Based Camp: Growing Up in the Progressive Cult

Here is a terribly translated transcript of the episode (mostly just here for SEO):

Hello Simone. It's wonderful to be here with you today. I'm gonna give you a topic today because I want you to talk more. I talked way too much in that last video. I don't like that. So I want to hear about your origin story growing up within the San Francisco Bay Area sort of your parents' background, how that shaped your worldview today.

 Interesting. Sure. Yeah, because I would say that meeting you was, it did feel like entering a cult deprogramming program that I only realized after meeting you that I'd grown up. With the subconscious understanding that there were certain things I wasn't allowed to think or feel, and that I just wasn't allowed to hold certain beliefs and so I couldn't which I think is really interesting and I think we're seeing more and more of that being discussed openly.

So this is a fun thing to talk about. I guess I'll dive into it. I, let's start with your parents. What. How did they meet? What's their background? Yeah. I think they ended up in common circles after graduating when both of them were married to other people.

I know that my mother. Would babysit for my father and his ex-wife. They would do various, things and that she had a close relationship with my half-brother and sister early on.

And that they, my mother and my father were also in a polyamorous relationship, which sounds awfully familiar, like in similar. She was not doing things with your brother and sister, she was taking care of them as a nanny. Yes. And she's in a polyamorous relationship with your father, with dad and his wife.

Great. Yes. And it's actually sounds very similar to common relationship structures in the Bay Area today. There are many polyamorous families so it's, oh no, they're real trailblazers. In terms of that stuff, is it, how don't, and I think that's the thing is people say that polyamory and act like polyamory is this new invention and that it's, so to you, it's not new.

I promise you that stuff was not happening in Texas. This is a, your family was just on the cutting edge of this new cultural movement. But I maybe, but to some extent she thought this was all normal. So you can talk about what were, so they ended up I'll just because you're taking No ill I will explain a little bit more.

So, obvi in this case, actually polyamory did not work out. It led to a fairly not fun divorce from my father and his ex-wife. That was really difficult for my half-brother and sister. My mother basically gave an ultimatum to my dad saying listen, I, I. I can't do this polyamorous relationship either I need to move out of state and just kind of quit you cuz I'm too in love with you or we need to be monogamous.

And he ultimately decided to end his marriage and get with my mom, which was rough. That's polyamory doesn't always work out. But anyway, so I. You'll fast forward if you're going. So they ended up going together to Japan and then they were gonna go to China to train under different masters.

Your dad was an Aikido master in Japan. And your mom was going to be a Tai Chi master who was going to study Tai Chi. Yes. In China. Yeah. But in Japan, after a long time of trying to get pregnant, they didn't think they could get pregnant. They accidentally got pregnant with Simone. And that is where you were born.

I was born in Japan. That's right. Made in Japan and they moved back to the United States after my first birthday where they were turned to the Bay Area where both of them grew up, where, you know, both our, of our collective families are and they were still very involved in all these cultures. So, talk about things like what you thought of politics growing up, what you thought of gender growing up, what you thought of sexuality, what was this world that you were in?

Yeah, I mean it, I in many ways think it was very ideal. I, back then there, there was so little discussion of it. Everything was just kind of taken for granted. Like I, I actually thought I think there were more, I. Lesbian couples I knew that were raising my friends than like straight couples.

So, I had no sort of prior on what a, like a marriage should be. I figured it was just as likely that I would end up marrying a woman as marrying a man. I, it just didn't seem any different to me. I thought that, a wedding meant like a naked sweat lodge and then masks in the forest.

That was my prior there politics. There was, in my school, there was one. One student who was the son of a Republican, and it was just considered this like point of curiosity. Like if they were an albino student in the school, I think that would be kind of the same thing of oh yeah, we have an albino student.

Like kind of cool, right? Like we have a Republican. But I had no idea what, republican values were. It was just a matter of course that. Any Republican political candidate was evil and, not good. And that, of course, everyone would disregard them and see them as well. Terrible.

What did you think of Republicans in that environment when you grew up and you thought of your average Republican, what were you thinking? Were they like the same species as you or were they like No. Yeah, they, yeah, it actually felt like they were very different species. I almost I wonder how North Koreans feel about like outsiders maybe.

