Gratitude Shapes Opportunity and Behavior

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins for a thought-provoking Thanksgiving special that challenges the way we view gratitude, abundance, and modern life. In this episode, they explore the history and meaning of Thanksgiving, reflect on the incredible luxuries of the present day, and discuss why genuine gratitude—not performative thankfulness—can transform your outlook and well-being.

From the evolution of food and the abundance in our grocery stores, to the psychological and physical benefits of gratitude, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into what it means to appreciate the small things in life. They share personal stories, historical context, and practical advice for cultivating a grateful mindset, even when life feels tough.

Whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving or just looking for a fresh perspective on happiness and fulfillment, this episode will inspire you to see your everyday life in a new light. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more insightful conversations!

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, I am excited to be here with you today on American Thanksgiving.

Speaker 4: White.

My, I bought them in your mouth. . Eat me. He wants for now food.

Malcolm Collins: Now, if you are unfamiliar with what Thanksgiving is as a holiday in the United. States, because about 50% of our audience is outside the United States.

Speaker 5: Remember, these savages are our guests. We must not be surprised at any of their strange customs. After all, they have not had our advantages such as fine schools, libraries, full of books, shampoo,

Malcolm Collins: It is a holiday where you are supposed to meet with family, have a big feast, and go over things that you are grateful for

Speaker 5: Why you are as civilized as we, except we wear shoes and have last names. .

Malcolm Collins: And I wanted to take this [00:01:00] episode to focus on something I know the algorithm’s gonna hate, but I think for the audience members who decide to trudge through this, it’s a message that I wish was more common in our society today. And it’s a message that’s not more common in our society today for the very reason that the algorithm hates it.

Mm. It is not controversial. It doesn’t make other people look bad. I mean, I mean, it may be controversial to say at this point. But that’s that you should feel incredibly privileged to be alive today. Oh

Simone Collins: yes. As hard

Malcolm Collins: as dating is today, as much as you may feel like you got dealt a bad hand in life as much as the the world.

Globally that we live in today, even if you are living in a degree of desperate poverty, even if you are living in a degree of you know, you’re, you are not attractive. You’re not, oh, I can’t get a [00:02:00] girl, I can’t, whatever, right?

Simone Collins: Oh, even I can’t get a job. I will never own a house there. There’s a lot that people like The narratives today are, I would say quite.

Negative and they completely diminish. Like some really serious,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. It’s not just that this, like, I’ll never own a house, I’ll never get a girlfriend. And I think that one of the biggest problems that we have in society now is this expectation that you deserve merely for existing. And I think that this is where a lot of the progressive movement actually comes from in their ideology.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Mm-hmm. As, as actual, like, not, not just rights, but like rights that you can claim, like, I have the right to have happiness. Not, not even the pursuit of happiness. To just have happiness. Right. Like, yeah. They didn’t put. They didn’t say

Simone Collins: life, liberty and happiness for a good reason to the pot

Malcolm Collins: potential, it shoulda said, and the potentially fruitless pursuit of happiness.

Simone Collins: Right? [00:03:00]

Malcolm Collins: That is, that, that is. But my point being is that most people throughout history didn’t even have like the illusion that this would be something. And, and even today you don’t, you know, your, your. Born in, in the United States, like one of the most privileged places you can be born on earth.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And there has become a culture in the United States around, and I, I see this all the time because we go on, on walks. My wife and I, we try to go on a walk together every, well now about half the mornings ‘cause you know, we have to do more works to film the episode and stuff like that and, and code and everything.

But one of the places we like going are places like Walmart and Target and I, these random

Simone Collins: grocery stores.

Malcolm Collins: Grocery stores, random grocery stores, and I will see people. I was, I was watching a v YouTuber recently, and they were like, oh my God, I never wanna go in back into Walmart again after, after being there.

It looks like so disgusting, so whatever. And my wife is a very sensitive person, a very autistic person. Does not like [00:04:00] being around people, but even she, you know, every time we walk through Walmart, and I mean, every single time you do this. You comment on just the level of obscene luxury we have in our society

to even have the opportunity to see and look at such a diversity of potential products,

Simone Collins: the sheer abundance of it, and like it’s, it’s. So annoying because people like I, there, there used to be a blog maybe 10 years ago. I’m sure it’s defunct now though. Maybe there may be variations of it called people of Walmart where people would just post photos of unfortunate, overweight, poorly dressed Americans.

I remember that. Yeah. People, it was delightful, honestly. I loved it. It was and it just, but it, it, it completely discounted the fact that it, it’s like. I guess it’s kind of like the, the, the fat scooter beasts in the movie Wally, where like, oh, look at them. They’re so disgusting, but like, it, oh wait, but they’re on an AI powered spaceship with unlimited abundance.

Like, it [00:05:00] just completely overlooks that. And, and just like with the movie Wally, like the focus is on, like him being on this trash stre world and his, his misadventures and everything. Oh, wait a second. There is this incredible thing that has happened in the background. This is not to say that we, we, people might think, oh, well they live in some, you know, like Valley for is, you know, a very affluent area and you know, they’re only going to the fanciest grocery stores.

I mean, this is the, the Walmart that we walk around has relatively pretty bad local reviews, and I don’t know why, because it’s. It’s an amazing story. It’s like

Malcolm Collins: Norristown, Walmart, Simone Norristown has one of the highest murder rates in the United States. Yeah. And

Simone Collins: like there’s, you know, we’ve, there have been like dirty diapers left on the ground of it, like it’s.

I think it’s great. I

Malcolm Collins: love it. But like diaper, so, so let’s just talk about Walmart for a second. For all of the negative things that people say about stores like this and everything Uhhuh. Contrast the fact that a Walmart exists near us to [00:06:00] what it was like historically to try to feed yourself in your family.

Yeah. You can in the United States take a minimum wage job. And for a couple hours of labor reliably be able to take the money you make from just a couple hours of labor at a minimum wage job to said Walmart and trade it for one of a thousand different flavors and products that can probably keep you alive for the day.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Whereas, you know, very recently our ancestors were. Only on potatoes. What are we having today? Potatoes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I wanna contrast that with what it was like to try to feed yourself at different parts of human history.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: If you go back to a hunter gatherer period and you told one of them in the future, your descendants will be able to trade like two and a half to three hours of minimum wage labor.

