Self-Defense Strategies in Uncertain Times

In this video, we delve into the significant vibe shift in America following the recent election cycle. The discussion features commentary on social and political changes, including insights from various left-wing and right-wing streamers. The conversation highlights the reactions from diverse demographic groups, touching on topics like personal safety, reproductive rights, and the public's changing political affiliations. This video also explores the current state of mainstream media, the influence of social platforms like Blue Sky, and the overall public sentiment. Whether you're left-leaning, right-leaning, or somewhere in between, this video offers a comprehensive look at the evolving American political landscape.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone, I'm excited to be talking to you today. Today we are going to be talking about the vibe shift in America post this election cycle. Some of my favorite streamers have been talking on this subject.

This has like been a reverberating subject in the online, right? Starting with an Asmongold video and then people commenting on the Asmogold video and then people commenting on people commenting on the Asmogold video. And I think it's because everyone knows it's true. And he was just the first to put a finger on it.

And I'll go into my experience of this. We'll go into some other people's experiences of this. But I want to hear from you, first, Simona, somebody who didn't even know that this is something that's being talked about. Because you've been watching, like, left wing streamers now. We need to talk about this.

Simone Collins: I love, oh my gosh, yeah, I can't even get into it.

I'm loving, I'm loving this. We

Malcolm Collins: will get into it, though. The one who thinks that she needs to, like, prep for war. It's insane. She expects people to come to her house and, like, drag

Simone Collins: her away. She's going to have her uterus removed. Like, actually.

Speaker 7: Okay, for those of us who have a uterus to contend with, I [00:01:00] personally plan to get mine fully yeeted before January 20th.

Not just sterilized, removed. I already knew that I didn't want kids because pregnancy would be a disaster for me medically, but this incoming administration is my cue to make that decision final. My answer to your body my choice is to entirely remove the part of my body they're trying to regulate. It is a rousing f**k you to any shitty man who voted for this.

Simone Collins: So, yeah. Oh my god, has she had kids yet? No, but she's married to, like, a really sweet dude,

Malcolm Collins: so it's kind of sad.

And the dude is, she's like, he's a first generation Indian immigrant. So they're going to come. He's not an illegal immigrant. Is he? No, they're not coming from him. You psycho. This isn't, she is preparing for her time in the camps, like getting her bug out bag ready and everything.

Speaker 7: I am a disabled, genderqueer, AFAB artist married to a first generation Indian American. So we'll be going over how we plan to protect ourselves and others from proposed mass deportation plans, how to remain safe in public if you're an [00:02:00] at risk demographic, steps you can take to prepare for crackdowns on reproductive freedoms, and how to build communities so that we can all lean on each other in times of need.

So even if you are an able bodied, cisgender, Cishetwhitemanwhosefamilyarrivedonthemayflower, this video will be useful to you too. We need as many people on the team as possible, and you do have a role to play. I also want to acknowledge that that these protections don't necessarily guarantee that you won't still be detained or that the person who's questioning you won't still resort to violence.

These are buffers, not shields, and I'm sorry for that.

Malcolm Collins: Well,

Simone Collins: but she's also arming herself.

So like, I, I appreciate the fact that she's like, get your firearms, get your concealed carry, go to the shooting range, know how to use your stethoscope. stuff. When you're not permitted to conceal, carry, like, and carry concealed, like have an actual weapon that you can use in an alternate. For example, I use a heavy bike chain.

Speaker 7: If you cannot or will not, Purchase a gun, still arm yourself to the teeth in every way you can, stash s all over your house, in your car, and on your person.

I have knives hidden all over my house, as well as a hammer in my car, and pepper gel in a homemade club stashed in my bag. Not every place you go [00:03:00] will allow weapons, so you need to build up some plausible deniability. That homemade club I mentioned? It's a heavy duty padlock tied to a scarf. When going through security, simply remove the padlock, from the scarf, and there you go.

You now have two completely harmless and totally unrelated items. Bag of coins and a sock, same concept. Just separate them when you're going through security.

Simone Collins: Like I'm, I'm liking, like, are we going to get, are we going to get like a leftist

Malcolm Collins: militants? Like we've had right.

Simone Collins: There are, I was going through the comments on her YouTube video and it was like, left wing prep were here. Like also make sure you know how to forage like they're out there. And it's funny because there's this like full circle where I'm like, you sound exactly like me.

But for some reason you think that, like, everything's gonna fall apart now, this is so weird. Whatever. I

Malcolm Collins: think they're coming, they're coming to your house. They are delusional in the extreme, and I think, like, actively dangerous.

Speaker 7: It's not perfect, but you can mess up somebody's knees pretty bad, and that makes escaping a much more viable option. You need element of surprise to make it work, though, so make sure you're fast.

It's not an effective enough weapon to be used as a deterrent, so the time between you revealing you have [00:04:00] it and it making contact should be as close to zero as you can manage.

Simone Collins: Well, no, no, no. I, I, my favorite part about her, I just have to gush. Cause I'm, I'm like in love.

Like she's amazing. Just from like, you know, I'm obsessed with weird subcultures. Like, you know, I had this like time where I went through all these weird Japanese subcultures and you just deep dive on them and you get obsessed. She is Just there's only really two videos of hers that are good for this, but she's an amazing view into this far left progressive subculture in the way that she deals the world.

She is late in life. She became deaf. So she knows sign language and most of her videos are teaching sign language and she has 1 video on how to sign. Various progressive terminology, like your, your, your gender and if you're poly and the, the amazing thing is there's this part of the video where she's like, well, in ASL, there are no pronouns, but I'm still going to walk you through how to introduce your pro.

It's

Malcolm Collins: the [00:05:00]

Simone Collins: best video.

