How the Internet Turned Illness Into Status for Privileged Women with Suzy Weiss

In this captivating conversation, Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with journalist Suzy Weiss to discuss her in-depth article on the Spoonie community, a group of chronic illness sufferers who have created a unique online subculture. Weiss shares her insights on how the Spoonie movement has evolved, the potential dangers of building an identity around illness, and the parallels between this phenomenon and other youth subcultures. The hosts and guest also delve into the broader implications of a society that increasingly valorizes victimhood and self-diagnosis, and the challenges of protecting vulnerable individuals from harmful online communities.

Suzy Weiss: [00:00:00] A Spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers.

What some people have described as Munchausen by internet what happens when your identity becomes illness, because how are you ever incentivized to get well?

Malcolm Collins: , if your community identification is defined by How ill you are then a status hierarchy is going to begin to form based on illness and people being people, they are going to have a motivation. To exaggerate their illness

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: I am so, so, so excited for our special guest here today. Um, easily our favorite writer. It's on the show today. This is Susie Weiss. We mentioned her in a number of episodes as just a writer who we really respect and does really, really interesting, deep based pieces that explore subcultures that are weird, which is like our [00:01:00] favorite thing.

Today we are going to do the first piece of hers that we really got into where I was like, Oh this changes my thinking on a number of things About how like memetic viruses can form was in current online environments and how we're gonna raise

Simone Collins: our teenage daughters Like it completely like it gave us a new model for female adolescence.

This was it was a game changer

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and where we should send people so this snoozy weiss. It's her twitter account. So go subscribe there. Although that You That never really converts as YouTube to Twitter, but what I can say is the Free Press her sister, Barry Weiss, runs it and she is a writer there and that's where you can find her stuff, so you should definitely go and subscribe to that.

Suzy Weiss: Thank you guys so much for having me. I feel like when we discovered each other, it was like, There are others. I'm so happy. And then, of course, I included you on a story I did about tech messiahs who wanted to live forever, which I loved your contribution because you were like anti live forever, which I think is like a weird, whatever.

We can get into that later, but I love that. Did you end up

Malcolm Collins: talking [00:02:00] to that other girl we introduced

Suzy Weiss: you to for that story? She, I never talked to her because she just I think yeah, she was intense. She

Malcolm Collins: recently did a post where she bragged about how she convinced a woman to break up with her husband for another woman and get an abortion on her three months pregnant.

term fetus. And this was like a huge win for her is talking someone into an abortion. That's pretty late stage, right? Or that early

Simone Collins: is it's on the older side of fairly

Malcolm Collins: horrifying. We were trying to get the perspective of an extremist antinatalist. Oh yeah. She

Suzy Weiss: was, yeah. She's a major antinatal.

Yeah. I guess that's a win. Take the ones where you can get them.

So the F the full post she wrote went one of the grossest and most faileo centric types of misogyny to me is males who are fine with, or even encourage their wives or girlfriends having sex with other women. Porn sick bros was Heron fetishes. It's an ugly and very clear mask off on how they see women.

They [00:03:00] feel so superior that a girl f*****g, their wife doesn't even count as sex. And that's cheating. Lesbians are just quote unquote girls having fun. That we do to please their stinky cheese Cox. And few things are, as satisfying is seeing their wives realize they can do better, divorcing them for their girlfriends and living happily ever after without a sexist leach in their life.

Two months ago, I convinced a girl who just married and with actually three months pregnant to get an abortion and divorce and continue dating her girlfriend, who the male picked for her, but who she fell in love with. They are engaged and I am so for it, heart. Uh, in case you can't tell she is, uh, a lesbian, maybe even a political lesbian.

Um, and an extremist feminist, as well as an anti natalist.

Simone Collins: Yeah. She's in favor, I think of even post term abortions as she puts it. Some murder. Yeah, some murder. Yes. Yes. But baby murder. So it's

All: baby.

Simone Collins: It's murder.

Suzy Weiss: It's murder. It's

All: [00:04:00] murder. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, so, Spoonies. Spoonies. Spoonies. Go. I am so excited to dig into this.

