Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

In this eye-opening video, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the startling fertility decline within the Catholic Church, both in the United States and globally. Through a comprehensive analysis of survey data and demographic trends, they uncover the shocking reality that Catholic fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels, and even devout Catholics are using contraception and obtaining abortions at rates similar to non-religious individuals. The couple explores the potential causes of this phenomenon, including delayed marriage, the influence of the urban monoculture, and the disconnect between the Church's teachings and the behavior of its adherents. They also discuss the theological debate surrounding the beginning of life and the impact of the celibate priesthood on the Church's ability to provide relevant guidance on relationships and family formation. Throughout the video, Malcolm and Simone offer thought-provoking insights and propose potential solutions to revitalize the Catholic Church and ensure its survival in the face of this fertility crisis.[00:00:00]Malcolm Collins: Needed fertility is the fertility rate that you would need to have to stay stable. As a cultural group, when you account for the percentage of people who deconvert from your religion per generation. On the other hand, Catholic churches will see appreciable decline.He says that they have 1. 9 children but these don't separate out the Hispanic Catholic population. the TFR for non-Hispanic, white Catholic women in the United States is 1.64,anyway so he thinks it's 1. 9 which it really isn't. Children born per woman is nowhere near enough to offset the rates of conversion out of these faiths, yielding a needed fertility rate for Roman Catholics of 3. 1. Whoa. Therefore these churches, and this is with the inflated 1.9 number, that's including the Hispanic population. Okay. A 40 percent decline in the next generation.Simone Collins: Wow.Malcolm Collins: Catholics view that life begins at conception the problem with this view is that by the statistics, it doesn't really appear to impact the rate that Catholics [00:01:00] use contraception or get abortions very highly.We'll go over the survey data right here. let's go for non religious affiliation.And so they must be doing it like way more than Catholics, right? Morning after pill. Presumably. No, 33 percent to 35%Simone Collins: Hold on, all of this gets worse.It's just gonna be like a, oh, and it gets worse! How can this possibly get worse? We just learned that Catholics have abortions at rates similar to those who are not Catholic.Malcolm Collins: I know what people are thinking.They're thinking. Okay, but this is just lumping all Catholics into one group. What if we divide Catholics by how religious they are? Simone, before we go further, I got more stats for you here. You've got to be kidding me. It can'tSimone Collins: get any worse. Oh, itMalcolm Collins: gets worse.Every stat here is this situation is more catastrophic than you could have imagined.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: .Hello. This is Malcolm and Simone Collins. We are so excited to be here with you today. And I am excited to be talking to you today, Simone, because this is going to be an episode our fans are going to [00:02:00] love because the. Stat heavy fertility episodes always do spectacular.Ooh, we're looking at here some terrifying numbers. Oh, really? Yeah.Simone Collins: Oh, no. Yes.Malcolm Collins: So I have mentioned before that Catholics have a lower fertility rate than non Catholics when you control for income and that Catholic countries. Seem to be hit by fertility collapse a lot faster and harder than other countries.For example, the average European Catholic majority country has a fertility rate of only 1. 3. And then you have the rapid declines in fertility across Latin America. With examples like Uruguay in just the past seven years going from an above replacement fertility rate to only around 1. 3. Argentina, if you're looking at the four year olds who are entering kindergarten this year there is going to be 30 percent less than just four years ago.You look at Costa Rica where a local demographer used the term vertiginous to describe their fertility situation and local [00:03:00] women have below one fertility right now. So just. Absolutely catastrophic. But what has always been said to me is for whatever reason, this is not true of American Catholics.Okay. Is that true? I, I idly decided I had taken it as a fact because so many people had told me this. Yeah.Simone Collins: Sounds like it might be true. The Catholics that we know have a lot of kids, so it. Seems to totally check outMalcolm Collins: of the prenatals movement. There are a number of Catholic the thought leaders in the movement.So I was like, okay. But, and I will also note of the prenatalist Catholics that I know of they fall into two categories of, they are either weirdly unmarried and childless younger people or married with a lot of kids, older people. But the unique thing about the Catholics in the prenatalist movement is that when they are younger, they are much more likely to be unmarried.Now, I'll get to this because this actually is what the statistics would [00:04:00] suggest we would find. So I decided to Google this. What is the TFR of Catholics in the USA? And I will put the results on screen here.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: The very first result is It, the AI review of the literature. Okay. Which says in 2023, the total fertility rate for Catholics in the United States was just over 1.6.Ah. But then I go down and I find a study that looks into this, right? Yeah. So the TFR for non-Hispanic, white Catholic women in the United States is 1.64,Simone Collins: as ofMalcolm Collins: doesSimone Collins: it give a year?Malcolm Collins: This is the terrifying thing. It does. This study was done in, 1992. Ah!Simone Collins: Oh no.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so it's almost certainly below that now.Simone Collins: Yeah, because I haven't seen in any instance, there have been tiny improvements, but not any crazy bounce backs. So we can't expect it to have gone up significantly if it's, , andMalcolm Collins: it is MUCH lower than the Protestant fertility rate.Really? In the same study, the [00:05:00] average Protestant fertility rate was 1. 91. So 1. 64 for Catholics. Now, if these numbers are correct, it means the average Catholic fertility rate in the United States is below the average fertility rate in the United States. What on Earth? But we'll go into more data here, because I Okay.Yeah, this is really neat. Okay, maybe it's being offset by these ultra religious Catholics that we're hearing about. Because I keep hearing about these hypothetical ultra pro family, ultra religious Catholics. And the stats are, basically show that they don't we'll get to them in just a second.One is an article actually written by a Catholic for Catholics. The alarming fertility decline among Catholic women. So first we need to note something. What we're seeing right now, and I'm gonna read some quotes here, uh, from the study that was looking at this, that they say, this contrast was the pattern during the baby boom era where Catholics had a higher fertility than Protestants.The authors state that quote, the baby [00:06:00] boom era pattern of high Catholic and low Protestant fertility has ended. Most of the, now what's causing this difference? And this is where it gets interesting because the studies have actually looked at this. Most of the Protestant Catholic difference in fertility is related to Catholics marrying later and less frequently compared to Protestants.When looking at currently married women, the difference in fertility between Catholics and Protestants was smaller, indicating less fertility. Later, and less frequent marriage among Catholics, it's a key factor. The marital fertility of white Catholic wives was still higher than that of non Catholic wives in 1977 to 1981.But, this difference has disappeared when Hispanics were excluded from the Catholic group. Basically, I'll word this. In other words, once Catholics are married, they have the same fertility rate as other Americans. Not a higher fertility rate, but about the same as other religious Americans. But they're,Simone Collins: they're struggling with relationships.Malcolm Collins: [00:07:00] So let's look like anecdotally. Okay. Okay. Few. Let's look at the Catholic influencers that I know about Nick Fuentes. Talks all the time about American fertility rates, and he's still unmarried. He cannot Oh, and Pearl Davis.Simone Collins: Oh no. OrMalcolm Collins: Pearl Davis. You still subscribe to the channel and subscribe. I don't know what I did to anger her.Maybe it was a tracked episode. You're like, sometimes people just unsubscribe. I'm like, she must have been thinking something when she just did that. I don't know. I still like her. She's cool. I wish she could find a husband, but she hasn't found a husband and this is interesting, right? And then I think more broadly at the young Catholics I know in the pronatalist movement and not one of them is married.When it is actually fairly rare to see unmarried people from other groups. They might be struggling to have a kid, but just completely unmarried. Yeah. So first I want to see if you have some thoughts here, because the stats will keep going and get worse.Simone Collins: Yeah, my first intuition, and I wonder if this is maybe at play, is that [00:08:00] more Protestant church communities in the United States have stronger overall community and town social networks, meaning people are more likely to find partners.Whereas I don't really think about Catholic towns, if where you would really see a religiously affiliated dating market the same way you would with I can think of cities and towns that are very Baptist, or very evangelical, and you can end up with a very strong church community there, certainly very Mormon, etc.IMalcolm Collins: disagree with this hunch pretty strongly. I think Catholics have great social networks. Consider that a lot of the Catholics, so you're thinking Catholic but a lot of the Catholics come from minority immigrant communities, like Irish and Italian Americans. And if you think about the Irish Catholic, it's because you're thinking Catholic broadly instead of about what Catholic communities actually are, which is often ethno national communities.Yeah. A town, like the old mafia families is probably what you should be thinking more of instead of this modern [00:09:00] idea of what a Catholic is to a Protestant and these families have great networks often. So I don't think that's it. Now, before I give my hypotheses, I'm going to throw out some more stats here that will further scare anyone who is concerned about Catholics continuing to exist.So this is a quote from Limestone. Okay. Likewise, Pentecostal churches will grow with an actual fertility of 2. 1, substantially above the needed fertility, 1. 8. So let's talk about what needed fertility is.Needed fertility is the fertility rate that you would need to have to stay stable. As a cultural group, when you account for the belief that your cultural group has, i. e. the percentage of people who deconvert from your religion per generation. On the other hand, Catholic and Orthodox churches will see appreciable decline.He says that they have 1. 9 children in both, but these are the 1. 9 study. They're the ones that don't separate out the Hispanic Catholic population. No, hold on. I will note here about the Hispanic Catholic population. Why am I considering them separate? Because their fertility rate [00:10:00] is declining rapidly.It's declining in their home countries. It's declining in the United States. It's declining much faster than just about any other fertility rate out there right now. So it's certainly not going to contribute to the higher Catholic fertility rate in a few years. When I say higher, I mean it's a lower fertility rate than you would expect, but a, it's bolstering the Catholic fertility rate in the United States in some studies.Way above that 1. 6 number. And the the second is that it culturally, they're a very different group. The Irish and Italian Catholic cultural groups are just, while they're like superficially the same religion as the Hispanic cultural group, the way that they, as somebody who's lived, like we live a lot in Hispanic majority countries.Like we used to split our time between Miami and Lima in terms of where we were living. And both of us have gone to school in the UK. So we've also been around a lot of like Irish communities. They are not culturally the same community. Not at all.Anyway, so I'm going to keep reading here. So he thinks it's 1. 9 which it really isn't. Children born per woman is nowhere near enough to offset the rates of conversion out of these [00:11:00] faiths, yielding a needed fertility rate for Roman Catholics of 3. 1. Whoa. Therefore these churches, and this is with the inflated 1.9 number, that's including the Hispanic population. Okay. A 40 percent decline in the next generation.Simone Collins: Wow. Like, Wow. Well, Especially, and here's the thing too, they're extra screwed if they're getting married later because then they're starting their fertility journey later and they don't believe in using IVF it seems.And yes,Malcolm Collins: so a lot of this is, I think, actually downstream of the abortion stuff. Catholics view that life begins at conception the problem with this view is that by the statistics, and we will go over the statistics here, it doesn't really appear to impact the rate that Catholics use contraception or get abortions very highly.Simone Collins: Wait. So Catholics in surveys are reporting that they're getting abortions at rates similar to non [00:12:00] Catholics. Yes,Malcolm Collins: we'll go over the survey data right here. Okay. No, I'll read the quote Finally, a bit of even more disturbing news for Orthodox Catholics. First, as shown in figure eight, the percentages of Catholic women using so called morning after pills is quite high.Among those who have ever had sexual intercourse, 25 percent have, 32 percent among never married women ages 15 to 44 have. So if you look here and you look at the percent who have used morning after pills, for example, of Catholics for the Overall, it's 25 percent for the never married at 32%.Now contrast this with evangelical Protestants, where for the never married it's only 20 percent and for the married it's 28%. Or you can go for black Protestants, 20, 21 percent respectively. Or you can go with main So Catholics areSimone Collins: doing it more? I guess they can askMalcolm Collins: for forgiveness. They can ask for forgiveness.It's okay. Hold on. But this is of the Protestant groups. Okay. So let's go. Now the mainline Protestants do it slightly more than [00:13:00] Catholics. So remember for Catholics overall, it was 25 percent for the mainline Protestants. It's 26%. Yeah. Slightly more. And so these but okay, let's go for non religious affiliation.And so they must be doing it like way more than Catholics, right? Morning after pill. Presumably. No, 33 percent to 35%. For the non married women group, keep in mind in Catholics that 32 percent who have done it, 35 percent for the non religious denomination. Now hold on, we're gonna, we're gonna go into even more chilling statistics for Catholics out there.Oh no. Figure nine shows the percentages of women who have ever been pregnant who admitted to having an abortion. Okay, yeah.Simone Collins: So we're getting into more serious ground. Yeah. Not just running after.Malcolm Collins: Okay, so for Catholics here, overall, it was 13%. Never married, it was 20%. Contrast this with Evangelical Protestants.Overall, it's 12 percent and never married. It's 19%. Now if we go to [00:14:00] mainline Protestants, okay, these people are like, not very religious often, they must be all, no, it was 13 percent overall for Catholics, 16 percent for the mainline Protestants and then for the never married group, 26 percent when contrasted with the Catholic 20%.Now if you look at the no religious affiliation at all here you actually get a slightly bigger boost with it being 28 percent and 33 percent respectively, but still not as big as you would expect.Simone Collins: That's a lot of people getting abortions. That's a lot.