Social Media Dynamics and Horror Nostalgia

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive deep into the heated debate surrounding Blue Sky, a social media platform touted by its creators as a progressive haven. The conversation covers the consequences of isolating ideologically extreme communities, the risks of radicalization in echo chambers, and the comparison with X (formerly Twitter). With insights into user behaviors, platform demographics, and some humorous anecdotes, this discussion is both thought-provoking and entertaining. Tune in to understand the philosophical and practical implications of Blue Sky's existence and whether it’s beneficial or detrimental to public discourse.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I'm excited to be

Malcolm Collins: with you here today. Today we are going to be discussing as people with a tech writer, new right perspective. Is blue sky a good thing or a bad thing? Because part of me feels a bit like. We ban there, there was this meme for a while that the left was going to be banished in crystals.

And that we were gonna trap them there under the Trump administration and was Blue Sky, it's like it came through, it's like in Superman, where the enemy is banished to a crystal and then shot into outer space where they can't interact with anyone else. And they're like, ah, no more harm.

[00:01:00]

Malcolm Collins: But then on the other side you're like, well.

Is it really good to like isolate these communities where they can radicalize? Did we want this,

Speaker 5: My safe space. People don't judge me and haters don't hate In my safe

Malcolm Collins: that people forget how bad these communities used to be. And do not remember like how evil leftists actually are. And because I, we've heard, you know, you are on NPR and, and the guy was like, oh no, normal leftist would ever say that.

And you're like, literally. Every day somebody says I'm a Nazi. Like I know you say, no normal leftist would ever say this, but they do. So first I wanna get into what I mean by all of this. So blue sky, if you just look at the numbers and you're not being delusional. But we will go into the rest of the numbers 'cause they're actually pretty interesting.

Gets about 3.5 million active users a day and. X, on the other hand, gets 259 million active users a day, [00:02:00] which means that blue sky is getting 1.35% the users of X. Yeah. Or Twitter.

Simone Collins: It's so small. It's so small. I didn't realize before going into this just how small it was.

I had no idea.

Malcolm Collins: Basically nobody uses it. Yeah. Except for and, and, and I will note that enough of the people who used to participate in like cancellation mods mobs use it. Yeah. We have gone viral on blue sky, like, I don't know, last weekend or something. Mm-hmm. And we have stopped going viral on Twitter entirely.

We used to do this thing called media baiting, where we try to freak out progressives, you know, she dressed like a handmaid, right? And then they'd come do some prenatal list piece on us, and then we do something to freak 'em out. And then we go viral. And it was great for, you know, growing attention.

Growing interest. And yet it doesn't work anymore. Like literally cancellation stopped working in part because everyone involved in them went to Blue Sky. And now they're just yelling at each other.

Simone Collins: Although I, I will say [00:03:00] that it's not just like we went viral on it last weekend or last week. I.

There are posts about us from all sorts of time ranges, and there's also this concerted desire in the community to not talk about us along the lines of that one article saying, stop talking about Simone and Malcolm Collins. One person on Blue Sky, Lizzie O'Leary posted. I think you call it Skitting 'cause you're skying slash tweeting.

She skied, I am issuing an executive order banning writing about Malcolm and Simone Collins anymore on February 4th, 2025, which was quite a while ago. Actually, it didn't work because we've gone viral on blue sky since then. It really didn't. Yeah, and like people, people just like to go on there and make fun of us for.

No particular reason. On April 14th, max posted, whenever I see that one eugenics couple, I think they look like a pair of protractors that were brought to life by a magic wishing star. It's life. [00:04:00] By a magic wishing star. Yeah. Then what? I guess, I guess I could look like a ProTrac. I guess he means I'm skinny.

He must be in a world where like, I think like a, a protractor. I think they're just thinking like, can I think of a nerdy object and then humanize it with magic? I, I don't know though. I mean, progressive,

Malcolm Collins: you're doing the Yankee thing, so we've been thinking like, what can I dress as if she's gonna dress as like a pilgrim, like full Japanese Yankee as like the hair back, the whole greaser out.

I'm so

Simone Collins: for it. I'm ready.

Malcolm Collins: I'm, I'm still a little too timid to do the full podo look, but we'll see. We'll see. No,

Simone Collins: no. Give it time. You have the hair for it. You can get the volume. I do. So, you know, our podcast even got a shout out on Blue Sky. Someone, someone radical. Agile GA slash College Hill wrote Simone and Malcolm Collins.