Okay. For reliable [00:07:00] calories in any flavor they want. That will not get them sick.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: This would’ve. Downed them. Mm-hmm. They’d be like three hours. And I don’t need to guess if the berries are gonna kill me three hours. And I don’t need to worry if the meat has gone bad because we got that from a hunt, you know, two weeks ago.

And who knows if it’s still good, like, and, and

Simone Collins: oh, I mean honestly though, like. There are all these things they wanna go back in time and show someone in history. There’s this one, TikTok, but also she posts YouTube short accounts of just this woman who holds up various berries and fruits and she’s, she has this little song, she’s like, one of these is food dead, one is a poison.

And she, you, you get to guess and she tells you all about them and like, they’re like, wait, there’s a random woman on your magical hand box. That tells you which plants are gonna kill me and which plants I can eat. Like the fact that we can just take a picture of a plant with our phone, like even if it came down to forging, if we still have the internet somehow, which I mean,

Malcolm Collins: There wouldn’t be enough food to support [00:08:00] forging with the population right now.

Just. If in case you’re not aware, I know, I’m, I’m aware of that. Which also bring to a thing all of the things people complain about. Mm-hmm. They complain about Walmart, they complain about GMOs. Do you know like what corn used to look like historically? You would grow corn and you’d get like a little thing that was like an inch and a half along and you could only eat like a portion of it.

And this is true of almost all of the food crops, whether it’s broccoli or cauliflower or lettuce. Or tomatoes, maybe like

Simone Collins: brussel sprouts, which, you know, just 30 years ago used to taste absolutely horrible.

And now they’re amazing.

Malcolm Collins: Right. But I think what people don’t realize is how recent this scene abundance is. So let’s talk about something simple like apples, right? Mm-hmm. Apples to, to grow the type of apple that you eat, you have to graft it, right? Like you, you’re, you’re grafting a, a branch onto a root.

You cannot grow edible apples from an apple seed. The type of apples that you grow from apple seed are really only [00:09:00] used in making. Alcohol, like apple cider. So Johnny Appleseed, when he’s going out and planting all these apples, he was planting the trees to be apple cider trees. He was feeding people alcohol.

He wasn’t, I thought you were gonna

Simone Collins: say he should actually be called Johnny Apple graft, but it didn’t sound so

Malcolm Collins: good. No, no, no, no. Apple jack for the, the alcohol drink that he, so he was just

Simone Collins: a, a booze. He was, he was the evangelist of booze, basically.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes. That makes him so much cooler. But it, well, you can see why the frontiers have been loved him, right?

Um, He’s the alcohol fairy. He is, no, he’s the alcohol fairy. Johnny Apple absentee is actually, we gotta teach our kids this about the alcohol fairy. The alcohol fairy who planted alcohol for, for daddy milk, as we call it. You know, they have milk and I have daddy milk. The, the point that I’m making here is people think that this was a long time ago, so if I go back, because I wanna go to different periods in history, you then go to the surf period in history.[00:10:00]

You think as a surf you had a choice as to the calories. I’m not even talking about the wonders of the internet or ai. I’m talking about being able to say reliably my family isn’t gonna starve this year.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: If my kid gets sick, they’re probably not gonna auto die. And two, like no, every time you got sick it was like, oh, I caught my finger.

Am I gonna die? Yeah. Am I gonna have a pain that I can never get rid of for the rest of my life? And this was true even for the wealthy, as we heard. Yeah. Louis the IVs who had such a bad infection in his butt, that anal fissures, the feces actually came out through the rotting hole the infection had created, you know how much Well, in King Henry

Simone Collins: vii?

Yeah. Some, some of the most, the most famous kings also famous for like their hedonic pleasures. Yeah. Suffered more profoundly than most of us could imagine in a modern age.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But, but, but the reason I’m starting here was going back to ancient times, then going to the medieval [00:11:00] period. But I wanna go to even more modern times, like the reason why I’m talking about like the, the later colonial period, right?

Mm-hmm. The idea that you could go to a store and have a choice. Of like 10 different varieties of an apple. Isn’t that crazy? I have astounded somebody. Well, even stuff compared to my

Simone Collins: childhood, you can now buy Dragon fruit in just random stores. We can get dragon fruit at BJ’s. Whereas I remember that being an exotic fruit.

I would only get if I went to Beijing or Shanghai.

Malcolm Collins: I, I agree and people have lived through this, but what I’m trying to point out. It’s even more modern things like a fruit, okay. That you can go and get for like 35 cents. Bananas. Bananas. You converted pineapples. Did you know that bananas, you needed a prescription to get bananas?

Simone Collins: Well, and, and people used to rent pineapples. They were so

Malcolm Collins: expensive. This is how kind of abundance. Yeah. They,

Simone Collins: they were such a, a financial flex that if you have like a pineapple at a table, obviously no one would eat it because you [00:12:00] rented it because, well, they

Malcolm Collins: cost, it cost adjusted $8,000 I think in today’s money.

Simone Collins: And then, which is I think also why you tend to see it at, on, you know. Carved into some buildings, like especially in South Carolina and North Carolina, you see them all over the place.

Malcolm Collins: It was like a sign of wealth. Yeah. Yeah. But, okay, so. But I wanna go. Okay. 1950s people like by the 1950s people had wealth.

So by the 1950s people had prosperity. We’ve had other episodes where we’ve done this, but if I show you food from the 1950s, you will be mortified.

Simone Collins: And actually, this ties in really well with Thanksgiving as a holiday because many of the. Iconic Thanksgiving dishes were invented in the 1950s. And that’s why

Malcolm Collins: they taste so bad.

That is why they have Turkey, because Turkey was genuinely a good food in the 1950s. Mm-hmm. And we as a society have invented better foods than roast Turkey. Well, another

Simone Collins: really classic one is the green bean casserole, which is Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup with [00:13:00] canned green beans. Cooked in a casserole dish.