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's a lot more people getting abortions than I would expect as well.Genuinely,Simone Collins: like genuinely, apparently birth control is not as widely used as I thought, which surprises me because. I was not sexually active before I met you, and yet I had been on birth control for years to control acne. I don't know, it's just bizarre to me that so few women are on it. Hold on, all of this gets worse.It's just gonna be like a, oh, and it gets worse! How can this possibly get worse? We just learned that Catholics have abortions at [00:15:00] rates similar to those who are not Catholic. This isMalcolm Collins: So now we're getting into the next issue, which is, in fact, the, this is, I'm quoting from the article where these come from.In fact, the National Academy of Sciences estimates that at least at earlier versions of the NSFG, that's this study right here, up to half or more of all abortions were not reported by the women who had them. This type of survey error is called selective recall bias. So basically if you have a strong religious reason to not recall something in a survey, you often won't.What you're sayingSimone Collins: is a lot of Catholic women who filled this out and said they did not have an abortion have had an abortionMalcolm Collins: have based on other surveys that have been done. This is a mistake we see in the data. Now we're going to look at another thing here because I know what people are thinking.They're thinking. Okay, but this is just lumping all Catholics into one group. What if we divide Catholics by how religious they are? And I have done that here, and it doesn't solve the problem. Right here we are dividing them [00:16:00] by church attendance. We have a once a month group, a one to three times a month group, and a weekly group.So less than once a month, it's the first one to three times weekly. Okay. Okay. This is the ever married, ever used artificial birth control of any type. So have they used artificial birth control? So of the people who don't go to church or go to church less than once a month, Catholics, 99 percent have used birth control.Okay. Okay. What about the people who go one to three times a month? 98%. Okay. What about the people who go weekly? The really devout ones? 95%. This is soSimone Collins: odd because we meet so many Catholic and otherwise. Harder line Protestant people who will not shut up about birth control being so unnatural and bad.And yet. It's so pervasively used. I guess that's why they're going on about it, but this really surprises me.Malcolm Collins: Hold on. She ain't over here. I've got to go through a few other things. But also ifSimone Collins: that many of them are using birth [00:17:00] control, are also that many of them so unconscientious that they don't use it enough to need, actually to use the morning after abortion?ThatMalcolm Collins: was birth control of any type. Let's narrow it down. Ah, okay,Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Let's say, of the Catholics who were married, An ever used birth control that does not include condoms orSimone Collins: vasectomies. I.Malcolm Collins: e. Plan B and abortions, etc. The pill, etc. Okay?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Of the group that goes less than once a month, it's 94%.Of the group that goes three to four times a month, it's 88%. And of the group who goes weekly, it's 81%. So the restrictions are just not that effective within the community. Do you want to talk about abortions? So if we're talking about abortions here the difference between the groups is 24%.One in four Catholics who goes to a church less than once a month has had an abortion. That's wild. Wouldn't thatSimone Collins: just be also mentally tough to go to a church that has such views? I guess it helps that you can confess, [00:18:00] butMalcolm Collins: still. One to three times a month, 22%. And then these very religious Catholics that go weekly, okay weekly plus.11%! Over 1 in 10 Catholics who is going to a church very frequently. You have a group of 10 Catholics, one of them are, Catholic women, so 20 Catholic women. One of them has had an abortion.Simone Collins: What this really says to me is that our message around cultural sovereignty and reproductive choice really matters in that you should focus in on your own group.If you believe abortion is bad, try to get your own group to ban abortion internally, but to impose that on other people is both. We've got to talk about why it doesn'tMalcolm Collins: work. But Simone, before we go further, I got more stats for you here. You've got to be kidding me. It can'tSimone Collins: get any worse. Oh, itMalcolm Collins: gets worse.Every stat here is this situation is more catastrophic than you could have imagined. So the next one [00:19:00] is so some Catholics might be watching this and they're like, yeah, but I know a number of Catholics who attend church weekly and are still not very religious. So what if instead we separated Catholics by how religious they are between very, somewhat and not.Okay. And we asked the same questions ever used artificial birth control of any type. 100 percent of the non religious ones, not surprising, but of the somewhat religious ones, it's 99%, and of the very religious ones, it's 96%. If you're talking about had an abortion of the not religious ones, it was 27%, but of the very religious ones?It was whopping 18 percent of Catholics, of the ones who are married and used artificial birth control other than condom and vasectomies, i. e. morning after pill, the pill, et cetera or abortions themselves. You are looking between 96 percent of the not very religious ones to [00:20:00] 94 percent of the somewhat religious ones and 82 percent of the very religious ones. And as a quick put related aside, it is important to remember that if you overlay a heat map of how restrictive abortion access is across the EU, it is going to directly overlap. , with a heat map of how low fertility rates are across the EU, there appears to be a direct link between how restrictive the culture is around abortion and how low its fertility rate is.Simone Collins: So the issue is that Catholics aren't Catholic ing.Malcolm Collins: And we've got to talk about why. Because they are Catholic ing when it comes to things like IVF. They are, and this is a major problem. Like, when I say I'm afraid of Catholics going extinct, I very sincerely mean that. When we have studies showing us that by 2060, 50 percent of men in the developed world are not going to, , be fertile anymore.And then you get the, and so if they ban IVF, they're banning 50 [00:21:00] percent of their population from having kids and they already have terrible fertility rates. And why are they doing this? This is where it gets really tragic and sad to me. So people on our show, they'll know. We talk about like high and low Muslim culture.There are is absolutely an iteration of Muslim culture that, goes out and defaces things in museums and attempts to start a caliphate and basically are barbarians, like in terms of their level, the way that they treat people within their culture and outside of the culture, the way they view outsiders.But then there's a side of Muslim culture, which is where the Muslim golden age did. And like all of our Muslim scientists come from. And, I have a number of Muslim friends who are. Very enlightened, philosophically engaged people, like within every culture, you get to choose the high road or the low road, right?And Catholicism, it has a high road, it has its Thomas Aquinas and Augustus of Hippo. It [00:22:00] also has a low road. The mad Pope Pius IX, who wrote the Syllabus of Errors, basically calling for a Catholic Caliphate. For people who aren't familiar with the Syllabus of Errors, I can read some stuff on it so people know.The syllabus of errors called for people who lived in Catholic majority countries to remove freedom of religion and freedom of press within their countries and create Catholic states. Some quotes here. Moreover, it is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship and the full power given to all overtly and publicly manifested any opinion whatsoever and thoughts conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and the minds of people and to propagate the pests of indifferentism.And then you can look at other quotes where like one of the things that should be banned or ideas that should be banned in the syllabus of errors is every man is free to embrace and profess that religion, which guided by the light of reasons he shall consider true. Another one is in the present day, it is no longer expedient.The Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the state to the [00:23:00] exclusion of all other forms of worship. Wants to He's against these things. He thinks that, we need to end this. But he is also the pope who ordered the great castration, the going out and ripping the penises off of statues made by a guy like higher than his own, that he personally could not even see the worthiness of this art, just like this level of cultural depravity.But here's the problem, right? I contrasted these three individuals. It turns out that the only reason that Catholics today think that life began at conception is because of the mad Pope Pius IX, the great castration guy, the syllabus of errors guy. Oh boy. Thomas Aquinas, Augustus of Hippo, they thought life began 30 to 90 days after the fetus began developing.So they'd have no problem with IVF. So you're really getting this option with Catholicism, which is culturally. Where do Catholics go? Do they go back to their great figures in their [00:24:00] history and try to revitalize a true older form of Catholicism, or do they go with the guy who went around ripping penises off statutes?The, an act that to me seems, not particularly different from, the Muslims who are defacing things in their museums because they see them as an affront to their religion. And Protestants have gone through dark periods like this as well, where they deface things.I've got to, admit Protestants went through lots of great art and just defaced it. Because as much as I'm against mythology, I do not believe it. So many Catholic churchSimone Collins: interiors that used to have priceless art. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: so every culture has a high road and a low road. It's which iteration of that culture do you decide that you want to follow?So I think that's one thing that we have to note here, right? Is if you're going to get married later, you got this issue. Oh, hold on. I've got some more stats here to go over really quickly. Before. Here, what we're going to do is we are going to put a silver lining on this potentially.Okay. ThatSimone Collins: sounds nice at this point, [00:25:00] please.Malcolm Collins: Some other stats that we didn't get a chance to mention. Among ever married Catholic women aged 35 to 44, the percentage having five or more live births dropped more than six times between 1976 and the most recent data. Six fold.But, More devout people do have more kids. The problem is I haven't been able to find this broken out by religion. So I don't know. What is also really interesting in these statistics that I'll put on screen here is that while more devout people have more kids the number of kids that non devout people plan on having when they are 18 to 24 actually isn't that much lower than the number that devout people plan on having.It's just the actual realized fertility potential is much higher for the devout people. They're just in the expectation among the other group just goes down and converges with the number of kids they actually end up having as time goes on. And you'll see this in the graph. So that's a little bit of a, maybe there's a way out of this.But now we need to talk about why are Catholics marrying [00:26:00] later than other groups? And this is something I can only speculate on, but here is my thought. And of course I have to go into some stereotyping about the Catholics I know. Catholics are typically, in my experience, much more intellectually heady, and things need to be technically correct, in terms of how they approach life, and much less I guess I'd call it like passionful in the way that they approach things, it's more what does the research say, what does the, very nerdy, but in a type of nerdy that's very divergent with our type of nerdy.Our type of nerdy is very much let's head for the truth and look at the statistics and find out how like the authorities are lying to us. Where the Catholic nerdy is, let's go through the ancient literature and the great thinkers and everyone that genius who has written on this subject. I think you need both of these working next to each other in an ecosystem to produce great outcomes, but consider finding a [00:27:00] wife.With these two hats on, or finding a husband with these two hats on, you're going to be much more interested in the particulars of an individual rather than just making it work if you're approaching it with this heady perspective. Whereas if you're approaching it with this you just have to make things work and.To an extent, like even though we try to quarantine our emotions as much as possible, I would still say there's much more emotional leak into our actions which may be leading us to sublimate this basically checklist mentality a bit more than Catholics do. That is one hypothesis here. The other hypothesis, it might be that historically, because we do know that historically, as I mentioned in all of these studies, pre 70s, Catholics really did have a higher fertility rate and they got this higher fertility rate by their perspectives on contraception which did genuinely increase their fertility rate.It might be that the Catholic cultural group was [00:28:00] basically able to cheese their fertility rate for a long time and not develop other mechanisms to motivate people to find partners and have kids because they had the boost from their bans on contraception. And when those bands stopped being effective anymore, then, They didn't have the rest of the cultural technology that motivated kids for the sake of kids, instead of because you're having sex and not using contraception.And so there's all of this talk around and you see this within Catholic communities, like this, elevation of life and children as being these great glorious things. However, I feel like the way the Catholic community intellectually relates to these concepts is in the abstract and not in the actual.I think it's the same way that they relate to marriage, for example. How much does like Nick Fuentes opine on the type of person you need to be to get a good partner? Now, if you're approaching information like a Simone or Malcolm, I would [00:29:00] immediately discount anything he says about the way a married couple should live their lives because He or the way you should go about securing a partner because whatever he's doing clearly isn't working, but a Catholic like the way that Catholics intellectually relate to information might actually take advice on how to find a partner from somebody like him because he aesthetically is giving views that align with great thinkers in history who they have respect for, even if functionally him following those perspectives has shown to not work within our modern context.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. There, There does seem to be a risk with Catholicism of becoming so divorced from, we'll say like this source material, and instead looking at experts who analyze experts and eventually become too separated from the actual religion. But I can't see a direct line between that and fertility rates.I just, [00:30:00] I think it's telling one that there clearly is a lot of a We'll say functional attrition taking place with Catholicism. Like they may, you might say that you're Catholic, but the urban monoculture is driving more of your behavior, if not your thoughts, then you would like or in practice. And then I do think that there's something going on with community formation.Most of the community amenities services, even missionary work that I've encountered in my life. And of course this is anecdotal, so it's not great information, but it hasn't been Catholic. It's been Protestant. And I do think that those are signs. If I don't see missionary work, if I don't see soup kitchens, if I don't see charities, if I don't see auctions, if I don't see events, then I'm probably also not encountering a community that is providing dating solutions.And keep in mind that people often meet each other at these things as [00:31:00] well. So I just, I don't know. I don't, it could be that the Catholic church has so much dedicated.Malcolm Collins: I'm actually being proselytized to by a Catholic. I'm just thinking about it now. That's what I'm saying.Simone Collins: And it could be a structural issue.Because for example, most Protestant groups are not really oriented around a large sprawling church. The attention goes more to mission oriented things or local community events and programming. Whereas because the Catholic Church has orders of priests and nuns and, payroll and staff and bureaucracy and internal processes, it could be that it's developed a form of governing bureaucratic bloat.That it's caused resources that would otherwise go toward community programming, like mission work, like community services, like matchmaking. Now that's instead going to training priests, and maintaining orders of nuns, and maintaining the internal apparatus of Vatican City, etc.Malcolm Collins: I have two other ideas I've come up while you've been [00:32:00] talking here.