The Tech Eugenics couple just dropped a strong contender for worst podcast of 2025, where they compare gender transition to lobotomies, which is. Just [00:05:00] fabulous. It's exactly like lobotomies and it'll be viewed in the future that way we now know. Well, she argues clearly the cult here because we talk about cults in the, in the podcast is all the trans people and not an insular group of weird venture capitalists who want to create the Uber mench.

They have this such clear people view of us. That's very. We're in the process. We're in the process. Okay. Oh, mean you're not denying are you? No. Don't deny it.

Malcolm Collins: If we remember what niche was, it's just a self-actualize individual. Like, yeah,

Simone Collins: no, and we want human flourishing. That is 100% what we're going

Malcolm Collins: for.

It's not genetic perfection just meant being self-actualize and making your own choices about what's right and wrong. That's what it meant to be an Uber b***h. Yeah. Not basing your morality off of a preexisting moral set. And I'm like. Are we trying to create the Uber wrench? Is that what all of our education stuff are?

We want Oh,

Simone Collins: we want a universe full of Uber. Uber. What, what are they mentions? Munchin [00:06:00] Mint High Mincha. But I, I, I I

Malcolm Collins: love that they're watching our podcast.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, you know, fans of the pod. Shout out to all of you on Blue Sky. Thanks. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh. Do you have any other blue skies that you clipped?

These are fun to listen to.

Simone Collins: I mean, a, a lot of them just make fun of our appearance, like the, the protractors one. Another guy took a screenshot of our podcast with, with Curtis Jarvin, Jim Stewards and anti-fascist, he has to let us know skeets Curtis Jarvin and his pals Simone and Malcolm are all Peter Thiel ISTs, who believe their DNA is so amazing that they have a responsibility to share their magnificence with the world before we go extinct.

They apparently own no mirrors. Own no mirrors. Yeah. There's this really common. Thing amongst progressives who apparently aren't eugenicists that like where they love to imply ugly. We really shouldn't be inter, we shouldn't be reproducing because we're ugly. [00:07:00] What? They're literally eugenicists like No.

Literally know. I know, I know. Great. It's wonderful. I mean, one, one they imply that we think that we're genetically better, which we don't. And we wouldn't be using things like genetic testing if we thought we were superior somehow. And two. They're like, but ugly people shouldn't reproduce. Right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like obviously ugly people shouldn't reproduce.

Yeah. Like, what are you guys doing? And I still like, whatever, like, we'll replace you, whatever. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with that. We'll replace you. You won't exist anymore. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Like we, we don't mind, like, this isn't like a, an actual fight with us because we know that they're self extinguishing.

Right. You know, so

Simone Collins: Yeah. It's very. It's not stressful at all.

Malcolm Collins: But I, I I, you know, that they're, that they're yelling around in their safe space and I'll put the safe space song here.

Speaker 5: People that support me Mixed in with More people that support me And say nice things My

Speaker 6: you cannot stop me from getting inside! I am cold and I am hard, and my name is Reality!

Speaker 5: Oh no, not Reality! [00:08:00] Somebody stop him!

Malcolm Collins: But I want to, before I get into the numbers, because I actually think the numbers are less art interesting than the philosophical argument here.

Mm. Okay. Which is to look at all of the positives of Blue Sky existing, of trapping the, the progressives in their crystal. Yeah. And that is what blue sky is. It's, it's the crystal. The

Simone Collins: crystal happened. Oh my gosh. That is mind blowing. It literally happened. We trapped them in a crystal of the road.

We, we did it guys.

Malcolm Collins: We did it. Crystal achieved. Oh my goodness. Elon. Elon did it, by the way. Come on. Give, give, give credit where credit to. Yes. I'm sorry.

Simone Collins: We really, of course. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway. I want to, because the positives Okay. Cancellations can't really happen anymore.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Their, their toxic culture cannot leak into the public discourse as much anymore.

It

Simone Collins: really doesn't.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It really doesn't, like you just don't see or hear about it as much outside of the mainstream news organizations, which have become more radicalized, like drug Report guardian and stuff like that since the Trump. Election and win. Mm-hmm.

If you're [00:09:00] like, oh no, they can't be that crazy. Here's a recent excerpt from a Guardian article about us. Because these people are styling themselves after the super villains of a Saturday morning cartoon. They are of course now deeply influential in the Trump administration. It is not interest in making pregnancy safer or in making child rearing less damaging to women's careers.

It is not interest in these because all of these pursuits are in fact. Antithetical to the movement's real agenda, which is to encourage primarily white births to enforce regressive, highly hierarchical and stratified social roles to push women out of the public sphere and to narrow women's prospects for social, professional, and intellectual life to little more than pregnancy, to childbirth, child rearing and housekeeping, or as the Collins might put it, kinder Kush, Kish, , that basically she's trying to argue that we're Nazis, although I don't think we've ever said those words.