Malcolm Collins: I heard it. This is like a big problem. They haven't like. I don't know, Finland or somewhere in Northern Europe where they don't naturally use pronouns. So what progressives in the country have done is use English pronouns, added them to their language just so they can force people to use the right pronoun.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That seems to be the same phenomenon here, but yeah, I, I loved it. And it was, it's actually like, aside from it being about culture wars or like left versus right, it's just really fascinating to see someone walk through like, here's the etiquette. In ASL of like how to introduce pronouns and how to explain to people that you're poly and here's what the language is and like the construction of the language and like also the etymology of the sign language, which she went over, like, well, you know, like, lesbian started out as this and part of it was like a sex joke, but then like, because deaf people often really center around church communities, like it evolved, like the language evolved this way.

And it's, it's fast, [00:06:00] like, it's a really good video. Like I'm, I'm super in and her project 20, 20, 20, sorry, her project 2025 prep video, which you first referred to where she's talking about just like, all right, the world's going off the edge. This is, it is one of the most fascinating views in this

Malcolm Collins: mindset, insanely boring.

She is, she is, she's gotten poor timing, she delivers information way too slowly. She, she could be way, way, way, way tighter. It could be way, way, way more interesting. She makes analogies that don't make any sense, even if you assume her world perspective. Yeah, she presented it as like

Simone Collins: We'll make like a Game of Thrones, a Game of Thrones analogy and then it like completely fell apart.

But No, just from like an anthropological perspective for Chan. No, an

Malcolm Collins: anthropological perspective, I, I like looking at her the same way I like looking at Chris Chan. You know, like Yeah, no, but like, so that has inherent worth. Chris Chan thinks he has a magical world that's all real. And [00:07:00] that's fascinating.

And she thinks that Wright is going to come and drag her from her house because she's gay. Like, this is, or fake gay, she's not real gay, she's dating a guy and she's a girl. No, now she's married.

Simone Collins: No, they're, they're happily married. No, gay

Malcolm Collins: in that way where she has identified herself as not a her, but like a they or something.

And so she's like definitionally gay and her husband's definitely, oh my God, I hate these self identified gay identities. I'd be so mad if I was like an actual gay person who fought for gay rights for so long. And now people like this can just be like, I identify as cisgender and now I'm queer. In fact, I'm more queer than you gay man.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Sorry, going over the video again, I realized, I assumed she was identifying as some form of gay by calling herself an a fab. But when I looked up, what a fab mint in. Progressive brain melt. Apparently it just means woman. , so like a normal woman. Sorry. I know you're not supposed to say normal, but yeah, it means a normal woman.

Malcolm Collins: Sorry. Let's get into this actual topic. I want to hear your thoughts on it. Okay. Has there been a vibe [00:08:00] shift?

Simone Collins: It's hard for me to say cause I'm not, I'm not as online as you are. I, I, I will say that there is some, there's not as much freaking out on the left as I expected. And I think a lot of that's because a lot of the people that. We're catering to that extremist view, didn't really hold those views themselves and thought their audience did.

And then after Trump won by a significant margin, they realized, oh, I don't have to front. For that so much like, the

Malcolm Collins: pressure is also a risk, a reputational risk to continue doing that because they just, a lot of them said that their side was going to win the election. They lost that prediction. And now all of these other insane views, which I bet they knew weren't going to happen.

They didn't really believe any of this stuff. They now have to walk those back because of, you know, they don't come and break down this girl's door and take her and her [00:09:00] boyfriend away for identifying as. Demi gender unicorns that she's going to be like, Hey, they were all lying to me. So there's that aspect, but I'd say as a online person, very online, I've noticed a giant vibe shift, a vibe shift online and in person interactions.

Simone Collins: Okay. What's going on? Break it down for us. Offline nerds, apparently.

Malcolm Collins: Offline nerds are people who just don't interact with other people that much, I guess. Yeah. So, the first is, is, it's like this weird, like, big coming out day for a lot of people, where a lot of people who I thought of as left leaning or centrist seem to be quite happy that Trump won, and are sort of coming out and being like, like, Yeah, I wanted this.

Some of them even don't seem to have realized because I've seen this in some interviews where they're like, I thought I was ambivalent to who won, but when Trump won [00:10:00] and looked like he was winning, I got really excited. And then I realized I haven't been ambivalent at all. I've wanted Trump to win for a long time.

And I think that's another thing that has happened within this community. Is a lot of people weren't sure right up until the end. They thought that they were you know, swallowing their pride. And I think even in the first Trump election cycle, that was an election cycle that I feel that Hillary lost.

I think a huge part of the Trump vote came from people who despised Hillary. In the Biden election cycle, there were still a lot of these never Trumpers or tradition, transitioning never Trumpers around. And I saw this. I think what we have seen is a full transitioned of a portion of the U. S.

population into enthusiastic Trump voters. And we'll go over the data on this. And not just enthusiastic Trump voters, but enthusiastic Republicans. in a way that I don't think that there have been this degree [00:11:00] of enthusiasm before. So I think that we're seeing two things. One is there's a huge amount of euphoria on the right right now and not like, and the left didn't have this type of euphoria when they beat Trump last time.

They beat him with a candidate that they saw as an institutional compromise candidate.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the responsible choice. No one gets excited about making what they feel is the responsible choice. Trump, for everyone, was the fun choice. The treat yourself president, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 9: Treat yourself.

Speaker 10: Velvet slippies, cashmere socks, velvet pants, cashmere turtle. I'm a cashmere velvet candy cane. Treat yourself!

Speaker 11: I mean, this is insane.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah there was that, but then there was also the element of I think that the democratic machine, even as Biden was winning and one was still, well, climate change is going to kill us and they're not really doing anything about that. The right are still all a bunch of Nazis, [00:12:00] you know, the country is still descending into madness.

