Episode Details

Are video games the most efficient sin? Malcolm and Simone Collins rank modern sins by their real-world damage — from video games and sports gambling to shopping addictions, plastic surgery, skydiving, OnlyFans, kinks, and more. They break down how to evaluate sins by time cost, financial drain, health risks, negative externalities, addiction potential, and alignment with long-term flourishing.

This episode offers a practical, first-principles framework for thinking about hedonism, temptation, family traditions, and moral trade-offs in the modern world. Topics include gambling vs. heroin, why some “harmless” hobbies are more destructive than others, rechanneling vices into virtues, the value of different lives, and techno-puritan views on self-defense.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to have an interesting conversation around ranking the severity of various modern sins so that we can understand which ones are worse for an individual in, terms of, well, just broad effects they have on your life.

Like, as I’ve pointed out in other episodes, sins are basically a list of things, you know, like don’t cheat on your wife, don’t be mean to people, don’t murder people, like listen to your parents. Stuff that’s just gonna F up your life if you don’t follow it i- in a, in a general format. It’s like a big list of don’t piss on the electric fence and then a- some humans are just like, “But if I just goon all day every day, that’ll feel fantastic, right?”

And it’s like, no, it won’t. Maybe for like a half a day you get to year two of that and you’re living the life of Anna Valen. See our episode on what happened to her life, right? Like going through her [00:01:00] private diaries in our Life of the Sinabyte episode.

Speaker 5: you were an interesting study. Must, greed, deception, fertile ground, but rather mundane.

Speaker 6: Doors to the pleasures of heaven nor hell. I didn’t care, which I thought I’d gone to the limits I hadn’t. The center bytes gave me an experience beyond the limits pain and pleasure.

Indivisible.

Malcolm Collins: it is not happiness at the end of the hedonism maxing tunnel.

As I often point out, if you look at the people in our society who have access to everything they could possibly want, your movie star, your music star, when they indulge in that, when they indulge in the, you know, endless chain of, of women and drugs and everything like that, they often crash out as some of the least happy and satisfied humans alive.

Whereas people who often do not have much, and I’m sure many of you, you know these individuals pious [00:02:00] individuals who just work to give back to the community they’re often some of the most fulfilled people you will ever meet.

And so this is, this is paid off to us, but whatever religious teaching you’re using, and I’m gonna try to keep this, while this is one of the track series, I’m gonna try to keep it useful to not just Christians or Orthodox Jews or anyone, but just broadly anyone because- the, the set of laws that, like, Christians follow seems to generally be useful for other people as well.

That’s why they seem to perfectly overlay with, like, the Noahide laws when Jews are like, “Well, I just want everyone to follow the Noahide laws.” And it’s like, all observant Christians already follow all of those. Like, why are you making this a separate thing? It’s just good rules for life and, and being a member of a community.

But we’re going to start, because where this came up was in a fan call which we have for our paid fans who get [00:03:00] our extra weekend episodes. If you don’t know about that, that, that’s a thing. And they somebody was talking about the relative sinfulness of video games, right? And we’ll be using the Romans quote that’s in here, whi