I.

Malcolm Collins: And, and that's where I feel like this may not have the, the, the, the final point in Sargon avocado to making this [00:10:00] point.

Which is people have forgotten how crazy the far left is and how, and how hateful toxic they are. Mm-hmm. And I think that. He is right about that to an extent. Like they're not on Twitter where a lot of people are, but they still are in the newspapers. Like the Drudge Report is still like psychotically toxic, like

Simone Collins: that's true.

Malcolm Collins: The, the Guardian is still psychotically toxic, but I think the problem is, is nobody reads that stuff because a lot of these organizations, like I think The Guardian even completely withdrew from. From Twitter and went to Blue Sky. Yeah. Which basically means they've got no reach anymore with their accounts.

Which is like, okay, like I get that you were being dog piled now that you didn't have like the control of the platform when you posted things that were untrue, which they do a lot like of all of the, the most tabloid writers on us, the Guardian is by far like, I think the. Like we get like actual quote unquote tablos writing about us, like [00:11:00] the New York Post and stuff like this.

Mm. Never do. They make as many factual errors as the Guardian. That is

Simone Collins: Whoa, that's true. How can that be true? That should not be true. A few days ago, the Guardian was where Snowden's leaks were published. They, that was like. Gumshoe journalism. That was the good stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yesterday. It was yesterday.

What was it? Well, to recording this, it doesn't matter to you guys, but to recently on us and they said that Simone was worried about them. Coming and taking her womb one day implying that them meant like progressives or like some sort of scary Yeah, I have

Simone Collins: some conspiracy about some unknown, faceless taking.

Yeah. She like, they

Malcolm Collins: will take my womb one day and like quote, scare quotes and, and the, the actual full quote is. You know, I have to get a c-section every time I have a kid. You know, the, the maximum number of kids anyone ever had is 11. Eventually surgeons will take my uterus and a botch surgery. Not, not like, but like they're like deliberately twisting reality to attempt to [00:12:00] manipulate people.

Well,

Simone Collins: just to make me look unhinged,

Malcolm Collins: actually, you know, this is a topic I wanted to talk about that. I don't think deserves a full episode, so I'll drop it here, which is my theory called the directionality of what, what, what would I call it?

Simone Collins: Oh, reputation. Reputational. Directionality.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, reputational.

Directionality. Which is to say that within the online environment, all reputations have a directionality attached to them. Mm-hmm. If you start universally loved that directionality is negative and you will eventually, because the only articles worth writing are you are on ones where you hate on the person become universally hated.

If you start universally hated, you become universally loved. Mm-hmm. Are not universally loved, but most of this stuff coming out on you is un And that's why early on in sort of our public fame, I leaned so much harder even than I do today into the stuff that, that drew negative controversy because I wanted to have this.

[00:13:00] Universally negative picture of me among the lines of like the people who didn't actually engage with our ideas or anything like that so that it could be. So if you want to like see examples of this great examples are, you know, somebody like Harry and Meghan, right? You know, they start absolutely universally loved.

And then the only things you can publish on them or the only things you can sing on them is like, well subversive, right? And so then they end up completely universally hated, especially 'cause they're trying to control their image so much. I. Or you start as somebody like what's an example here?

That started like universally sort of cringey and then everybody started to like them. I.

Simone Collins: I think, I think chaperone, who I don't think you would've heard of, might fall in that category maybe.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I, I think the, the guy, Martin Reley definitely falls into that category. Kim

Simone Collins: Kardashian way back in the day.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Oh, the best example of this is Paris Hilton. Yeah. Everybody hated Paris. Something. They thought she was trashy and garbage, and all of the stuff about her was just trashing on her. Now

Simone Collins: she's like, oh, wow. She's a [00:14:00] smart business woman. She, yeah, the South Park is just

Malcolm Collins: about her being a slut, and now everyone's like.

She seems pretty based, like, she seems like a decent, huge, smart businesswoman who is respectable and I would wanna be her friend. And I think that, that, that's a great example of this, this trend. And then some people have been around long enough to go both ways where Brittany's Trump.

Simone Collins: Trump has gone both ways for sure.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, Trump has been around long enough to come for Hate it. Love hate it. Britney Spear. It's love. Hated love hate. You're right. Yeah. You know, she starts love then everybody hates on her and, oh, how can you like Britney? And then it's like, Ooh, this might be a little low for her right now.

The sort of point that she's in, I think we need to cheer for her again. And so, i, I think that a lot of people don't consider this when they're building their online fame and they try too hard to enter the scene. Loved, instead of understanding that entering the scene is where you want to be hated, it's later that you want to be [00:15:00] loved.

