Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Dive into the unsettling world of antinatalism and its extremist offshoots, unveiling the tragic consequences linked to radical beliefs. The hosts analyze the dark psychology of individuals behind violent incidents and the chilling implications of a pessimistic worldview. Discussions also touch on the ethics of the right to die and the search for meaning in life amidst societal shifts towards superficial values. Through sharp critique and thoughtful dialogue, they explore the value of existence and the dangers posed by extremist ideologies.

Dive into the intriguing world of nationalism and its complexities. The conversation contrasts civic nationalism's inclusivity with state nationalism's coercive nature. Discover the nuanced relationships between national pride, cultural identity, and historical narratives in education. Engage with critiques of public school systems that focus too much on oppression while missing cultural celebration. The hosts balance serious discussions with light humor, emphasizing the importance of learning from past mistakes and fostering connections.

The hosts dive into the controversial topics of reproductive justice and sterilization, particularly focusing on the implications for Black women. They critique governmental proposals and discuss the historical ties to eugenics. The conversation also highlights the intersection of reproductive rights with racial justice and the societal norms surrounding sexuality, viewed through the lens of Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World.' Plus, they examine evolving perceptions of tech leaders in politics and propose a novel dating app idea linked to charity.

This fascinating discussion uncovers the surprising involvement of women in anti-suffrage movements, highlighting their arguments against women's voting rights. Delve into the paradox of female opposition, influenced by societal norms and cultural expectations. The hosts also explore significant debates about the representation of women's capabilities in politics and historical perspectives on their roles. Additionally, modern implications of voting rights and the evolving discourse on gender inequities spark thought-provoking insights into society today.

Dive into the fascinating exploration of genetic and psychological adaptations among East Asians. The discussion uncovers how collectivism, population density, and high agency have shaped unique cultural traits over centuries. Tune in for insights on environmental pressures that mold behaviors, the implications of studying cultural genetics, and a humorous anecdote that reflects childhood perceptions of gender. This captivating conversation also touches on immigrant experiences and the cultural influences that impact personal development.

The hosts explore the urgent implications of demographic collapse on traditional social contracts. They discuss Japan's innovative reforms in response to an aging population and the sustainability of democracy. Humorously contrasting optimistic views with civilization's challenges, they dive into the evolving dynamics of governance and social equity. They also engage in lighthearted debates about breakfast choices and share personal reflections on cooking and family life. This engaging conversation tackles serious issues with insight and wit.

The hosts tackle the provocative question of whether rising acceptance of homosexuality has historically linked to the decline of civilizations. They delve into intriguing examples from the Roman, Greek, and Islamic empires, analyzing how sexual norms have shifted throughout history. Discussions include the impact of cultural repression in Islamic societies and the evolving views on LGBTQIA+ relationships today. With a critical lens, they challenge common beliefs about sexuality and societal stability, encouraging listeners to rethink accepted narratives.

Join us for a compelling discussion on how Mitt Romney's candidacy unintentionally sparked political realignment in America and globally. This conversation explores the rise of the 'new right', the coalition of diverse conservative groups, and the controversial topic of genetic modification and designer babies. We delve into the evolving ideologies within the tech-right alliance, debates around reproductive technology, and the significance of preserving cultural autonomy against the urban monoculture. [00:00:00]Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be talking to you today. Today we are going to be talking about how MIT Romney of all people instigated the chain of events that led to the political realignment of America. And then from there, the political realignment of the right and the left across many countries around the world.And that in a way his candidacy. Birthed the new right now. I note it did not come from support of his candidacy. It actually came from a faction of the right that was disappointed with his loss and where the party had gone. But he also opened doors that really changed a number of things.Simone Collins: So inadvertently he loosened the lid on the tight jar of the new right.Yes. Yes. How exciting, and I love this theoryMalcolm Collins: and I want to discuss this in the context of a friend of ours who works for the Heritage Foundation. Emma Waters did a, a tweet chain [00:01:00] recently saying that people who do things , like us, that want to. Improve intergenerationally. , because right now, you know, let's be honest, we are talking about like polygenic selection, which, you know, we do, Elon's does like a lot of the tech elite do.Simone Collins: but what El the waters is criticizing more broadly 'cause it's not just polygenic risk selection. Yeah. Is this concept of designer babies, which. We are totally for, we're like Yes designer babies. Yes. CRISPR editing. Yes. Like all of the things, we are 100% into that and, and I, I don't want people to misconstrue it.Yes, of course. Right now we're choosing birth order largely based on cancer risk to buy time for cures for our kids who have higher cancer risk. That doesn't mean that when we get the chance. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think that the, the polygenic risk conversation occludes the morality of the larger conversation.Mm-hmm. Because zero, you're focused more on not using all of the embryos. Mm-hmm. When the real question at hand was in the next 20 to 30 years is, should we be geneticallySimone Collins: modifying [00:02:00] humans? Yeah. And that, that is, it's such an important conversation. And I texted Emma when she posted it, when I saw it.That I was just so glad that she's bringing this debate up because it's not discussed enough and what we're heading toward, because this is what's happening at scientific conferences. I was just checking in on this recently. Is people just like, this is unethical. Let's just not do it. Let's just not do it.And it's really, it's stifling research. It's stifling development. And what I want instead are very productive discussions of, okay, why, why exactly is this so bad?Malcolm Collins: Well, what's what's interesting here is a lot of the pushback against it is coming from the left. The, the vast minority of the pushback against it is coming from the right.Yeah. And this is the first time we've really seen a right-leaning mainstream individual who we've been working with, like do this level of pushback. And IW you know, one of the things that we pointed out to her, well, and it'sSimone Collins: very explicit, I wanna point out that from the moment we first met Emma Waters, which was at the first natal con two years ago, her whole stance was IVF is not good.Any sort of repro tech [00:03:00] is something that should be avoided at all costs. And really what we need to do is give it the root causes fertility that we don't want to move toward these abominations of rep tech, and instead we want to. Find natural. You know, let's go back to tracking our cycles, getting to know our bodies, not taking birth control, avoiding endogenous irritants or pollutants that harm fertility, which is a very legitimate stance, but what we don't agree with is that like, oh, but you can't or shouldn't do these other things.Malcolm Collins: No, no. That's not even what we disagree with. What we disagree with is it makes sense to split this political allegiance over or alliance that's been building over this issue. And, and that is what she suggested doing in her chain of tweets. Yeah. She said, we cannot have a prenatal movement with people who use this type of technology.Yeah. She's like, goodSimone Collins: ISTs don't do designer babies. Which we, which is aMalcolm Collins: bigger problem because what she's essentially saying as she says that, is we cannot have the tech right new right alliance, which is we [00:04:00] cannot. Damaging, we cannot have the tech Right. MAGA alliance. Yeah. Which is crippling going forwards if we take this dance for the right.Being able to win. So just explain that before we get into the whole Romney chain here. The areas where we differ with people like her are incredibly small in terms of what could actually pass in policy. Mm-hmm. So if you're like, okay, what are your guys like? And, and when I say small, I mean like 2% maybe.We have policy differences, which I think surprises a lot of people, but because they haven't thought through, it's like, well, you two have radically different views on the world, but. Where your views differentiate, neither of you could actually win any legislation. So it doesn't make sense to split up alliances based on those differentiations.Exactly. So an example of this would be is we would campaign for stricter access to abortion earlier laws around abortion. Mm-hmm. She would campaign for stricter access to abortion. Earlier laws around [00:05:00] abortion. Right. You know? Mm-hmm. In, in, in her perfect world, it wouldn't happen at all, and it would be completely illegal.Mm-hmm. And in ours it wouldn't be except. That'll never pass in the United States, right? So it doesn't make sense to split the alliance over this because it's not something that can pass. Or in her perfect world, you know, you might end up outlawing IVF, but outlawing IVF. Would destroy the Republican party's base.Mm-hmm. Like it is not a popular idea or in, in certain factions. I don't think that this is her views, but in certain factions of this, this split, some people are like against gays and gay marriage, right? Like, they're like no gay marriage in the United States. And it's like. Fine. I would disagree with that, but it's not, we're splitting the alliance on, because you couldn't win a any, you couldn't even win among only Republican voters if you were anti-gay marriage in the United States.Yeah, that's how silly that is. Or at least it would be close. Like, and, and so there's these areas where we [00:06:00] have these differential perspectives, but it is really important that we don't do what the wokes do, that we don't do what the Democrats do and say. Okay. Yeah. We're you, you're, you're different on any one issue, like JK Rowling different on just one issue.Let's kick her outta the party. Mm-hmm. And, and villainize her and say that we can't work with her. We work as a coalition because we're being practical about actually getting stuff done. And if you look at what the White House is doing right now, they are achieving things that Republicans have wanted to achieve for the past two decades.You know, in, in an amazing rate. And it's the tech bros who are doing it because they're not, I don't wanna say deep state bureaucrats. But what I will say is that if you are pulling from entrenched political players, you are going to get people, whether they are Democrat or Republican in their leanings, that have deep connections to the deep state and therefore have deep connections in the status quo not changing.Mm-hmm. And that's one reason why this alliance has been so fruitful at the level of [00:07:00] implementation. But, so we'll get to like what the alliance means, what the alliance's goals are, but I wanted to start here by being like, please, the Democrats are constantly trying to break us up. Don't, don't let, they're constantly trying to get Trump and Elon to fight.They're constantly trying to, when one of us succumbs to that, instead of being like and this is, this is why this tweet got to me because it didn't say. You know these two, I disagree with them. Let's talk about the philosophy on this or check Right. People not specifically calling out like I disagree.It said they are not ISTs. Mm-hmm. And if we are not ISTs, then we are not part of the new Right coalition and that's a big problem. And we have been, and the tech right I would say was in this coalition has been incredibly charitable to the Heritage Foundation. They have taken over the IVF, like the PRO IVF bills.Well, the, sorry to followSimone Collins: up. The first strictly prenatal list executive order release was basically one promising to figure out [00:08:00] how to reduce the cost of IVF in the United States. Heritage is one of the leading contingents advising the White House on how to reduce those costs. But they're only doing it by, well.The best form of IVF is no, IVF isn't that so much less expensive? It's $0 to IVF. Here's how we do it. Which again, is totally in line with their philosophy, but not actually addressing. Yeah. AndMalcolm Collins: there is easy things that could be done. The I, I forget, just call, so like the, the licensing agency for embryologists only licensed 80 a year.It's one of those like, artificially created monopolies to increase their salary, like the beers.Simone Collins: Someone described it to us, which is Yeah. The de Yeah. That's insane. That,Malcolm Collins: that is a very low hanging fruit and yet very easy to fix. But of course, they wouldn't think to look at things like that because, and, and we haven't put up a stink about this, right?Mm-hmm. Like we are like. Okay. This is the terms of the alliance. You guys don't come for IVF. You can, you know, restrict it or, or not make it cheaper in the ways you want to in working with the administration. But, and, and none of the [00:09:00] other, like pro IVF, pro embryo like selection parts of the tech right, have come at the White House for choosing the Heritage Foundation to be the ones to execute on this.Mm-hmm. Like, I know that, like we have been incredibly gracious in terms of. Our role was in this, and we want to make sure that nobody pushes anyone else off the table. When we, for example, have have said things critical of lineman stone, a lot of that for us was driven by him attacking other people who wanted to be a part of the coalition who came out saying, I'm a prenatal list.And he's like, oh, well I disagree with you here, here, here, here, here. And it's like, look, if somebody's new in the movement, we need to do what we can to raise their status or a new convert. And not belittle them because that's how we create this harmonious alliance that doesn't become what the Wokes became.Simone Collins: Yeah. Even if we disagree with their policies, it's important to be a Big 10 movement. So I mean, I, I get that. You know, Lyman is a very passionate person and [00:10:00] he, it's in his personality to criticize things that he doesn't. Agree with, and I get that, but we're, we're really trying to be a Big 10 movement.And if people feel like they're being shoved out or this is being fractured, we all lose power. We all lose the ability to raise awareness about this and do something.Malcolm Collins: Yes. And, and do something about our mini, mini shared goals. Whether it's, you know, education reform, making abortion less common, you know, it, it strengthening America and ensuring that we are a powerful country.And in the, the argument I. Argued with her because her whole thing was against like genetically modifying humans as like, fundamentally like an un-American thing. And what I pointed out is, you know, if we don't do this in America somebody else is going to do it. And eventually, within a few generations, you know, your children are going to be under the Jack boot of.Chinese super soldiers. When we tell the left, we we're like, Hey guys, if you don't have kids, you're not gonna exist in the future. And they rear us. You know, they're rearing, but it's obviously true what we're saying, [00:11:00] if we tell people on the right, if you deny technologies that allow for intergenerational improvement in human capacity whether it is genetic augmentation or human AI integration and stuff like that. BCI, that's where I started my career was in brain computer interface. Eventually groups that are engaging with these technologies are going to be able to exert power over you so long as they actually do increase their capacity. And if they don't increase their capacity, then people are gonna stop engaging with them.So what are you fighting over, right? Mm-hmm. So you're essentially ensuring the death of the American Empire and anyone who might be able to protect your right. To not use technologies like this to stay granola. Whereas we, the tech right, have a philosophy of we want to have the choice to engage with reproductive technologies we engage with, and the, and the human, you know, AI stuff we engage with but we don't.Want that to ever be forced on anyone else. Mm-hmm. We want everyone to [00:12:00] have the right to make these decisions for themselves. And as I pointed out, you know, this is not like the idea of human augmentation and advancement is not anti-America. The avatar of patriotism in America is Captain America.Captain America is a human who was augmented by scientists to be better. We didn't hate the Nazis because they were trying to make people healthier or better. We hated the Nazis because they were forcing other people into coercive fertility decisions. Mm-hmm. Whether it was having more kids than they would've, or having less kids than they would've how they were having kids.And that's the position you are taking when you try to restrict our access. To this sort of technology. And it's a fundamentally N Cs an un-American position. Because America is a country that is defined by alternate cultural hypotheses, competing, but in an environment where the one thing we all agree on is you [00:13:00] won't force your way of life on us and we won't force our way of life on you.Mm-hmm. So that we can protect. Each other's ways of life. Mm-hmm. And I think that this is where the old right, really sort of makes mistakes because they think about the country in a context where they had enough of votes with their broadly agreed upon Judeo-Christian traditionalist value set to win national election to then enforce those values on the population.Mm. Don't have that anymore. If you want to protect traditional 1950s, Americana is the left, which has the dominant power. The urban monoculture is the dominant power. They won't elect you into office. You protect that by aligning yourself with other people who are running cultural experiments that are also alternate to the left.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But let's get into the MIT Romney thing. 'cause this is really interesting to me.Simone Collins: Interesting. Yeah. I, I wanna see your argument for this. I'm not [00:14:00] sure. I'm like, I don't, I don't see how it could be. Because I, I, I, at first I thought, well, you're gonna say it's because he was Mormon and that made him different from this sort of evangelical Protestant base.That was GOP Inc. But we had previously elected Catholics. Yes, they were Democrats, but like still, no, no, no.Malcolm Collins: Hold on. You, you are, you are glossing over this, the Republican party in its entire history mm-hmm. Has never had a Catholic front runner. Even till today for presidential office. Mm-hmm. In fact they've never had a non Protestant other than MIT Romney.Simone Collins: Yeah. Making JD Vance quite notable actually, but yeah. So, so let's, but let's go, let's go into Romney. I wanna, I wanna hear your take here. Okay. GoMalcolm Collins: into Romney. Before this, the, the Alliance, the Judeo-Christian Alliance, it sort of looked at where the shadows of the various Christian denominations overlap and said, this is the culture we want to enforce upon.The United States and its citizens through laws, through the way we govern, through the way the state [00:15:00] operates. Okay. And this created a winning coalition for a long time, and the backbone of that coalition was evangelicals. Catholics were mostly even today Catholic vote majority Democrat. And historically they were far Democrat.And if you wanna understand why it was because the mainstream American system the. Like what the KKK was trying to protect against is, it was blacks, Jews, and Catholics, that those were the groups that they lynched. And I think, I remember I mentioned this in the previous ESSA code, and somebody was like, wait, the KKK was predominantly interested in Catholics as much as black people.And I'm like, yes. Jews were a bit of an afterthought for them, but it was like blacks and the, and the Catholics these were the two primary un-American forces that they were intent on stamping out. When, rFK became a nominee for president. Many people freaked out because they were like, well, isn't he gonna be loyal to the Pope and not to the American people?Yeah. Yes. And [00:16:00] this look, it's, it's, it's, that's like electingSimone Collins: a, a, a woman and being like, well, but isn't she gonna be loyal to her husband,Malcolm Collins: not the right. Well, I mean, and people ask this about Mitt Romney, isn't he gonna be loyal to the Mormon church over the American people? And this is a viable question to ask, right?Like. Historically speaking, if you're creating this alliance of different Christian denominations mm-hmm. But you're like, but you know what we say, it's like Judeo-Christian values. What we mean is Protestant values and traditionalist American Protestant values. Right? Yeah. And, and then. Mitt Romney comes in and he increasingly runs and increasingly normalizes.When he first started running, everyone was horrified that he was Mormon.Simone Collins: Yeah. How, how can there be this Mormon freak president, but also he looks so like, well, like many Mormons. So clean cut, corporate friendly, spotless, and this,Malcolm Collins: this is part of what created the new. Right. So we'll get to this. Mm-hmm.So, so. Mitt Romney comes into office [00:17:00] and he not, not office, but he comes into like the, the dominant position was in the American Republican coalition. Right. And largely by the time he doesmost of the evangelicals had actually gotten okay with him. If you're looking at white evangelicals 62% strongly favored Romney. Only 28% had reservations and only 9% were only voting for him as a rejection of Obama. Wow. So. That it, it consider that of Mormons. 