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Okay. One idea is the aesthetic idealism of Catholics is what is causing them to get married later. So when I talk about the aesthetic idealism of Catholics, I don't even do I need to explain what I mean by this concept? You know what I'm talking about when I say Catholics are aesthetic idealists.Like they really like, This grandeur feeling this everything it's like this is the way you do a marriage for it to be just and good, right? This is the way you live your life for it to be just and good and it's an aesthetic direction of Perfection and grace and beauty and there is you know, obviously there's something motivating about this But it's pretty bad at sealing the deal with specific other individuals.Because it's very easy for someone to not meet this aesthetic idealism in a fallen world. So that could be one. Okay? Next. What if it is downstream of the priest class being celibate? Because you're talking [00:33:00] about this giant bureaucracy that the Catholics have, and one unique thing about the Catholic bureaucracy that is often acting as their dating coaches and life coaches and psychologists, like when it's functioning correctly, right?They're celibate. They haven't gone through these trials.Simone Collins: Oh, and so these, yeah, basically the tribal elders of the Catholic community are not speaking from experience when helping people form relationships or, that is to say romantic sexual relationships or get married or find a partner because they themselves.Did not successfully do that. They didn't want to. It wasn't their calling. Contrast likeMalcolm Collins: a young Jew, or a young Mormon, right? I go to my rabbi and I talk about dating problems, or finding a wife, or something like that. Or I go to a Mormon. A stake president, orSimone Collins: yeah, whoever. Yeah. Yeah, they're gonna probably have a family and a ton of kids.They're gonnaMalcolm Collins: be able to talk from a position of not sympathy, but empathy. Really, some people don't know the difference. Empathy is when you're talking about an [00:34:00] emotion that you've had before, and you can put yourself in their shoes through mirroring the emotion through when you've had sympathy. It's when you're you can imagine what it's like to be them, but you haven't actually experienced something like that yourself.When You've got it mixed up. I got it mixed up. It's the empathy is one and the empathy is the other. Yeah it's the same word. Simone is the smarter one, and you're proving it again right here. I'm probably wrong, Malcolm. I just we'll see. We'll see. I'll just leave this whole thing in. I won't even check it when I'm doing editing and then A couple things.Okay. No, so I think youSimone Collins: make a good point there, though. If the influencers of your space are giving advice, it's going to get, our general rule of thumb is the advice that you take from someone is advice. It's going to get you where they are. And if you're getting advice on relationships from a celibate person who works in a bureaucracy, yeah, you can end up married.Malcolm Collins: Then consider like we've got to, we've got to flip this consider how this is actually protective of the aesthetic idealism problem I was talking about. So when you go to a, [00:35:00] Rabbi that's actually had to deal with being married to someone and finding a spouse, and you're like, look, they don't live up to my ideal of what a woman should be in this area.They're going to be like, buddy, it's like that for everyone. You'll grow together. It'll work out. Yeah. You go to the Catholic priest because they've never actually had to deal with these compromises in a marriage. They are much less likely to be compromising on those aestheticSimone Collins: Yeah, or you can talk to a nun.She's basically married to Jesus. That's a high bar. She's comparing all men to Jesus. Yeah, she'sMalcolm Collins: comparing your husband, your potential husband to Jesus. No, it's hard. And then you've got to keep in mind that as a Catholic, and this is another huge problem that Catholics have, because of the priesthood, is typically your most devout members, okay?Your fanatics are the people who in a normal religion are pumping out the most kids. In Catholicism, you're memetically castrating them. Your most devout members are entering the priesthood.Simone Collins: Yeah. Rather they serve theirMalcolm Collins: [00:36:00] duty to God rather than by having kids. So if I would make a few prescriptive changes for Catholicism, one is the celibate priesthood just doesn't make sense anymore.It's not a biblical thing. It's definitely not in the Bible that your priest should be celibate. This is. Something that was made up after. It was made up with good reason, I think, when it was first made up to prevent nepotism within church institutions. Great reason to do it initially.It doesn't make sense anymore. End it. Two this life begins at conception thing. During the greatest periods when your church was still this living entity that was producing all these amazing and great thinkers That I look to respect and that I draw religious authority from even as a non catholic I can go to the writings of someone like, Thomas Aquinas and Feel like getting information from somebody who is genuinely touched by God in his writings and these have theological import to them.Whereas when I look at more modern Catholic writings [00:37:00] they read like research abstracts. Like it's it's it's the difference between a living and a dead religion right and to Bring a religion back to life. You have to bring the theological conversation back to life Which means you need to be having a living conversation about the theology and that's the final thing.I would say it's that the conversation about the Catholic theology Needs to become more of a living thing in the way it is within Protestant communities you know If you look at like the pre millennialist versus the post millennialist Protestants, and you look at them debating this is a living conversation.Even if it's like nuanced stuff they are passion about this. I don't see this because I watch a lot of like religious communities talking to each other. With the Catholic religious authorities, it always feels more like an academic debate.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And so it's, how can you bring that passion back in?I think it's by Doubling down on the asceticism, but the asceticism of the old and the ascetic not asceticism like being an ascetic, but the ascetic drive or [00:38:00] morality, I think you can maintain that because I think that's key to Catholic culture, but to aim for the early church instead of the modern church.Simone Collins: Which should take you closer to the true church. Any organization that grows over time is going to drift a little bit. Sometimes you have to reorient back.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so to aim for the early church restructure around that. And to would be the second thing the priesthood thing. I just don't know how you can fix this issue when your entire ruling bureaucracy has never had to find a spouse.In a world where the difficulty of finding a spouse has become astronomically harder you're talking about the Mormon prophet, right? He's an old guy. So he's out of touch was what the modern dating market is but at least he has like some connection to it. Like at least eventually somebody is going to be in that position who has dealt with something like a modern dating market that will just never happen with the Catholic community.So there is not the same mandate to update their perspectives. [00:39:00] And you even have the Pope now calling for people. There was a quote recently that like women need to have more kids and they're shirking their duties.Simone Collins: Wow. That's. intense. And I, I wish there were something more productive to say aside from I still think the big thing is when people look at falling birth rates and they think that the solution is to impose one cultural solution on everyone.I don't think that's the right answer. And I think cultures really need to look within and solve their own problems before doing things like trying to universally ban abortion. Which is only causing things to become harder for Catholics in many ways, because now a bunch of people are pushing back where they wouldn't otherwise see pushback.Yeah, I also feel like a lot of people maybe stepping away from the Catholic Church because of these developments, which is only going to hurt them more. And the bans aren'tMalcolm Collins: even really affecting abortion rates within your own community. Like, instead of focusing on this deontological like ethical structure to build [00:40:00] relations.And if people want to hear more of our Catholic abortion debate you can go to our video, who's actually killing more kids, other Catholics. Where we go into that question and the theology behind it really in detail. For me, I think the sign that God does not, did not intend us to believe that life begins at conception and meant for us to know this, is really clear in the fact that human identical twins exist, where the conception happens and then it splits into two humans, and chimeras exist, where two different fertilized eggs end up forming into one human.This is something, both of those things don't happen in all species. God didn't need to make them happen in our species, that he did seems like a pretty loud signal that the early Catholic thinkers were right and not the penis rip off guy not the caliphate guy not the anti freedom of religion, anti freedom of press anti I think That there's this, oh, this is what we've always thought in perspective, and it's just, it's useful to help break that, and I'm trying to break this, not as an attack on Catholics, but because I want to save the [00:41:00] Catholic cultural group.I think that it has something to offer our civilization but by the numbers right now, if it keeps doing what it's doing, it will die. ItSimone Collins: will die. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to hopefully doing something to address it. And I hope that awareness is raised about this actual issue because clearly the current stances being taken are not effective.And a lot of introspection and inward looking, I think would, Do good. And I also think more focus on the actual infrastructure of relationship formation within the Catholic church needs to be revisited because one reason why probably people are even getting the abortions that they're getting is because they're not married.And I bet if they were in, and happy marriages at younger ages, Those abortions would have turned into live births, which is really sad too. So I think that's where it should be.Malcolm Collins: Here's the real fix. Some of the Catholics that have reached out to us have [00:42:00] indicated that they live in small, all Catholic communities that are very high fertility rate and absolutely religiously zealot.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: These are the communities that will end up replacing the current Catholic church and potentially saving it. I'm superSimone Collins: okay with that because these people we've met are awesome.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but the challenge that these communities have is they are ruled by a central bureaucracy that is much more moderate than they are, and that's out of touch with them forSimone Collins: sure.It'sMalcolm Collins: so challenging to be a community that is being dragged towards the urban monoculture, not just from the culture around you, but your central ruling bureaucracy, which is setting your church mandates. Yeah, I think what we really need to see is a Catholic break off church. I think that's what's gonna survive.Simone Collins: We'll see.Malcolm Collins: Or an order. Oh, this would be interesting. An order. An order of nuns slash priest like Catholics that all take a vow to be high of fertility and incredibly religiously celibate. The orderSimone Collins: of families. I like it. Very cool. The order ofMalcolm Collins: [00:43:00] fecundity. Anyway I, what would you call them?The the baby friars?Simone Collins: No. The family order.Malcolm Collins: I love you. I love you too, Malcolm. Have a great day. And I do hope the Catholics solve this, cause I'm worried after seeing these stats.Simone Collins: We love you Catholics, good luck!Malcolm Collins: We can't help, but hopefully you've worked this out on your own somehow. Trust in my BF!.Simone Collins: You look very pretty, by the way. So do you. I know the white is better,Malcolm Collins: I know you try hard and ISimone Collins: looked like Dobby the house elf. And so I figured, grayappropriate for me. All right, let's do it.This way? Yeah. Yeah? Where are we [00:44:00] going? Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this insightful video, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into the complex ethical considerations surrounding parents showcasing their children on social media platforms. They explore the potential benefits and drawbacks of raising children in the public eye, addressing concerns about privacy, consent, and the long-term impact on a child's future. The couple discusses the importance of age-appropriate media exposure, the need for open communication and education, and the value of building a strong family brand in an increasingly connected world. They also touch on the role of social media followings in creating opportunities, fostering trust, and navigating a changing societal landscape. Throughout the conversation, Malcolm and Simone emphasize the significance of parental responsibility, adaptability, and the development of resilience in children growing up in the digital age.