Malcolm Collins: And why was this considered a good dish in the 1950s? Because in the 1950s, they believing that they had reached the peak of human hedonism, the peak of humanity’s utopia. They lived in an era where they had variety. In the calories they consumed, except unlike the variety of calories you consume, it wasn’t flash frozen and delivered to a grocery store.

Simone Collins: Yeah, there wasn’t a Coltrane shipping system. So to get frozen or fresh foods, like most of the refrigerated foods you got would have to be local. That’s why people had local milk delivery. On a daily basis because there, there wasn’t this big cold chain system set up. Whereas now there are refrigerated trucks that are able to bring all sorts of frozen and, and refrigerated juice.

It’s not just

Malcolm Collins: about refrigeration, it’s also about flash freezing, which allows you to move things like meats and stuff like that in, in mass. But the thing about the 1950s was you would, all of the variety in [00:14:00] foods they had, all of the miracle in foods they had came from canned. Foods. Yeah. Your dinner was made up of a collection of things that came that were hands.

Mm-hmm. And then maybe on a special occasion, like Thanksgiving, an animal that came from the butcher. So this would’ve been cuts of meat that came from a butcher off of a. Recently living animal. Often that’s, that’s how the food was often moved, so it didn’t go bad like a Turkey. Right. And this was very difficult.

Right. So I, I’m, I’m trying to point out that even very recently, things were much harder. Mm-hmm. And things were harder for our ancestors. If you compare your life just to the life of people 20 or 30 years ago, I could understand why it can feel depressing these days. Right. But there were bottlenecks in human history where.

17 women were breeding for every one man that was breeding, okay? Mm-hmm. Be grateful that the Intels of our era, if you incel B,

Speaker 7: hold [00:15:00] tight your buns. If buns you do hold dear

Malcolm Collins: have access to those men, okay? They never saw a naked woman in their life. Likely. Okay. Those men, like, they couldn’t even goon. Alright. Those men, they, they couldn’t have simulated conversations with women who can pretend to like them, like AI women.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. The dating sims at Asman goals has been playing, are so realistic. The rendering of the, the Korean women. I haven’t seen these. What? You’ve got to watch the Dating Sims and Asman Gult. He, there are three Asman Gold videos on YouTube of like, they’re like over an hour each where he plays all the way through a Korean dating sim and it’s hilarious.

And you have to watch. Okay. I cannot look away. It’s. Like the, the decision music in it is now iconic and seared into my brain. You’ll understand what I mean after you watch them. Okay. So anyway, do it. But yeah, no, like literally you can have an extremely realistic [00:16:00] harem experience.

Malcolm Collins: I’m not, I’m not even just talking about that.

Mm-hmm. The point I’m making here. Is if you incel B you, you historically, the, the, you know, 16 guys who weren’t breeding for that. Every one guy who was, they were living lives of constant torture and slavery basically. They, they were not, it’s not, it’s not even that they couldn’t goon, okay? They, they didn’t have reliable access to calories.

Their lives were generally constant pain. They lived in incredibly terrible environments. People also falling,

Simone Collins: they hyper fixate on the really bad maladies. Like, oh, you get a cut and then you get a, you know, an infection and you die, or you get injured and you die, or you have to go to war and you die.

They’re not forgetting the fact that. You know. Well, you know what you do. Probably every day, probably less. ‘cause they didn’t eat so much. Was you poop? Do you know how most people wiped themselves when they pooped? No. Tell me. There’s [00:17:00] actually a book, I think it’s called Clean, that talks about the history of cleanliness that I read like 15 years ago.

But it’s fascinating, highly recommended. ‘cause it makes you really grateful for modern times. Most people just swiped their index finger across their anus. So that was what you had in India, don’t they? Yeah. Many places they still do it. Absolutely. And actually I think a lot of I’ve heard accounts of many people who have family in India and have to go there for holidays and stuff are really much more likely to be grateful for what we have now.

‘cause their cousins just sort of, they’re shocked to watch as their cousins in a very blase manner. Like will walk, like, just step over like a dying child in the street and not care. And. Like, you know, here, here they are devastated to see the level of poverty that they’re around. Yeah. Because yeah, it still absolutely does exist today and it still absolutely is devastating.

But yeah, that’s how you wiped yourself. I mean, every time I get in our warm shower, especially now that the weather’s getting colder. And our house is [00:18:00] getting colder. I am. My mind is blown that we have warm water. ‘cause our house is more than 200 years old. It didn’t have any indoor plumbing for its first years.

It, it, the first bathtub was in this one isolated room, close to the the kitchen. Which is now the, the kid room bathroom Yeah. Tub in there. I don’t know how they fit a tub in there. But

Malcolm Collins: Oh, it’s because bathtubs back then were meant to be filled by hand, Simone. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess they were

Simone Collins: taking it up from, they were heating it in the fireplace, which is adjacent to that right there.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so like the, the fact that we have just the luxury of heated water, and I would presume that the vast majority of people who listen to this podcast. Have hot water. And if you’re taking cold showers, you’re doing it probably because you’re in the top 1% of earners and you’re, you know, doing the whole like cold exposure thing.

But I just, I think people don’t think enough about those details too, that there are just so many tiny things we experience every day that just [00:19:00] someone 50, 100, 200 years ago would just be mind blowing. And. We, we just take them for granted. We don’t even realize that they’re there until they’re not, and then suddenly,

Malcolm Collins: well, what I think is worse for me about all of this,

Simone Collins: mm,

Malcolm Collins: is in any era that we live in.

There always seem it, it’s almost considered cool to take extra the things for granted that you should be the most excited about and you should be the most grateful for. Oh, what do you mean? So if I’m gonna be, remember I gave an example of like GMOs or AI for our generation, but if I’m gonna give an example from our generation growing up, you’re in my generation growing up, it would’ve been Wikipedia.

We literally, oh my gosh. As a generation had and this is back when Wikipedia worked and wasn’t totally biased. The hu all human knowledge accumulated for free at your fingertips whenever you wanted it, with infinite background on almost any subject. [00:20:00] And the primary takeaway was you can’t really trust Wikipedia and you’re, you’re a, a bad journalist or researcher of your ci.