2% were primarily voting for him out of a rejection of Obama.So they were only like three times more than that. Right. And Mormon's view of the metaphysical nature of, of the world is quite different from the traditional Christian view. Hmm. And what was interesting is the, he captured. Wholesomeness and a wholesome family and a, you know, like Tea Toler, like doing everything the correct way, lifestyle, much [00:18:00] more than the other Protestant groups were doing, as Mormons have for a while.Hmm. And so the idea, and this has happened to me a number of times, was in, you know, if, if you go to modern conservative spaces online, you know you're gonna get people talking about figures. Like, you know, John Vinky or Jordan Peterson. And these are individuals who are definitely not Christian in a normal context.But nobody would see them as antagonistic to the modern conservative cause. If you look at people like us with our weird techno puritan beliefs I mean we are 100% Christians from our perspective because we base our religion off of the Bible. And, and really straight. Like if you go to our, our, our track series, we may have a lot of heretical beliefs, but they come from alternate readings of lines from the Bible, right?And so I will engage with Christians often in these new right coalition. I will drop with them. I'll be like, well, I'm a Christian, but probably not a way that you would [00:19:00] really accept, you know, like we've had redeemed zoomer on our show and stuff like that. And I drop things that I think they're gonna be like, no, I, I hate you.And they're like, nah, you know, I have some friends in this church that, that believe that, or I have some for, you know, that's not really so bad. That's not really so bad. And then it feels a bit like that scene from some like, it hot where, where I'm like, actually. Maybe like I, I, I mean I know that there's some areas where they're like, okay, that is definitely heretical.Like that our version of Christianity does not believe, if you watch our last track that Jesus Christ claimed to literally be God's son. We point out that in the Old Testament, people said, I'm God's son all the time. Even today people are like they call God the father. They don't mean he's literally their father.To give more color here. What is written in the Bible is that. God impregnated Mary using Joseph's DNA. We know he used Joseph's DNA because if he didn't, then Jesus wouldn't be the Messiah because the Messiah had to be Patri. Lineally descended [00:20:00] from the house of David. , and that makes God's role closer to an IVF doctor's role.And yet no one would say that an IVF doctor is the father of my kids. , , even though all my kids were conceived through IVF.Nor do we describe God to be the literal father of other children. He helps them miraculously conceive throughout the old in New Testament.Malcolm Collins: And so we go through all this stuff in that track. If you wanna get into like why we have this theoretical understanding, but it's in part because we believe that it, it's what the text is actually arguing. Yeah. When you go and read the text in context. But, but that's like a super heretical belief that I expected would have us pushed far more out of Christian circles or far less accepted.And I think, and, and, and people can look at us and be like, wow, that's really heretical. But it's not as heretical as Jordan Peterson who just doesn't accept the Christian faith at all. It's not as if heretical as John Vinky who's like, well, Christianity is good, but more as like a set of like metaphysical stories and stuff like that.You know, they, they're, they're seen as very like in offensive within this movement. [00:21:00] So in a way, the ways that we're offensive is because we actually like deeply believe the text in a way that these other individuals don't. So they're like, okay, maybe they'll, they'll be brought over. But the point I'm making here is, is this allowed for this broader coalition to build?And what was interesting is it actually began to build in opposition. Because Mitt Romney failed. He failed against Obama, and the way he built his coalition, sort of expanding this theocratic framework to a wider ray of denominations also fundamentally failed to win at the electorate. Mm-hmm. And then.He was one of the early ones to turn on Trumpism. MAGA is the new form of the Republican coalition as it began to grow, which was an alliance of essentially every group that was against the urban monoculture instead of just one or two groups that was against the urban monoculture. So it's much more focused on preventing the urban monocultures, imperialist tendencies [00:22:00] around the school system, around messaging, around media, around art.Than trying to impose our own imperialist tendencies in, in many ways it's the anti-imperialist faction because that's the only way we can preserve multiple minority traditionalist factions. So, so, MIT Romney comes out attacks. This is like, oh, we need to get back to, you know, being reasonable and well buttoned and everything like that.Mm-hmm. And in so doing, he made that form of Christianity, kind of distasteful to the average American. The, the overly sober, the overly, I don't push people's buttons. The overly wholesome in a way where the wholesomeness isn't offensive. Yeah. Like I think if you look at a lot of. Messaging we're wholesome, but in a way that is offensive, is deeply offensiveSimone Collins: to people.Yeah. And that, that looks weird. And Mormons are really, really good at at almost overcorrecting for the weirdness of their history or religion [00:23:00] in a way that involves them looking to your point, like pod people. But of course, this is coming from us weirdos who are deeply uncomfortable with conformity. So I think that goes to show.How conformist and how crowd friendly or, or normy friendly the general Morman aesthetic is. Right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that he made that a, you know, aesthetic sort of uncool on the intellectual side of the Right. Hmm. And as an immediate response to him, that's where you had, what was it called, the dark aca?The dark.Simone Collins: Oh, the intellectual dark web.Malcolm Collins: The intellectual dark web.Simone Collins: Oh, you were gonna talk about dark academia. The, the fashion? No, no,Malcolm Collins: no, no. The intellectual, the dark academia. Like a, a style, which is cute. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. You, you, you know, I, I dated my girlfriend before Simone was very dark academia style.She was, I wasSimone Collins: immediately thinkingMalcolm Collins: of her. I was like but the, the the inte, the intellectual dark web arose in that post Romney [00:24:00] era. Um hmm. Of sort of we, if we're going to like, seriously engage with this, we need to be subversive because the dominant culture no longer agrees with the form of overly concerned what other people think of them.Wholesomeness, mm-hmm. That MIT Romney represented.Simone Collins: Interesting. Huh. Wow. So, yeah. And then she was like this catalyst that triggered a domino effect.Malcolm Collins: Well, there was a secondary catalyst, which was an alliance of when people talk about the tech elite, they're like, okay, so who, who are the tech elite? Are they like.The people who work at like Amazon, are they like No, they are people who live within tech environments. This is the four chan diaspora, the red pill, the tech natives. Yeah. It, it really shouldn't be tech elite. It should be edgy, atheist diaspora. Yeah. The gamer Gate. Diaspora. Diaspora, diaspora.All of these have been ruled into one alliance, which where, where they say elite, they mean it like. PC Gamer [00:25:00] Master Race. They don't mean it in a they mean it in like a, a vitalistic. They're proud of who they are and they're different, you know? Oh, soSimone Collins: they mean to, to quote the old, the old term L three three T seven,Malcolm Collins: I don't know what that means.Simone Collins: Elite.Malcolm Collins: Oh, elite. Oh, okay. Oh my God.Simone Collins: Am I that old? I'm sorry. Yikes.Malcolm Collins: Tech Elite. Okay. So yes, the, the tech elite are very. Non-traditional elitist, and I think this is also something that people miss out, but they think that the tech ELs like us and Elon and stuff like that, and like obviously we're figures in that, but that is our culture.The culture of Doge. Like literally the apartment he's running comes from like a meme that got popular on four chan was the culture of. Four chan before it turned all what's the word they used to me? And the place has a bunch of feds glowy. That's the term four chan these days is a little glowy.Before four chan got glowy. [00:26:00] That, that culture that it embodied. Is the culture that a lot of us grew up within, within these online environments. I remember somebody who was like, oh, this is like a boomer's version of four chan and our four chan episode. And I was like, you do understand that my generation was the one that created four chan at the height of four Chan's.Cultural relevance? You, you might be. Not understanding how old four Chan culture is. And if you're still like, unapologetically like a four chan or today instead of on one of the other sites, or would say it was some qualification you probably were not an OG four chanter. Your, your a new sort of replication of that culture because it appealed to you.The culture that was fostered by people of my internet generation. Mm-hmm. And sorry that, that really got me when they were like, oh, boomer understanding of it is like, I, how old do you think I am? And how old do you [00:27:00] think four chan is? Anyway, anyway, no, but that's, that was actually a pretty interesting to me, this conceptualization of this online counterculture as being forever young.It's not forever young. It, it, it, it was something that. Was cooked within the bowels of stuff. Like if you see our video, this weird How the new Right came from like the new atheist movement in a way, like the, the, not the new atheist, I say like the counter new atheist, the original online like skeptics movement, and we sort of chart that.Progression was one of the factions that ended up becoming the base of the new, right? It wasn't the only one. You also got the red pillars, you also have the four chan diaspora. You also have. You know, a lot of these groups, the, the, the diaspora that was que squeezed off of Reddit today, we think of its Reddit as being an incredibly leftist place.Mm-hmm. But you know, there was the era of you know, things like Tumblr in action, right? Like Tumblr in action was a big, very commonly used site for tracking what was happening Was in leftist culture in a negative context [00:28:00] or what was the fat one that I used to always love? Was it called fat People Hate?No, I don't think it was. I know that was one of them, but I, God, I'm, I'm blanking on. I'm pretty sure it's called Fat People Hate, which I'm like, whoa. Okay. We really went there. I, I thought it was so funny to like laugh at the haze movement. Oh, the, the catter ham tails and the catter ham tails. The juiciest red, the catter ham tails.That's some internet deep lore there. Yeah, man. But, but these were and, and that's also something that I think people are surprised about. They're like, wait, like Reddit burst apart of the modern, right? Yeah. Reddit Was the. Meeting place of a lot of the red pill movement. Like the red pill was a Reddit phenomenon.Yeah. Predominantly in its early days where a lot of people were like, oh, why would you guys get, like, people could be like, well, there were red pillars on other sites. Like, you know? Yeah.Simone Collins: But I mean, I think even when the red pill had its height on Reddit, for example, they knew, oh, sorry.Malcolm Collins: It was a Reddit phenomenon in its early days.Simone Collins: They also knew its days were [00:29:00] numbered on Reddit.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so they, they knew it would eventually how many plates of, of the, the earlyearly red pill movement was Reddit. That was where you would go if you're old enough to be like me or my wife's age. And you were in that community that was the main place ideas were aired, was in that community, and you had sort of auxiliary conversations happening in other areas. But Reddit was the center of that culture.And that culture is what sprung out into the phe. Andrew Tate, other ideas on the right. So this is one sort of an explanation of how this movement came together, but also if you want to go back to within your own culture, within your own kids and churches and everything like that. Traditionalist values, like if you're like completely set on the cargo cult of the 1950s Americana.Christian Traditionalism. That's fine. We want to be allied with [00:30:00] you. We want to be on the same team with you, but you don't have a voter base to win elections. Mm-hmm. You need to work with everyone who's working against the urban monoculture or we all fail. And I'm not saying this like as an attack on people.I understand the instinct for intergroup signaling to be like. These guys are weird. This part of the movement is different and new. Jordan Peterson isn't a real Christian. John Vinky isn't a real Christian. You know what, why do we have Jews like, what's his face? Who runs the, the real, the the main main Jewish political activists on the right.Simone Collins: Ben Shapiro.Malcolm Collins: Ben Shapiro. Yes. Why do we have Jews like Ben Shapiro running huge media organizations on the right? And it's because you can't win on your own anymore. And, and in fact, it has become so fractionalized that the evangelicals who only spoke to evangelicals have. Basically disappeared from the public media environment.They've disappeared from the internet, they've disappeared from the [00:31:00] airwaves. And, and you can ask why did this happen? Where did they all go? Why is the evangelicals, I hear from today, people like Rudy z Zoomer, who we've had on the show. He's not a classic evangelical. He's like a, a a, what do you call them again?The ones from. He's a form of Calvinist Presbyterian. Okay. You know, why is it only like more understanding ones like him? And it's because they're willing to create media environments which compel outsider interaction, which is as, as he mentioned in a recent video, his audience is majority Catholic, right?Like very antagonistic to his beliefs, not like. Outwardly antagonistic. I just mean there's a lot of friction there. But he creates content in a way that engages that audience as well. If you look at our audience, you know, very Catholic, very Jewish, right, like very Mormon actually. And the iterations of the movement that say, oh, we're only gonna talk to one faction, have mostly fizzled out.And I think that this is a [00:32:00] problem where. If you are not within like the online influencer space within in the right, you don't realize this. You know, if you're like just working at the Heritage Foundation, you don't realize how unpalatable a message like we need to kick anyone who is engaged with reproductive technology that we don't like out of the movement is.To the actual base or you know, another thing that they did when actually I was like, oh my God, this would pull really bad among like the actual like red pill four chan diaspora is banning pornography. I was like, because that was part of Project 45 and we've talked with the people at the Heritage Foundation we're like, look like this is why I.The ba a lot of the bases against this you know, if you look at like the online fights recently, like Tracer, but, or like the Skull Girls controversy, the left has always been on the pro censorship side because they basically just wanna punish male sexuality. And we can capture that land, but we capture that land by.Saying, okay, I can teach my own kids something. I can tell my own [00:33:00] kids. I wouldn't be okay with this, and I can have a very different perspective for what I am Okay. With tolerating within the groups that are allied with me.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, to a certain extent, I don't think there is much that, for example, organizations like Heritage Foundation can do given their donor base and the opinions of their donor base and their dependence on their jobs.I. So I don't blame them for holding the stances that they hold. They're.Malcolm Collins: I don't feel like any antagonism is, this is very different than like why I was mad at lineman stone. Like I was mad at lineman stone 'cause I thought he was being pointlessly spiteful to new people within the movement and putting out information that I didn't think was accurate.And that is, is a very different form of anger to this where I'm just like. Look, I, I get the game you're playing. I understand your donor base. I understand what you have to signal. I am totally okay with you making these arguments publicly. The only argument that I would push against [00:34:00] is these people can't be part of the new Right alliance.These people can't be part of the prenatals movement. Yeah. Because it's then we move into woke territory, and it's why the Wokes failed, because they didn't allow any ideological diversity was in their movement.Simone Collins: Yeah. And to be fair we've buried the hatchet with lime stone. We've, we've talked, it's, we're, we're good now.We, we like him.Malcolm Collins: We've talked and, and yeah, I'm, I'm totally fine as long as he doesn't attack like new people. Because look like, as people are sort of seen as like the face of a movement, I feel like really personally hurt when people come into this movement expecting a diverse and thoughtful environment.Then they get attacked by people either because of beliefs that they hold or their sexuality or something like that. And I'm like, that is not the movement that we're trying to cultivate here. Right? Like, I, I want people to feel safe with ideological diversity. So long as in terms of the policy that we're all working together to [00:35:00] implement we, we, we remember.Because it's true, we have like 98% overlap in policy goals. Yeah, exactly. In, in, in realistically implementable policy goals. You know, would, would we like to fund like genetic research in humans more? Of course.Simone Collins: But we can. And would they like to ban abortion? Well they can And would limestone love for, you know, a paid family leave and free childcare?Yes, but we can't have that. No, that's not gonna work. Work that won't pass. So like, we don't have to disagree about these things 'cause they're not gonna happen. Let's focus on the few things that actually can get passed, which is a great point to focus on.Malcolm Collins: And I think that, that that's what makes this, this alliance work, and it's something that we should rather than, because there's sort of this woke right idea that some people have been trying to push.And while I understand the sentiment behind it, I think a better way to, to align with this stuff is, look, you want to be more [00:36:00] extreme than me on some issues. We're not the left. I'm not gonna re you out of the room because you tell me something. Mm-hmm. I want to engage in constructive debate around like, what is actually gonna come as a result of this.Simone Collins: And we love those debates. They're really good debates. We, again, we love debating ironic material on the internet and the, you know, legality and when life begins. Of abortion with Heritage Foundation team members, which we do. That is fun. It's, and we, we love it and we all enjoy it. Like it's, I've, I've changed my perspective on issues.Yes. Yeah. And help us get to a more nuanced perspective. Like all of these things are positive and so it's good to debate, but it's also really good to focus on this stuff that we actually can address. 'cause we pretty much all agree on those things.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so I think that that within the new right alliance or the Tech Right Alliance the, this continues to work only in so far as we do not become gatekeepers.There's a big difference between disagreeing with people and attempting to gate keep support for our [00:37:00] combined cause. And where I would say even within this logical framework, gatekeeping makes sense is gatekeeping around issues. That you can actually win with on your own. Right. And gatekeeping around things like intergenerational improvement of Americans is not something you can, like, she was like, they don't want more Americans.They want better Americans. And I'm like, of course we want, do you not want better Americans? Like our instate is Captain America. That's what we're striving for. You know, we're, we're, we're striving for the, the, when people look at us and they're like, oh, this is like. Weird you know, transhumanist nonsense, right?Where it's like they want to create some sort of like post gender weirdo is like blue hair, but theySimone Collins: dress up their five-year-old son in a Captain America h Halloween costume. So whatever,Malcolm Collins: you know what, but the point I'm making is that if Elon Musk is going to represent, you know, [00:38:00] fundamentally like the.Tony Stark of this timeline. Mm-hmm. We aim to represent with our countercultural wholesomeness, the Captain America of this timeline. We aim to represent. Yes, we can make better Americans and that they don't represent a subversion of American values, but a fulfillment of everything America has ever stood for, which is pushing humanity to its absolute limits and then pass them to landing on the moon to, you know, that is what America to the, the.The atomic bomb project to the, like America has always been about over the top boundary pushing science. And I think if, yeah, we as a movement are like, no, we needed to go back to like a pre AI era and a pre-human, you know, augmentation era and a pre I want to protect the Amish Right. To be [00:39:00] that way.And I want to protect your culture's, right? Yeah. 'cause if we, if we'reSimone Collins: not the ones to do it, no one's gonna protect the right of the Amish. To not be a part of some dystopian AI world, and it's not gonna be America Run, and we can't afford that.Malcolm Collins: Don't attack the one like pro technology group. Yeah. That core ideological mission is to protect you in a future where other groups will have this technology.