I'm still living with persecution every day. It was a bandaid for them. The enthusiastic. Trump contingent, which I think is the dominant contingent on the right. And the statistics do show that this is a case. Doesn't have a bleak view of America's future. They have an incredibly optimistic view of America's future.

And I think unbridled optimism, that to me has been the most shocking part of the vibe shift. But in addition to that, there's the second order thing, which is in the first Trump, when many people saw it as a referendum on stuff like pollsters, like pollsters got it wrong. They saw it as. A faction of extremist Americans who you know, they, they, they really saw as deplorables, like even, even among our communities you know, educated people, the people who now have moved to the Trump side, the people who now make up, you know, your JD Vance's and stuff like that.

There was [00:13:00] still a view of like, well, I don't really like either of these candidates. I may secretly vote for Trump, but I'm going to tell myself, I don't like him. I'm not going to be like openly enthusiastic about him.

That has transitioned.

The, the other thing that happened was that in this, this election, the referendum was not on Trump, but almost sort of seen as culture more broadly. So.

Simone Collins: Well, it's, I mean, I actually think Trump is a bigger part of this than you may give him credit for, but what I have heard from people is that they're not excited about the Republican Party.

They're excited about Make America Great Again. They're excited about the new right. Like, they're excited that, oh, wait, like. Conservatives aren't what I thought I were like. They were conservatives are fun. Like this is that this is the, this is literally a mandate and an administration that is all about fixing things.

And I think people are really except they're like, wait, could we actually have a simplified tax code? Could we actually have curtailed government spending? Like, this is exciting. Like, [00:14:00] like

Malcolm Collins: JFK, like over the FDA. And I think a lot of people, like a lot of the leftist. Who are just really like deep staters corporatists, bureaucrat type people, they respond to this like, oh, can you believe he said this?

Can you believe he said this? But I think anyone who is like a mainstream American who's watched this guy's videos, Or like, Oh, he wants to put like regulations on stuff that should have had like, you're like, Oh, this sounds great. Ready thing to do or what the Democrats told people they were about. And I think what people are realizing, and this has been one of the realizations, it's like the people who watch the JFK videos who know what JFK is really about.

They're like, Oh. The Republican Alliance includes things like granola moms now. I didn't fully understand that. I thought that was like a confused lady, not somebody who literally had all of her positions embodied and the person who's running the

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: The secretary of health and human services.

Speaker 12: This is what most Americans innocently put [00:15:00] into their bodies these days, and most alarmingly, into the bodies of their children we've grown now to accept chronic disease conditions as normal. But now, in 2024, we're finally waking up to this cataclysm and we're asking ourselves, how in the world did this happen?

A big part of it is our diet. Restaurants that serve contaminated food are fined or shut down. When it's the government that approves the poisons in our food, a few people get very, very rich, and the toxins end up in every supermarket aisle. Let me show you what I mean. Doritos, Cheez Its, Cap'n Crunch, Gummy Bears.

Everyone knows that these are junk foods, so maybe you wouldn't be too surprised to see that the ingredients include a lot of poisons, including a harmful yellow dye called tetrazine, or yellow dye number five today, it's made from petroleum, not coal tar. Either way, it's crazy to add this to your kid's favorite foods. It doesn't even change the flavor. This [00:16:00] yellow dye isn't just in junk food, it's in the foods that we consider healthy.

It's in everyday kids snacks like popcorn, mac and cheese, fruit snacks. It's in sports drinks like Gatorade and so called vitamin water. It's even added to chicken broth, to corn, to pickles, to mustard, and to yogurt. And so, of course, our kids get sick. And we lovingly feed them chewable vitamins which have, surprise, Tartrazine.

And so the cycle continues until the coughs and asthma kick in, at which point you go to pick up some cough serum. And yeah, you guessed it, Tartrazine. I've been picking on Tartrazine today, but that's just one of at least a hundred chemical poisons that our health agencies allow into our children's food. All eight of those crucial steps forward in our kids health were taken under President Trump. But the Democrats, who claim to be all about health care, have stood by watching other countries ban these poisons and make our kids sick, asthmatic, [00:17:00] hyperactive, and depressed.

They left them on every supermarket shelf in America. They even used your tax money to put them in your kids school lunch. So their big food and their big ag donors probably gave them all that golden handshake and the big money hug. And their big pharma donors probably called them up and thanked them also, because now they're gonna make billions selling Adderall, Prozac, and rescue inhalers.

Enough is enough. President Trump and I are gonna stop the mass poisoning of American children.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: So there's that but I think it's more like a okay So this year when you talk about things like the sweet baby inc controversy and gamergate 2 You had this series of like major flops of things coming out and nobody at all buying it Whether it was the woke concord or the woke dustborne or you can watch our videos on this stuff And just no audience for it or the woke star wars acolyte Nobody's watching this.

We have seen a shift To where if something has [00:18:00] any degree of wokeness in it, everyone stays away from it. And I think there was this, people have been beginning to, like, this needed to prime the pump before the Trump election for the vibe ship to happen. Because there were people at the top of a lot of companies and people in a lot of, Corporate positions who are like, it doesn't seem financially good for us to continue supporting these woke individuals like do we, maybe we should begin rolling back, you know, you begin to have people talk about maybe rolling some of this stuff back the break in the wall of this damn, like, Where, where the cracks in the water was spewing out was really big.

Like there were already, if this was a movie, there were already pieces of concrete, like shooting this way and that right before the election happened. But when the election happened and I almost am struggling to psychologically understand why this happened. And I think I have a chain of events that can explain it.

It's like. For a lot of people who sort of [00:19:00] felt this way but were unsure if they could commit to it in a public context, we're now like, I can say DEI is dumb as s**t. I can say that this is bad for our company. I can say we need to stop doing this stuff. I can say Trump isn't Hitler. I can say that The multiple of three riots were staged by a three letter organization and all of the evidence completely supports that at this point.