Yeah. Well,

Simone Collins: first off, what made you decide? Explore this world. How did you even learn? Sorry,

Malcolm Collins: the audience needs to know what they are first. So I'm letting her describe that before we go into questions like this.

Suzy Weiss: Okay, so what is a Spoonie? A Spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers.

They're mostly women. From what I could observe. They're mostly white women. The term comes from, I believe it was like a 2013 or 2014 blog posts by this lupus blogger. And she had a well friend who asked her, what is it like to be sick? And she took all the spoons. I just reread the post last night.

Cause I wanted to be reminded of it. And it's strangely like cinematic. She's like with tears in my eyes, I held the bouquet of spoons. And I don't not believe her, but it's just interestingly written. And she describes that like normal people have unlimited spoons, people who are sick have a fixed number of [00:05:00] spoons.

So, let's say you or I, we could, get up and shower and make ourselves breakfast and go to work and we don't have to think about it. Someone with, let's say, six spoons has to portion them out. So two spoons to wake up and get dressed. One spoon to make lunch. Do you have enough spoons to work?

And I think it is like an effective way for people to think about other people who have limited resources. But since then it's been co opted into a cottage industry, a world, a community of people who suffer from these sort of amorphous and hard to pin down illnesses. So Ehlers Danlos syndrome POTS autoimmune diseases, ulcerative colitis.

You name it. And they're called

Simone Collins: pots is included in that. I have pots. That's crazy. Yeah. Well,

Suzy Weiss: Spoonie. Yeah. You could be a Spoonie and you would find a lot of like minded Spoonies out there and you could, buy different products with your Spoonie codes and learn how to. lie to a doctor which is apparently like a moral thing in this world.

So yeah I was interested in what some people have described as Munchausen by [00:06:00] internet and like this, where the psychosomatic, I guess what I was really interested is what happens when your identity becomes illness, because how are you ever incentivized to get well? And I spoke to a lot of people and doctors and that's the story that you're reading.

Malcolm Collins: So I want to talk about that, but before we go further, I'm going to take and just word this a little differently. Yeah. Essentially what happened and what created the Spoonies is that if you have a, either a chronic illness condition or a short term illness condition where you are frequently going into a medical setting, of course you are going to tweet about this and find other like minded people.

Now, like any social community. Hierarchy within a community is often determined by things that differentiate you from mainstream society and make you more aligned with that community. Within a goth circle, if I'm meeting a goth I haven't met, the more gothy they dress, the higher status I assume they are, because they are othering themselves from mainstream society in a way that shows dedication to a community.

Well, if your [00:07:00] community identification is defined by How ill you are like if that's the what correlates the community, then a status hierarchy is going to begin to form based on illness and people being people, they are going to have a motivation. To exaggerate their illness find ways to get on more visible forms of treatment.

A lot

Suzy Weiss: of it is about externalizing because a lot of these illnesses that I listed, they're invisible illnesses. You can't see them. So a lot of these women will use crutches casts, tourniquets, not tourniquets, but like you got like ways to show, to pick lines, like food yeah, feeding tubes. To show that they're sick.

So I, I think it's really interesting. And it, yeah, sorry. I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and then doctors will say well, you don't actually have these illnesses. And so then they need to make the doctors for the community, the villains.

Simone Collins: Right. Wasn't there like a word that they used, like zebra? Zebra

Malcolm Collins: something?

Suzy Weiss: Yes. So that's an old medical [00:08:00] adage. If you hear hooves think horses, not zebras. So, if someone's coming, it's like the real world. It's not an episode of house. Not everyone has the like deep cut, weird disease that you can own, that no one's seen a case of in a hundred years, but the spoony mantra might be, I am the zebra.

I am this rare thing. And it has to do, I think, and you brought up a teenage girls, like kind of this need to be special. I was thinking about it this morning. Eight or nine years ago, there were these movies like mural in the dying girl, a fault in our stars, like that sort of romanticized illness and being sick and dying.

So there's a lot that goes into it. And what you were saying about like hierarchies and structures, I think a lot of the Spoonie world dovetailed with the me too movement that kind of became really suspicious of let's say male dominated hierarchies and created a world in which Patients were being victimized by doctors.

