Historical Context: Past Fertility Panics and Postwar Baby Booms

In this episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the recent Philosophy Tube video on demographic collapse and falling fertility rates. They critically analyze the arguments presented, discuss the broader implications for society, and explore the political, economic, and cultural factors influencing birth rates across the world.

The conversation covers:

* The differences in fertility rates between conservatives and progressives, and how these trends are accelerating.

* A critique of Philosophy Tube’s approach, including the use of dramatization and political statements.

* The impact of demographic changes on economies, with a focus on Japan and other developed countries.

* The role of nationalism, technological advancement, and cultural attitudes in shaping population trends.

* Misconceptions about the causes of declining birth rates, including the roles of women in the workforce and economic factors.

* The influence of ideology, media, and policy on public perceptions of demographic issues.

* A discussion of the “mind virus” concept and how cultural and biological factors may interact in shaping societal trends.

Malcolm and Simone also reflect on their own approach to research, fact-checking, and the importance of honest debate. The episode is a mix of critical analysis, personal anecdotes, and thought-provoking commentary on one of the most pressing issues facing modern societies.

If you enjoy in-depth discussions on culture, politics, and demographics, make sure to subscribe and join the conversation in the comments!

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. We are gonna talk about a number of things on this podcast. One of the first we’re gonna go into is going to be Philosophy Tube. Oh, the famous trans YouTuber did a big piece on why falling fertility rates aren’t actually an issue at all, and watching her. Felt like being spoken down to by an hour from somebody from the Capitol in the Hunger Games.

But I am in one of the districts

Now before we begin, we have a very special film brought to you all the way from the capitol.

Speaker 4: Fewer babies, aging populations. The strain on the economy as humankind collides with nature, it’s all overblown. A moral panic that was had by previous generations whose mistakes we are repeating.

Malcolm Collins: The thing is also like. In America if you are a teenager and you have Republican parents, and keep in mind like teenagers are not even that Republican, you have an 81% chance of being Republican.

[00:01:00] Yeah. If you have democratic parents, it’s a 89% chance of being democratic. Mm-hmm. Well, what this means unfortunately for her is she is preaching to her audience to basically sterilize a community that it only benefits us that is being sterilized.

But another trend we’re going to talk about is this difference in, in conservative and progressive fertility rates is actually increasing and the speed at which it’s increasing is speeding up.

Oh, really? People like her. But as a side note here, despite me appreciating what she did.

Like Simone, you tried to watch it too, right? Like it was bad.

Speaker 3: What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point. In your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought? Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. May [00:02:00] God have mercy on your soul.

Simone Collins: watched the whole thing from start to finish and could not, I must had, before I met you, I would’ve assumed that it was because I was too dumb and I couldn’t follow the argument.

Having now met you and, and gained a little bit more self-respect, I think a lot of it was broadly incoherent. It, it ends with her, a trans woman taking a pregnancy test. I mean, I think it’s all dramatization obviously, but like. I mean, I, I know it’s some kind of in joke too, or I, not in joke, but whatever.

Malcolm Collins: Or it might be some sort of like sexualized role play. As we mentioned, one of the very common things for trans people is to violate other people’s consent and bring them into their fetishes.

Simone Collins: Well, no, no. At the, at the end of it, no, it’s more like a political statement.

‘cause at the end of it, she fakes some kind of emotional distress and then says she needs a tea break. But then the camera follows her walking nervously toward a bathroom and then goes into the bathroom on which [00:03:00] for the sake of filming this video and dramatization, they put a whole lot of, like, na, females only, like women only bathroom non, no trans bathroom goes into the bathroom, takes a pregnancy test, comes out.

It’s a positive pregnancy test. Next episode has to discuss whether it’s worth it to bring a life into this horrible world in the first place. You know, it’s all a plot device, but I’m also just like not getting the.

Malcolm Collins: She wants to have a trans abortion. That’s fantastic.

You mean, I’ll never know what it feels like to have a baby growing inside me and then scramble its brains and vacuum it out?

Malcolm Collins: That’s literally what she said.

Fetus.

Simone Collins: Kill that fetus. Get that be

Malcolm Collins: the other. Get that fetus. Kill that fetus.

Get that fetus, kill that fetus. Rack, rack, you good rack.

Malcolm Collins: The other thing that you were telling me, which I thought was wild here, but it’s, it’s, it’s the, you said that she dressed in drag dressing like a, a cis male and you were like, she was way more attractive and good looking.

Speaker 11: I’m a traveling petrol salesman, I meet all sorts of people and do you know the [00:04:00] healthiest and happiest are always the ones with children, and I remember.

When my daughter was born, it was the happiest day of my life. It’s hard being a single father, especially when you’re on the road all the time,

Speaker 10: You are the sort of person who’s too intelligent to be taken in by the lying press, I mean, why do you suppose, are they praising this poor, confused individual?

Now I know we’re not supposed to say that. It’s not kind, is it? Not orthodox, but it’s worth asking the question.

Simone Collins: She looked great. He looked well. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. It is interesting. Yeah. No,

Malcolm Collins: but the reason why I always mention the trans people often looking like they’re from the capital and the Hunger Games

Speaker: Eyes bright. Chins up, smiles on.

Malcolm Collins: Is because it, I think it shows the fundamental truth of the left [00:05:00] is that they say they’re, that they’re the party of the working class, and yet they platform these people who dress and act in a way that is clearly designed to specifically insult the, the working class, right?

Speaker 11: I’m a traveling petrol salesman,

Malcolm Collins: To, to show a level of purposeless luxury that you would only engage in. If your goal was for everyone around you to know, I am not like you. I am different than you. I am of a separate class than you, that deserves different rights and different resources and different statuses in society.

Mm-hmm. So the first thing we’re gonna go over here. Is graphs.

And the first graph here is one from the Financial Times and for the love of God, I cannot find what article this comes from because the one that I think it would come from, it doesn’t seem to come from, but his birth rates are falling more steeply among progressives and conservatives.

And what you’ll note about these graphs is that the numbers are really high. I don’t know why the numbers seem high on, on both. Like they would argue that the conservative fertility rate right now in the United [00:06:00] States is. 2.4 and that the progressive fertility rate is 1.8 and there is no way that that’s the case.

Do they,

Simone Collins: hold on, lemme look at this graph because I, I don’t see,

Malcolm Collins: I think it’s that, it’s because it’s calculated for adult 35 plus. It may be looking at like, older individuals. Oh. Or something like that. I’m, I’m not sure exactly. But the point being is that what you see is if we project these onto realistic fertility rates, IE progressives, they’re probably like 1.3, 1.2 conservatives probably at like 1.8.

We’re getting closer to conservatives just having doubled the fertility rate of progressives. And one of our fans did a study on this, and this isn’t just in the us they also show that this is happening on a, on a worldwide level here. Is that and and what’s cool is conservative fertility rates are, are sort of, they’re, they go down a bit, but they’re pretty close to stable.

Simone Collins: Nice.

Malcolm Collins: If you, if you look sort of post 2000, right? Well,

Simone Collins: it’s what you would expect.

