The Innocence of Fear and Joy

Dive into the shocking reality of affluent youth's mental health crisis. We explore groundbreaking studies revealing higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse among wealthy teenagers compared to their less privileged peers. Uncover the paradox of privilege and its unexpected consequences on mental well-being.

Key points discussed:

* Surprising statistics on mental health issues in affluent communities

* The role of parenting styles and societal expectations in creating these issues

* The concept of "urban monoculture" and its impact on youth development

* Comparison of risk-taking behaviors between affluent and inner-city teens

* The importance of resilience and coping skills in child development

* Celebrity culture and its influence on parenting trends

* The potential dangers of overprotection and lack of real-world experiences

Join us as we challenge common assumptions about wealth and happiness, and explore how traditional values and experiences might be key to raising mentally healthy children in today's complex world.

Would you like to know more?

Hello Simone. Today we're doing another research heavy episode because our audience loves these. I love counterintuitive research and I love. on the urban monoculture the, the, and the, and the tragedy it has created in this society. And the, well, there's

Simone Collins: just something that there shouldn't fraud from specifically luxuriating in the misery of people whose core value is not misery and who fail so badly at it while also dumping on us [00:01:00] constantly.

It's just amazing.

Everything else, every other value that a human could have in the name of

Simone Collins: happiness. And then they're miserable,

not, not happiness, but being able to seek after every biological instinct. They have

Simone Collins: anything

that they think will make them happy. They go pursue it. Anything that they would make them happy to believe about themselves.

They have to have it affirmed. And they say we're monsters for not creating that, that, that cultural structure for our own children. They say, how dare you live the life you want to live. And then. We look at them and they live a life of horror, even when they're successful, even when they achieve everything they want.

It's still a life of existential horror. And that makes me so, I, I would be so hard to live in a world where you, the people who are unjustly oppressing you are living great lives. Yeah. Like, I, I, I, I don't know if, like, God worked this out for [00:02:00] us or whatever, but yeah. So this is something I decided to dig into after I noticed in a study when we were, like, looking for other people.

Causes of fertility collapse, blah, blah, blah. And I noticed in one study that it showed that the demographic of young people who had the highest rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse were in families of over 120, 000 of average income, which is right. And you see this too.

Simone Collins: Like you're going to be hard pressed to find a Spoonie, which in other words is a like hypochondriac internet denizen, like the modern version of a hypochondriac, they are pretty much upper middle class young women again.

Yeah.

So, we're going to go over a few studies on this and then discuss hypotheses around what could be causing this. Okay. Let's do it. The first study here is called. Children of the Affluent. Challenges to well being. And this came out in 2005. So affluent youth showed higher rates of substance use, anxiety, and depression [00:03:00] when compared to their inner city counterparts and national norms.

By 7th grade, some affluent students exhibited clinically significant depressive symptoms and substance abuse behavior. This was particularly pronounced in affluent girls where these symptoms were twice as high as in normative samples. So literally 200 percent higher in the affluent cohort.

Simone Collins: And, and, you know, of course, these are people with parents who assumed that because they had more money, their children would be better off and so many parents or would be parents thought that.

Don't have money or put off having kids because they think I need more money before I have kids. Meanwhile.

, in one cohort suburban affluent teens reported significantly higher use of cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs than their inner city counterparts. So the suburban teens are doing more hard drugs than the inner city teens.

Simone Collins: I went to on the island where I grew up outside [00:04:00] San Francisco, Alameda there was the rich side high school and there was the less rich side high school. And the joke was that we always. We sold the drugs. And Sunil high school sold the drugs to Alameda high school.

It's funny. You mentioned that I'll continue because I, I went to boarding school.

Yeah, long story. I'd been basically kicked out of my family. I hadn't, I hadn't lived with my family after the age of 13. I lived off of a education trust. One of my ancestors set up at boarding school. And. at a boarding school. So I wasn't like living there because I had everything. I was living there because I had nowhere else to go.

I didn't go home over the summers either, really. So, I, I, it wasn't one of the best boarding schools. Okay. Enough throat clearing, get to the story. But it was known, like, I remember that at one point I was going to be sleeping with like an Andover girl and like my roommate in the same way, when like, You so people who I don't know, Andover is like the best.

It's like the [00:05:00] Princeton of boarding schools. Okay. In the same way that you had some of your friends when you were moving to Texas and they were like, watch out, like you're going to get shot if you move to Texas, like they have guns there. Like they were like genuinely afraid for you. And, and he was like.

You know, make sure she doesn't offer you hard drugs, like, like genuinely concerned for me, you know, and this is somebody who even like did drugs, but like, you know, and over and over is a different thing into the hardship, like heroin and cocaine and like, you know, she's like, you should probably get her tested if you're going to sleep with her, you know, like you're imagining them like sharing needles and stuff and like, this is just, this Well, but I

Simone Collins: thought there was something to it.

Like that the kids at my high school, yeah, we're actually known for selling the drugs, but not really necessarily for doing them. And that the kids from the wealthier high school who were known for buying them maybe had more problems in many ways. And I feel like a lot of tropes and jokes. You know, they're funny because they are surprising, but they make sense.

And there's something to that. I think that's part [00:06:00] of this dynamic here of wealthier kids also kind of having the money and the leisure and the ennui necessary for drug use. If you know what I

mean? Oh, they're so ennui. They're so ennui. I always call it the what was the woman from Great Gatsby's name?

Daisy. Daisy the daisy effect and I dated. Some girls like this because my mom wanted me to marry an heiress, right? And she's like marianne eris marianne eris marianne eris. She goes the easiest way to get rich is to marry rich It'll be the easiest money you've made in your entire life.