It's left when QAnon, it's and they're trying to take away your agency and power. I see a lot of overlap.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and it makes sense that something like this would [00:09:00] organically form within young female communities that are looking for affirmation. And I think in, in, in a sense of community and they get affirmed by the community, but then they begin to do things like you talk about in the article, like pill pork, like right.

Pills and there's like special status if you need tubes and there's and if they

Suzy Weiss: up your feed That's like a bad thing because it means you're getting better and that you might one day get off the tube And like I want to be clear like and this is a really hard subject to write about I think these girls are actually Feeling pain.

I don't think they go into their bedrooms and shut the door and jump out of their wheelchair and say ha I tricked another doctor today. I do i'm not sure that their pain You is a symptom of what they think it's a symptom of. I think that's the best way to put it. But yeah what you said is correct of the need to externalize and differentiate and make unique according to your illness.

Malcolm Collins: Also, when you're looking at this from the context of young girls who are coming at this, they're beginning to try to find themselves, they're going through puberty a lot of the times. And I think that female [00:10:00] sexuality is broadly misunderstood in our society. And I think part of what we're seeing here when women first go through puberty Is a need to be cherished or treated like something special and a fragile that is cared for which this self framing elevates.

So you almost get this perfect storm of hierarchy, affirmation. That's a HUD. victim of this and I'm unique to such an extent where when I was reading your piece, I was like, how do I protect my own kids from this? It seems like such an effective package. So I'd love it if you could talk a bit about the people you interviewed, people who got out of it and what you will be doing for your own kids.

Suzy Weiss: Yeah. It's interesting. You bring up teen girls. This is like a theme I come back to in my writing all the time. Like I, I actually think teen girls might be like the most potent, if you could harness the energy. And like the intensity you could power like cities like that is like the power of a collective of teen girls and i've done a lot of i'm not a lot.

I mean i've done reporting on eating [00:11:00] disorders on cutting you see the different waves of what that is I think the conversation about gender dysphoria actually fits into this in a certain way.

Malcolm Collins: I think it fits into it in every way. I think we're looking at two very similar phenomenon on and it's one of the things I point out.

I'm like, okay, kids are going through puberty and there's a community out there that says, if you just do this, you will be comfortable with your body. And that affirms you obsessively whenever you're around them, like in the same way that the fact that some spoonies are being talked into this or, don't have these conditions, that doesn't mean these conditions don't exist.

It doesn't mean that POTS isn't a real condition that there aren't really young girls who have chronic medical conditions but when you create a community that affirms them around this, you have the potentiality of the psychological exasperation of You know prodromal or low level tendencies in these individuals, which I think you see within different youth communities with gender [00:12:00] dysphoria and I should point out not just on the far left but also on the far right, Right These Andrew Tate following guys, a lot of them seem to have a form of gender dysphoria, where they want to define who they are based on their gender identity.

Suzy Weiss: I also think there's like kind of a reflex to categorize everything. Like you can't just be tired. You have to have chronic fatigue syndrome. And like to answer your earlier question about how you protect against this, I'm one of four girls and female puberty is brutal and your body betrays you.

And you're it's really confusing. And I think and you see this with anorexia and maybe there's like an aspect of this with the spoonies. It's the want not to grow up to have your mother take care of you to go to 0 to not be so wide. And I think as much as we can encourage people And except when someone says, you know what?

I'm really I'm feeling lazy. I'm feeling down. I'm feeling tired and not be like, you should go to the doctor and get a pill for that. That is something that must [00:13:00] be categorized and medicated. And more deeply understood because it's a pathology of some sort. I think that's 1 thing to do. But teenage girls, the Internet did not invent it.

Like teenage girls cracking up around the age of 14 or 15 that, that is going to be forever. But the internet does do it amplifies it and it incentivizes it in ways that I find interesting.

Simone Collins: Well, to your earlier point to the suffering that many of these young women are going through. feel is real, even if they don't technically have the actual condition they may think that they have.