I can say that because we've had a lot more stuff come out since then, I can't talk about it in detail. Actually, I'd say the core reason why you, the audience if you still think that it was a genuine eye attempt It is because the evidence that proves it wasn't is so heavily censored. It is one of the most censored things we can talk about on this channel, which is why we don't talk about it.

It was like now, like all of the evidence is basically in, there is no doubt in my mind, one iota which is [00:20:00] shocking. That they got away for this for so long, but people who are like interested, engaged people now know, oh, we had a feds erection where the fed basically tried to take over the state government with the bureaucracy and succeeded in doing so.

And now it is the average citizen taking the part of the country back. The other thing I've noticed is I think where you have a. And this feels very much like come join the fun side for me. Like, Oh yes.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: People have been joining the right as you've seen more and more over this election cycle. And you see this in this thing, especially among young people's becoming every generation, the young vote moves further and further to the right for the last three election cycles.

You have this, Oh my God, they're actually really fun. Like their events aren't numerous. And I think that when this side won, Last time there was a group of lefties who are like, we are gonna like buckle down and we're going to be the rebellion and we're going to be fighting in [00:21:00] the background to make sure that, you know, the country stays, our democracy stays, everything like that.

And I think that there is a portion of the semi dedicated left that when the call to this happened this time around, they're just like, There isn't actually going to be people being dragged from their houses unless they're illegal immigrants. I should just go join the fun side Oh, it's no longer racist to be a Trump voter.

Oh, it's no longer homophobic to be a Trump voter. Like what? Why am I fighting this so hard?

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: And if the girl whose videos we used earlier in this video ends up watching this. This is what we would say to you.

There's room on the fun side for one more. No thanks. Look, I've been thinking. Maybe if you gave this place a chance, I don't know, you might even enjoy yourself. [00:22:00]

It's him. Who is it? It's the pizza man. Who the heck do you think it is? Yes? Can I help you? Can I come to the fun side?

Beg your pardon? You know, I've been kind of a jerk, Morty. I'm sorry.

Welcome to Casa Del Wild. Take a load off. Mi casa es su casa.

Very impressive. Hey, have a drink. It's on the house. This is seawater. Oh, you don't swallow it. Check this out. Wow, would

you look at that. It's like billions and billions of helicopters.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that there has been a shift in part of the community. That's just like, wait, I can be on the winning [00:23:00] side and it's fun and they'll accept me. Which is something that I think a lot of people didn't feel for a long time because the left in this country hasn't been accepting.

You can join it, you can signal your alliance, but they'll still chew you apart the moment that you show any degree of independent thought, as we see from like J. K. Rowling. J. K. Rowling is as far left as you can get on every single issue. She's a left icon, she's a core point of every leftist's life, and yet they turned on her just because she wouldn't say men or women.

Like, how do you, there is, there is no room for negotiation at all within their faction. You are a slave to the hierarchy or not.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: But I think that this also explains where the huge mental health problem on the left to comes from where the really huge problem with just absolute Dumor isn't because even when they win, they're still nothing to be hopeful about.

And your own side, no matter how high you Gries could [00:24:00] turn on you at any instance, why would you not have a constant state of severe anxiety and self hatred?

If you surround yourself with this level of toxicity?

Speaker 17: Hey, Dad, I'm calling from my history class. So, who was president when you were a kid?

Speaker 15: Oh, I don't know. I guess I think about killing myself pretty frequently. And why not? What's so great about a living? You know when I'm happy? For about five seconds in the morning when I first wake up. Before I remember who I am and what my life is all about.

Anxiety. Disappointment I don't, I don't know if there's an afterlife. But who cares? Nothingness couldn't be any worse than this meaningless march through my empty days.

Malcolm Collins: But the other thing I've noticed, which I think is really interesting, is, and I think that Blue Sky might have actually facilitated the vibe shift.

Simone Collins: Really? You mean just by removing themselves from most of the mainstream conversation?

Malcolm Collins: It's more than that. It's like they were all staying on Twitter until the election night. Like you had a million new year to the blue sky again, a [00:25:00] day, like for the seven days after the election night. And so the question is, is like, what's happening there? Why didn't they move to blue sky before this?

And I think it's because they believed. That they were still in control. They believed that the right was just being elevated on X because Elon was artificially elevating the right. Not because the right outnumbered them. Not because the right had more enthusiasm. Not because the right actually controlled the cultural zeitgeist.

And when the election happened, In the same way that when Rome fell and Byzantium, like the, the, the kingdom, you know, the Western Roman Empire sorry, the Eastern Roman Empire being run out of Byzantium, and so a lot of the elites in Rome fled with all of their gold and jewels and everything like that to live out the LARP of a still existing Roman Empire in this new camp, capital of Byzantium.

That is sort of what blue sky is. The urban monoculture [00:26:00] controlled online environment basically collapsed and any argument they could have even to themselves that they still controlled it collapsed. And so if they are going to LARP living in a world where they're still the dominant faction, they need to actively and aggressively.

Create the LARP for themselves. And I think that's what we're seeing with Blue Sky. It is a LARP of an earlier time. It is, to me, very, very analogous to the cargo cults of the trad people who are like, Oh, I'll dress like, you know, I, I, I see 1950s people dress in Hollywood movies and it will recreate the culture of that time.

They have this culture of like, 2017 Twitter that they're attempting to recreate through a LARP with the belief that through like some form of sympathetic magic This will be recreated in society if they can recreate the LARP that people will go to their community Even though they actively ban like half the people who try to [00:27:00] go

Simone Collins: That's what I'm what I also at least just getting from that one young lady is This video was this perception that now we have to build our own sub communities, our own little safe spaces, but like also literal safe spaces.