Simone Collins: She's right.

She's right.

Yeah I tried it. Their level of ennui was too much for me. When they didn't come from, you know, my cultural group of my cultural group is small. And, you know, there weren't many what I'm saying here is my nieces and nephews grew up very wealthy. I've seen this they do not have this ennui.

Yeah, isn't that interesting? But it is, they have not fallen to the urban monoculture. And as such, you know, they still have a level of cultural expectation and hardship in their life that keeps them very virile. In a way that [00:07:00] the, these other girls who I dated who came from these groups didn't have as much.

Resistance, vitalistic, vitalistic, virile, whatever you want to call it. I mean, they have a lot of like human life energy to them in a way that I just didn't see in the young rich girls who I tried dating,

Which was always a problem for me. That's why you know, it's too bad. And I actually think you, you point out something really clear.

If you talk about like hard drug use, when I think about like the scenes that I was aware of as a teen. You really only saw it in the ultra affluent group and in the ultra poor group who were like upper lower class, lower middle class, middle and middle class didn't really touch the stuff. And I think it was because they had seen members of their family fall to like the lower class status and or

Simone Collins: they just didn't have the excess cash for it.

You do need to have cash. If you're going to get, if you're going to buy these things as a kid. You have cash and you have time. And the thing is like, you [00:08:00] know, the, the, the kids who worked to get their money didn't have time necessarily to just sort of like blitz out and the. Yeah, the kids who couldn't even get jobs to have money

to buy anything.

So what are you going to do? Okay, so let's continue here. Yeah. Suburban girls were three times more likely to report clinically significant levels of depression than the normative sample.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Check this out. Three

times more likely. Yeah. About 20 percent of affluent youth showed persistently high substance use throughout high school along with depression and anxiety and academic problems.

Simone Collins: Oh.

And for this study, the first one we're looking at here the reasons that were cited were academic pressures, children with high perfectionist strivings and those who felt their parents overemphasized achievements showed higher rates of depression, anxiety and substance use. Okay. I don't believe that one effing second.

I believe that's what they told researchers. But if you [00:09:00] think that people from other demographic groups are not pushed hard, I was pushed extremely hard as a kid. Not, not actively pushed. It was more just like, well, we expect you to achieve this because that's who you are. If you achieve any less than we'll never talk to you again.

And I had already been pushed out of the house. Like they were serious about this. Okay. And my family was like, make this work or you're gone. They're like, remember how you haven't been allowed home since you were 13? I'm like, Oh yeah, I, I get that this thread is real. Like the disowning thing is not a, and other people in another video, they've been like, I've never heard of this, like disowning tradition.

It's a real tradition. We mentioned it in another video. And it is a tradition that is implemented for people who see it as cruel. It comes from families who have high clan based structures where like family really matters, blood is stricter than water is something I heard. Yeah, but also successful family.

But low rates of nepotism. It's how they prevent nepotism i. e. the promotion of people who are otherwise incompetent. And it's also how they prevent inter clan warfare. Well, the only way you can have

Simone Collins: [00:10:00] meritocracy within a family clan is by getting rid of people. You have to just get rid of people. Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

Yeah. And so, no, it's not that they were being pushed too hard. It's just that that was the just so story the kids came up with to explain their whininess. And then two, isolation from adults, both literal, being left alone, and emotional isolation from parents were linked to distress or substance abuse.

So if they didn't show this statistically, and I'm pretty sure that Well, no, no, no, I think there's

Simone Collins: something here. Mm hmm. And I think a lot of it has to do with affluent parents being more likely to be really like concerned about safety and more controlling, but in that way of like, you can't go out, you can't like, you know, a lot of I would say, I will say lower class, less resourced parents are like, you know, go out, what play in the neighborhood.

I don't care. Play in the streets. Whereas more high maintenance, more. Middle class parents are like, no, stay inside, like study, work with your tutor. And that can be very isolating. And that is, you know, we, we [00:11:00] complain, you know, people blame phones for. Kids, mental health, not thriving. But I think the bigger issue is that kids aren't allowed to go outside.

Ultra wealthy friend groups. So we hang out with like a lot of billionaire class people and we hang out with their, their infants and their toddlers and they act very different from ours. I don't know how much of this is what you're talking about. How much of this is genetic? But they, are very timid compared to our kids.

And we do things that our kids, that they would consider bordering on child abuse in terms of how much freedom the

Simone Collins: internet's very open about the way that they think. But also when I see any post, for example, by ballerina farms, where just shows their kids out. In the fields or something, there will be 15 comments on this is child abuse.

This is child endangerment. They could be kicked by a cow. They could fall into the water channel. Like [00:12:00] you, you don't understand just how egregious the standards are among, especially moderately affluent middle class parents and safety. And so I do think that they are socially isolated and they're socially isolated because of out of control standard.

Around parenting and child safety, quote unquote for children. So anyway, I just want to say that

that is a really interesting point. And I want to elevate part of it here because it's something that I remember from my childhood. That I haven't seen in other families and even you struggle with this a bit is I remember on multiple occasions Somebody said something like this to my parents because we were very free range II as kids Oh, yeah,

Simone Collins: and you guys were described as like the Addams family and you get it Ponds and almost dying so I know that your parents were hands off that we fell into ponds We drove four wheelers into ponds.

Oh yeah, we, well, yeah, I mean, I, yeah, I drove a four wheel. I had major crashes you know, stitches, everything like that. In, [00:13:00] in,

Simone Collins: in, in one

instance when I was around Octavian's age, so this would have happened when I was five.

