In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins sit down with researcher David Lorentzon to explore the “hot girl service economy”—an insular, self-reinforcing ecosystem concentrated in places like Bali, Phuket, Dubai, and Miami.

Attractive women are drawn in by modeling gigs, OnlyFans, free travel, and aspirational Instagram lifestyles, then sustain each other through yoga studios, Pilates, hair, makeup, and other services run by other women in the same scene. The result is a lifestyle that rewards staying single, staying hot, and never putting down roots—making family formation and community nearly impossible.

David explains how this economy grew out of broader gender segregation in jobs and geography, why natalist policies barely touch it, and why a combination of economic pressure, travel restrictions, and AI-generated models may soon force many of these women back home. The conversation also covers Mormon influencer exceptions, the “friendship tax,” passport-bro incompatibilities, and whether social shaming or structural change is the more realistic response.

Follow David Lorentzon on TikTok, X, and YouTube for more of his research on gender segregation and demographic arbitrage. :)

Show Notes

We didn’t personally bring show notes to this episode, but David Lorentzon provided some additional notes after we recorded; adding them here!

Yes, China does a lot to reduce global demand, but it’s still not enough. The world has done various measures to reduce the oil supply shock from a 20%- down to a 10%- reduction, which is still large enough to cause a recession bigger than the 2008 financial crisis.

Even if you were to fix the oil supply completely, the other essential exports from the GCC are enough to cause a world recession. The world gets 30% of its synthesized fertilizers transported through the Hormuz Strait, with the worlds farmers having 30% less to use, it will lead to 20-30% less food grown, causing a global famine and high food prices. This is why I talk about “food migrants” and that international travel will have to be shut down to prevent people from leaving famine-striken Middle Income Countries across Asia and Africa.

My mentor Economics Professor Steve Keen predicts that a 100 million people may perish as a result of the famine in the coming 12 months. The big majority of them are mostly living in Africa and Asia.

Besides that, the world gets much of its Helium from the GCC. There’s no reserves or replacement for that. You cannot manufacture the chips used in all technology without helium. So if you have 30% less helium available, it results in 30% fewer digital products made globally.

Lastly, the Sulphuric Acid, a key import required in making copper products, such as electrical wiring. Less sulphuric acid means less copper, which means less cables, less data centers and other tech stuff. There are no replacement or reserves on this.

So all of this means that a global recession of at least 10%-, travel restrictions, famine, pause on building more data centers, and debt deflation is all guaranteed at this point. The crisis will truly begin in the autumn.

All of that will practically put an end to the Hot Girl Service Economy. If people have less disposable income, then that means less money on non-essential services, which the entire Hot Girl Service Economy is.

This will provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for blu e collar men to ‘wife up’ some of the hottest women out there, because they will have lost their entire ecosystem sustaining their lavish lifestyles.

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Another key detail I forgot to mention regarding the Hot Girl Service Economy is that in many of the modeling contracts they include huge fines if the model gets pregnant.

So if the model gets pregnant, not only would she lose her job, but also have to pay a large fine for getting pregnant. This scares many models to not take the risk of having sex.

Such modeling contracts are abhorrent to me, terrible. But if there is a global recession, then the companies and brands will have to tear up these contracts, and fire the models. When this happens, these women are no longer threatened with large fines if they get pregnant. So in that sense, they get liberated. The girls will adapt.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm, and David Lawrence, and our guest today, who is here to talk about the mysterious and also incredibly toxic hot girl service economy.

[00:00:09] So imagine actually, you don’t have to imagine, ‘cause there are actually places like New York, like Dubai, like Phuket, like, Bali that are essentially like sticky fly traps, where women will go because they get random modeling opportunities, random vacation opportunities. They decide to work remotely there for a little bit, and then they basically get sucked into what David has come to call the hot girl service economy, where they develop jobs modeling selling services to models, that almost require them to not only stay there and get sucked into this lifestyle, but continue to stay completely unattached, not meet other people, not form families or have kids, and not go back to whatever their home countries might be or their hometowns might be, which means that they’re increasingly isolated from the rest of society, much in the way that, say an Orthodox Jewish community might be isolated from the rest of society in that they are buying and selling services to and, and from each other.

[00:01:05] They’re not really interacting with the rest of the world. But they are nevertheless often facilitated and made possible by government subsidies in the form of, say, food assistance and housing assistance, and other assistance for people working technically on extremely low incomes perhaps because a lot of stuff is happening off the books, which definitely happens at this, this hot girl service economy.

[00:01:25] So David, tell us how you encountered this, and why you think it matters for people to even know that it exists. Like, who cares that hot girls are, like, disappearing into this fertility trap where they just get shredded?

[00:01:38] David Lorentzon: The way I, the way I got started with public opinion making was on researching the gender segregated economy and mass female marriage migration going on in my country, Sweden.

[00:01:50] And ever since I did that six years ago, I’ve just continued in my lane, focused on it as much as possible, trying to find not just per- good explanations and stories about what’s going on with the men who are segregated from the women, but also finding the stories and explanations for what’s going on with the women.

[00:02:07] And it was only about a year ago that I really coined the term the hot girl service economy to really encapsulate what is actually going on here. So-

[00:02:16] Malcolm Collins: And you, and you interviewed a number of these women to, like, understand their perspective on all of this-

[00:02:21] David Lorentzon: Yeah, yeah ...

[00:02:21] Malcolm Collins: and, and, and what it’s like. Yeah.

[00:02:23] David Lorentzon: So I, I’ve, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to some of these girls that live basically six months or even year round in these various tropical paradises.

[00:02:32] Basically, a hot girl service economy location is some place that is coastal and that is warm year-round. I wouldn’t count necessarily New York as a part of it. There’s a lot of women there, but not as the hot girl service economy hotspot. It would be places like Miami, where you have sun and you can basically be, be in a bikini year-round.

[00:02:52] Bali, Phuket

[00:02:53] Malcolm Collins: But yeah, when he was talking to us about this earlier one of the things that he mentioned was that they often will buy from the same sorts of services. Like, they’ll all go to the same Pilates studio, they’ll all go to the same yoga place, they’ll all get their hair done at the same place, they’ll all eat at the same places, and these places will often be run by women in this sort of hot girl network.

[00:03:13] And we had run into s- such a person in the past. We were meeting with various entrepreneurs and one of them was a woman who had described her yoga studio as like the it yoga studio, the cool yoga studio. And I didn’t quite understand what she meant by this, and at one point she described a guy coming up and being very angry at her because she was quadruple charging him, you know, for...

[00:03:40] He goes, “This, this can’t be right.” And then so she pulled up the profiles associated with all of those accounts, and he goes, “Oh, they all go here?” Just like, the supporting the lifestyles of multiples of these hot girls, and this is part of the way... Like, that’s actually pretty unusual when you think about the economic structure of a [00:04:00] thing in that you have a guy paying for various pretty expensive aspects of a collection of women’s lifestyles which is then trickling down to other women who have been part of this.

[00:04:15] But, but continue. You, you dropped off there for a second.

[00:04:17] David Lorentzon: Right. So you have these various women that we see the most online that are the, like, say, the top models, the top OnlyFans content creators, and they, to continue keeping their job as a hot girl, as a model, et cetera, they have to spend a lot of money on themselves.

[00:04:33] Talking about yoga, dieting, exercise, gym. And when you look at t...