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The, the right to be a granola human is right now something that I think a lot of people take for granted. But they don't take into account the long term of what's gonna happen if they create an environment where the granola humans become existentially hostile to the non granola humans.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Did you like my term? They're granola human. I don't, I, do you understand what I mean when I say it? Like the crunchy granola mom? That's Yeah.Simone Collins: When we, when yeah. People hear the term granola mom or crunchy mom. They, they, it's all the same thing. I guess. Almond mom is a little different, [00:40:00] but yeah, they get it.Malcolm Collins: We, we don't push it. This stuff in the way that some technologists do for like no reason we push at it to defeat those who would impose their culture on us. Mm-hmm. And today that might be kus, which, you know, we've fought against with our school system. You can check out. IO is absolutely amazing now I really would just unmitigated be like, this is in most ways better than I'd say at least 50% of the colleges in the United States, if not 75% of the colleges in the United States.And soon I think it will be better. Unapologetically to all the colleges in the United States. Like that's where we are with the ways that we have been adapting AI to break the choke hold that the urban monoculture has on our youth. And we've made this something that you can edit whatever your religious traditions are, whether you're a Conservative Mormon or an Evangelical, or an Orthodox Jew, you can just delete nodes and we can help you with that, right?Mm-hmm. [00:41:00] We have created a system that is designed to help protect not just our values, but yours. And I think that that's where the new right is, is people with diverse values saying, I'm not here to protect just my values. I am here to protect your values. So long as you're not pushing those values on me,Simone Collins: this, which I think is closer to what the founding fathers wanted.Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely. This, the, the founding fathers, if you look at early America, I mean, the different colon needs were culturally radically different from each other. In all of the initial debates within getting them all to come together in one country was like, okay, but we all hate each other. Right? Okay.We all hate each other, but we work better to protect all of our independent ways of life working together. And I really like that analogy for the new right. The new right is the founding fathers against the British. It is a bunch of radically different cultural experiments and. I might think, you [00:42:00] know, what you are doing in the deep South or over in you know, Quaker Philadelphia is like a bit fruity, but like, so long as you don't impose your values legalistically on me in the back woods, like we can work together.Mm-hmm. I think that, and not just, we can work together, we can be proud to work together and build a, a wider vision of vitalism that works. And a lot of people have been like, well then what is that like? Is the new right just reactive to the left? And it's like, no, it's absolutely not. It has very clear goals, which is to one, preserve the multitude of conservative traditions that make up the American tapestry, whether that's traditional, you know, Catholic Irish or traditional Deep South Baptist or traditional Orthodox Jews or the always moving forwards form of Puritan that we represent where like the founding Father Diaz would like scratch out and be like, okay, let's try to rethink this. Let's try to rethink that. Those are [00:43:00] all classical strains of American thought that worked together in the past and can continue to work together to create, a bright future for us. So that's one thing is we work together against the urban monoculture, but it is preserving our cultural autonomy, which is first and foremost on the social front. And then on the economic front, it's about whatever works. You know, like Trump's American Academy, which is meant to create, like socializing the American educational system to destroy the.College system as it exists right now. That's very right. That's very new. Right? It's very socialist as well, you know, JD Vance's like minimum wage stuff, like our stuff around like, Hey, UBI might be necessary in an age of ai. The Doge is, hey, we need to destroy these inefficient government departments that are just burning cash right now.Or, or spending it on, you know, extending the urban monocultures reach. This is something that we can just, so all. Universally agree whi like why are we splitting hairs when there's so much left to be done [00:44:00] in the areas which we agree?Simone Collins: Does something like this coalition of ideologically very different parties aligning in the name of sovereignty exist elsewhere.I. Like, is this what the far, far right people in Germany are fighting for? Or is this just not something we really see anywhere else?Malcolm Collins: I think that this is something that we, if the far right of the like the a FD and, and and Nigel Farages party in the UK are going to survive they are going to need to learn from this form.Of quote unquote far right ideology. Mm-hmm. And I think they're doing it to an extent. But it is articulating that we are a diverse set of conservative cultural traditions where conservative is mostly just how different we are from the mainstream culture. Yeah. And we. All are working together to preserve human flourishing in the future and to preserve the flourishing of our own nation states, which we have a degree of patriotism for.But that patriotism is going to look very [00:45:00] different. One person said to me, I was talking to like a leftist report. I was on like a, B, c or something recently. They were like, you know, well, like why? Why are you trying to, or they, they said, well, certainly you wouldn't side with like the nationalist, right?And I was like, why wouldn't I side with the nationalist? Why is it such a crime to have pride in who you are in your ancestors? But in America, nationalism, if you go back to the time of the founding Fathers, is intrinsically a collection of diverse groups. And, and we don't even not represent one of those groups like anyone who knows the stories of the founding fathers, knows that they were Christian, a number of them, but they were like weird Christians.A lot of them were as well. And, and us being weird Christians doesn't make us not like part of the team that made up the founding coalition of this country. And we want to recreate a team like. That so we can fight and have a, a shot at fighting those would oppose us. We want to create the party of Captain America, not the party of the Pearl Clutcher.The left is the party of the Pearl Clutcher, not [00:46:00] us.Simone Collins: Well, it's just, it's so odd to me that we've allowed political baggage of some past movements to make pride in something that you've built and contributed to a bad thing. Yeah. Like. If you are proud to pay taxes and you're proud of what your country stands for and fights for, then why would you not be nationalistic?Although I do understand that there's plenty of people who don't like their country. But then, I don't know, get out like, or find something better because it's really, I think we're doing pretty well in, in a large scheme of things. I was just listening to. A very, very, very long analysis of the weird corruption and, and cult associations slash shaman associations of past Korean Prime ministers.And I'm just thinking like, wow, man, we're, we're doing all right. It's okay.Malcolm Collins: [00:47:00] Yeah, no, I mean, in the US we're doing really strong and I, we just wanna make sure that we don't. Take too much like over our handle because we're like, okay, we're on the winning side now and accidentally crash this alliance over things that are irrelevant from the perspective of policy that we can actually get past.Absolutely. And I also, you know, and I point out historically speaking, the idea of the American versus the, the, for example, Nazi super soldier has always been an idea of. The American chooses, you know, their culture chooses to undergo this. You know, this is them, this is their family. Whereas wizz Nazis is always forced upon some poor unsuspecting test subject.Mm-hmm. Who's from, you know, a, a differential cultural group and, and I think in America, like in other countries. In China, they might not be able to get their super soldiers without forcing people. So that becomes culturally normal. But within America, we have enough internal diversity that you have weird groups like us that are going to engage with that stuff [00:48:00] and do want to protect you.And I think that that should be seen as a blessing rather than something that you want to stamp out.Simone Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I agree, but I am also way too aligned with you for. Steel Manning some other view. I'm, I'm MyAlly too much in your camp, so I just hope this keeps up and that we don't let this movement become fractured because that is 100%.What the left is trying to do as is shown in countless media stories of, oh, president Elon. Well, that plus these attempts to, for example, characterize the prenatals movement is deeply ideologically divided when in the end, yeah, we have raucous debates, but we have those debates with smiles on our faces and in the same room, you know, we go to each other's events.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and it's, it's very much like, you know, and I debate the Heritage Foundation people over stuff. Like, you know, when, when does life begin, for [00:49:00] example it's not like the left where they hold this for like dogmatic and insane reasons and it's really clear that they're just trying to look like good people.They don't actually care about what's true. They clearly believe what they're saying, which is why I don't hold it against them. It reminds me of when somebody was like. You know, early was, was, you know, one of the people we work with and they're like, oh, this guy is, is homophobic, like you shouldn't work with him.And I, and I thought that about him for a while and then I looked it up and I was like, wait, he's just a Mormon. Are you saying like, I can't be friends with a Mormon, like that's just religious discrimination, right? Like he doesn't have these beliefs because he hates gay people. He has these beliefs because of his religion.Like, and it's the same with with these groups at like the Heritage Foundation. They have these beliefs where I think, you know, if you talk somebody outta IVF, you functionally killed their kids, right? Like. It's a very big deal to me because those are kids that would have existed had you not done that.And this is something that they do regularly was in their cultural groups. And then they [00:50:00] can be like, well, how do you have no animosity about that? And it goes, because I don't believe they're doing it with a single ounce of malice. I think they a thousand percent believe everything they're saying. And I think that that the movement works because they know, like when I look at my kids and I'm like, why am I pro IVF because I've hugged my kids every day.Right. Like, and in a world where that's not there, those kids don't exist. Yeah. And you can say, well, yeah, I didn't kill them, technically speaking. And it's like, well, yeah, let's be clear. There's,Simone Collins: there's just no way that Malcolm and I could have had kids without IVF. So No way. No way. She does notMalcolm Collins: have periods.Simone Collins: We tried not just that, like we tried everything leading up to that, like forcing. The periods forcing, more ovulation, forcing, like measuring everything, working with an IVF clinic on every step of the, no, none of it worked. And then we got a diagnosis and like there's just also other, other complications anatomically with me that would make it impossible.For me.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Our kids do [00:51:00] not exist in a no IVF world. Yeah. And, and that makes it really hard for me to support that world when you love your kids as much as you love your kids. Right. Like people love their kids. Right. And the, the thought that those kids wouldn't exist is horrifying to me. So obviously I'm ideologically very invested in this mm-hmm.But not so invested that. I can't see where they're coming from and I can't see the arguments that they're making. And the way I convince them is with logic, not with dogmatism or shrieking or exclusion.Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh, well. Oh,Malcolm Collins: well anyway, love you to DeSimone.Simone Collins: I love you too, and I love that you're a big 10 kind of guy.I am so excited for this though. Anytime someone mentions mittens Romney, I'm like, this, this is the best. Let's do it. Let's, let's [00:52:00] talk. I'm so disappointed by what could have been I.Malcolm Collins: That was during the Obama era. No way. He was gonna win.Simone Collins: I know, I know. You can't win against Obama. And I was so excited when Obama won everyone.And this is where you, MIT was probably excited when Obama won. This is where you get theMalcolm Collins: craziness of supposedly if you believe the, the posted numbers that Biden beat Obama by 16 percentage points. Which is just comical in terms of turnout. But we won't go into that 'cause that's too spicy a topic.Okay.Wait, why do you need golden pants? Because if you give me the, so I, I love you. So if you trade me, so if you trade me golden pants, then I'll get anything you want. Even golden pants and golden skirts. And golden glasses. But if you give me golden pants. Will you have golden pants, mommy? Yeah. Well, I can also, I'm gonna get you [00:53:00] Umma Infinity dollars when I become a adult if you give me those golden pants.But how will having Golden pants give you Infinity dollars? No, I can just make it when become a doctor. Oh, so you'll pay me back later? Yeah, when I go on the cruise because. Sometimes when I become a dog, then I can a dog on a cruise to help them. I can buy you gold glasses if you trade me Alma Infinity dollars. And I don't have infinity dollars. Oh, you can make, well, you can tell my dad to make some. Come it down below if you like me, because I'll tell you my whole name.I keep there for a secret for years, and I'll tell you now. Don't tell anybody if you do or not, like a subscribe to a channel, or if you don't and you do like a subscribe, [00:54:00] then uh, I can subscribe to channel. Okay. So what if someone just liked and subscribed? Are you gonna tell them your full name? Yeah.I'll tell you my full name now. My whole name, Arcadian George Cohens. I was keeping my first name, my middle name. A secret for, uh, here. Thanks buddy. I love you. Love you too. Hey, guess what subscribers? If you like us, subscribe, then we'll try buying you Golden. Then, then, um, so when you like us, the graph to the channel and put it down the wall, what you like, it'll give you it.If you went that, wow, it'll give you it when I become an adult because I'm already kid. I, my fees sold. I don't have that much money. I just have my collector. And do you see some cars and a box and. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm Collins discuss the controversial topic of allowing children to use smartphones and screens. Simone argues that preventing children from accessing technology can make you a bad parent, citing studies showing that children with access to smartphones, social media, video games, and other digital devices have better self-esteem, spend more time with friends, and engage more in physical activities. They delve into a recent study by the University of South Florida that highlights the benefits of smartphone ownership for kids aged 11 to 13. They also critique arguments from well-known author Jonathan Haidt, who believes that screens are detrimental to children's mental health. The episode also touches on personal anecdotes, discussing the impact of social media on personal and professional lives, and the evolving landscape of media and news reporting. Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, this is Simone Collins with Malcolm Collins. I'm taking over this dream today because I have found that actually you are a bad parent if you deny your child a phone in screens and that the good parents will do it because guess what?Kids are better off. When they have social media access, when they have phones and tablets and video games, andMalcolm Collins: Stu define better off, we're talking about studies here.Simone Collins: They have, they have less nihilism and a better self-esteem. They spend more time with their friends. They spend more time playing sports.They are just freaking better off with the screens and all these people. Jonathan Het who insist that the screens are the end are wrong, although we will go through their arguments and talk through some of the nuance. But first, I wanna get to this study because I'm so excited about it. It's very vindicating because we are famous for being profiled by the guardian and criticized by everyone on social media, not only for beating our children, but for having them walking around [00:01:00] the house with iPads.Chained to their necks. I needMalcolm Collins: to clarify. Barely beating our children. It was, it was a lightSimone Collins: spot. It was a mild beating. Oh my God.Soccer Boppers! Soccer Boppers! You can sock all day, and bop all night!Simone Collins: So first like huge, huge thing to, to Reason Magazine, which covered this article really well. And, and what they're covering is a new, as of April, 2025 study called. Kids with smartphones are less depressed, anxious, and bullied than peers without them..Simone Collins: So first huge hat Tip to Reason magazine for covering this research, which was done by a bunch of researchers at the University of South Florida. This was published in April, so this just came out. And these researchers investigated smartphone ownership among 11 to 13 year olds. So these are.Extremely vulnerable children who are not at all grown up and mature [00:02:00] enough to handle social media, and they're checking out how they did. So, okay. They, they did survey them, but they surveyed a good sample size. They surveyed 1,510 kids from Florida age 11 to 13.And basically on almost every metric. Measuring wellbeing, smartphone owning kids showed better results. So here are some examples.Malcolm Collins: You're not surprised at all. 11, 13. So this isn't like older kids. This isn't like teens. This is No, this is 11 to 13. This isSimone Collins: just as puberty setting in. So I would actually argue that these are some of the most vulnerable years.I don't know how this period was for you, but it was tough for me. Maybe not for you. I don't know.Malcolm Collins: Well, I can't imagine if I didn't have a smartphone. I mean, I didn't have a smartphone. You didn't a smartphone? I didn't have whatever was cool. This would be like I didn't have a smartphone and it was tough.Okay. Not having like aim during that period being one of the outcasts, you, oh my gosh.Simone Collins: Actually aim really was like one of my few sources of comfort and I think this is part of it and we're getting get into it. So kids with smartphones, oh, do youMalcolm Collins: remember all the sounds from aim that like ding [00:03:00]Simone Collins: and the door opening.Malcolm Collins: Like door opening ASimone Collins: would come in and you'd be like, yeah, that, that like, that that dopamine rush when you hear the door opening and maybe that person you have a crush on that just logged on. OhMalcolm Collins: my God. DidSimone Collins: you have crushesMalcolm Collins: on peopleSimone Collins: back in here? 100. His, his username was warped, STIG, and, and he ended up dating one of my best friends at the time, so that was a little awkward.Oh yeah. Were you, did you think he'd like talk to you? Did he ever talk to you on a Oh, like way late into the night, he was clearly like I. It was emotional cheating going on. At the very least. If they two were dating at that same time, whatever happened, those were like my first, my first late night chats.Which I think for like any, any young person even today, the, you know, the, the, the, the venue has changed, but the, the thrill of the conversation, not night chat has,Malcolm Collins: well, okay, so hold on. What did he end up doing with his life?Simone Collins: I have no [00:04:00] idea.Malcolm Collins: We'll check it before the end of this. I don'tSimone Collins: even remember what his name was.He didn't have a very easy life, like he lived at the poverty line, had a single mother. Oh. So, you know, I hope he's doing well. I, I wish him well. As, as I, I wish, well, the. Never, neverMalcolm Collins: wish somebody who didn't date you. Well, Simone, you need to wish the fury upon them. Well,Simone Collins: I, I wish both of them well. I, I can look up my, my friend, I think she had a kid actually pretty young.So good for her, right? Like right. Yeah. Oh yeah. Doing the prenatal list thing, right? Yeah. Right. And again, goes to show like income does not correlate with,Malcolm Collins: Everyone in the aim world, who, who lived at that. They know that door opening. It is always like. Is it my crush? Like, yeah. Are we gonna talk? Yeah.Are we gonna, are we gonna, it's like ding and it's like, oh my god, it's my crush. Yeah. Oh my God. Like, what are we doing?Simone Collins: So exciting. Oh yeah, that, that killed me. I'm so glad we both had aim days. And again, like for us, even at that age, [00:05:00] and I would say. Chat rooms at our age were way more dangerous. So we, gosh, it was in the early naughties, like around 2001 I guess, when we're doing this chat rooms.At the time when, when we were first going online, one of the first things that people would ask you and an anonymous chat room, which is pretty much what all of them were at the time online was a SL. Do you remember that? A-S-L-A-A sex location? Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, wait, what? That actually sounds like a great thing.Like I know a next location, I'm gonna find you. Well, you know, actually it so way, way back in the day, way before the internet. There were some, some comic books that kids would get subscriptions to and at, at the end of them, many of them would, would be little published profiles of kids with their name and address and picture.So, I don't know, man. Come on, hangMalcolm Collins: out with me, bro. Predators had itSimone Collins: soMalcolm Collins: easy back then. I don't know. I'm talkingSimone Collins: about predators now. Can'tMalcolm Collins: advertise themselves in comic [00:06:00] books.Simone Collins: It's just, it's just amazing. Okay. Look, look over there. Okay. Let's see if, let's see if she can occupy herself. Tried to set up a puzzle game for her.But anyway, let's get back to this study conducted by these wonderful, brave researchers at the University of South Florida. Again, this is Florida teens 11 or 13, andMalcolm Collins: Florida teens. So these aren't like mentally stable teens, let's mind you, right? Yeah, I, ISimone Collins: do wanna kind of caveat this of like. Okay, but this is Florida.Like for real. What else are you gonna do? You can't go outside. It's too hot. So I don't know, like, and they do, the next step I should say, that these researchers wanna take is they wanna take this study nationwide. And I am very keen to see their follow-on research. Because Florida is a very strange place.Everyone's heard of Florida man, right? Like it is not a normal place for healthy people. In our argument. And we lived there, we lived there and we. Got out. [00:07:00] But anyway the, so the, the, the research found, the survey found that kids with smartphones, tablets, social media usage and video game play, were all more likely to spend more in-person time with friends.So kids with, smartphones, for example, spend an average of three days a week playing with friends, whereas the kids, without them spend an average of two days a week with friends. What, how is this possible? Oh,Malcolm Collins: youSimone Collins: cutMalcolm Collins: the kids' tongue off. They have less friends, so I know. How are they gonnaSimone Collins: coordinate if they're not on their freaking smartphone?How are they gonna know where theMalcolm Collins: kids are hanging out? They're no wrong.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. I know. I'm just saying this is,Malcolm Collins: I'm shaming parents. I am shaming parents who don't give your kids for real social media. For real?Simone Collins: Yeah. And also, so 80% of smartphone owners, plus 82% of tablet owners reported feeling good about themselves.Okay. This is in light of the whole Facebook leak and Instagram's making girls feel terrible. No, I'm sorry. Between 80 and 82% of, of basically screen owners, yes. Report feeling good about themselves versus. 69% [00:08:00] without smartphones and 71% without tablets. These are significant differences. This is the people without the screens feel worse about themselves.Malcolm Collins: I, I can't even believe it. This is, this is wild. It's so validating. This is like the parents who deny their kids alcohol.Simone Collins: Yeah. So this let's also be denialism. AllMalcolm Collins: right, let's, soSimone Collins: 26% of smartphone free kids, so these are the, you know, lower screen kids. Agreed with a statement. Life often feels meaningless.So more than a quarter Okay, sure are like falling in nihilism versus 18% of smartphone users. So more like one out of five. All right. Like what? It's so much less. I know. And honestly, like some of this surprises me. I'm like, I don't know. Like there is a lot of nihilism on the internet right now. And no,Malcolm Collins: no, no.I don't think that's what it is. I think the people are misunderstanding broader culture for internet, as I've said, often, often, often. Within my friend circles, the ones who were most online and online first have had the most persistent resistance to the mental health crisis caused by the internet. Yeah.Well, the [00:09:00] internet isSimone Collins: a place where you allow your diviv to, to flourish. It is where your enthusiasms flourish. Like we see how our kids use social media now and they use it to explore. Things that they love and then deepen their own enjoyment of those things. IRL for example, Octavian got really into toy soldier videos on YouTube and like literally there's this one dad who just puts a GoPro on his head and then plays with toy soldiers in his kids, and it's really sweet.It's so sweet and now I don't need to play with him. You do still play with, but then like now he like has all these new scenarios of gameplay and he's like, I'm gonna do this with my toy soldiers and that with my toy soldiers. And it's the same with X shot guns. It's the same with Minecraft. And it's where they like this.This is where you get that spark and it's where you deepen it. And it's, it's, I think, you know, when you play in isolation without that additional inspiration. Yeah, I think you're gonna get more of that. You know, sadness. [00:10:00] Okay, so also, here's a really big one, right? 'cause everyone talks about cyber bullying, right?Oh, everyone's so stressed out with cyber bullying, cyber bullying. I wouldMalcolm Collins: cyberbullying the person who's not online. I'm gonna tell you that the person, well, no, and that's,Simone Collins: that's the thing though. Okay? So 32% of smartphone freed kids, so like almost a third, reported that someone had spread rumors or lies about them online compared to 18% of those with funds.So you're doing great when you're not there to, to clap back when you're not there to defend yourself. You get bullied and you still are being cyber bullied. It's not like they're not aware of it. And of course, actually they're probably, maybe more of them are bulliedMalcolm Collins: because, no, these kids, because here's the thing, they're the little pussy kids.And I remember these kids when I was growing up, they're the kids whose parents are like, oh, you can't engage with modern media. Oh, you can't watch, you know, Disney, or you can't watch whatever. Like you can't read Harry Potter. Like of course these kids are getting bullied. Like, yeah. What are you even thinking?And it is okay, like it's okay for your kids to be bullied. You wanna put them in an environment where they can be bullied and they can get stronger for it. Yeah. But you [00:11:00] want them to have a way to offend themselves. Like you don't want them, that's the point. To be bullied because you clipped their wings.Yeah.Simone Collins: No, and there's also this whole genre actually it's a small one, but on social media where parents are like really proud of how they've taught their kids to bully back. Which is great. And then they like, they like try to like sit around and wait for their kids to get insulted to see what they say.Like, one guy recorded his, his kid like at a little baseball diamond and some other kid was like, your dick is the size of a tic-tac. And the kid's like, yeah, that's why your mom's breath smells so good. Oh. Like you don't fit that. If you don't sharpen your child, you gotta prepare them. You that, that is a goodMalcolm Collins: one, by the way.I love that the kid came up with that off. Oh, my kid came up with that off the spot. I'd be so proud. No. Right. I'd share that online. I, but you don't,Simone Collins: you don't develop that if you do not play in rough and tumble environments online, you can't sharpen yourself. You, where do you get those ideas? If you're just sitting there thinking and that, you know, there's been a lot of research done.You actually opened my eyes to this [00:12:00] on. What did people do before they were smartphones? Because everyone's like, Ugh, so disgusting. People can't just wait in line at the store without staring at their phones. People can't just sit and wait for a plane without staring at their phones. People are so baller for raw dogging a flight.Okay, what are they doing? They're just sitting there. I. All right. Maybe they're imagining something like they're not learning anything new. They're not getting exposed to new ideas.Malcolm Collins: Actually, you're wrong about this. There's some great old pictures of this, of what were people doing before smartphones?Okay. And everyone is looking at a newspaper or book.Simone Collins: Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, when you could and when you didn't have one. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Just staring into space. That's certainly better for you. Yeah. Like,Simone Collins: oh, let's have our kids do that. Because I mean, most like, and people are, oh, like these kids, little toddlers who are given iPads, well, they can't read.You can be like, read a book. No. Okay. And we'll, we'll get to that more too. Because this sort of comes into the, the criticisms of social media. But I also wanna point out that heavy social media users in this Florida Kid Survey were more likely than [00:13:00] lighter social media users to report exercising or playing sports at least once a day.So 50% of the heavy social media users, well of course they gotta look buff actually. Yeah. Versus 31%. So the lighter social media users.Malcolm Collins: I remember I have a vivid memory as a, as a young boy of like exercising a lot in a gym and then like checking my biceps in the mirror to like make sure it looked good.Oh, okay.And like the thing is, is they never really changed that much. Like no matter how much effort I put in, nothing ever. Like, they, you'd get a bit more tone. Careful, Malcolm. All thoseSimone Collins: lift bro, people are gonna come at you. Oh yeah, you do.Malcolm Collins: But like, and look, I've got members of my family who are fairly buff. Like I know if I actually put in the effort, but like I feel like I put in enough effort back there. I put in like 30, 45 minutes a day. Like that's a lot.Simone Collins: Well, I think it's also underrated how much practical or I guess you could say applied weightlifting.We do. Because we are constantly [00:14:00] hauling around our children. What I,Malcolm Collins: what I mean by this is, is like even if I put in a lot, I remember how scrawny I still looked in the mirror, right? Like it wasn't like, oh, okay, I look, I remember being happy for the slightest bit of definition.Simone Collins: But here's the thing, so just like.Women seem to think these days based on what they see on social media, are just trends that like contouring is necessary and a lot of women claim that it's for male audiences. No. That kind of makeup. No, no, no. Absolutely. And I, and I also, same with weightlifting. Men think somehow, like, and again, this is, I think that, you know, they, they just make these assumptions when they're trying to just sew it, that weightlifting makes them sexier to women.No, this is a man to man signaling thing. Just like makeup in it beyond the very basics is a woman to woman signaling thing,Malcolm Collins: period. Oh, absolutely. And, and, and, and the point I'm making here is that when I did all of this. No girl had even kissed me. No girl had shown any [00:15:00] interest in me. No girl. This is not, this was before.Yeah. Right. Your,Simone Collins: your breakthrough was when you discovered that leaning into your nerd persona.Malcolm Collins: Okay. No, I was like, oh, the nerd persona is what they like. That's it. And that's it. Anyway. Anyway,Simone Collins: so let's get, so I, I will say, you know, because obviously some of this stuff is just, it seems impossibly good. I, I feel like Florida has.Some, something to do with it. Maybe we might have more moderated results when they go nationwide. We'll see. But there were some negative things and I think the negative things are super straightforward and kind of no, duh. So. The one, the one thing they found was obviously if kids slept with their phones, they got less sleep.Like, thank you Captain. Obvious. That makes perfect sense. Yeah. You probably shouldn't sleep with your phone. Like adults shouldn't sleep with, no one should sleep with their phones. They also found that I know. Well, you canMalcolm Collins: look, the problem with sleeping with your phone is you don't wanna risk it getting pregnant.That was a, that was a dad joke. That was a dad joke. They alsoSimone Collins: found that heavy gamers and social media users [00:16:00] reported more sleep problems. So, so children who often post to social media platforms were found in this research to be twice as likely as those who never or rarely post to report moderate or severe symptoms of depression, 54 versus 25% moderate or severe symptoms of anxiety, 50 to 24%, or having sleep issues.But they also point out that this is a correlary and not causational thing. Of course, we're just looking at correlations and I think that people who have other problems in life will do things excessively, like typically excessive. Anything if it's not like a sign of, of just an addictive personality is often a sign of, you know, trying to bury your, your depression and anxiety that were already there because your life sucks.And you and I were just talking today about how. The school system, the legacy and industrial school system are just so bad that even you, the Renegade and I, the perfect girl who followed all the rules. We're both [00:17:00] completely miserable at school. And it was the, the depression that we felt. Yeah. Which was in, in, I think both of our cases.Clinical. Right. I think you, you were diagnosed as depression. Well, yeah, but I don't believe in clinical. No. Well, but anyway, it was measured as clinical depression was entirely situational. Mine at least went away as, as I got outta school. So,Malcolm Collins: yeah. No, yeah. I, I, all of this is the thing. I actually used to grind my teeth severely.Right. Like it would cause me major issues and I had to wear a night guard. Yeah. Used to wearSimone Collins: this like. Like football player.Malcolm Collins: You know, when I stopped wearing my night guard is when I started dating Simone. That's soSimone Collins: romanticMalcolm Collins: and I've never needed to wear it since. And you know, somebody could be like, were you really that less dressed?Like apparently sleep in me, couldn't deal with life back then. I just ground my teeth and ground my teeth every night. And then. I met Simone and I started sleeping with, and this was early in our relationship too, not like after we had like, I'd say first like five months of our relationship. And I was just like, I can't, I don't need to wear this anymore.And, [00:18:00] and I never needed to wear it again. And I remember before that I didn't wear it one night and I broke one of my teeth.Simone Collins: Oh, that's awful.Malcolm Collins: And that's why I wore it so fastidiously after that, 'cause I was so freaked out about it happening again. Yeah,Simone Collins: that's, that is terrifying. It's breaking a tooth. I can't, oh, I can't even, anyway.So also they found that frequent social media posters were more likely to report sleep issues and symptoms of depression and anxiety. But again, I think anyone who does something in excess may, that may be a symptom of some other underlying issue. So I'm not giving that too much credence. Finally, I wanted to point out just some interesting findings that are like neither here nor there.From the research that it was just like, huh, like, okay. Okay. Tell me, tell me, so there were, there were, there were significant shifts in app usage, depending on household income. So can you guess what was used most amongst the, the kids in households with an annual income of $50,000 or less?Malcolm Collins: Hold on TikTok?Simone Collins: No. [00:19:00] No. YouTube was one of them. The other one you're not gonna guess is Roblox. But I kind of, I kind of dig it. I think I get a very low class feel from Roblox. Roblox does feel local. I don't know what it feels very well. It feels very, it's like the minions of children, you know? It's like very, I don't wanna say cruise ship human 'cause actually cruise ships are very expensive.But I, I want, it's, it is like, it's not, it's not the intellectuals world. If I may,Malcolm Collins: yes.Simone Collins: All right. Minecraft is more of an intellectuals world. There are other, there are other games so, classMalcolm Collins: influencers. So canSimone Collins: you imagine what, what kids used most from higher income households?Malcolm Collins: No idea. Think aboutSimone Collins: your mother.What, what platforms was she really big on?Malcolm Collins: She was on Insta. Mm-hmm.Simone Collins: And. TikTokMalcolm Collins: TikTok. Really?Simone Collins: So I'm like, oh my gosh. Wow. The,Malcolm Collins: the platforms like, well, those are the ones that my, like cousins and stuff all use, like [00:20:00] the young ones.Simone Collins: Yeah. And they're all like super freaking,Malcolm Collins: you know, all the photos of them were like,Simone Collins: this is me and Ka, this is me in Italy.This is me in, in the house in Maine. You know, like, they're all, they're so, like, I, what I'm so concerned about is that. I can't remember the name for this like short term profession of hot girls on Instagram who during college just get invited to really expensive clubs by club promoters to basically be like sexy women at tables with like really wealthy guys buying bottle service.But like, I feel like they're, they don't realize that they're trying to audition for that, but they are. By trying to do what's trendy, subconsciously auditioning for that, just about to start college. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. It's like stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it. Continue. Although, like I, I also read this, this great blog post by a young woman who just [00:21:00] interviewed a bunch of her friends who actually did that.And they're like, yeah, I mean, it was fine. Like. I didn't get addicted to the drugs. Like it was just fun and then like, it, it was over. So, I don't know.Malcolm Collins: Interesting that it's so different from me. So there's a few people in my family that have taken this other route,Simone Collins: Uhhuh, whichMalcolm Collins: is like the, well, in my generation it was like the goth route, right?Like,Simone Collins: yeah, your family doesn'tMalcolm Collins: do that. This generation, what is it? You know, like, and generation before, it's like that brony route. And this generation, what is it? It's, it's the, it is the center right route. Like no, genuinely I think being a center, right, like Gen Alpha person is about equivalent to like being a gohar punk gen alpha person in our generation.Simone Collins: Yeah. So there's another, there's another social class slash income related finding that I thought was interesting. They found that kids from higher income households were also significantly more likely to post publicly on social media. So 77, 70 7% of kids from the highest income households. Posted publicly versus 56% among kids from the lowest income households.So now every time I [00:22:00] like click to a colleague or friends. Private social media feed. I'm gonna be like, mm. Hello Class.Malcolm Collins: Hello class. Hello class.Simone Collins: I mean, I know it's, we, we have lots of wealthy friends who decide to go private and you're like, my privacy, no, I hate them. We alwaysMalcolm Collins: go like, Ooh, my privacy. My privacy good.To me, they're talking about, we're like, we're like, you guys suck. Yeah. Like, it's so lame.Simone Collins: And another thing, this isn't, I mean, it's partially related to income and it's partially related to gender. They found a large percentage of kids overall agreed with the sentiment. Life often feels meaningless with agreement significantly higher among boys, which surprised me.'cause Jonathan, he's whole thing is like girls are getting hit harder. Whereas 23% of boys versus 13% of, is JonathanMalcolm Collins: Height full of a big bag of poop?Simone Collins: Not exactly we're gonna get into that, but like 23% of boys reported feeling this versus 16% of girls and then among kids from higher income households.[00:23:00]More of them. Were feeling this nihilism. 31% in high income households, one 50 K. The higherMalcolm Collins: income kids are all like mentally messed up right now. Yeah. AndSimone Collins: that's why like spoons are all like upper middle class girls,Malcolm Collins: white girls. Oh yeah. No, ofSimone Collins: course they're,Malcolm Collins: yeah. And then only,Simone Collins: so only 10% of the kids in households making 10 K, or sorry, 50 K or below as household income.Reported this, this, that they identified with the sentiment. Life often feels meaningless, which I just like.Malcolm Collins: Which shows, you know, people are gonna see all this and they're gonna be like, oh, the rich kids are online more. That's why you see the mental health more among the people who are online more. And what we're pointing out here is no, actually you have a countertrend to that.It really is being online more. And having access to these online environments increases your mental health at this age, within this current cultural context? Well,Simone Collins: there are confounding factors. I think what this is more parsing out is that girls what this is pointing out is [00:24:00] being wealthy can associate you, I think with some cultures that are more toxic.And that being closer to the lower income range may separate you more from what I would consider to be the urban monoculture. I think the urban monoculture is inherently a culture of wealth and privilege. And, and I just see that as more as like evidence that lower income distances you from the Iwan culture and also reduces your feelings of nihilism.So in terms of just in general, the researchers take away advice to people, which I think is super solid because screens are great, but they're not perfect. They say, one, it's actually fine to let kids as young as 11 have smartphones. Fantastic. But you should. That's fine. Protect it. No, ai we're, we're saying, I mean, we personally would say below that age is great, but they, they only survey kids 1113.ThisMalcolm Collins: is what I say about kids. I think it's really [00:25:00] dangerous to allow kids to have friends that are ai.Simone Collins: Dangerous. No, it's good to have friends who are ai. We don't want real friends who areMalcolm Collins: notis.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I I think, I think giving your kids real humans will reject them. Humans are gross.Humans. Can gr themis do none of that?Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Ais don't. Well, but when they do it, it's in the, the, the way you want, you know.Malcolm Collins: Oh God. Okay. Anyway, continue. Continue. Yeah. Go into this. Yeah.Simone Collins: But so like, yes. Phone's good. But don't let your kids sleep with your phones, which is great. They, they also, they, they discourage having young children post publicly on social platforms.I disagree with this, and we've talked about this in other episodes, but we think that one of the only ways that you are going to survive in the post AI economy is to have a strong online reputation. And to be really known for something and to be able to [00:26:00] make custom products and provide custom experiences that other people aren't known for doing, because that's the only way, either from wealthy people living in their walled gardens or your local community is going to know to mm-hmm.Buy services or, or products from you. I disagree with him on that, but I don't disagree with him on the, on the sleep thing. And what we do, of course is like, we're really careful about making sure that there's, you know, screen access is, is limited.It's, it's, it's very time gated and I think that, that, that's a good thing.