Exploring the Influence of Online Communities on Gender Identity and Beliefs

In this thought-provoking episode, Simone and Malcolm sit down with Alex Kaschuta, the host of the Subversive Podcast, to discuss the escalating gender wars in the digital age. They explore how the internet has amplified polarization between men and women, the role of evolutionary psychology in shaping online discourse, and the impact of globalization and cultural homogenization on gender dynamics. The conversation also delves into the aspirational lifestyles promoted by figures like Andrew Tate, the challenges of navigating relationships and sexuality in the internet era, and strategies for raising children in a world saturated with digital influences. Join them as they unpack the complexities of gender relations in the modern world and offer insights on fostering a healthier understanding between the sexes.

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. Today we are joined by one of my favorite people in the entire world, Alex Kashuda. She is probably someone you've heard of through her podcast Subversive, which is how I learned about her. She also has a sub stack at alexkashuda. substack. com. It's called the Garden of Earthly Delights.

She has excellent content there as well. Also, Do check her out today. We're going to talk about gender wars, which is really exciting because everyone loves talking about it. Come on. It's, it's fun.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: I'd love to hear how you got on this topic, Alec. Oh, and I should also note, like, if you don't know who Alex is, Alex is probably one of the most famous dissident intellectuals in sort of the idea space right now in terms of and interviews a lot of other dissonant intellectuals.

Alex Kaschuta: Thank you. That's very yeah, I feel flattered by that introduction. It's very sweet. Yes, I mean, this is a, this is, I feel like it's a topic that maybe this is my algorithm. Cause I'm just like so morbidly curious [00:01:00] about what's going on. So obviously now I have a small child, I am breastfeeding all the time.

So I'm also staring at my phone all the time, lurking, you know, reading stuff online more than usual. And it seems to me like if things are kind of, bubbling up in a, in a. Almost like violent way, like the discourse has. You know, I keep saying this, but it's like, you know, Rwandan radio levels of hatred between the sexes have been brewing now it's, it's you know, I'm someone who made quite a lot of my following on Twitter by, you know, being honest about sex differences and, you know, essentially, kind of like, you know, human biodiversity, but with with a sex lens, because that was, you know, that was interesting to me at that point.

And these things are, you know, Quite kind of uncontroversial in some ways, like sex differences do exist, you know, they're interesting, people like talking about them but I feel like You know, there was a certain dynamic and certain incentives on these platforms that take things like that assert a level of discourse that [00:02:00] is based on you know, what's that called the evolutionary psychology and all these things that that are they're interesting to people in the space and then yeah, reduce them to the lowest common denominator and great kind of like many, you know, sub cults around personalities that Yeah, it's quite interesting.

I mean, even even kind of from a cold perspective, just looking at at how the space is morphed from when I, you know, started posting about it to what's going on now, it's It makes me think that, you know, maybe there's a certain even to, to truths that are quite basic, like this is quite, you know, mundane stuff.

We kind of forgot about it for a while, but, you know, the fact that there are certain average differences between the sexes. Yeah. I mean, that's something that was kind of instinctively known for a while, you know, present in many stereotypes for sure. But now that it's kind of out there and, and It's almost kind of like codified in the intranet.

It, it's turned into an info hazard in a way, like, and it's, it's gotten kind [00:03:00] of monstrous in a way. So I feel like maybe we should be a bit more blue pilled about these things. I don't know. It's just, I, I recoil at what's going on right now and I'm afraid for all of us. Our

Malcolm Collins: future a thesis on what's going on right now.

Historically speaking the humans, at least the humans that survived, we're always in opposite gender pairs. And so they always had a level of interest in the other gender, even though they were different. And when they had kids, 50 percent of those kids would be the other gender. So they would have interest in the other gender as we move to like as marriage rates fall dramatically across the world.

And as fertility rates are falling dramatically across the world, there's a large group of individuals that really only has the best interest of one gender in terms of any of their the ways that they're trying to influence the public. On top of that, we live in a society where, I say, sometimes I'm like, wouldn't it be cool if, like, Neanderthals were still around?