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I claiming there are no ethical issues here? No, I'm very clearly not. I'm saying there are ethical issues, but what people on the other side of this argument arepretending, which is just false in a lie is that there are no potential upsides for the kid from this. I'm doing is I am contrasting the upsides with the downsides . That they have the environment to start their lives with decent sized social media followings within wealthy intellectual circles, the doors that is going to open for them. And this is something that we also haven't talked enough about in society, social media followings and the ability to translate these into high value relationships.Simone Collins: if we live in a future in which Society's current vetting systems are bankrupt and don't work anymore. The only way that you can really build trust and have people expect you to deliver on what you [00:01:00] promise is if they feel like they know you and can trust you and you're predictable because trust lies in predictability.And the only way that they can know that is if they have some kind of access to your thought process or they have a parasocial relationship with you. And the only way to do that is if you have a very open and transparent media history.Malcolm Collins: And we want to have kids whose lives matter. If you are afraid of people making fun of you online, Your life won't matterSimone Collins: becauseMalcolm Collins: you can't do anything publicly.And it's very hard to change the world if you don't do things publiclyWould you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello everyone I am excited to be here with you today. Today. We are going to be talking about the ethics of putting children in media and the Considerations that need to go into this because a lot of people might look at what we are doing we are a very public family. We are in the news all the time these days which is funny becauseour channel is medium size, but not really correlatory to how [00:02:00] publicly famous we are getting. But again, just this last weekend, like the big three page front page piece in the guardian. And then a bunch of follow up pieces to that and then trending and and so people are like, wow, your kids are in all of these, like in the Vice documentary, right?This little baby right here is in the media because she is in this shot.Simone Collins: Yeah. And I watch a lot of snark online. A lot of the snark there's a big theme and people criticizing parents who include their children in TikTok and Instagram and YouTube posts, et cetera. And whenever they include clips that they're criticizing, they blur out.The poor baby's faces, because they've been included in the shot. And even when they're trying to critique the video, they themselves do not want to repeat the crime of putting a child's face online, which to a certain extent, I understand the basics of where they're coming from.For example on Google photos, which uses facial recognition, it is able to recognize the faces of. Baby versions [00:03:00] of very old people. Like it is very good at continuous face facial recognition. So it's not Oh, it's a, it's them as a baby. No one will know that this was them. Oh, actually they will.There is no not parsing that, but also you and I have been talking a lot about this recently, this concept of privacy. Is such a farce and often to a great extent, trying to be more private and trying to hide is only subjecting. I'm goingMalcolm Collins: to push back on you here from their perspective.Simone Collins: Yeah, you can sayMalcolm Collins: that as an adult privacy is a farce to adults. Okay. Yeah. Which is very hard to actually both be private and have an impact on the world in this current world. You can be private, but you are sacrificing your ability to impact society by doing that. Yeah. However, and I think that most like sane ethical systems believe some form of social impact is a personal obligation.I can see how there could be like hedonist based ethical systems or like weird ones where like your family is literally the only thing that matters. But your [00:04:00] family is going to have to deal with downstream consequences of a society you didn't alter. So that's silly to me. So as an adult, yeah. I believe that privacy is a silly thing to strive for, but you could keep our children from appearing in any media.Like I could genuinely achieve that in the way that the world is structured today. So why Delta? Hmm. Okay. Now let's talk about the ethical position that they're arguing from, right? They're saying the child did not consent being in media. And therefore the child. should not be in media, right?Which is a fairly stupid argument. Children do not consent to the vast majority of parental decisions made around them.Simone Collins: They did not consent to broccoli. They did not consent to bedtime. They did not consent to. Exactly. Many things.Malcolm Collins: So that's [00:05:00] just stupid. Like the consent argument around kids appearing in media is stupid.Simone Collins: But they would argue broccoli and bedtime are good for you. Media is. ButMalcolm Collins: that's their judgment. And this is what we're fundamentally going to argue by the end of this video is that I suspect that the core value source in our society going forwards, especially like accreditation source with the universities, is Collapsing as trusted sources of accreditation.Cause I've seen this more and more just nobody trusts the universities. Like they've gone way too far on DEI. They've basically become these extremist cults. Nobody really sees them as a good source of an individual's value anymore. Where do people. And then it's then what about like designer brands, no longer like this sort of scarcity around fancy clothes, no longer has value anymore.It's what is luxury? What is value today? Because we have now, I think, cross correlated luxury with. Signs of this is somebody you should [00:06:00] pay attention to which is the way historically used to be the guy who walked into the village with all the beads on him and all the gold on him what he was showing Is I'm someone you should pay attention to you.I am someone you shouldSimone Collins: well really to boil it down someone who Actually has wealth or luxury has a scarce commodity. And right now branded luxury goods are not a scarce commodity. A lot of these other things, prestigious university degrees are becoming less scarce as a commodity. For example, there are a lot of people claiming that they have a Harvard degrees because they've gone to a Harvard extension program.They just stretch it a little bit and, other universities have really loosened their. Admission criteria, right? So carry on.Malcolm Collins: So it's scarce quantities. But in this current world order, the, it seems to be sorting towards the core thing of value and the core sign of competence and the core thing that opens doors from you is.is subscriber count. Basically, it's how many people are paying attention to you in online environment. Please and subscribe. No but I mean that very [00:07:00] seriously, right?Simone Collins: I would say it's that or Other means of proving value. Like I, I built this thing that created this much in wealth, or I am able to turn this thing into money.So you have to just prove value or prove reach. And I think, reach is a sign of proven value and that's what we're looking at. You can no longer just use someone's vetting or someone's someone else's possessions to get there.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, there are, I would say it's. There are other means, but it's mostly proven reach.If you look at what's the richest person in the world doing with his money, Elon Musk, he's buying Twitter slash X, right? He is buying something that gives him control of the flow of information because that is the key thing about, especially as we move into an economy was more AI where human labor has a different value than it did in a historic context where like human information labor is less important The human creative labor where creativity [00:08:00] isn't defined in the narrow sense it was historically, which is to say around narrow like pictures, which it turns out we're just like averages basically, or art, which it turned out was averages or music because all of this was very easy for AI to replicate. But, nuanced conversation and interpretation of what's going on in a global context and philosophical and cultural, like the type of information that we are providing people with or the type of entertainment we are providing people with, we loop our children into this at an early age and they come out with the large followings, basically starting their lives, what people are from our perspective, arguing against our kids having right is it's almost in the last generation.It's like we have prepaid for our kids to go to Harvard, but they also absolutely have to go to Harvard. And you can say, what if your kids don't want to go to Harvard? I'm like, that's a [00:09:00] possibility. A lot of people in the world might not want to go to Harvard. Yeah. But. on the edge. If I told the kid I didn't know if you'd want to go to Harvard or not, so I didn't pre pay and secure your acceptance, the vast majority of people would be like, fuming.Are you insane? How dare you deny me this opportunity that I had so set in stone for some sort of bizarre I wasn't sure if you'd want it or not. That is the way that we relate to this concept. So we can look at the counters. It's what if your kids don't want this, right? So you need to look at the actual, because we're very consequentialist in our ethics.What are the actual consequences, negative consequences to our kids?For being in media and stuff like that. I canSimone Collins: walk, I can walk through some of that. And I think this is where the nuance comes in that people aren't willing to discuss. And a lot of this is similar to what we saw with corporal punishment, where there's a lot of people who are like under no circumstances, can this thing ever be done?[00:10:00]And then on the other end, you have people who take it too far after hearing that it's okay, or thinking that it's okay. And there has to be a happy medium. So the top critiques that I hear when people are criticizing this is one, parents are bringing up subjects that these kids probably really don't want.to have their parents talking about my daughter just had her first period. Now I'm picking up tampons for her and we're going to go have the talk on how she's going to use them. And, as a teenager, maybe that's not something that she really wants to have heard, or, people talk about, with eight passengers, obviously Ruby Frank was having conversations with her kids when her kids were even quite openly and verbally signaling that they did not want to have those conversations on the plane.Camera. So there are instances in which there's active lack of consent. There are instances in which embarrassing things are happening. There are instances in which the kid is okay with it at the time, but in the future, you're pretty sure, like 80 to 90 percent confidence that person is not going to be happy to have that video content out there.Cause it's just embarrassing. And then there's the [00:11:00] instance or the issue of financial exploitation and already States, I think like California have legislation that require Parents that are making money from content with their kids in them have to set aside a certain amount of income for their kids.But this is far from, universal legislation. And I imagine that many parents that should be compensating their children for the income that they're getting using their children are not doing so, and just using their children.Malcolm Collins: So I want to push against all of these points because go ahead.Okay. I'll explain why they're dumb. So first you've got to look at different age ranges. And stuff like that. Yeah,Simone Collins: absolutely.Malcolm Collins: So suppose industry, the one who's in the shot right now wants to be a private person when she gets older within no like normative or logically consistent ethical system, could she be concerned that something that she did at this age is going to be used against her as an adult?LikeSimone Collins: what is the effect? What about that girl who tweeted those, that the hummus or, But the girl who [00:12:00] tweeted really insensitive and very racially bad things, racist things. And then her father's business was completely shut down. I've forgotten his name. Do you think industry is going to be tweeting anything?Malcolm Collins: No. Are you out of your mind? But what I'm saying though is there are instances of kids doing things that come no. The point I'm making is you need to divide by age ranges. Okay? Huh.Simone Collins: Huh.Malcolm Collins: Anything below I'd say the age of probably about six just isn't going to affect you as an adult.Maybe even the age of seven. Anything below the age of seven. Yeah, I'll go seven. Anything below the age of seven, just know it. They're like a seven year old. That's probably fair. Yeah, and they're probably not All the things people are like,Simone Collins: that's fine. Tweeting anti AndMalcolm Collins: you could be like what if the kids walking around screaming racial obscenities or something like that?Simone Collins: One, It's more a reflection of the parents than anything. It's more aMalcolm Collins: reflection of the parents. It's going to be a general problem anyway, if they're that sort of person. When they're that young,Simone Collins: again.Malcolm Collins: And whether or not they're online, it is not a problem that their [00:13:00] parents made a mistake there. Their parents made a mistake somewhere if that's happening, okay?The point is that under the age of seven, Or so there's they're just not going to be held responsible for any of their actions once they decide to become private and all of this stuff can really be disintermediated from their adult identity. So it is largely irrelevant, especially when there is a potential positive for them.Now we're going to deal with the tricky age. Okay. And this is the age you were talking about. Yeah, this is like seven to maybe 11. Oh, you're saying tweenSimone Collins: years, really? I thought it was when that sort of, I would say from 13 to adulthood. No,Malcolm Collins: I actually don't think there's any. And so we'll take out the tween years and then we'll just jump to the next age range to explain why it's not ethically complicated.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: The sort of. I'd say 11 and up. So let's say 12 and over. These are [00:14:00] fully cognitively human things. They can decline consent whenever they want. They can say, I don't want to appear on film. And if they say, I don't want to appear on film, I think it is the parent's duty to respect that.And I think honestly, in most cases, except when you're dealing with like actual crazy people, like the eight passenger situation, most parents respect that. Yeah. If a kid says, I don't wannaSimone Collins: line there, you say, if a kid ever says no, I would even say, what if a five YEAROLD or 4-year-old says no, then we don't, we would never put them on camera.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But I don't look, what I would say is. A four year old not saying no, even if they might have said no, if they were more cognitive is not relevant to me because there's no real negative repercussions for their actions. No one's going toSimone Collins: judge them for the thing that they might've said no to.Right.Malcolm Collins: So irrelevant. And then you could be like, yeah, but what if a 12 or 13 year old is they they say yes, but then they do something stupid, like something racist or something like overly sexually aggressive or And it's and then they have to deal with repercussions for that when [00:15:00] they're older.It's excuse me. What about me when I was 20, if I did stuff like that? And then I had to deal with repercussions for it when I'm like a totally different person. Now people change over time. All I can do is try to inform my kids as much about the world as possible and hope that they make good decisions.The fact that they might need to if my 12 year old murders someone, are they not supposed to be long term responsible for that? Be realistic people. So I really just don't see a lot of ethical consequences there. Like we are giving our kids the chance as fully mentally developed beings.Not fully, but like they're on the way to full mental development and they have the ability to decline consent and the record, the historic record is going to be judging them with that in mind. So as an example, recently, I saw there was somebody trying to cancel Turkey Top for saying something Using racial slurs when he was 15 or 16 on like Twitter threats.Now, he wasn't public. He didn't have parents who were making him public. But [00:16:00] once you're at this fully mental age and you're in an online space, this is where your argument of privacy is an illusion at that point, right? He wasn't public, but he became famous later, and so those things became relevant later.And most people were just like, bro, he was 15, chill out. And nobody who matters actually cares. Turkey Tom isn't canceled. Turkey Tom is a popular YouTube channel who most people think positively of, who are not insane. Might an insane minority hate yeah, but that insane minority doesn't matter.Like they don't have, like, okay. Ignore the insane minority because. They don't matter, and they'll always find some reason to hate you no matter what if you fit into the groups that they desire to hate. So now we've got into the, do you have any counter thoughts to that? It seems like you might, before we get into the tween category.Simone Collins: I guess I, some I mostly agree with that. I do think though that what this is, This means also is that you have to do this the right way. You have to educate your kids about the ramifications of anything that they do [00:17:00] online or frankly around any smart device or anyone who's holding a phone, because that phone could be recording.But perhaps the fact that we would have our kids on camera, anyone who does have their kids on camera and does educate them about safety around these things it acts as a good forcing function. It gives them essentially media training at a young age. For example, had the girl I'm thinking of who tweeted all these racist things been trained early and also been exposed to media a lot earlier, maybe she would have been a whole lot more savvy and wouldn't have tweeted all those things that ultimately then destroyed probably much of her career and also really either destroyed or Really compromised her father's business, which employed quite a few extended family members as well.