Evolution of British Society: From Pre-Industrial to Industrial

In this episode, we delve into a controversial yet intriguing theory, backed by a recent study, about the evolutionary dynamics that may have set the stage for Britain's Industrial Revolution. The theory suggests that higher survival rates among the wealthy during pre-industrial times led to a spread of 'middle-class values' such as discipline, literacy, and lower violence, both culturally and genetically. These traits, inherited by the lower classes through downward social mobility, eventually created a population more suited for industrial productivity. We'll explore the historical context, the supporting data, and the potential implications of this theory for understanding global income inequality and the future of human development.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here today. Today we are gonna be talking about a controversial theory that I hadn't heard before but recently was backed by a new study that came out. So the gist of the theory goes like this. In Britain. , As disease continually killed off the poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the descendants of the wealthy. And that way, according to Colar, the less violent, more literate, and more hardworking behavior, middle class values were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population.

This process of quote unquote downward social mobility. Eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap. So. Essentially what he argued was something unique about the environment of Britain during that period.

And in part, but to a lesser extent, the other countries where the Industrial Revolution caught on, created an evolutionary effect that [00:01:00] altered the populations within these environments at a genetic level, making them more capable of creating something like the industrial Revolution. More specifically, he said.

The, what normally happens in history is as a population advances in technology, it produces more food and then more people exist, and then those more people start to just starve and die. And so you don't really get the opportunity for this, this flourishing. But what was happening in Britain.

Was a unique situation in which the poor were dying at a much faster rate than the rich. And the rich were maintaining their wealth in a way that led their higher fertility rates. And note, he, he brings data to this in the original explanation, which we'll get into, okay. In such a way where their descendants.

Filtered down through the social ranks. So it was more like you had this wealthy class that was producing way more children and those children were [00:02:00] filtering down through the other classes, or is at the other end at like the bottom of the poor. There's like this giant cysts cutting off, cutting off, cutting off every iterative generation and the big new study that came out that was so cool on this.

Looked at the polygenic scores for educational attainment, which today is associated with high educational attainment, which is probably associated with a number of other positive. Things potentially. Yeah. In the British population, so looking at samples of dead bodies, basically from, you know, the year 1000 ad, 1,100, 1,200.

And what you see here is. Basically no change in the rate that this appears from 1000 to around 1700, and then you go from 1700 to the mid 18 hundreds and it jumps a ton. It jumps if you look at this graph.

Hmm.

And to, to get an idea of what this means, if you go to the 1000 population in England the, [00:03:00] the top score.

I don't know what this is. It might be like, like IQ tests here. Average IQ test. Okay. The table compares mean score and upper tail distribution for educational attainment. Okay. Not, not iq. This is the educational attainment scores.

Simone Collins: They're correlated.

Malcolm Collins: Correlated, right? So the mean score in the 1000 CE population was 95.8.

In the 1850s population, it was 1 0 7 0.5. Whoa. So you see it completely jumped there. And, and you see a gradual rise across the population over time. If you go to the top 5%, you go from one 20 in the CE population, 1000 ce into the 1850s population. 132.2. And then if you look at the above 150 CE population, 5% score.

So this is what percent. Of the population is above the 5%. I like if you're looking at the top 5% in the 1850s. Right. [00:04:00] Okay. Okay. Score wise.

Simone Collins: Yeah. In

Malcolm Collins: the 1850s, obviously 5% is above the top 5%. All right. That makes sense to but the percent that was in the one thousands population was only 0.75%.

If, if, if you go, oh my,

Simone Collins: okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If you go to the 1600, it's 3%. So, no. What's a, a a above the top 1%, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. So, the one top, above the top 1% for the 1850s is obviously 1%, but if you go to the 1000 CE population, it's 0.093%. And then the top 1%. So you would've had you know, 10 people in that range.

In the 1850s population for every one person born in that range, in the 1000 CE population of intelligence. Wow. Wow. Okay. This matters because, and, and note here, I'm [00:05:00] not saying this theory is true, but it's a very interesting theory because it looks at the development of a society without comparing different ethnic groups, which I always try to avoid doing when I can.

It just looks. Within one ethnic group. Mm-hmm. Which is really interesting. It is only comparing British people of one time period that didn't have an industrial revolution. Yeah. To British people of another time period, which did have an industrial revolution. Yeah. And I note here that the British people of this other time period, like you go to a South Sea or something like that, like, they did not seem capable.