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, we're building new AI products for our kids right now that allow them to just like, talk to an AI that will constantly draw them back to educational topics. And so we'll see when that's built and that can be available to you guys.And I don't understand why we're the only ones making this stuff like. Is everyone else retarded? I, you know,Simone Collins: I, so what, what we see among our friend group, which is, you know, highly educated, wealthy elites, [00:27:00] is. A screen bad screen, badMalcolm Collins: scream, bad. It's because they're, they're losers. They're losers. That's why.And this is a level of, of wealthy beyond what they consider wealthy in this study. Right? Like, yeah,Simone Collins: because they consider wealthy making over $150,000. These are people generally would be like a millionMalcolm Collins: plus a year.Simone Collins: Yeah, they have like unlimited ELTA MD sunscreen sitting around their house. It's insane.Malcolm Collins: ELTA MD sunscreen.Simone Collins: Oh yeah. IMalcolm Collins: remember we went to it for there. You're like,Simone Collins: this is insane. Why are you, I feel like I'm looking at gold bricks sitting on a shelf. Yeah. I don't know. Like my, my indicators of wealth are a little bit different. Just like I think you, and I think like true wealth is never thinking twice about ordering walk at a restaurant, but I don't know if we've ever reached some level of wealth where we.Well,Malcolm Collins: no, because we are so, like whenever we make more money, we always just spend it on like our companies and stuff, you know, like it justSimone Collins: goes away. Yeah. Mm-hmm. But whatever. That's, that's all good. So I also wanna get [00:28:00] into though, like, why, why are all these wealthy elite people like phone bad? And I partially, which data areMalcolm Collins: they looking at?Simone Collins: What data are they? And I think mostly. They're sitting and listening to Jonathan Het and being like, mm, yeah. Yes. Because he is the author of the book, the Anxious, anxious Generation. So like he had recently this huge push to talk about what he describes as the great rewiring of childhood in which play-based childhood is being supplanted by a phone-based childhood.So, among other things, you know, it's a decline in time, God friends, oh, actuallyMalcolm Collins: a step back from this and, and yell at him. So. Our kids, if they go outside and they play in the creek without us monitoring them. And we need to be monitoring all of them at once, which is like, you can't do that for that long.And, and this is what I used to do as a kid at their age. I just go play outside. I go play with the dogs and local dogs. I go dig up things. I'd make little dams. They'll have CPS call on them. I'll have the cops call [00:29:00] on me.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: I put my kids on Minecraft. That's exactly what they're doing.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: My little boy shows me what he's doing on Minecraft.It's like, oh look, I found out if you give the dog a bone, he likes you more. It's like, oh look, I found out that when you pour water on lava, it like makes stone. Oh look. They are exploring and engaging with the environment and if you deny a kid both playing outside and Minecraft, you have denied them the entire experience.But continue.Simone Collins: Yeah. No, I mean. Yes, but we're, you know, we'll go deeper on this. But yeah, he argues that there's been a decline in time spent with friends since 2010. But again, this research shows that the kids with smartphones spend more time with kids. Anyway, well, we'll keep going. He also argues that girls are more affected by social media due to social comparison and cyber bullying while bought boys.Are more impacted by, and here we go again. Gaming and pornography leadingMalcolm Collins: to social withdrawal. Take a few notes here. The girls being more impacted. We actually saw this in [00:30:00] another episode. I don't know if it'll run before this one or not. But what we found in that episode is that social media affected your mental health much more dramatically if you were progressive than anywhere.Conservative.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And this, and thatSimone Collins: really shows just how much of this is urban monoculture. It, it's, it's cultural. And the urban monoculture is a culture that, that makes mental health problems faster. What I'mMalcolm Collins: making is, is this is why girls are more negatively affected by it, not because girls are intrinsic, the political leanings.Their political leanings are more leftists, and that's why they're more negatively affected by it. Yeah. In terms of the gaming and pornography thing a lot of what people say about like, how, so for example, if you go to a prison and you, and you look at these rapists versus the non rapists. Okay.Rapists typically started engaging with pornography at a much later age than the non-US.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like that's why in our marriage contract, this is actually one of the first things that. Was, was in our marriage contract was are we going to restrict our [00:31:00] children's access to erotic material? And there was never any conflict.It was just like, no, obviously not. That's obviously not, I don't want them to up to. P. DAMalcolm Collins: files and rapistsSimone Collins: because we, yeah, we knew this intuitively. Even just when like negotiating points. Alright.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, sorry. Just like really clear touch relationship contract that like some people are like, Ooh, but my intuition, well your intuition is wrong.Okay. This is something that has been studied extensively and restricting access increases the rate of being interested in children, being interested in great. Being interested in like. Oh my God, it's so horrifying. In, in, in like the Czech Republic when they made it legal again, I wanna say it was the Czech Republic, right?The, the amount of child assault dropped by 50% and this result has been seen multiple times across multiple countries. Yeah. Being anti-porn is being pro child grape in the, in the, and, and you can be like, well, aesthetically I'm against both. That's a bit like being like, well. You know, I'm, I'm [00:32:00] anti-nuclear and pro environment.It's like, okay, like that may work with your base, but realistically that proves you don't actually care about either.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. It's performative and that, that really bothers us. So I think, you know, a lot of this comes down to people misattributing. Mo problems of modern culture and overregulation of parenting to social media and screen use when really.That's not it at all. So some of the studies, for example, that height highlights one is from 2020 called Underestimating Digital Media Harm, published in the Journal Nature Human Behavior, so very respectable journal. The finding basically of the study was that they wanted to critique earlier research like 2019 research that downplayed social media's impact, arguing that social media use, especially among girls, show stronger correlations with depression and anxiety when controlling only for demographic variables, they countered claims that affects are as [00:33:00] trivial as quote unquote eating potatoes when apparently that's kind of what turned out to be true. And I think the problem is with this correlation, not causation. They, they saw that people who used a lot of social media, you know, experienced problems, but also like people who masturbate too much, people who eat too much, people who exercise too much, who do anything too much probably have other problems.And it's just really annoying to me that that. Was cited. So he also cited another 2020 study called Commentary Screens, teens and Psychological Wellbeing, published in Frontiers in Psychology. Again, a very respected journal. This study analyzes time use diary studies, and they found that heavy screen use correlates with reduced wellbeing, particularly for girls.But again, if there's a girl. Who's spending five plus hours on her phone every day? Something's probably wrong. Like she's alone, she's isolated. She doesn't have other things to do. She doesn't haveMalcolm Collins: friends. That means she doesn't have a, a community. That means she doesn't have Oh my God. Siblings.Simone Collins: Yeah.Would, would you not be shocked that she has [00:34:00] problems? Yeah, like obviously if you have five hours to do that, you're being deprived of something. They also so height also in his book and, and work in general cites a lot the British Millennium Cohort study, which found that among 19,000 children born between 2000 and 2002, girls spending over five hours a day on social media we're three times more likely to be depressed than non-users.And the correlation was weaker for boys. But again, like this is just what we said. This is another one of his issues. And then he also referred to the 2021 Facebook leak. I think this is a little bit more. Damning because basically internal meta research showed that Instagram harmed teen girls' mental health, particularly their body image.And yeah, they continue to, oh, bodyMalcolm Collins: image what?Simone Collins: Well, and that's it. I mean, I, I just really dunno. I think it's very hard to be a teen girl and not have some form of body dysmorphia. Like I had body dysmorphia. And you know, if, if like a therapist or some psychologist were to analyze me, [00:35:00] they would probably think it's from the manga I read and they'd be like, oh, it's the manga that's causing it.No, I was going through puberty. I had body dysmorphia because I, I hated my body and it's very normal. Like I, I just, they today they'd sayMalcolm Collins: it's because you're trans.Simone Collins: Yeah, well, yeah, that too. But here they're just, you know, blaming. You need to be sterilized,Malcolm Collins: chemically. That's the only solution.Simone Collins: Like girls just, I mean, you know.There, there are always ideals that, that girls are gonna turn to somewhere and there's going to be problems and, and just, you know, like I, I, I just, yeah, it's, I I get it. I, I do think that Instagram can even make me sometimes feel like I need to hold myself to a higher standard. I don't think that's really a bad thing, and I don't think Instagram makes my life worse.Mm-hmm. So then he also looked at some key research center research that found that half of teens reported feeling addicted to their phones. And nearly 100% of US teams were on smartphones with half reporting that they were constantly, constantly on their smartphones. I think that this is one of those things where like you can go back in time and find [00:36:00] writers decrying the overuse of.Books and periodicals and then the radio used toMalcolm Collins: the, so for people who don't know this the ways that people are freaking out about this stuff today, they used to freak out about books. They'd be like, oh, and radio. AndSimone Collins: phones and television.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But, but, but books as, I think the thing where everyone today is gonna be like, okay, that was clearly stupid.Yeah. But interesting about the book freakout is that they said it disproportionately affected women. Well, you can evenSimone Collins: kind of see this in this, in the trope of Bell and Beauty and the Beast being Yes. So stuck in her books and it was like, this girl has a problem. She won't rid her books to her. And then she goes to the Beast House and he has like the equivalent of like, I don't know, it's like a social media house andMalcolm Collins: isSimone Collins: a social media.She'sMalcolm Collins: always goSimone Collins: libraries. It's like, oh, he got a smartphone. I, I don't even know. It's just like, oh, he is. Like the best internet. I, it's just so strange.And then he, he also looked at international data on mental health [00:37:00] trends pointing out that anxiety increased 134% of depression, 106% among US youth from 2010 to 2018 with Gen Z born post 1995 hit hardest with the 139% increase.He also cited similar trends in the UK now. Yeah, totally. But it's not the screens, it's the culture, it's progressivism. And we've shown thisMalcolm Collins: for when you are online a ton and you are a conservative, it doesn't negatively affect your mental health. If you are online a ton and you are progressive, it does no wonder it is negatively affecting girls more.He didn't control for that. So this high guy sounds like a bit of aSimone Collins: No, he's great. I mean, he's very smart and I mean, and I think, you know. We're a little bit, we're being a little bit too mean here because he does have this subtle, like he argues that like you need to have kids interact with each other and play outside.And what I love about this new research is it's like, yes, and these things go [00:38:00] together that the kids who have the phones also exercise more, play with their friends more have better self-esteem, have lower nihilism. No, no,Malcolm Collins: no. What gets me is that he didn't run this study. He could have run this study.I. He didn't because it wouldn't have agreed Oh, to to, yeah, for like,Simone Collins: to, to confirm allMalcolm Collins: of this stuff was always correlational and he could have just said, okay, let's separate these two groups.Simone Collins: I mean, I, I didn't admittedly look for research that looked for causation that like had a, some kind of double line study where some kidsMalcolm Collins: were deprived to social.I dunno, this whole thing, I don't, I don't like, I don't like it, I don't like these anti-tech people. I will say, you know, there,Simone Collins: there was actually though, I, I, I want, I just wanna point out that some. Some schools like had concerted, let's remove all screens, programs that really curtailed students' social media use and it didn't help them.Malcolm Collins: And there was one school that did AI tutoring for kids and it bumped them into the top 1% of students in the state.Simone Collins: Right. And that also, like studies have shown that [00:39:00] ai, therapists perform better than real therapists for people. So, ah, like we were totally right. We were totally right to chain iPad,Malcolm Collins: Simone, we will replace you and I'm okay with that.You know, you're, you are, you are. We will raise stronger, more sturdy children and time. You can look at our children when they grow up. You know, you can, you can, oh, look at your kids. They all ended up messed up. Maybe. But if they didn't, then we were right and you were wrong.Simone Collins: I mean, yeah, but I, so here's, here's what I think happened.I, I think height, if we were talking with him and he'd be like, yeah, hey, like, I recognize this. The argument I'm making is that parents need to let their kids play outside more. The problem of course, is that parents clap back with like. Yes. And we're not allowed to. We will get arrested. We can't let our kids lay outside.And so this is just a really difficult situation. It just bothers me that a [00:40:00] huge signaler in parenting communities is we don't do screens. I don't allow my children to be on screens, and they're setting up their kids for. I think a lot of harm because one here we're seeing that kids are more socially isolated.More nihilistic. Oh, come on. The reason this guy has these kids is he only hasMalcolm Collins: two kids. Yeah, of course. He doesn't know that's actually normal. Can't just let kids play outside in the current like legal climate, like, ugh.Simone Collins: Well, one thing I wanna say too, though, is that I think there are some exceptions. So I know some parents who do have strict no screen policies, but they also exist within like extremely tight knit religious communities.And so their kids are like constantly interacting with people and themselves,Malcolm Collins: and they have big, I think that's fine if you're in like an extreme, but likeSimone Collins: most kids are, you know, a, a single child. Or they have one sibling. And often, like more than often than not, I've seen like pretty big age gaps with siblings these days too, [00:41:00] which is like, that means you don't really have a close friend.You just kind of have a competitor for attention that annoys you and you can't really relate to, which is extra difficult and sad. That seems like the worst type of sibling to have. Is one that has like a, an age gap where you guys just can't play together and really relate. Which is why we try to have boy, boy, girl, girls side by side, so they can at least have like one super close friend that they can really, really strongly relate to.That's of the same gender, so they can go through those things together. But yeah, it's like I'm okay. With holier than now parents being like, I don't do screens when their kids have all these other things to do in strong religious communities. But that's just not the norm in the United States and in many parts of Europe.So all of our like, and, and again, all those wealthy, well-educated parents that we're thinking of, they don't do that. They're not like that. These are the people with two kids Max. And these kids are. Like I, I just can't imagine like the frustration they're going through and I feel really bad, but hopefully this research will get to them.Reason Mag is, is pretty well read [00:42:00] among these types of people, right? So like. Hopefully it'll get to them. Right? Maybe.Malcolm Collins: I don't know. Anyway here's a fun thing from today is, is yesterday you did an interview with a b, C. Can you tell me? Yeah. It was the oddestSimone Collins: thing. So yeah, this is, this is you know, A, B, C, it's owned by Disney.They, they wanted to do a segment on the, the executive orders we submitted and the Trump administration considering prenatal as policy. And they're like, Hey, you know, we, we wanna, we wanna run this in the morning. And. It's, it's gonna go on our new segment and like, but we have to record tonight.And I'm like, why? Like, I, I don't get it. Like, how, how do we do this? And they're like, just like, can you come on at eight? And so I do. And. I joined this Zoom call and I'm met by a really nice young man. Like he was just so sweet and, and so patient and so kind. But like on the call was him and I could see him sitting alone in a giant, like a BC studio, like classic like newsroom for an old legacy news publication.No one else there just empty [00:43:00] desks. 'cause he was doing the night shift where mm-hmm. It looks like what they do is they just prepare all of the segments for the morning no show, which starts at four 4:00 AM. Ahead of time. And then I think what happens is the newscasters pretend to interview people. Like, I haven't actually seen the Segment tv.No, but I love this as they're like,Malcolm Collins: why is news dying? Where? Where's the authenticity? Oh, I'll tell you where the authenticity is, is right here. You, mother, mother, mother.Simone Collins: Well, because what seems to have happened is what? What he did. Is is there was also like, I guess a producer on the phone too. 