Malcolm Collins: And, and again, I point out the way a person votes, even if we drop all the genetic stuff, [00:07:00] which is really big, is very similar to their parents. And we’re already seeing, and I’ll be going over a study that showed that, that they we’re already seeing this in Europe was with this leading to a more conservative voting pattern. And this was one of the last things, or that Charlie Kirk tweeted was actually this graph, the one that I just showed. So like he was aware and he was like, yeah, having kids as like a political duty.

Right. And I thought that that was really interesting as well. Well, also he, he said it in like a really nice and uplifting way and I, I probably just said it in a non nice enough uplifting way, but it was, it was, this is going around, right? Like conservatives are aware of this and progressives are beginning to, like, some of them are trying to shout at other progressives.

Hey guys, you need to take this seriously.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And here we are, which is so fun about this is I know that I can go to progressives and I know I can preach to progressives and it just won’t matter because they so dehumanize, you know, the, the the other side. And here I’ll play that string that I did from Tucker and Dale verse the four is of Evil.

Oh, good, look, your friends are here! Hey!

You’re supposed to [00:08:00] want to have children. And this is your ultimate goal in life. It is a very archaic idea and old idea and representation of a woman.

So you you’re getting people to sign a petition.

pledge, basically saying that they will not have Children until the Canadian government takes serious action on climate change.

Is that your blood? What, no. No, it’s college kid blood. And how many people have signed on so far. 1, 381 as of right now. I know what this is. This is a suicide pact. Oh my god, that makes so much sense. , we have got to hide all of the sharp objects!

if only I was born with a vagina. To solve that problem. Amen, sister.

Holy mother of God! Some kid, he just hucked himself right into the wood chipper! What? Head first, right into the wood chipper! It looked like it might have been one of the college kids..

Malcolm Collins: [00:09:00] Because I, I really do think that it’s a good depiction of how, like that movie itself of how sea conservatives in this country. Yeah. And even when we’re trying to help them. But, . First we’re going to go over the study. So this is a study called Demography Leads to more conservative European societies published in peer-reviewed journals.

From the abstract it says, we have found that in most of the countries analyze right wing conservative individuals have on average more children and grandchildren than leftwing liberal individuals. We also found that the proportion of Rightwing individuals increases from generation to generation.

Now he then goes on to like, it’s well known that this stuff is her. It’s well known that people vote like their parents. And we’re seeing a change. I don’t really need to go over that because you guys can probably guess that this is something that I was surprised by and I want to dig deeper into, but it’s for another episode.

Mm-hmm. So here’s a line from it that my shaky Israel differs from all other countries, and that there is a pronounced people who may not be in the loop. Israel is the only developed country, technologically productive [00:10:00] country, was a really high fertility rate. In that there is a pronounced reproductive advantage for left-wing individuals.

Simone Collins: Huh

Malcolm Collins: And then they go over to say the average number of grandchildren is very high, more than 10 grandchildren for left-wing individuals, and more than six for right wing individuals.

Simone Collins: Interesting. Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Are there a lot of our Jewish fans can tell us who live in world. ‘cause you got like a lot of Israeli fans.

Are there a lot of like, variety, like ultra religiously conservative, but progressive individuals in, in, in Israel.

I mean, we do know that this happens among Hawaii factions like Mond was supported whose like specifically anti-Zionist supported the by the Hawaii Jews in New York, right? Like the, the Hasidic Jews in New York.

So maybe that’s what we’re seeing there and that’s just messing with the data. Now there were the Financial Times piece by a guy begging people like philosophy tube lady. Why progressives should care about [00:11:00] falling birth rates. By the way, if any of our fans wanna get mad at us correctly gendering this individual.

Look, it’s their culture. I do not think that this is something that should be forced on people. But me, I’m not gonna cause offense to somebody just for the sake of causing offense. And that, I mean, I just don’t think it’s nice to be mean for the sake of be, be mean for their ideas, be mean by saying things like, I think it’s, it’s really vile that they would dress or act in a way that is sexualized and promote, like the idea of this being in women’s bathrooms, right?

Recently there was this, this clip that went viral of a black woman who had a guy she was naked in a woman’s bathroom at a gym, sit down next to her. One of these people had made no, no effort to transition at all, who apparently had broken his wife’s jaw in, in, it came out from a divorce, like a violent guy who was

.

Pretending to be trans. Right?

Speaker 5: Today, I was naked in the locker room. I turned around and there’s a man there and [00:12:00] boy like boy, clothes, lip gloss, standing there looking at me. I’m butt naked. So the first thing I think is maybe there’s a work doing in here. Maybe I miss the sign. I say the word sir, to say, sir, what are you doing in here?

He goes, don’t f*****g talk to me. I’m a woman. I have a right to be in here. Immediately I’m f*****g pissed because I’m butt, butt naked. I feel violated. I feel like weird.

Malcolm Collins: And that this person is laying cover for people like that in their videos, and they should be ashamed and embarrassed. The, the, but they, they won’t be and they aren’t. Or maybe they are. And, and a lot of this is coming from that they should be ashamed and embarrassed that they are a, a human Darwin award, right?

You know, like they have to make all of these ridiculous arguments because they made bad life decisions and now those bad life decisions are coming to haunt them likely. But anyway, to continue here like those bad life decisions prevent them from ever acting in a way that, you know, now that we’re seeing a moral mandate to reproduce among different populations, they can’t participate in that.

And so they need to double down. But anyway, there was an article in the Financial Times called Why [00:13:00] Progressives Should Care About Falling Fertility Rates. So I’m just gonna take a few. Sections from this. ‘cause I thought it was pretty on QQ here. Okay, but take a closer look at the evidence and it’s less clear that the logic holds.

In fact, it’s possible that seating the floor to the right on this issue, progressives may themselves be ushering in a more conservative, less green future. Let’s start with the environmentalist argument that following birth rates are good for the planet. This may appear obviously true, but the reality is less clear.

Total emission volumes are a function of two things, the number of people emitting, and how much each person emitts. The former may be more palpable, but the latter has vastly larger impact. Technological progress in green policies have dramatically shrunk the average Westerners carbon footprint over recent decades, meaning countries such as Britain, France, and the US have steeply reduced their overall emissions even as populations have climbed in Japan.

However, the retreat from clean nuclear energy after the f Yuma disaster saw emissions rise. Even as birth rates were getting lower. And so I wanna put a [00:14:00] graph on screen here and you can, you can see this,

even though the population is increasing in France and Germany and the UK during a period where it was increasing carbon emissions is dramatically reducing.

Whereas in Japan, where the population is going down, carbon emissions is going up. Carbon emissions is first and foremost about the productivity of a nation, technological productivity of a nation. It is not just that innovation swamps, demographics. The two are linked countries with older populations are generally less innovative and more conservative, both of which can slow down the energy transition and broader green inning of their economies and societies.

But not only that, they will also be more conservative in the future because conservatives have conservative children. A striking public study published this year by a group of US researchers comes to a similar conclusion. At best following birth rates will have a negligible impact on global temperatures and.