These are my own ancestors I'm talking about here. So don't accuse me of racism, of creating large scale civilization. As I point out in my One Civilization video my ancestors, if you're like, oh, what did the ancient Brits build? And it's like, well, there is some really nice and detailed ruins in ancient Britain.

You know, you people are like, oh, great, where are they? And I'm like. It's the Roman Bath bath. The, the [00:06:00] Britains didn't make anything like that for about a thousand years after that. Yeah. Like they, they, they, they, it seemed incapable. They were basically idiot tribals in mud huts bringing poo at each other.

When Roman, it was a little, it was a

Simone Collins: little stark. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, we need to be honest, this is one of these things where I'm always like really annoyed when people are like, my people were colonized and then you're a white supremacist because you lauded Roman culture. And I'm like, well, Roman culture isn't my culture.

They colonized me, me lauding Roman culture is no different from. A black person Laing Roman culture or an Asian person lauding Roman culture. It was the descendant of the group that colonized my ancestor, at least my a your

Simone Collins: ancestral culture. Yeah. There's

Malcolm Collins: together, yeah. Like, we can all, all men can look back.

There's a great meme that's like, all the men of like different ethnic groups are looking back at like ancient Rome. The, the, how often do you think you got our, our [00:07:00] Roman. Helmet right there with the, with the Greek helmet in, in frame right here that I got for Father's Day.

Very Father's Day gift. But I found this to be a very interesting theory, and again, I wanna be clear. I'm not saying I support it, I'm saying it's interesting. So, Clark begins by describing the pre-industrial world from 10,000 BCE to 1800 CE as a Malian trapped named after the Alcon economist Thomas Malice.

In this era, technological advances improved productivity and living standards temporarily, however, population grows quickly outpaced those gains, driving incomes back to substance levels. People who don't know who mouse this was, that was the guy who thought that the worst world's population was gonna grow forever.

And what we needed to do was kill people. He's basically the enemy of all ISTs. Although he was, he was

Simone Collins: very much, he was the original population bomb dude. What is it that he wrote? The did he wrote the, a modest proposal. He, he, like when people talk about Malian situations, he was basically just like, we're not gonna be able to feed everyone.

This is dire. Too many people, he was the original [00:08:00] pop popular popularizer. It was

Malcolm Collins: the the modest proposal. One was a bit, it wasn't just about population, it was mostly about the Irish. Because at the time they were breeding like Irish and now they barely have kids at all. You know, as, as we've pointed out, they're gonna be going extinct soon.

The Irish are, one of the populations is definitely gonna go extinct soon. Which is sad, but whatever. Birth rates were high, but death rates from disease, famine and violence kept populations in check societies worldwide, including England, were stuck in the cycle was no sustained per capita income growth.

Clark notes that England was no exception until around the 18 hundreds when productivity finally outran. Population growth, enabling the industrial revolution. The question is why this breakout happened in Britain first. A central pillar of Clark's argument is that in pre-industrial Britain. Particularly from the 1200 to the 18 hundreds, economic success directly translated into reproductive success, creating a form of natural selection, favoring certain [00:09:00] traits.

Wealthier individuals from middle and upper classed had more surviving children than the poor. For example, data from English wills shows that min was assets over a thousand pounds, left nearly four surviving children on average compared to fewer than two for those with under 10 pounds.

Simone Collins: Oh, wow.

Malcolm Collins: That's really stark difference.

And

Simone Collins: that is, yeah. The reason

Malcolm Collins: why this is important to note, if this really was the reason why Britain became so successful is that if we have the exact opposite happening today, if we really are heading into an Idiocracy, we really can lose our civilization. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: this, this shows that selective pressures.

Both change the make makeup of the genetic makeup in addition to downstream of that then culture of a society, but then also the output and development of that society. That's what this is all about. Yeah. And, and

Malcolm Collins: keep in mind that the change can happen quickly. It appears that most of the change happened between the 17 hundreds and the 18 hundreds.

So, that's something to watch out for. Yeah. If, [00:10:00] if this is really happening. And what it means is, is that if you want to like humanity to continue to thrive, you essentially need to genetically isolate yourself from people who aren't thinking about this type of stuff.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which is you know, another reason why we work so hard to source potential mates for our children.