Simone Collins: Okay.

So yeah, around Octavian's age. When the

Simone Collins: hornet stings, the bee stings.

Oh yeah,

I had to go to the hospital for that once. That was a totally separate thing. We went over at Ground Nos Nest and then we were revving the four wheeler engine on it. I spent my weekends on a ranch, okay? But this is different. This was in the town. So we had a a three story mansion in Highland Park and it was covered in ivy.

Simone Collins: And Highland Park was, it's the Beverly Hills of Dallas. Yeah.

Yes, it's a nice area. Very, very large. Who owned it actually? I think it was the Cox's who owned it and they were like lending it to us or something. Anyway I, at a five year old, and now as an adult I realize like why our neighbors like seriously had problems with this.

I apparently used to like to climb the ivy on the outside of the house to the third floor. Of course you did. Imagine if you, you go, you're driving through a wealthy neighborhood and you're looking at one of the mansions and on the [00:14:00] outside there's a little five year old clinging to I. O. I. You know

Simone Collins: for a second that Titan would do that.

She would. Her daughter climbs anything she could possibly think to climb. She would climb curtains if we had them in our house.

Oh my god. I, I actually now as an adult, when I understand how genuinely young I was and how genuinely like horrifying that was. I actually think that's pretty funny. I was genuinely, but the point I mean here is my parents at various times throughout my childhood made it clear that death was an option for us.

What I mean by that as is family said, and other various points when they were criticizing my parents, if you let them do this, they might die. And they said. Well, they deserve it if they die. And it was, it was, you can totally see my mom saying stuff like that, right? Like, well, like if there were being idiots, dumb enough to

Simone Collins: die doing that.

Oh my

God. And I [00:15:00] have noticed that I have that mindset with our kids a little bit, you know, it's like, are they better off, right? Being in this ultra protectionist mindset. In terms of their adult outcomes or adding because with everything you do, you're adding some probability of death. You're always valuing a human life no matter what you do.

You know, when you decide to put up, you know, guardrails on a highway, you're trying to price, okay, how sturdy these need to be because they could always be made sturdier, right? They could always be made with more cushion at a certain point. You just need to be like the harm or the don't let it go. And I was raised to believe that that equation should be very much on the side of If a kid is not allowed to be put in a position where they could kill themselves, then they are going to grow up without the skills they need to survive.

To not kill themselves.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. And also they're, they're more likely to. Probably do dangerous stuff in the future. [00:16:00] Yeah, I mean, I will say, I want to point out though for the audience just actually how concerned you are with our children's safety to the point where literally you don't want to go on family vacations from this point onward in which everyone flies together because you are too concerned about everyone possibly dying.

So,

That's me concerned about everyone dying at once, to be clear. That's a little different. But you, I want to be clear here, I am concerned with their safety when it's a variable risk. The plane flight doesn't gain them an experience that is critical to their adult experience. And this is something where I look at something like these parents who are like, well, with the additional kids you have, you won't be able to take your other kids on vacations.

And it's like, Is the vacation really going to augment their adult identity significantly? No. Am I risking their life for something that doesn't have any real impact on their adult identity? No. But when I think about other things, like taking them into the woods, right? Like, do I feel if I never let my kids [00:17:00] go and play in the woods by our house, supervised, of course that I would be putting them at risk.

And people would be like, why are you scared of your kids? Supervised playing in the woods because I love 4 1 1 files.

Simone Collins: And they always start with family goes on an innocent hike in the woods. Five year old runs five yards out of view. Five year old is never seen again.

So this last weekend I was playing with our kids in the wood.

Actually we were playing by a Creek and we were throwing things in the river and then seeing how far we can get up one side of the Creek and how far the other. And I got three kids to take care of. Right. So I'm always. More focused on the younger two than I am on the older one who's about to turn five.

And so this older one he Disappeared And I had lost my phone that day somewhere when we were playing with the kids I think one of them might have yanked it and gone to play with it. They love pickpocketing and stuff like that. They're very uh, I gotta post a video here in this video of just how mischievous Titan is.

Oh boy. Yeah. For a sign of mischievousness. Like this is not something she learned. Where we clearly

Simone Collins: established that something is not nice to [00:18:00] do. And she's like, Oh great. Let me do this in abundance and then do it again.

Just, oh, no, you made a mess, you made a mess! Titan! Why? No! Titan,

Are you bringing some back to me now? Oh, oh, oh, what?! You are monstrous! You pretended you were bringing some back to me?

You gotta see to see how much you'll punish me. Right. You know, so anyway. Octavian, gone, gone.

I was going to get Titan because she'd fallen over in the creek, and then I go back and Octavian is gone, and I am running up and down the creek. I am panicking. I am reflecting on all the 411 stories. The next day, the Wall Street Journal is coming to our house, and one of the thoughts I have is, Oh my God, are we going to be doing like a child search with like the police and like everything like that?

Like I read in all the 411 stories while the Wall Street Journal is here with us about one of our kids going missing in the woods. [00:19:00] But it turned out that he just decided he didn't want to be with us. So he, he, he walked home on his own. Yeah,

Simone Collins: and started asking me for food and he comes to me inside.

I'm with, I'm with Indy, our infant. And he's like, I told daddy I was going to go home and here I am smirk. Can I have an apple? And yeah, little did I know you were eating

apples while I'm having a panic attack. So, you know, there's downsides to this. I do worry for my kids and I do understand that there is risk in taking them to play in the Creek to play in the woods, but let's bring this back though, because what

Simone Collins: we're arguing is that this is a very unusual sentiment among.

