In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive deep into the cultural phenomenon of the “sassy wife” trope—how it’s been normalized, celebrated, and even weaponized in media and real-life relationships. From celebrity scandals to sitcom stereotypes, they explore the history and impact of wives publicly belittling their husbands, why this behavior became so widespread, and how it affects modern couples.

Listen in for a breakdown of viral moments, analysis of personal experiences, and insights on building healthier, more respectful partnerships. Whether you’re curious about relationship dynamics, pop culture, or just want a thought-provoking conversation, this episode is for you!

Episode Transcript:

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Malcolm. I’m so excited to be speaking with you today because you didn’t leave me after I did a bunch of toxic things when we were first married and dating.

And that actually is, is, is pretty big because it was one of the biggest points of conflict in our lives and I, I wanted to actually do a podcast on it because you spent years deprogramming me. From doing well. So

Malcolm Collins: what the podcast theme is gonna be on is we are gonna be digging into how normalized and, and, and, and sort of praised sassy behavior is in wives towards husbands.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And sassy is the word I’d use. But there’s other words that you can use to, you know, behavior that is designed to put the husband down in front of other people. Yeah. And everybody sort of knows that this was normalized by media. We went through this as kids. Yeah. But now there’s a phenomenon where a bunch of celebrities, like big celebrities ranging from like Obama to like, you know, will Smith, to like, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll go over them all.

And, and this was [00:01:00] brought to our plate because we saw this, Brett Cooper was covering this. Mm-hmm. And I was like, when I saw the clips she had found, because like, obviously I don’t watch what celebrities are doing. I was You’re kind of horrified, shocked. Yeah. At the degree to which these women.

Actively and intentionally we’re degrading their husbands. Yeah.

Simone Collins: If y’all wanna watch this, it’s called Ranking the Top four Worst Hollywood Wives, and it’s horrifying. I’ll put

Malcolm Collins: a clip right here. From, from when it, I’ll put the feet clip right here, because that one just was like.

Simone Collins: Oh it’s, it’s bad

Speaker: he crazy eyes like, look at the end there. Like look at his face there. At the very end as he is rubbing her feet, he is like, oh, this is what my life has come to.

Simone Collins: .

But I mean, I, and what I wanna explore, in addition to exploring some of these examples and like kind of poking into what is going on here, I also wanna look into what has caused this to become programmed. ‘cause actually there’s, there’s a longer history behind all of this and there’s a really interesting tipping point, and I wanna get into it because I think getting to the [00:02:00] heart at what is causing this problem is going to, to play a key role in helping both men and women systemically dismantle it from their lives.

Yeah. Because you and I struggled with this as a couple well, hold on. You

Malcolm Collins: and I did not struggle with it. You struggled with, and I put the kaya collar on you and had to kaya.

Simone Collins: Please, please.

Gotta stay in that little place for eight hours.

Simone Collins: Well, where you struggled was how exactly to communicate to me. To, to get me in a way that got me to stop.

‘cause I knew what I was doing was bad. And it took years for you to figure out the right way to message to me, to get me to stop doing this. Literally about three years of dating before you really respond. I think it took more than that. I think it took five to seven years. Well, no, not seven. Not seven, five.

I’m gonna say five. You haven’t, yeah. You haven’t done it in

Malcolm Collins: at least three years. I, I would say but we’ve been together

Simone Collins: for. 12 or 13 years now. So, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But, but what’s [00:03:00] interesting about this is, you know, you grew up in San Francisco, you grew up surrounded in the heart of the urban monoculture, progressive culture.

And you grew up even starting dating me and internalized this sort of mindset, but

Simone Collins: no. Mm-hmm. This is not an urban monoculture thing. It, it, or even it’s not a progressive thing. This is a pervasive, deep, heavy thing. I think it has to do with a lot of, I, we’ll, we’ll parse into it when we go into the history boot.

Let’s start with the salacious. Okay. Let’s go Celebrity gossip. Because celebrity gossip, it’s so powerful and, and, and amazing. And so I, there’s obviously the examples that were, were highlighted by Brett Cooper in her ranking, the top four Worst Hollywood wives video. She talks about hilarious Baldwin and a Barwin.

And she also talks about Jada Pickett Smith and Will Smith. So with hilarious Bal Barwin. Who Malcolm highlighted at the beginning of this, it’s not just the social media clips that she posts of Alec Baldwin, who really comes across [00:04:00] almost like. A captured animal.

Speaker: I mean, look at this photo. We don’t even know what is going on here. And yet you have her playing chess, smoking a pipe, and somehow she was able to convince Alec Baldwin, see, this is now where I feel bad for him. I feel guilty. He’s wearing a made outfit with a little cap and he’s bringing bunny slippers.

Like, is this how bad his career has gotten? That

Simone Collins: Yeah. No, he, oh God. Yeah. I was, I was so, I, I’ll, I’ll send you a link to, I, I, I literally would

Malcolm Collins: rather be kaya than, than Alec

Simone Collins: Baldwin.

No, I would, I would rather be kaya than a baller in right now. Like I, I swear we, it’s not ‘cause like, so, Brett Cooper surfaced a bunch of the really worst, most egregious things that hilarious had posted on her Instagram. However, if you just scroll through there in general, she’s just using him as a shill for her really stupid vanity projects like Dancing With the Stars and it’s like hostage videos where he’s like, text ex to this number to vote for hilarious [00:05:00] Baldwin on dancing with a star.

Like, he looks like a hostage who’s being forced to read off of a script to do her bidding. And it, it just, everything, everything where, where she uses his face just feels like he, he is being parasitized by this woman. Whoa. They have eight children. Yeah, they’re actually doing seven with her

Malcolm Collins: and one with someone else.

Simone Collins: I know it is. That’s the thing that’s, that’s, that’s really, you know, but I mean, maybe that’s one of the reasons why he’s so, he is a man is taking all this from her because something that I’ve seen from many men who have a lot of kids with a woman is when she’s had a lot of kids, they’re like, listen, I love my kids.

Like, I’m so grateful for my kids that I will endure a lot. And I think that might be a factor for why he’s tolerating this. But the thing that I found most egregious, yeah, I would,

Malcolm Collins: even if you went crazy like this, if I had had seven kids with you at that point, I’d be like, yeah, you’d be

Simone Collins: like, whatever, man.

But the thing that got me the [00:06:00] very most was the red carpet scene, which I also just sent you on WhatsApp. That it, it, it’s so horrible. Alec Baldwin is standing with his wife Aria on the red carpet, praising her. And she says, oh my God, when I’m talking, you’re not talking. When I’m talking, you’re not talking.

This is why we need to cut him out of the shop like she is. She just cuts him off and acts like the most ungrateful, horrible person.

I don’t think you make it more silly than it is. I actually feel, I try. Oh, didn’t get that on the show. No, no. We just, we just cut all that part out. Cut me out. Cut you out when you’re trying to make it silly.

Simone Collins: I don’t care if this is your husband or a colleague or a stranger on the street. It, it, it just came across as so disrespectful. So I think it’s a really strong starting point.

Well, and I

Malcolm Collins: guess some people are gonna be hearing this and they’re gonna be like, well, why do I have to respect my husband? Right? Mm-hmm. And the answer is a few fold. First of all you shouldn’t have married somebody who you don’t respect, right? Like that’s a personal failing on your part.