Because you know, you have gotta be careful about them breeding with the gen pop and this is gonna become a bigger problem. Intergenerationally, you know, you're gonna get

Simone Collins: in so much trouble for saying that if,

Malcolm Collins: if, well look, the idio, if you look at the numbers, okay. The, the single genetic trait that is because, you know, I can look at genetic polygenic scores and say, these traits correlate was X or these traits correlate was y

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The single one that has the highest correlation was low fertility. Is intelligence was Oh,

Simone Collins: obesity too. And I think our, well, obesity

Malcolm Collins: was the next highest correlation. Yeah. So, so you're gonna get one population that's like low intelligence, high obesity you know, high, some [00:11:00] other likely negative traits.

That are very genetically successful. And I love it when people are like, oh, how dare you call these, like, negative if they're, what is genetically successful was in the current environment. And it's like something could be successful in a current environment and obviously not be successful was in the wider meta.

Like, not, it, it's like becoming a hyper specialized species before a mass extinction event. Yeah. You could say, well, the species isn't. Genetically, like it's not having problems genetically because it's having lots of kids. And and, and if the species was sentient, one of them could say actually these kids are very non adaptable to changes in the environment.

And so while they are winning within this environment, they are not likely to succeed, was in multiple potential environments. Mm-hmm. And worse you could say, here's this other iteration of the species, which appears to specialize. In taking advantage of the way that this species is specializing.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And, and that's sort of what's happening to humanity right now. If any faction of [00:12:00] humanity does break out and doesn't fall into this you know, idiocracy sort of spiral that faction is going to have a hugely disproportionate amount of power. Because as I said, in many other things, people are gonna bringing be, bringing AK 47 to an automated drone swar fight.

It's just not gonna be relevant What non technologically engaged cultures do, even if they are in this is happening to them.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You're gonna something of your culture that thrives because you exclusively. Or largely depend on exploiting social services of a government. You're, you're gonna quickly stop thriving when that government is no longer capable of providing those social services, which is going to happen with demographic collapse.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. To continue here. This wasn't due to higher birth rates, but better child survival. The rich could afford better nutrition, sanitation in healthcare, reducing mortality and diseases that disproportionately affected the poor. In contrast, the poorest families often failed to replace themselves demographically, their lineages died [00:13:00] out and their social positions were filled by the Downwardly Mobile Offspring of the Rich Clark contrasts this using research with hunter gatherer societies.

The, you know. Tami where violence or aggressive traits correlated with higher fertility or with with aristocratic classes in England, whose warfare involvement led to lower reproductive success. So specifically he pointed out that if you look at, at tribal groups which you often see is, engaging in warfare and being aggressive towards your neighbors leads to higher reproductive success by the research. Mm-hmm. But if you were in medieval England, the exact opposite was true. And what led to higher reproductive success was accumulating capital.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Now this seems like potentially an overstatement to me.

Like I would be very surprised. I mean, I guess not that much if you're talking about a totally decentralized clan based structure. But then why not? You know? Higher reproductive success in like Islamic [00:14:00] cultures, for example, right? Like you could have even higher reproductive success by being wealthy in Islamic cultures because you could have multiple wives, right?

So like, if this was an effect, it should have affected them even more.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Yeah, actually, good point.

Malcolm Collins: Don't know what his counter to that would be. Mm-hmm. This survival of the richest meant that traits associated with economic success, such as discipline, thrift, and long-term planning, literacy and non-violence were selectively favored and passed potentially through both cultural transmission, eg.

Educational values and genetic inheritance. Mm, downward social mobility and the spread of borgo east traits over generation. Bourg. Oh, bourgeois. You see, I didn't get those traits.

Simone Collins: I love you so much. I love you so much. Why? There's something about, you know how, like Elon Musk can't meet a pun, he doesn't fall in love with, with I I can't fall.

I can't. When people mispronounce things, it just kills me. I love it. It's, it's great. [00:15:00]

Malcolm Collins: It, it shows I'm American and don't care.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That's good. So, the rich produced more children than they needed to fill the late positions. So many offspring were demoted socially becoming artisans, farmers, or laborers.

These descendants carried the middle class values impossible genes of their forebears enriching the lower classes. Enriching the lower class. I didn't write this. With traits like patients evident by falling interest rates from 10% in medieval times to four to 5% by 18 hundreds. Harder work, we see longer hours.

The working class in England, it's over that time period. Literacy rising from low levels to widespread in the 18th century and reduced interpersonal violence, homicide rates dropped dramatically. They pointed out that if you go to the beginning of this period, that the homicide rates in the uk in, in sort of the medieval period were today equal to the highest homicide rates in the world in, in some country in Africa.

