doing. And I think this is also true with people like Musk, when people are like, oh, Musk is just an idiot in everything he's doing. He's completely unhinged. Musk is not unhinged. He's just a, he's a super genius who likes puns and dad jokes. Is it that hard?
Like, well, it's not just that for being the wealthiest man in the world, people are going to have a negative association with you. They are going to, no matter what you do negatively. It is very hard to cut through that and achieve any degree of positive public image. And you're like, well, what if you just like gave the money to charity?
It's like, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg frigging tried that. Yeah. How did that go for him? That, you know, in terms of. Positive public image of the ultra wealthy Elon Musk is fucking like winning. I know. I know Facebook has a marketing department. Musk's companies just have Elon. Yeah. I love it when people pretend like [00:30:00] he doesn't know what he's doing.
And this is one of Actually, an interesting thing with me and social environments is I have, like, really developed mirror neurons. We talked about this in another episode, which means I, like, can't help but feel pain when other people feel pain. You're like hyper developed mirror neurons. In other words, you're very, very sensitive.
Yes, so like if I see somebody else's knee hurt, my knee will start hurting, but it causes other problems. One of the problems people note in the Piers Morgan interview of me where you and I are talking, and when you're speaking, people get through my mouth saying the same words. That is how He's some kind of puppet master.
Is he controlling her remotely? What's really happening is as I'm thinking of her saying something, because the mirror neuron on my pathway is so hypersensitized, I can't help but move the muscles that would be involved with me saying the thing that I am thinking about her saying. It looks so bad. It looks so But I feel like really nervous.
That's just the way I act. But it also means I'm very, very, very good at reading [00:31:00] people. As you've seen, like you've seen me be around people. This isn't like a boast. I'm just genuinely, it's one of my strong talents. And I have fear deficiency. Like people think, you know, when we gauge intelligence as all being like one thing I am probably, I would argue in the bottom 2 percent to 5 percent of the population in ability to learn languages or music.
True story. What can you, what can you say in Spanish? Aside from hello. Can you say one sentence? I know like no hablo espanol. That's not really a sentence. I do not know. I mean, technically it is. I don't know anything. I can maybe think of a few words. And how many years of Spanish did you take? How insane it is that I can't do that.
You had Spanish speaking mamies as a kid. I had Spanish speaking mamies. My family sent me out to live with a Spanish family in Mexico for a month. I did multiple summer jobs for months in Spanish speaking countries. Costa Rica. Well, Brazil, not Spanish speaking, but okay, [00:32:00] whatever. Costa Rica, I lived for a month, and I lived in Mexico for a month.
I I I didn't graduate Spanish 1, which I took every year in elementary school until college, until I was going from my junior to my senior year of high school. I failed Spanish 1. One class, like 20 times in a row. To say I am bad at languages is the biggest understatement of the century. I am very, very bad at coding languages too, for example.
I've tried to learn them multiple times, I just haven't been able to. And this is something that's important to know. When you're dealing with programming languages. People who are high end was in certain types of intelligences. There's a really high degree of variability, and this is actually not uncommon for an individual.
So they're like a retard in some places and they're a genius in others. Yes, and so I'm just saying one of the areas I happen to be uniquely gifted is in reading people and people are like, [00:33:00] but then why are you so dislikeable so much of the time, right? Oh, like, well, yeah, because a lot of people are like, Oh man, he just doesn't know how to read people.
He's so tone deaf. The thing is, it's not that he can't read them. It's that he doesn't care. He doesn't care what they think. I don't care. It's that they assume that the optimal pathway through every. Interactive conversational environment is one designed to get the person to like you or to cause maximum positive emotional states in the individual that you are engaging with, when that is just objectively not true.
In truce, if I am trying to achieve specific outcomes from conversations, I'd say half of the time about, it's not the optimal pathway to focus on getting them to like me. And this is from a disintermediated social perspective what Nick Akado Avocado realized. Yeah, yeah. He did not try to be liked. He did not try to be respected.