Middle class parents right now in, in developed nations. And that is a problem for the wellbeing, the mental wellbeing of their children, as is reflected by the general misery of wealthier children right now.

So let's get to the next study, the price of affluence. This was talking about new research shows that privileged teens may be more self centered and depressed than ever before.

This [00:20:00] was in 2009. And this showed that adolescents from homes where the average income was 120, 000 or higher reported higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. One in four students in recent generations showed elevated rates of narcissism compared to only one in seven in 1985.

Simone Collins: And again, can you blame them when all you're allowed to do is sit at home on your phone and then watch the channels and Instagram accounts and TikTok accounts of people who are also very narcissistic?

Yeah, well, in here this is from the American Psychological Association

yeah, it is more reporting on the first study. Okay. But they report on it in different ways. So let's see what they have to say here. Oh, they also appear to have a really high lack of resilience where they have really big troubles coping with disappointment or failure. Now, of course. Urban monoculture says this is due to high expectations. In [00:21:00] reality, it's due to we never martially punish our kids. You know, Oh we now know from the research, i.

e. The 2023 paper that did the meta study and actually match the data sets that it turns out that marshal punishment of kids, corporal discipline that it leads to actually higher outcomes when you don't say that any kid who wasn't disciplined is in the. So just so people understand, because we've talked about this before, but it's probably important to.

Reiterate here. A lot of papers came out in the eighties trying to argue that corporal discipline was bad. But the way they did their sample sizes, sample sets, they did enormous sample sizes. So no one would question. But then they say any kid who wasn't corporally punished within the non corporal punishment category and any kid who was, was, was out matching for families.

Which means that if you were a family where one of your kids needed to be disciplined and the other ones didn't need to be disciplined, i. e. you had some boys and some girls, because often girls don't require this they would have put the boys in the corporal discipline category, the girls in the non [00:22:00] corporal discipline category, and then say, well, you see, clearly, corporal discipline is causing more behavioral problems.

When, No, that's not the case. And when you correct for this, you actually find it's useful. And like anyone should have known this, hiding somebody from any negative stimuli as they grow up is going to hypersensitize them to negative stimuli and going to lead to things like trigger warnings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But I want to hear your thoughts here.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that plus sheltering people from general hardship. Is going to cause this. I think we're also seeing this in things like grade inflation, where literally, even when you've completely failed to Excel in an area, you're not allowed to receive that negative feedback.

The, the removal of standardized testing or, or SAT testing in some areas, just we're like, we, we can't show you when you're doing wrong. And then the moment life happens to you and inevitably you. fail at something, which is the only way you're going to start getting good at something or start moving forward.

I mean, you can't do anything [00:23:00] ambitious. Like we say, success is built upon a mountain of failures. So you're, you're dooming people when you don't teach them that failure is part of succeeding, a core part of succeeding, and that it is both okay and a sign that you're pushing yourself enough to actually get somewhere.

Well, yeah. And they don't let the kids really suffer or learn their own boundaries or anything like that. You know, you've pointed this out was play behavior where play behavior in children. Is about learning boundaries, you know, and when you remove that, especially if you teach them that the core boundary center is the authority, right?

You teach them to always make appeals to authorities when their boundaries are breached, right? So instead of pushing back themselves, they appeal to the Twitter mob. They appeal to CVS. Somebody pushed my boundaries. It was a CVS incubator. 37 percent of kids in America now have CVS problems. People are just spamming because people don't have, and I think a lot of this came downstream of when [00:24:00] schools started to go this pathway where it was like, when a kid's being bad, tell the teacher.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Appeal to authority. Yes.

Appeal to authority. Always. All violations of individual boundaries are fixed by appeals to authority, which of course is one, not a mentally healthy way to do things, learning how to handle things yourself. The quote from my mom that I mentioned in other episodes, I remember when I, when I You know, teacher was praising me for having told on another student after she pulls me aside and she goes, what are you snitches get stitches.

We say this with our kids as well. When they tell on their siblings, she's like, what are you a narc? Like that's what you're like, but you didn't mean picked on. And she's like, that's what you're But I get in trouble and she's like, well, that's honorable. You know, the fix things yourself. Don't go to an arbitrary authority.

And it's the cultures that we're able to maintain this mindset that I think are going to get through this particular period of fertility collapse because the appeal to authority also allows you to off load. Responsibility to authority. And I also now think, [00:25:00] I'm just now going over all these stories from my childhood and I was like, wow, I really was given maybe even, maybe even I need to push myself to let my kids do more because it might just be that I'm starting from a culture that was much more like do your own thing.

And I remember one incident where I locked Miles in the bathroom for an entire day and nobody found out. What? That's awful. That is awful. Yeah, we must have been like five and six at that. No, no, four and five range or five and six range. Yeah.

Simone Collins: No, we're not doing that with our kids, but I, I get what

you're

Simone Collins: saying.

They just weren't paying attention. They were just like,

Simone Collins: yeah, no, I mean the, like, you know, I've told you of the various times when I've wandered off as a kid and then, you know, come back and like their police search teams coming together for me and like, Explain this story

when you disappeared and you had no idea.

Well, it

Simone Collins: happened a couple of times. Once we were camping in Death Valley in [00:26:00] California, which is a very, a very hot desert. And I decided to just, you know, wander further from the campsite than my parents expected and take, you know, normally they'd let me disappear for like an hour. And this time I disappeared for two or three.

And then I came back and they, you know, were putting together a search party for me, you know, when, meanwhile, I'd just been going around meeting people at different campsites. And another time when I was babysitting an infant, I decided to take the infant for a very long walk in a stroller during the babysitting session because it's what made the baby stop crying.