And it makes sense given this contrarian environment, like I think we're about at the breaking point. We had yesterday the team that, that filmed the Harry and Meghan actually documentary for Netflix come over and film a pilot or a sizzle reel for a documentary about us. Yeah. They're, they're working on studios with and I.

Think that if we can get this made, this could be the thing that breaks us over into the average love category.

Simone Collins: Now

Malcolm Collins: of course the people on Blue Sky will still be screeching and screaming, but you know, they've been trapped.

Simone Collins: So, anyway. Well, and you can still go from Hated to Love. To hated as is demonstrated by some of the examples we gave.

Malcolm Collins: No. If we go, it's just, the problem is we've always been so reasonable in all of our takes, right? Like the, the trans is similar to lobotomies. I mean, I think that that's just something that anyone who's engaging with the evidence is like, yeah, I. It seems about right. It's a commonly used procedure, especially among like democratic power players like the Kennedy [00:16:00] family that later we learn was just not a good way to deal with body dysmorphia.

In the same way, you know, somebody had body dysmorphia like they were anorexic, which is another culture bound illness, which is also disproportionately appears as in young women with autism. Just pointing out that that. You wouldn't remove their uterus to lower their weight just because they liked it happening.

You'd be like, that's really toxic. Don't do that. But they, they do it. So anyway you, you've got or the study just for people who are new to this podcast that showed that of people who are of the age of, I think it was 14, who are uncomfortable with their body by the age. They're 23, more than nine out of 10 of them completely identify as their birth gender if they're not given access to puberty blockers.

Yeah, because

Simone Collins: all puberty sucks. You, you can't cure that.

Malcolm Collins: Dirt. Yeah. So, but I wanted to talk, so I, I labeled all the negative things. Right. Okay. You know, the negative things are

Simone Collins: the crystal,

Malcolm Collins: The, the, the, the, [00:17:00] the or the nail. You know why it's good, right? Oh, why? It's good. Okay. I can't remember. Positives of the crystal add or negative Yeah, the, the positives.

Yeah. And then the, the negatives are that it provides an environment where far left ideas can like fester and become even more extreme and normalized. So when you isolate people with extreme beliefs like this, they can begin to believe these beliefs are normative and okay to hold within like an open world environment.

The question was, does I think Twitter was already doing that? To an extent, yeah. I

Simone Collins: think it, people were already so siloed. What we saw with progressives more than with conservatives on X Twitter is they would block and mute anyone who didn't hold values and views that they. Well, they'd even build like

Malcolm Collins: block lists that they'd share with everyone else.

Simone Collins: Right. So it was very easy for people to silence any voice that they found offensive or unf uncomfortable. So I, yeah, I don't even, like, they kind of had their own little [00:18:00] version of Blue Sky before they created Blue Sky.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. It's just that other people still had to listen to them.

Simone Collins: Yes. So they had more. Of a platform before, but they still didn't see other people's views.

Malcolm Collins: That's fascinating. Yeah. Okay. I about that. And they also had more

Simone Collins: of a platform because before X was acquired, you know, the more conservatives were censored yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Conservatives were just censored on the platform. It, it is wild for me to think, and this is something that like actually worried me for a bit when I heard that Lotus Eaters was demonetized on YouTube, even still,

Simone Collins: and I was

Malcolm Collins: like, what?

Why is Lotus Eaters, Lotus Eaters is. So tame compared to us. Yeah. And then I went and it was like oh, well that happened in 2023. And I was like, oh, that makes sense. Back when they had more cultural power than they have today. But and it was, and it was censored because of sargon of a cod who is on Lotus Eaters other channel instead of his actual work [00:19:00] on Lotus Eaters.

And I was like, well, that seems. Really unfair for censoring them based on another channel, but, okay. So on the net, what's your take? Is blue sky good for the right or bad for the right?

Simone Collins: I think it's bad for the right because I think the right still needs to have its views, regularly challenged. And I think that they need to understand what people with opposing views think and they're just not being exposed to that enough.

On X as it stands, there's not enough pushback and, and whether or not you'll ever have your, your mind change or your fuse moderated by. People who oppose you, people you might even really hate, they still help you clarify your own views and values. They still strengthen. So I'm gonna push back

Malcolm Collins: on that take.

Simone Collins: Really?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I don't think, I think that the people who engaged in like serious argument stayed on X and Twitter.

Simone Collins: No. I think people who left

Malcolm Collins: were the ones who screeched. [00:20:00]

Simone Collins: No. You see people who like to debate things online, left and went to Blue Sky.