[00:07:00] Totally. But then in, in, in, in addition to that, like Alec Baldwin, even if I have like political differences with him or something like that,

Something the, the global warming and corporate America.

Malcolm Collins: like he’s actually done stuff with his life. Like, I don’t know what this woman has done, right? Like nothing but marry a guy who’s like twice going dancing with

Simone Collins: the stars.

Like,

Malcolm Collins: Like she should be treating him with respect because he is better than her.

Simone Collins: Well that, and that’s a big, I mean, with these prominent celebrity tiffs, in the majority of cases that are really egregious and that have gone viral, there’s also a power distance. I mean, there are, there are other instances of just toxic celebrity couples like Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, where it just, it’s clear that everyone’s a, a complete psychopath and you know, it’s not about men versus women, it’s just about crazy people being crazy and irredeemable.

But. Yeah, the, the, the issue of these, these, these women who [00:08:00] like really are no position to be complaining ‘cause they’ve married into wealth. Like, do you know how many people would kill to be in that position who would gladly be beaten daily just to be in that position? I mean, it, it’s not PC to say that, but that’s just how it is.

Another prominent example that Brett Cooper highlighted, which, which deserves honorable mention is indeed Jada Pickett Smith and Will Smith. Everyone of course is really familiar with Will Smith completely flying off the handle at the Oscars and slapping it was Chris Rock right in 2022. But the, the most egregious scene that Brett Cooper highlighted and, and that’s just so insane is Jada Pickett Smith having Will Smith on her podcast called The Red Table, where she just in front of him actively talks about.

Her entanglement sleeping

Malcolm Collins: with her son’s

Simone Collins: friend, just

Malcolm Collins: disgusting. And she, she’s like, well, you know, and he’s making while’s still

Simone Collins: married.

Malcolm Collins: She’s making him, and I’m [00:09:00] not gonna play the clip for you guys. ‘cause like, I would stop watching, like, when that clip started, it was just paid for watch, couldn’t handle it.

But she ma she makes him go on about how like, he’s like, well, you know, I expected monogamy for marriage. And she’s like, but you know, I expected poly like being polyamorous ‘cause like, that’s how I was raised, I guess. Raised in a single parent household or something. It is all I can assume is what she means by that.

Because, you know, polyamory was not common when she would’ve been raised. So, I, I think that, like, that one, I just love the way she argues for this and tries to normalize her behavior. Like this is just a difference in our ideas around what marriage is, right? Like, as opposed to no marriage is what you agreed it was when you got married, right?

Like you don’t get to change the terms of your relationship unilaterally.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And it’s clear that Will Smith was not okay with it. At one point she says something like, you know, the only person who could give permission for that was, was me. And he is like, yeah, I, not, [00:10:00] not me, like, but in a way where he’s like, I did not give permission for this.

Like, I did not consent to this at all. It’s just horrible. It’s a

Malcolm Collins: really,

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: can consent to, to who sleeps with, but, but the, the problem is, is part of, normally, like, like, and it’s, it’s clear that, and I see this a lot within that generation, is one partner wants to be polyamorous and they see it’s like a thing now.

And so they basically just force it on their partner because they don’t understand that your partner has the right to turn down you wanting to be polyamorous, right? Like that’s, that’s always been, and they don’t understand that our partner doesn’t work. Partner polyamory,

Simone Collins: that’s just cheating then.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, if my husband could just say, no, how does this work? And it’s like, well. You should have negotiated it before the marriage. Right? Like, I, and I, I, I see this over and over again within this generation. And it’s really toxic the way boomers have taken and tried to use the word and, and relationship format of polyamory.

Not that polyamory isn’t in itself toxic. You can watch our episodes on those, but the [00:11:00] ways that boomers are doing it is like a whole nother layer.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and this is a, a common theme in prominent couples being criticized for the way that they, they treat each other is airing dirty laundry like this, like talking about the fights they have.

Like I think Christian Bell was criticized for talking about the fights that they have and her husband’s anger issues and other things and, and just people being really uncomfortable with that, like dirty laundry being aired. But also, and Brett Cooper did not discuss this one, but there are really prominent examples.

Of just women being physically abusive toward their husbands in public, like in a very intentional way in front of the media. And in this case, I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna send her a TikTok. This is because you can actually see it in this, it is insane. It is Bridgette Macron, that is the, the first lady of France.

You know, the, the school. No one who’s like

Malcolm Collins: way older than her husband and was his teacher or nanny [00:12:00] or something growing up. You’ll see

Simone Collins: in this clip at Hanoi Airport as they’re dis Oh, she physically assaults him. Yeah. As they’re getting off an airport, she pushes him in the face. And then when they are heading down the stairs, he goes to like reach to hold her hand and she.

Like holds the rail and like clearly snubs him. And, and this is all very intentional, very in front of the cameras. Like at, at first Macron looks like kind of shocked after literally his face gets pushed. Yeah. Like it’s one thing to shove your husband like that already is, is, is, is physically, but you

Malcolm Collins: should be like desperately shamed that anyone can see this.

I’ve

Simone Collins: never seen anyone push anyone else’s face with two hands. Like who even does that? And just that like we’re talking about a First Lady. A First Lady, the First Lady, and [00:13:00] that

Malcolm Collins: like, I had heard of this, which is wild. I would think this would be a major scandal that I would’ve heard of. Perhaps in

Simone Collins: France.

It was, but it is not a scandal here. I, I just dunno. But I mean that was just insane to see. I mean that’s like this level just. Open. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I’m, I’m curious to hear where this came from, because this is, this is what, but it’s behavior that I’ve seen. You know, when I look at like my parents’ generation whether it’s them because my parents were divorced and remarried, or their friends except for my, my biological mother did not act like this ever to my knowledge.

Simone Collins: No, no, no. In public. She always took on this, this very supportive persona. Like you could tell it was an act of just like, yes, dear, and like, but she always acted the perfect part. She never,

Malcolm Collins: and even, even behind closed doors, she would even, no. Yeah. Even behind

Simone Collins: in, always in front of the, of, of her husband, like.

Very, very sweet. Very respectful. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But the, [00:14:00] the, the, the person who my dad remarried, does act intentionally like sassy and puts him down in front of other people. And this is

Simone Collins: actually, so I think this is the more important form of spousal sassiness that I wanted to discuss more. Because this is what had, had brainwashed me and I think this is what’s more normalized, right?

Like we can all look at these. By the way, I

Malcolm Collins: wanna, I wanna be clear when I say this about the person who my dad remarried, I’m not saying this as like a disparagement of her character. What I’m saying is this is normalized behavior to the point where it was something my wife did until I corrected her behavior.

She’s expressing

Simone Collins: normative behavior. Like it’s Yeah. She’s

Malcolm Collins: expressing normative behavior and it is my dad’s responsibility to correct that. Mm-hmm. And he never did.

Simone Collins: Yeah, exactly. So we’re not putting it on her at all. And, and this is so in terms of the prominent examples that I think are much more indicative of what’s this widespread, toxic, sassy wife syndrome is actually something that, that I saw and that really shocked me and, and kind of shook me.

When I was [00:15:00] watching this Netflix documentary called Inside Build’s Brain Decoding Bill Gates and it’s this three part documentary talking about Bill Gates and it’s just, it’s, it’s pretty boring in general. It’s like, what books does he read and let’s go on a walk with him. But it’s peppered with these short interviews with Melinda Gates.