And I come home and there is a search party being formed for me. This was before the age of cell phones, of course, when no one could know where your kid was. But yeah, I mean, I would sometimes take But yeah, my parents, my parents let me at the age of 13 spend a month working abroad. are volunteering abroad at a hostel in Mexico in a, in a mixed gender adult hostel, one bedroom, just like, you know, rows of beds.

I did similar

things when I was God, I must've [00:27:00] been 14 or 15 at the time I did hitchhiking through central America. Yeah. As an adult, I now realize that was very dangerous. That is an insane thing. I

Simone Collins: don't think I would let a 13 year old girl. Being an adult makes gender hostile in Mexico. So yeah, I would say that there are some things that we were allowed to do.

But this is a problem. Are we, are we just starting from a further point? Yeah, are we being,

Simone Collins: are we being cucks right now? Do we need to just I think

we're being cucks. The comments can let us know.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Are we being cucks by the month? I'm in guys. Also, please like and subscribe and if you do happen to have an iPhone, If you could leave us a five star review on Apple podcasts, it would mean a lot to us because no one has iPhones anymore, apparently.

And also like, we just

don't know. It's because our audience, sorry, I don't want to crap on iPhone users right before I say don't.

Simone Collins: iPhones are very pretty and they have great cameras. And I think a lot of very competent people have iPhones. Many very [00:28:00] competent people have iPhones. Is this a Good Samaritan joke?

What do you mean Good Samaritan?

Who should wander by but a Samaritan of all people? And he actually helped the man. No. I mean, this is what I'm saying. That a Samaritan, alright, so have a good think about your attitudes, went and helped.

 Because what I'm saying is that he was a good Samaritan. That's good. Samaritan, if you could imagine such a thing. Yes! Yes, I can! I know there's a lot of prejudice against Samaritans, which is terrible, but I'm sure I speak for everyone in this room when I say that there are loads of really nice Samaritans.

Yeah, some of my best friends are Samaritans. So what I'm finding offensive, Is your unreflecting acceptance of this cliché that all Samaritans are w*****s?

 No, I'm saying that goodness comes in unexpected places. Yeah, and I'm saying that the fact that you wouldn't expect goodness from a Samaritan betrays your inherent racism. I didn't [00:29:00] realize there were any all Samaritan sympathizers, you know, Sammy lovers. Oh, I didn't realise it was such a PC environment here, and at the end of the day, it is only a parable.

What, it didn't really happen? Well, of course not. A Samaritan tosser wouldn't do that for his own grandmother.

 That's a fantastic one. But what are they going to say here? So, so people might be wondering, like, why are we talking about like the urban monoculture? It's the urban monoculture people. We talk about the urban monoculture is this culture that is dominant in urban centers around the world right now.

It's a fairly new cultural group. It attracts people with a promise of no pain, no suffering, just come to us and you can do whatever you want, whenever you want and be affirmed for believing whatever you want to believe about yourself. And obviously this has. Massive negative psychological consequences.

And it's, it's, it's Sentinels. It's preacher cast as the modern psycho, psychology movement. Which, other episodes we talk about this. You can go into our arguments. I was trained in psychology. I know what I'm talking about. Everything they're doing [00:30:00] now is stuff we were trained 2000s. Because it could cause dependence.

They are essentially creating dependency. You go to a psychologist today. What you are getting is closer to what historically you would have got in a Scientology Theaton reading than you would have gotten in a, in a psychologist reading. They are trying to implant trauma. That said, that's not all psychologists.

Some are still okay, but most are part of this. That these, this group, this urban monoculture has penetrated wealthy culture more. And it's penetrated non wealthy culture. And the same way the Scientologists go after the celebrities first, the urban monoculture went after the celebrities first. If you look for an example.

And I would,

Simone Collins: well, and I would, I think we need to argue and point out that one of the primary vectors for indoctrination is universities. And most, you know, most people who are making [00:31:00] upper middle class incomes have gone through the university system, essentially having gone through cult indoctrination at this point.

I agree with that, but I'd argue it's also a portion of targeting as well. So, if you look at like celebrities, I saw a thing recently, there's looking at just how many celebrity children are trans. And it's like, Really? Like an insane amount. It's an insane amount. Yeah! Come to

Simone Collins: think of it, it is really weird.

I wondered if it was just a selection thing, because

No, no, no. They're, they're, they're convincing their kid because they see it as a status symbol.

So they are, because within the urban monoculture, being trans, especially having trans children and being okay with it, is a huge status symbol.

See, see these celebrities, what they used to try to do within the urban monoculture, they try to raise their status by adopting black kids, right?

Everyone remembers that. fad. And then it turned out they were basically stealing children from like non consenting families in Africa. And everyone then was [00:32:00] like, you know, it's actually pretty racist what you're doing. Like, honestly. And so then, Oh no, high and dry. How can I value signal with my children?

How can I show I'm the best in the besties? Well, I can chop their genitals off. That works. Um, So now they're all trying. And if you're like, no, some of their kids are likely Transcribed In multiple families, you'll have an instance where they'll have like three adopted kids and all of them have come out of trans.

It's like, or, or three biologically,

it's like, just wouldn't happen.

Simone Collins: That's like

impossible by the statistics. You would, unless it was a social contagion, you would not get three trans people into the same family, okay? People, like, you must see this, right? Like, you're not stupid, are you? Or are you stupid?

Are you stupid and you can't see that it is surprising that all the celebrities are doing this, and that yes, trans people might actually exist, but that doesn't mean that people aren't using a trans [00:33:00] identity for nefarious purposes instead of signaling, and that these kids aren't gonna suffer from this.