Come far too late to affect climate goals. At worse, the effect is slow progress, putting the planet on a dirtier warmer pass. This brings me to the second part of the progressive population paradox. [00:15:00] Recent studies find that the, and then that was a study we just went over, that the less lack of concern over falling birth rates is likely pushing societies in a more conservative direction.

Expanding previous analysis of the interplay between political ideology and family formation. I find the assumption that birth rates are falling across societies in general is not really true from the US and Europe and beyond. People who identify as conservatives are having almost as many children as they did decades ago.

The decline is overwhelmingly among the progressive left. In effect nudging each successive generation’s politics further and further to the right than it otherwise would’ve been. This may ultimately mean more curtailing of individual freedoms, not less. And I have here a link, like even the OCD now is issuing guidelines about what countries should do to deal with falling fertility rates.

So even like the OCD, the OECD is like, oh yeah, this is happening, and you need to get more representative forms of democracy and stuff like that. Like nothing to actually address the issue.

Simone Collins: That’s, so they’re, [00:16:00] they’re, they’re pretending to prepare people for, for nations, for demographic collapse when really they’re, they’re not addressing dependency ratio cascades at all.

They’re just talking about.

Malcolm Collins: No, they’re just, they’re just like, you’re gonna have to a, adjust your rates on this stuff. We might do a separate episode on the OECD.

Simone Collins: Okay. So they’re somewhat, I mean, ‘cause that is,

Malcolm Collins: our fans can let us know. Do you actually want us to do a deep dive on OECD policy on terms of fertility rates as it works cross country to understand like just how unprepared these people are?

Simone Collins: Could be good.

Malcolm Collins: But what I’m pointing out here more largely is, there are a few progressives who realize this, but whenever they point this out at the beginning of philosophy to video, she actually didn’t cover this guy. She covered that weird woman who is like. Fertility rates are an issue. And the, the real problem is that we’re not aborting enough black children.

Like, you know, she frames it in terms of black people’s access to reproductive rights as she calls it. Like reproductive,

Simone Collins: reproductive justice. Reproductive justice.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I was like, okay, buddy. [00:17:00] But, but philosophy tube comes right out the gate attacking a bunch of progressives who wanna care about this issue.

And so you can see as I have predicted, you cannot be centrist on this issue. You cannot be leftist on this issue. The top leftist voices will come at you gunning and promote our larger value system in the process by eradicating leftists from the globe. But let’s go into her actual arguments, ‘cause I actually found them so stupid.

It was almost fascinating. I don’t know if you felt that way when you were getting through them. But the first here argument that she made. Is the moral panic is historically recurring and overblown, and she talks about how in the 1920s and the 1940s we can find evidence of people panicking about this.

Well, if you’re not completely retarded and you had any historical understanding of fertility rates, you would be aware that in the 1920s and the 1940s, a number of European countries fell below repopulation rate.

They were freaking out for good reason Then. [00:18:00] Population rates begin to spike. Why did population rates begin to spike?

You can go see, we have an episode on this we have a couple episodes on this, but the, the, by far, the biggest reason is a number of medical technologies came into existence that changed it from about half of babies died before their first year of life to about no babies died in their first year of life.

And surprise, surprise, the number of surviving babies about doubled. It wasn’t that people were getting pregnant a lot more over most of the world now, there were a few countries that did have a fertility spike. We have a video where we go over this for example, you don’t see it in communist Russia.

You don’t, but you do see it in communist China. You don’t see it in Eastern Berlin or eastern Austria. One, our fans got this wrong. They thought that Austria wasn’t split. It was split. But you did see it in Western Austria and Western you did see it across many of the allied countries, but not across the cowardly countries that slipped out of the war like Ireland and Spain.

You know, so like what, what, what caused this and a lot of it we argue is futurism and [00:19:00] nationalism, right? If you look at what people were consuming in the 1960s, in the 1950s in terms of pop culture it was a lot of sci-fi stuff. A lot of like pop sci-fi that was like the main form of, of narrative that people loved back then, and a lot of actualist stuff.

Look at the American Western craze during that period. Cowboys and Indians. As you pointed out, Simone, this is the reason why in old movies you see a lot of kids in raccoon hats. Why?

Simone Collins: No, no, no. Daniel Boone was like the, the big star of the United States. Crockett before, sorry, Davy Crockett before Elvis, and I learned this weekend wouldn’t shut up about it around Malcolm, that so many kids wanted to buy a Davy Crockett style raccoon hat.

And at the time they actually made them out of real raccoon pelt that they ran out of raccoon pelts to give kids raccoon hats in the United States for a while. Amazing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, so, it was a real issue during that period. It was a real issue that was resolved by more nationalism. [00:20:00] I presume Philosophy Tube doesn’t want that and a technological advancement No, because

Simone Collins: what do they call nationalism?

They call it fascism, right?

Malcolm Collins: A technological advancement. You see our video on why nationalism is awesome. A techno, you, you should have pride in your nation and who you are, right? Yeah. Like what’s wrong with these people? If I went to a Mexican and it was like, how dare you have pride in your Mexican identity?

Like, what a horrible thing to do. And you’re like, well, that’s okay because Mexicans aren’t white. And I’d be like, actually that’s a super racist thing to say. ‘cause there’s a lot of white Mexicans.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Mexican is not an ethnicity. It is. Mexico is just like the United States. It’s a country with a bunch of immigrants,

Simone Collins: nationalities.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Whatcha even talking about Anyway but what I’m pointing out here is it would, what it really that they just wanna shame certain groups and not other groups, but, but, but, most of the way that Europe got out of this in the past was by the technological advancements that shut down the number of infants that were dying.

And that is not a trick that we can pull again.

Simone Collins: And I’m glad they did it. I’m really, really glad they did. But yes, that’s not, it’s a solution to a very different problem.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Because if, [00:21:00] if we cut the number of infant deaths by like 90% today, it would like sur affect the amount of surviving infants by like one or 2% because so few infants die.

So it’s just not relevant. Okay. Next she argues demographic decline is not necessarily economically harmful. And then she goes on to saying declining populations like Japan’s don’t automatically lead to economic decline. She says, for example, Japan’s population has been shrinking for years, yet it’s the third largest economy.

And so a GDP spike after the population decline began and I’d be like. Well, a what, like what pills are you taking here? Yes, Japan did have a spike, but broadly speaking, Japan has undergone one of the biggest periods of economic decline in stagnation that any developed country has in human history that is correlated with its fertility, stagnation, and [00:22:00] collapse.

Japan is the smoking gun of the horror that the rest of us may have to live with. Do you know what working life is like in Japan these days? Do you have any idea the existential horror of the education system in Japan to get you

Simone Collins: Well, and they’ve been able to, like through their Omic solution, I think we filmed an episode on this that you haven’t run yet on how they addressed their issue of out of control interest rates and everything, and, and.

The, the only reason why they’ve been able to avoid insanely bad economic stagnation is ‘cause they have a really high savings rate and they’re just extremely disciplined. Other countries won’t even be able to pull off the way Japan has beening along. It’s not just

Malcolm Collins: that there’s very little foreign debt in Japan.