Like, one thing that she was talking about in her video, she was talking about was the importance of creating sort of offline safe communities of mutual support stockpiling abortion medication, but also stockpiling things like water filters, because she argued that many of these things were imported and that.

They wouldn't be able to get good water filtration in the future because everything's going to go crazy and they'll have to monitor food quality together because the FDA is not going to work anymore. Things like that. So maybe there's also this feeling that they're now just going to form break off societies and go off the grid because this new world is too hostile to them.

Malcolm Collins: No, I, we are lit to [00:28:00] releasing, you know, Ella DeGeneres left the country finally. Where did she go? I don't know, but they're, they're actually living this right now. And it's really interesting. We're for a long time. And in our redeemed zoomer podcasts, we talk about this. They. Worked to try to infiltrate and corrupt mainstream and conservative organizations.

So historically it would have been, let's see if we can corrupt X. Let's see if we can make X our little play pen. And now it's, Oh my God, retreat, retreat, retreat. We need to create our own bubbled spheres because this isn't working anymore. And I think across the board within many organizations, if you're in some big organization and you're like, can I push out the wokes?

Yeah. Now is the time to go on the offensive. You can now, okay. And it might be one of your only shots to do so, but the wokes are willing to retreat now and feeling the need to retreat. Now they are seeing the rate break. And they are looking [00:29:00] for, this is why you have people like, you know, Joe Scarborough from Morning Joe going to Mar a Lago to kiss the

Simone Collins: ring.

Malcolm Collins: This is why you see, no, we're seeing this across the board. The other big place where I think we've seen something really wild happen is in the perception of mainstream media. There is now a perception that the mainstream media, and it's weird, it was like on election day that this happened. And we've done a few videos on how few people read the news, how few people, but I think People, when, when contrasted with podcasts, it was like you know, whatever.

But I think now everyone's like, oh yeah, Joe Rogan won the election for Trump. Kamala may have had a shot. Had she gone on Joe Rogan they are now saying, oh, Joe Rogan matters more than Steve. CNN. Oh, Joe Rogan matters more than MSNBC. Oh, there's about three or four podcasts that probably matter more than these entire networks.

Yeah. I think

Simone Collins: the, the first thing that happened when Trump was elected in 2016 was a crisis of faith. That was then further [00:30:00] deepened and during the pandemic, when just there were so many flip flops on policy of how to stay safe masks, not masks, vaccinate, whatever. And then there's some, I'm trying to figure out exactly what it was that shifted with this latest 1, but I think what it was, was that indeed, like, basically, at this point, we all collectively realize that functionally speaking.

for listening. The audiences are no longer reading the New York Times. They're no longer watching CNN or MSNBC. They are distributed among a series of podcasts and YouTube channels and sub stacks. And that is where reality is being shared. And I think that is the fragmentation of reality. There's no longer this, like the media, like the BBC declares this reality.

So we no longer, we we've entered an age of split reality, which I think is kind of [00:31:00] scary because it's going to be harder for people. To, to interact on like a shared foundation, you know, people are going to come in and have lunch and, you know, even friends who went to the same high school, you know, who knew each other for a huge portion of their lives are going to see each other.

And 1 is going to assume that, well, everyone understands that like. You know, red dye 40 is going to kill you or like seed oils are bad and the other person is going to be like, what are you talking about? You know, like, I've never heard of this. So people are just going to have these very different priors and foundational beliefs.

And I don't know how we're going to navigate that as a country.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm gonna go over some statistics and anecdotes that I found pretty interesting. This is from a Fortune piece talking about the vibe shift, and I thought it was pretty interesting. She said, At an event over the summer where I knew the vast majority of attendees to be socially and politically progressive, a woman pulled me aside and told me she needed to talk to me about something.

Slightly concerned, I asked what it was [00:32:00] regarding.

Simone Collins: Trump,

Malcolm Collins: she said. Oh God, I thought, has she been offended by one of my columns? She then uttered six words that have been ringing in my ears ever since. The thing is, I love him. This woman, who considers herself staunchly to the left on the political spectrum, went on to tell me what it was about Donald Trump that she found so compelling.

His quote unquote punk, her words, outsider status, his funniness, the fact that he's unafraid to say what he feels, his anti war, anti establishment. Stances. And it's true. Like this is people find that very appealing to break from the narrative. You'd be like, he is so

Simone Collins: punk when he was, he started out on the left and there's a bunch of people in the new Trump administration who are from the left.

Yeah, Tulsi Gabbard

Malcolm Collins: RFA, like this is a truly inter party alliance.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, so it shouldn't, it should not be surprising to anyone that a lot of people who [00:33:00] are currently identify as leftists are excited about the new administration. And it is disappointing to me that already does just seem still is like something that Democrats need to oppose when really we, 1, we all need it.

We need it desperately. And 2, Like, this supports many of the left's values, but this should not be partisan in the first place.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and so here is an interesting, some interesting statistics here. This time around, only 48 percent viewed Trump unfavorably compared to 50 percent for Harris. His favorability ratings, meanwhile, rose from 36 percent when he won in 2016 to 50 percent this time around.

So he went from a 36 percent favorability rating to a 50 percent favorability rating. 50 percent of Americans view Trump favorably.

Simone Collins: That's pretty

Malcolm Collins: amazing. That is wild. Yeah. Republicans surged from just 10 percent before the election to 35 percent afterwards. [00:34:00] The proportion of Republicans feeling hopeful rose significantly, with 76 percent expressing hope about the state of the nation, compared to only 29 percent of Democrats.