All: That,

Simone Collins: A lot of it then they psychosomatically give themselves that condition, and the same can happen with therapy culture, or this is controversial, but we would argue with gender dysphoria as well, where you may not actually be trans, or you may not actually have Post traumatic stress, or sorry, post traumatic

Malcolm Collins: trauma, just generally the community, a large one that is, I'd say adjacent to the community but still distinct from it where the hierarchy is based [00:14:00] around a trauma or something traumatic that happened to them in their childhood.

And they begin to create these communities where there is a huge incentive to to Imagine trauma that didn't happen, but then that

Simone Collins: creates real pain, that trauma, like you are making it worse by leaning into it. But then also you end up in these communities where people use that to your point as well, to virtue signal.

And they, it's bad because you turn to it naturally as a solution. This is a problem I want to solve. I don't want this. This is bad and I need to get through it. But then you subconsciously, especially if you're a teenage girl, get sucked into the social dynamics and then you're in this like status hierarchy game fighting for higher status without even knowing it.

Because of the way your brain is wired at the time.

Suzy Weiss: Right, and I'm sure you, you were a young girl I was obsessed with holocaust books, and I didn't understand trauma, or horrible things happening, and so, there's this want of to go on chat roulette, and see someone masturbating, even though you're scared of it, you also want to see it, because you want to [00:15:00] know what's happening, and you're afraid if you don't see it someone's going to make you watch it it's so confusing and intense, and to your earlier point of Or I don't, I think a lot of how we got here in terms of the conversation about everyone's traumatized, every, I think it has to do with the spectruming of life.

So, sexuality is on a spectrum, Kinsey scale, I can get behind that. But now aggression. Is on a spectrum microaggression, macroaggression, autism's on a spectrum. So it's if everything's a spectrum and we're all on it, we're all sick. Cause sickness is a spectrum. So I think as right.

As I think a lot of. Nuance is in terms of sickness, in terms of sexuality, in terms of a lot of these human experiences. I think for an undeveloped brain, it can also trick you into believing that you've been a victim of something and you're never not gonna be a victim of that thing, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and something that we have an episode on that we've filmed, it hasn't gone live yet, is on the idea of how our grandparents [00:16:00] generation essentially lived in a teen dystopian. And that's

Suzy Weiss: like their boyfriends went off to war and stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I recently read

Simone Collins: my grandmother's autobiography during the occupation of Paris when she lived there and she's describing like fleeing Paris while the Nazis are coming in.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The roads are being bombed. She is driving her car across bridges that are actively being bombed. You're thinking, I'm going to die. Watch the

Malcolm Collins: episode for this topic. Yeah, there's no

Simone Collins: food. But it gives us the impression there's maybe this need to have difficulty in life, that the hardship is real.

Also part of a good upbringing and we don't have it now so we crave it and we read these teen dystopias and we subject ourselves to these stresses and we try to find something that's wrong because we need something that's wrong

Malcolm Collins: But the point being is that I think people undersell if you go back to our grandparents generation or earlier how insanely quote unquote in modern standards traumatic the average human life was and that the anathema now is [00:17:00] people living in environments where there is not genuine scarcity.

And because of that, I think it's causing sort of psychological haywire ness almost to the extent of being like raised in a cage or something like that, where they are seeking out forms of self victimization and trauma, where that is a thing of status and allure. And they read about it and they fantasize about it, which is just really fascinating.

And I don't think that we expected humans to be like this.

Suzy Weiss: Right. And then for us to put ourselves in the cages, it's let me sedate myself and let me come up with a justification for watching cartoons all day as like a grown woman. You know what I mean? Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: your Herkle Derkle story. Yeah, exactly.

Suzy Weiss: Exactly. It all comes back. It all comes back to Herkle Derkle. But yeah it's, I it's such, it's amazing because it's very understandable wants being, I think manifesting in a sort [00:18:00] of, what am I trying to say? It's manifesting in a way that it's self sabotaging ultimately. And that's what's sad, but I think it's so interesting.