And it’s like, come on. It’s way more, way more accurate than mainstream news is today. For right. Like, and yet, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We have to pool all over Wikipedia. ‘cause it’s the big invention of our lifetimes. I mean, it’s the same with AI today. These, these. People who whinge about AI art and AI music when, oh my God, they’re like, think about all of these artists who are losing their jobs.

And I’m like, well, think about all of these humans like myself, who now have all of these new skills that I can undertake because of ai that I would’ve never thought that I could do. I would never think that I could, could have a, an image in my head and get that image on paper that was in. Growing up, I just made decisions in my life that made it [00:21:00] inevitable that I would never have that ability.

Genetically speaking, I am just not good at singing or keeping a tune or anything like that. I can write funny lyrics, I can, I can get an idea of what a song should be like, but actually creating a song I just had to accept growing up, I would never be able to do that. Same with programming. I just grew up accepting.

I’m never gonna be able to program. I’m never gonna be able to do that. And now, regularly, every day I’m having fun creating images and songs and programming because ai, while it has lowered the value of those skills for people who overspecialize in them, has given me these additional skill sets and many skills that I had specialized in over the course of my life.

Are now also trivialized, but I am okay with making that. I, I think we need to look at where the benefits are to us rather than where the things have been [00:22:00] taken away from us. Mm-hmm. So for me I had a, a, a my own skills sort of de what do I say, democratized to an extent, but. As a result of having my own skills democratized to an extent, I have gained the ability to do all sorts of amazing things that I never thought I’d have a chance to do growing up.

And I’d point out when people are like, oh, vibe coding or whatever, or, or whatever music. Like that’s not, there was an AI song that was top of the charts recently, vibe coding. There was like a vibe coding company acquired for, what was it like? $80 million recently, like made by people who don’t know how to program.

Like people, we point out that, what was it, 97% of people can’t tell The difference between a song created by AI and created by a human at this point a art, it was next to chance. Like there’s a lot of people who note from the bad AI stuff and they’re like, oh, that’s proof that. Like it can’t do it well, but it can do it Well, we’re just queuing to the negatives because that’s what so many humans.

I do. And [00:23:00] we have another episode on this about like, why people do this. I think it’s called like Doom. Doom, I don’t know nihilism or Doom? Moralism. Look it up, you’ll find it. But in, in that episode, we go over it, it’s because one, it’s a great social hack. It’s a great social hack. If everyone else is excited about something, like if you go into a room and the other person’s like, I’m really excited about X, and then you’re like, oh, well.

That’s pretty pathetic to be excited about X ‘cause X just isn’t that cool.

Speaker 12: To what do I owe the pleasure?

Speaker 11: Jack, pleasure is the name of a pony I hate. This is business. So, I just happened to bump into Jenna Maroney

Speaker 12: what did you do to her, Hooper?

Speaker 11: Oh, her brain’s like silly putty. A toy I am too old for. Kaylee

Speaker 13: Hooper! OMG! It’s Jenna!

You’re wearing that belt as a joke, right? Of course I am!

Speaker 14: Where did you get your belt? You’re so cool!

Speaker 15: Kayleigh, you look so gorgeous today. I’m wearing a headband because you [00:24:00] are. Pathetic.

What?

Malcolm Collins: You look cool and they look lame. Being ironically excited about something puts you at an enormous disadvantage socially speaking and, and so well, and also

Simone Collins: studies have shown that this is 10 well, somewhat related. I think it’s quite related.

People who perceive themselves to be lucky are far more likely to capitalize on opportunities that. Cross their desk than those who don’t see themselves as lucky. Even though the same, you know, they have access to the same opportunities. I think if you are similarly pessimistic or focused on the negative, you’re gonna miss out on a lot of really great opportunities because you’re too busy looking at the negative and not seeing the potential and therefore not capitalizing on the potential.

Well, yeah, and I, so I think there’s a spiraling effect as well that people who see things negatively. Also end up actually having worse lived experiences and, and logistically they’ll earn less and they’ll do less and they’ll have [00:25:00] less benefit because they’re unable to capitalize on the good available to them.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think that the urban monoculture. Sort of lived synergistically was this impulse where if somebody came up and they were in my group and they started being like, oh, well this is actually not that great, or you don’t know how bad it really is. Like, so, so imagine we did this. We’re in an urban monoculture group.

One person would be like, well, you’re only saying this because you haven’t experienced what I’ve experienced. Right. And on the private scene stream, because I don’t like playing victim cards or whatever, like, my upbringing was not awesome, right? Like, I had very difficult positions at times of my life where I had to work myself from nothing back to where I am today while having a system that was constantly working against me.

And I don’t, I don’t talk about that ‘cause I don’t think that that’s a useful thing to talk about. But what I’m saying is, is, it immediately, whoever can prove that their life is the hardest. They get to determine how hard the world is for people, right? Mm-hmm. You know? And so everyone in the group then immediately goes into like victim hood Olympics.

Like, look at how [00:26:00] bad this is, look at how bad this is. So I get to determine if society actually is terrible or if society actually is bad, right? And you can’t, you can’t counter that if you’re in one of those groups. So how do, how do you do this? You teach your kids when they’re teenagers, when they’re in school, and we’re gonna do this with our kids, some.

If somebody ever comes up to a group that they’re in, and I think this needs to be part of like conservative youth culture and they’re like, X is really terrible, or X isn’t something to be excited about, or X is you know, especially if it’s to someone else and not to our kid themselves. Okay. But our kid is supposed to stand up for that person and be like, don’t, don’t act like that.

It’s not cool. Mm-hmm. It doesn’t make you look cool. You know, telling somebody not to be excited about their life is a evil thing to do. I

Simone Collins: like that. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And you normalize that among the kids. And then the people who wanna pull those games, they just stop. They’ll freak out the first time the kid did it and go into a hissy fit and they’ll just, you know, just, you gotta teach ‘em to be calm about it and be like, I understand that you want to [00:27:00] play these one up men games or whatever.

I don’t care. You know, we are here to have fun and live good lives and make the world a better place. And you are not doing that through the way that you are socially engaging. You are trying to bring attention to yourself at the expense of other people. And that’s fundamentally, you know, it. It also, I point out just sort of in terms of life framing, in terms of world framing and everything like that.