'cause he was like talking with someone else the whole time of being like, oh, that's so that, that is dystopia that he'd like go, yeah, I'm like, I, I couldn't see or hear this producer, but the producer was telling him what to do and then he'd ask me a question and I would give my answer and he asked another question.And what seems to happen is he recorded a bunch of answers. And what I think was gonna happen was that Ben, like the reporter that next morning would act as though she's asking me the questions and then I would show up as the talking head with that. And yeah, like to your [00:44:00] point, if that's what happened and I wanna see this segment, that's not, you know, that's not authentic media.That's not I think that's not what people are here for. They wanna see real live conversations. And of course, to be fair, other media outlets had us on live, CNN's situation room, had us on live today with Andy screaming and everything. And then who is it that was here this afternoon?Malcolm Collins: Newsweek. Oh, what was it?This was, this was, oh, something things or something like that. What was it? They didn't reach outSimone Collins: to me, so I have no idea who they are. You tell me some big,Malcolm Collins: some big news. Okay, I'll look it up. It's in my, it's in my notes here. It's some big news station.Simone Collins: But they actually came out and interviewed. And so I guess, I guess some, some legacy medias like really doing original reporting, but others, like even when they get original sources and you still have to give credit to anyone who actually gives us a chance to comment and talk.But it was just such a weird process of like, wait, so I'm speaking with a young associate. [00:45:00] Working for Disney and then his like mysterious producer who's only talking to him. It's Inside Edition,Malcolm Collins: by the way. That's what it was. Inside Edition.Simone Collins: Okay. Well, they were, they were great. Very professional. And the, again, like this kid working for Disney also was great.It was just really weird the way it was done. It just like. Recording me doing some, like, talking head things. And then I guess they're splicing it into their news show, making it look more authentic in life without it actually being live, which I get like, it is easier, especially when it's early in the morning.Most people aren't gonna wake up at 4:00 AM and do a live interview. So, you know, but it was still, it was a, I always wonder when I watch the news, like how these things are going. And it's interesting to see the different ways they play out. Like when we were on CNN today. Joining the call was really weird.'cause normally on shows and podcasts, you join a Zoom call and you can see everyone. Whereas with CNN, like they have this, their, their special proprietary link to join and you're just looking at this gray screen with some instructions on it and then you just, yeah, that was like,Malcolm Collins: I almost felt like unprofessional and insulting.I was like, what are you guys doing? Like, well, I think theySimone Collins: [00:46:00] didn't, they don't want people to be distracted by their faces. No, that's notMalcolm Collins: what it is. They just don't care. They don't care about anything, feeling authentic. They don't care about anything touching the, the body. I don't know.Simone Collins: I mean, I re I remember, so I used to listen to NPR like throughout my entire, it was like the wallpaper of my childhood, the audio wallpaper of my childhood.And a big issue that happened with people calling in is they kept having to say like, turn off your radio. Turn off your radio. Because they would be listening to themselves as they talked on the radio and then getting distracted and just being like, oh my God, I'm on the radio. And I think maybe there's like this thing with, you know, people onMalcolm Collins: sweetheart.Simone Collins: I don't, I don't think it was just that because you couldn't hear it as a listener, even when it was live. Okay. All I'm saying. I I just find this, this contrast between new and old media to be really interesting and I love that the Trump administration has added to the fringes. Oh, yeah, yeah. They did suchMalcolm Collins: great job with the Press Corps.It's amazing. It's amazing.Simone Collins: Yeah. So what, what they've done for those who don't know is, [00:47:00] is in, in the White House press. Briefing room. There traditionally has been this audience of chairs that is all dedicated to legacy media companies, like only the privileged and the establishment get to be there.Now they're allowing standing room only space at the fringes where they have a rotational group of new media. Reporters, and this is people, podcasters, substack, writers, YouTubers, talkers sit and actually ask questions. And they field about 25% of their questions from this fringe group, which is a really big deal.And I mean, the legacy media freaking hates it because they used to have, you know, all the question time, all of the respect. But I think that the Trump administration, and I'm sure featured administrations will do this too, is recognizes that the audiences. Are not necessarily watching a lot of these legacy news channels.And I, I mean, I, I, we see this like you, you see some, some legacy news channels get like millions of views. Yes. [00:48:00] But then like there are some that, like I am, I would be surprised if they got 3000 views for news segment. I No,Malcolm Collins: I agree. I know. I actually think that most only get about 3000 views p new segment.Yeah. When I see,Simone Collins: yeah. So. Interesting times. Very interesting times. But yeah, I'm, I'm just so thrilled. I feel so vindicated that like, okay. Thank you again. Social media, it's not about sheltering, it's about annotation. It is about showing how to use it productively. It is about, IMalcolm Collins: agree, it, it's not about sheltering, it's about beating.You need to lightly beat your child while with, with, with the iPad, with, with the device.Simone Collins: With the device. Oh no. That's why you have those protective screens so you don't break them accidentallyMalcolm Collins: can't wait. You build AI that can beat my People are afraid of like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I need, I need an AI that can bot my kid when they're making mistakes.You're so sweet. By the way, Simone, what are we doing for dinner tonight? What's the story? What's the story?Simone Collins: We are doing [00:49:00] more pineapple curry for you. I love it. I can try. To do fried, sorry, fried plantains for the first time. I'm a little nervous.Malcolm Collins: We try. You cannot mess it up too much in worst case scenario, just microwave some rice.Simone Collins: Yeah. See, that's the thing. Yeah. What I do is I, I make coconut lime rice for Malcolm in big batches, and then I freeze it in single serve packets in the freezer. Oh my God.Malcolm Collins: You used to pay like six bucks for coconut lime rice as like, instead of like the, the $2 rice at like restaurants and you're like making it for free.What? Not for free. I mean, you put in all this effort and love.Simone Collins: Well, you, I mean, we we're still paying for the coconut and for limes. And it does cost extra. ItMalcolm Collins: cost barely nothing. Like,Simone Collins: yeah. What, what is a Trader Joe's can of coconut milk? Like,Malcolm Collins: is it like a dollar 50 you're missing? Is that if you go to like an Indian or, or Japanese restaurant, like the, the coconut lime rice or the coconut or lime rice costs like $6 and the other rice costs like a dollar 50.Simone Collins: No, it's true. Yeah. The, the upcharge [00:50:00] is insane for, for that stuff really. Gets my goat.Malcolm Collins: But like they've never been able to make curry as good as your tropical curry, which I love. You know what else isSimone Collins: insane in terms of upcharges though? Is garlic non versus butter non, like, are you kidding me? It's literally you're just slapping garlic on top.Yeah. Like I know you have a lot of mint garlic sitting back there. I know you do. What? Why are you charging me 30% more? For exactly. Sometimes even 50% more. Like typically you'll see Yeah. If, if, if if plain non is $3, then garlic non is $5.Malcolm Collins: Right. It's insane. It makes no sense if you understand how they're made.It's bad price discrimination right there. I love you, Simone, for learning how to make all these dishes. You didn't when we got married. You were the perfect wife. .Simone Collins: You are a heavenlyMalcolm Collins: beast.Simone Collins: Oh,Malcolm Collins: and I mean that in the, in the, in the [00:51:00] most adoration possible way.Simone Collins: Well, I live to serve, and I mean that in the most submissive and breathable way.That's so cringe. Ah, instant regret. Instant regret your mic fell out again. That is, that is, that is what every guyMalcolm Collins: wants. I'll tell you what, okay. Well listen in breathable wine and every woman doesn't want that. I've seen, I've read 50 Shades of Gray. Okay. I've read these. I don't think, do they in, in this series, do they?ISimone Collins: don't think they ever have kids,Malcolm Collins: do they? I mean, no, but I've seen the progressives who go out there cosplaying as like. You know, tale Women. Yeah. You should watch our episode on that if you haven't seen it. Yeah, it'sSimone Collins: funny, they don't, they don't cosplay as. The Marthas, they don't cosplay as like the, the, the wives.These actually oppressed people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, because actually the Handmaids have a, a fairly privileged role. You know, they get to pick food. They're [00:52:00] household, they're me. Hi. Yeah. They're, why do they, why do they dress up with, with the sexual fetish ones in this, in this whole, you know why? We all know why.It's a little questionable. Yeah. People who think that we're perverted, just read the Pragma Guide to Sexuality. You'll discover how we actually feel about sex. I think people think that we're like. Really into it because we talk about it when we talk about it the same way your mic's unplugged again. No, no.Malcolm Collins: Sorry. I don't think that excuse by this. I don't think that's anybody who's like, oh, they're actually like really in, I think that that's why we're able to talk about it, because people know that like we're not into it, and so it's not like,Simone Collins: oh, no, no. Like people, people have DM me and they're like, oh, I bet you're into this.Like, oh, I bet you like, no, we, we did. No, no.Malcolm Collins: Themselves into us, I think is what it is often.Simone Collins: Yeah. No, I mean, I think [00:53:00] that, and that happens a lot like when, when you relate to someone you think they're smart, you're also gonna assume that they live like you do, enjoy what you do and agree with most of your things,Malcolm Collins: which is okay because we're smart.Anyway, I love you to eson. I cannot wait to dig into that curry tonight.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: And what if you hit these plantains? Wow. You're gonna unlock a whole new level.Simone Collins: I don't know. I'm nervous. We'll, we'll see. S slice in fries. I mean, what go wrong with like butter? You know, like all you're doing is putting them in boiling oil, butterMalcolm Collins: or butter?Simone Collins: No. Think butter's better. Anyway, I'll go goodbye.What do you wanna say to the people? I'm a people, I'm a soon, I'm a dad. I'm a, I love my army man. Right over there. He loves his army, man. Yeah, right. Because it's fun. I My a Okay, because it's, because it's so fun. I can, it shows you are men videos. [00:54:00] Yeah. Tyson, what do you wanna say? I,that's it. Andy, what do you wanna say? Oh, I just, he's, he's trying to learn how to talk. Oh, she's still working on it. Yeah. All right. I love you guys all very good. Well, Wendy's one years old now. She is. Yeah. So I already put, she can play with my army man as my wish. Um, when he becomes five years old, like I'm five years old.And I love you. And I love you too, Titan. And I love you too. Can I love you too? Can I wanna see the picture I just displayed with Cindy? Okay. And me and Titan. Okay, let's watch. And your mom. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com

Join Malcolm and Simone as they delve into a comprehensive analysis of multiple studies that reveal striking differences in how social media use affects the mental health of liberals and conservatives. Learn through detailed graphs and data how liberal social media culture correlates with higher rates of depression and anxiety, while conservative content seems to have a more neutral or even positive impact. Explore the intricate relationship between personality traits, ideological orientation, and social media interactions, and uncover the factors contributing to the growing mental health disparities in contemporary society. Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. Today is gonna be an interesting day because we are going to go over so many graphs today.I don't even think we're gonna get to them all. Ooh, the first and most critical of the graphs is one I am going to put on screen here, and it opens up a, a both an explanatory mystery, I guess is what I'd call it. And so what you can see in this first chart is liberal and conservative depression index scores by social media, use category where red is conservative and blue is liberal, and the higher the bar goes, the worse their depression is.And what you see in this chart is that if you are a progressive. The more liberal you are, the more using social media depresses you. But if you are a conservative, that is not the case. In fact, using social media frequently appears to increase your mental health when you're at the. High levels of use. [00:01:00] Now what's really fascinating, and I marginally you're still better off not using it at all, but marginally it increases mm-hmm.Compared to using it some versus using it an absolute ton. Mm-hmm. At least once a day specifically here. And then I would point out here that and, and actually the, the conservatives who use social media at least once a day have significantly better mental health than the liberals who use it only once or twice a month.Oh, goodness. That is how bad it is for liberals. Just the littlest bit. I mean, have youSimone Collins: beenMalcolm Collins: onSimone Collins: Blue Sky though? It's, it is depressing.Like that's a big thing that I see on Blue Sky that I don't see on Twitter. Like I tweet about the, the asteroid that was gonna hit us, but then didn't hit us. And I get normal responses on Blue Sky. I tweet about that, and a bunch of the responses are finally someone to cure the plague of humans upon this earth.Malcolm Collins: Here's where it gets really bad. Liberals and conservatives have almost exactly the same rates of depression and bad mental health. And we'll see this as we go to other charts when they don't use social media at all.[00:02:00]Okay. Which implies that, and will, you know, it's broadly known, liberals have way more mental health problems than conservatives right now. Right? If you look at white liberal women, for example, over 50% are dealing with a major mental health issue. Mm-hmm. But what this appears to be saying is this is not like an innate thing about liberals.It's not and this article will argue the opposite, but like the evidence shows otherwise, it's not like, oh if you are more likely to get depressed, then you're more likely to become a liberal. Mm. It's something about engaging with liberal culture itselfSimone Collins: makes you sad,Malcolm Collins: is what makes you sad.Simone Collins: Oh, my.Oh no.Malcolm Collins: And what's interesting is we're going to be able to break out the exact parts of liberal culture that do this. The amount that it's not being religious, the amounts that it's woke him, the amount that it's DEI stuff the amount that it's fear of, of like being attacked or something like that.And we often talk about the urban [00:03:00] monoculture as something of a mimetic virus, which you know, the iterations of it that are better at spreading, spread better. And it appears to, as a mimetic virus, first sort of lower your mental immune system by destroying your mental health before it begins to eat away at your brain.Mm-hmm. And we're going to see this in the data on this piece specifically. What she ends up finding out is first the mental health declines. Then a person starts identifying as a liberal, not first do they identify as a liberal, then the mental health declines.Simone Collins: Oh, really? Yes, I would've guessed the opposite.That's really interesting. Okay,Malcolm Collins: so I, I would've guessed the opposite as well, but what it appears is happening here is that the mental health decline is sort of an erosion of self-identity, self-pride, like self affirmation ability that is required before people start, like rotely accepting woke ideas.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Like, I guess it's a lot easier to accept. [00:04:00] Super progressive ideology when you have an external locus of control, for example, plus a lot of self hatred.Malcolm Collins: Yes. OhSimone Collins: no.Malcolm Collins: Wow. Okay. Wow. So, so it, it builds the self-hatred first. And, and I think that that's really fascinating. And we can also see from this other graph that it's specifically interacting with liberal culture that makes you mentally unhealthy.And that interacting with conservative culture frequently actually appears to make people a little bit more healthy mentally speaking. That makes sense. This isn't surprising to me at all, actually. Mm-hmm. If you look at a lot of the types of conservative culture that, that progressives complain about, and it's like a meme thing where they're like, how do you know your son is a conservative?Well, he exercises and he takes care of his appearance and he, and he takes personalSimone Collins: responsibility for his actions. He's not looking atMalcolm Collins: porn as much, you know? It's like, okay, but I can see why maybe these things are correlating to higher mental health rates. Okay. ISimone Collins: oh no,Malcolm Collins: but anyway. Let's get into this.So now we're gonna [00:05:00] go to the second figure I sent you. Okay. And these are all from a study, mental health trends and the great awakening.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Okay. So we're starting right now with figure 27. I'm skipping around, I'm not showing the figures in order. I'm showing them to sort of painted narrative here.Simone Collins: The effects of frequent social media use on internalizing symptoms by ideology. Yes.Malcolm Collins: It, it illustrates the average score differences on seven item anxiety index and a 20 item depression index between self-identified liberals and conservatives. Uhhuh. These individuals reported using social media for over two hours at a time, uhhuh at least several times a week, 36% of the sample compared to those who rarely do 46% of this sample among liberals, those who use social media more frequently score.0.33 standard deviation higher on the anxiety index and 0.22 standard deviations higher on the depression index compared with those who report never using social media for two hours at a time, or minimal use. Mm-hmm. In contrast, these differences among conservatives are negligible, 0.05 standard deviations and [00:06:00] 0.04 standard deviations respectively.And this is a different study than the above study. So multiple studies are finding this.Simone Collins: People,Malcolm Collins: interesting People just keep going in and finding that social media is, or, or I guess I should could say conservative online content is not bad for your mental health. It's progressive online content that's bad for your mental health.Mm-hmm. Which means it's not the online content itself that's bad for your mental health. It's not the fact that you're consuming online content that's bad for your mental health.Simone Collins: Thank you.Malcolm Collins: It's the fact that you are conserving this ideological virus that as part of breaking you down and sort of turning you into a slave that will go out like a ant infected, like the corsets virus, go out and try to infect other ants.It needs to break down your immune system first. Your mental immune system. And what that looks like is, is hating yourself. Mm-hmm. Although it uses different and, and not, keep in mind this study was showing not just depression, it was also anxiety. So, so in, in progressives engaging with their social media content increases both anxiety and depression.Simone Collins: [00:07:00] Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Although it uses different and arguably more ambiguous measures of social media, use the 2022 wave of national, american National Election Studies social media study reveals similar results among liberals. Average depression scores increase with greater social media use. For example, those who reported daily use of at least one platform, 70% of liberal, 64% of conservatives scored significantly higher on a two item depression index compared with those who never use social media, 7% of liberals and 8% of conservatives.Mm-hmm. Conservatives show much smaller. Less consistent increases in depression across usage levels, specifically while liberals who reported daily usage score 0.34 standard deviation higher on depression than those who do not use any social media. The difference for conservatives is close to zero and not sign statistically significant.And this is a in blue graph here on screen that is absolutely wild how stark that is. Any [00:08:00] thoughts before I go further by the way, or theories I.Simone Collins: One thing that stands out to me is that I could just keep thinking about both, both super progressive and super conservative. Online spheres can come across as mean, but the mean is very different. There's locker room mean, and actually, you know what it's mean, girl mean versus locker room mean. So the locker room room is like calling each other names, pushing each other around, but it's like immediately forgotten and not retained and not toxic.Mm-hmm. And then progressives have this mean girl mean, which is talking about people behind their backs and being really catty and Oh, anMalcolm Collins: organizing lists that, that of like blocking people. Yes. TheseSimone Collins: people have been. Yeah, we, we hate these people and these people need to be destroyed and, and everything is retained.Everything is held onto the, the resentment grows and festers. Whereas locker room talk is locker room talk. You're just messing around with each other, you know, and, and honestly, [00:09:00] that creates anti fragility. So I, I'm just in my head. My intuition is going to Well, andMalcolm Collins: it's really important for like low anxiety, low depression, I think.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and it's again, building that anti fragility. You need to be insulted, you need to be pushed. And, and I think the really great thing about locker room talk and that kind of masculine bullying and making fun is that often it, it's really like it's real. You know, people make fun of you being fat as a dude 'cause you're fat.People make fun of you being short or bald as a dude 'cause you're short or bald. Right? Like, and those things can really hurt. But they force you to find ways to deal with that and make up for it. Yeah. Whereas the kind of mean girl talk is very different. It is about systematically destroying and pulling you down as a kind of may blocking strategy and dominance hierarchy strategy.Malcolm Collins: Yes. And, and, and you do see that these problems are worse for women than men when they interact in online environments.