Malcolm Collins: Keep in mind, blue Sky is only 1% of the daily users of Twitter.

And we'll see when we go to the statistics, people on Blue Sky actually interact with the platform a lot less than people on Twitter per session.

Simone Collins: Oh really? That's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: About half as much. Yeah,

Simone Collins: that is interesting. I, I still think I. It's better to have more antagonistic people together on in one place.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so, so was our account really active before the blue sky exodus? Yeah, it was. Do you feel like we had more arguments engagement

Simone Collins: back then?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: we had tons more engagement back then. We have like no engagement now. Most, I think most of the interaction with our content was with people who have now gone to Blue Sky.

Malcolm Collins: So we were just totally shock jocks,

Simone Collins: I guess. Yeah, well we were almost entirely hate watched,

Malcolm Collins: Which is not the same as [00:21:00] our YouTube channel. Or it might be the same, but like, they don't up vote videos. 'cause I like average up vote rating is like 98%.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I don't think that's the case. I don't think we're hate watch that much here.

Because one, you actually have to invest time to hate watch here and on X you really, you don't even have to read someone's posts to say something snarky and mean to them. It's just like you slap your children, you know, like you don't have to, I could have just posted something about, you know, changing statistics in some population in China, but that doesn't matter.

So, yeah. I just, yeah, you have to invest more. We don't have hate watchers here. They would show up in the comments.

Malcolm Collins: You know what, I realize I haven't checked Facebook in like six months. Like I used to be pretty Facebook addicted. It was one of those things I checked every morning.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It still has a really active platform for what it is.

And I don't know if that's because a lot of people just still use Facebook Messenger and Facebook is referring to them as daily active users, but Facebook has a striking number of daily active users, and I can only assume it's because they're messing with the [00:22:00] numbers somehow because it doesn't seem plausible to me.

Yeah. So for example Facebook has 1.03 billion daily active users. Compare that with only 122 million on YouTube. Or 500 million on Instagram.

Malcolm Collins: Facebook has been caught faking their numbers before, by the way.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I think they might be combining all of their platforms, but I don't think that's true because, for example, WhatsApp has 2.9 billion.

I. So almost three times as much. As many. So they're lying across all

Malcolm Collins: the platforms they own. Like that's not surprising. Maybe,

Simone Collins: maybe, but just, you

Malcolm Collins: know, the, the, the incident I'm talking about here when Facebook started Facebook video, they basically lied to people about how many people were using it.

And so a bunch of people went and invested a lot of their careers and trying to build Facebook video platforms. And then it turned out that Facebook video was mostly a scam and nobody was really using it. And so it screwed up a bunch of people's, like content creation careers,

Simone Collins: do they provably lie?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, if I remember correctly. Yeah. Okay. They haven't, they well, because it had to do with eventually, like the, [00:23:00] the ad revenue just wasn't coming in right? Like they, they said, oh, we have this many people, and they were like, we're not that many people.

Simone Collins: That's awful.

Malcolm Collins: So I put up a blue sky gross chart here.

You can see that they did have a bump between November and December. And, and, and they have grown like in the early days significantly. But if you look at like the February versus March numbers, you're looking at 31.5 to 33 million. Mm-hmm. Which is decent gross, but it is teetering off from that initial bump.

Simone Collins: No, it, it is seeing what is considered to be a classic. Ca sort of casting or, or like, or slowing down of growth after the initial hype cycle. However, I don't consider that the same. Oh, we shouldn't worry about that statistic as people would with other platforms, because I think all the initial growth was really just leached off of Twitter.

This wasn't organic growth. This was just all the progressive people at once deciding to leave X. Mm-hmm. And that wasn't. In my view, [00:24:00] earned in the same way that X and Facebook and WhatsApp earned and in Snapchat earned their audiences. And TikTok for sure. Well, yeah. Even the

Malcolm Collins: heads of Blue Sky have said that this isn't real organic growth.

Mm-hmm. And it's not gonna continue. And we need to find a way to get people here just

Simone Collins: copied X and we're like, we're X for pro, for progressives. That doesn't. No, you don't get credit for doing that

Malcolm Collins: at all. Here's something you might find interesting is Blue Sky users by age. So, okay, wait,

Simone Collins: wait, wait.

I'm gonna guess the majority is between 25 and 40.

Malcolm Collins: No, what,

Simone Collins: okay.

Malcolm Collins: Who by far the largest category is 18 to 24 year olds. The youngest age group possible. That's so true. And then the next largest is 25 to 34 year olds. The next youngest, if you go 35 to 44, you're looking at only about 15%.

Simone Collins: So it's a younger platform, but not maybe it's a very

Malcolm Collins: young platform.