He did not try to [00:34:00] look good. He did not try to look dignified. I mean, all of it. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, when you are playing sort of 4D chess in terms of outcomes, it's not about always trying to get people enamored with you, right? It's about achieving the particular outcome that you are interested in. And so I think that, He shows that within this online environment, but also we show that.
That's something we show, if you want to see our video on media baiting and stuff like that. Trying to appear as generic, broadly likable people within an online environment is a very bad idea. Yeah. People will hate you. The Hillary Clinton effect. It does not work. You have to be generic. Well, spiky in some way, right?
And that's what people see of as weird. And in the same way that when you are a mime, right? Like a mime, because you're dealing [00:35:00] with less communication venues will over exaggerate every one of their emotions and every one of their actions. It's the same as an online personality over exaggerate to really reach your target audience.
But. More so than that when we talk about this transition to this new social model, some people have gotten it and some people haven't gotten it. When we first moved from theater to movies, if you go back and you look at movies from like the 70s or 60s, you will see many elements of them that look more like a stage play than what you would think of as modern cinema.
Well, and you actually see this, like, from The early, earliest forms of cinema, everything went from like minstrel show style to like Broadway stage play style. And it was really driven by the stage. And now like increasingly things are becoming based on optimization native to that media. Exactly. Well, when things move to [00:36:00] the online environment, the same thing happened.
A lot of people tried to recreate specific genres that they were aware of from the old TV days, right? And so two really carried over. One was the more cinematic style skit comedy and stuff like this. Remember like college humor and stuff like that. And you just don't see stuff like that anymore.
Yeah. Like Saturday night live style skit. Yeah. And then the other was like trying to create jackass, but was in an online environment. A lot of the early stuff was, it was like random pranks and like acting a fool and stuff like that. And gradually it became clear to people that what it was really about was this disintermediated social relationship.
And I think a great example of this recently was a famous gun YouTuber recently became number two and trending was just a video that said, I died. And he had died and he had pre recorded a video for when he died. He was old, he knew he was gonna die, he had cancer, pancreatic [00:37:00] cancer. And You know, that is the relationship that people have with this audience.
Now, this audience may not be friends in whatever friends meant in the traditional use of the word. I mean, if you're playing yourself and that's important, right? Or at least a facsimile of yourself. Everyone's playing an act even when they're meeting with friends. Let's be clear, you know, you're always in people who are like, no, I'm not that.
I'm like, you're probably exceptionally boring. If you have no like intentional aspect to your or they're just so lost in trying to meet their this identity. They have for themselves that they forgotten their method acting if you know what I mean. Like, their objective function is to satisfy that particular character sheet they built for themselves.
And I think with Nikocado Avocado, if you watch his recent video, he like, tries to play this villain character or something like that. And he's doing this, it's obvious to me, it's very, a form of emotional defense for him. To try to like, regain control of who he is and his identity. Because, [00:38:00] When he was playing that character, I, I genuinely believe there were moments where he was wondering, am I really this person now?
Like, is this who I am? And the belief that I'm not this person is the lie. Scary. Yeah. You know, because he, you know, he's a smart guy. He probably thought those things. So many people were like that. So many people you know, delusional people probably think you know, I can start tomorrow. Yeah, I'm gonna start tomorrow.
I'm gonna, you know, and you can look at somebody like us and people can be like, well, I mean, does that mean that you are a character in the way that you're portraying yourself? And it's like, well, sort of. I mean, I've chosen a character to be my identity and I live as that character because I think it's optimized for achieving my particular goals in the world.
But I don't differentiate myself terribly from that character, which we've talked about in other videos, I think, is why we have a good relationship with our fans, where I've noticed that some famous people have a very [00:39:00] negative relationship with their fans. And these are famous people we know privately, you know, who we've had conversations with.
And these are individuals where their fans perceive them as a character that is highly individualistic. with who they see themselves as and who they are in private. Whereas for us, while we are presenting a character, it's also the character that you will meet if you go to a dinner party with us or something like that, you know?