So like the homicide rates were quite high in [00:16:00] the UK back then. And, and I, I found actually very interesting that he used interest rates as, as evidence here showing that interest rates had to be to be competitive in the early medieval period, 10%. And then by the 18 hundreds, it was only four to 5%.

Mm-hmm. Which is actually a pretty strong argument outside of how sophisticated the banking system was, it's, it's how much do people within the middle classes actually pay back their loans? And what you're seeing here is they paid back them with a higher probability over time.

Simone Collins: That's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Clark estimates this process operated over 20 to 30 generations, about 600 to 900 years, gradually transforming the population's average characteristics. By the 18th century, England had a workforce that was more productive, innovative, and oriented towards saving and investment. Traits essential for industrial capitalism.

Clark suggested this was an evolutionary adaptation from hunter gatherer instincts, impulsivity, short-term thinking, to those suited for agrarian and eventually industrial economies. He leans towards a [00:17:00] genetic component, though he acknowledges cultural mechanisms, arguing that the. Changes were deep enough to alter human nature itself.

Why Britain specifically? The, this was a que a follow. I was like, yeah, but why not? Like other places, what happened in Britain that was so unique?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Versus, I don't know, like the Netherlands or Sweden.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, all those places industrialized really early. So you need to choose a place in industrialize more slowly.

I.

Simone Collins: That's in the area, I would wanna think, but yeah,

Malcolm Collins: or Russia. Russia I think would be a better like counter example.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So Clark attributes britain's primacy to its unique historical condition that amplified its evolutionary process. Institutional stability from the Norman Conquest. In 10,066 onwards English enjoyed relatively politically stable as a island nation with secure property rights and low internal violence.

This allowed for selective pressures to operate consistently, unlike more turbulent societies like China or India, where invasions or [00:18:00] instability disrupted the process.

Simone Collins: Hmm,

Malcolm Collins: I don't buy that. Maybe. Maybe early capital. I mean, I, I guess I'm just more like, yeah. But the Muslim countries, it should have been, had a louder effect in early capitalist orientation.

England's economy rewarded economic trades, EG thrift and innovation more than Marshall prowess accelerating the speed of B Forgoes

Simone Collins: bourgeois.

Malcolm Collins: Bourgeois values.

Simone Collins: Thank you.

Malcolm Collins: I needed that

burgo. I've got all those Virgo values.

Simone Collins: Yeah. What a, what A Burgo restaurant to go to

Malcolm Collins: Mr. Stanford graduate degree. Comparison to other societies in places like Japan or China, similar Malian dynamics existed, but less downwards mobility or differing selective pressures favoring conformity over innovation.

Delayed breakthroughs. Poor countries today, Clark controversially implies may lag due to incomplete adaptation [00:19:00] of these traits, whether genetically or culturally. And if he's right, it means that feeding the poor or preventing poor people from dying is genetically sabotaging. Many countries and that the, when wealthy countries do this to other countries, essentially they're trapping them in a such cycle of intergenerational poverty.

Mm-hmm.

And that the, the UK did well because the poor, it didn't, didn't help them. He argues that this, it's a bad look, Malcolm. What? It's a bad look. I'm not arguing it. I'm not arguing. I'm just saying that other people are arguing this.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: I've even argued against his explanations here at times, you know?

Mm-hmm. People he argues this explanation, not just the industrial revolution, explains not just the industrial revolution's timing and location, but also persistent global income inequalities. Ooh. Okay.

So, before, we, we go into this more 'cause I, I, I think that this is, this is interesting.[00:20:00]

Clark argues that the transformation took hundreds of years because natural selection and cultural transmission operates slowly across generations. The process began in earnest in the medieval times, around 1200 to 1,250 post Norman Conquest in 10 66, which established institutional stability when England's economy rewarded traits like thrift discipline and literacy with higher reproductive success.

Over 20 to 30 generations, approximately 550 to 900 years. The bourgeois traits spread downwards through society. Okay, so let's, let's try to steal, man, this, how would this work specifically in England, really what he is arguing here is stability in England over this period meant being Marshall did not lead you to have more children.

And he is arguing this was not the case in other regions. And I agree with, I I I do think like if you're looking before this period in England, England was like a bunch of waring clans. It was like just as warlike as anywhere else in the world. Yeah. And after this period where England was.