They were still married at the time of the filming of this documentary. And even mentions that Bill Gates makes of her in other interviews where she’s not present that just show that the relationship which did end in divorce after 27 years was also permeated with this sassiness. She constantly kind of cut him down in interviews and kind of had this like sassy eye roll approach toward him of like, well, I, I kick, you know, I, I, I take him down a notch every now and then.

Like I keep him grounded. And there’s also this scene when he’s hiking where he talks about how she always makes him walk first. So he walks into all the spiderwebs ‘cause he like, yeah. She doesn’t wanna deal [00:16:00] with them. And you know, like what we, I can imagine

Malcolm Collins: these people who I think of as like super successful and having great lives and they’re like trapped in these, these horrifying relationships where they’re the billionaires who are like kaya in their own house.

Kaya, please.

Simone Collins: The, the thing is too, and this is another, like, such a prominent example of this, when they met Melinda was just a newly hired marketing manager. And, and Bill was the CEO of Microsoft and co-founder. Like there’s, there’s a clear power distance, and yet she acts as though she is this morally superior, smart woman who rolls her eyes at him.

And, and just seeing that, like subtly throughout the documentary, no one ever criticized that. Like there’s all these other prominent examples of like Stephen Curry’s wife going super viral after talking on a podcast about how like she never wanted to be a mother and she never wanted to be a wife, and she wishes she had male attention and people freak out

So [00:17:00] I, I didn’t want kids. I, I didn’t wanna get married.

Simone Collins: .

And I just, and I mean these are like sort of more violent examples, I guess, or like really egregious examples of women being openly ungrateful. But the much more insidious issue is that women feel like it’s okay and normal to be shrewish, to roll your eyes to nag the husband. And that’s, that’s where I wanted to get into like, okay, well.

Where did this programming come from? Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: where did it come? I wanna hear, ‘cause you say it’s not just typical wokeness, it came from somewhere specific.

Simone Collins: No. Yeah. And that’s what’s really interesting. So first it’s, it’s important to note, and I think all of us will immediately recognize this, that domineering wives were presented as warnings against male weakness.

Just either straight up through like we are gonna shame this, or through comics subversion. For basically, as long as there have been stories so that you have like, well,

Malcolm Collins: so it’s so funny that you mentioned this. Yeah. So people who know, [00:18:00] I love my Korean romance dramas that are, that are period pieces.

Right. You know,

Simone Collins: you, we need to like link to them somewhere. So people can

Malcolm Collins: go through your topic. Yeah. I’ll link to some of my favorite ones. If, if I can remember too just go to like WebToons and look up anything about villainous reborn or something, and they all take place. And like this medieval world with like balls and galas and everything like that

So people might be underestimating how cheesy. The ones I like reading are, the last two I read was charming, the Northern Duke, which I did not think was very good. And I abdicate my title of Empress, which I thought was actually pretty decent. Uh, among the ones I’ve read.

Malcolm Collins: And, and by the way, if you’re wondering, they have no, not safer work suits.

Simone Collins: No, they’re all very just like, I actually remember and

Malcolm Collins: one of them I was reading recently a character got pregnant and I was like, wait, what? Like when did they, you were not sleeping together. Like how did you, it was so [00:19:00] sly.

That’s cute. About implying that they had moved to that stage of their relationship that I, the reader was unaware. Like, this is news

Simone Collins: to me. I love, love that. The thing, love that I was gonna mention

Malcolm Collins: about it is in these stories, if a woman is acting domineering over her husband mm-hmm. That would be seen because they, they deal with sort of older tropes, which is what I like about them.

They’re still very like, older type stories. Yeah. That the husband is a bad guy. Right. Like that he is in some way morally a, a failure of a person. You know, that that would be, you know, an intro and then you’d find out that he’s into drinking and gambling and buying slaves or something like that. That was the point though, and this is a very old trope that it’s a sign of milk.

Go further. Before we go further, another trope that I’ve noticed in them, which is very funny because this was true of all old stories, but it totally wouldn’t happen in today’s media.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If, and this is like universal, if a prince ever ends up. [00:20:00] Getting a crush on, like a maid or a Duke ever ends up getting a crush on like a common woman.

You know, by the end of the story, it’s gonna be revealed that they were actually a princess all along. Oh yeah, that’s true. And just got separated from their family, or they were actually from a noble house all along and just, it is, it is never crossing social boundaries, whatever. Because I remember in one I was like, Ooh, the, the, the princess is interested in this guy who, who is a.

An orphan. And then no, he’s not an orphan. He’s actually a prince of a neighboring kingdom. Well, you know what’s interesting

Simone Collins: actually, when you, you look at the current British royal family, I believe that there have been plenty of, of narratives in which people have tried to trace Catherine Middleton’s ancestry to British nobility, even though she’s a commoner.

Like her family’s not titled. Whereas Meghan Markle seen as, you know, this largely villainized woman who is also highlighted in Brett Cooper’s video of horrible wives who demean their husbands is, you know, she, there’s no provenance to her. Like there’s no [00:21:00] way someone could argue that. But that, that, because Kate Middleton has been accepted and loved even though she’s sometimes ridiculed as Duchess Doolittle or the Duchess of buttons or whatever those are in the earlier days now, she’s pretty much beloved.

She, she has been like, the narrative has been shaped around, her, her being from, actually she is noble. That in the end. So I think that’s interesting that the, these tropes bleed into reality. But yeah, I mean, even if you look at biblical references like Proverbs 29, 21 9 they, they warn of a quarrelsome wife.

I also, I didn’t know that the, the Greek philosopher Socrates, he was married, he had a wife. Her name was Zan Zan dippy. And he was, he was rid ridiculed because she apparently had a pretty sharp tongue and he didn’t really do much to resist it, but he was openly, publicly shamed for that. So that’s, so like ancient Greece, this was an issue.

Biblical [00:22:00] references. Then we have, you know, plays like the Taming of the Shrew with the Shakespeare. You know, where it’s, it, it this, this, this popularized concept of a shrew as a witch like skull that needed to be tamed. Like this is a problem to be solved, right? When, when a woman acts like this, you put her in her place you don’t tolerate it.

In the 18th century, so we’re talking the 17 hundreds there, there were these comedies that had what were called slipper heroes, which were men who were comically struck by their wives shoes as they asserted dominance. So this, you know, they’re shaming men for this. Like, it was like calling a man a cook or something.

And then in, in the 19th century, that’s when, if slang like the old ball and chain sort of started to come into modern parlance or normalized parlance where like wives were sometimes framed as these like shackles as, as men felt like they were being. Domineered by them. It was always framed in a very negative, and, and this is not an okay thing context.

And then in the [00:23:00] early 20th century both cartoons and vaudeville and, and also early, really early films had comedians play hep packed husbands fleeing their, their nagging spouses. And, and that’s something that was again, framed as negative. Ridiculed not okay. Unusual. There was also this radio show called The Bickersons in the 1940s.

It’s featured constant sipping between spouses, or, sorry, constant sniping between spouses. And it that that sort of set the stage for what was to come, but it should be emphasized. And this is the key thing, and I think this is a really key turning point. All of these were framed as aberrations, as like, look at this freakish behavior, this woman who won’t be put in her place.