I think that there’s this problem where if you say, just accept the world and your life as it is and move forward from that position, people see this as being like. Sigma Grind, set nonsense, right? Like, oh, just tough it out. You know, work as hard as you can. Clearly we’re not Sigma Grind set people, right?

Like, I have fun, I play video games, sometimes I drink, right? Like, I play with my kids. I am sweet on my wife, you know, even when it can make me look bad, right? Like, that’s, that’s not red pill. That’s not tough to like [00:28:00] tell your wife, oh, I love you at the end of every stream, you know? I appreciate you so much.

So what I’m trying to make is, is. All of that can be true, but it can also be true that you still just need to accept the bad things about your life that you can’t change for what they are, right?

Iron Man: And dad went to 7 Eleven to get scratchers. I guess he won because that was six years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Which happens, dads leave. No need to be a pussy about it. Here’s what I need.

Malcolm Collins: Like you, for example, live in a generation where dating is harder. Then you have to develop new strategies, then you have to work harder.

If that is what you want from yourself. Right. You know, you need to, you need to sit down and, and from first principles try to think out, okay, just trying what they did in the past isn’t gonna work because, you know, society is broke. This is what people mean when they say society is broken now. And this is actually a really, you know, sort of toxic thing that you can get in communities like out, like when I say the red pill [00:29:00] community, I don’t say that to like attack the red pill community.

I see who we overlap with in channels. Like we definitely are part of the Red Bull community which is to say you know, the world is broken now. Dating is broken right now, and what what is really meant by that statement is dating is broken. When I use the strategies and tools that. People in previous generations used and that I was raised believing would work.

That is not to say that nobody finds a partner today. Lots of people find partners today. Lots of people who aren’t attractive don’t find partners today. Lots of people who aren’t rich find partners today. I see them walking around in public. I see them. No, I, I, I know them personally. Like there are people who are worse off than you who find better partners than than.

Than people who you date, right? Like there are strategies you can implement. It might require more creativity, it might require more [00:30:00] audaciously. But when I found Simone, both of us we’re practicing dating practices that everyone else said we’re stupid and gushy. And weird. And lame, right? We met online dating.

In an age where online dating, and I, and I did lots of online dating before meeting her was something that was for weirdos and losers. Right. And, and it was

Simone Collins: definitely, yeah, there was a stigma. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: There was a stigma, but what are you doing dating online? Are you not good enough to date in person? Right.

Now obviously online dating has changed dramatically since then and now in person dating might be your weird arbitrage, but the point being is. You had a table for dating where you had a point space system to force yourself to get out there and date people, to force yourself to decide when to triage people to you know, motivate yourself.

I had a system where I was trying to do two dates. I had done, most of us had done two dates on the day where we met. Like that was how high throughput our [00:31:00] dating was at that point. Like we were doing stuff that people would see as crazy within, it was in the time now. Would our strategies work today?

No. You likely need a strategy that’s equally audacious today, but likely along some different variable, right? Mm-hmm. But the point I’m making is that it’s okay to accept when you’re just not gonna do something. What’s not okay is to say that it’s outside of your control, okay? Mm-hmm. If it’s not actually outside of your control, so I can say, I drink because ultimately I’m choosing to drink. Now the truth is, is like everyone I’m descended from is an alcoholic. Everyone, everyone, I’m, I mean my dad, my mom, my mom drank was it half a bottle of wine a day while she was pregnant with me. You know, yeah. I think a lot of people

Simone Collins: are like, whoa, half a bottle of wine a day, and they think it’s just.

Normal. And they’re like, that’s her. That’s terrible. That was her, [00:32:00] that was her pregnancy level. Her pregnancy. That was her pregnancy level. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So the point I’m making is, is I could say, well, it’s genetic and I don’t have a choice. I could say, oh, well, you know, it’s, it’s not good for me, therefore I’m gonna sigma it out or anything like that.

But I’m not like that. I’m just like, look, there’s some things in life that are like not good for me and I’m gonna do, and, and that’s my own failing, right? Mm-hmm. And what I hate in a person is when they say. I don’t have a girlfriend and that’s society’s fault or women’s fault or my circumstances fault.

And it’s like, no, there is always somebody uglier than you or in the same society than you, or poorer than you who does have a girlfriend, right? Or does have a wife. Ultimately it is in part choices you’ve made and in part luck. But you don’t have control over luck, right? And so I think that there is a way to, to relate to the brutality of the world that we live in, which is [00:33:00] ultimately very cush compared to worlds of the past.

And tot and, and, and, and to take that and say, I am grateful for the world. In spite of this, I accept where life is hard. And I am going to just work to move forward from where I am. I, I do, I think it’s also

Simone Collins: important to point out that research has shown Nick get it again across so many different spectrums that.

Your, the, the bad things you, you may complain about in life are actually less bad when you express gratitude. Yeah. Like, if you, if you studies have found, for example, they, I know you hate the idea of, of gratitude journaling or gratitude letters, but that’s an easier way to measure this in research.

So. A lot of research has found that things like gratitude journaling or letters are linked to lower levels of depression and anxiety and higher overall life satisfaction, and that people who co cultivate gratitude deliberately tend to report more positive moods, less stress and worry, more psychological [00:34:00] wellbeing, greater resilience to setbacks.

Oh, true. Their physical benefits. Studies associate higher gratitude with better self related physical health. Partly because grateful people are more likely to exercise and eat well and seek medical care when needed. And research also links gratitude to lower blood pressure and inflammation, improved heart health, fewer physical symptoms like headaches and pain, and even stronger immune function.

Plus gra grateful people sleep better. It just, I mean, it makes sense. They sleep better, they report better sleep quality, which honestly matters more than your actual sleep quality qualities I’ve pointed out in multiple times. ‘cause I’m just fascinated by that one study. Oh, sorry.

Malcolm Collins: I’ll say it just for people who haven’t seen it in, in studies if you.

Have sleeping problems, but you don’t believe you have sleeping problems. Your health effects from the sleeping problems are negligible if you sleep perfectly well, but you believe you have sleeping problems, you have the same negative effects of people who believe that they sleep poorly. Yeah.

Simone Collins: And then on, on the brain level, gratitude engages, [00:35:00] reward in emotion, reg regulation circuits.