I feel it could be something kind of similar to that of just Who could model these people, and I remember when I was like 11 or 13 years old, I spent a month in Mexico staying in a hostel, working on an environmental preserve where we would do sea turtle conservation. And we met a lot of families that would come in and visit and just, join.

The Ecological Center for turtle walks and stuff. And so I would speak to other people and at one point I met this young woman around my age who came from Texas on vacation to this place where I was volunteering in the Yucca 10. And she was like, I. Oh, all I wanna do is, grow up and get married and have kids.

And I just remember the shock at hearing that from someone. I, I lived to 13 years old and this was my first time hearing a young woman say that she wanted to be a mother. And I was honestly a little bit. Shocked and worried for her. Yeah, like you thought something was wrong with her.

Like she was, something was definitely wrong. Yeah. And I would argue, now you can tell me if I'm saying this wrong, but it was almost like there wasn't real animosity for these people because they were subhuman.

I don't think you, no, it's not. It's not about someone is less than human. It's just It's the same way that you would view someone who is in a toxic cult or something. Like one, I can't even model your weird worldview. You think that, aliens walk among us and the earth is flat.

It's just like, how could you be so wrong? I can't possibly, like it, it's dangerous how wrong you are. I can't even wrap my head around it. I don't even know how I would argue with you. So I never tried. Here's my question now, given that you accept many conservative views as being broadly right.

Why was it that you were unable to consider those views back then? Why? I think when you grow up in a normative culture, that's just like everyone holds the same view. And I think, people who grow up in conservative Mormon communities, people who grow up in like any sort of isolated, conservative community, when you don't get exposure to people with other worldviews, and especially not just that, but you don't get exposure to debate around these issues.

That nothing is. Ever questioned. That's when it's a problem, because obviously like I was exposed to I was aware of the existence of these other groups. I was aware, and I think that's how it is with many cults that other outsiders exist. You understand broadly their worldviews, but because there's no interchange, there's no pushing back and there's no one questioning your own views, and that's just not done.

I think that's where a culture becomes cult-like and toxic and dangerous. I was just actually watching a YouTube video where someone was pridefully saying that they were going to punch up throughout the video. And I was like, oh man. Like I intuitively, I felt really bad about that, like punching up.

Just safe. It's safe and kind of cowardly punching down kind of a dick move. I honestly think we should be punching sideways and punching ourselves that is where to punch, right? You should be punching your own culture. You should be seeing where you fall down, where you can't stand up to criticism and sharpening yourself.

And because that didn't happen in the Bay Area Cultures where I grew up, I literally grew up not. Allowing myself to feel certain things and it, this is something also I've seen recently trending on Twitter. People having all these conversations about, Progressives doing mental gymnastics to justify their passive reaction to being assaulted on the subway regularly.

There's a lot of discussion I'm seeing among we'll say dissident, right? Like speakers being talking about, actually, it takes a lot of mental firepower to convince yourself to not react when. You're regularly being assaulted by, mentally ill people on the streets and to support these homeless encampments and to support fentanyl distribution, et cetera, et cetera.

And I'm looking back at that and I'm looking, and I'm seeing in these people that they're pointing to myself in how I also had to do these mental gymnastics. And it wasn't because I had ill intentions. It wasn't because I was stupid. Yeah. It was because I literally had no tool set. For questioning them.

Sure. And then I met you and you were literally the first person ever who asked me what I believed and why I supported certain things. And it's so simple to ask that. And yet somehow I couldn't do it. And no one I knew did it. I, what's going on there? I think this is the thing, when we talk about this as being like a cult, I do not think it is different from extreme conservative cults.

For sure. Which exists across our society. Kids grow up in them. They are afraid to question them. They know that they will be shunned from their community if they question them, mean it's, no, it's not. And I think that's where you're getting it wrong. It's, yeah. Okay. It's not, I'm, I wasn't afraid of being shunned.

I wasn't afraid of being isolated. I wasn't afraid of being kicked out and I see this also when I hear. People in conservative cults talk about their experience. It's not that per se, it's literally just not having anything question your worldview. It's, so, it's not even that insidious.