And not as a normative thing. Yeah. And then what happened is we got mass media in the 1950s and while in the beginning you had sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver, where there [00:24:00] was, you know, a very aligned family and wives loved their husbands and women were happy to be subordinate to their husbands

.

This, this is when you first see the arrival of the Sassy wife and why I think the sassy wife in these instances caused women to normalize this as behavior that was permissible and not just like. Some joke or, or like an example of like a, a bad woman being, you know, uncontrollable or a man failing is because these were sitcoms, these are serialized shows.

And people, instead of seeing a one-off play or like, a sort of like weird scenario, these were like slice of life shows that were teaching people what was aspirational and normal. Does that make sense? Like we still look back to the 1950s of like, this is what normal, ideal life is like, and people are anchoring to this.

And so when you have shows like the Honeymooners. [00:25:00] Where Alice crammed and frequently exists, sarcasm and eye rolls to, to deflate her bombastic husband’s Ralph. And, and, and says things like, one of these days, Ralph,

Speaker 2: You know something right after you left the house this morning? I got in one of those silly moods of mine. You know how I get sometimes. So just for after, well, I’ll do the breakfast dishes and make the beds and take the garbage down. Then when I came back up, I was still in such a funny mood, you know? I thought, why should I settle down to the drudgery?

Amending your socks? So I scrubbed the kitchen floor.

Malcolm Collins: this all started in 1950s culture is what you’re saying? Yes. It was the 1950s culture that was, that makes a lot of sense.

Simone Collins: But it’s not even, it’s not, I, what I’m trying to say too and highlight is that it’s not just the culture because these tropes were always here. It was the fact that these tropes were then inserted into. Slice of life sitcoms, serialized shows that became part of people’s lives, and that became aspirational templates for their own identities.

Does that make sense? Yes. Like it’s one thing to see painting of the Shrew by Shakespeare. It’s one thing to see, or to [00:26:00] read something in the Bible or to like, hear about an example. But here you’re being like, programmed by these shows of like, this is what I’m anchoring to. I wanna be like, I love Lucy,

Sorry, honey. Seven 30. Gotta have the sheets for the laundry, man.

Simone Collins: I wanna be like this.

Well, and

Malcolm Collins: I’ve noticed this from women who aspire to be trad wives as well. Yes. You know, so, and this is why both ways, and this is why I always say it’s, it’s really dangerous to anchor to the 1950s in this way. And I think that you’re a hundred percent right. This is how people build sort of their templates for actions.

They build ideals that they want from themselves. Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: They’re like

Malcolm Collins: the conglomeration of things that they admire or, or sort of, you know, primed whiz, like this is how you be the correct type of wife or the correct type of woman. And then they spin their lives trying to get other people often to see them as that type of thing.

Simone Collins: Well, and it’s, it’s very like monkey see, monkey do. People, and, and we also see this in all these various social studies where like [00:27:00] when, when girls are exposed to people in STEM roles more that are like them, then they’re like, oh, well I can join a STEM role. Like when, when you see someone do something that’s like you, that’s what you decide.

Oh, well that’s what I do then. So when I, because I grew up seeing women in the world of wife being sassy, my default assumption was, okay, well if I were to become a wife, like, okay, I have to pull up my, like, what does a wife do? And I like pull into my Rolodex of like TV examples and they’re all sassy. So what do I do?

I act sassy because that’s, that is where I learned how a wife acts.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think it was a, a amplified for our generation because, you know, when we grew up, that’s when you had, you know, love and marriage the Simpsons you know, all, all of those sort of, well, yeah, no,

Simone Collins: it’s, so, yeah, it does get, so I’ll, I’ll, I’ll explain a little more.

‘cause it’s more nuanced. I just wanna, it is more nuanced than that. I, I wanted to emphasize with the fifties, the thing that happened is a new form of media gets released that I think changes the way that people [00:28:00] created social norms. Where the social norms were no longer coming from their local church community or from their schools or from whatever, like very localized stuff.

It was coming from tv. And that those tropes then suddenly become a lot more powerful. And then in the 1960s, you had the arrival of second wave feminism, which contributed to these tropes. It also revealed some tension like there was this British sitcom called Georgian Mildred that established the blueprint of what became this sort of new trope, which I think further justified this behavior on behalf of women, which is this trope of the mediocre husband and then the materialistic middle-aged wife who belittles him for not providing more like, and that’s like this sort of Homer Simpson in March thing.

There’s the Twilight episode called the, the Stop at Willoughby that portrayed a wife pushing her husband who hated into, into a job that he really hated framing hers like. This person undermining him and pushing him into things. [00:29:00] There were shows like Bewitched where Samantha, the, the witch used sarcasm to kind of manage her husband.

So like this is sort of where the nagging wife came out, but also husbands be, I think in, in part because of second Wave feminism also started getting framed as a little bit more hapless. And then in the eighties and nineties, the sort of like hapless husband who was being nagged by his wife in a more critical way.

‘cause like this also showed the tension with second wave feminism. Like the women were depicted as kind of evil for doing this. And then in the eighties and nineties, suddenly the women weren’t evil for doing this. And the husbands were just lovable buffoons, like Homer Simpson and like, I don’t know.

So what are some, oh, I think Love and Mary, everybody Loves Raymond is is another one. Love,

Malcolm Collins: love. And marriage I think is one of the best examples of this, given how long it showed and how ubiquitous it was. Yeah.

Speaker 5: Look at them over there. Men are such idiots. Look at them. Our protectors, the great white hunters. You know, in the old days, those men would’ve gone out there, fought the bear, come back with [00:30:00] supper and a nice rug. Now you send them for milk, they come back with a leaking carton, a runny nose, and a bad back.

You know, it’s amazing. The one thing they’re good for, they’re not good at, I hate the way they won’t ask directions when they’re lost

Speaker 8: and the way they leave the toilet seat up

Malcolm Collins: and, and that show is very big on the wife, you know, nagging.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But you saw it on, on almost all of the shows.

All of the, and this is what I think that you’re, you’re capturing here with that I had forgotten this was present on all of the major old sitcoms or most of the major old sitcoms. And

Simone Collins: the sitcoms are how we, this is where a lot of us learned how husbands behave, how wives behave, and what is acceptable and normative.

Even though like the writers didn’t mean to do this, they were trying to create comedic situations. They were trying to create drama. And I, I also think like, you can [00:31:00] see this too with reality tv. You know, they, they have to manufacture drama and toxicity because it’s entertaining. But I think that has led many people to think that their lives have to be toxic because that’s what’s normal, even though, because that’s what they see, but that’s not normal.

Like relationships aren’t toxic like that. But because we don’t, we don’t spend a lot of time around people anymore. Like people aren’t hanging out with other fam. Like unless you’re Mormon and you have like, family home evenings and you hang out with your church community or whatever, you’re Catholic or you’re an Orthodox Jew, you’re watching tv, you’re watching reality tv, you’re watching social media.

And so you’re watching these really toxic and dramatic and really fake relationship dynamics play out, and then you ape them at home because you don’t have anything else to anchor to. Mm-hmm. And I think that’s, that’s a lot of where this is coming from. But here’s, and, and I think one of the things is, is being aware of the media you’re consuming and, and being really targeted about it.