Normally it [00:21:00] really did suffer a lot less war than other regions. So like this extended period of peace in which poor people are allowed to die allowed for this which plausibly, and then in, but I don't know. I, I, I, I pushed back because I think that, you know, there was a lot of conflict across the European continent throughout this period.

Even if people were under large states and Europe industrialized like way faster than other locations. And I don't know if you had this same phenomenon playing out in the American frontier as much in America, industrialized super early too. But maybe

Simone Collins: I don't, a America, I think industrialized because so many of the areas where you saw that early industrialization was like, for example, in the, in the South, where you had a bunch of people who literally moved there to create businesses to make money, and so they would be, yeah.

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: You have the selective pressure of only taking the, the most [00:22:00] industrious people.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And people who are literally only there just to make money instead of to say survive. And, and you had a very different set of also, like you had slaves who were working instead of like, people kind of farming their own land in a much more, this

Malcolm Collins: house didn't industrialize for a long time because of slavery.

Yeah, it was slower.

Simone Collins: It was slower because of the Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But still a lot of people don't realize that when they argue that. Slaves, like Built America or whatever, or like helped the south economically that they're basically arguing for slavery. They're, they're basically saying slaves were an economically beneficial institution when if you actually look at the data, slavery almost certainly economically hurt the south and prevented the south from, from economically developing.

But. The, the wealthy parties and the entrenched power structures within the South benefited from keeping the institution of slavery around because they were in positions of power, in part because of the existing economic structure that had been built within the region. [00:23:00] Mm-hmm. But slavery was not good for the south.

It wasn't good for the overall economy of the south. It was bad after slavery ended the south rapidly, economically developed. And it's not like it was like a poise to, to, to be about to do this. But to to, to this larger point. A lot of people, the, the, if you look at the selective pressures, because we can see by looking at the polygenic scores that we associate with educational attainment we can see how quickly they're disappearing from population samples today.

And there was a nicet. Set that shows as well. You can also look at the dropping IQ of people who go to college and is dropping by about 0.1 points per year. This was both in a French, in a United States study. And so we're looking at about a one standard deviation drop in the average IQ about every 75 years.

But what you can see from his data is that this means a way faster drop in the number of people who are born in the top one or 5% of people's I IQs because you get that's where things disappear when you get this, this center moving. It's at the long tail distributions.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well things just [00:24:00] seem to be accelerating really quickly and moving faster on all fronts.

So yeah, we have a, I mean, with this level of technological advancement it wouldn't surprise me that the changes would be much faster, but I don't know. I mean, like in general, the concept of evolutionary pressures changing, the composition of a population, which in turn changes the way that that population engages with technology and.

Commerce and capitalism, and it makes a lot of intuitive sense. I, I don't know how you couldn't have that happen.

Malcolm Collins: Well, people would say it might take longer than this, but we, as we can see from the data, it clearly doesn't seem to another really, I know like literally like

Simone Collins: people who, I don't, not to use such a blunt comparison, but people who breed dogs, like if you stop breeding dogs with floppy ears.

You, you're gonna get no more dogs with floppy ears. You know? Like if, if you just don't. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: No, I hear you. And there was another interesting study on this. If you're [00:25:00] like, oh, like has IQ ever gone down before, after the collapse of a civilization? Mm-hmm. We see this in a study that came out. Of that looked, yeah.

That looked at Roman populations. Mm-hmm. And it showed that the Roman iq reached, or it was propensity for educational attainment, which is what he was studying as well. So IQ is the wrong thing. It propensity for what, what is associated with higher educational attainment today.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: It, it, it went up like if you're talking about like the early Roman Empire and then it went up, up, up until you get to like the middle of the Roman Empire and then it starts to collapse.

Before, yeah. So it

Simone Collins: precipitated the fall.

Malcolm Collins: It precipitated the fall, the collapse in IQ happened before the collapse of the Roman Empire. Mm-hmm. And, after the collapse, it started going back up again. But e even today, the average Roman IQ is not as high as it was during the height of the Roman Empire.

Which is, I mean, it shows how dramatic these effects can be. And so, I think one of the things, like when I talk about the average IQ dropping likely by. One standard deviation over the next 75 years. You know, people can hear this and they're like, well, [00:26:00] and I'm talking basically three generations is what I'm looking at here.

People can look at this and they can be like, well. I am still not gonna engage with your weird genetic technology or screening or whatever. And it's like, if you don't find another way to present some form of genetic selection and prevent this from happening within your own population your population is going to go that pathway as well.