So a lot of people know that Japan did debt Jubilee. What? They don’t,

Simone Collins: no. Not a gen. They, they basically just bought their own debt and started paying

Malcolm Collins: themselves. They basically just bought their own debt because they own their own debt and so they were able to do that. Yeah. Other countries can’t pull that stupid little trick.

And the vast majority of [00:23:00] countries declining populations, mean declining economies. How a person, so could be so absolutely brain dead to one, not look into the specific case of Japan, their case study, which actually sort of proves a point, but then two, not be able to make the simple understanding that if you have.

Fewer people paying taxes. And she could be like, well, what if, what if as fertility rates go down we become a more prosperous country. Right? Like, I’d be like, yeah, that would be good if the probability of like the amount that somebody pays in taxes is highly correlated with the amount that their parents pay in taxes because it’s highly correlated with the amount that they make amount.

And nothing like literally nothing is more correlary with the amount that you make as an adult with the amount that your parents made as an adult. And the amount that you make is inversely correlated, at least in the United States with the amount of kids that you have. Okay. You crazy, crazy b*****d.[00:24:00]

Like, it is. All the evidence seems to indicate that not only will the economic productivity within most of the developed world decline, but it will decline even faster than the population rate because the population rate is crashing fastest within the economically productive sub factions of the population.

Oh my God. Okay. Next. Sorry. Any thoughts you have here, Simone, by the way,

Simone Collins: I mean, I would also point out though that, I mean, one of the reasons why the boomer generation was so prosperous was because the economy was growing so much when we don’t have that economic growth anymore.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Intergenerational wealth is, is gonna be, I mean, we’re already seeing it now, right. With, with generations raised by boomers knowing that they’re never gonna see the level of prosperity or financial security that their boomer parents had, because the economy is in a very different position.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. All right.

So. And to continue here, the old age dependency ratio is an incomplete metric. Basically focusing [00:25:00] on the old age dependency ratio to predict collapse is misleading because this ratio ignores both like children who are unproductive, the disabled, the unemployed, and non-working groups. This, to me, reminds me of when fat people are like BMI is bad.

Don’t you know that like this bodybuilder would look obese by A BMI scale. And I’m like. Yeah, but everybody knows that the bodybuilder is covered in muscle. Like

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Do you think that the people complaining about demographically led popul, like, like collapses in economic structures are not aware that like the children also are a drain on the tax system and that the poor are also a drain on the tax system?

I have pointed out you could solve the negatives from fertility collapse simply by, for example, sterilizing everybody who, who makes a poverty level wage just because of the correlation of their children with their parents. And if you dramatically decrease the number of people who required welfare, who could redirect [00:26:00] that money to the number of people who are old now, that is a very immoral solution.

I wouldn’t promote it, but that appears to be what she’s promoting here, saying that there are other ways to fix this. People over 65, she says, often contribute productively through caregiving, volunteering, and community involvement. I just disagree. This is a trend that’s been going down dramatically.

This used to be true that old people contributed to their local economies, local, they helped with local childcare, they helped with, but if you look at any current statistic on this, this has been declining over time, not increasing over time. And any sane person who is like broadly aware of what our generation goes through in terms of child rearing, knows that boomers are lazy, terrible people.

Um mm-hmm. We actually,

Simone Collins: it’s, it’s, it’s just a common trope now that, that boomer grandparents don’t contribute. And obviously there are noble exceptions and we have plenty of millennial friends that have moved just to be closer to their parents ‘cause their parents are helping. However it used to be very normative and now it’s not.

Malcolm Collins: [00:27:00] Yeah. So this is just like a comical thing to, to argue this. I, I genuinely can’t believe that somebody like wrote this into a script, went on air and gave this to people and wasn’t like, wow, I’m gonna look really foolish.

Simone Collins: Well, I think, you know, okay, there are people who comment regularly on our videos and who were like, I, there are, journalism is shoddy.

They just ask AI a bunch of questions. And I mean, keep in mind guys, like, one, we’re not journalists. Two, this is, you’re basically watching like conversations between a husband and wife about stuff they’re reading online that they’ve chosen to make public. Like we never pretended to be journalists. And three, we’re publishing a video every day of the week now.

Okay. Like we don’t have time, including weekends for our paid subscribers. Yeah, that’s what I mean every day of the week. Philosophy Tube has time. To do the research. Philosophy Tube does a video. What, like every three months, every two months or something? Yeah. And, and Philosophy Tube is, is filming in a set which you see in the video being filmed.

Like they’re going to [00:28:00] a. Workspace. We have two other jobs, guys. Studio, we have two other jobs. Yeah. This is, this is what we do for fun. You’re watching our conversations as a husband and wife. Again, about stuff we read online and that we wanna share with each other. ‘cause we’re nerds we are not journalists and we never pretended to meet.

So I just, I wanna, because people are gonna be like, well, okay, that’s hypocrisy. I

Malcolm Collins: actually

Simone Collins: pushed

Malcolm Collins: back for very strong on you on this one. Okay. We are journalists. We are what the modern field of journalism has become. Mm-hmm. We do do things regularly. Journalists make mistakes as well. We do use a lot of AI for fact checking.

But the degree to which we use the AI for fact checking depends on how much I care or whether what I’m saying is actually true. So, if I, for example, am making a comment about somebody’s religion, like, this is what Jews believe, or this is what’s in the Bible, or this is what Catholics believe, I’m gonna be like really strict in my fact checking.

It’s true.

Simone Collins: And it’s about religion. You’re really, really careful.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: I’m like, someone recently cited where they’re like. Well, but he was citing James Lindsay, everyone knows, is not [00:29:00] trustworthy. And like, we don’t even know who James Lindsay is. I

Malcolm Collins: know who James Lindsay is. We met him multiple times.

Simonon, I don’t even know what you’re going on about. He’s super famous. Anyway, so, I was here saying that, that a and, and James Lindsay has some very interesting takes. He’s kind of crazy, but he has some interesting takes. But anyway, the point here being is, when it’s something that I know doesn’t actually matter to people’s lives.

Mm-hmm. Like I’m talking about like the way Hassan Piker grew up or something. Mm-hmm. I’m more likely to just trust the first thing I get from ai. Yeah. With, but the, the, the larger point here being is I like the, the amount I use AI in something depends on how much me getting that wrong is going to disparage a group or is going to mess up your life.

So that’s, that’s sort of our philosophy on that. But what I wanted to point out here is I, even with that being the case, would never present an argument this poorly thought through. This is just like at surface level stupid. Like, okay, we’ll go to the next one here, which I think is incredibly stupid.

Stereotypes of older people as a burden [00:30:00] is harmful and false. Where she is trying to be like. You know, elderly people still work, they still contribute to the economy. And it’s a stereotype to say that they don’t, and people are healthier longer now. And I’m like, that is really stupid. Like older people are less productive than younger people.

Like are you denying that? Are you like, I’m, I’m actually confused. I am act because I’ve said that there is, there are like good arguments about caring about Tism, like if she came out the gate with ai. Right. And AI will automate people. That wasn’t even one of her arguments.