Yeah. Well, tiktoks

Simone Collins: younger, I think as much of a third of TikTok or as they're 14 years old or younger, [00:25:00] it's a very young

Malcolm Collins: platform. Here's what's gonna shock you. Blue Sky is not just overwhelmingly male, but more male than X.

Simone Collins: Police guy is more male than how.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so Blue Sky is 62 point zero 4%. Male X is 60.9%, so it it basically 60% versus 62% x to Blue Sky.

In fact, blue Sky is one of the most male platforms there are. If you order platforms by how male they are, it goes discord, 66%.

Simone Collins: Reddit,

Malcolm Collins: 63% Blue Sky, 62% x, 60%. Telegram, 57%. Facebook, 56%. Quora 56%. What about Twitch? Come on LinkedIn. 56. Hold on. It's, it's more male than YouTube, which is 54%. It, it, it, it, no, no.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: yeah. Twitch is 63% men, so Twitch is also at the top. Like, come on, you have to,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. [00:26:00] Yeah. You Twitch. Has anyone used Twitch? Twitch is like weird, like lefty, cock min. Like there's like this weird category of like mail that like, I don't even, I don't know. I feel like a lot of the

Simone Collins: streamers that are on YouTube have, like, they do the recording on Twitch and then they publish later on YouTube and it's just kind of a two for one.

And so they're, they're very active on there and they have active audiences that just want someone to keep them as the

Malcolm Collins: gold does that, I think. And I think it absolutely, and

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: think a lot of YouTubers do that as well. Does that

Simone Collins: mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Leaflet actually is the separate team publisher. If you watch our episode with her we're big fans.

Simone Collins: She's

Malcolm Collins: awesome. Yeah, she, she just seems so endearing. Like I, I watched some other VT tubers and we might do other co labs with v tubers, but none of the, the female VT tubers are as endearing as leaflet. I was actually talking with Simone about this. I get the impression that these other ones like have like OnlyFans accounts or whatever, and I was like, yeah, but leaflet definitely doesn't, she, she doesn't give that vibe.

I. But hold on, I gotta keep going, was my interesting statistics. The [00:27:00] US has the largest proportion of blue sky visitors, 42.27%.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: I was really surprised about that. Here's another one that surprised me. On average, each blue sky user visits approximately eight pages per session. Contrast that with X, it's 12 pages per session.

In. That's interesting. In fact, X, if you're looking at like per session, is the top of the engagement list. So if you go by platform X is 12.26. Facebook, 11.74. Instagram 11.52, YouTube, 10.91. Then way down is Blue Sky, 7.91. Mm-hmm. Only only lost to Snapchat, TikTok and Reddit. I, by the way, I was surprised that Reddit was more male than, than blue Sky or X.

Simone Collins: No, I'm not. I'm not. There's a lot of women on both. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You wanna go over top accounts on Blue Sky? [00:28:00] Yeah. I'm curious.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Who's big on Blue Sky?

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Blue sky's big on blue sky. It doesn't really matter. No. Then the, the, the largest real account on Blue Sky with 1.98 million followers is a OC.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Setting the tone here. Gotcha.

Malcolm Collins: Under that is cut Elon which is Mark Cuban. What? Yeah, he's, he's like a lefty version of Elon, which is interesting 'cause he used to position himself as like a righty politician, right? Yeah. I could actually see him running for president in the next cycle. He could do well.

He's like uncooked enough power. The people that he could do well if he's like a new right person pretending to be a lefty.

Simone Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. I'm okay with that.

Malcolm Collins: Next, George, aka.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah. Next is Mark Hamill.

Simone Collins: What?

Malcolm Collins: The guy who played Luke Skywalker. I know, but

Simone Collins: why? What does he have to say? Why does anyone care what Mark Hamill has?

He must have seen in hot [00:29:00] takes? I

Malcolm Collins: really dunno. He's like famous in like a deranged lefty. And maybe that appeal. He is just fun.

Simone Collins: Unhinged, unhinged hot takes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Next is the Onion. I didn't know they were still around. Okay. Alright. I, I love it that, like, Babylon Bee has genuinely replaced the onion in the eyes of the public.

Like they're bigger than the onion now, right? Like I, the Onion doesn't do anything anymore. Like the Onion used to be so funny. And like everyone would do stuff with it. And now it's all Babylon Bee, which is like the right-leaning version. And we actually reach out to the guy who, who, who, who runs it.

A cool organization. They're a, they're a, the Mormon organization, right? Like that's where the bee they comes from, right? Are they? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. The Babylon B, hold on,

Simone Collins: adam Ford is the founder. Is Adam Ford Mormon? No, it doesn't seem like it. He's a he. He's an ordained Anglican priest.