Abigail Shrier has like just such a brilliant book out of called, Oh God, what's it called? I feel like we have it here. It's about therapy culture and and it's just really interesting and how. Therapy is it's a medical treatment and hundreds and millions of kids are getting this medical treatment through their schools through online kind of unbeknownst to the parents.

And it's shifting who the parents are. Is it the state? Is it the school? Is it? Your mom and dad and you see this I won't ruin it.

Malcolm Collins: We talk about this a lot in other episodes, the cult of therapy and how it's transformed. It's building dependency with his patients and it's training them.

One of my favorite lines that I just keep repeating that there was a popular online YouTuber that was like, don't people know about the number of young people with mental health issues? This is because we don't have enough therapists and they're not inexpensive. [00:19:00] Oh my God. Do you think that our grandparents generation had therapists?

Do you think in the Old West, there were therapists running around to kids, especially? Being like oh, 10 year old, we need to talk about your feelings. It's do you think that maybe that could be the problem? This correlation you're seeing here? And they're like, no, you don't understand, I'm traumatized.

It's no, you don't understand. All of Europe, like, all of our grandparents generation who was in Europe, went through a form of trauma that you can't even begin to conceptualize outside of fantasies. And they didn't go to psychologists about it. They didn't, it's wild. Yeah.

Suzy Weiss: Which isn't to say they aren't traumatized.

And I think the thing with kids is like, as an adult and Abigail talks about this, you can push back on a therapist. You could say, and she says this Hey, it's enough talking about my mother in law. As a child, you want to please the adult that you're in the room with. You don't understand that there's like a service being offered.

You think you're in trouble. And I think therapy on adults and therapy on [00:20:00] kids are very different propositions. Oh

Malcolm Collins: yeah. And when, especially the State sanctioned, almost ubiquitous thing that's happening now and I would strongly recommend parents not send their kids to therapy.

I've gotten to the point, it's not that therapy is bad it is very useful for some people, but the I think that the vast proportion of therapy that's being practiced on kids these days is not of the safe variety. And so it will likely on average make things worse rather than better. Or even if it's a minority of cases where it's making things worse, it makes them so much worse that it's not worth medically, yeah, medicalizing the rest of your kid's life over.

But I want to talk about some of the interviews you did, some of the spoonies you got to know what were they like, describe these experiences.

Suzy Weiss: It's interesting. They were so open with me, first of all, which is always something I'm so grateful. I'm a stranger on the internet that I'm reaching out and I'm like and you said this ruined your sex life.

Can you talk a little bit? It's crazy. But one of them, this quote that really struck me was that someone had asked [00:21:00] this girl who had this really rich life in college is who she is outside of being sick. And she said, my jaw hit the floor. I didn't know what to say. And that's someone who was able to go to college, was able to leave the house and then all it all goes backwards and everything is in reverse.

Which I thought was interesting. Oh my God. It was so long ago. Who else did I talk to? Well, the main girl I talked to, Morgan she described, opening up an Instagram page, wanting to be like a spoonie influencer. I have a piece coming out that I'm editing about unwellness influencers.

Like we all know wellness influencers with their Ayurvedic smoothies and whatever. But what about the unwellness influencers that just Encourages you to hurkle durkle and everything else. But this girl, Morgan, she was in a hospital bed. I think she had been there for months. She had to gain weight, but she wasn't gaining weight.

She had a PICC line. She had mouths. Nothing was working. She had stomach pains every time she ate, which got worse from the feeding tube dah. And then her mom came in and plucked her cell phone out of her hand. And that became that was the moment that she started to get [00:22:00] better when her mom cut her off from a community of people that she believed to be her friends.

And I'm sure they were her friends. It was a Snapchat group that she had like in 1000 day streak with or whatever it was. And it gives you this sense of being understood. But you don't realize that you're, You're there are like weights on your ankles. While this is happening, it's like when you freeze to death, you feel warm at the last second or something.

But yeah she was really interesting. And she described she didn't say Oh, I made it up. And I don't think she did, but she was able to have awareness about how this community has a really dark side and a side that. That doesn't encourage you to get better.