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So there, I think it's more just good parenting and it's just that you're more on the hot seat for good parenting. And in a way this could be positive for the kids because again, you can only look at the negatives. If we are doing a bad job as parents, it is going to be more loudly and immediately obvious at these age ranges.[00:18:00]If our kids have a public window, right? No, I need to look at theSimone Collins: ethics of our life philosophy in general, and that we are willing to be subject to criticism. And we believe that's the right way is that if you're wrong, you want to know that you're wrong. And so the idea that so many people are trying to hide anything that might be criticized about their lifestyles, their beliefs, how they raise their kids or their kids lives.That they're trying to hide that from any potential criticism means that if they are doing something wrong, they're probably not going to correct it, which is a pretty big deal. And so I like, weMalcolm Collins: get to know a lot sooner and the public gets to know a lot sooner. Are we bad parents? You don't have to wait until our kids are adults to know that y'all find out pretty soon, I think.Because we do plan to keep our kids in the media spotlight and I do plan to with this podcast, as our kids develop more cognizance, bring them into the podcast.Simone Collins: When they want to participate.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I imagine five, 10 years from now, instead of me talking to Simone every day, some days it'll be me talking to one of the kids, or Simone talking to [00:19:00] one of the kids, or two of the kids talking to each other, or, I want this to be a family thing.That's based around their understanding of reality and their engagement with reality, because I think people would find that very interesting. And I think they'd find that very interesting as a historic record of their development of ideas and stuff like that. We'd keep it focused.It wouldn't be like a normal parenting podcast. I'm not interested in. You guys seeing like how awesome of a dad I am by like following me around and making sure I'm punishing them correctly and making sure I'm doing, like a lot of the parental bloggers.Simone Collins: No, I'm watching your YouTube channel.That's just Octavian and Torsten. They already have very interesting conversations.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I'm much more interested in the philosophical development of my kids and their development in terms of self narrative and how they think about reality in the world. I think that's more interesting and I think that our audience would find it pretty interesting.And I don't think I just don't see a lot of negative externalities coming from that for my kids in the future, even if they decide to be private. There's a lot of child stars. Who are now like, Oh yeah, I'm private now because I decided to [00:20:00] become private. It's not like some huge scarring thing for them unless they like got into drugs or something while they were a child star.And that's evenSimone Collins: people who I think, I don't know, catch a lot of heat for things. Typically it only goes wrong when they try sand it. When they're like, Oh no, no one needs to know this. We have to stop this right now. And then they flail a lot and then people pay even more attention. So again, a lot of this comes down to media training, which I think is a key theme here is that parents have to be savvy about teaching their kids how to deal with a public life, but also only doing this with.SoMalcolm Collins: now we need to talk about the ethically dubious age. So this is the seven to 11 age range when kids are cognitive enough to do things that can cause long term repercussions for them. And they are also in hierarchical social environments. Where things that they do privately, they may not want shared, but they may not have the ability to be able to tell their parents.I [00:21:00] don't consent to you sharing this information. Whether it's first puberty or something like that, like we would always just have a rule. If you're going through something and you just don't want us to share it, just say, I don't consent to you sharing this. At that age range, okay.I can understand where some concerns come in, but again, not really. So I'll explain why the not really enough it's where you get this a little blurring of the slider of, but they didn't know at that age range that Y would have those consequences.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And. I think that we are entering a generation where because of the consequences of doing something like going online and yelling a bunch of racial slurs or like sexually aggressively approaching someone can be as severe to a person's long term like employability as them as an 11 year old taking a knife and stabbing their little sister.We need to teach them that those consequences are that severe. At a very young age. And make sure that they internalize that. And it's more of [00:22:00] a I think people who want to, keep this pure privacy at this age are more people who are just not about parental responsibility. In terms of the them teaching kids like proper social boundaries, because even without us, if they're on a discord or something like that, and they do something insane, like this is there's still consequences for it.And people can be like they chose to be on those social media channels. They chose to be on that discord or that Twitter or that. YouTube channel. It's not really. All of these things have addiction based algorithms or those TikToks, right? That have sucked them into them. Do they really choose them?No. It's a combination of their parents and their environment and their, So again, I'm just not really concerned. And this is where you get to the downside. Am I claiming there are no ethical issues here? No, I'm very clearly not. I'm saying there are ethical issues, but what people on the other side of this argument are complaining.Pretending, which is just false in a [00:23:00] lie is that there are no potential upsides for the kid from this. I'm doing is I am contrasting the upsides with the downsides and there, the probabilistic relation our kids will have to those upsides and downsides. Okay. So when I look at my kids, um, coming out of this, that they have the environment to start their lives with decent sized social media followings within wealthy intellectual circles, the doors that is going to open for them.It's just so obvious to me that, you go look at who's even though, the podcast is okay. Like we do. Like 1300 hours a day or something. At this point, we've got about 55 people watching us at any given time at this point, a day or night. If you just look at what's the average probability, somebody's watching our channel and this is just on YouTube and we distribute through other channels.But so this isn't a huge number, but what's the demographics of this [00:24:00] number? Because we know, because we interact with a lot of them, it's venture capitalists, it's campaign operatives. It is. academics. It is this channel just does not appeal, to like your average person that much. And it is the type of people who, one, my kids can source good career opportunities from that will get them a huge leg up in life.But And I think that this is really important that they can serve as partners through. And this is something that we also haven't talked enough about in society, social media followings and the ability to translate these into high value relationships. Which I think is going to be when our kids are like, yeah, I really appreciate that you were able to hook me up with a spouse through this network that you spent the time to build.But yeah, and I want to create something that is a clan based network or channel or something like that. So that my kids, cause right now we're trying to build it so that we get a TV show made on our family. And we're in talks with a lot of people that I [00:25:00] can't talk about.But as we do that I want it to be like a clan based media empire, right? Like where they are Working with each other to build up their own properties, but they're also investing in any properties that we built out.Simone Collins: So what you're saying is a lot of your interest personally inMalcolm Collins: inheriting any properties we built outSimone Collins: and having a lot of people be aware of your behavior and philosophy and activity is it makes more people willing to are interested in working with you.And the same would happen with our kids. Yeah. If there is, if we live in a future in which Society's current vetting systems are bankrupt and don't work anymore. The only way that you can really build trust and have people expect you to deliver on what you promise is if they feel like they know you and can trust you and you're predictable because trust lies in predictability.And the only way that they can know that is if they have some kind of access to your thought process or they have a parasocial relationship with you. And the only way to do that is if you have a very open and transparent media history. And if you can't show those receipts and you reach out [00:26:00] to someone and you say, I want to work with you, or I think we should start a business together or please hire me.They have nothing to go on. So it'sMalcolm Collins: not just that, as the economy changes, like if our kids want to start a company, how do they get their customers? Like it's hard to get customers, right? But if they have online followings, it's much easier.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: How do they get, how do they get anything they want?Like everything gets easier for them. The larger a following they have. And we have some people in our circles that are like, I want to be as private as possible. And it's because they view, I think negative comments about them online is like a genuinely negative thing. When like random haters don't matter.Like they do not matter.Simone Collins: Yeah, there was one critique video I watched where they showed a clip of someone filming their kid's reaction to someone, like an online commenters snarking about their name or something. And the kid looked hurt and was like, why would someone say that? And they just looked, [00:27:00] genuinely like their feelings were hurt.And that is a combination of bad media training in general. But. They're totally missing the point that if a kid learns early on that a bunch of idiots online are going to say dumb things about them, they're going to develop a much thicker skin. They're going to become anti fragile and shielding a kid from mean commentary online or from criticism that is coming really from no strong foundation.It's not something to worry about. That's TheMalcolm Collins: Bergens are gonna Bergen, we have an episode of like it's humanity becoming the Bergens from the trolls series, which I referenced way too much on this show for a child's cartoon. But yeah the Bergens are going to Bergen.They just hate everything. They're weird mutants who sit online all day yelling at people. And the earlierSimone Collins: you get used to their commentary, not mattering the better, cause we even know people now who. After seeing the tiniest semblance of that act as though someone has showed up their front porch with a gun pointed at [00:28:00] them.And this is not a productive way to live. And if that's what takes you out in a day, if that's what you have a freak out overMalcolm Collins: life is never going to matter.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And we want to have kids whose lives matter. If you are afraid of people making fun of you online, Your life won't matterSimone Collins: becauseMalcolm Collins: you can't do anything publicly.And it's very hard to change the world in any sort of productive way. If you don't do things publicly. So that's the other thing where I'm just like, I don't care. Like it's about training my kids to be good people, not about. Protecting them from dealing with the consequences of their actions. No, I need to help head off those actions to begin with.And we live in this fragile world, right? And I think that you make a great point there. I'm really sad because some of the people we know who are like, Oh my God, like you guys are getting so famous. And now it's hurting me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because you're in the media and some idiots don't like you.And it's How are you ever going to do [00:29:00] anything? You don't disagree with my views. I know you don't disagree with my views. You don't disagree with how we're trying to change the world. You're just afraid of pushback. So you can't do anything. Even if you're competent. Even if you're rich.You can't do anything until you are willing to do it. to allow the world to hate you or the idiots, the Bergens to hate you because the truth is, and you've seen this with the whole like corporal punishment controversy where at first Simone was like, Oh my God, everybody hates us online. I got to chill out Simone.There were things I was embarrassed about with people. With that article, I was embarrassed that I had framed Kevin Dolan is further right than he really is. He's actually probably to the left of me. He just has a public reputation as being to the right of me and I shouldn't have done that.And I was really guilty about that because I had caused somebody else, negative repercussions that they didn't need to deal with. But the slap itself, I was like, no, this is going to turn out in our favor. Don't worry about it. Like the research agrees with it. And. You've seen that now since the, then, like [00:30:00] everyone we know who is like a smart, competent person has been like yeah, they were right to do that.What did you about, or atSimone Collins: least they acknow that this is a nuanced situation. I think that's,Malcolm Collins: I haven't heard that. I, no, I literally haven't heard anything other than enthusiastic support. What do we have? We got like Richard Hania, the enthusiastic support. Recently I had Sarah Hater and Meghan Dunn yeah. But no,Simone Collins: but they said it's nuanced. They said it's nuanced. Sarah Hader didn't even say that. I don't think she practices corporal punishment with her own kids. She just had made one comment that like,Malcolm Collins: Sorry I watched the whole video. She said, if it's not done in anger, okay. And it's not done to cause pain.Yeah. But I, that's,Simone Collins: I count that as nuanced. No one's coming up being like we're not saying that either.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. She said it is enthusiastic support was in the realm of what actually happened.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And this is what you saw with other people who reached out to us whether it's a, God, we had her on early.We should have her on more often. I have an episode of hers [00:31:00] that I haven't done live yet. Yeah, Diana Fleishman. It's on how we can stand being such lazy parents. That's the episode that hasn't gone live yet.Simone Collins: Oh, we shouldn't do that.Malcolm Collins: I'll put it out. She's soSimone Collins: cool. I'veMalcolm Collins: got such a backload of interviews because I'm always, I process the interview so much slower than the other episodes because it causes me like emotional pain to process them because I have to think through somebody else judging me and I often just don't really fully process the interviews.I think going forwards, that's what I should plan on doing. It's just interviews are cut as they are.Simone Collins: Why not?Malcolm Collins: Because I can't deal. I do not like social environments and it's like reliving a social scene. Whenever we do one that's what I'm so slow with. I'm like the make this or hater one.Anyway, I absolutely love my wife. You are amazing. I appreciate that you are so sane in this world of stupid, weird deontological stuff. Can shouldn't do, it doesn't matter when you're talking about a f*****g four year old. [00:32:00] Okay. Because they, no, it doesn't. They don't understand. ISimone Collins: think, I think it's important to model what, when, and I, no, I actually do think that an infant can show and in toddler can show consent and lack of consent.You tell you can tell when our children are not happy with the situation and when they're happy with the situation. IMalcolm Collins: don't, I don't disagree with that, but the problem is that when you value the perspectives of somebody who's not fully mentally developed, you get stupid things.Does my child consent to being punished when they do bad things? Do they consent to timeout? Do they consent? No, they don't consent to that being. Of course they don't. They're a child.Simone Collins: I'm just saying that there's nuance.Malcolm Collins: And then there isn't nuance. There isn't nuance. I am saying there isn't nuance. Okay.The, if our child comes to us and they go, I think I'm a woman today. Can you medically transition me or put me on a drug that will change the course of my life? I'm going to be like, no, f**k off. That's a dumb idea. I understand that you're hearing about this online, but you're four. Like you don't [00:33:00] even like our four year old cannot consistently state his gender.Simone Collins: But Malcolm, if our, if our two year old or something saw us filming him with a camera and said no and ran away and started crying, we would think it wasn't cool to film him with a camera.Malcolm Collins: I suppose, but that doesn't happen.Simone Collins: I know it doesn't happen, but if it did, we would take it seriously.