Like, you could interact with something that was almost like a human, but, like, had [00:04:00] pretty vastly different mental proficiencies and perspectives. And I'm like, but we kind of live like that already. Like men and women can almost be thought of as two different sort of hominid species that live alongside each other.

And

Alex Kaschuta: historically promote this in the dissident. Be careful.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Historically these, these two groups they always had to work together. But now because they don't as much anymore, As soon as women got the right to vote, we were sort of on a crash course to a society in which one party represented the needs and wants of one of the two groups, and then the other party represented the needs and wants of the other of the two groups.

And I do think that in a way, that's where sort of politics is drifting throughout the world, is a feminine mindset and a masculine mindset in terms of, you know, Policy positions. But yeah, open to hear your thoughts on this

Alex Kaschuta: theory. No, I think, I think that's fair. I [00:05:00] think that's, you know, as someone who's a little bit skeptical about democracy in general, I don't necessarily know if it's that tied to the vote.

I think it's more tied to the fact that materially women have kind of unlinked from The protection, like physical protection in terms of, okay, I'm fighting off invading predators, be those in the forms of men, or I don't know, big cats and stuff like that, that was really necessary back in the day.

And the fact that a lot of women really don't need provision from men. And I think there's a, quite a big class of men who kind of expected to have that, to bring that to the table. Okay. I'm going to provide for my family or, you know, whatever parameters society around them. Gave them like for example now You have the phenomenon of the of the two income household.

It's pretty tough to maintain a middle class standard of living without making, you know, big sacrifices. If you want to have a family or, you know, Children, multiple many, many Children in the style of the Collins is without making some [00:06:00] sacrifices in your social status and, you know, kind of going down the rung of where you find yourself as you know, in your relative status in the groups that you're in.

So, I think that's, that's been a bit complicated because essentially, you know, I also draw from what I see around me and I'm looking at you know, I have a lot of friends who would like to get married. And at one point I was really critical. I was like, okay, come on, you know, you're 30 years old women, come on, it's time to get married, you know, be serious.

You know, you know, it's, it's, it's a moment, but looking around, it is really tricky. You know, I don't necessarily know who exactly these women are going to marry because I have, you know, men from my generation as well. They're not necessarily marriage minded. I know they're online. There's kind of this idea that you know, the men are just waiting.

You know, the women are kind of the bottleneck in the marriage market. You know, they're sowing their wild oats. They're girl bossing. They don't want to get married. In reality, I think things are a bit more matching the old, old stereotypes where women were a bit more marriage minded, [00:07:00] you know, things have changed, obviously, but I think the old stereotypes still hold, like, you know, men in base reality outside of, you know, online spaces where everyone, every man's a future dad and super trad and can't wait to, you know, have pop out 10 children and provide for them.

They're a little bit more reluctant to, you know, tie the knot for classical reasons, you know,

I

Malcolm Collins: think you're absolutely right. And I want to unpack this a little bit.

So I think what we're seeing in society, because I think guys, like when I tell a guy, you're not actually marriage minded, they don't perceive it that way. And they perceive it as a woman's fault. And I think the reason is, is because they are being unrealistic. So this is the plan that these guys all have, cause I've talked to them about it.

They're like, Oh, I'll reach like. 30 or 40, and then I'll marry a girl who's like 25 or 22. These women are not going to marry you. The women who want to marry when they're 22 want to marry 23-year-old guys. Yeah, like Simone and I did when we got married. [00:08:00] This is, this is who those women are marrying.

There are women out there who will marry you. But they are your age or around your age, and it is those women who are desperately out there looking for someone to marry. And then the guys are like, oh, nobody wants to marry me because they're trying to lock down a girl who's much younger than them.

And I've just consistently seen this phenomenon because, I don't know, it's some fantasy that's baked into guys when they're young, which is like, well, I have an infinite fertility window or because they're over focused on fertility windows. And it's like, if you care about fertility windows and you're a man, you need to marry young.