Simone Collins: Well, people already engage in genetic genetic selection by choosing who, right? They have kids with.

Malcolm Collins: That is very hard to do intergenerationally with fidelity around these sorts of things. When one of your son has some hot girl who comes from gen pop flirting with them, right. You know, especially if your son is more economically successful.

So. You're, you're, you, you, you really need to culturally impart this. And if you don't culturally impart, like genes are real and you have to pay attention to them you are going to end up in the unga Bunga tribe. You know, the, the people who are so rabidly against the forms of genetic technology that we use I do not think that they realize the [00:27:00] horrors.

They are committing their children to now of course they'd say about us like that Adams family scene, you know, your family is like some sort of weird medical experiment. And I'm like, and we are proudly and proudly.

Speaker 5: I think that's disgusting. I think their whole family's like some weird medical experiment.

I think they're like circus people.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I'm done with that.

Simone Collins: I love you too. I'll point out just one, one little caveat too that any trait that's correlated with success now, it could be intelligence, it could be anything else, could be.

A death sentence depending on the conditions you're living with, you know, so it to make any blanket value statement about these are good and these are bad genes is dumb because as soon as the environment changes, that could completely flip. So

Malcolm Collins: I completely agree. I mean, culturally speaking, we would've thought you know, being [00:28:00] Amish is, is bad, right?

Like, it's not useful if we're talking about like cultural evolution yet it turns out that it's really useful in today's environment. Mm-hmm. I would've thought growing up being an Orthodox Jew isn't useful, and yet they're absolutely thriving. If you're looking at like fertility rates and, and intergenerational cultural fidelity.

Mm-hmm. So it's very hard to predict what's going to be good and what's going to be bad. That's why it's, it's good to only make these decisions not from a eugenic perspective, IE an absolute perspective, but from a polygenic perspective, IE from the, the perspective of your own family,

Simone Collins: yeah, you need to make that judgment and you need to understand that you might be wrong and that people should have a right to make their own decisions.

Malcolm Collins: Love you, Deeson.

Simone Collins: I love you too. So just pasta with pesto tonight. Or anything else? Just

Malcolm Collins: pasta with pesto tonight. If I want something else, I may do like some salsa or something. But pasta with pesto sounds really good and, and with extra pesto 'cause it's so yummy. Okay. And do we have any Parmesan left?

Simone Collins: Maybe we definitely have. A hard cheese [00:29:00] from toast. Oh, let's do that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we gotta cut off the parts of it that went bad, but I love that hard cheese on the pasta pito.

Simone Collins: Perfect. Okay. I'll get out the little wheely grater

Malcolm Collins: we're on. We can put it on after, after it's cooked up.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I'll let you know as soon as we're ready.

Malcolm Collins: You are my princess. I love you. Why do I get to be married to someone as special as you?

Simone Collins: Because you made everything in our lifestyle the way it is. You, you built this up, you got the fixer upper wife, and now you get to enjoy the beautiful renovated house of a wife of

Malcolm Collins: of of wife. That's what you are, the renovated house of a wife.

Yeah. No, you invest in a lot though,

Simone Collins: like fixer uppers require a ton of work, and I hate the idea. Of getting fixer uppers. And you did that on, on the human level. I mean, you invested in a graduate degree in a complete, like several complete makeovers tons of education aside from formal school education.

So I'm just saying yeah. You earned it. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You I really am [00:30:00] rock tumbled that rock to get a, a big shiny stone out of it. Seriously. And a lot of good. I can't believe

Simone Collins: how long you have to do that. When we bought that rock, Tumblr for the kids thought was like, oh, three hours and it'll be done.

And it was like, no, leave this on for days. That was horrible. It's so loud. Who buys the, why did we do that? I didn't know. Remember the kids crying over who gets the Red Rock after we finally opened it? The collective grief in our households that we caused simply by doing this whole process of rock polishing and the stupid little plastic discovery education.

Rock Tumblr. It was horrible.

Malcolm Collins: At least you didn't get a nice one.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess. Fair enough.

Malcolm Collins: Just watching a homax video on, on women being the worst.

I really feel like, you know, after we did that episode that like chilled me on the New York Times writer who was driven crazy by feminism. And I've been reading other articles about like, what it's like to date these days and I just feel [00:31:00] so a sense of despair for young people in this generation who don't have their parents actively helping them date.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like obviously we are trying to set things up for our kids. We work with other, you know, high profile parents who are like super competent and age agentic and orthogonal and try to, you know, keep track of them when they have kids around our kids' age and we have a big CRM of this and we're gonna be working on building those relationships.