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we take it seriously, but I'm just saying it doesn't happen. So it's not within the realm. I guess there might be some kids that are afraid of the public seeing them, but our kids love it.Simone Collins: Yeah, that's our fortunateMalcolm Collins: reality. But again, it's because they're genetically related to us. So I think that this is another thing that people don't understand is we're making these decisions for people who will think similarly to us.AndSimone Collins: yeah and you have in mind for all these influencer fame w****s as well, who are fame w****s like us, that, these people have children who are probably, So at least a little bit like them andMalcolm Collins: the problem with a lot of the fame w****s and I'd say that they're [00:34:00] in a more ethically questionable scenario than us is they use their children to augment the way the public sees them.So their children are props to demonstrate their parenting and stuff like that to the public. Whereas our children, like the point of all of this is our children, the point of developing the schools, our children, the point of everything is giving our children the best shot possible. We are developing like an intellectual conversation.Brand which is very different from the brand that a lot of people are developing is like the only negatives to our brand is that it's weird and that the kids can even leverage that in the early social media days if they want to go against it. I hate what my parents did. It's horrible, but a great way to get sympathy and build up a lot of followers in your early days, right?Like Even if they disagree with us, that very disagreement can be capitalized on, but only because of how extremely weird and extremist we are. We're an extremist and they just look ungrateful, right? You've got to create an environment where even if they hate you, it's positive.Simone Collins: Yeah and you can't skew things.There are famous examples, too, of [00:35:00] YouTubers who, I don't know their dog is dying or something, and then they, are filming in the car and the parents coaching their child on how to look more devastated. So I think a lot of it also comes down to being genuine.Malcolm Collins: I love it. All right. Have a good one, Simone.Bye. Hi, Malcolm. Spectacular woman. We're gonna be talking about, we're having a call for the Natal Wisdom Conference Two. For anyone who missed the first one, be sure to check it out on the website,Simone Collins: number six and seventh. See you there.Malcolm Collins: Bye. Oh we have to go. Oh, it's a call.Simone Collins: It's a video call. So stay here.Not stay here, but get on the video call. Wait, let me check. Hold on. Let me check.Yep. It's a Google meet call. Join it. It's in your calendar.Malcolm Collins: Sarah is deleting angry Facebook comments.Simone Collins: What wanna happen?Malcolm Collins: No. Facebook just seems to bring out like the lowest of the low in terms of haters.Simone Collins: Oh no. Twitter is pretty bad. [00:36:00] Twitter's pretty bad. IMalcolm Collins: appreciate that you engage with Twitter to protect me.Hold up. There you are. You have my social media comments? Yeah, yeah, right here. . Oh, that's nice. Oh, great. This is all the Twitter comments? Yeah, oh, Kyle! You thought me having someone edit my social media would make me look stupid?People are actually really stoked on me now. It's a pretty brutal job sifting through all that darkness. Mhm.Simone Collins: Instagram's just funny because now the theme is every time I post something because, oh, people just say. It's always oh god, his face is red. Was he just slapped? Or oh, do you slap him for being adventurous or not adventurous enough? They'll just find some It's gotta be like a little bit of both.Yeah yeah. IMalcolm Collins: would love to post the Venezuela meme thereThis is outrageous. You shout like that, they put you in jail. Right away. No trial, no nothing. You're playing music [00:37:00] too loud? Right to jail. Right away. You're driving too fast? Jail. Slow? Jail. You undercook fish? Believe it or not, jail. You overcook chicken? Also jail. Undercook, overcook.Malcolm Collins: That's such a goodSimone Collins: one. Parks and Rec is so underrated. It's actually not underrated as a show.It got the attention it deserved, I think. Speaking of things that I really enjoy watching is Snark. It is a delight to me and I love Snark. So are you trying to do the intro? Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Then do the intro from the intro not from banter because that loses people I always have to put that at the end and you just do the intro.Okay. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this thought-provoking interview, YouTube creator Benjamin Boyce joins Malcolm and Simone Collins to discuss the complexities of the transgender debate. They delve into Boyce's extensive work interviewing detransitioners, the concerning rise in rapid onset gender dysphoria among teenage girls, and the potential risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on brain development. The conversation also explores the societal implications of the transgender movement, the influence of social contagion, and the importance of open dialogue and education in navigating this sensitive topic. Boyce shares insights from his personal journey and his documentary on the Evergreen State College protests, highlighting the need for nuanced discussions in the face of polarizing ideologies. The group also touches on the role of religion, the challenges faced by different communities, and the importance of protecting children while fostering understanding and compassion.Benjamin Boyce: [00:00:00] Anyway, so he, he was a very effeminate gay man. He goes on these hormones and stuff. And then he become, he comes of age 18, 19, but he's still like a little boyand I'm like, wait, they were, it wasn't just a gay thing. Like they had a young boy. It was basically legalMalcolm Collins: PDFBenjamin Boyce: files?. Because he was, he had all the attributes of, he was locked at 14, but he's 19. Oh, that'sSimone Collins: so gross.Benjamin Boyce: So they're like, he was preserved and then offered on the altar of this stuff.Simone Collins: No. Oh no. No.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello everyone. It is so wonderful to have you here again today.We have a very special guest with us today, Benjamin Boyce his YouTube channel has one of the highest overlaps of subscribers was ours And if you watch it, it would be immediately obvious that Why he does lots of very high thought, high intellect intellectually dissonant interviews.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But what's interesting is I can get a trickle of what you think in your perspective from the interviews, but I haven't, I, I'd love to have an interview that's like the you [00:01:00] interview, what you think on things.So I'm excited to at least be one of the people who's doing this. And one of the projects you've been working on recently that I think would be a really great start to this. Is I guess I, I call it like the de transition project, which is lots of interviews with people who are well known voices in the de transition community.I'd love it if you could just get started with what got you thinking about this and where you see things changing within that community over the past year or so.Benjamin Boyce: Can I answer that question by asking you guys a question? Of course. Like, when did you become cognizant or invested in what we call the culture war, in its current iteration?Malcolm Collins: Wow. God, that's a good question. Honestly, not at all until they started firing at us. It's very interesting. So I would have considered myself Is this aboutBenjamin Boyce: Spankgate? So just two or three weeks ago? Oh god,Malcolm Collins: No, before Spankgate. It was the beginning of the pronatalist stuff. Really, as soon as we started getting public attention [00:02:00] you're forced to pick a side these days.And at first, both sides were yelling at us. But the one side when we'd sit down and try to talk with them they could have a lucid conversation. And then the other side, there just wasn't really a conversation. It was just. Concede and submit to our world perspective.I'm actually goingSimone Collins: to say it's earlier than that. It's when we got involved in education reform in the state of Pennsylvania. And the mere idea that we were critical of the legacy education system meant that we were going to be Republicans. Just like period of course you didn't Republican because you don't think public school is perfect and in need of more money and therefore.Obviously.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. So what year are we talking about?Simone Collins: At least 2019. Yeah. Okay. We were like firmly centrists. And then when we were younger, we were full out, like quite progressive Democrats. I would say. Yeah. BlueBenjamin Boyce: Pills. Yeah. Do you guys have any remembrances or you might be too young of Gamergate?Oh my God. [00:03:00] OfMalcolm Collins: course. Would I, when Gamergate was happening, like I was well on the side of the gamer, like I was like, okay this whole five guys situation is ridiculous. This is clearly a bit breach of journalistic integrity. But I think back then there was still a believable disconnect between the, of the time, the Tumblerina army the Tumblr internet and the cloud agendas and all of this insanity.And. The real mainstream democratic party. Like I didn't think that those people had any direct connection on the type of policy that would be implemented by a Hillary Clinton government. That changed pretty dramatically over time.Benjamin Boyce: What's your memory of Bernie Sanders, the 2016 lead up.I neverMalcolm Collins: liked Bernie. So I, my favorite progressive, but notBenjamin Boyce: commie. Yeah. That's interesting. Okay. So you're already, the red pill is already leaking into yourMalcolm Collins: Yeah. No, I loved who was the other guy, the old guy who [00:04:00] was the anti Bernie, who seemed really cool? Ron Paul?Ralph Nader? Ron Paul. I really liked Ron Paul. Ron Paul seems like a righteous dude. Ron Paul is what all libertarian bros are really into. In the early political dissonant days, I was Ron Paul count, not Bernie camp. One of, one of my favorite things about Bernie, and this is like one of my favorite stories about him, because to me it represents who he is.And I think he truly is both him and Ron Paul, I think, show themselves really honestly in the public sphere. And the big, it was when he was a kid younger than us, like in his late twenties, I think is he went to a commune and they kicked him out because all he would do is stand up in like the common room and give speeches every day.And I was like, this man has not changed over the past 50 years. And so he is honest about who he is. It's just, I think a malicious element in society. But Our malignant element in society. But what about you? Were you at Ron Paul Bernie?Benjamin Boyce: So I went to this college, hyper progressive [00:05:00] college.I didn't know that it was going to be hyper progressive. It was just down the street from where I was living. And it was really cheap state school. I was older. I hadn't gone to college. So I got the Pell Grant and it was just like basically free college for four years. So I could pause my life and.Concentrate on what I wanted to concentrate on, which is what I ended up calling narrative arts. Like what is the function of narrative? How do you build it? How is it deconstructed? What are the different ways to arrange, rearrange and derive meaning from it? And so I went to this place called the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, which has a very non traditional structure, no grades.Courses are like completely immersive, three, four or five professors for a quarter or a year. You just go there, you sink your teeth in and a lot of independent work. So that's why I went there. But when I got on campus, it was like stepping from, what year was this? 2013 back into 1993, they had Pictures like posters everywhere, stop the war in Iraq, so there's still a little bit behind there by 10 years, which would all, by the time I left, [00:06:00] all those posters would be replaced by the BLM poster.And then they had big posters about no one wins under patriarchy and like this really crusty kind of old. Weird Gen X feminist kind of bluster and gusto. And I'm like, okay, that's really weird. This is like ersatz or anachronistic. And as I went to, and as I like, progressed through my degree, working on my stuff, the civil rights or the civil rights 2.0 anti racism via D'Angelo and even Kendi came and became central to the entire experience of the college where the administration empowered, very radical teachers to basically try to redesign the entire college experience around ending racism in our time. And that blew up in their face.Phenomenally. It just completely the, what happened at my last four weeks of school is that the students who were taught to fight the system and end racism, turn that against the system that taught them that and took over this college. [00:07:00] took people hostage, live streamed the whole thing on the internet in this super cringey manner.You guys should watch my documentary. It's if you're into cringe, if you're into like the end game of this progressive It's I document it all, but I'm readyMalcolm Collins: for this documentary called of our fans want to watch it.Benjamin Boyce: It's called the complete evergreen story. I'm currently doing a watch through because of seven years.It just, the seven year anniversary just happened and me and my wife are now going through and watching the whole documentary. It's really extensive and it's not even complete because there's too many stories going on. I was there watching that whole thing progress and I was working in the media department.I was on the camera recording these workshops. Yeah. I would say, as we've heard it's a, it's an interesting like an interesting if you look at the black community, there's a lot of people that are like, you know, we're in the middle of, You know, they're kind of, they're trying to, you know, reinvent the race.students. CommunitySimone Collins: groups. That's. What? Affinity groups. Like I [00:08:00] know we need like black people to hang out with black people and white people to hang out with white people because and I'm like this is, you are reinventing racism.Benjamin Boyce: That's basically what got them a lot of press because the college had a, every year they had based on a Douglas Turner Ward play called a day of absence where this Southern town, all the black people don't show up for the, for a day.And it shows just how much this town relies on the black people. And then they did that every year at evergreen, like do this the people of color, the POC would go off campus and they'd have a little thing. And then they come back and then they have a day of presence where everybody gets together and have a cultural sharing multicultural positive thing.But one year, 2017, after the election of the former president, Possibly next president, Donald Trump. They decided to reverse that and ask white people to leave the campus. And they even required white students to not be on campus, go out in the woods and do classes like under tarps in the rain, because the campus was going to [00:09:00] center people of color because they wanted to be inclusive.under diversity, equity, inclusion. And then Brett Weinstein, who's an evolutionary biologist, who has a lot of, you guys probably heard of him by now. He stood up against that and then got flack back and forth. And so when all the, it's a, this crazy narrative, I won't spend too much time on it right now, but all these layers upon layers of stuff going on in this tiny little campus, when