Oh, they don't suffer from this, it's not a big deal. Oh yeah, except trans people have a penis. 40 percent to 50%, depending on the study you're looking at, rate of unaliving themselves. You are taking that kid and you're saying, here's a coin, flip it. You get to decide if you die.

So just for a quick list of some celebrities with trans kids. Dwayne Wade, Naomi, want share Jamie Lee Curtis, Cynthia Nixon, Marilyn widens. Charlie's Thurone uh, Charlie Theron. A really horrific case. She adopted two black kids and immediately transitioned one of them. Uh, at the age of three. Uh, so, you know, obviously. Uh, this was not the kid's choice.

If you have raised kids, you understand that at the age of three kids do not understand the concept of gender fully. Uh, one of our kids is five and I say that's when they reliably seem to understand gender as a [00:34:00] concept. , but, , pre four, no, it would be really rare for a kid to understand. Fully the concept of gender irregularly.

Get people's pronouns, right. The next we have, I also got that adopted these kids and going for double signaling points. So gross. Uh, we have Heather Debrow here. We have a net binning. We have carob. Peyton. We have Jennifer Lopez. We have Cindy bar shop. We have Bossi Phillips. I've got another long list here, but you guys don't really care. , I will say that one to be, The, the one where it's the three kids together. , that is Megan Fox.

However, she just dresses all her boys as girls, but she doesn't, she still calls them by male pronouns. And, I don't know. I mean, clearly she's doing it for the points. It would be very rare for three boys to happen to all just coincidentally prefer dressing as women. , so I don't know, I don't know what's going on there, but. Yikes. , when you consider that underlying oneself rate, when you acculturate a person into [00:35:00] this.

Sorry, it's not, it's not that cool.

It's not that cool. Not that cool. Not that cool. But what about you, Simone? What do you think of this urban monoculture of anxiety and depression? We've talked about All the time, the stat. I love it. CD, C. Just a few years ago, one in four girls created a plan to unlive themselves on any given year. Over one and 10 kids in high school is attempting unli themselves every year.

Simone Collins: I would love to see more research on how specifically children subject to, we'll say, real trauma are doing mentally. So remember there was that one, I think they were looking at kids in Norway or Sweden or something like that maybe the Netherlands who had either reported having childhood trauma versus reported having no childhood trauma and then how they were mentally doing.

And then they looked at whether or not there were court records implying they had real trauma. And it turned out that the correlation in terms of like being a mentally healthy person [00:36:00] today didn't have to do with real trauma. It had to do with perceived trauma. And what I'd love to look at is do children who suffer from constrained resources in the United States, who suffer from hardship, who have reported Like actual problems in their lives.

Do they have better rates when we're looking at suicidality, when we're looking at drug use, when we're looking at substance abuse in general or depression then those who come from. Affluent non traumatic, technically speaking backgrounds because I'm very curious to see it. I was so intrigued by the mindset and the baby boom following World War 2, where all these people had these incredibly traumatic experiences, a very difficult time.

Tons of deprivation. I mean, first you had the depression, then you had a world war and then people come home and it is a fifties and everyone is having babies and everyone's building companies and everyone's buying everything. You know, they just [00:37:00] like, wow, you know, everything exploded and it was a very optimistic time culturally as well.

I am wondering. I mean, yes and no, I guess, but like what I want to know is what's going on among those who actually have it hard. So if we know that those who have it, quote unquote, good from a resource perspective are doing really poorly are what's going on with those who aren't doing so well, resource wise.

Are they better

off? I mean, yes, that's objectively what the studies are showing, but the point I wanted to make here. Okay. And I think that this is interesting. And I always think that one reason there is the urban monoculture hasn't pierced their culture as much. Everything here is a lot of this is around girls.

Okay. And I think this is a unique psychological phenomenon that occurs within young women that needs to be better studied and understood if only real researchers still existed. But the phenomenon I think works like [00:38:00] this. When men go through puberty, they desire to F. It overtakes them, it's like somebody got you addicted with drugs without your permission.

Obviously, it differs depending on your culture and genetics and everything like that, but, you know, that's the way it felt for me. Now, women, very different, okay? They don't have this desire for sex in the same way. They have more a desire for Affirmation and to be cared for and to be protected. Right. But the problem is, would you agree with that or would you say that I'm

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Yeah. To be, to be treasured and trust over and sought after. Yeah.

Well, unfortunately you know, we live in a society today. Where historically, this fussed over protected mindset in part came because women lived in real positions of one personal danger and sort of [00:39:00] subservience to men, and they were often in environments where people were able to any way Offer them a form of real protection,

Offer them a form of real comfort, you know, like a blanket, right?

But today they don't have those things and they're, they're in this ultra individualist mindset because of our existing culture. And because of that, especially the ones that have a no real problems in their lives. I think that women was a little bit of a non hardship men do okay, but when you get a little bit of hardship women's brains go haywire.

Look at the effect on a man and a woman's mind. Into the mind of a man. See how tidily stored. Now see the same thing on a woman. At first we see a similar result. But now look. Still at a reasonably low level her brain suddenly overloads.

 She becomes frantically and absurdly deranged. Look at these venomous harridans. [00:40:00] They went to university. Hard to believe they're all under 25. Especially this young youth women because they begin to look for Instinctually, what's my hardship and who's going to leave it? And if they don't have a hardship, they invent a hardship.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Think about it. Maybe I have gender dysphoria or maybe I have an auto immune disorder and they become spoonies and you know, maybe, maybe,

maybe my parents are too harsh on me or maybe society pushes me or maybe it's the patriarchy or maybe when you invent a hardship, the problem with invented hardships is they don't have solutions.