Is important [00:32:00] to your point. I can go both ways. I wanna be,

Malcolm Collins: Clear about the way that you grabbed onto this early in our relationship, which I think differs from the way I’ve seen other people. You did not unlike what, what somebody might say. You, you did not and you never and I don’t think it should ever be normal to regularly criticize your partner, right?

Like, that was not something you ever did. And the way I see other people do this you know, you, you also didn’t actively throw me under the bus in social situations. You never once I think in our entire relationship, have raised without any provocation, some fault about me. But what you did do early in our relationship is people would attack me publicly and you wouldn’t defend me.

I would side with

Simone Collins: them often.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You’d often side with them and be like, well, they do have a point about. I was like, Simone, you can’t do that if you’re married to somebody, right? Like, no, but I, I’d point out because people could hear all this, they could think that you were actually worse than you were.

And that, like, maybe you can fix more about a person. You can,

Simone Collins: I feel really, I feel really bad about what I did though. It, yeah, I mean, basically what happened is I just assumed that like, [00:33:00] oh, well it’s my job. As Malcolm’s wife to be the one who like takes him down a peg. ‘cause that’s what wives do, right?

And so every time, and this happened a lot at like family reunions, his family would gang up on him for really stupid things. And he would naturally react with, with some umbrage sometimes because he was being ganged up on for really stupid reasons. And like, keep in mind like examples of things that his family would do to him, like at gatherings, like stick fake cockroaches in his food and hope that he freaks out at a restaurant.

Things like that. Like the, this is not nice. I never do though. I have like a

Malcolm Collins: perfect self-control. Yeah. No, you were, and I think I was kind, was trained by my family from a very young age. Yeah. To, to handle all of this with, with with a plum. Perfect.

Simone Collins: But whenever, whenever you did show a little bit or like whenever you tried to stand up for yourself, I would, I would side with your family and it would really deeply hurt you.

You’d be like. Why did you do that? Like, who side you want? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Why, why? Well, I’m, I’m siting with the majority because women have a natural [00:34:00] instinct to side with the majority when they’re in group situations. Now that is not, that is above and beyond the behavior that we’re talking about here. Even when you first started dating me, you never insulted me in private.

And you never were the instigator of a public insight. But I think

Simone Collins: it’s still notable that, that even a woman who is a, a, a devout super fan of a man like I was of you and, and still am of you more than ever Yeah. Would, would normalize to throwing him under the bus in situations where he’s being ganged up on in public when she should.

Obviously stand by him because that is the culture we’ve been taught is notable. I wanna point out what, what you, what you finally, ‘cause you were always like, okay, well what are we gonna do? Like you would always try to correct it by after that happened, you would talk with me and be like, that really hurt me.

Why are you doing this? Like, try not to do this in the future. For a while you tried priming me, but then sometimes we’d forget. You’d be like, remember like, we’re a couple. Can you please be supportive of me? And [00:35:00] that didn’t work. What finally worked in the end, I think for me, like what finally hit me is like is you sat me down and you said, Simone, need to be aware of the fact that when you undercut me like this, you don’t make either of us look good.

Like you make yourself look like a terrible person. You make me look like a not good person and you make us look like. A, a, a bad couple. And you think that what you’re doing is, is diffusing tension and increasing social harmony, when in the end you’re making yourself look like a conniving, backstabbing wife, and you’re making me look like a buffoon and you’re making our marriage look unstable.

Oh, poor thing. He’s, he’s picking up all the tension and. And I, I realized you were totally right and I think when, if you are a dude, this, so you couldn’t do it for

Malcolm Collins: my sake, but as soon as your own [00:36:00] stability was on the line. No. I mean, what cater the people’s selfishness, Malcolm, I don’t know what to say, but like were just trying to diffuse social situations.

I was, I

Simone Collins: was, yeah. I was trying to diffuse tension. You did not

Malcolm Collins: wanna take the action that you saw as escalating the conflict. So if somebody attacks, because this is what you’re used to doing with yourself, you look for a way to. Disarm them. The customer service approach. Yeah. Just make it go away. Yeah, make it go away.

And you can’t take the customer service approach. But the reason why I mentioned this is I wanna talk about like, what should actually be normalized in a relationship. One I think, you know, historically and today, first of all, there is no reason to ever regularly criticize your partner about anything.

No. If your partner is doing something that is causing you distress or that you disagree with this is not resolved by constant nagging. This is resolved by setting them down, talking through with them. Why, like, as Simone said, I did with her. Yeah. When she had, when I had problems with her being like, you need to stop doing this for this reason, this reason and this reason.

Yeah. And let’s think through the [00:37:00] consequences of you doing this. And if they actually care about you, then they’re gonna do that. Right? Yeah. Nagging insulting, especially publicly, does absolutely nothing. And you should never, ever be the first to error negative information about your partner in a social context.

But I do

Simone Collins: think, I do think, because one, it was effective when you did it with me. Yeah. That catering to women’s vanity is important because when all these women are doing this, and even when you see these examples that we’ve posted, these women think they’re looking good. They are being vain. They are, when, when Melinda Gates rolls her eyes about Bill Gates and, and, and, and talks about how she, you know, you know, takes ‘em down a notch and how, you know, she keeps him, you know, solid.

And when, when hilarious. Baldwin on the red carpet is like, you don’t talk. When I, she, they’re all thinking. That they’re, you know, advocating for themselves and, you know, no, they look horrible. Absolutely

Malcolm Collins: horrible. And I think they look horrible even to other people [00:38:00] like themselves. Yeah, exactly. Like very few people watch or look at this behavior and are like, wow, that person’s really cool.

And, and I note here, if you’re like Malcolm, what you expect from a relationship, it’s just unrealistic for other people. Okay. I would point out that we have a lot of friends within our generation who are married and I don’t know one of them who doesn’t hold their relationship to these standards. Yeah.

If of, of my married friends that are like, like educated out sort of elite intellectual class, which is like the class that we hang with mm-hmm. None of them ever have spoken poorly about their,

Simone Collins: they’re so solid. And I think a really great, if we wanna talk about like a palate cleanser of a prominent couple.

That the media tried to make look divided and toxic when they ultimately aren’t, is Hannah Neman and her husband when they had that British Journal journalist. This, by the way,

Malcolm Collins: what’s, [00:39:00] what’s she known by Mor Mormon Ballerina Farms. The ballerina farm

Simone Collins: is Mormon tribe wife. They have a, a beautiful farm and like eight kids and maybe 10.

A lot of kids. There, there was this British journalist who went out and wrote this piece about them and basically talked about like, I think it’s David Neman just mansplaining, like talking over her all the time and like, you know, taking too much control of the conversation and, you know, tried to frame Hannah as this victim.

And after it came out, Hannah posted on social media, like we were taken aback by this, that, you know, my husband has always been there with me. It is always both of us in the trenches with everything. She 100% stood by him, defended him, said that this is completely not an accurate depiction of reality.

And they’re so aligned and they work wonderfully together.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it, it worked out in their favor. I mean, I think the public cited with Zim on that one was, was generally no.

Simone Collins: All the leftist female content creators that I follow are like, [00:40:00] confirmed. She’s, she’s

Malcolm Collins: horrible.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That it didn’t, people are gonna believe what they wanna believe.