So it’s associated with higher levels of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. Which are linked to improve mood and reduced stress. So you, you know, you could take SSRIs, but we’ve pointed out that leads to a lot of problems. Or you could just, I don’t know, be grateful, but I wanna, I wanna pull out an option.

Malcolm Collins: And the way that people relate to the concept of gratitude is. Stupid because it’s not genuine gratitude. It’s listicle, performative gratitude. If you Yeah. You know, like the going around the Thanksgiving table or something like that. When you sit down at Thanksgiving and you actually consider what’s in front of you is in its historical context.

Yeah. Every stupid little thing in front of you should be astonishing. Mm-hmm. The silverware. That you have in front of you. If you go to my ancestors, we did a, you know, a number of episode on like the backwoods people. So this would’ve been the greater Appalachian culture within in America just a hundred years ago or something.

The way that they proposed [00:36:00] to each other was with something called an engagement spoon or fork. Oh, I

Simone Collins: forgot about that. Yeah. Golden.

Malcolm Collins: Were such rare and valuable items that you would have just one of. For each person in the household, wouldn’t they

Simone Collins: carve them nicely or something

Malcolm Collins: like they, they would carve them nicely and give it to their partner.

Yeah. ‘cause that’s what you would’ve, you’d have your one spoon and fork, your spoon, your fork, your plate, your bowl. You had to have the fine China and everything like that where people would display their, their bowls in plates and everything like that. We still

Simone Collins: do that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, you still do it with fine China.

But the point is, is that for a lot of people, the fine China was what they would eat off of because there just weren’t that many other options unless you were just eating off a table or something like that. The food itself, every one of those ingredients, people fought wars and died. Yeah. Over salt and pepper and seasonings.

That, that, that is you. And I’m not even talking that long ago. That is [00:37:00] like what the pirate trade was about. Right. In the many areas it was about. Seasonings that you just put on a shelf and forget about.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s crazy. He didn’t like he remembers and he has told me stories about when like foreign food was rolled out in America.

Do you like, like any Asian food, let’s say Taiwanese food or Vietnamese food, or Japanese food or Chinese food, you wouldn’t have had that had you grown up? My dad. Okay. Oh, even our

Simone Collins: age. I’ve, I’ve said this before, but I’ve been measuring. My food on software apps since I was maybe 17 years old. And we’re in our late thirties now, the food database that existed in the United States for calories that basically was like considered standard food in America, did not include Thai food, Indian food, any, any sort of Asian food.

It did [00:38:00] include possum. So

Malcolm Collins: awesome.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Very American.

Malcolm Collins: Very American. Yeah. I could,

Simone Collins: I could, you know, both cooked and raw possum, I could enter and, and you know, have accurate calorie measurements for that. But God help me if I, she, she wanted pad tie.

Malcolm Collins: Sorry. Good context here. My wife will not eat anything.

She can’t measure down to the exact calorie due to her autism. So she couldn’t eat many foreign foods because she couldn’t get accurate calorie measures of them. Yeah, really stress me. And just, you know, the United States, if you’re like, well, you don’t know how poor some people are. Starvation for example, basically doesn’t happen in the United States.

The number of people who die in the United States, in of starvation yearly can be measured in like the two hundreds. And almost all of them. Or because they became immobile in some way, either due to like extreme age or injury or a coma or something like that, right? Like the level of abundance. Even, even extremely poor people in the United States have cell phones with access to the internet.

O overwhelmingly, I think the majority of them do. [00:39:00] And I think, I think it’s even like a super majority of them. Which is wild if you consider growing up, and I wanna talk about boredom here because people don’t understand the boredom of even our generation. If you’re not from our generation.

When you got on a, if, if you got carsick, which I did, right? And you were driving somewhere that was like two hours away, which my family did every weekend, drove two hours and two hours back. You couldn’t read books, you couldn’t read magazines you couldn’t listen to something that the entire family wasn’t also listening to.

So you are sitting there staring at a car seat for hours. A young person, today’s brain would go absolutely benain bananas if they had to just sit and stare for hours. People may not remember this. It’s actually

Simone Collins: trending. People are calling it raw dogging life. Got

Malcolm Collins: raw dogging the entire world, raw dogged life.

When I was growing up, when nine 11 happened and they, for a period like a band, like [00:40:00] books and magazines on airplanes, every trip was raw, dogging it. That was just life.

Simone Collins: So are we officially old? We’re like, here, we’re, we’re like, well, when I was a child, I walked two miles in the snow uphill both ways. No, I, I agree with you.

I mean, it, it is a little bit rich that we’re doing this because one, we don’t really, for us, Thanksgiving isn’t really a holiday where we talk a ton about being thankful. Thankfulness is something that Malcolm integrates into our daily schedule, literally at the end of every single day. Malcolm, like when our kids are going to sleep, part of his daily routine is to talk with me about things he’s grateful for.

He initiates this and it’s not something you’ve ever talked with me about or something that you try. It’s just something that you automatically do. He’s, Malcolm is really against any form of performative gratitude. He absolutely hates [00:41:00] it, and yet he literally does it every day. You may not admit to it, Malcolm, but every day.

You do

Malcolm Collins: well. Okay, so our podcast listeners can listen to our podcast that we do every day. I don’t do it every day. I do it with literally every social interaction I have with my wife or children. If you watch this podcast, you are well aware that almost every interaction I have with Simone Ends was me telling her that I appreciate her often listing something specific.

I appreciate about her, and then telling her I love you. That is every single social interaction. If you are not doing that, every social interaction you might think, oh, that’s weird that you do that. Or, oh, you’re, it should be normal for you. We need to enter a world where that’s normal again, because when you make that normal for you, the people in your life will make that normal for them.

And it’s a. Really hard to begin to build animosity towards [00:42:00] somebody who is constantly grateful to you. And people will be like, oh, you’re submitting to your wife. Oh, you’re being submissive. Oh, you’re Don’t get brainwashed by all of this. You can be grateful to somebody and still be the leader in the family.

Right. In fact, I would say that and we, we’ve done an episode on this, but this is really, it’s like parts of the Red Pill community. Watch the movie, the Gladiator. This is like the we joke Andrew Tate was this way and they think the emperor is the masculine guy, the one who walks around with a sword and is constantly threatening people.