There, this isn't like an infinite thing where, yeah, that, and so I think that that's what's creating this misinterpretation is that the women who want to get married, you know, when they can get married, like in their thirties, and the guys are like, who wants to marry them? They've been passed around and it's like, well, say the same for you.

Why are you 30 and not married? Right. You know, you made the same gambit these women made.

Alex Kaschuta: I think it's also, you know, [00:09:00] there's a growing popularity of content like this. You know, 10 years ago you had kind of Red Bull forums and pickup artistry and things like that. It's quite relatively niche. I think, you know, maybe one in.

You know, eight men knew about it and, you know, knew about game, had read the game or something like that, like kind of the more, the more analog version of this whole thing. Nowadays, I mean, you know, I don't necessarily think there are many men in the Western world who at least haven't tangentially heard of Andrew Tate and kind of the whole, the whole sphere around him.

I mean, he's kind of like, you know, the, the spiritual godfather of the last man, you know, people, You know, he's, he's kind of a focus point, but there are kind of concentric circles of this knowledge of, you know, female nature, all of this stuff, you know, empty egg cartons and this is partially derived from evolutionary psychology.

Like there are actual. Insights in it. And it is interesting. I mean, I've, you know, I've been kind of in these spaces for a long time and it overlaps like the Venn diagrams between evolutionary psychology actual scholars of evolutionary psychology and you know, what, what the red pill says, or what some of [00:10:00] the red pill people say, there's overlap.

These are not completely overlapping because there's also a lot of kind of lore that's very specific to the red pill. It's very selective as well. You know, this, this is about female nature, not necessarily the interplay of male nature with female nature, because if you try to be too, um, forthright about male nature then no one's gonna buy your e book, because this just has a very specific target market.

So, to sell the e books that one wants to sell, it's all about, you know, how to you Female nature is duplicitous, you know, the dual mating strategies, all this type of stuff that comes out of evolutionary psychology, hypergamy, you hear all this, you know, scholarly lingo being you know, presented but not necessarily used in a certain way.

For example, the red pill sees hypergamy as Essentially, if you drill down into it, is, is women dating anyone other than me? If that's, you know, it's like anyone who has any sort of redeeming quality, be it looks or money or social status or being funny or tall or short, or, you know, whatever, whatever [00:11:00] thing that is attractive to the woman is hypergamy because, you know, this guy has it and I don't.

So it's No, it's

Malcolm Collins: such a, it's such a silly concept. It's like women want to date up. Everybody wants to date up. Men want to date up. What? You want to date down? Like Who wants to date down? Like, why, why is this they're like, I'm, I'm going to tell you this horrible secret about women. They like have, they like trying to date people who they think are higher status than them.

And it's like, yes, you know, I do too. You know, another thing about Andrew Tate that I want to get on here is I don't, have you ever seen our Andrew Tate is blippy takes like

Alex Kaschuta: on the, I think you mentioned that on, on my podcast. The

Malcolm Collins: commodification of the male identity which is to say you know, if our listeners don't know who blippi is, he's this guy who a lot of kids watch these days and he like dances around fire trucks

Look this right here. Yeah, this is a hydrant wrench. You use this. It's to open up the fire hydrant. [00:12:00] Wow,

Malcolm Collins: and like goes on and gets in like garbage trucks and like all of the things that kids would like, but like, obviously no adult actually wants to do these things.

And we argue that Andrew Tate's online identity Is optimized around what like a teenage boy would think that an adult man wants to do with his life but that like very few adult men actually want to do,

You can't not booze. We need booze, bro. We need some like, booze, Aikido, how you know Aikido without booze?

Malcolm Collins: But he's really gotten good at, at, at packaging this sort of instinctual masculinity that young boys feel and then.

Selling to them a pathway to achieve this thing that no one should want to achieve anyway, and I think in creating these sorts of aspirational pathways, because on the right, we have as much of a problem with this on the left, you know, on the left, where we, we, [00:13:00] we, we may You know, condemn individuals who go out there and create this illusion of like a lifestyle where they're just sleeping around a lot and they are, you know, all polygynous and all, you know, whatever.