Simone Collins: No

one can protect you for a hardship. That's only in your own brain.

Simone Collins: Well, and certainly that's self, self imposed. And what's even worse is that now the present therapy culture seems to only really average, of course, there are still great therapists out there, I'm sure, but create codependence with a therapist [00:41:00] and sort of cause you to dig into this trauma, to identify with it.

You get codependent, you get a viable

stream of income. That's an annuity. A girl who you can build dependence on, you bring a young girl there, you fix her, you're like, Hey, honestly, these things don't really matter. No, no, no, you don't want to tell the You want to tell them, Oh, you're traumatized and your parents did it.

Honestly. So if they try to keep you from seeing me, they're abusive. And you know, it's, it's a good strategy. It's a good strategy for reliable source of income. It's only all rational actors, but it messes up these young girls. Because they have never been in an environment like this from an evolutionary perspective.

And so they create simulated hardship for themselves that is worse than the real hardship they would have experienced historically. And I see this so much, you know, when I talk to Queen Anne, for example, like people just don't understand how hard people had it until fairly recently. Who's Queen Anne?

Queen of England. Queen Anne. Oh, oh, oh, 12. No, I think it was [00:42:00] 16. 16. Miscarriages.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

All miscarriages. One was a kid who died when he was in his early teens, like 12 or something like that. She had the best healthcare anyone in her world could have. She had the best support network, the best living accommodations, the best.

And yet her wife was demonstrably more traumatizing than the life of human living in the miserable. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's the bottom 5 percent of the U S population. But with our social services in this country, not

Simone Collins: really.

And so this is the thing, like, we under appreciate just how bad people had it, historically speaking.

Oh my god, one of the ones I remember, I think it was one of the King Louis, it was one of the King Louis's. He had an anal infection.

Simone Collins: Louis XIV, anal fissures.

Anal fissures where it was so [00:43:00] bad and it was constantly infected because you know, they couldn't do anything about it back then, that his feces came out through a different hole in his butt that had rotted through higher in his sphincter.

I

Simone Collins: didn't know that. That didn't sound right.

Yeah, yeah. It was a separate hole had rotted through is my understanding due to necrosis.

Simone Collins: Near, yeah, near the end for Louis XIV, yeah, it had gotten really, really, really, really, really, really bad.

He lived a life, despite being the most privileged person of his time, constant pain that almost No, Kittenhammer the Athenist, his later years

Simone Collins: as well, was an intense pain.

He had gout, right? No, the injuries he sustained from hunting, like there was Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it got infected, it was just, yeah, just terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They stink. Yeah.

Oh, I remember working at the Smithsonian. I worked with skulls of like pre limited ancestors. And one of the skulls was like covered in little pot marks.

And it was because a fungus had eaten the person's face away to their skull and was [00:44:00] starting to eat away the skull. And they lived like this for decades. The level of pain people experienced on a historic basis, their quality of life. And yet they We're able to intergenerationally sacrifice themselves to create a better world for you.

Simone Collins: For

these young girls who, for their simulated fantasies, have created these depressions and hardships. It's Well, they don't They're not doing it intentionally, obviously.

Simone Collins: They're not trying to be ungrateful. Obviously that we haven't evolved to live in a world with this level of affluence, with this level of not needing to strive and try to survive.

That's, that's it. We're not meant for this. And so we need to build cultures and lifestyles that don't put us in these very dangerous situations. I,

You know, I feel like these, these people, these days they're, the urban monoculture is not as [00:45:00] tempting. To our kids, if it wasn't our generation, I'll tell you that.

Um Well, we're seeing

Simone Collins: that with Gen Alpha, for sure. They see

They're like, this is not working. Yeah. It turns out, doing whatever would give you pleasure whenever you want to, so long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else's pleasure, and then affirming whatever you want to believe about yourself, does not create positive mental health outcomes.

Avoiding all negative stimuli. through trigger warnings, through a lack of corporal punishments, through a lack of that causes people to be ultra sensitive to any minor negative stimuli and then create feedback loops. Oh, this should have been obvious. Yeah, it should have been obvious. You. Um, Sorry. I realized this for a long time.

Like even when I was studying psychology in college, which was my, you know, I studied neuroscience predominantly, but you have to study a lot of psychology that no neuroscience um, the direction of all of this was beginning to become obvious. I remember I kept seeing things in society. I kept [00:46:00] seeing things that people, psychologists were telling them and was like, but you shouldn't be doing that.

Right. Like, you know, you shouldn't be doing that. This, it came over the edge actually at Stanford business school. I went to this class called touchy feely. And it was a cult. There is a class at Stanford business school that is an active cult and it's still running, isn't it? Yeah, I went into it and I as somebody who both studied neuroscience psychology knew what you weren't supposed to do in psychology, but also was really interested in studying cult tactics.

I was like, Oh, sleep deprivation, humiliation, forcing people to rank each other, forcing people to look into each other's eyes, long uninterrupted, uninterrupted periods where you're kind of Force interrupted periods where you're forced to give like self monologues searching for individual trauma This is like not like maybe it's a cult It is like to the letter a cult and one of my favorite things [00:47:00] that I tell this to people Yeah, but you've got to remember people who went through touchy feely make up a lot of the board of the stanford business school And I know very few people who went through it who don't one donate to the school because of their experiences in it And two sales one of the most fun experiences of their lives in terms of shaping who they are today And I was like, ooh It's not actually convincing me it's not a cult either, buddy.