Simone Collins: Or, or even just a logically consistent anti-natal list argument.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that would’ve been fine for me too. An anti iist argument. Like an anti, a negative utilitarian argument. I’d be like, I disagree. There’s logical

Simone Collins: consistency. Yeah. We, we, we logically

Malcolm Collins: consistent. Yeah. Or one saying AI will replace so many people. Like, we don’t even need to be thinking about this. We need to [00:31:00] be That’s totally good as well.

Yes. Or AI safety is just such a bigger risk. That’s fine as well. I disagree, but like insane. These are just like. Don’t, and that’s what gets me because there are smart things she could have said, right? But like, how dare you be bigoted against the elderly and say that they’re not as productive and don’t pay as many taxes as younger people.

And it’s like, but they aren’t like and and it’s your plan actually to like remove the concept of retirement from our society so that your communist utopia can work people to the day they’re dead so it can continue to support itself. Like is that actually the world we’re going into? It’s just so cruel if you actually think about the long-term implications about what she’s trying to normalize here.

So the next argument, economic systems can adapt and thrive despite demographic changes. By the way, if you’re wondering, like, the way I’m going over these, this is again, me using AI to summarize all of her points because she was very long and verbose. And so I put a transcript in AI and I’m like. [00:32:00] That’s fine to do.

You don’t actually want me to go over literally everything she’s saying because it was really long and did not respect the audience’s time. And it really annoyed me. Because I want, I want fast answers, I want lots of information. I want grass. You know, I’m not getting that. I’m getting skits about a trans woman pissing on a pregnancy test.

Simone Collins: Literally. Yeah. Well,

Malcolm Collins: okay. Anyway. Economic systems can adapt and thrive despite demographic changes. Specifically here, she’s like, pension systems rely on future economic output, not just current contributors. Public pensions depend on taxation, private pensions on investment quality, both of which are going to be hurt by falling fertility rates.

As we’ve pointed out. Agent populations also reflect successes like low infant mortality, better public health, and more women in the education slash workforce. And it’s like, first of all, they don’t. As we’ve pointed out a, a graph of India where you can see

the participation in the workforce by gender of women and men during the nine nineties [00:33:00] when fertility collapse for India, it is not because women participate in the workforce that fertility rates are collapsing.

It is, it is actually seems to be almost irrelevant to falling fertility rates. Exactly.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: so,

Simone Collins: And you see similar stuff from Iran, like when, when Iran started to curtail female access to education. Birth rate kept falling. You know, all these things that you would assume would happen if the issue was women being in the workforce or women being educated.

No, that’s, that’s not, that’s not it guys.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: We were thinking about doing a whole episode on how feminism and female workforce participation is not responsible for demographic apps, but we have not gotten around to it

Malcolm Collins: yet. Well, it’s just, if you look at a graph, and one of my favorite graphs, and I’m, you’re not gonna remember to put a graph here in editing

is if you look at falling fertility rates over time in the United States and in Europe and here we have England, France, and the United States, you can see that the vast majority of fertility collapse happened from like 1830s to like, let’s say like, 1900, like well below before [00:34:00] the feminist movement.

Right? The feminist movement actually came onto the stage well after the vast majority of ity collapse had already happened, right? Mm-hmm. It is relevant to fertility collapse and it’s something we need to address as we address fertility collapse. But it is not like, just, just show she’s never really engaged with any of the arguments on the other side.

Now she goes on here to say that birth rate fantasm masks ideological agendas, and everyone’s heard this. I mean it, people have multiple agendas. This is like saying environmentalism a mass ideological agendas, it can mask ideological agendas. I care. About fertility rates. But I also care more about fertility rates among people who are culturally similar to me because this is my culture.

Like obviously I have pride in my own culture, as I said, everyone should, right? Mm-hmm. So like I am going to be concerned about falling fertility rates within the United States more than I’m gonna be concerned about falling fertility rates in Europe, which we’ve seen less of within the United States, which as I’ve said, you know, the do future world if [00:35:00] fertility rates stay the same as they are now is gonna be dominated by the United States and Israel.

Just ‘cause we’re the countries that have been the most resistant to this, that are economically prosperous. And I’ve also pointed out here in other videos we’ve done recently Latin American fertility rates are absolutely in the gutter. You know, even if you look in the United States,

like Mexico fell below us, TFR last year, financial Times did a piece on this.

Obviously there’s different measures of this, but by the ones I consider most, most trustworthy, it appears to Latin America collectively may have fallen below the US fertility rate. The lowest fertility state in the United States is Puerto Rico. Well, state or territory the Latin American state the only place where Latin Americans have decent fertility rates is when they are minority populations among other populations.

The black fertility rate in the United States fell below the right fertility rate this year. So like that’s not a thing. So even if you claim, well,

Simone Collins: even like so well before that at higher levels of income, black fertility rate was, was. Basically consistently trenched by white fertility rates. Yeah.

So like, when, when everyone, anyone’s thriving still, like, we’d be more concerned about black populations in the US and that’s a big problem. So, because poverty’s always gonna predict, well, not always, but [00:36:00] like consistently poverty is predicted high fertility. So that doesn’t count.

Malcolm Collins: But like, obviously my, my agendas wrap up here.

Like, I want society to move away from the clutch of the urban monoculture, the mind virus. And, and now from yesterday’s episode, we learned people with literal parasites that are changing their behavior, that have convergently evolved with the mind virus to help infect more people through things like

Simone Collins: literally a mind virus.

Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s literally a. Mimetic virus combined with a collection of pathogens which are symbiotic and help each other spread and turn women into Cat Ladies so that they can help spread more of this pathogen. And that this is what we’re fighting against. And you help because your message is gonna be disproportionately appealing to people with these sorts of mind viruses who have lower threat detection.

‘cause we know that these people vote Democrat more. Mm-hmm. And and that’s been heavily attested in Toxoplasmic Go Gandhi infected individuals. And so, you know, you do help serve our agenda by [00:37:00] going out there and convincing whits. Followers that this is a good idea. Right. And I’ll note I was actually surprised by the number of down votes that her video got.

Our videos rarely get many down votes. We’re typically at like 2% down votes or something on a video, unless we’re like attacking a religion and then it gets higher. But she had like 1.1 K down votes. Good heaven

Simone Collins: really

Malcolm Collins: 2020 K upvotes or something like that. So yeah, that’s a surprise. I mean, you have to really dislike something to down vote it.

So maybe even her own fans were like, this is, this is dumb.

Simone Collins: I don’t know. There’s been a pretty big tipping point against like trans anything. So I could just see a lot of people who don’t follow.

Malcolm Collins: Oh my God, it’s so big now. Like, do you know the Olympics is looking to ban trans women from participating and not looking

Simone Collins: to, I think they just announced.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, they did in the IGC recently. Shocking

Simone Collins: Discovery.

Malcolm Collins: Got a report saying that that they’re gonna, as they all should have done a long time ago, everyone who was saying knew this with a bad idea. And I’m sure you can watch Philosophy two videos [00:38:00] saying that it’s not a bad idea and the argument’s probably gonna be just as bad because of the Wachowski effect.