Democrats, in stark contrast, the Democrat sentiment declined before the election. 38 percent of Democrats felt satisfied with the state of affairs. This dropped to 24 percent post election. Feelings of fear and anger have increased among Democrats, with 73 percent now expressing fear about the country's direction, and over half feeling angry.

, I think this is what we see, which is the, the vibe shift has been one of, Oh, the online environment may be at the executive level controlled by ultra wokesters, but that's only because they were afraid. And in our video about how corporate America went woke, we're like, honestly, I think it's because there are a bunch of conformists who buckle at fear of being canceled or fear of pushback.

And I think after an entire year of embarrassing Let's just say successful right [00:35:00] cancellations of things like the acolyte of things like Concord of things like the executive class of these companies is like, I don't want to be embarrassed like this anymore. They are coming for us and doing it successfully.

And I'd also note here that there has not been a successful. Right wing cancellation and about since Elon purchased X. And we've noted this before, but it's really important to know that there is not another platform that is suitable for cancellations. And with the wokes moving to blue sky, it gets even harder for them.

Their advantage was being able to create the perception among people who weren't ultra wokesters that the ultra woke opinion was the mainstream opinion. And that is what having all these blue skiers on x allowed them to do the normies aren't leaving x It's the wokesters that are leaving x and so now the wokesters can't influence the normie opinion of what is normative in the way that they did historically And as such the perception of what is normal [00:36:00] and by the way Just so people understand this like when we did the numbers on this you had for x it was something like x 257 million daily active users on blue sky, even with all of their rise.

It's like 3 million and, and that's up from 1 million just like two weeks ago. Which seems to be a temporary boost due to the election.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: You might be thinking here, wait, blue sky has less than 1%. The daily active users as X on a normal day.

, and even with the boost from the election cycle, it still only hovers at around 1% of the daily active users. Why is everyone saying it's growing so much? I could have sworn I saw numbers that were bigger than that.

And the trick that all those articles are using is they are comparing the daily active or monthly active viewer users on X to the total accounts on blue sky, which is a very different thing.

Malcolm Collins: So they are completely isolating the community that used to AstroTurf these messages. To the extent where people who used to hang out on Twitter a lot go to Blue Sky and they go, Oh, I [00:37:00] recognized all of these people as former famous people on Twitter from before from like x many years ago when the culture wars were happening.

And because, and people are like, what do you mean you can't cancel people on other platforms? What are the, can you cancel on someone on Facebook? No. Can you, can you cancel someone on Instagram? Not really the only other

Simone Collins: platforms have moved in a direction of they're not being a centralized discourse.

Whereas Twitter more still has UX design that's oriented around that. Everything else is highly siloed. Like you're in your own little tiny community. Everything's sort of user based. So I think

Malcolm Collins: now people finally realize we've had so many cancellates over the past year and they've just, You know, Dennis, Dennis Nugent's that from Jurassic Park, which nobody cares like especially with the Guardian.

Oh, by the way, and we now know why the Guardian left Twitter and some people were like, Oh, this is a sign that Elon is anti free speech. So what Elon did is he made it so that any post that has a link on it is deprioritized in the algorithm which [00:38:00] really hurts news sites because news sites use that as like their bread and butter with their Twitter account.

And some people are like, Oh, this, how is this a bad thing? If new sites are predominantly a disinformation campaign and Twitter notes is working really well. If you just post the information in a tweet and it is working spectacularly well. So much so that people like, how can you say Twitter notes is working?

Well, it even fact checks Elon. And I'm like, that's how, you know, it's working. Well, when the, when the king was no clothes and somebody's walking around with a sign, So everyone knows that's when you know the kingdom's working well. So the, that explains

Simone Collins: a lot. I would say people are still kind of being canceled, but it's more like only self cancellation is possible.

So all the coverage that I see now of like people face planting is because they've handled their own comms. Really poorly, or they've done something really shitty.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, but I've seen this on two [00:39:00] occasions. They were both the right cancelling the left. And it was on YouTube. Or the left cancelling the left.

You know, there's

Simone Collins: some prominent scenarios recently of celebrities kind of cancelling themselves. I mean, Mr. Beast kind of cancels himself. Ariana Grande is kind of cancelling herself right now. They're But these What's that one who was in Gossip Girl? The

Malcolm Collins: Mr. Beast cancellation took place on YouTube and required the YouTube algorithm to work.

And it's very different from the old type of cancellation. Two other good examples of cancellations that happened this way was the In Praise of Shadows cancellation, where he tried to cancel somebody who he Wendigoon, who he saw as right leaning but was very centrist. With a bunch of spurious accusations that were just like insane lefty nonsense.

And then the other cancellation was Illumina Hottie Illumina Hottie has had her career completely dusted. But both, I think maybe these,

Simone Collins: I just don't think either pencil, I mean, also like Katy Perry, but these are people who just have, she released a couple of [00:40:00] bombs of songs, like just have, it hasn't been great with public appearances and, and

Feminist coded material that was really not feminist and people weren't having it and it was Just not great. But again, it's just like people not really handling the debut of something Well, like also the and I can't remember any but like the this actress who? Was in this movie about abuse essentially was she'd like flubbed the promotion of it saying like, wear your florals, bring your girls.

And she like, wasn't taking it seriously that this is a movie about breaking the cycle of abuse. She, she face planted, but like, I think that's not cancellation anymore. That's just like, That's a poor release of yourself. I'm pushing

Malcolm Collins: back on you. There have been successful cancellations. The two events that I mentioned, and I'll say three.

Simone Collins: Yeah, those, yeah, those, well, I don't know. But were, were they just people behaving dumbly and getting No, they were

Malcolm Collins: cancellations. It was a media cycle, a social media cycle, that [00:41:00] if the social media cycle had not have been the end. Their careers would be intact. They would still have followers. They would still have online platforms.