Right? And we're like, oh, how horrible that you have created this aspirational lifestyle that doesn't correspond with kids or like actual happiness or whatever. We keep, recently, we've been playing a lot of the end scene from The Gladiator, where we're like, you know, this is what heaven is, right? You know, it's the farm with the wife and the kids.

And it, but on the right we have the same thing. I mean, how is Andrew Tate Any different in sort of the aspirational life that he's showing people. Because it's not a life that leads to productive, stable relationships.

Simone Collins: I have a question for both of you though. And cause I'm not really sure.

This is something I wonder about, but I don't know if it's maybe really what's playing out. I feel like to a certain extent, Globalization, the internet, et cetera, has allowed us to sort of culturally homogenize like there's, there's less differentiation between us, between men and women, between different cultures, between different nations, [00:14:00] and people are in these various tribes online.

There's a lot more similarity and perhaps a lot of the polarization that is emerging between men and women has more to do with homogenization and less to do with there being like serious differences. What makes me think this is because when you look at a very, very homogenous nation, South Korea, you're seeing some of the most antagonism between Genders, because there are no super different racial and ethnic and religious groups really in South Korea instead, the way that people are choosing to galvanize is based on gender.

And so you have the four nose movement among women, you have men who are extremely resentful and of course, then you have this major problem. Could it be that part of what's going on with gender wars online is we're also seeing a little bit less balkanization of other groups. People don't necessarily feel like they belong to some specific group aside from their gender.

Like it's the easiest thing to identify with. And then that's [00:15:00] what might be causing this to become more. Pronounced. I don't know. It's just something I'm wondering about. And I'd love your thoughts.

Alex Kaschuta: Yeah, I think, you know, if you look at how politics works online you know, there's, there's polarization and on every dimension.

And like you said, this is kind of the most, the most close to home thing where you almost inevitably have frictions. You already have frictions within the family. So you either have mommy issues or daddy issues if you're online, probably one of them at least. And you know, that's already kind of a gendered strife that you bring to the table.

And then obviously as a red blooded individual, you probably will pursue romantic relationships. You're going to have. Rejection. I know I'm remember, you know, being in middle school and not very attractive and, you know, getting rejected by boys. And if I had whatever the fem cell manifesto to hand at that point, I would probably gone down some sort of rabbit hole, you know, condemning my life and not realizing that, you know, by the time I turned 16 and I know my cup size would go up, you know, all my problems would be solved from that perspective.

But this [00:16:00] is the type of, uh, thing that just wasn't available at that point. So I kind of had to move. muddle through and and just kind of, you know, take it on the chin and, you know, wait for things to get better and keep trying and, you know, smile at the cute guy and, and then hopefully something will work out.

And it did I guess for some people, maybe it takes longer. Some people never happens. And for those people there's more and more of this kind of palliative care for your ego online. And there's nothing more. Kind of injurious to your, to your person than being sexually rejected. And I think, especially for, for young men, it's very scary and, and damaging and if you have all these kinds of metanarratives of why this is happening and why, you know, women are demons and on the other end, you know, you have you know, a lot of kind of porn culture and, you know, even if you're a young woman, you're like, okay, you hit puberty and then you open up the internet.

And it's just. You know, it's just boobs and ass. [00:17:00] And, you know, obviously this is kind of what the, the younger men also relate to. Okay. This is kind of what femininity should be. This kind of trickles into your first relationships. If you have them it's re it's a scary environment. It's like you go from zero to 100 in, you know, very scary waters.

And I remember that was the case even when I was in high school. school. You know, I hadn't heard about porn, but you know, my, my first boyfriend clued me in on, on everything that I needed and didn't need to know. And it was a very, you know, frightening time actually. And I can't even imagine how much this whole thing is ratcheted up.

And it doesn't surprise me that, you know, younger women have, you know, all sorts of, you know, you know, desires to transition and you know, extreme forms of feminism are taking root in in the zoomer mind. And yeah, I mean, things are polarizing because The enormity of the opposite sex online and it's, you know, detailed, you know, darkness is presented and reflected at you every day.