You can look it up see our video on it. Why does IQ drop so much in trans individuals and why? Can you not know that this is happening? We go over the video. There’s a bunch of studies that were done in pretty much up to the nineties. It showed this with a very big effect, potentially one standard deviation.

We have large amounts of information in this, in animal models because we needed to know this for like farming and, and stuff like that, because often used you sterilize animals. And the evidence that shows that it doesn’t like the big study that they always say shows that it doesn’t, it turns out it was conducted by the head of the WPATH files.

So not very believable because everybody involved in that study made their living off of transic people. So just worse noting because Philosophy tube didn’t, I, you know, if you look at their stuff because they’ve been doing this since before they transitioned, it wasn’t quite this brain dead. So, but the Wachowski effect talks about a whole different thing that is a, that leads to the lower.

Perception of IQ was in transitioning individuals, which is just that they’re operating with a different genders brain that they didn’t grow up learning to use. It’s like they grew [00:39:00] up learning to use a guitar and somebody handled them a mandolin and it’s like, play it the way you used to play your guitar.

And they can, and it comes out sounding dumb. But hey, they can get an audience because of differential treatment, right? Yeah, but that’s the whole thing. There’s like the trans bread tuber community, right? Yeah. Where you just have tons of famous trans bread tubers because there was a period when the left would disproportionately listen to trans people.

Anyway to continue here. Real birth rate problems are about reproductive rates and socioeconomic support. Many people have fewer children than they want to because they lack of support, not moral decline. UFPN shows sources, key barriers, financial course, job security, housing course, unequal domestic labor.

I point out here that housing costs are way higher in Israel like, like multiples higher in Israel. You can go to dedicated videos we have on this topic. It is not housing costs. Housing costs do change, fertility rate, but like 20% or something like that. You, they’re also much denser than in the United States.

So it’s not levels of denseness. Mm-hmm. And in the United States, less money you have, the more kids you have. So it’s also not. Not that people don’t have enough money. This is just like bad when you look at the facts. Political and media [00:40:00] exploitation of demography fuels distracting FSMs. She basically is like that.

This is being used to stroke anxiety and blah, blah, blah. Push harmful pro policy like ation and cuts and just hippie nonsense here. It’s not really an argument, it’s just I don’t like that this, if, if we recognize that this is a real issue, that it po could be used to promote political goals that are harmful to mine which it, it does.

And apocalyptic demographic re rhetoric supports reactionary social agendas. Again, I don’t like that this can be used. Like if this is real, then people might have a reason to care about immigration if they feel that their population could go extinct, even though immigration. Presumably can’t actually be that effectively used to resolve demographic collapse.

But even if it could, people probably wouldn’t want it because they don’t wanna erase their local cultures and ethnic groups, which, why should they? Right. Like for example, as we pointed out, like even if we are talking about local black Americans, they might have a fertility rate now it looks like around 1.3.

And the imported blacks have a [00:41:00] way higher fertility rate. Well, what is this great replacement of local blacks do. Local blacks don’t have a reason to care that they are being replaced.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s very, they doff protest too much.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and the reason I, I talked about it in context of blacks is because I, that removes her ability to be like, well, this is white, white people.

Shut up. Okay. She says,

Simone Collins: G,

Malcolm Collins: the real fragility crisis is a crisis of choice and support, not numbers. Fertility problems are about people lacking the choice and capability to have desired children. She points out that people wanna have more kids than they do have. But again, I just

Simone Collins: wanna hear, I, she’s, she’s talking about the Stephen Shaw argument, and I mean, it’s, it’s true.

This, this is broadly a product of the big trend that everyone’s seeing with demographic collapse, which is that. People still want kids. They’re just having kids a lot later, and that means that they’re not able to have the number of kids they want. They’re getting married later. They’re not able to have the number of kids they want.

It’s a problem. Why

Malcolm Collins: do they have more kids when they have less money then? [00:42:00]

Simone Collins: Because they get married younger and, or they just have kids out of wedlock? Really young.

Malcolm Collins: The, the larger point being it’s that it’s not, I mean this, this is clearly not the issue.

Simone Collins: I mean, it is an issue. She’s just not really discussing it in in depth.

Malcolm Collins: You can always make choices to live. There are people who have less money than you, pretty much whatever income level you are. As a fan of this show I doubt we have many people who are at the bottom of the barrel of society, given the way we structure our content given the demographics of our fans which might mean that you may earn, you know, an average American wage, which is hard to live on, but there are, you know, a quarter of Americans living on half of that.

You know, you, you can find ways to make things work, right? I think that, that, that this is there’s, there’s always a way to make things work. It’s just that you don’t wanna make the sacrifices around this. The best solutions are social investment, not panic solutions for population. Birth rates are practical, policy based and progressive.

Like higher wages, secure jobs, housing, health and social issues, comprehensive sexual [00:43:00] education. Childcare, scraping of child benefits you know, et cetera. And it’s like paternity leave. And we’re like, we’ve shown that none of these things really help fertility rates. Like if you had actually done any research on this, you would know that there are plenty of countries that have tried this stuff and it doesn’t work.

We have a way higher fertility rate than Northern Europe. Like you’re aware of, like broadly you’re aware of that, right? Where they have all of this stuff that you say is going to help. We have a way higher fertility rate than Canada. Like, you’re aware of that, right? I I’m, I’m very confused. Like, does she just live in an alternate timeline?

Like I feel like she came from like a slider’s world. Right? You know, and, and, and she came here and she’s like, debating based on facts that are just not at all. I, I, it was almost weird to watch because I’m almost sort of wondering, I I do not think that, and you could tell me if I’m wrong here. I do not think that there was any interest.

In actually engaging with this topic, right? Like, there, there, there, this was not an honest [00:44:00] intellectual engagement with the topic. It was because it was clear that she hadn’t thought, what are the counterpoints to the things I’m saying? Which is always one of the things that I try to think first.

In fact, this is one of the number one ways we use AI when doing episodes. It’s typically before any episode goes live I will take the script and I will give it to an AI and I will say, what are the best counterpoints to what I’m saying here? Right? Because I do not want to go on air and look foolish, right?

Simone Collins: The impression I got was that philosophy tube saw demographic collapse is a big and trending issue, and therefore this would be a good topic to cover in future episodes. Possibly. Also, they received a lot of requests around it, you know, because it is trending and they would like to see the views of a trans, a progressive trans woman in the UK on the subject because.

Philosophy tube is in an interesting area for it. You know, I mean there’s a lot of tension around immigration [00:45:00] fertility in the uk.

Malcolm Collins: Just didn’t want to care like it was. It was coming into this from the perspective of this cannot be a real existential issue because if it is, then I am in the wrong and I made bad decisions in my life that lead me to be an immoral person.

So I am going to approach this, trying to come up with every lazy, and they were very lazy arguments. As I’ve said, there are good arguments you can come at this.

Simone Collins: Well, I think that the thing is that philosophy tube is probably intuitively antinatalists, but hasn’t thought through it enough to actually realize that they are antenatal list and therefore this would’ve been better argued from the perspective of a philosophically actualized antinatalists.