Simone Collins: Well, one thing also that I think is really interesting, and I was mentioning before we started recording is how pervasive Spoonie language is, even if people don't know what the community is. I had heard before I read your article about spoons and then we were like, Oh, this friend is a Spoonie and this friend is a Spoonie.

And some of them have even used these analogies with us and we just didn't realize it. And then once we read your article, we started [00:23:00] seeing. this culture and bits of it everywhere. What scares me is that I think a lot of people fall into it without knowing what it is. And I think most Spoonies fall into it without knowing what it is.

When you discovered it, because you really, you write about it as a cohesive thing and from this very sober minded perspective of an outsider, how did you manage to not Just immediately fall right into it and fall for it. Like I think most people do even people who are like, otherwise we'll say very critical of maybe we'll say like therapy culture or trans culture or anything.

I think a lot of people still totally fall for this.

Suzy Weiss: Right. Is there anything that. Yeah. Cause it's such a taboo thing to doubt someone's lived experience of their illness. Yeah. That's that horrible thing that I had to do. It's a good question. I think. Everyone always says follow the money and when you have someone saying Hey, if you wear compression socks and you have to drink salt water all the time, and your doctor says, do you faint even if you haven't fainted, [00:24:00] maybe just tell him you fainted and also buy these 40 blue light glasses.

I really have no problem getting into it when I feel that there is like quackery and people wasting their money on things that are ultimately harmful to them not to say that every person who identifies as a spoonie is trying to sell you like weird electrolyte tinctures But I think that's part of it.

And then I think throughout the whole internet, there is this like trauma porn or horror porn masquerading as raising awareness, the two most abused words in the English language. And I don't know, I call b******t.

Malcolm Collins: I love because I'm thinking about this in a historic context, like this historically just would have been described as hysteria.

Like, why is it? That these women have this affirmed in them. And what you said at the beginning is why this has been allowed to get out of control like this is doubting. Someone's lived experience is a sin within the shadow religion or whatever you want to call it. This alternative religious and theological system that exists within our society.

Because there's no reason for that to be an intrinsically wrong thing. [00:25:00] I call BS on what you're telling me. It sounds self indulgent. But you're not allowed to say that, but that's like a totally reasonable thing in a historic context to say to a teenage girl, I think you're being a bit of a drama queen.

Simone Collins: Go back to Jane Austen novels and like a common feature in them, like a common trope, it like the gay best friend of its time was this sickly mother or something who was just always taken to her beds and swoons. Yes. That was a thing. They were totally spoonies. There was a spoonie flare up during Regency era.

England among wealthy people. And again, it was wealthy white women doing it too, which is hilarious. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I want to elevate something else you said that I thought was really interesting, which was the thing that broke her out of it is what is your identity outside of being sick? And I think that this is where the, what you discovered in the story, I think is so useful to people, even who would never be at risk of becoming a Spoonie because as our society has moved to A secular [00:26:00] place or a post religious place, when people think about who they are, we are not given a good framework for determining that within our educational system.

And so some individuals like Simone, I, yourself, probably thought a lot about who am I? What do I want to be in the world? Like how do I define which actions I take versus which actions I don't take? Like I built some sort of like core moral framework that I'm living around. But some people, if they're just walk into this without thinking, it's very easy to accidentally say, Who am I?

Like, how do I define good action? I guess I'm this illness because this is what I get a firm for in my community, or I guess I'm a woman, right? And therefore,

Simone Collins: like you were pointing out earlier, right? I'm a, just a manly man.

Malcolm Collins: I'm a manly man. And I be myself by being a manly man, but this can also be political parties.

The person decides I am a conservative and therefore all the opinions I hold, everything I do during the day. And while not all of these communities are intrinsically as damaging to [00:27:00] an individual as the Spoonie community they fall into very similar psychological loops, which we are all susceptible to if we don't take time to have a firm understanding of what heuristics we are using to make decisions in our lives and choose a self identity.

Suzy Weiss: Well, this is why I love you guys so much and love talking to you so much, because you're one of the few. People who actually believe things and I know it sounds silly and are willing to say what you believe and it's like we believe in having lots of kids. You may not, but that is the thing we and it's you're not trying to say you're both.