And it's extremely frightening. I mean, I [00:18:00] wouldn't, I'm not surprised that men, you know, are incels. I actually, I went into a rabbit hole a few days ago. I did, I didn't know about this. You know, there's a whole subculture, obviously incels have their own lore. They're all, all things, but for some reason on, you know, this kind of tick tocky videos on YouTube.

They showed me some incel videos where there's this whole group of male models that they all idolize. Male models that I, I've never heard of as a woman who apparently, you know, loves these guys, these chads and they're, they've kind of picked out for the proportions of their faces and things like that.

And all these guys saying, you'll never be Chico, apparently Chico is a guy who they all love. And it's just such a deep rabbit hole of, you know, this. Perfectly proportioned, twink looking gentleman. Yeah, I don't know, it's it was kind of, sometimes when you, when you stumble onto something that's not yours, and it's so exotic, and has so many layers of lore, and, and things that people have been thinking about, it's kind of, it was very startling to me, especially because this is apparently, [00:19:00] They're kind of codifying what it is to be attractive to women and it's such a such a failure of cross sex mind reading like a lot of this This incel stuff is oh It's why

Malcolm Collins: I I

Alex Kaschuta: cannot elevate me of men.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah Yeah one of the things that I often mention and in the body is is that I am what most women consider to? Be a very attractive man and men like in the comments will be like That can't possibly be true. I'm like, no, I'm not what men consider to be an attractive man. But in the, and then they're, they're, they have these aspirations of body types and attitudes that don't correlate with what the other gender actually wants.

Instead, it is an idealized version of, Of what their gender wants.

Simone Collins: And we're seeing the same with women. I think we're seeing the same with

Malcolm Collins: women. Yeah. I mean, what, what, what do women want? Like, I'm just look like, I'm just telling you, like, guys, look at the guys who young girls are drawing. These are elf men.

[00:20:00] All the young girls are into like this twink elf man. Look, or they're like depressed dads. I

 the meme I was trying to remember about this was young girls are into guys who look like line cooks, elf, princes, or depressed fathers, or some combination of them. , and then they have various people this Venn diagram here.

Alex Kaschuta: Skipped the depressed dad phase. Yeah. I don't know about that one.

Malcolm Collins: This is the there's a, there's a great like chart on this. So they, the Elfman versus depressed dad. And then there's like another mark on there.

I can't remember what it is. But anyway, yeah, but it's, it's not the ideal of, you know, the, the Andrew Tate like character. But I also think there's something that you said at the beginning. Yeah. If so, both of you said something that I really want to elevate as ideas, because I think that both of them have an element of truth to them.

Simone's point about homogenization, the more homogenized a culture tends to be these days, the more, like, as severe the gender war is. And for [00:21:00] people who want to learn about the gender wars in South Korea, I suggest a YouTube video called the Gacha Game Wars Part 1 and 2, it's a fantastic breakdown of this.

And we'll probably do an episode on Korean culture eventually. The second one that I think is really true is you talking about forbidden information. I think as the, the sort of dominant culture in our society, this urban monoculture begin to ban certain types of information tied to human biodiversity with a subclass of that information being.

gender differences in perspectives and proficiencies they made this information more powerful and very useful for individuals who want to use it towards malevolent ends, even if those ends are not like, they don't intend them to be malevolent, it can just sort of like organically evolve in a malevolent direction, because now this information you know, it can be delivered in a, did you know X and Y, and like, X and Y are things that are obviously true, but are banned truths within our society.

And then, you know, B and Z, [00:22:00] B and Z are things that a person wants to believe are true but are now being tied to this obviously true information. So like, did you know that women want to date men who are better than them, you know, and therefore, All women cheat and lie and, and, and the, the, you can package these and the same thing is done with men, you know, the, the, to, to young girls.

Like, did you know that men get turned on by violence and therefore all men want to beat you?

Simone Collins: The other thing that Alex pointed out that that's really sticking with me is before, if you felt something, if you felt uncomfortable through puberty, or if you were rejected by men or women, okay, it sucked.