But I will say, even if, even if Hannah, I would actually argue that Hannah, in everyone’s view comes across better. So if you wanna believe that they’re the aspirational corporate family or like trad couple, they look great after this. If you want to believe that Hannah is a beautiful, delicate victim who’s ballerina car now you get both.

She still looks better having not thrown her husband under the bus because she looks like the victim who’s taking the high road. So no matter what is true,

Malcolm Collins: she got no. So, Simone, I what, what was I gonna say here? I, I also note that we have a lot of people reach out to us, like fans of the show, about their spouses and not in a single one of the emails.

Did any of them ever complained about their spouses? Never. No.

Simone Collins: They’re, they’re aligned. They care deeply about each other. [00:41:00] 100%. It

Malcolm Collins: is, it is, is the thing. Yeah. I can only think of one instance. So, so I’m actually like racking my brain to think of anyone we know. And the one instance, I don’t think he saw it as a bad thing.

He was like, well, my wife said that once we went above, what was it, like four or five kids, I needed to start doing more of the housework myself. We’ve

Simone Collins: heard that actually from a co, a bunch of

Malcolm Collins: husbands. I don’t know. To me that was like a, but she’s a stay at home wife, you know? No, no. We’ve

Simone Collins: actually heard that from multiple husbands.

I think that’s a really common thing for. For husbands to experience in their lives. But what I’m pointing out

Malcolm Collins: here is this isn’t asking too much from somebody. And no, this isn’t a one-way thing. The reason why we’re not talking about men doing this is because we have other episodes about men doing this.

Yeah. Watch our episode. You’re so red pill you cut yourself, which is where we talk about how within some parts of the red pill community or the culture that’s downstream of that, they sort of confused aggression with masculinity. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Anger with masculinity. When in, when in the [00:42:00] end. A demonstration of anger is a demonstration of a lack of self-control, which is a demonstration of a lack of maturity and masculinity.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: We talked about who’s the example of this crowder in his wife’s divorce, right? Like Yeah. People are like, he didn’t physically, he didn’t physically abuse there, but he talked to her in a way that I would be deeply ashamed to be caught on camera talking to my wife. Like, I’d be like, oh my God, this is like a you don’t, and, and apparently he talked to his staff the same way, which also was like, you don’t.

Just, you don’t talk to people like that, but if you, yeah, if you learn masculinity from what was at one point normalized, and I say, yeah, somebody who considers himself like squarely within the red pill manosphere movement there was this you know, be growler, always be in frame, always be, you know, and most of the people who had that mindset have moved away from it at this point and are like, yeah, that’s probably not the right way to think about this stuff.

But generally speaking, these men are the minority, even within the red pill movement. And men just do [00:43:00] not cross this boundary as frequently as women do because they know, because culturally they know. It makes them look terrible to talk about their wives this way. Mm-hmm. I have never heard a man in my age range, and this isn’t even just like our friend group or something, refer to their wife as the ball and chain, you know, refer to their wife as it makes you,

Simone Collins: it makes you look like a dick.

Just like acting like your husband’s a lovable buffoon makes you look like a dick. It’s not, but everyone

Malcolm Collins: would, I think in most immediately realize this and call it out much faster if a man did this, if a man put his hands on a woman in the way that Macron’s wife put his hands on him, oh, he’d be an effing jail.

Yeah. I know, right? If, if, if somebody you know, treated their partner, and I have actually seen this within certain man, your influencers, where the man will treat their partner the way that Baldwin’s wife treat him like, oh, you know, I, I sit down and I like put, I have her dressed up as like a maid and like [00:44:00] delivering me stuff.

Or I sit down and I put my legs in her lap or something. And these are typically like the. I’ve, I, I watch some less popular manosphere creators. Okay. And they got it in their head that like, the way that, like you show dominance over a woman because they’re like, well, I’m married now. Like, I’m, I’m in a, a long-term relationship, so how do I continue to show how cool and dominant I am?

Well, there’s that one

Simone Collins: guy who gets up at four in the morning and his wife or girlfriend, like. You see her hands show up in his videos as he’s getting up and like she slices his bananas and gives him food in a bathtub or something. Yeah. That kind of thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. That kind of thing. And I’m like, it doesn’t make him look good though.

It makes him

Simone Collins: look like a baby.

Malcolm Collins: Makes him look like a baby. I like the way you say that, but what I wanted to point out here is the way that you, either way are coming off to other people with this Yeah. With women, people come off this way, but it doesn’t get stopped. Yeah. And, and the reason why we need to bring this up is we, the show does have a lot, a lot of female viewers.

And also a lot of it also has, it

Simone Collins: has a lot of young male [00:45:00] viewers who are going to find themselves in positions where there will be the first time where your girlfriend or fiance or wife does this and what, you know, you need to have a conversation about that immediately, about what it means to you about the optics for her, about the culture that may have led her to believe that.

And, and, you know, all this stuff too makes me think twice about Mormon standards, around media. How like it actually does kind of matter what you grow up watching. And I think Mormon, Mormon standards around media would not shield any Mormon from these toxic dimen dynamics. Like they’re trying to hide Mormons from swear words when instead, like they should be hiding them from toxic relationship dynamic shows.

Like, I don’t know how to, I mean, make a standard around that.

Malcolm Collins: And if you’re like, how do I quote, unquote train my wife on this stuff? It’s, you sit her down and you don’t let any instances of this slide every time it comes up, it is a, you bring it up, you have a

Simone Collins: conversation you

Malcolm Collins: need to have. It’s not a nag, it’s a this is, is is not productive.

It makes both of us look [00:46:00] bad and it makes our relationship look bad. Mm-hmm. And it is detrimental to our combined goals as a couple. Yeah. So how do we work on this? Right? Yeah. Like, and I think that the way that I would frame. Your relationship with your spouse to, to them so that they can understand what you mean by this is as like a noble house.

Think of it like what it used to mean in one of my Korean romance to marry into like the Duke’s house. Okay. Where you,

Simone Collins: this is, this is what I’m talking about. Media coloring. The way that you see the world now. You see the whole world through like Korean dramas. You marry into

Malcolm Collins: the Duke’s house. Now the house’s goals are your goals.

Yeah. It’s true though. That’s true. Something bad happens to the, so you would never act counter to the Duke’s will in public because you two are a team. You are two faces of the same sort of corporation, right? Um mm-hmm. You, there, there is no conflict and, and it’s not that you could negotiate for a higher place.

You are his wife. That means your role is ex, he’s your husband. That [00:47:00] means his role is what his

Simone Collins: successes are. Your successes. Your successes are his successes. Absolutely. And failure. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And so like. That is, and I think that one way you, you can really do is, is when you’re having the marriage conversation with a woman and you’re like, this is what I expect from marriage.

Like this is what I want marriage to be about, about us. Not, you never criticize your husband in public, but like we are working as a combined entity for collective goals. Yeah. And that it’s very easy to, to have aligned goals with someone so long as your goal isn’t just hedonism or status or something like that.

But even then, you’re probably better off working. I, I knew,

Simone Collins: I knew actually really good couples whose, whose shared goal was hedonism and they did, they pulled it off, they made it great. Like, and they had a lot of fun together, but they were aligned on it. Like it’s, I don’t care what your aligned goal is but it is your aligned goal and you do it together.