Yeah. And I think that all, that's really the only way to, to secure a, a, a spouse for our kids anymore.

Simone Collins: Well that, and I think really un underrated is the extent to which parents always did that in the past. They, they were always pretty involved in their kids dating. Yeah. And it's only really recently that parents became super hands off on that front on average this, this expectation that there are these third spaces, or there's this dating culture.

Which I think really saw its big rise [00:32:00] in the 1950s that will facilitate finding a partner is just crazy. I I, I, I've been listening to these historical biographies and, you know, there's like, there are maybe five men that you meet in like a 10 year period who might be people you could marry, you know, if, if you're a woman.

Like there, there just wasn't that much choice.

Yeah.

And. So either you would marry the person who was kind of obvious and who would propose to you, or you would propose to them because you kind of don't have any other choices or your parents would get involved and try to help. And now, I don't know, I, I, I, we have to get involved again because those third spaces in that dating culture is gone.

And it was really unusual in the 1950s when we had this age in which. There was almost this manufactured dating culture because I think to a certain extent it was outsourced to the state and schools would literally run videos, like propaganda videos [00:33:00] teaching you how to date and being like, this is how you do it.

Yeah. This is how you vet partners. And there was this, there was structured language around it. There was the concept of going steady versus just dating people. And

Malcolm Collins: well, and the, the way to escalate where you would have you, you'd get their, their leather jacket or leatherman

Simone Collins: jackets. There were promise rings.

Yeah, there was, it was, it was very, I mean, similar to like the London season, you know, there were, there were, there were signals and things meant something, except in this case, the parents had abdicated their responsibility and the state slash larger society had taken it on. But then society this's a really good

Malcolm Collins: point.

The state took over dating for a period, and then it abdicated that. Yeah. We decided his job was actually to prevent sex in dating

Simone Collins: Uhhuh.

Malcolm Collins: Which is really what happened was the, the period of abstinence only and everything like that. That's a really good point.

Simone Collins: Yeah, is

Malcolm Collins: the state took over dating and courtship from the family, and then it abdicated that during the abstinence only movement.

Mm-hmm. Which I think was really, really harmful for, for our [00:34:00] culture. Because it, it, it normalized. The demonization of human sexuality which unfortunately just made it cool for kids and allowed kids to develop their own culture around what sexuality was, which then they went into this period of total debauchery.

Then everyone was like, well that's, that's wrong. And now they seem to have forgotten how to have sex. Which, you know, we go over another video, you know, just the rates of sex are plummeting. Anyway. Oh wait, what were, what were people saying on the comments of the video today?

Simone Collins: I I think in general, it was something along the lines of.

Honestly, just women are terrible. Women don't realize this. You know how bad they are. I think a lot of men didn't actually engage, or a lot of viewers didn't actually engage with the topic of this being more about social class than about gender wars. And instead, many are still like repeating as though they're broken [00:35:00] records.

Women are delusional and they, they're hyper gamy. They're trying to get high value men. That Yeah. They don't warrant. And I agree that that's true, but let's stop beating the dead horse. Okay. Like we're, yeah, no, I mean, trying to look

Malcolm Collins: at this from different angles. I mean, some of these people aren't smart enough to do anything else.

They're just like, NPCs at this point, still appreciate the comments. We're really bad.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, I, I'm, it's great to see you. Thank you. Yeah, I yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. I mean, you're, you're clearly a terrible woman. I'm, I'm, I'm so obviously,

Simone Collins: and, and I'm, I obviously going to screw you over somehow soon.

Malcolm Collins: No, I, you're fully domesticated at this point.

I don't think that you're not a domestic wife. You're a domesticated wife. I had to, to to break her will anyway.

Speaker: How are the berries guys? Do you like them?[00:36:00]

Good, Barry to hope my hands are getting Daddy. Of course, you're outside. Pick a berry and eat it. Octavian. Do you want any berries? I don't hate my gun up at the sky.

And Octavia, are you guys done picking blackberries? Yes. You wanna go back inside? Can we go play water garden? Well then you need to get on your water shorts. Okay, let's go. And daddy. Safe, so put it on daddy desk and it'll be somewhere safe. Okay? Okay.

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