It's just about a lack of and you lacked like the vocabulary to question your world. Yes. The mental vocabulary to say, is this wrong? So in the past, if somebody had come to you and engaged you with those questions, Would you have immediately thought they were evil? Would you have immediately thought that, would you have been able to engage them or that just like you were always open to be deconverted, just nobody ever questioned you, ever.

You were never. I think that's really what's more happening in all these scenarios, and that's what was happening with me because I can't even imagine because no one ever asked me, no one ever questioned these things. A testament to your parents is they never really primed you as hatred.

To people who are different from you? No, and I think that's not true for everyone. I think that there are people within both these conservative cults and these progressive cults that are primed to hate anybody who questions it. I'll buy that. Yeah. Or that that also dehumanize and other outside groups and that is totally not how my parents raised me.

Yeah. Never. Clinton using the word deplorables and stuff like that, like just these people are less than human, but that isn't what's happening. Was would you argue that your. Experience is actually representative of a larger majority of the movement. Yes. I think, and I also think that most like cult-like environments don't do this evil exploitative stuff.

I think that most are genuinely well-intentioned groups of people who just tend to echo chamber themselves into a state of insanity. So let's talk about some of the big things for you that were like big shifts. Gender roles, for example. I remember when we first met, you're like, oh, I would never consider taking a man's last name.

Blah blah, blah. So talk about but also other things that we've adopted in, into our lives. I would never consider stepping back from the workplace, when you began to really think about gender roles, how did you decide that some of your views. Actually had value and you wanted to continue into your adult life, and then other of your views were sort of cultural artifacts of not really questioning them.

I think what you taught me to do and what most people I would hope do with. Culty programming is to ask everything from a more pr first principles approach is, okay, first, what are my values? What do I actually care about? And then once you've worked at that out it's easier to answer all subsequent questions.

Can you talk about your values right now so people understand what value seed it was that you built from? Yeah, there the things that influenced my lifestyle and like political decisions now, both. Are based on my genuine personal proclivities and also our inherent values and our core inherent values revolve around preserving.

Interchange discussion and that kind of bouncing off of ideas that leads to innovation and human flourishing. So, we encourage we encourage debate first principles, thinking intentional action and plurality. And preserving that and encouraging that is something that's at the core of our collective values, we argue that. Progressive culture now is more of a monolith that when you scratch just beneath the surfaces of every progressive subculture, they're ultimately saying the same thing.

And that conservative culture now is more defined by a coalition of very different ideologies, just trying to maintain cultural sovereignty, .

 But that's the can we don't have about economics and how those changed or your views on being a housewife or having kids, like any of that stuff.

I think they, they only matured the way that most things mature for adults or mature for adults. I I'm certainly not trad wife. I think we believe more in a. A hybrid almost like we're, we go even further deep into tradition and that we believe in the corporate family and we're not like, oh, you should just be only a wife at home doing housekeeping.

We're like no. You should, yes, you should be at home doing housekeeping while also running a business and raising kids all at the same time. Which is, very different. But I think yeah. One of the things that, when it comes to a lot of this, you wouldn't say, my views today, would you say that.

Your views are now the views that I came into our relationship with, or it's more just that I caused you to question things. And now both of our views are highly different from where we were to start. 100%. Both of our views are different and they evolved together. And I think that's a really great aspect of.

A, a culture that is first and foremost about Quest. Self questioning. Yeah. Solving as we get, we adapt when presented with new information. I think that's a, I think that's one of our core values here. And the thing that we wanna spread too is that we want the best ideas to win. And that means bringing in sometimes scary and offensive ideas and genuinely engaging with them.

Because sometimes they're right, and if we're wrong, we would rather be corrected than to never find out that we're wrong and feel safe. Yeah. And we regularly change pretty dramatically our worldview on things. And this is where I think a lot of people misunderstand opportunity with us.

So many people on Twitter will attack us, and they'll be like, look at this right here. This proves you're wrong. And then we go look at it and we're did you not Google the statistics on this before sending this to us? Because it doesn't support your position. I think people just aren't used to having that opportunity to genuinely change someone's mind.