They would still have a job. They would still have a future in their industry of choice. So do you

Simone Collins: find cancellation is like basically a social media cycle? Like a wave of content about that person being

Malcolm Collins: Yes, but more than that, it is a, an event that prevents an individual from working any longer within a particular field due to a social media cycle.

But these cancellations function very different from the Twitter cancellations, the Twitter cancellations were people engaging with them because they wanted to hurt other people. When you look at the cancellation of Illumina hotty, or you look at the cancellation of In Praise of Shadows or even Mr.

Beast. People were watching the videos about the cancellations because they enjoyed watching bad people's lives be destroyed. I did not algo promote the Illumahati videos or the In Praise of Shadow videos [00:42:00] because I wanted Because I was like trying to elevate and help these people be canceled.

Like on Twitter, it was like, Oh, we got a signal boost this to ensure this person loses their job. Whereas in these instances, the individual is being canceled in every single one of the instances was an influencer. And it was the, the influencer cycle that reacted against them and blew back against them.

Simone Collins: Okay, so it's different when they're a star because it's not people eating their own?

Malcolm Collins: No, it's, it's different because it's part of the social media content cycle and the thing that's leading to the promotion. The reason why In praise of shadows, life being destroyed ended up trending on YouTube, ended up being in a cycle of really well performing videos is because it was very satisfying to watch.

Okay. When you had something like dongle gate, do you remember [00:43:00] dongle gate when like two men at like a conference? Oh my gosh. Yes. It was like super innocuous.

Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah. Two guys sitting in the audience of like a talk at a conference said something about dongles.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they were in the audience.

Somebody overheard them and decided to ruin their lives, get them fired for their jobs, etc. The problem being that, that this wasn't entertaining to watch. Anyone who's like a sane person is like, these are two basically random people having their life destroyed for nothing. Yeah, well, then I think, so we

Simone Collins: have to differentiate between like, so that, that form of cancellation, I think is more like, The original Red Scare, you know, where people were sort of like flagged as communists, whether or not they were public figures.

Malcolm Collins: The reason why dongle gate works, the reason why some of the original gamer gate nonsense worked. And I'm talking about like the anti gamer gate nonsense was that people was in their social communities thought they could earn points by attacking basically innocent people. They, when they were contributing to the cancellation, when they were posting this stuff on X, they were [00:44:00] posting it.

With the hope of it raising their own status, it wasn't like people watching something or engaging it because they enjoyed watching somebody's life be destroyed because they're a terrible human. It was them engaging. Was it because they thought it would increase their own status was in this leftist hierarchy.

It's a completely different mechanism of action.

Simone Collins: Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Cause in one it's just people gossiping and then in the other it's people like pulling others down in the hierarchy because they view it as a zero sum game and they're fighting their way to the top. Yeah. Like crabs in a bucket.

Okay.

Yeah. All right.

Malcolm Collins: I getcha. All right. Love you, Simone. Fun to talk about the vibe shift during this particular conversational loop. I've noticed it very severely in my daily life. It's been pretty interesting. It feels incredibly refreshing. I think one of the most important things to remember with the vibe ship is we can not make the mistake that the left made.

[00:45:00] The core reason the leftist agenda fell is because they One made up fabrications about what the other side was doing and did not punish people for spreading them like the thing that we talked about earlier in this. Two, they had a woke faction that was attempting to impose their cultural value system on others.

And people didn't stomp that down. On the left, the left needed to end that because the right, I'm not genuinely going to try that stuff because it's just such good ammunition for us. The woke insanity helps our cause. We don't need to police that. When somebody on the right goes around and says your body, my choice, the right needs to be saying that person's a ridiculous buffoon and doesn't represent us.

And the right has done that very successfully in a way that the left didn't. We just need to not become complacent with this stuff.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: Note here. I'm not talking about the originator of the phrase who clearly meant it as a joke. I am talking about the [00:46:00] fans of his, who used it to harass women in public spaces.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: And this is what we saw on the left, in the left, when you would have these ridiculous protests and stuff like that, that were the ultra far people that were really just doing this to attempt to hurt other people. When you would have people banned from platforms for silly reasons, it ended up hurting their livelihood. They would never attack their mal actors.

They would never say, oh, you ultra walkies. You need to reign it in because if they did, then they'd be the next target, the right doesn't have that problem. And it's important that we don't develop it, or we will lose this position of cultural hegemony really quickly.

Simone Collins: I agree, that's very reasonable.

Malcolm Collins: Alright, love you Simone, have a good day.

Simone Collins: I love you too,

Gorgeous.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. She's

decided that she's going to talk a lot

now.

Speaker: Whoa! It's a dancin dancin yellow sneaker [00:47:00] creeper!

Speaker 2: Can I see the video of this? Dad? I wanna see the video of this.

Simone Collins: I was, by the way, by

Malcolm Collins: the way, for, you know, horrifying gossip, Simone,

Simone Collins: you know, I love that.

Malcolm Collins: Did you do that? Christian got a girl pregnant.

Simone Collins: That means that a girl opened her legs to him. That's on her.

Malcolm Collins: A girl in Finland flew him out to meet him and they're dating now.

Simone Collins: Well, then I wish them great happiness. I'm extremely pissed at him for ruining striped sweaters. So f**k him. Very angry. Here's

Malcolm Collins: another, here's another crazy. Oh no, I was gonna tell you the food.

Yeah. That's not going to be ready for another day.

Simone Collins: Yeah. All right. So then

Malcolm Collins: we're doing slow cooked rendang beef with what is it? Corn butternut

Simone Collins: squash. chopped onion and lots of coconut

Malcolm Collins: milk. Yep. [00:48:00] Yeah, and we're going to get a slurry out of it that I can then use and reheat on many, many days because you are cooking a lot this time.