And maybe you, you would, you know, complain to your friends about it and you would listen to some sad songs, but that was kind of the extent of it. Whereas now there are so many resources, like you say, to go online and there are communities that will say, well, of course. And that's because. Men slash women are evil and therefore you can become this and you're going to identify as this and now you're going to dress like this and talk like this and believe these things [00:23:00] and it's going to change your entire life trajectory when as whereas before it was just a mood it passed and you see the same maybe magnified more with transitioning right you're uncomfortable with your body going into gender and then a lot of people who aren't actually trans end up starting to transition or using hormone blockers because There's a community out there that's like, Oh, you feel this way.

Therefore you're this. So I think that's a really good point that there are all these resources now for various feelings. I think associated with a broad external locus of control, as in, it's not your fault, this is happening. It's society's fault. And therefore you should join our group. That. And you now have me thinking about it very differently, which is fun.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I also wanted to elevate a final thing that I think is a big problem here that I didn't realize. So, our fans set up like a Discord server for our community and it's ended up doing really well. And after I've been interacting with the discord server, I've realized how harmful [00:24:00] these types of places are in terms of like psychologically speaking they're, they're sort of like, no, no, I mean, I, I think ours is fine, but I think generally the rules.

Because it creates these insular online communities that are typically focused around a single person. Because a lot of the times they'll be created for like a YouTuber or something like that or a single online personality. So that person has elevated status within the community. Everyone, there's sort of a feedback loop of acceptance and praise for that individual.

And then whenever anyone says something positive about that individual, and the moderators, whenever somebody disagrees with them Can, they don't do it in our community, but they can within other communities, just ban the person or silence that particular like wrong think, which allows for real quick snowballs of ideas to sort of radicalize in a way that they just couldn't historically because someone historically, if a group was getting sort of crazy, you could always go, Hey, Let's take it back a few steps, but that's not really as easy [00:25:00] within these environments where some people have so much control about the information that's being communicated.

Okay, I have

Simone Collins: one final question for you on this subject, Alex. How are you going to be raising your kids differently or intentionally in a way with the gender wars in mind, because you don't, I mean, obviously on the extreme end of the very bad direction spectrum, you have extreme feminists, for example, who are raising their boys to essentially hate being male, right?

That you are the evil thing. And you, you know, we have to make you feel guilty from age one. You know, how, how do we, how do we correctly raise kids of various genders?

Alex Kaschuta: What's your plan? Yeah, I mean, this has become, and to be honest, at least in part, this is, except, except for my, you know, morbid fascination with it, because it is really interesting to see all this kind of develop.

But you know, I, I wrote an essay a few years ago about my worries about, you know, raising boys, and it was more about, you know, kind of the, you know, DEI complex, and you know, the fact that, you know, as, as white boys are going to have, you know, You know, it may be issues, but to be honest, I think at this point in my life, I'm like, I'm more concerned that they're going to [00:26:00] be seated with some sort of, you know, nihilistic b******t for the internet.

And you know, either that or completely rendered useless by, you know, extremely lifelike video games or something like that. I mean, it is, it's, it's, it's, it's captivating. I see how much of a, you know, slavery I have to the screens. I'm I really try. To be mindful of this, to kind of distance myself to, but it doesn't always work.

I mean, it doesn't often work actually, also because partially this is also what I do, you know, I kind of have to keep an eye on it to see what's going on. But I think, you know, our plan is essentially in the longer term to move to New Zealand. to build a compound, have a much more nature focused life.

And what we have there is a lot of Ben's extended family, which is my, my husband. And yes, essentially those kids are all, you know, into surfing, into hiking, into, you know, we, we're really going to push the physical activity, be outdoors. You [00:27:00] know, things of an online nature need to be incidental rather than the main, the main thing, which, you know, here where we live in Romania, it's, it's a bit of a kind of a small city, big town, something type location.

And it does not the same caliber of outdoorsyness that we, that we want. So, yeah, that's kind of the plan. And I think, I don't know, just, you know, Being very mindful of, of limiting screen time controls, all this type of stuff, but also at the same time, you know, being also mindful that the fact that their social life is probably going to be plugged into this stuff.