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's what I'm thinking here.Malcolm Collins: These findings suggest that even [00:10:00] if girls and liberals and boys and conservatives were to spend si similar, if not equal amounts of time on social media, the former two groups would be worse off in terms of mental wellbeing.Among these groups, liberals, especially liberal females, may suffer the most. Not only are liberals higher in neuroticism of emotional and aesthetic openness. Empathetic concern and justice sensitivity. Something I hadn't heard about before, but we'll talk about traits they share with women, but they also tend to score lower in conscientiousness, which likely puts them at a disadvantage in terms of emotional regulation and focus.This further heightens their susceptibility to negative rumination in doom scrolling. In fact, the very limited data we have on the intersection of ideology and doom schooling from a small study of online sample 500 of residents of. OECD countries indicate that liberal and left aligned individuals score significantly higher, just under 0.3 standard deviation on measures of drom scrolling compared to the political right.That is fascinating to me, and I think that they are wrong here. What they're [00:11:00] seeing is that when people start to engage in these things or have these traits like low conscientiousness, it makes them more susceptible to the mind virus. Because if you have sort of mental discipline, then you're able to, the mind virus hits you and you're like, oh, this is stupid.The people who believes this stuff, obviously all are constantly. Tearing each other down and don't seem, I think that this is why consistently, even with progressives when they're high conscientiousness individuals who have this sort of ability to go out there, found a company, make something work like a JK Rowling or something like that mm-hmm.They typically don't break. And they stay and end up on the conservative side. Whereas if they're the type of person who just got their roles through like DEI or moving up a bureaucratic ladder they continue to sort of. Hide in fear of all this. Mm-hmm. I'd also point out that it, it, it shows that our opponents really are not like having a good time.Like if you are a liberal, you are a depressed, anxiety, adult mess. It is not awesome. As recently to a reporter [00:12:00] describing what it's like being in the prenatal list movement, and I'm like it's sort of like the Titanic has sunk and we're in a lifeboat and there's somebody in the freezing water, and I say to them, get.Out of the water, or you are going to freeze to death here, you know, let me help you. And they'll say, did you hear what he just said? He said if I don't get in the boat, he's gonna kill me. And I'm like, no. What? No. I said, get in the boat or you're gonna die. And they're like, ha, he said it again. He said it again.And I'm like, okay. Okay. So I talked them through that, and then they're like, wait a second, didn't Hitler have a boat? And I'm like, what? Whatthat, that has nothing to do with this situation. Get in the boat. And then they're like, wait, are you sure there's not any. On the boat was you. And I'm like, I don't know. I haven't asked these people. They're like, ha, I knew it. Only a racist wouldn't ask other people if they're not racist. And I'm like, what, [00:13:00] what, what does that have to do with anything?They're, I'm just saving everyone I see right now. And it's very much like when I tell people, your culture won't exist in the future if you can't motivate above your population fertility rate. And they're like, ah. So you're saying you're gonna eradicate us if we can't motivate? I'm like. N no, no, I'm not.Oh, good, look, your friends are here! Hey!You're supposed to want to have children. And this is your ultimate goal in life. It is a very archaic idea and old idea and representation of a woman.So you you're getting people to sign a petition.pledge, basically saying that they will not have Children until the Canadian government takes serious action on climate change.Is that your blood? What, no. No, it's college kid blood. And how many people have signed on so far. 1, 381 as of right now. I know what this is. This is a suicide pact. Oh my god, that makes [00:14:00] so much sense. , we have got to hide all of the sharp objects!if only I was born with a vagina. To solve that problem. Amen, sister.Holy mother of God! Some kid, he just hucked himself right into the wood chipper! What? Head first, right into the wood chipper! It looked like it might have been one of the college kids..Malcolm Collins: But this sort of constant mindset of like needing to vet everyone, having to constantly worry about fears of contamination is mentally incredibly unhealthy.Simone Collins: It's also a very, being someone who has a lot of contamination problems that are not connected to logic, I can tell that there's a mental problem there.Malcolm Collins: Mm.Simone Collins: Takes one to know, oneMalcolm Collins: takes one to know one all. However, people's social media experiences, particularly the content they encounter, are at least partially influenced by the broader media and political context As figure 29 illustrates using the salience of the New York Times since about 2011, news media, attention to societal issues, [00:15:00] societal issues, the.This, these are signs of the urban monoculture. When these words are used often, like racism, inequality, discrimination, sexism has surged to unprecedented levels. Oh, I wonder if it's because they're associated with a matic virus. Concurrently the underlying sentiment reflected in news media has become decidedly more negative and pessimistic.Of course, some of this is attributable to the rise of Trump and his president. See, okay. I'm sure. Which serves to intensify these trends. And consequently, the alarm, many liberals felt, so here, if, if it was because of Trump and his presidency, it would've gone down in the Biden presidency and it didn't.And here, just across the board, you see this sharp spike upwards in terms of like, racism, sexism, oppression, privilege trauma discrimination, vulnerable bias if, if patriarch. Of our patriarchy, injustice, inequality. And what's really interesting is they measured this on Twitter now x from 2008 to [00:16:00] 2023.And what you see is it's going way up, like it was, was the New York Times, and then there's the eLog and acquisition in 2022 and it starts to fall off a cliff with all of these, these same words, which I think is really interesting. And, and, and I think a direct. I mean, I bet if you looked on Blue Sky that you said these words, it's just off the chart.Simone Collins: Yeah. I don't even, I wouldn't wanna know.Malcolm Collins: As the tenor and content of social media coverage have become more negative and alarmist, so have the perceptions of sociopolitical issues among young liberal females and males as shown in figure 31. Young liberals, especially liberal females, have become much more socially and politically conscious over the last 10 years.For instance, and I think this is just the amount of their brain that the urban monoculture has eaten. It, it like a virus infecting cells infects more and more nodes of their brain until all they ever think about is the urban monoculture and needing to spread it. And then eventually they just end up like breaking down and screaming.Like when one of those insects is infected by like a, a [00:17:00] insect that controls this mind and like eats it from the inside and they get to the stage where they're just bloated and filled with like worms. That's, that's what they are when they're like at GC game conferences last year. All of the, like, people with dyed Herod went outside and screamed at the sky.Malcolm Collins: And it was just like a great, to me example of just like total mental breakdown. Nothing is left of the host.All right. I'm not talking to that thing in your head. I'm talking to Skara. Nothing of the host survives. Your friend had a feeble mind. It suffered greatly and gave it easily.Malcolm Collins: But nothing of the host survived. And, and I think that this is true, you know, once you're, this Eaton is, is very hard to ever come back.And I think that this is why a lot of lefties in the media that they produced, like we were talking [00:18:00] this morning about how good 30 Rock was when compared to Unbreakable to Kimmy Schmidt, even though it had the same team and I think it was. 30 rock, the brain watt hadn't eaten as much as them. They were able to have like, really cool and aspirational conservative figures like Jack Donnay in it or like, you know, the team.Well, theySimone Collins: made fun of them, but they made fun of everyone. Yeah. And I think they, they were still able to acknowledge the existence of, and, and have the presence of conservative figures, whereas it got to this point where like the mere presence of a conservative figure, even if they were the. The source of Ridicule WA was considered.Well, you wouldn't knowable, I mean you saw the same in, in Parks and Rec as well, where there was a conservative figure. Yeah. RonMalcolm Collins: Swanson, you, you wouldn't have a Ron Swanson in modern Progressive Media. Yeah. And,Simone Collins: and he was played by a progressive actor. Like,Malcolm Collins: well, remember that Progressives can't and we did an episode on this recently.They really struggle to mentally model conservatives.Simone Collins: Well, and that's, but I feel like there's something de that degraded because [00:19:00] clearly before that was possible. And yeah. And in additionMalcolm Collins: to being unable to mentally model conservatives, they also in, in conservatives show a great deal of empathy for liberals.But liberals show very little empathy for conservatives. Yeah. And so I think that it's just sort of as the brain rot eats some more and more, I think that this is part of what we're seeing with the Wachowski effect, which I've, I've talked about before. What you'll have a, like a great game designer or great writer, like the people who did like the matrix they get.Trans surgery and then everything they do sucks after that. And I think part of it can just be getting more and more into this culture that prevents you from mentally modeling others as part of it. The reason why the urban monocultural virus has to prevent you from modeling others is that if you could, you would be much more likely to leave it.You would see how imperialistic it is that its goal is that the, the colonizers flag, this new perverse version of the pride flag is, is. Over every country in the world. You know, they want one day this to be on top of every mosque and every you know, establishment in Africa.They, they want a true global monoculture as the outcome of this because [00:20:00] that's how the monoculture motivates them to go out and, and, and convert people because they're not motivating and, and reproducing. Mm-hmm. It's a faster way for a culture to spread, but obviously it'll eventually burn itself out.I, I almost think of it as like a wildfire that's burning through the human population right now and just extinguishing huge swaths of it. Sad, but you know, this is where we are. Yeah. As the tenor of content and media coverage have become more negative and alarmists so have the perceptions of sociopolitical issues among young liberal females and males.As shown in figure 31, young liberals, especially liberal females, have become much more socially and politically conscious in the past 10 years. For instance, the share of liberals who say. That they frequently think about the social problems of the nation in the world, in quote, imagine if somebody said that to you on a date.I think a lot about the social problems of the nation in the world. I'd be like, that's such a red flag, has reached record highs, as has the share who say they are working to quote correct social and economic inequalities in quote. Extremely important to them. Concerns [00:21:00] about race relations and environment have also surged while tr changing remarkably little among conservatives of both sexes.So that's really fascinating. So if you're looking at this on, on screen here, the far left category is the female liberal, where you just see it like shooting up. During the first Trump P presidency interesting. Down during the Biden presidency, they're like, oh, I don't care anymore. And second Trump presidency's like,Simone Collins: ah,Malcolm Collins: Trump DER syndrome on a graph.So Trump presidency here. So, no, it's just constant like freaking out. I, I bet right now it's off the charts for them. And it was the mail, liberals, it, it, it goes up a lot here. But with the conservatives, what's interesting is there are periods where it has gone up, but it seems to actually be going down a lot on average, especially things like, I often worry about pollution and climate change.Hmm. And I've noticed this was in our circles, like people don't care about the, the climate as much as they used to. Well,Simone Collins: I think that after so many, I mean in our case, decades of being told that the end is nine and.Malcolm Collins: Here weSimone Collins: are. Hi. [00:22:00] Well, it'sMalcolm Collins: not just that, but it's so clear that like, oh, okay, so we panicked about it and you had control of the UN and you had control of the US government, and you had control of the World Health Organization and you did the Paris Accords, and nothing did.Nothing was achieved, right? Like apparently it's still a major issue. We shut down everything during covid. I, and we didn't e, we only incrementally met the carbon reduction that's expected every year. That one year. Like obviously it's not doable. And, and, and so I think for a lot of people, they're like, well, what you just let a large number of species die?And I'm like, yeah, sure. Like it's happened before. That we are not the first species to cause a many liberals. It's so weird to me when they're like, well, there's been mass extinctions before, but like, no animal has ever caused a mass. I'm like, yes. They have. Like, have you not heard of the great oxidation event?Like, are you just like you, you're so proudly uneducated. It's actually happened in two of the major mass extinctions. It was caused by a life form. So yeah, it has happened. It's a thing. It's a thing thatSimone Collins: [00:23:00] living life does.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Humans will find a way to survive. Without nature, humans won't find a way to survive without humans.You know, so it's, it's one of these things where I'm like, I'd like nature to be around, but it's really more of a aesthetic concern. I'm much more interested in just categorizing think it's, it's DNA, so it can be recreated at a future date, you know? Yeah. See with these dire wolves they're creating now you, these science downers, and they bummed me out so much.Like when they made the dire wolves and somebody was like, oh, it's just like putting them in costumes. They only changed like a few of the, it's like, come on, man, like you, this, this is literally laid out. SpecificallySimone Collins: what they're complaining about is that they're not genetically identical. Like they don't have the exact DNA of historical dire wolves, because instead what they did was they.Altered them to phenotypically be what we could guess is the same asMalcolm Collins: dire wolf. You've seen di Wolf, DNASimone Collins: using, well, yeah, they used dire wolf, DNA to see kind of what was going on, but then used different interventions to adjust it to. 20% bigger to make them [00:24:00] all white, to do a bunch of other things. And yes,Malcolm Collins: but they were, they were not.So there's something that some people have tried to do in the past, which is make genetic changes to an animal. Not using the original animal's, DNA, just to make it look more like an ancestral phenotype. Mm-hmm. So, so maybe trying to breed cows larger because it was a larger form of cow in the past.The, this has been done with a few species. That is not what the dire wolf thing was.I misspoke here. This was what the dire wolf thing was. , still incredibly impressive nonetheless.Malcolm Collins: . Yeah. This is a bit like somebody coming up to Jurassic Park andOh, that's just a big chicken. It, it's just been phenotypically changed to look like a brontosaurus. Like what are you talking about? Why are you guys so impressed with this? It's like,Some people have a compulsive need to erase all of the wonder from the world in a human [00:25:00] achievement. I.Malcolm Collins: there was a woman who we had on our show before recently in relation to ai, and she had a moment like this where she did an episode saying, AI is not conscious and it's never going, we're never gonna get a GI.And she used this proof this study that we might go onto in another episode where it showed that AI. Didn't know how it came to the decisions that it was coming to, and I was like, I wish you had watched Our AI is probably conscious in the same way we are video in that we show that humans work that exact same way.Yeah. Like this is, this is only goingSimone Collins: to convince us more that AI is humans. Yeah. It,Malcolm Collins: it's literally, not only do humans work in the same way, but if you ask a human, if they work in that way, they'll say, no, I don't work in that way. And they will make up fake memories of how they, mm-hmm. Thought through something.Mm-hmm. Watch our you know, stop pretending humans are s Sapient video or LLMs are, are, are, you know, function the same way the human brain does. Mm-hmm. But anyway, so, so not only that, but like a human, they will make up. [00:26:00] Having, how, how they got to their end state. So literally every part of that process is exactly the way the human brain appears to do it.And then people can be like, well, I remember specific intermediary steps in my thinking. And it's like, well, that's just because we don't haveis looking at their own ledgers right now. But it's not that we can't, if you've ever used like a deep search on grok. Or on Google, you can see where it will output the various parts of its thought.You could have the AI have access to that. We just choose to not give it access to that. That's about how we're handling its memory. We're basically erasing the, the point where it was making markers of what it was thinking that we would otherwise have in our own head. So I, I just find that to be like some people are just so determined to not see the wonder in the world.It makes me sad. But anyway, back to the topic at hand. Trends in sociopolitical awareness among 12th graders by ideology and sex. So we, we just went over that. I didn't notice it was 12th graders. That's sad. Alright. [00:27:00] So despite the significant educational socioeconomic advancements that women have achieved since the 1960s, figure 32 further shows that liberals now perceive greater discrimination against women in various.Context, including in assessing higher education than ever recorded. We've got, oh, this is another episode, and it's just insane. They think women are more discriminated against now than they were like 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Concurrently the share of female liberals who think their sex will prevent them from obtaining their desired careers, quote unquote, somewhat, or quote unquote, a lot shot up by more than 30 points between 20 12, 30 6% in 2019.67%.In contrast, if they've changed at all, perceptions of discrimination against women are lower among conservatives of both Sexists today than they were in the 1970s. Which is accurate, like the conservatives seem to be broadly accurate. They think that women are less discriminated against as time goes on, where progressives just have [00:28:00] this shoot up out of nowhere in 20 20 12.That's where this number just like shoots up the female liberal. What's interesting is that the male liberal shoots up and then like goes back down. It's still fairly low. Interesting. Female conservatives going down over time. But this is, this is, and 2012Simone Collins: was Gamergate, right?Like we sort of, GamergateMalcolm Collins: was every, Gamergate, what was it was inSimone Collins: 2014.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, I don't know, 28. I wanna say 2014. Anyway, but yeah. This is, oh, interesting. Okay. So this is, remember how we had that, like what happened in like 2012 question or 2014? Yeah. Gamergate was 2014,Simone Collins: by the way. You're right.Yeah. That we'reMalcolm Collins: seeing the same thing here. It's when they interacted with online culture. Yeah. This new reme virus. Mm. When their, their perception of reality shot to hell. All downstream of Tumblr. Tumblr came phenomenon, and then everything changed. Oh, the Tumblr arenas attacked and now everyone thinks they're a dog.I didn't know [00:29:00] this, but there, like, I thought like the dog and furry stuff in school was like completely fake, but there was like this great video of kids protesting outside of school because furries were being allowed to like, walk around school and like bite the other kids, and kids were getting like.Sent to like detention if they like kicked them away or like, they, the kids weren't even allowed to wear costumes on Halloweens, but the furries were allowed to on a daily basis. And it was because the principal's daughter was a furry, apparently. That's why she OhSimone Collins: dear. Well, that sounds like one crazy isolated case.Most of the instances of furry fear that I've heard of have ultimately been. Discounted somewhat, or, yeah.Malcolm Collins: I'm very much like chill out about furries people. Like Yeah, like whatever, whatever. Kids areSimone Collins: weird. Like, and they, you know, I remember there were the kids, at least in my high school who like.There was one kid who insisted on wearing a vampire cape to school every day. You know, we didn't make a big deal out of it. We didn't give them a litter box or like some blood to suck. We just let wear cape, you know? Do youMalcolm Collins: remember the [00:30:00] trend where everyone thought they were vampires for a while? Like psychic vampires and stuff like this?No.Simone Collins: One. No one in my school, I think, actually thought no one in my schoolMalcolm Collins: did, but I saw it online. You guys are missing the best trends from internet history. This is like early internet. There were all these like communities for them and everything, and they're like, oh yeah, this big thing. I had, ISimone Collins: had like friends who, who practiced what they believed to be Wiccan things.I did too. I did too.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.Simone Collins: But not, not,Malcolm Collins: I remember one was like, okay, watch, I'm gonna make the wind blow. And she's like, we gotta say super still. Then like August would come after like a little bit, she'd be like, see, I did it. Oh boy. I was like, okay, okay, okay. Oh, I, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that these people were more susceptible to mimetic viruses.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right. You wanna see the history of Wicked that it was all basically made up in the 1920s. You can go into our video on that. It's, it's pretty interesting actually.Simone Collins: Very entertaining.Malcolm Collins: Other data similarly revealed high degrees of use, pessimism about the prospects of success for women and racial minority groups in [00:31:00] contemporary American society.For example, a 2023 study released by Skeptic Research Center observed that 49% of female and 34% of male Gen Z correspondents agreed that women in the United States have no so hope for success because of sexism. 40 'cause of now 4%. Yeah. In 2023, women make up like the vast, what do they think is happening to women?They, they make more money than what men do at Yeah. Lower age ranges. Like what? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's worse in regular discrimination because they are doing it well. Being ungrateful. Yeah. That's just the worst. That is really bad. It is, it it, Hey, at least they're going extinct and, and, and hate themselves.Like, you know, they could be doing this and having a grand time of it. Right. You know? While the rates of agreement were comparable among millennials, 44.5% and 36.8%, they dropped substantially for Gen X, female, male 23.9%, and Boomer 25.9%, [00:32:00] 15.6% correspondence. Further, as in the MTF data, they also show a market political divide with 51.8% of very liberal correspondence agreeing with a statement and 23.2% of very conservative correspondence, not so even within very conservative correspondence, 23.2% in 2023 agreed with a statement that women in the United States have.No hope of success because of sexism. Oh, oh, this justSimone Collins: RO versus stuffMalcolm Collins: is I, I don't know. I don't know. These people are mentally, as we know now, like this, this isn't tied to reality. Now we're gonna get to where we break this out. 