So they're so used to just sending out statistics that are overly biased towards their existing preconceptions that they don't expect somebody to go and then try to do literature review on the subject and then come back and say, okay, you lost your chance there, and I'm not going to engage with arguments like that again.

But I'd love to know more of where do you see things going in the future? Where do you see, like, how would you deprogram people or do you think people even need to be deprogrammed from your environment growing up? Do you wish you had found an out, do you think you'd be mentally healthier today if you had found it out earlier?

Or do you think that it was, okay to not find one until you were an adult? What are your thoughts on that? That's a good question. I think to a great extent it's better to become deprogrammed from your culture once you reach adulthood because I think when you become deprogrammed and you're still a minor and you don't have the rights of an adult, and you also don't have the ability to go out, get a job, live in your own place.

Then the cognitive dissonance that you experience having to live a lifestyle and in a household that you don't inherently agree with can cause so much mental anguish and pain that it probably does more harm than good. I think being like a closeted whatever, like different person, a black sheep of the family is really painful and difficult and the more you can, put that off, the better.

And maybe you have a different opinion about this. And I also feel like, maybe I'm wrong because, if the Amish have rum springer at a younger age, And, theor, I guess though it's at an age at which they could choose to never return and start their own independent life.

I guess it depends, but that's my take. But what would yours be is it better to be deprogram early or as an adult? I actually I heard what you were saying. I had never thought of it that way, but I think you're absolutely right.

I think at the end of the day, as long as our society is structured with parents being parents, like presumably one day some factions of our society could have like corporate raised kids or something, or government raised kids, and then that would be different. Or like child labor laws that allow people to become emancipated minors so long as is we expect people to be wards of a specific family. And with our existing adoption laws being what they are in adoption system being what they are, it's probably less emotional pain overall to not. Introduce people to other cultures until they reach the age at which they could support themselves, at which point it makes sense to in mass introduce them to other cultures and be like, okay.

Now you get to choose, which is one of the things that we've really tried to set up for our kids is systems in place that ensure that they feel no obligation to continue on any aspect of our culture that we raise them with, that they don't feel was actively beneficial to them or that didn't cause any sort of emotional pain to them.

So that we can have this intergenerational cultural improvement. While also maintaining aspects of harder cultures. And by that what I mean is stricter cultural rules. But many of these ideas I did not have when I met Simone, I was still, I was actually pretty you might think of this as like a conservative person meeting here.

I was pretty progressive when I met you, right? Extremely. Yeah. Very, I was just more questioning at the time. Yeah. It was really like our relationship was much more like when I'm on YouTube and I hear a questioning Mormon meets a Mormon wife or husband who was like totally in on the church and then they slowly start questioning together.

Instead of, me coming into this and saying, Oh, I have a totally different way of seeing things. Also, I, as I said, I think that there is, and I've said this in other videos where I talk about this concept of the super virus. I think what the progressive movement has become is no longer a movement about tolerance as much.

And now that the movement no longer I feel tolerates diversity or. Tolerates people doing things in different ways. That and it says my way of doing things is correct and everything else is evil. Yeah, that is, we're having to lose a lot of sympathy. It's not just that though. And when you ask me like, when I should deprogram, I would definitely have been way worse off had I stayed in that culture specifically because I do inherently have a lot of issues around social anxiety.

O c D now diagnosed autism. Right? Where I have a lot of reasons to fall into victimhood mindsets. And that is a very now predominant mindset in progressive culture. But it wasn't when you were growing up. Not, yeah, not so much. But talk about mindsets. We've got six minutes here. Yeah.

The idea comes from in progressive culture, one of the top. Selling points essentially is that we will protect you from hurt feelings, we will protect you from pain. And one of the greatest evils is pain, mental or physical, or any sort of anguish or suffering. That, that is not okay.

It's not okay for children to get hurt or beat up or to experience bullying or to, any adversities is bad. And ultimately that would cause me. Immense damage as an adult because it would give me an excuse to become a complete shut in. And when I met you, I couldn't go out to eat restaurant.