Don’t undermine each other and oh my gosh, just how uncomfortable it is to veer around that couple that like fights.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, it’s [00:48:00] miserable. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t wanna be around them at all. You, you’d have no reason. And, but

Simone Collins: we’ve all been there where you’re like at a dinner and a couple starts fighting and you’re like can I leave now?

This is

Malcolm Collins: cool. I have, when I was growing up, I was exposed to a lot of Boomer parents. Okay. And I have a lot of friends who are around our age and I guess of sort of a similar social class to the parents I was exposed to as a kid. I can think of few. I would say maybe 25% of those boomer relationships where I didn’t see the wife belittle the husband totally.

I I, of people in our age group, I would say it’s near zero. And, and so. Don’t do it. It’s not normal. It’s not a holdover. I think that our generation is already normalized to not do it. But if you’re, if you’re dealing with this or if this is a challenge for you and your relationship, I think even just normalized to your friends, right?

Like if, if she’s like, oh, this is the normal push back. Yeah, push.

Simone Collins: So we’ve had other episodes where we talk about this, where we have the, the episode where we talked about the mental load concept that has been really spreading around social media [00:49:00] where. Women are unfairly complaining about this mental load they experience because they are the ones remembering to pack their kids’ lunches.

They’re totally not acknowledging. As people like Amanda Claypol have pointed out the fact that men also have their own mental loads of like yes, defend the family. Like what happens if you hear a, like a door open your house at 2:00 AM in the morning, is that your problem? Is the woman or is your husband the one going down?

Like, men also have mental loads that they deal with, that women take for granted just as men do. So, like that’s not even fair, but like, so there are these, these memes that circulate on social media. And one thing that was really interesting in the comments on our video, on mental loads where women are complaining about this and acting like, you know, it’s so unfair what they take on as wives and they have to take on these man children and take care of them.

Is that in their friend groups, they often had like one person who would constantly complain about these things because they’d been poisoned by various, like algorithmic pools on social media. And that it was really annoying to them that like the two [00:50:00] other friends in their groups would never point, like call ‘em out on it and that they were always the one to call them out on it.

But I think that it’s, it’s so great that they’re doing that and you need to be that person. You need to be that person to be like, girl. Like that’s what are you doing? Well, trying

Malcolm Collins: to pull yourself out of friend groups like that. Yeah. I think that that’s another thing is, is is pull your, your partner out of toxic friend groups if if, if they’re taxing.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Because that stuff spreads like a virus. It does.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, thank you for pulling me out of it for deprogramming me. And I, oh, you know where I do still see it. Lesbian relationships.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, thought you were gonna say, I still do it. Worry about that. No, I, you still see it in lesbian culture, but lesbian culture is, you know, uniquely toxic.

Like very low levels of mental health, high levels of divorce, high levels of spousal abuse. So like, I can see why they would also, they’re more close to the urban world culture. What lesbian

Simone Collins: friends do we have,

Malcolm Collins: We, we have a few lesbian friends, which I don’t see it, but in everyone that I have had, like a white lesbian [00:51:00] acquaintance I have had, or I’ve seen, I’ve seen negative talk about partners. I don’t wanna be too specific.

But you don’t remember that

Simone Collins: living, that they

Malcolm Collins: transition. So maybe you don’t think of them as a lesbian

Simone Collins: transition

yeah. Anyway.

Yeah. I love you.

Love you too. Thanks for tolerating me. I’m barely, I’m barely making it. Guys. Just get the shock caller out. It’ll be okay. Get

Malcolm Collins: the shock color. I’m gonna see if I can make a video where I edit you to be shocked.

Looking.

Simone Collins: We need to, no, I’m sure like there’s some Halloween sale. After Halloween where we can just buy like shock colors for humans, you know, like the kind that we’re supposed to have like bombs on them, like have flashing lights or something. We need to the flashing light Kay. Colors. We need to those for like all of our children.

And every time the journalists come over, I course

Malcolm Collins: people dressed up as Kaya and, and Hassan. Shocking. That

Simone Collins: is the Halloween costume of the year. Year. That is, that is to [00:52:00] be kaya for Halloween. Kaya and Hassan Kaya. Please can we, oh my God. I wish we had a Halloween party to go to so I could be, I could be ka or no, our children would all be Kaa and we would both be Hassan.

That would be Chef’s Kiss. Oh, well I’m well love you. Bye. Love you.

Malcolm Collins: But it’s all good. I think delicious chips and salsa

Simone Collins: and what I’m gonna do with the bullock is I think I’m gonna go ahead and freeze everything so that we’re not like reheating it after refrigerating it multiple times. I think that, like from a food safety standpoint isn’t good, but every time I redo it, I’m gonna simmer it for a while.

Okay. Before I,

Malcolm Collins: well, did you, did you boil the bullock first

Simone Collins: boil? No, you’re supposed to, for the recipe, you pan sear it until it’s browned on the outside.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I think what

Simone Collins: needed is like, it needs to be steamed because you were saying the inside didn’t [00:53:00] seem soft.

Malcolm Collins: Well, remember the first time you cooked it, you steamed it before you pan-seared it.

Simone Collins: No, that was just for Bullock. Sorry. That was just, sorry. That was just for to buki whatever,

Malcolm Collins: like

Simone Collins: plain. No. Well, I think.

Malcolm Collins: And, you know, we did something wrong. We were supposed to steam it in some way and then brown

Simone Collins: it. No, I did it exactly the way I was,

Malcolm Collins: I followed, I followed the directions. You got the directions from an AI perplexity or

Simone Collins: something?

No, no, no, no. Actually I got it from a recipe that you sent to me.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, wow.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When, when, when perplexity gives me instructions, nothing goes wrong. The AI only guides me correctly. You don’t understand. I love

Malcolm Collins: it when people get mad about AI hallucinating, and I’m like, people hallucinate all the time. You knob.

Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: it’s, it’s human recipes. Give me the most trouble. Honestly,

Malcolm Collins: that’s, that’s where I, well, then it’s my fault. I, I sent you a bad recipe. So I guess yeah, we’ll just cook it longer when we reheat it.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s, well, and, you know, we’ll see tonight if that works, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll find something else to do.

But I, I [00:54:00] have confidence in this one.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The, the the rice cakes came out for the audience who wants to know, they were a little hard compared to how they normally taste or their usual texture as one of our kid is very into texture. He’s like, I really like the texture on this toy. He’ll say, like, feeling it as like metal or something.

He’s like, this got a, a great texture to it. And he sounds so sophisticated. Well, they’re, they’re

Simone Collins: autistic, so, I mean, yeah. Texture’s, everything. If you’re autistic, I don’t, I don’t tell him he’s a weirdo. We know we’re weirdos. I love that you, when you’re, I knew I was gonna love your family when your mom said that.

The family motto was, I’m not okay. You’re not okay. And that’s okay. And I’m like, that is amazing.

Malcolm Collins: Please. There, there what was I gonna say? The, the episode today, so in, in my GSB class for, for Stanford Business School there’s like a group and everyone’s starting podcasts now. It’s like the third podcast that’s gone live recently.

And of course I’m terrified they’ll one day find my podcast. Or you haven’t told

Simone Collins: anyone about your [00:55:00] podcast in that group?

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. I am terrified that they will find, because they are, they are far, far left. Anyway. Yeah.

Simone Collins: But they never liked you anyway. I mean, you had some friends, you had like a few friends who were really nice to you and then everyone else like.