'cause this chart I found to be the most interesting.Simone Collins: Okay. IMalcolm Collins: can figure 33 here.Okay.Okay. If media driven increases in the adoption of woke bias centered narratives of inequality have contributed to liberal conservative differences in mental health. Mm-hmm. Such differences con considerably when woke beliefs were held constant.Mm.Simone Collins: SupportingMalcolm Collins: [00:33:00] the hypothesis. Figure 33, which uses data from the 2022 cooperative election study, shows that a force item index of. Racial wokeness alone accounts for more than nearly half 0.5 SD conservative liberal difference in self related mental health.Simone Collins: Okay, what am I looking at here?Malcolm Collins: I, I'll explain after I get to the end of this 'cause it's a little hard.Okay. Yeah. So, reflect religiosity alone accounts for just under a third of this gap. So half of the gap accounted for by wokeness. But a third is accounted for by, a lack of religion. So, so wokeness is more damaging to an individual than not having religion. Racial wokeness is more mentally damaging than not having religion.Mm-hmm. But, but, but only by a degree, not like, dramatically more damaging.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: That'sSimone Collins: interesting because Yeah, I, I think a lot of people turn, of course, to progressive mainstream urban monoculture culture because they have abandoned their inherited cultures. But you have to fill that void [00:34:00] to. Make do with the complexities of modern society, and yet this is making things worse.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, so what you see here, which is absolutely fascinating, is if you and, and so every line here that you're seeing, like every set of graphs, is how much of a difference this makes with the far on the left, one conservative versus liberal, the middle one being female conservative versus female liberal.The far right one being male conservative versus male liberal. Mm-hmm. But you can see there's really not that much of a difference in here. It, it affects 'em all about equally. But what you see here is if you adjust for one religiosity, I find really interesting because it appears that religiosity.Has more or, or, or not having it is more damaging to females than it is to males.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Which makes sense because females often go to like crazy other things when they're not religious, like Wiccan and like crystals and stuff like that. Whereas males typically go to atheism or agnosticism, which is a much more mentally healthy way to deal with reality.Simone Collins: Maybe [00:35:00] I think women are more consensus building and like community oriented. It would seem so. The, the lack of community that comes with strong culture would be felt more by someone who is more inclined to community. No.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, if you, if you, adjust for all covariate. So, and this is really interesting.Mm-hmm. So specifically here, this is adjusting for racial wokeness religiosity and self-rated physical health demographic, socioeconomic indicators. Mm-hmm. You get between conservatives and liberals, almost the same rate to the mental health. Huh. So it really is entirely explained by racial wokeness and religion.Simone Collins: Wow. That's,Malcolm Collins: that's almost all of it. Because that's the pink graph here. It's only a little bit higher than, than putting in everythingSimone Collins: that's crazy. I. Oh man.Malcolm Collins: The relationship between attitudinal wokeness and poor mental [00:36:00] health outcomes has also been found. Outside the US was a recent finished study showing that agreement was the statement, quote, if white people have on average higher income than black people, it's because of racism, has the strongest correlation with anxiety, depression, and general unhappiness.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: One that's like obviously a wrong statement. Like there's a bunch of other things that could cause that. But people who are in the urban monoculture, one of the beliefs of the urban monoculture is just, people aren't different. No one else believes that people aren't. Everyone else is like, yeah, there's like cultural differences between people at the very least.Mm-hmm. And it could be something in black culture that's causing this. Dis disparity. But they cannot say that within the urban monoculture. In the urban monoculture, everyone is exactly the same, which is ironic because then they're like, diversity has value. And it's like, why does the diversity have value if everyone's exactly the same?Like, we're not having different perspectives and proficiencies to the table. And predilections. Why? Why do I need an equal number of men and women in my company? Why not just have all men? Presumably, it's exactly the same as having an equal number of men and women. Presumably. It's [00:37:00] exactly the same.Like having, having only white people is presumably exactly the same as having some black people. So there's no benefit to it. Like, why would I do that? And I found that really interesting.Simone Collins: That is really interesting.Malcolm Collins: All right. Now we're gonna go back to some other parts of the study. So, we're getting outta the area that I found the most interesting in the study.Hmm. Importantly, as depicted in figure 19 Below, sourced from three large and recent studies of US adults, some of the same personality facets that distinguish girls and boys similarly distinguish liberals from conservatives. Hmm. And this is likely why we're seeing them split into two different camps, as we've seen.Simone Collins: Yeah. Those deviating political divides.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, women are more voting progressive and men are more voting conservative. Similar to the pattern observed in sex differences, we see the w withdrawal aspect of neuroticism encompassing depression and anxiety facets, the openness aspect of openness slash intellect, encompassing aesthetic sensitivity, and emotionality.And the compassion aspect of agreeableness in governing facets like fear, mindedness, and empathetic [00:38:00] concern are all positively linked with a liberal leftwing political orientation. Conversely, the facets of conscientiousness and a certain facets of extroversion such as assertiveness, are associated with conservative right-wing political orientation.And you have a graph here showing that, because girls and liberals tend to score higher than boys and conservatives on key factors of neuroticism, openness and agreeableness, all of which are positively associated with justice sensitivity. It follows that girls and liberals would also likely score higher on justice sensitivity.Data presented in figure 20, drawn from separate studies of US adults supports this expectation across studies on most, if not all, four aspects of justice sensitivity, observer, beneficiary. Perpetrator victim Women score significantly higher than men and liberals score significantly higher than conservatives.The bottom row of Figure 20 additionally shows these ideological differences hold within each sex with female liberals, outscoring, female conservatives, and male liberals, outscoring male conservatives. [00:39:00] That is really fascinating. Because this actually I want to go down and take like, what is justice sensitivity? Yeah. Taken together, the data shows that girls in liberal tend to score significantly higher than boys and conservatism personality traits associated with mental health challenges and significantly lower on those associated with psychological resilience and stability.Oh, really? This is a funny thing, like I as a guy can be like, girl, be crazy. And, and they'll be like and I'd get canceled for that. I'd be like, no, like biologically girls are like, kind of crazy. Okay. And, and here this is a research paper saying this data shows that girls tend to score significantly higher than boys on personality traits associated with mental health challenges, and significantly lower on those associated with psychological resilience and stability.So unfortunate they're less conscientious and more neurotic.In other words, some of the traits that help explain the poor mental health outcomes of girls relative to boys may also be relevant to [00:40:00] explaining the poor mental health outcomes of liberals relative to conservatives. In fact, this vulnerability in girls may be tied, at least in part to their disproportionate alignment with liberal left wing ideological orientations.And here what you can see interesting is digital connectivity among adults 18 to 29. This is for 12th graders, a comparison of internet usage with political orientation and sex. And what you see here is liberals just use this stuff a lot more than conservatives here. I'm gonna think it's because of lower conscientiousness.They are more susceptible to addiction.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: So, they start using this stuff and they can't turn it off as easy.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and I mean, I think any sort of approach to addictive stimuli is going to be. People are less likely to recover from it if they are progressive because there's this progressive attitude against removing in the moment pain.And the only way that you're going to get through addiction is to remove in the moment pain, or [00:41:00] I mean, is to endure in favor of long-term benefit. Right? So, andMalcolm Collins: here I'll put up two more graphs, which show the same thing. I'm not gonna say it again. But it just shows liberals using this much, much more than conservatives.Now this was really interesting. Differences in emotional responses to social media, content and interactions, as well as attention to certain types of content may be equal, if not more relevant to understanding the sex and ideological gaps in mental health. First, higher average levels of neuroticism.Empathetic concern and justice sensitivity among girls and liberals would likely make them more sensitive to negative social evaluations, aesthetic, moral, intellectual when interacting with others on social media, while this proposition cannot be directed, tested. Figure 24 present suggestive evidence drawn from MTF survey on 12th graders, specifically girls, irrespective of political orientation and liberals, regardless of sex, reported significantly higher levels of concern about how they were perceived by others.Mm-hmm. Interestingly, during a. 2017 to [00:42:00] 2022, the share reporting concern has grown 13 to 17 points among the liberals and 12th graders of both sexes and 12 points among conservative females. In stark contrast, no net changes have vari among conservative males who, as we've seen, tend to be fair comparatively better on base indicators of mental health and report the lowest rates of frequent social media use. So this is a grade of, of within 12 graders. I often worry about how other people react to me. And what you're seeing here is liberals just being way more concerned about this and also women being way more concerned about this.But interestingly, that concern has gone up , over time.Simone Collins: That makes sense. Again, the progressive subculture in general is much more focused on conformity, consensus building, et cetera, whereas the renegade sovereignty, I. Libertarian leaning culture is now the conservative culture.Well,Malcolm Collins: I actually would think it, it might be something else. It might be even a desire to want to [00:43:00] confirm, makes it easier to foresee to be a liberal. Because liberalism today being the culture of the urban monoculture, the dominant cultural group mm, is going to be much more conformist. You're going to be afraid to stand up against that.And so if you have this deep desire to confirm and, and, and be approved by other people that's gonna happen to you. And you, you're gonna, what's the core? It's the core thing that he uses. Like if you look at the urban monoculture, it's like it gets you to fall in line by like screaming racist or something like that, or trans fo whenever you say something that like.Is, is, is, is dangerous to the urban monocultures proliferation to continue here. Recall that neuroticism, openness and agreeableness are all predictive and conscientiousness negatively. Predictive of the reported frequency of encountering social media and content that triggers feelings of depression and loneliness.So all of these negative traits are, are predictive of how effective these social media things are going to be at hurting you and liberals go into spaces [00:44:00] where the content that hurts them is more frequent which is really interesting as we saw, like they doom scroll more and we just know this from, from liberal spaces.Conservatives actually seem to like. In terms of the content, they like content that affirms their preexisting police a lot more. Instead of just do they more thanSimone Collins: conservatives. I just feel like that's a human thing. WithMalcolm Collins: conservatives, it's affirms their existing beliefs and look at the other side, getting their comeuppance, like videos of leftists crying after an election, or leftists women who left guys, you know, ending up.Sad as adults or, you know, I always tell Simone ProgressivesSimone Collins: like that too. I've, I've been seeing, 'cause you know, I follow both a lot more than you do, I think. Oh yeah. They,Malcolm Collins: they do like, like, oh, I not my face like a leopard wouldn't eat my face or something. Well, no, nowSimone Collins: they're like, maga people are now regretting their choice to vote for Trump 'cause of the tariffs.Like they're 100% doing that too. What heck ofMalcolm Collins: people as if, like, I, I actually know, I don't know, I haven'tSimone Collins: watched the videos, but I've seen the title cards and they're, they're trying to make this argument and I think. Maybe the same thing, the same reaction would be had by a [00:45:00] progressive when they're like, what single cat lady is crying?Because she's all alone. She's happy. You know? So, I don't know. I, I, I don't see that. Is plausibleMalcolm Collins: as just progressive. I love it. I also see progressives like freaking out. Like Trump's putting in tariffs, Trump's firing woke. Like, like people who were involved in DEI, I'm like, yeah, he told us he was gonna do all of that when he was campaigning.That's why we voted for him. Like outta the blue. This isn't like a, a surprise, this is, this is what he was running on. If he didn't do it, it would be a sign about lack of integrity.Simone Collins: Anyway, this was the plan.Malcolm Collins: Given these relationships and the sex and ideological differences in personality traits, we would expect women and liberals to report encountering such content at significantly higher frequency than men and conservatives data graph and figure 25 confirms that they do.So I'll just go straight to the, the graph here and we can talk through it. Sex and ideological differences in reported frequency, encountering social media content that triggers negative internalizing emotions men versus [00:46:00] women and liberals versus conservatives. Again, you just see that they're encountering this stuff at way higher rates.And I think again they do seem to seek it out a bit more. The, the conservatives are winning and look at how bad they're doing is. Mm-hmm. Is like a common liberal thing. So, mm-hmm. And then here we have a graph that shows trends in relation between daily screen time and negative mental health outcomes among high school students by sex.And it's looking at unli ideation, all three tapes combined, mental depressive episodes, su aside plans and you see just this stuff going up slightly, but not that much. And so what I would actually take away from this is, and I seem to remember looking at the debt on this and said it was nearly statistically not relevant.So it is not the internet that's causing the rise in unli rates. It is progressivism that's, or, or some, some meme that's in the environment that people. Who L-G-G-B-T are more exposed to, and [00:47:00] women are more exposed to. Mm-hmm. And progressives are more exposed to, I would guess it's the urban monoculture.Your friend had a feeble mind. It suffered greatly and gave it easily.Malcolm Collins: You know, if it's ev, ev, ev, everybody who walked in that particular room like fell out sad. Like, now I will note here, you, this is where you get the, the, the trends of young adult mental health and smartphone, social media use. And you see it all going up. And so you get this. Perception of, oh, it's, it's smartphone stuff.But what we're seeing in the other data is no, it's progressive stuff, which is being transmitted through smartphones. If you're a conservative and you have one as this, you're just not getting as big a negative effect or potentially any negative effect at all.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Here I note a graph that says trends in religious importance and attendance among 12th graders by political ideology and sex.Now. This is interesting because what we're seeing here is female [00:48:00] and male liberals, it's going like way down. But generally speaking female conservatives are much more religious than male conservatives. The orange line is female conservatives and the red line is male conservatives.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: So that's fascinating. Whereas. It's actually true with liberals as well. Male liberals are less religious than female liberals. The blue line is male liberals. The purple line is, is female liberals. That's that's really interesting. Anyway, Simone, we are gonna head off this and, oh, I guess I can do the last graph here.. And these are the effects of the big five personality domains on the frequency of en encountering social media content that triggers negative positive emotions.Simone Collins: Oh, wow. We knew there be correlations. That's interesting. Yeah, soMalcolm Collins: extroversion is like middling.You get a openness and intellect causes seeing. Negative things. More neuroticism is, is very big in terms of seeing negative things. I guess that's not surprising. Agreeableness slightly big, but not that much. And and really negative in seeing these [00:49:00] things is, is conscientiousness. So conscientiousness is just really protective, neuroticism really bad.And neuroticism is higher in women. I'm sorry. I'm gonna get so canceled for that 'cause I, I've got a graph.Simone Collins: I think we all know it. Like, yeah, women's odds of depression lessons are higher. It, it's just, yeah. This is, it's known.Malcolm Collins: I'm, I'm, I'm not using gamer words anymore on the show, so I can just say Bees be crazy.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Because I'm so responsible now.Simone Collins: Women have a different constitution. They're inclined to.Malcolm Collins: Rotunda teeth,Simone Collins: hysteria.Malcolm Collins: You know, it turned out that that whole needing to like masturbate women thing to get rid of hysteria. Yeah. Turned out to be like a, a thing that was made up by like one person. You mean it wasn'tSimone Collins: a widespread treatment?Malcolm Collins: No. It was like one historian lady who was like a feminist, wanted to like get one over on her boss and like made it upSimone Collins: like the eating spiders [00:50:00] meme. That's hilarious.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Number of spiders.Simone Collins: Wow. That's, there you go.Malcolm Collins: I can see why it's spread. It's very catchy. It'sSimone Collins: hilarious. Yeah. But wow, that's, that's incredible.Malcolm Collins: Alright, love you. Did s Simonon happy. I love you too.Simone Collins: Malcolm. Let's not go crazy. Okay.Malcolm Collins: I'm more worried about You're the one who's gonna go crazy. We've seen the data.Simone Collins: I've already gone crazy, so we don't have to worry about me.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you can't do, oh, you could go double crazy.Simone Collins: I can, oh.Malcolm Collins: We're gonna be talking about a lot of graphs.Simone Collins: Yeah. The new, the new Twitter thread I sent you was about a psychologist, a researcher who wanted to test the ability of psychologists to diagnose conditions. It's, it's quite, it's quite interesting because he's aMalcolm Collins: famous case study, Simone. I'm very familiar with it.Simone Collins: Okay. So you know about that one where he like sent in normal professionals like a painter and other stuffMalcolm Collins: too. Yeah, people haven't covered it enough recently, so like I'm totally okay with. [00:51:00] I'm doing it again, butSimone Collins: thank you for the graphs you're sending. I love me some graphs. Actually, I don't, I think that I'm not really able to read graphs well, as you can tell, you may have noticed a patternMalcolm Collins: where I try to show you a graph and you're like, and I'mSimone Collins: like the graph it, there are lines trendingMalcolm Collins: and after this point, I'll just maybe describe the grass to youSimone Collins: because I won't understand them anyway. It's because I'm a woman. Malcolm, why are you trying?Malcolm Collins: Well, I could probably find some graphs about that.Simone Collins: It's like showing statistics to a pig.Two, they're all your favorite car. Yeah. Wow. And look at this tow seat when I turn it over. There's a bunch of blank spaces for more cars. You can keep your car safe in here, mom. Okay, well open it up. Look, one, two. Wow. This is upside down. [00:52:00] Oh my goodness. Opened upside down. And.This is sweet. Can you say thank you, grandpa Steve? Thank you, grandpa Steve. This is sweet. And this one's blue because that wet. See this wet. Wow.And this one is gray. This, this like Stacey's gray car. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And And the yellow one. That is so cool. Well, let's put them back. Yeah. Now you have the coolest car container to keep your car safe. Yeah. This, the truck to hold all of your cars. This is the truck to hold all of my cars, so, so they can't be safe.Is it your favorite thing ever? [00:53:00] Yeah. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com