And I think a lot of these communities like that the Andrew Tate manly men, they're defining themselves based on what they believe the culture has done to them. It's a grievance culture. And, same thing with Spoonies and you brought up that this is, whatever, filling the God shaped hole in all of our hearts.

I do think there's a spiritual aspect of there is badness. It has migrated to within me. I am dirty. I am sick. [00:28:00] I must be cleansed. But none of it's my fault. It's like a little confused, but yeah, I think defining yourself based on lack, based on the fact that, It's harder for you to run a mile because of your condition is not a recipe for a good life.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the spiritual part, because one of the things that I often say is like these evolved religious traditions, like they came with a lot of Malware, but they were the only mimetic antivirus we as a species had. They were a bad antivirus. They were a heavy antivirus.

They were like old school, McAfee or Norton where it slowed down your computer by 60%. Right. But it still fought the viruses and when you completely remove it, you get these very simplistic mimetic viruses that certain people are just incredibly susceptible to.

Suzy Weiss: Right.

And cer certain people who I would argue are.

Very sensitive and open. I don't think they're like necessarily maladjusted. I just think, We've taken all the guardrails off. And here's what happens. I think a lot of [00:29:00] these women might have been, in a committed relationship if men could get it together. So there, there are a lot of factors that make it spin out of control.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, if men could get it together, and this is interesting is that in a post scarcity world, finding your purpose and I want to go back to this. Because most of the developed world, and especially the people who become Spoonies, are living post scarcity lives. Middle class white women, that is a post scarcity lifestyle.

You're not really going to starve or anything like that. There are things you want that you can't have, but those things are primarily status symbols that you primarily want, because they have Generated value based on the fact that a lot of people want them and therefore you can't have them, a

Suzy Weiss: nice car.

What's in it? What's an example?

Malcolm Collins: Like a nice car or designer clothes like nothing intrinsic about them. You can get clothes if you want clothes The reason why nice clothes are something you can't get Is the very reason you want them like they wouldn't be a status symbol if you could trivially get them if you want a computer you can get a [00:30:00] computer from two years ago that costs like 200 bucks, right?

The things are always accessible to people. Smartphones are accessible to everyone. I think, what is it like 89 percent of homeless people have a smartphone now? We are in an extremely, housing is probably the only thing of real scarcity in our society. Yeah. Interesting. But we suspected as we transitioned to a post scarcity ecosystem, that people would begin to indulge in hedonism.

And instead what they indulged in with self victimization, which allowed the removal of. Personal responsibility, which is in a way one avenue is spoony ism. But indulging in self victimization doesn't feel like indulging in self victimization to the individual. It feels like highlighting the parts of themselves that differentiate them from society and thus make them.

Special and I think that you see this even within communities that I consider myself, like I'm a pretty big supporter of the gay community, for example. And what [00:31:00] was really interesting is one of the things we mentioned is gay men, we've mentioned this before, 45 percent of gay men voted for Trump in the last election, like the gay male community has changed 45, 45%.

Yeah. So much since I was a kid, when I was a kid. You had this hierarchy within the gay male community where you would act like more of a gay male to move up within this hierarchy. And so you had these very flamboyant gay men that have disappeared as part of our culture. Because being a gay male, especially a gay white male, no longer really others you in our society in the way it used to.

So there is no longer a reason to build your identity around it in the way that Minnie Young Mid did when I was growing up.

Suzy Weiss: Right. I think, I think about this all the time. Like I'm the first woman in my generation or I'm the first generation of my family as a woman who got to move to New York City, got my own apartment, got my own job, had my own money.

Not because the women before me, they were smarter than me. They were totally capable, but it just wasn't [00:32:00] done. They got married early. They had kids. They had probably a better life than me. But I like the so quickly. And I think with gay male culture, everyone was dying. 35 years ago, everyone was dying.

And now it's basically

Malcolm Collins: a genocide. It was the

Suzy Weiss: craziest thing in the world. And then it's you shoot to the top of culture in this way. That's almost, it's incredible. It's a miracle, but it also, I think induces some sort of like cultural vertigo of okay wait, where do we stand now?