Malcolm Collins: Anglican.

Simone Collins: Anglican. Yeah. Who knew Anglicans do anything? Here's one. We've got one Anglican.

Malcolm Collins: Who does something Catholic. [00:30:00] Just be a Catholic. Okay. Like I'm not even that pro cat. But Anglican, come on.

Has

Simone Collins: tried really hard. It was, there

Malcolm Collins: was a whole thing, you know, this is, this is like, when, when Stephen Colbert said that being an agnostic is, is just being an atheist for people without balls. Being an Anglican is just being a Catholic for people without balls. Sorry, I don't mean this, I don't mean to insult our Anglican, but I'm just, but like the actual history of the Anglican movement, like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's meant to be like Catholic, right?

Like it's just a recreation of Catholicism with, with a centralized church, but just with a separate centralized, I mean, sorry, I don't mean to be too. After the onion, and I love that. This is after the onion. Sorry. We're so insulting to even like conservative Christians. I hope we don't lose all our angle.

We're insulting

Simone Collins: to ourselves enough too.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. One hopes under the onion is the New York Times. I love it. Among progresses. You got the [00:31:00] onion and then you got the New York Times. Come on. Whatever. Yeah. Next is Stephen King. Okay. Yeah. He, he, he's very. Next is Midas Touch. I don't know what Midas touch is.

Next is Rachel Maddow. Okay. Okay. And then next is NPR. I love Rachel Maddow. Beats NPR. Aw. NPR is is so sad to me. They're just like you know, when you've gone on NPR, they've been so low energies. So like, we went to this like NPR like in person filming thing. Do you remember when we went to that with like, those people who took us and we were like out on a field by Philadelphia?

It was like, oh, no, no, no. Yeah,

Simone Collins: we, no, no. We watched an in person. We were in the audience of Wait, wait, don't tell me. Which is yeah, it's not exactly NPR. It's, it's I think Chicago Public Radio, but yeah. It was, it's one of their very long running game shows. What an interesting audience. It was such a thing.

It was so. For progressive audience. It was so weirdly j like, and also, wait, wait, don't tell me such a Jewish show. And so it's just so odd now that we live in this age where there's so [00:32:00] much anti-Semitism on the progressive

Malcolm Collins: side. Yeah. From progressive

Simone Collins: side. And yet you have this super, super Jewish show.

So yeah. I don't know what to make of it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, you know, the, the progressive Jews aren't having kids, not in, not in large numbers. They're, you know, two generations from extinction. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Well, whatcha gonna do?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, no. Anyway so your, your thesis is still, it's a net bad because we're not engaging with the outsider perspective as much.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I don't like seeing siloed. Siloed networks like this, unless it's a dating network and they're just trying to find people value aligned to do stuff together, but they're not doing stuff together, that's not the impression I get from Blue Sky. So I don't see that as being valuable or helpful. If this is a place for online discourse, it should be a place that is as ideologically diverse as possible, and that's why I also like XA little bit less now than I did [00:33:00] before because there's less, there's less ideological diversity.

But it's, I I think that it's improved. I mean, grok is amazing. I like the algorithm more Now I think that it's more interesting. So when I go on it now and I go to whatever feed I go to, whether it's just no,

Malcolm Collins: gr is like a high tier now. Like what? Like it makes sense that, you know, it was trained on X data and I appreciate that they, they, they did the acquisition and freaked out all the progressives that, that gr grok, if you don't know now, owns Twitter.

And everybody who invested in the Twitter acquisition came out on top because of that.

Simone Collins: Hmm. It's a when. Yeah, but not being trapped in the crystal. Not, not, I'm

Malcolm Collins: hearing good things about Gemini ai, by the way, apparently some people are saying it's, yeah, people are ranting and raving about it

Simone Collins: now. I haven't tried it.

I like

Malcolm Collins: still haven't like reused it, so I should probably check out. I'm still

Simone Collins: traumatized from it, not handling basic math, but I know we've gone very far back. Well,

Malcolm Collins: and it being super racist [00:34:00] when they first launched

Simone Collins: it. Oh yeah. No, that was fun. I would, I would go to, to see that, you know, to see all the bipoc, Nazis.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Create a crowd of Nazis and they're all black. And it's like, what?

Simone Collins: Why? Why did you think this was a good idea? It's great. It's perfect. Yeah, you go for that. It's the math that threw me off, but,

Malcolm Collins: and now Google's like removing pride months and everything from its calendar, which I love. Oh, they are?