So totally and professional life too. Exactly. You don't want them to be, you know, this is kind of the thought process here, especially in Romania, where, you know, people are very conscious that everything is on the internet. If you want to have like a white collar job and it'll be. A professional, you have to be really savvy with using these tools, which I can understand, but, you know, scrolling on TikTok, it's not really using the Internet.

So, you know, one has to be mindful of that as well. So, yeah, I [00:28:00] mean, that's kind of my take. I'm not, it's not very, it's not a solution, but it's, you know, a, Mindset more than anything.

Simone Collins: I like that. That's a good approach. It sounds

Alex Kaschuta: very healthy. Yeah, it does. Hopefully. I don't know. They're still small, so I haven't messed them up yet.

Okay. I, I

Malcolm Collins: will ask one, one more final question here. How are you going to relate to, or have your kids relate to AI in a social context? So I'll, I'll explain what I mean by this. One of the toys that I'm really excited that'll be coming in a few weeks for our kids. Is this grok toy, which is a AI that a kid can talk to that by grimes.

And it looks really cool to have like a, you know, because I think about my kids, like the caregivers who their whiz are not the most educated people in the world. And so this would allow them to verbally interact with something that is. You know, the equivalent of like a Stanford PhD and it's level of knowledge and in its grasp of the English language whenever they feel like it, which could dramatically advance their intelligence and communication [00:29:00] capabilities, but it could also create really negative psychological effects like the rabbit too.

We also have ordered and we'll be giving to our kids. I don't know if you've seen this device. It's a little, like a screen that you can talk to and interact with the internet through just your voice. So they don't even need to learn to type to really have full access to the internet. So how do you think about tools like this?

Alex Kaschuta: Yeah. When, when you said Stanford PhD, I was just imagining, you know, the voice of Andrew Huberman coming through the grock toy and teaching your children to do cold exposure.

Malcolm Collins: Rhymes actually voice them. So you'll hear her voice. Oh,

Alex Kaschuta: okay. The voice of Grimes telling your children to do cold exposure.

Exactly. Here you go. Yeah, I mean, I, I actually haven't I'm still in kind of the the fearful peasant, you know, Waving her hand at the sky stage of, of interacting with AI in relation to my children. I'm just like, don't, don't slap the iPad out of their hand. Don't do it. I'm still kind of developing a coherent approach to it.

I'm not a, you know, you [00:30:00] guys are pretty much the, the Internet's early adopters on many things. So I don't know if we're all at that stage. I, it's admirable. But yeah, I mean, I'm actually going to look into this. It sounds pretty cool. I might, I might get it as well. They're only 99 bucks. Really? Oh, yeah.

And what we realized is

Simone Collins: we think it's so cool. It's we, we actually, since our oldest son has autism, he's been going through ABA therapy, which it's actually about to stop because he's improved so much. But during every session that he had, both when he was in daycare and then after he left, they, they graphed.

All of his good and bad behaviors very autistically actually, which is quite appropriate, I guess. So we can actually see like spikes of bad behavior, spikes of good behavior. His behavior was terrible in daycare. As soon as he leaves, these graphs that are like all high and, you know, going up and down, they just, they plummet.

And suddenly his behavior is amazing. And we realized, okay, it's important for kids to have peers. And we're kind of like, okay, well, we'll just provide them with siblings. Child peers are not [00:31:00] necessarily the best influence. Same with child peers on the internet, but also completely random peers on the internet.

So part of our approach is, well, we can't trust humans anymore because everyone's going to be corrupted. So maybe we can just choose the right AI for them, not the wrong one, the right one. And then. Use that as their influence instead. But it is, it is one of many approaches and I like yours, but it's been so great to have you on.

And I just want to remind everyone listening to definitely check out the subversive podcast as well as go to Alex Xushida at sub or sorry. substack. com. We'll include links in the description so you can get to these things easily. But Alex, thank you so much for coming on and we hope you'll come back very

Alex Kaschuta: soon.

Thank you so much for having me on.