Who are we? It's

Malcolm Collins: taken over by marginal portions of the LGBT community. And now you are the oppressor.

Suzy Weiss: Right. Exactly. But even like a. Let's just say like a gay guy 25 years ago wouldn't really dream of having a husband and kids and a white picket fence. My the gay dudes of my generation, that's exactly what they want.

They're getting married before me. So, even a 10 year difference has totally changed what was, What's possible and therefore changed how, what behavior you model.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When it really messes up the way adults are [00:33:00] interacting with culture, like even us, we did an episode where we were talking about I grew up where we're gay men were genuinely impressed, oppressed, beaten up.

If they were found out, like it was very rare that someone would come out. One of our listeners who was a gen alpha person was like, it's so weird to hear you say that because. Yeah. When I was growing up, being gay was a status symbol.

All: Oh, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It was in school and it gave you special protection from teachers.

It gave you special access to things. And Yeah, it just

Suzy Weiss: means you're like vicious and fun.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah and that the older population doesn't realize how much the pendulum has swung. And so they think that they are affirming an oppressed group without realizing they are pedestalizing the group that is at the top of the status hierarchy which is really fascinating.

Suzy Weiss: Right. And then of course, with Gen Z who are having way less sex, queer just means like straight with weird hair, like straight with the right politics or whatever it is. Like it's the whole [00:34:00] decoupling your sexual identity from what kind of sex you have, I think, is really interesting. Because you no longer have to have gay sex to be gay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we always point out that we are technically trans by LGBT ideology, because we are agender. I don't care what gender I am. If I woke up a woman tomorrow, it would not genuinely affect my life that much. He'd work it. You're just a,

Suzy Weiss: you're just a brain in the head.

Malcolm Collins: Right, right, I'm just a brain and a head, and that makes me agender from the perspective of trans ideology.

Well, being agender is a form of genderqueer. Genderqueer is a form of trans. So we are not incorrect in saying that we are fully trans within a trans moral architecture. And they'd say, well, no, you're not. And it's well, then why, no, am I not? And it's because your politics aren't trans. Because, We have turned these into political identities.

Suzy Weiss: It's interesting, too, because this almost goes back to the Spoonie thing, because it's like these are invisible illnesses. I don't need to look sick to be sick. I don't need to tell you my diagnosis to be sick. I can self diagnose and be sick. I don't even need to go to a [00:35:00] professional.

Similarly with gender ideology. You don't have to present as a woman to be a woman. So it's all internal, but there's still this need to like signal to everyone else, but you don't need to do that because that has nothing to do with it. And it's it's, I don't know. I think there's some sort of connection there where it's yes, you, a transmit, a trans person and me like a deathly sick person, even though observably, none of those things are true.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but you're treated the same with society. In both cases, society doubts your, and the supposed authorities within various professions doubt your lived experiences. And so you can come together under this umbrella of never doubt what I say is true about my experiences of reality.

Suzy Weiss: Who coined, we have to find who out who coined lived experience.

Yes, it is like the trick of the century.

Malcolm Collins: Well, this has been such an engaging conversation. I almost feel like you could be a third host of the show. You are, I get along with you so well. And for our fans who [00:36:00] say that there are not Unmarried, like super, super eligible women. Now she, I think she's dating and stuff like that now, but she doesn't have a ring on it yet.

And this means you should be sending applications because attractive based and super intelligent. Okay, last one, ladies and gentlemen, getting kids. And so I don't care how that happens. My kids need people to marry. I always say this, that's encouraging. So, this call has been absolutely fantastic.

Please check out her stuff, create a Google alert with her name. If you want, do you have a Google alert with her name, Simone?

Simone Collins: No, because I just subscribed to the free press. Yeah. Subscribe to the free

Suzy Weiss: press. That's the best thing to do. Go to the fp. com

Simone Collins: slash subscribe. All the content's really good, but Susie's is the best.

And you, man, I want to see more at, every time I see the free press, I'm like, is it Susie? And not enough. Come on, man. All right. Thank you guys so much..

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