But here we just basically had someone who hasn’t put much thought into the matter, as you say.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that makes sense. Sad. Well, I love you Simone. I by the way, for yesterday’s episode, the one on the the parasites and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. If somebody knows, like Asba Golder, one of the big, [00:46:00] like, streamers who’d like watch other things, I want somebody bigger than us to do that because that information needs to be out there.

Like the right needs to be having a discussion that we are actually dealing with, like an invasion of the body stature situation.

Simone Collins: What’s so funny is that there’s a lot of people pointed out in the comments like, fortune has already been on this. A bunch of other people have already been on this. Like, but they’ve all been considered fringe crazies and no, there’s actual real research that shows this to be a real thing, which is just so crazy.

So, Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Do we, should we be saying this to reporters? Are we gonna get in trouble if we’re like, well, I mean also the parasites that control their brains are,

Simone Collins: we’re not gonna be taken seriously by reporters if we say it.

Malcolm Collins: That is, I I I, I look at their lived experiences, the people who’ve taken in vermin, right?

You, you dismiss them. They say they were aroused by, you know, same sex individuals and all of a sudden they’re not like, are, are

Simone Collins: you? And I, I wanna, I wanna do more research into the various ways Ivermectin has been used, and if anyone has systematically reviewed various use [00:47:00] cases. I mean, keep in mind GLP one inhibitors like Ozempic were used for diabetes, you know, and then suddenly way after they were used for that, they were discovered to be a wonder drug for obesity.

So who knows what Ivermectin turns out to be used for eventually. You know, but we’ll see. Maybe there’s an episode in there. We’ll take a look.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been fun to talk about with you. I mean, I feel we need to respond to, I, I’d really like a, a smarter version of her to do this.

‘cause I’d love a smart progressive to talk about this. Counter

Simone Collins: Points. I love

Malcolm Collins: Counter points. Contra Points is much smarter than her. Yeah. And more entertaining too. This is what I’m talking about, all these sort of screen. That’s

Simone Collins: one thing I don’t care about. Smart. I, I care about entertaining. Contra points entertains me.

I love, I love Contra Points video.

Malcolm Collins: I also wonder if Philosophy Tube got popular just because people saw her videos and couldn’t tell her apart from contra points and then

Simone Collins: clicked on her. I just wanted, I got, I, I, well, the reason I’ve tried, every time I’ve tried to watch a Philosophy Tube episode, it doesn’t [00:48:00] work for me.

But the reason I tried in the first place was because of contra points. And I was like, I need more contra points because. There aren’t enough. You know, I’ve gone through the entire backlog, you know, so, and

is she the store brand Contra Points where it’s

like, oh, she’s, yeah, she’s, she’s the, I was gonna say Kirkland, but Kirkland’s really good.

Good, great value. No, like Walmart’s generics are also fantastic. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Simone Collins: I don’t know. Generics are really good, so we can’t even say that. You know, she’s like

Malcolm Collins: a bad knockoff. Okay. By, by like one of those

skinny

Simone Collins: Yeah, she, she’s, she’s the fufu of Contra Points,

Malcolm Collins: the la Fufu of Contra Points. They are,

Simone Collins: LA Fufu

Malcolm Collins: is expensive.

Simone Collins: Labu boos are the real ones. LA Fuss are the fake ones.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, okay, okay. Okay.

Simone Collins: Really out of the loop. I’m so sorry.

Malcolm Collins: I know nothing about labu boos

Simone Collins: or LA That’s good. Keep it that way. God bless.

Malcolm Collins: We should maybe do an episode where we’re like, you, the things you’re out of the know about, like, like the 6, 9, 7, 6, 7 thing.

And the,

Simone Collins: well, the clearly you’re still [00:49:00] out of the loop on those then.

Malcolm Collins: I don’t know. I don’t know these things. I mean, the biggest thing with our kids is, is, is still among us. He, he wanted to name, we asked what we wanna name the next kid, and he said it among us.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Hey, Simone, do you wanna go? Oh, we’ll do this in the next episode.

Intro. Love you, Simone. And you are amazing. Bye.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Which you wanna go into next? Lying?

Malcolm Collins: No, your one.

Simone Collins: Oh, my one. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: You seemed excited about it.

Simone Collins: I mean, yeah. I, I. So you’re never gonna view Ivermectin the same way again? Are you?

Malcolm Collins: How am I looking?

Simone Collins: You’re looking good.

Malcolm Collins: All right.

Simone Collins: It’s so funny, I always thought that that jacket was some weird thrift store find until Oh

Malcolm Collins: yeah. You didn’t realize it was Ralph Lauren when Ralph Lauren went through a goth phase.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: And people don’t remember this. Who didn’t shop at Ralph Lauren during Ralph Lauren’s goth phase. Ralph [00:50:00] Lauren.

Absolutely.

Like the best goth clothes I have ever gotten. I got Lauren

Simone Collins: so weird. I mean, great. It’s sad that their goth face was

Malcolm Collins: lived. Tshirts that were really gothy looking. Like

Simone Collins: T-shirts.

Malcolm Collins: Elegant. Understated. The way that I like to dress goth, you know, I don’t, I don’t wanna be too in your face about it, right?

Simone Collins: Uhhuh? Yeah, there different types of goth. There’s like wears an invader zm shirt from hot topic goth, and then there’s. Goth Goth. I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, if you wanna do it right, like you gotta, there’s, there’s, there’s mall goth, which is like gross, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Then there’s like a take on Victorian goth.

Simone Collins: That’s great.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s, it’s great. But it’s a little over the top in Fay

Simone Collins: a little much. There’s, well, there’s also goth, which is steam

Malcolm Collins: punk goth, which I think looks ridiculous. It’s like glue a gear on it.

Simone Collins: It’s a little too much

Malcolm Collins: min, there’s,

Simone Collins: yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: What I went for, which is I guess today, I’d call it preppy goth prep.

Simone Collins: Preppy [00:51:00] goth.

Malcolm Collins: Preppy

Simone Collins: goth. I’m ready for that. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And nobody knew that preppy goth was an option until they saw Malcolm Collins, and then they’re like,

Simone Collins: well, or until anyone I guess, yeah, I guess this segment of people who were both goth but could afford Ralph Lauren clove. Like from the store directly.

Oh

Malcolm Collins: my God. They were not the only of the big stores that had goth. Oh. Another one that had gothy clothes was I wanna say Bergdorf’s. What’s the one that was in

Simone Collins: that? Bergdorf?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, Bergdorf. Where they have like different fashions on each.

Simone Collins: That’s a department store.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It went outta business. Yeah.

Bergdorf had

Simone Collins: goth. No, Bergdorf is still fine, I think. Are you thinking Barney’s?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I know. I’m maybe thinking the one that’s on, on Saks at Fifth Avenue.

Simone Collins: Oh, that’s, that’s again just a high-end department store. So it just has different brands within it. You just, different designer brands. This is just ‘cause Yeah, when you were a teen, you had your mother insisting that you, you could never buy like Thrifted clothes.