And I would say, is it, is it that dis distant from who I am when I'm just alone with you, Simone? I mean, it is to an extent, I guess. No, no, not really. It's this, these are the conversations we have. I am not putting on an act because. I don't, I don't have the mental bandwidth to do that right now. And I don't know, you just, you should be you.
I've never seen you act like anyone but you, and I don't, I mean, you certainly have. Things that you say in public that you don't say in private, but you know, Yeah, well, I love when everyone is like [00:40:00] who didn't actually follow us before is like, oh He disciplined his child like he hit his kid like mask off moment.
We had a video early in our channel This was the jordan peterson is raising kids to be sims video if people want to see it where not only did we talk about bopping, but we talked about how it works why we do it, etc Long before that big Ooh, expose happened, newspapers just watched our episode.
We'd be in big trouble. But you'd, you'd think that, but like I'm running for office and I was told that before becoming a politician in the United States, you know, clear everything on social media, they'll dig through all your dirt and find everything. And you'll find them throwing every little stupid detail and thing you've said at you and other people.
Who run for small offices in our district, in our county have just said really inconsequential things to other people on social media and ended their campaigns based on criticism around that. And yet nothing has [00:41:00] come out with this campaign. And what's more interesting is we have been attacked for things, but they're not real.
The attacks we get are fictional. Like what I am, I am like di I abuse you. I am disrespectful to you. I one of us must, we get a text, we have the same space, that Twitter account. Oh, that one of us must have cheated on the other. Yeah. Again, if they just watched our videos, they would understand our internal policies around who gets to sleep around.
Like, I just. Yeah,
Rather than have people dig through our backlog to find out what she is alluding to here. The point she is making is that one of us cheating on the other would be a virtually impossible thing to have happen because, Well, Simone just wouldn't cheat on me at all. It's not something that she had the desire for.
She's basically completely asexual other than me. , I. She [00:42:00] never really experienced arousal before interacting with me. I mean, you've got to keep in mind just how negatively she reacts to any physical contact with anyone other than me or the kids, where if she has interacted with somebody, it's like scrubbing her hands. For like, You know, five minutes afterwards. , you know, really vigorously before she can go on with her day, she finds human contact really repugnant. , keep in mind that even whiz me where she does have exceptions, she still wants to have our podcast recorded in different rooms.
It's still too much of a distraction for her. And then from my perspective, I'm allowed to sleep with other people if I want to, I just choose not to, but if I did it, wouldn't be cheating on her because it's something I'm allowed to do.
It's not part of our understanding and our relationship that I wouldn't be sleeping with. Other people. So.
The cheating is an impossibility given the way, given our characters and the way our relationship is structured. Also for those who might be like, well, Eve your wife [00:43:00] lets you sleep with other people, then why don't you? It's like, well, a number of reasons, one. You too. When I say you, I mean, I just, the idea for whatever reason, kind of grosses me out, you know, I have a wife who's really dedicated to me. , there are few people .
Who I would rather choose to take time. Two. Seduce or sleep with other than her. But in addition to that,
It's a huge amount of emotional and mental effort. , And in addition to that,
Like what's the benefit to us or our mission. If I was to do that. If I thought that there was some marginal benefit to our family by sleeping with someone fine, you know, that's something that I might consider. , but if not, then why would I do that? Why would I take the time to do that for hedonistic reasons? Because it feels good. I mean, think about the effort that you are putting in to get somebody else to sleep with you in a safe context. And contrast [00:44:00] that with the momentary pleasure you get from the actual sexual act, just the equation makes no sense there they, they make stuff up. The controversies that are public about us are fictional. But like, when people who watched us or knew us were like, Oh, would he discipline his kid or discipline his kid in front of a reporter? They're like, yeah, that's exactly the type of thing Malcolm would do.
What did one of your family members say about running for office? Like all the bad things they say about you won't be real. Yeah. So my uncle used to be head of the fed in Texas and he ran for Senate in Texas. My granddad was a congressman in Texas and ran for Senate as well. So I've got like a lot of politicians in the family, but anyway, this came from my uncle and not my grandfather.
So my uncle said the weird thing about running for politics. Is you will be attacked for so many things and none of it will be true. Like but he's like it's not just that the reasons people like you that also won't be true They will like and hate a fictional representation [00:45:00] of yourself and when you Fall into the cliches of thinking these cliche things about donald trump or thinking these cliche things about elon musk And don't remember that this is like elon musk is just an autistic dad Okay.
Like you can see him however you want, but at the end of the day, Elon Musk is just an autistic dad. And when you remember that a lot of this false framing can begin to dissolve. Trump is an insecure guy who always wanted to fit in with the rich kids and never really got to, and now he's having his moment in the sun.
And on all of his behavior makes sense within that frame. Context, but he's also stuck in an echo chamber of yes men, which is not great. Not anymore. Not as much. And he's got, yeah, he's, he is more, yeah. He has a lot of surrounding competent people, but he, at least in the first administration was surrounded by a bunch of yes men who made things difficult.
But what I'm saying, yeah, first administration, but that hasn't been true for like 10 years. Yeah. Now he's got some great people. I'm super [00:46:00] excited about it, but you know, we'll see. But what we have to talk about here, very interesting is just remember like the point of this, the point of all of this from, from the perspective of the audience is remember that in this age of disintermediated parasocial relationships one in a, in a big part, and I would.
Commit this to other creators, the relationships you have with your audience, the fact that it's parasocial doesn't mean it's not real. Okay. You have chosen to play a social role within their lives. And it's important that you own the role that you have chosen to play. Right. And you don't have animosity at them for viewing you the way you have sold yourself to them.
But in addition to that. There are going to be people who find ways to exploit the worst of human instincts. And not all these people will be bad. Some of them will just be smart entertainers who are like and I [00:47:00] respect Nikocado Avocado endlessly for doing this. I, I have, like, I'd love to have him on the channel.
Not that we'd ever get somebody that famous on the channel, but we'll see. I mean, is Ayla not fulfilling one of these roles, right? Of the ultra educated, you know, educationally controversial, um, what's a nice way to say it? Woman who sleeps with men as a profession. This is something that we've seen historically over and over again.
It's like a trope our culture has, whether it's what are the two ones that you always mention? I can't remember their names. Asphasia. Asphasia. And Madame de Pompadour. Yeah. Among the famous ones, yeah, among the famous ones. But it's a common role that we have sort of in the background of our minds, especially people who are educated in history.
And let's be honest, her audience is like a fairly educated audience. And they like that she plays that parasocial role for them, you know, she's their aphasia, right? And then there's idiots who have no education and are just like, she's a, a prostitute and prostitutes are [00:48:00] always low class. And I'm like, that is.
Objectively not true from a historic context. In fact, historically speaking, until the modern age, I want to say maybe until the last 200 years, generally, the most respected women in most societies in history were women who you paid for sex. This is why people like asphasia were able to achieve the rank that they had as to why that's the case.
It's because those were the only women who Now keep in mind that women of the knight fell into two classes here. You'd have the ones for the lower classes and you'd have the ones for the upper classes. They were the women who the upper class men were having intellectual conversations with. Yeah.
They weren't stuck in the back of a household. Yes. And so that's how they achieved the highest ranks in many of these historic societies for women, not for men. Anyway, anyway, I love you to death, Simone. You are amazing. I am so happy to be married to you. You are just a wonderful mother. I am so glad you have allowed me, you know, we recently passed the over a hundred people are watching us at any given moment, day or night at this point.
I can't believe it's just wild [00:49:00] to think about. If we were a mega church, we would be getting what was it recently where I ran the numbers we'd be getting.
Yeah. So we're now at for watch hours in a 28 day period, 67. 9, 000. And what that means is that
on any given day we have, if we were giving an hour lecture or an hour of sermon so suppose we were like a preacher who ran a mega church and gave an hour sermon every day, we'd have 2, 425 people show up to that sermon. That's insane. It means that at any given time, day or night, we have 101 people watching us.
It means that if I woke up every day and for 16 hours I was preaching on a side corner, this includes weekends, we would have an average of 151. 6 people in that crowd. That is just wild to me to think about. And this is just YouTube, not our other channels. Anyway. But that's, that's what I talk about with [00:50:00] like a parasocial disintermediated connected network that we have been able to achieve this.
I've only achieved it. Thanks to you, Simone. I could never do this without you. And you know that a hundred percent, you are the key to everything for me. I'd never do anything interesting without you. I love you so much. Love you too. Bye. All right.
But yeah, I don't. By the way, guys, everyone, Malcolm has placed his bet on Kamala. People know the logic behind my bet. I don't know a single Sorry, Malcolm has placed his bet on Trump.
I placed my bet on Kamala. Yeah. I don't know a single person who moved between the last election cycle and this election cycle from a Democrat voter to a Republican voter, but I know lots of people who have moved from sorry, I don't know a single person who has moved from a Republican voter to a Democrat voter.
And I do because I went door knocking. Yes, we'll talk about your [00:51:00] counter argument, but I do know lots of people who have moved from Republican to Democrat. Simone's core counter argument. No, no, no, Malcolm, Malcolm, you said this the wrong way. You know a lot of people who were Democrats and are now voting Republicans.
Okay. I know a lot of people who were Democrats and are now voting Republican between these last two cycles specifically, it's like this giant new audience. But I mean, consider like Elon, for example, right? Like mainstream figures have moved pretty dramatically, but Simone when you're knocking and she's like, you wouldn't believe how many people are going to be voting just because of the abortion law change.
Well, that's It's a, it's a big thing. Like, even if you're a family that's otherwise conservative, but wants the optionality of doing IVF, because maybe one of you has fertility problems, but you still care about having kids that are biologically yours, you're, you may feel motivated, like it's the responsible thing to do to vote Democrat, just to make sure that your [00:52:00] right to IVF.
Is protected, right? If you're a conservative male who sleeps around a lot, I guess there aren't any of them. Actual candidate policies. You would know how ludicrous that is. Yeah, but, but again, when I listen to, to certain media slants, like certain algo dives, cause I'm trying to see what like normal other people who aren't necessarily conservative coded are listening to, they, they just, they, they make it sound like an inevitable thing, but it's not.
That your right to abortion and birth control and everything will be taken away if Trump wins. They're just like project 2025, which Trump hates. I know, which he hates. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's very annoying. And honestly, I think that they'd be better to lean on Trump derangement syndrome and just keep pointing to his face because it seems to drive people nuts instead of talking about a project with which he has zero affiliation, but whatever.
Regard to the episode on [00:53:00] where is the woke audience? Yep. Someone on Twitter sent to us a YouGov America poll saying Americans overestimate the size of minority groups and underestimate the size of most majority groups. And it shows a series of gaps between the true proportion and estimated proportion.
For example have 1 million. True proportion, 0%. I mean, cause I'm sure it's like 0. 00 whatever. Estimated proportion, 20%. What
Our transgender. What? Okay. Our transgender true proportion. 1% estimated proportion, 21%. Who is filling out these polls? ? No, and I'm wondering for the people, because it might be a lot of people who are like, oh, it's probably like five or 3% or something. Yes. There's other people being like 50%. Yeah, but maybe they're like, they're, I mean, one, this is presumably like people on the internet with too [00:54:00] much time, so they're like terminally online.
And maybe then, you know, you're kind of surrounded by like trans people and you think everyone's trans. Have a household income over 500, 000. True proportion, 1%. Estimated proportion, 26%. Are Muslim, true proportion, 1%. Estimated proportion, 27%.
This is, this is 27%. This is how these girls get out there and they're like, Oh, I'm going to get a guy who's making six figures in life. You're like, yeah, I'm going to get a guy who's making like 300 K or something in his early twenties. And it's like, they have a completely misunderstanding of reality.
It's, it's the, the understanding the average person has is just out of whack. Out of whack. You know, it's interesting though, is there are some where it's actually spot on and here are the ones where it's. Almost the same have at least one child people estimated 57%, sorry, real 57%. The [00:55:00] collective estimation was 58%.
So very close voted in the 2020 election. Real 61%. Estimated 62%. So there's some that were actually like, they're not 100 percent delusional, but man, that, that millionaire gap, pretty crazy. And then basically there are huge gaps of about 30 percent for our Muslim, our native American, our Jewish live in New York city, 30 percent estimated that Americans live.
What percent do they think are Jewish? They, they thought around 30% are Jewish, 30% of Americans are Jewish. I mean, so basically anyone who's a dick or who, who, who's like their manager is probably gotta be 1.5%, right? 2% in, in this live in New York City, 3%. Estimated 30% are gay or lesbian, 3% estimated 30%.
Our atheist 3% estimated 33%. Yeah. [00:56:00] These, these are terminally all on people. Bisexual. Estimated 4% real 29%. I would, we would actually argue probably slightly over 50% because Wait, only wait, hold on. Listen a moment. Yeah. They think really only 4% of people are bisexual, whereas we would argue probably almost all women, no.
So, but the real number of bisexuals in this poll was 29%. No, it was 4%. Oh, okay. Yeah. You said 29 percent or whatever. 29 percent is what they thought. Okay, okay, yeah, you got those numbers backwards. We would think that it was a little over 50%. Are vegan or vegetarian? 5%. No, of females, potentially. Yeah, females.
No, I'm pretty sure, like, Males are basically never bisexual. Like, almost never. I know, but you, that's, I feel like that's the 4 percent though. That like, think they're bisexual. And, which really means that they're like, gay, but they can have low standards sometimes. Gay with low standards sometimes.
Gay with just like, sometimes I'm just I don't know how low the standards are when it's different A penny fuck, [00:57:00] Malcolm. You know, they have a friend who's like, No one will sleep with me, I'm so alone. Simone, I have been to a DMV, okay? I know what, like, your average American looks like. And I'm like, how does this population breed?
And, you know, the joke from, people were posting this on Seinfeld, the joke was, well, alcohol. But here I'm thinking, I'm like, you know, if you're willing to drop your standards, I'm willing to to sleep with like the average type of looking person you see at the DMV, you're probably willing to drop your standards to a different set of genitals than your preference.
At that point, you're just like, is this thing warm and like adjacent to something living? I don't think you understand the desperation of many people. So that's not fair. Okay. Okay. Well, that's exactly, I think I do understand the desperation of some people. That's the point I'm making. Okay. This is a, this is a factor of standards.
Well, here's, here's one that I would have missed. Misestimate. No, poorly estimated that a lot of other people did too. Most people like the, sorry, the collective [00:58:00] estimation for having a driver's license in the United States is 83%. What do you think? What would you guess? It is 60%. Yeah. 68%. I don't know.
That's like a lot of people who aren't technically allowed to drive. It's because you haven't been around stupid people Simone. No, you, you, you, you work in a company that has, you work with like middle intelligence people, but like I, growing up for reasons I didn't, I don't want to get into because people would say, well, you're stereotyping certain groups here associated with more like actual stupid people during my life.
And not having driver's license was actually pretty common in those communities. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, we're going to get started with the episode. We're going to have a long and ample on this one. Sorry, but thank you too. Wait, who sent this to us? I sent you a link. Thank you too.
Thank you to question assumptions for sending us this graph on Twitter. Really appreciate it. At QA underscore [00:59:00] NJ. Thanks.
Being Bullied for Profit: The Man Who Lived as a Fictional Character for a Decade