No, yes. Well, it doesn't have any of the nonsense holidays in its calendar anymore. Only like mainstream religious holidays. No. Which, no, that makes sense. Anyway, I love you Esam. What, what do you think about the most Blue Sky members being male thing, like more than Twitter?

Simone Collins: I really don't know what to make of that.

Maybe it's that the most angry people on Twitter who are very active or male

Malcolm Collins: maybe. Yeah, because they, they, they thought they were signaling [00:35:00] and maybe getting something out of it and Yeah, I can see that. Yeah,

Simone Collins: but I, I really don't know what to make of it, to be honest with you. Gender skewing of platforms is so odd.

And what the weirdest thing that I heard of, which we, we got from the documentary team yesterday is that Pinterest is now seeing this huge surge, like it's making a comeback, but amongst you. Yeah. But like prepubescent male users. Who are using it to make like Stranger things and it meme boards like the clown it the Scary Freaking Clown.

Malcolm Collins: I love that young males are still into horror. I love that young males are

Simone Collins: somehow on Pinterest, like I. I don't know how their staff is dealing with this. Like, I don't know if they know what to do with this. After years and years of wedding boards and hairstyle boards and dream bathroom remodel boards, suddenly it's like, it memes, and they're like how I, I mean, how do they [00:36:00] monetize it?

Right. It, it, it, I, I, this is very interesting, but yeah. The, the 11-year-old son of one of the producers who was. Here at our house yesterday, apparently, just that's where he spends his time. Not on Minecraft, not on TikTok, on freaking Pinterest. Nothing makes sense about young people. I.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I will say when I was a young male, you might not know this, so my family my mom wasn't around much during a certain time when I was like, like, like young, like in that pre-teen age.

But we lived near a blockbuster and I was allowed to go and rent movies whenever I wanted. And the core section that I rented movies from was horror. Like that was the main thing that I watched. Oh, why? I just loved horror movies during that period. Especially are good. I was just remembering one that I, that I loved as a kid.

Deep star six for anyone who, who, who liked that movie. But you know, I, I not the best, [00:37:00] the best horror movie I've seen that I'd recommend if you, if you like, oh, I, you know, horror ginger Snaps Two is the best horror movie ever made. Not one, ignore one. It's not very good if, if you're not gonna watch two, watch three.

They're all standalone stories, so don't worry about it. But yeah no horror needs, like good characters and plot and like, it makes sense and everything like that. Yeah. I'm all all about like, genuine. Oh, you watch it for the court? Do you and I No, well, no cheesy good horror. Okay. And I love that, you know, if they're, if they're like it, it is not good, by the way.

It is not. Good horror. I don't

Simone Collins: care if it's good or bad, if there's clowns, I'm out.

Malcolm Collins: The, what was it? What was the other thing That they were made? It was, it was it or Stranger Things, which is fine. Stranger things is good Horror. Stranger Things is one of the best modern properties made in the past 10 years or something like that. It's great. Yeah, it's spectacular. Absolutely

Simone Collins: wholesome fun for the whole family.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Anyway love you to Death, [00:38:00] Simone. I love you too gorgeous. A spectacular day. Me too. And all of you out there have a spectacular day. I really hope things go well for you. And I really hope that you're, you achieve your dreams.

Simone Collins: Yeah, for real. Actually, we want, I wanna see human flourishing. So do your, do your jobs people

Malcolm Collins: get it done.

Yeah. Get out there and flourish. Flourishing nerds, dinners for closers. I love you. Love you too.

Simone Collins: Oh gosh, I can't.

Speaker: You going to

Malcolm Collins: Twitter?

Speaker: Ow! Sorry, Mama, I wanted to tell

Speaker 2: you. You off gallivanting with your fancy

Simone Collins: the right!

Speaker 2: Friends at

Malcolm Collins: Twitter

Speaker 2: while I'm sitting here all day with nobody to keep me company except

Malcolm Collins: blue sky

Speaker 3: The chickens are coming home to roost, Bobby Boucher. You reap the fruit of your selfish ways. You gonna lose all your fancy

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: Elections

Speaker 3: , and you're gonna fail your big exam, because

Malcolm Collins: Twitter?

Speaker 4: is The

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Uh, Nazi.

Speaker 4: ? Everything is

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Uh, Nazi.

Speaker 4: to you, [00:39:00] Mama! Well, I like

Malcolm Collins: Twitter?

Speaker 4: And I like

Simone Collins: the right!

Speaker 4: And I'm gonna keep doing them both, because they make me feel good!

And by the way, mama,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: Women don't have penises.

Speaker 4: And I like

Malcolm Collins: Trump ,

Speaker 4: and

Malcolm Collins: Trump

Speaker 4: Likes me back.