But, but, but, these are smart people. And I was like, yeah, but it turns out that cults actually disproportionately work on smart people. I know this, having, when I was younger, having studied brainwashing techniques, and very, very interested in brainwashing techniques. I wasn't as moral as I was, and I am now, when I was younger.

I didn't understand. That's part of the urban monoculture. It's like, if it feels good, it's good. Right? Okay. Great. Brainwashing techniques don't really work very well with stupid people because they can't hold the mimetic architecture. Cause what a brainwashing technique really is. I think that if you see this, where

Simone Collins: you really see this is with Karl Pilkington, where he just doesn't fall for so many.

Pieces of [00:48:00] b******t that that are even part of the urban monoculture. And one of the reasons why he's so fun to watch and why his commentary is so great is that he sees through even sort of the cultish tactics of modern society. And it's like, wait, why would we want to do this? Why this is, this is really dumb.

I'm not into this. I don't want to be here. One of

my favorite favorites of his was some guy in Africa who was super rich was trying to show off how great he was to Carl Pilkington, the helicopter guy. Helicopter to show him the city and the estate and then they land and Carl Pilkington goes Couldn't we have just looked at like a gps or a picture?

Like why didn't we do that? And the guy was so distraught and downtrodden That he just couldn't impress this guy. But it's true. Karl Pugin didn't want anything more than what he has. He's like And

Simone Collins: to your point, all the weird mental gymnastics that take place with cult indoctrination and societal indoctrination just don't work on him.

Because [00:49:00] he's He's just, he thinks too simply. He's, he's of another, another ilk. A god like ilk. I love him so much. Oh my god, he's so wise. He's great,

yeah. , he's clearly just not affected by social pressure in the same way that other people are, and it leads him to say things that sound insane to other people.

Oh, oh, we can end the show with our little buddy?

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, can you get the kids? I can interview Octavian.

Octavian, do you like playing in the woods?

Yes. What did you learn about playing in the woods this weekend? With daddy.

Simone Collins: Is it okay to run away from daddy in the woods?

Yes, but then I was telling daddy that I will not do that again, I promise. I won't go in the forest again, and then he just got me a kiss. Yeah, and then you got a kiss. And, and I have a question, Octavian.

What? Are, are there monsters in the woods? Yes, they are. Are they scary monsters? I understand [00:50:00] monster stories now. I understand why the witches live in the woods. And they are, and they are fast and they can kill you. Kill me easily. Yeah. . Yes. Thank you. I was explaining 'cause we have wolves around our property.

Big ones. I've seen them too. They're Oh, we're, we're

Simone Collins: about to take a vacation to a place where there are bears and we have sea bears and they're very large bears .

Yeah. Oh my gosh. They're so scary, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

So you remember very well.

Simone Collins: Do not walk away from us when we're outside. Okay, Octavian? Now Malcolm, will you go pick up the kids? Octavian do you think that kids with a lot of money or kids with a little bit of money are more happy?

Kids with a lot of money.

Simone Collins: Why would kids with a lot of money be more happy, Octavian?

Because

Simone Collins: Maybe they're not more happy, Octavian. Do you think that money might make you unhappy?

It will make me a lot happier [00:51:00] and excited.

Simone Collins: Why would money make you a lot happier and excited, Octavian?

Because if I have money, I'll be much happier.

Simone Collins: Why will money make you happier, Octavian?

Because.

Simone Collins: Because thumbs up.

Octavian, what makes kids happy?

My Do you like money? Titan! Hi! I like a lot of money. Well, I do like a lot of money. You like a lot of money, but Torsten doesn't like a lot of money. Yes. What does Torsten like? I will buy everything I like. And what will you do with all the things you buy? What would you buy first if you had all the money in the world?

I will buy everything I want in this entire world so I can play.

Simone Collins: And will you be happy with those things? Cause you don't play with your toys that much.

Yeah. You don't really play with your toys. You mostly play with [00:52:00] boxes. What if you had a lot of money, but you could never play with a box again? Yeah.

I ain't gonna play with it. I like playing with boxes only. Would you choose money or boxes? He chose boxes over toys. He said boxes over toys. Yeah, so boxes are more important than money, right? Yeah, well if I play with toys, they'll be pretty boring. Pretty boring, okay, yeah. So what if you could have a lot of money, but you couldn't go play at the creek?

Would you rather play at the creek or have a lot of money? Let's do both. No, you can't do both, you have to choose. Would you like to play at the creek or have lots of toys? Both. I'm just gonna do money right now. Right? ? What about, what about, what about the boat? Would you rather have a lot of money to play with the inflatable boat?

Boat. That's so big.

You wanna go to the creek right now, Tracy?

Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. Why don't you say, would you rather have lots of money or [00:53:00] go to the creek? I just want to go at the creek. Okay, Toasty, do you want money or do you want rocks? Torsen, Torsen, Torsen. Toasty? Hi, do you want money or do you want rocks? I want to go at the creek. Oh, he wants to go at the creek.

I'll take

Simone Collins: you to the creek, my friend.

Titan, Titan, do you want money or do you want baby deer? He's, he's so mad right now.

Simone Collins: Yeah, he's so mad. But you see, my kids love the creek. They even know it's dangerous.

Titan, do you want money or do you want baby deer?

Simone Collins: She wants baby deer. Are you sure you want baby deer more than money?

Kick, kick your kick to me out of here!

Simone Collins: All right, Michael, I'm gonna come down. I love you. I

love you. Give thumbs up, guys! Thumbs up! Thumbs up and subscribe! Right? Please subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and

Simone Collins: [00:54:00] subscribe. Like and

subscribe.