And obviously vain and insecure. Whereas no Maximus is what you want to be. Do you think that Maximus, when he interacts with people is not. Constantly showing his gratitude, whether that be a woman in his life or a man in his life. It doesn’t make him look like less of a leader to constantly shower everyone around you is gratitude and you can make this a thing if you’re like, one thing I wanna do to improve myself today.

Every conversation, just make a habit of ending with something you’re [00:43:00] grateful for in the other person. Yeah. And it, I also, I just

Simone Collins: wanna say very clearly, this is not us. Complaining. A. A about rampant consumerism on Thanksgiving, because that is probably more how we actually celebrate the day of Thanksgiving.

Oh yeah. Because what happens in the United States is the two week period before and after Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Is marked by sales in in various stores, some of which are fraudulent, like the prices aren’t actually different. They’re just made to seem different and some of which are legitimate.

So what we do is basically in late summer we go on a purchasing hiatus for non-urgent items and then just buy all the things that we need. Socks, underwear, basic supplies, et cetera. Staples like I just bought ‘em, just shoes for our kids that I knew we’d need in the coming year. We buy all those things for the year.

On these sales. And it just makes us feel so sick. We buy so much that like we, we never wanna buy anything ever again because we, we do sort of a year’s worth of shopping on [00:44:00] discount and we get quite severe. Like the discounts are very meaningful in, in, during this holiday. If you get real ones, like between 25 and 40% off mini products that you are definitely gonna get anyway.

So we always make a list ahead of time and try to stick only to the list though.

Malcolm Collins: Well, we’re shopping. You just bought, bought fake blood.

Simone Collins: I don’t know. I mean, Malcolm.

The fake blood requires context. So the kids are afraid of Krampus when they’re bad because Krampus comes in and it’ll take them if they’re bad. And so they have to hide because I dress up in a Krampus conference too and then come and scare them. And , the recently I’ve been going down and, you know, battling Krampus for them.

I’ve got my sword. And so I go down with a sword and I battle krampus, and then I come in and check to make sure they’re safe. Well, recently Octavian was being bad and he told mom when mom goes, well, Krampus will come take you if you be bad. And he goes, oh, , don’t worry, daddy always beats Krampus. So now I need to have one battle.

Krampus, like, seriously bloodies me and like almost gets [00:45:00] me so like the kids understand what’s up.

Simone Collins: It

Malcolm Collins: doesn’t always, I also wanna talk about accepting the hardship of your life. Right. Okay. When, when life is hard, ‘cause there’s been times in my life where, you know, I am in the prison system for not really having anything that I personally did and just knowing that I have to support myself from like this point forward.

This is when I. 13. And I have to figure out how I’m gonna do this and I have to figure out how I’m gonna structure my life to like, make things work. And I have to figure out how from here I’m going to get back into a normal school when I know that my parents don’t want me to live with them anymore.

Right. I have to figure out how I’m going to get into a decent college. I have to figure out how I’m gonna, you know, and. I actually don’t really remember ever feeling despair about any of these things. Hmm. I saw it as a cool challenge and I remember the people around me thought I was very weird.

‘cause everyone else in this situation was dep. Yeah. They were like, oh, this is horrible. Oh, this is woe is me. And I was like, why? Like. It [00:46:00] doesn’t help me to see, to, to frame myself that way. To frame myself as a victim. Like even the framing as a victim, I find personally a very gross thing to do to yourself.

It, and I think that’s one of the easiest ways to not fall into the trap, is to just be like, how icky would I have to be to think of myself as a victim of anyone? No, no one has gotten one over on me. Mm-hmm. They may life, the world may have temporarily thought. That it’s got one over on me, but I know the in tour of this game, and I’m gonna win, and I’m gonna make every one of those people embarrassed for the decisions that they made in terms of thinking that but I, I say this in regards to, but there are people who are wealthy out there who seem to have these lives of luxury, who seem to have all these advantages that you don’t have.

Right? And I wanna tell you something, as somebody who has socialized with these crowds pretty heavily the ones who live sinful lives, if you are living a life of [00:47:00] strife and a struggle, but it is one where you have intentionally decided what you think is meaningful in your life, and if you don’t know how to do that, get our book, the Fragmented Guide To Life.

It retails for 99 cents. It’s very good for, this comes with a free audiobook. It can help you with all of this very like structure. This is how you determine without us sending you on any of our weird pathways, how to actually structure your life. It’s perfect, perfect for that very, very short read too compared to our other books.

But if you’ve done those things, I guarantee you, you are living a better life than these celebrities that these people. And you can see this, you see the celebrity culture, you see the rockstar culture. You look at them. Recently I’ve been seeing, I don’t know what forever reason, but I keep seeing videos at the top of like Reddit now of Britney Spears today, right?

Her life is a living nightmare. Every day. She’s like this sad, unattractive, middle-aged woman who keeps dancing, like barely dressed in front of a camera. It turns out maybe she needed all those [00:48:00] curators. Which is a sad thing to say that at the end of the day, it turns out that the people who are saying no, you don’t know, she’s actually completely lost it.

Were Right, right. You look at your Michael Jackson, did you say Michael Jackson? Like the very, and I’m I’m talking about people here at the very top. You think he lives it? Elon Musk, right? Who, who almost more than any of the ultra wealthy is doing the most he can to try to contribute to society. And he has said that his life is a living hell on, on, on a stage, on on shows.

You know, he doesn’t have, would I trade my life with his. No, because then I wouldn’t have Simone, and Simone is worth more than, as, as Getty said, you know, the, the super wealthy Getty guy who made all that money, he said he would trade everything for just one woman who would appreciate him and stay loyal to him and stay good to him.

And I’m like, and I have, that’s really, I

Simone Collins: don’t, like, there’s no amount of money that someone could pay me to trade away this life. I’m so, I’m so grateful.

Malcolm Collins: Well, the point I’m making is even if you don’t have our life. And you’re [00:49:00] struggling and you’re an incel out there trying to make things work. If you just find out what matters to you and dedicate your life to that while still indulging where you can.

In the same way, I still drink and play video games, but I, for the most part understand I’m working on a very short timeline to try to say if human in civilization is the way that I see it. And I think anyone who’s alive today gets to live with that knowledge, whether it’s from AI or demographic ads, you, you as that person.

I guarantee you we’ll be living a better, happier, more fulfilled life than I’d say 98% of billionaires and celebrities. And you may just be like, Malcolm, I do not believe you. Like if I could eat at a luxury restaurant every day, that would improve my quality of life. I can tell you as somebody, ‘cause when I stayed with my parents at certain times, and Simone, you did this as well, we go to New York and we get to every day and it, and it’s even worse ‘cause you sort of feel obligated to do it, you know?

Mm-hmm. They order in from the fanciest of restaurants. Lunch, they order in or we go [00:50:00] out and then dinner, we go out every day. My life, normally I get one meal a day made by my wife, right? I feel so much healthier. I feel so much better, and the meal tastes so much better than the very best foods I was able to get in Manhattan.

And, and after a while it begins to feel gross. Like you can think, oh, how would it feel gross? What do you mean by feel gross? It’s the feeling. It’s not just after one meal. Have you ever had a pizza and it had too much grease on it and then afterwards you’re just like, Ugh. Wealth, ultra luxury. It feels that way after

Simone Collins: it’s that greasy pizza.

Yeah, for four days.

Malcolm Collins: It feels like you’re living in a greasy pizza. And I mean this not just in terms of. I have lived in mansions where my friends have put me up where it’s, you know, a a 30, 40 room mansion. It’s giant, it’s overlooking the ocean. I’m there alone or I’m there with just my wife. You know, it’s not even like I’m having to deal with all the staff and other people who are there.

It’s like in between other guests. It is the loneliest [00:51:00] place you could ever imagine. Even when there’s other people that. Because you’re, you’re walking through empty hallways overlooking, and it’s not just the loneliness. It’s the loneliness compared with the opulence, which never makes you happier, so it grinds on you.

It’s like. The emptiness of the place is constantly reflected within your own heart. Yeah. And, and I promise you, you do not want that. You think you want that, you think that when you get all of this, you will, but how, how is it that so many people who have achieved this. People who are smarter than you. By the way, Elon Musk is a smart guy, and he hasn’t figured out how to turn his mission and money into a life of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, I don’t think he, to be fair, cares about being happy

Malcolm Collins: is it’s not just Elon. It’s [00:52:00] the great industrialists of the past generation, who is that great industrialist who like invented all those giant jumbo planes and everything and lived that, that life of existential horror. They made a movie about him jumbo

Simone Collins: planes.

He so, you’re thinking of the one Yeah. Who became like a hypochondriac and had really intense OCD we’re so bad with names Malcolm.

I was thinking of Howard Hughes.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway let’s wrap this up. Oh, but hold on. I will wrap it up. But what I’m saying is, is it’s not just him. It’s Tesla, it’s Edison, it’s all of these people had horrifying lives, right?

In terms of, of of, of what they actually went through. Be grateful. You know that you’re not Van Gogh, that you’re not all of these people who could have there is, there is so little to envy in this world of streamers and Instagram stories. Yeah. I mean, even Alexander

Simone Collins: the Great died super young and didn’t really build a lasting empire.

People still weep and not being him, so. I wouldn’t. [00:53:00] So I wouldn’t just want you guys to

Malcolm Collins: actually be grateful and accept your hardships for what they are, which is trivial compared to the hardships of the past, but also things that you’re just gonna need to move ahead with and know that there is no one that you should be jealous of so long as you are striving for well thought through goals.

And if you don’t know how to do that, get the pragmatist guide to life. Love you, Simone.

Simone Collins: You love you. You’re an amazing

Malcolm Collins: wife.

Simone Collins: You’re the perfect husband,

Malcolm Collins: and thanks for those amazing meals you make me

Simone Collins: Mm, looking forward to another one tonight.

Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: Okay, ending. I’ll see you in the next room.

Malcolm Collins: Did you look at the episode today? How, how did, how did it do in terms of comments? I mean, obviously everything’s been doing terrible recently in terms of viewership which is the very reason we’re doing our episode today on a topic that I knew would not perform well in the algorithm, but that you needed to hear.

Because Thanksgiving week is just been a nightmare on 10 10, 10 10, like all the episodes are. There’s an episode I really wanna release because it’s quite a big break that we found, but [00:54:00] I feel bad doing it this week.

Simone Collins: Which one is that?

Malcolm Collins: That Russia basically completely astro turfed uh, black. And we have very hard receipts on.

Oh, the one we, yeah,

Simone Collins: we recorded that already. Well, then we can, we’ll do that next week. It’s fine. People will, well, I mean, the numbers are up.

Malcolm Collins: Winter’s always a really down season for us. But people seem to to like it, you said?

Simone Collins: Yeah, they did. They enjoyed it. And someone understood the amazing nostalgic value of the sound of glass vintage Christmas lights clinking together.

Oh my God. That sound, they get them on eBay. I have to look on eBay now. I have to see if I can get some. And someone tried out our fab and said it was really good. I sent you a screenshot of that, which is

Malcolm Collins: good to hear because I think it’s really buggy right now. But I think by the time this episode goes live, we should have the new version up, which should basically be impossible to lose, save data on, which has been one of the major issues.

Saved data and random loss messages.

Unfortunately, because of the scale of the overhaul, we’re probably gonna have to wait another two days [00:55:00] before we make it live. Sorry about that.

Simone Collins: That’s important. Very, very important. Yeah. No. So it was it was enjoyed.

Speaker 8: Come down here to get people dressed. What is happening over here? What are you doing? Andy taught me, so his funny, his birthday party. How did Indy get out of her bed? Tim did it. Octavian? Yeah. Did you help Indy get out of her bed? Be nice.

Speaker 9: They are so cute.

Drove us marching around. Had Indy gotten out of her, her cage? Yeah, they got her out in, got your, so they were marching around and doing what? They were just marching around yelling.

Speaker 16: Toasty. Andy wants to play toasty. Come on. Alright girl. Are you being silly, [00:56:00] but I just having, what are you doing, Titan?

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