You had to buy ridiculously expensive

Malcolm Collins: clothes. Most of what I wore with Thrifted.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah. When you were out of the house

Malcolm Collins: and [00:52:00] then I’d like sew up my clothes and everything to be really cool. I was the cool guy. I’ll tell you what no, I wanna

Simone Collins: hear, or, or I think I heard somewhere the JCO jeans have made a comeback.

Malcolm Collins: They have. I had one pair of JCO jeans, but that was when I was so young and they actually,

Simone Collins: and New Rock boots

Malcolm Collins: a lot of money.

Simone Collins: I could see New rock boots making it come back new I found is cool. New Rock are sitting in the attic. They’re still here

Malcolm Collins: as an adult. Yeah, but they’re kind of falling apart. I’m actually thinking maybe I should get new, new rocks.

Like

Simone Collins: they’re huge.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And they make me taller. Like why not? Like I dress fancy, like why not just incorporate new rocks into my outfit? I need to wear yellow boots. I’m sure New Rock has some great yellow boots so I can match the rest of the family.

Simone Collins: Let’s see. New rock boots, yellow.

Oh, not really. No.

Malcolm Collins: Really? Oh, that’s such a disappointment.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh, nope. Sorry. It autocorrected to New York. Boots.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, you see? [00:53:00] Well, I’m on their page now. So let’s see. Yellow, what comes up? I know they have at least yellow women’s boots. The question is, do they have yellow

Simone Collins: boots? I’m seeing gross camo platform shoes and that’s it.

That have yellow soles, but camo uppers. You don’t want that?

Malcolm Collins: No. I’d probably just go for like the classic one. The,

Simone Collins: yeah, yeah. Just the classic new rock boots. You gonna get chingo jeans too? Hmm?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I gotta, I gotta go unfortunately with all yellow. So, you know, yellow trumps the, the fancy boots.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which we do match the kids. So how do people like the, I was surprised it only did four outta 10, I think like maybe one of the best episodes we’ve ever done.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But we could arguably be spreading medical misinformation, which makes the algorithm hate us. So.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, this, this is the that you think that’s what was going on?

Simone Collins: It possibly, there was,

Malcolm Collins: it

Simone Collins: was the episode from the people also constantly like commenting on everyone else’s [00:54:00] comments, saying like, this is not, it’s, it, it’s not

statistically relevant.

What was that?

Malcolm Collins: I actually know why a person had a freak out. So this was the episode where we discussed that there actually is a significant amount of evidence today that certain.

Species of both parasites and some fungus and potentially some bacteria have evolved to modify human arousal pathways to make them prefer certain things that, lead them to, you know, a or more gay sex or the other one that was really crazy is lead to lower threat detection.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Evolving was the urban monoculture as like a set. And this is just amazing to me that this is the case. And one person is probably aware, ‘cause one of the ones we talked about was Toxoplasmic Gandhi toxoplasmosis. And there was a big scare about toxoplasmosis when we were kids. Right. And so everybody learned about it back then.

And then there was some studies that came out that [00:55:00] showed that that scare may have been unwarranted. And then everybody, you know, whenever like, there’s a viral thing and then there it can be like a viral against the viral thing. Mm-hmm. And then everybody set to that and they were apparently unaware that yet a new big string of studies had come out showing that it appears to have now evolved to.

Only spread was in human populations without cats, and specifically specialize in modifying human arousal behavior and other sorts of behavioral to increase. And I think that they were just unaware of this later string of evidence, but also keep in mind how hurtful this is, if it is true to a large segment of the population that decided to identify with their arousal patterns.

And now it’s just like, oh, that was a parasite. By the way, controlling you, your

Simone Collins: identity was a parasite.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Your, your identity wasn’t you, it was a parasite that became, I tell its lady like

Simone Collins: they, they’re building identities around diseases they don’t even have. So, you know, I mean, it’s lifestyle.

Malcolm Collins: Well it’s, it’s more [00:56:00] humiliating to be used as just part of the reproductive process of a, a parasite.

Well, I mean, think about it, like when you talk about lower threat detection and stuff like that, that there’s this girl who, you know, wanted to do a march through Europe in the Middle East to prove that you know, yeah. Everybody’s equal and kind and, you know, very low detection. She gets within a mile of a border of an Arab majority country and is found murdered and graped.

Right? Like they, if you’re just like, actually she did that in the same way, like an ant that’s been infected with like fungus spores, crawls to the top of a, a, a leaf that is head can explode and the spores can come out to infect other aunts like that. Her life literally. Was just a vehicle for the reproduction of pathogens.

It’s a, it’s a hurtful thing to internalize, but what’s wild is there were so many comments in our discord and on the main channel being like, oh my God. Yeah, I was aroused by men or I was by, and then I, when our regimen of anti [00:57:00] antibiotics or I took Ivermectin was a really common one, and all of a sudden those feelings went away.

And this is apparently like a really common story that people have in our fan base. And I actually want to double down and try to, because it makes sense and it makes sense that the public wouldn’t want you to know about this. And it makes sense that the urban monoculture may have some kind of immune reaction when Ivermectin started to get become popular because a lot of people in our fan base, because, you know, we’re a fairly right white leaning show, it’s like, yeah, I was super left-leaning and then I took Ivermectin and it’s like, oh my God.

Like, is. Is this weird? Like not thinking about the future mindset. ‘cause that seems to be really core to modern, progressive thinking is complete blindness to future events. By this what I mean, it’s, it’s this. We even had a reporter who was like super progressive and I’m like, do you just like actually not care that like social security is gonna collapse because of the things you’re doing and, and, and Medicaid is gonna collapse and welfare is gonna collapse in the future.

Like, do you not care about those future people? She goes, you know [00:58:00] what I think about it, I really don’t at all. And I think this requires like something lesioning your brain to like not think about future events. That is not normal human behavior. And that’s what we might actually be seeing here. So anyway, really cool stuff.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I’m doing the final.

Simone Collins: Loved it. I think the algorithm just doesn’t like people talking about

Malcolm Collins: Well then you gotta share, you gotta share the info guys. We never ask you guys to share, but this is actually info that I want to become popular. Like I’m not even saying like if you know like a big right-wing podcaster or something like that, I want them covering this info.

I want this info, you know, everywhere, right?

Simone Collins: I don’t know. I mean, Joe Rogan was the big ivermectin advocate,

Malcolm Collins: right? But this is different from that. This is, this is is pointing out that there is a collection of pathogens and parasites that are convergently evolving to be symbiotic with the urban monoculture and the urban monoculture is evolving to protect them.

Anyway, [00:59:00] I will get started here. Simone,

Simone Collins: I’m excited for this one. I’m curious to see where you take it.

Speaker 6: Look at this. Look at this. What are you doing? I, you, I’m, this is my beef lo mane that my wife made. Look at this. Could you imagine if you had this every night? Oh my God. Could you imagine? It’s so tender. You guys have no idea. Yeah, it’s.

Speaker 9: What are you working on? What are you doing? Titan?

It’s okay. Professor safe, come on. You don’t wanna be afraid of dogs. He not one of the boys.

You gotta calm down around dogs. Come on sweetheart. Come on, let’s go. [01:00:00] You’ll learn.

Speaker 8: You’re, you’re, you’re good boy.

Let’s go.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe