Based Camp: Rich Trad Women Turning to Poly & Kink to Get Pregnant

Malcolm and Simone discuss problems in modern dating caused by dating apps and cultural shifts. They explain how the "lazy 8 problem" leads to unrealistic expectations. Women compare current options to past partners out of their league. Men get overlooked. Simone suggests women try polyamory or kink to land a high-value male. Malcolm says men should lock down a partner by 22 and optimize for gratitude, not glamour. They mention niche religious communities and goal-oriented dating sites as options. Ultimately there are no easy solutions, so people must work hard and have realistic expectations when seeking a partner.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] we have this algorithm for relationship stability , the stability score is a person's individual value to a specific individual who there was divided by What they think they can get on an open market and this can be inaccurate and as long as that number is above one, the relationship will be stable when it falls below one, the relationship becomes unstable and many cultural things can augment this. The reason why celebrity relationships are so intrinsically unstable is because the value of a celebrity on an open market is almost always higher than their value to somebody who's gotten to know them as a human being.

Simone: hello, gorgeous.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be talking to you today, despite the seasonal affective disorder that both of us are feeling.

Simone: It's really unfair to us who are Fected by summer rather than winter, cause no one recognizes our plight.

Simone: But here's one thing we don't have to worry about that actually makes us [00:01:00] extremely smug and I think moderately intolerable, which is our relationship.

Simone: I feel like. Some kind of crazy wealthy person, in the midst of a sea of poverty that is systemic, that is deeply unfair. And people sometimes reach out to us and they're like, Hey, as a, single person with X, Y, and Z characteristics, what tips can you give me?

Simone: And obviously like we tried to give whatever advice we can possibly give. But I'm also like, oh, but like the system is so broken. I really don't know what you're going to do. And I think it's a, an interesting thing to discuss, especially in the context of demographic collapse, of pronatalism of mental health problems, societal decline, as some people like To talk about it.

Simone: So let's dig into it. Let's talk about broken relationship markets.

Malcolm: We are living in a world today where I feel like both men and women are really screwed in relationship markets, but in, in very different ways. And a lot of people feel rightly. [00:02:00] Somewhat helpless in trying to find a partner. And one of the things we're doing is trying to build new cultural solutions, but let's talk about why the existing system isn't working effectively.

Simone: Okay. So we call this the lazy eight problem. It is a problem that emerged with swipe based dating, where dating both became associated with very low switching costs, like switching from one partner to the next was.

Simone: Fairly easy and seamless. There wasn't a lot of social grief you got for breaking up with someone or ghosting them. But also with swipe based dating, it became very image heavy, very aesthetics focused. So whereas before, even on apps like, okay, Cupid, et cetera, you used to be able to compete or appeal to people based on a lot of different metrics.

Simone: Like on, okay, Cupid, my whole, game my churn was to answer their weird questions and end up in people's feeds and then catch their attention there. So it wasn't even images. It was like my funny answers and humor. Like that's just not an option anymore. So it's become like really honed in on.

Simone: Aesthetics driven characteristics.

Malcolm: So before you move further [00:03:00] for some of our listeners, they may not know the way internet dating used to work. So there were two systems that you used to be able to use for internet dating and Simone made effective use of both of them. And they are radically different from the swipe based systems you have access to today.

Malcolm: Essentially it was a directory. So I would go, I would create a long form profile that was much more focused on the text, like who I am, than what I look like. Which gave you an ability to compete on different metrics and not just on attractiveness. Then what you could do is go and search and say, okay, all, women interested in men within 25 miles that are slender.

Malcolm: that are atheists, that are Republicans, you could put a number of metrics in and you would just get a list of every woman who is using the app at that time who fit that criteria. And you could go through, you could sort the, those people and then outreach to them, knowing how valuable each one of them was to you while also knowing that once you exhausted a potential lead.

Malcolm: That lead was exhausted until new [00:04:00] women or men would come onto the app. Now, this is very different than the swipe based system where there is a perception that there are always more people out there instead of a, okay, I have a broad understanding of what everyone of sort of the things that I value most with that entire dating pool, is my area, which actually, it might not be good as the older monogamous systems in terms of relationship stability, because those had really high switching costs.

Malcolm: And I'm not saying good for quality of life. I'm just talking about relationship stability, but it was dramatically better than the current system because you had a perception that was accurate of what was really out on the market. Now, this created a problem when that perception was inaccurate, which often happened and that's the lazy eight problem.

Malcolm: So talk about that. Cause that was a problem both in the old system and the new system, I'd argue.

Simone: Yes, but I think it's become much worse now. So the lazy eight problem is this you'll see in online dating data that we'll just say 80, 20 ish. I don't know [00:05:00] exactly what the proportions are, but 20% of men are sleeping with 80% of women, meaning that most men really aren't getting partners.

Simone: You see this in declining rates of reported sex among men. So that means that most women are dating. You could argue if we're ranking humans from, especially in terms of attractiveness, partner attractiveness from one to 10, they're dating eights, nines, and tens, even if they are a three, four, five, six.

Simone: Even if they're out, like certain, those men are out of their league. Why is this the case? Think about it this way. If you are an eight and you're lazy and you just want to have sex one night, you want to hook up with someone. It's really easy. To just reach out to a six or a five or a seven on Tinder, on OkCupid and have a one night stand with them and never get back to them.

Simone: The problem this creates is the fours, the five, the sixes, the sevens end up thinking that they are entitled to an eight, a nine or a [00:06:00] 10, that they could get an eight or a nine or a 10 as a marriage partner, as a long term partner.

Malcolm: I think entitled might even be the wrong word. I think that they're just genuinely confused.

Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah.

Simone: Yeah. I guess entitled is a little bit too harsh of a term to use, but they're certainly given the impression that

Malcol