This might be the biggest one we've ever cooked.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the pot almost overfilled. That's okay. It's just going to take a while.

Malcolm Collins: I reset it by the way. It was going to end in 20 minutes.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, it only does 20 hour cycles. So we have to, and

Malcolm Collins: then we yeah. Why haven't it made for longer cycles? And did they not expect families to cook food for like four days?

Simone Collins: Apparently not.

Malcolm Collins: Is that something other people do? Maybe they're the food safety issue. Why a lot of people don't do it.

Simone Collins: Probably, but let's not ask. I don't know. I'm really like getting on board with this whole, like being chill about food thing. I was. Talking with this woman at Toureticon about her, her food and she does like fermented foods and sourdough starters and she's talking about her sourdough starter and I'm like, how can you travel so much?

Like people act like it's a pet. Like you have to feed it. And she's like, I don't know. Like, if it gets crusty, I just scrape off the top and it's fine. [00:49:00] And it's been like going for years. And so, okay, like, Maybe we can all just relax a little bit about food. I mean, not, not, I mean, I like the cautionary tales that you share with us about food poisoning that actually kills people, but that just seems to be rice and pasta.

So

Malcolm Collins: just

Simone Collins: the silent killer

Malcolm Collins: rice and pasta.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Speaking of which, I need to get rid of the fried rice sitting in the fridge, but I was thinking this morning about something that made me think contextualize themselves, like their attractiveness. So I was thinking about how, like, every time I look in the mirror or I see myself on camera, I just cringe, which is why as soon as I make sure, like, you have your lighting set up, I switched to Instagram.

So I'm not looking at myself. And if I, I switched back, I have to like, kind of just try to look only at you. But I realized that no matter how like deformed or ugly you may technically be, you are [00:50:00] someone's type. Realizing that you are someone's type can make you feel kind of good about yourself.

Like

Malcolm Collins: if you're like, that's not true about everyone. Yeah. Christian just got someone pregnant. So yeah.

Simone Collins: I, I'm, I may find myself repulsive, but I'm your type and I should feel really good about that. And then there's this secondary knock on effect of that is once someone actually feels good about themselves.

And and realizes that they're super hot to someone, then they're confident and that confidence on its own, then like catches this whole other set of people and is very attractive and appealing, independent of your actual physical morphology. So, really, everyone should just recognize. If they're someone's type, own it, be comfortable in their own body, be comfortable with themselves, know that someone out there, like a subset of people is going to find them super hot anyway.

And that confidence will also make them super hot to like another 20 percent of all people. And so that is. Thanks. The approach [00:51:00] that should be taken to the way that one views oneself. And maybe if I can impart that on any of our self conscious teenagers, once we have them, I will be doing them a world of good because I grew up.

I mean, I think, I think there's also this thing where like, you are your own type, Malcolm. Like you've never walked by a mirror and not been like, wow, hello. But I look by a mirror and I'm like, oh, like

Malcolm Collins: what are the odds that the person that you are, their type is also that you're also gonna wanna like marry them or be with them.

You know, there's about, yeah, but

Simone Collins: my point though is that there are two types of people as well. One finds themselves attractive, and then the other, maybe there's an A group that finds themselves neutral and there's another group that find that finds themselves repulsive. But just because you find yourself repulsive doesn't mean that you are repulsive to everyone else.

And I think that's another you may not be your type. Yeah. And I'm, I'm not my type. You are your type, but I am not my type. And that is also interesting to me.

Malcolm Collins: I'd also point out that really high profile [00:52:00] people who generically are thought of as some of the hottest living women have said that they thought that you were incredibly attractive.

And

Simone Collins: so I am some people's type and that should make me feel good. Like I should be confident about my appearance because I know some people find me hot. Even if I think I'm repulsive, like I would not bang myself. But I would bang other people. I would bang you. And some people would bang me, including you, which is amazing.

So everyone should think about that. That should be their self care of the day.

Malcolm Collins: I think that you're being delusional because you're one of those women who actually is traditionally attractive, like trying to act like the internet

Simone Collins: says, I know the internet says I'm a four slash three depends on probably the angle being taken that insider photo.

So it's a three, but again, you think I'm a, it's so subjective. And that's, that's the thing I was telling you the other day, how like in Regency era England, supposedly, and you actually see this in the writing they describe a woman's countenance. Not like her [00:53:00] cheekbones or her facial symmetry. What's a countenance?

How expressive they were, like if they had very expressive faces. So, you know, there are some people who just like, don't seem to have facial expressions. Like they're not, they just kind of like have one, one face. And that's kind of always how they talk. And then there's other people who have like rubber faces that are like, just, and you see it, like, I think a lot of YouTubers have like very expressive faces and it's like all this huge range of like, I agree countenance is hot.

Yeah, and so but that's but that's the thing is like in regency because you'd think like well at least like western culture They all think that one thing is hot and then like eastern like maybe there's these group hotness There's

Malcolm Collins: a huge thing for ankles in men for like a long time. Like that was like a really oh, yeah

Simone Collins: Like well ankles

Malcolm Collins: were hot in men longer than abs were hot in men I

Simone Collins: have an intuition that that's a myth because I just haven't really come across it it in the literature.

However, count again, like there was this era in which facial expressions were the thing that was hot. Like they weren't looking at their like waist to hip ratio. They weren't, they were [00:54:00] looking at how expressive women were. , so that's interesting anyway.

Speaker 3: What are you? Are you a creeper?

Speaker 4: Oh no! Are you gonna get me?

Speaker 5: No!

Speaker 4: Blah!

Speaker 5: We got fight back! We got the tough guys! We got the strongest boys!

Speaker 13: Whoa! It's a dancin dancin yellow sneaker creeper!

Speaker 14: Can I see the video of this? Dad? I wanna see the video of this.