Acted super superior and kind of ignored you and didn’t

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they kind of did. It was really surprising. I don’t know why. Yeah,

Simone Collins: there’s, there’s really no love lost Malcolm. I, I, I have, I mean, there were, I I could, I could probably count on one hand the number of people who are not dicks to you at Stanford, GSB.

You can, you can, you can take this part out. But

and not even, she was only nice after yeah,

Malcolm Collins: she was nice. No, she was nice to me for a period at the beginning of the gsb, and then,

Simone Collins: then she got in with the cool kids. So she, she

Malcolm Collins: stay away from you didn’t kids? Yeah, I was, nothing, nothing

Simone Collins: on her.

Malcolm Collins: Nothing on her. You, you’re hanging out with the cool kids you’re hanging out with, but I meant I’m only at four.

Oh, you forgot what’s her face? And I’m sure there were others. I don’t have a great memory.

Simone Collins: No, sorry. And [00:56:00] she was

Malcolm Collins: dating me from the first day I went there too, so, you know. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Actually no, no, because for the first at least 30 days you were, you were, you were dating and like in, in the, during the summer vacation leading up to it.

You were, you were traveling with various subgroups of the GSB to get to know them and also in search of a wife.

It’s so weird to have a wife who was with me during my time at graduate school because, you know, I can look back on high school or I can look back on college and feel like, Hey, maybe people weren’t that nice to me. But then I’m like, no, Malcolm, you’re just being indulgent.

Everybody thinks that way. And now I have this person who is fairly level-headed and experienced all this with me and is like, oh, no. No, Malcolm actually, people didn’t really like you that much. .

Because of course, in my head, like trying to be generous, I assume that I must have been being a jerk to people and not realizing it. And so when I looked back on my life, up until Simone started [00:57:00] being an external recorder, this is the way I saw myself.

Hey, Liz. How’s the telescope? I don’t know. Kelsey, how’s your mom’s pill addiction?

Simone Collins: So, but

Malcolm Collins: anyway, I thought it was really funny ‘cause they released this podcast and, it’s so like NPR voice and everything like that. And on the same day that that podcast goes out, my podcast about Nick Fuentes fangirl comes out like fan fiction of Nick Fuentes and like, you know, morning Glory

Simone Collins: Milking Farm or whatever, milking

Malcolm Collins: mini tars at the milking farm.

And I am like, this is like my level of culture right here. This is like your level of culture, right? Like, we’re not in the same world. She’s talking about like Haitian relief efforts or something.

Simone Collins: Not even that though. Like you had so much more. Okay. We had so much more substance in our podcast about Nick Fuentes fan fiction and female Gooners.

Then she had an entire opening podcast, which was literally the, the thesis of it was [00:58:00] I lived through a disaster in Haiti and I discovered that someone was nice to other people during that disaster. What a revelation. I’m going to go give speeches about that and start a podcast about it, because I can’t believe that people might actually do nice things for other people.

Malcolm Collins: I’m,

Simone Collins: I’m being

very true. I’m gonna be generous.

Malcolm Collins: What I would say is, I think she’s not going for like an informational podcast, I think. No, no, no. She’s, she’s like a, she’s, she’s a

Simone Collins: development coach, so her entire shtick is motivational messages and, we’re dealing with a lot of very helpless people

Malcolm Collins: like us and our thing.

Like obviously we would, we would not gel with that sort of like a vibe. But I think for the audience that she’s trying to target I thought it was incredibly well produced. Like I, I’m gonna be honest, well produced. It was, I mean, like was top quality way better than ours.

Simone Collins: And yeah, we’re, we’re very, I mean, there’s like a grunting baby in, in our audio here.

Like, I, I get it.

Malcolm Collins: The, the [00:59:00] theming, the, she would even have like within her own words, she would trail off and then like audio would start and then it’d go back to her words. To have like a, you know, like you would have on NPR as a transition between two people’s, not my aesthetic, that’s not my aesthetic.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s, but it’s, it’s, it’s for, oh my God, though, if we did though, we’d have to use audio of our sun Torsten going do, do, do. No, it’s funny, but when I was listening to it, all I

Malcolm Collins: could think is like, the person who consumes this is like a different species from whatever we are.

Simone Collins: Well, people literally comment on our podcast being like, what is that?

So we are different species from other people. Yeah. They’re, it has been confirmed by our own viewer viewership,

Malcolm Collins: so it’s

Simone Collins: fine.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah

And I wanna be clear here. I’m not saying it was bad, like something produced for this alternate species of human that exists alongside me. It was expertly produced, like it sounded like a very high quality NPR piece. But like when I listened to NPR pieces, I’m like, but why? Like, the speed at which new ideas are introduced to me is so.

Slow. [01:00:00] I think it’s more about a vibe and some people live for like this vibe and I struggle to emulate that part of humanity.

Malcolm Collins: We, we are, we, we target nerds. Like that’s the thing. Right?

Speaker 4: So the, the people I’ll be working with what they like, standard nerds.

Malcolm Collins: You know, we, we don’t target, like what’s the, the in in thing? I think pretty much everyone who watches us as a nerd a religious

Simone Collins: nerd, a midtown nerd, a racist nerd, a gene bro, nerd tech nerds, AI nerds. You

Malcolm Collins: wanna do you wanna

Simone Collins: get

Malcolm Collins: us started on today’s sexy nerds, though? They’re

Simone Collins: all sexy nerds.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We got a bunch of sexy nerds ready to unh holster their autism on the, on the world.

Simone Collins: That’s what Basecamp is all about,

right? Yes. Okay. Wait, sorry. Lemme get that one in front of me.

And I mean, I I I had to slap this together really quickly ‘cause I didn’t know you wanted to do this today. So it’s not, it’s not perfect, but we’re gonna gonna get into it. Well, we can go through some

Malcolm Collins: of the specific examples that What’s

Simone Collins: her Facebook. Yeah. And I, and I, [01:01:00] I have, I have, I have some too. No, I’ve got, I’ve got, yeah, I’ve got, I’ve got stuff.

I’m just saying I’m, I’m running on two and a half hours of sleep and it, I understand Simone. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: If you wanna put this off, we can do another one.

Simone Collins: No, I’m ready. I’m ready.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, I’m

Simone Collins: ready. And I, I, I’d rather do my debt Jubilee one when I’m not running on so little sleep. ‘cause this is a little more personal. Alright.

Speaker 9: Okay, so what’s happening guys? Whatcha guys doing getting,

that’s a lot of pumpkins. Yeah. There’s G. Yeah. What are you doing, sweetheart? I’m pumpkin. Yes. Oh my gosh. Are you gonna take out too many seeds? Yeah. And put them in the bowl. And put ‘em in the bowl. Yeah, but it doesn’t look, oh yeah. You are putting ‘em in the bowl, aren’t you? I’m putting them on. [01:02:00] Oh, that’s a good plan.

And what about you, toastie? Well, I have a

Speaker 10: so many seed.

Seed. Okay. And Octavia, what about you? Is this fun? Yay. Is this fun? Ocion this Very fun. Oh, you like having a Halloween birthday break Scoop.

Speaker 9: Did you know that daddy has a birthday around Halloween? Yeah, because mommy a.

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Closing Bell: 10/22/25

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