Oh yeah. You were restaurant getting shut in. You didn't leave your house at all. No. Yeah I only left my home for work. I had to really force myself to get out. I. Really had to force myself to socialize and it was extremely scary for me. So all sorts of things were very difficult. Talk about how that felt.

So how did your growing up lead to that outcome where you were afraid of engaging with the world at all? And how did engaging with me and beginning to think first principally and for yourself, get you outta that? I don't think it's the culture that made me feel that way. It's. My, it's the fact that I'm autistic and I've ocd and I don't, people stress me out.

Culture help you outta that well, so no. Yeah, so deprogramming from progressive culture helped me out of that because progressive culture basically says, Oh, we must accommodate you. If you get really stressed out by being around people. If you get really stressed out by leaving the house, don't do it.

Like you don't have to do it. You can stay inside. We're not gonna do anything that's gonna trigger you, et cetera. So it builds this cocoon of learned helplessness around you, whereas the culture that you and I developed from, thinking about things from a more first principles and questioning standpoint was suck it up.

Things are hard. This is how you sharpen yourself. This is how you learn your own boundaries. This is how you build strength, adversity, and suffering is just part of the human condition. It's a signal that you learn. To navigate that is very informative, but that shouldn't make you never do things. And mentally, how did you.

Feel versus those two mindsets when you were in one versus the other? Did you feel better when you hid from the world in any way, or? No, and it definitely leaning into, to protecting my my, my mental Or shielding myself from the world only made it worse. It's very similar to recovering from surgery.

They want you up and walking as soon as you can so you get blood flow to the injured area, it recovers more quickly. You're not as likely to develop additional weird limbs and stuff that like make other parts of your body start to break and get misused. And I think, dealing with.

Anxiety issues and other mental issues is a lot like that. Like you're gonna have to somewhat work through the pain to be able to recover enough to function as a human and working through the pain is part of the recovery process. And so I think a lot of that sort of exposure therapy has led me to be able to do things I could never imagine I could do.

And I definitely feel less overall anxiety now because I'm just so accustomed now to throwing myself into completely terrifying situations and it's just a normal thing. And it is, no, it is no more. I think a lot how like humans have a baseline happiness level. I think humans also have a baseline anxiety level.

And I actually think that our lifestyle now has my baseline anxiety level a little bit lower because I'm not doing things that exacerbated it, which is what I did when I tried to protect. And this is very interesting. So our viewers may think that Simone is the one who has like more timid in our relationship now, but it is absolutely the opposite.

Being with her is what inspires me to take risks and put myself out there in endure suffering, in pursuit of my goals because, I look at her as an example and as such a shining example of the type of person I could be if I had her mental fortitude and the mental fortitude she has developed dwarfs. I even wonder if what I'm capable of, but I can try every day to reach her levels.

And I don't know if that makes me simp to say that I really love and admire my wife and every day I am almost a ashamed at how great of a person you are and how much you embody the type of person I wish I could become, and how much you have shaped even that set of aspirations for myself.

It's back at you. I think we each push each other to go further and I think by because each of us models what the other person believes we can become and tries to, to live up to that standard and be the person that you think we, we each think we can be makes a big difference.

I just have to thank you so much for giving me the ability to see so much more than the myopic world that. I grew up in. I really love you, Malcolm. I'm so grateful for it. Thank you so much, Simone. I'm so glad to do these with you and talk with you. And I know these things can get us in trouble, but I think for people either on the conservative or progressive into the spectrum, it helps them see people who are open to outside opinions who do differ from them.

Those that are able to engage with ideas without yelling. Just the idea of being like or dehumanizing people or saying, oh, you hate this group, or, oh, you hate that group. Because I, I think that's how we can improve and help ourselves, but also help our kids by exposing them to different ideas.

Hopefully that's the hope. But we'll see. But hey, we've a roughly 18 year sales pitch. If we did a good job, they don't buy it and they say, Hey, your life kind of sucked. I am glad for them to try something better If we're wrong, we want them to be right. Yeah. At the very least, that's what it is to have kids right to.

To understand that I lack the capability to iteratively improve as much in the next 30 years is I expect my kids to iteratively improve from the starting point we give them. Totally. I look forward to our next conversation already. Thanks Malcolm. Thank you.

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