you know, the students do this uprising, they live stream it, they're acting just insane.And. The internet gets wind of this. Now, this is post Gamergate. This is 2017. A lot of people post Gamergate on YouTube had gone from, anti feminism to anti SJW stuff, which would then become anti woke stuff. So there was just a lot of hay being made out of social justice. Warriors. And that was just how people made their money was doing all these cringe compilations when the evergreen stuff just dumped all of that material on there.They had a heyday. They had an absolute heyday. And I was already like interested in what was going on the internet, but I [00:10:00] didn't understand that people would just run with the narrative and not actually talk about what was going on behind it. And so what I did was I just took my phone and I started to record like a view from the inside.And then I worked in the media department. So I got my hands on all of the yeah. Primary footage of how the teachers taught the students to rebel and explicitly said you need to uprise and destroy these bureaucratic institutions because they don't treat, they treat you just as bad as they treated your ancestors in the sixties or in the 18 twenties or, in the Caribbean and stuff like that directly they said that.So my job as a YouTube person, when I got onto YouTube was to chronicle that, and I spent a lot of time just focusing on that one story. And then a similar event to get to your question, a similar event happened up in Canada at Wilfrid Laurier University, where a young TA named Lindsay Shepard was she showed a video with Jordan Peterson and this other guy arguing about pronouns.And she was teaching in a [00:11:00] composition class and she. Politically just shared this about composition because if this is how language is changing, like what are your thoughts and the, her professor and her her, the guy in charge of the department over there and then their DEI All took her aside and grilled her for 40 minutes and she recorded the whole thing.They broke her down into tears, this total struggle session and it was all about gender. And then that hit the internet. And again, the internet makes hay with that. And I'm like, there's something else going on deeper in there. So I started going through that college and looking at the gender issue. And I saw that these gender.Activists, these trans rights activists specifically would are just the most borderline personality, narcissistic Machiavellian characters on the planet. They claim to represent this marginalized group and then they proceed to act like complete tyrants. And just like the black people are, POC did at evergreen, like these this handful of just [00:12:00] radical idiots took over and then just smeared.That community that they supposedly represented, it's just replicating. So this social justice ideology or whatever this thing is, I don't know what you guys how you frame it, but that has a pattern that just goes over and over again. Once I got into the gender aspect of it I was just fascinated.with this topic because I was tired of race. And I don't think that there's an end game with race. I don't know. Maybe we can talk about that. What you guys are your thoughts on the end game of race politics, but gender stuff is so dynamic. It creates children. It transcends race. And we always are struggling and it just, it's flies in the face of this kind of liberal ish assumption that we're all created equal.And that, that different noticing difference is really problematic, but it keeps on protruding into our,Malcolm Collins: I think both the race and the gender thing have really backfired on them in completely unique in different ways. Recently. The race thing, and this is [00:13:00] fundamentally what progressives don't understand,Benjamin Boyce: sorry, interviewer hat. You said them backfired on them. Could you just define for the sake of the conversation you, they areMalcolm Collins: the larger memetic structure that is obsessed with race.The normal American doesn't give a s**t about race. It's just not important in our daily lives anymore. So you're saying,Simone Collins: so them, them is defined by the activists that are actively trying to end racism. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: They have created a world Where they seem to believe that America is okay, this is the way I genuinely think the world works in their head.America is 70 percent white, 30 percent black, and the 30 percent black is like this oppressed class. That, that is not The case in America. The, for example, Hispanic population is about twice as large as the black population. They cashed in all of their Hispanic chips by over indexing on the black population in a way that [00:14:00] completely marginalized the Asian and Hispanic population in this country, which are both fairly significant voting blocks.And then They went even further by going this whole anti Semitic route recently. Which has, the Jewish population in this country, even if they're not a big voting block, they do have a lot of institutional power and wealth. And so that was astronomically stupid of them.And so I think that this sort of missed is it's one of the things I often look at when I'm looking at like media representation is media representation. If you want to talk about who's not being represented. It's Hispanic people, like white people, we get like less than we probably should but low numbers when I'm talking about like percentage of the population, black people, like they seem to believe that black people represent all minority groups and that all minority groups like and identify with black people.And that's just not true. One of the things I point out is that in the LA riots, The communities that were hurt the most were the [00:15:00] most recent immigrants because they had moved in right next to the black community. And in that instance, those most recent immigrants were South Koreans which were then radicalized because it was their community being burned to become a far right community.This happened within many Latin American communities during the BLM riots, is that the towns and neighborhoods that were being burned And the shops were mostly Hispanic owned. And of course the media wasn't talking about this, but that again, doesn't matter because the media doesn't understand Hispanic families.So I, as a white person, I get my media from like the news, right? Hispanic families get the media from their family networks. That is like their source of what's true in the world. That's alsoSimone Collins: like Hispanic media, but it seems to be somewhat similar. Someone divorced familyMalcolm Collins: network information chains. Yeah.Simone Collins: AndMalcolm Collins: so we have a lot of, our company is almost entirely Hispanic. We, like our friend network is heavily Hispanic. This is we're, we used to split our time between the US and Lima. BetweenSimone Collins: Miami and Lima. So we wereMalcolm Collins: Yeah. [00:16:00] So the media, like the progressive tool for manipulating public opinion doesn't work as well against Hispanic communities as it does against other types of communities.Yeah. So they just,Benjamin Boyce: where is their outcry from the 2020? Were they just ignored or did they not complain if they were, we didn't see complaints.Simone Collins: What we thought internal, we saw people left behind, like internally they're like. There's been aMalcolm Collins: huge shift in the Hispanic community towards conservatism.And then they have a problem that they don't understand the real American black community. So the real American black community. is more than anything else distrusting of authority. They're very conspiracy theory is the wrong word, but they are very open to these right leaning ideas of the powers that be are lying to you in attempts to manipulate you.And this isn't like gullibility. It's something they've gone through multiple times learning from history. And it is clear to many in the black community, who is the power that be today. And it's this urban [00:17:00] monoculture, progressive, whatever you want to call it.In regards to the the trans stuff, this is insane. And as you say, it's insane. Like I can't imagine being like a real trans person. Or like a real lesbian or a real gay person. And now somebody says I'm queer. And I'm like by queer, do you mean that you're a sexually aggressive, cis male sex pest that's pretending to be a woman?Or do you mean that a lot of these quote unquote, trans women. When I was growing up, I was very involved in the LGBT movement. I really support the real gay, lesbian and trans community. What is being represented, like the people who took over this movement are just this male sex pests, largely speaking.Benjamin Boyce: And they're female enablers. If you look at every major feminist organization that's connected to power, they're all on board and pushing the trans stuff. Hardcore. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Spread like a virus through many lesbian communities and ended up one of, one of the most interesting yeah, I was listening to, and I'd love to hear your anecdotes around this and a [00:18:00] lesbian who I respect talking about this recently.And she's there was this weird moment when I went to a group house where three lesbians was living. And I went back a few years later and all three of them were transitioning. And I was like, wait, what are the odds that all of you just happen to be trans? This is supposed to be an incredibly rare thing.And so I think that's, something that we've seen. As to why this disproportionately happened in lesbian communities. I don't I think and I know this is a very offensive thing, but I think that women are slightly more susceptible to social norms changes. Like they, they're more likely and you see this in the data as well.They're more likely to support whatever the So the perceived social norm is thatBenjamin Boyce: some sort of evolutionary Stockholm syndrome baked in because women would be captured in combat and just have to adapt to new it could be. And alsoSimone Collins: There's more dependence as someone who like when you're more likely to spend a significant or not insignificant portion of your life vulnerable to, to pregnancy or having an infant [00:19:00] with you, it would make sense that you'd be more compliant with whatever Society you have to depend on for some protection or social services or at least a little bit of assistanceMalcolm Collins: Also, I think that part of this is probably downstream of religiosity women historically were more religious and more spiritual than men and We've argued in the past that gender has taken on the role of the soul within progressive circles where they're talking about there's something about myself and it's not biological.It's not how I was raised it's different than either of those, but it controls who I fundamentally am. It's that's what we used to call a soul. And so I think a lot of this is a type of a religion.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. I love how they don't do that with race. Like my inner black man, if they went that route with the race, racial soul, then Rachel Dole is all would be, would come out on top.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering yeah. So when you saw this happening, when were you like, I'm where did you? think you were a progressive or identify with the progressive movement when you were younger?Benjamin Boyce: Oh, [00:20:00] no. I grew up in suburbs of Sacramento mostly. So red, but purple.And, my, dad's pastor. So we were pretty much in church all the time. I did a lot of paper routing from 11 to, 18. And I would listen to Rush Limbaugh a lot because he had, he was really entertaining. And, he did all these bits and skits and stuff like that. And then I just went apolitical.And then when I wanted to get political again, when post 9 11, George Bush W just goes in this holy crusade about just going after people that are millions of miles away or thousands, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of miles away have far Iraq is. And I didn't like that.I didn't like the war mongering and stuff. And I wanted him out. And then Bush. John Kerry concedes. I'm like, this is just b******t. I spent all this energy caring about this thing that doesn't care about me at all. I was also living in Portland at that time in the 2000s when it was like the Portland that people wanted to move to [00:21:00] before people moved to and made it something else.Yeah. Portland squared. But and I just had the sense before Barack and during, Obama's era that we're just in this, we're in this bubble where we're not really connected to reality and we have these beliefs. I just had the sense we have these beliefs about what truth and goodness is, but we are so coddled in this bubble and someday it's going to break.Someday it's going to pop. And I just, I was uncomfortable with the smugness that, just became more and more ramped up. Over the course of Obama era, and then I want, I thought Bernie was You know, had some sort of mandate of heaven on some level and his treatment by the democratic party was just so awful that I just said, screw you.And I went, I didn't go pro Trump, but I was just really happy how upset Trump made everybody because it was so hypocritical higher on their own farts. And that Just piss them off [00:22:00] so much. So it was I slowly became trollish, but then when I saw what happened at evergreen firsthand with the end game of this racial stuff where I like, they turned me racist where I went, I was on campus after that hostage situation happened and I saw a black person and I got literally the first time in my life, got scared and just turned around and went another way because I'm like, this person has all the power and can completely lambast me, accuse me of all these things and even beat me up.And I have no recourse just based on the color of my skin. Imagine how Jews feel today if you've seen some of these videos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a yeah, that Jew thing, the Jewish thing really throws a wrench in the whole system. It upsets it, which just makes me really interested in how it, because a lot of like the Jewish people were complicit in a lot of the anti white stuff.But then once it comes after them, then they're like, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're, We're there. We are the og oppressed class. We've been oppressed. longer and harder than anybody because we've been living [00:23:00] with these whiteys. So don't turn that stuff on us. But it seems like in colleges and stuff, I saw a lot of that, like that lot of Jewish people riding the anti white line up until, like it blows up in their face.And then you're like, okay what did you expect? You're dancing around with leopards. I'm, this sounds like I might be a little, I don't know how it sounds. No, I thinkMalcolm Collins: The problem we have is the conservative Jews. And the Orthodox Jews never went along with the progressive b******t.It was always the reformed Jews, but reformed Jews are richer and they're more likely to be in colleges but like we always say people don't confuse Unitarian Universalists Christians was like Catholics, right?And yet they often confuse Yeah. Like conservative Jews. Yeah. With reformed Jews. And I'm like, these are, it's a brandingBenjamin Boyce: issue. It's, their names are all the similar. So you just lump 'em all in. Yeah. They're all of one thing. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But the reformed Jewish movement basically has no fertility rate.Like they're going to be gone soon. They're basically just a a malignancy, which is [00:24:00] affecting this one generation of Jews.Benjamin Boyce: Malcolm, I have to inspect this idea because you put a lot of stock into, fertility rates, like being drivers of meme.The meme complexes and stuff, or like the, these meme complexes are not Yeah, I wanna hear pushback inseminating itself. But are we not at a time where the meme complexes are faster than genetics By orders of magnitude, can't they travel faster, infect more people than the other ones that breed people so that they can just Yeah,Malcolm Collins: and you're absolutely right about that, but they in sort of their wave, they wipe out.So it's a bit like saying okay. The Black Plague is spreading through our civilization right now, right? Except it doesn't kill people immediately, it just sterilizes them, right? And I'm pointing to one community that's been sterilized, and you're like, yeah, but it's continuing to spread in this neighboring community.And I'm like yes, it is spreading in the neighboring community. I don't disagree with that, but it eventually burns out. Like it is true that it is spreading in neighboring communities right now, but it [00:25:00] hasn't fixed its fundamental issue that it hasn't figured out how to replicate itself other than through taking children.And because of that, I just don't see how it survives. It can in some countries like in Germany where they've gone full Nazi where they're like, okay private school is not legal in this country anymore. Okay, we get all your kids. It can burn itself out. And then what does that end up looking like at the end of the day, German becomes what a Muslim country or something like that, because they know how to protect their kids.Eventually, whichever group it is. Fundamentally knew how to protect their Children in a way that other groups didn't or the groups that come out on top after the disease is done. We're just in this period of fallout now where we can predict the various outcomes. We can't predict them with 100 percent certainty or anything likeBenjamin Boyce: that.It's just because our, because the way that information travels so fast now and the way that kids are plugged into the internet from such an early age and the way that these algorithms work in a black box, there's, I [00:26:00] don't think that the battle so much can, we can just rely on fertility.Replacing it has to be active and that's what you like, why your work, I think, is so important because you guys are speaking into this place that's dominated by these anti natalist forces, right? And you're providing pushback and upsetting the radfems and, Poking fun at the all these different groups that you guys find yourself being on theMalcolm Collins: end of the whip of interesting points you make that has me reflecting on something that I hadn't reflected on before.Which is to say, you're showing off your skills as an interviewer here. So this is why people need to go to this channel, right? The thing I was thinking about, you are theBenjamin Boyce: gazelle. I am the cheetahMalcolm Collins: Kiki. The different communities and how they react to, like, when I say communities, cultural groups and how they react to, or how susceptible they are to the virus.And there's huge amount of differential here. So conserved Jewish communities seem to be uniquely, good at preserving their community values [00:27:00] without going crazy. They seem to have almost a complete immunity to the, this these intellectual viruses in a way that doesn't cause them to radicalize as to why I think it's because Jews are predominantly an urban cultural group.We did a video recently, something like 89 percent of Jews or 98 percent of Jews live in urban centers. Can IBenjamin Boyce: What do you mean by radicalized? Can you specify what you mean by that?Malcolm Collins: So a weird thing that happens to some communities when they're hit by the urban monoculture is the iteration of them that is resistant to it or survives the interaction becomes like crazy radical.So I think this is what happened to Protestant communities in the late nineties, early two thousands is that they were hit by the urban monoculture and their reaction to it was to become the form of evangelical that fits into popular culture today. But this sort of radicalization in response to contact seems to burn itself [00:28:00] out.That iteration, that evangelical Protestant. doesn't really exist in huge numbers anymore, or not in a way that's actively engaging in the cultural conversation. If you look at the listened to conservative commentators they are predominantly of Catholic or Jewish heritage.You're looking at like a Ben Shapiro or a, whatever, or bill O'Reilly. Oh yeah, Bill O'Reilly! Yeah, I'm pretty sure Bill O'Reilly was Catholic. He also wrote crime novels. But the question is again, okay why Catholics? Why did they not go crazy? They went a little crazy in response to this and their fertility rates have fallen more than other groups, but they seem to have a little bit more resistance to deep penetration.And again, it's because they're a predominantly urban cultural group. Catholics mostly settled in urban environments. And so they're alreadyBenjamin Boyce: adapted to what is the special sauce in the urban,Malcolm Collins: Were adapted to the proto version of this mimetic virus. They were they, which would be oldBenjamin Boyce: school multiculturalism, like being able to coexist with a bunch of different kinds of groups and then seamlessly [00:29:00] integrate through.CommerceMalcolm Collins: basically, you live in a city. You have to learn culturally how to prevent your kids from being deconverted in an environment where you're a minority. And the Protestant groups just never needed to pick up that skill. And so when this sort of virus like swept across the country, like the black plague or something, it just completely decimated their communities and turn them woke like super fast.And then they began to put up what we call the colonizer flag based on a part of our discord, which is the the triangle flag. We call it the colonizer flag. Yeah. AndBenjamin Boyce: then the other faction of that same group that you're talking about broke Trump. Broke MAGA and became the blunt of the regime or the monocultures jokes and fears and a lot of the riling up, like they are the enemy.If those who didn't succeed and going breaking towards progressivism, we're are the Number one outcast group. They are the ones that Biden talks about when [00:30:00] he's I'm going to bring, I'm going to unite us together to destroy this one group in our country. These mega ultra mega, people who are going in the NASCAR, who still believe in Jesus, but the wrong Jesus, the white Jesus or whatever.So they are a very powerful group, but they are vilified inside and out by everyone. Every rung of the vertically integrated messaging apparatus. AndMalcolm Collins: one culture that was uniquely susceptible to this, maybe even more than the Protestants were the Mormons. The Mormons just were destroyed deconversion rate wise.Within their culture and yourBenjamin Boyce: theory is that because they were so isolated by within a very specific chunk of time, 50 years in American history, they took a break from they were disconnected from the path of American culture for a certain amount of time and then it caught up with them.Malcolm Collins: No. So the Mormons were destroyed for a somewhat unique reason. So Mormons were both isolated. They lived in mostly Mormon communities for a long time. But then in [00:31:00] addition to that, the Mormon community became hyper fixated on trying to fit in like being normal, being weird. And this drive to fit in with the perfect like black pill or kink in their armor, Cultural viruses could use to infiltrate the community.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. Yeah. I spoke with a ex Mormon. He's a therapist. And so he works mostly with ex Mormons. And it was just like hearing his story about how he was really plugged into this worldview, this Mormon worldview. And then he lost faith and he was in faith. Free fall and it was terrifying for him. So he grabbed onto progressivism and then he realized like, this is just as radical and just as disconnected from reality.But there's no going from a really tightly formed meme plex or whatever you want, like belief system or ideology into this liberal wasteland. There's nothing to believe in and the people, a lot of people have to reconfigure how to believe or what is the function of belief. And progressivism [00:32:00] is.Is a tight or a thick belief. Whereas liberalism is a loose or diaphanous belief system, like where you can have you bring your own, you create your own meaning, no meanings handed to you. It's really destabilizing for, the Mormon frame of mind when you're really deep into it. So I wonder if there's something there about liberalism's problematic relationship to progressivism or how this kind of liberal, anything goes, you do you, we do.us. We just understand what reality and truth is. We're all going to work on that was so susceptible to this progressivism, which is a more thick belief or a narrow myopic belief, harder, hotter.Malcolm Collins: I think you're right. I think that one is the funnel that leads to the other, like one catches you as you're falling and then funnels you towards the extremism.Benjamin Boyce: That is, can we live in a world without extremism and do you guys in your consciously created ideology or, and I mean that in [00:33:00] a, just a non moralistic way. Are you building into your Children? Antibodies to radicalism. Have you seen have you played around with your ideas enough to say, okay, how could they be radicalized?And what would the end of that radicalization point be?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I the radicalization of our ideas and the dangerous radicalization of our ideas would be extremist transhumanism IE AI over humanity roboBenjamin Boyce: wombs.Malcolm Collins: Oh, no, that's perfect.Simone Collins: Of course, forMalcolm Collins: us,Simone Collins: that'sMalcolm Collins: perfect. The extreme radicalization is the discounting of humanity altogether.Which is a potential downside of what we're doing. But we protect,Simone Collins: I disagree with Malcolm. I think radicalism is inevitable and we have a radical religion and a lot of people see that and criticize us for it. But the stance, you guys areBenjamin Boyce: already radical. Yeah. You cannotSimone Collins: be a true religious devotee.You cannot truly live your values without being seen as a radical by mainstream society. So we have to define radicalism. But [00:34:00] you're going to be seen as a radical if you adhere to your beliefs and if your beliefs do not immediately track with mainstream society, which in any person's lifetime, especially now in this period of rapid cultural iteration, you're going to seem at some point like a radical.If you do not change with the vicissitudes of changing culture. For example, if you just, let's say like you held the mainstream political beliefs about gender and race and everything else from 1992, you would be seen as some kind of radical today. So I think that the nice thing about being a religious radical is that you are at least.radically devoted to carefully selected values and objective functions.Benjamin Boyce: More or less coherent system. Yeah.Simone Collins: Instead of just this is what's correct. And what I would say is the worst kind of radical is one that hasn't basically come to a conclusion where they can show their work. They've just chosen a random, seems to be [00:35:00] correct answer.And then that's where they're going. And that's what you're showing yourBenjamin Boyce: work right now. Oh, baby work there.Simone Collins: SheMalcolm Collins: is wobbly. My firstBenjamin Boyce: infant interview.Malcolm Collins: There you go. We're ruining this little infant's life by putting her on camera.Simone Collins: Yeah. That's yeah. Someday someone will be critiquing this YouTube video and blurring her face out in their attempt to undo the evil we have done.Stole herBenjamin Boyce: soul before her time. Honestly, like I watchedSimone Collins: a lot of YouTube critiques of people who have babies in their videos and always they blur out the babies and it's not good. There is this kind of yeah, I'm preserving their soul. I'm not going to be a part of this terrible machine.But yeah, anyway, I, what I'm really curious to know is what has surprised you in these interviews, because I think a lot of us come to blanket conclusions around, this is progressivism. This is what progressives think. This is what gets people to convert. But I think that there's a lot lost in, in those functions.I'm curious. [00:36:00] Yeah,Benjamin Boyce: So I'm I have about 80 interviews with de transitioners or around that topic and de transitioners fall into variety of different. Categories. So you have the male to estrogenize male to male de transitioner, and then the female to masculinize female to female de transitioner, and then you have the lesbian, or you have the straight girl, or you have the teenage girl, ROGD, rapid onset gender dysphoria, read a bunch of, fanfic, and was attracted to men, but like really disliked the power dynamics.So imagine herself as a gay man to enact like that, what we were talking about earlier about the spicy straight queer stuff. And then you have males with autogynephilia, you have males with personality disorders, you have males with, pornography addiction, you have very hyper effeminate gay males who don't fit into society.And if they just surrender and build on that femininity, they can just be accepted as a female. Cause they're never going to be accepted as [00:37:00] a like kind of Blair white, just as a very hyper effeminate male, you just don't really have a place in certain societies and stuff. One thing that surprises me to directly answer your question with regard to that kind of community, which is not a community because there's so many different people there, is just the resilience of the human soul.And the central key in the detransition or story arc is where their soul speaks to them or where God speaks to them and say, you're lying to yourself. Stop lying to yourself. It's just such a, Beautiful moment. And then they look down and they realize it's usually after a very traumatic surgery that these doctors just sped them on either an orchiectomy penile inversion or a mastectomy.They look down at their body and say, wait, I didn't like what I was, but this is not what I am. I'm not. This is not my pet destiny or something. And you just get this glimpse that we are, for lack of a better word, and maybe poking fun at Malcolm's interview with me, we are loved and that when we betray that, which loves us, we betray ourselves and we can't actually function in [00:38:00] this world without that connection, that really deep.Belonging that is underneath all these other, hierarchy of needs and that D transition or arc, probably similar to like an alcoholics arc, like a lot of TV shows and movies over the last 30 years have overused the A format because it does have this. It's got this really convenient arc where somebody recognizes the truth.And then apologizes, confronts their resentment, confronts their your regrets and then, picks up and moves on and then say, okay, I'm damaged. And everybody can see how damaged I am. Everybody can see how fucked up, I am. Because I participated in this lie, and then it shows the lie of the system, but it's no longer a political act.It's no longer a political story. It's no longer a reformation story of the system. That's just gobbling up people. This huge satanic industry. That's basically Literally sacrificing children like you people cannot understand that are our current regime is worshiping Moloch. They are [00:39:00] sacrificing babies on the altar of this gender ideology and nobody can see that.But if you these D transition or stories they show they just show this is a human thing, and so bring it back to the human and then you go to the universal and that's what it's not surprising. It's just beautiful to me. It's like damage.Malcolm Collins: To your answer there one episode that hasn't gone live yet because I don't want to get, too cancelled, too many of these, too quickly.Oh, you love it. I'll use the word, I'll use the word boobicide. So that what I'm saying here which is to say that it is widely known, like even the, who has training courses and Stanford has training courses for media professionals to not talk about boobicide because it's a very addictive concept.And so whenever you have it happen publicly, they typically tell the story. Yeah, he's talking aboutSimone Collins: theBenjamin Boyce: realMalcolm Collins: one.Benjamin Boyce: I thought you were talking about this massive amount of Ectomies, not Ectomies. Okay. Which is a, breast center also a thing. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. What's really interesting is that they have created [00:40:00] this idea for young, impressionable people where they're like, okay, you are X now, and if you don't do Y, the only alternative is Bic side.And like any previous study of this would be like, Oh yeah, of course, that's going to lead to a lot of kids doing it. And it reminds me of this South Park episode which we put in the other thing where Rob Reiner is going to kill Cartman. To prove that cigarettes aren't bad for people and that secondhand smoke can kill and Kurt was like, but he reads it and he's all happy to have all these adults paying attention to him.And he's wait, what? And I feel like that's, unfortunately what's happening to a lot of young people is that anyone who understood psychology could have predicted the result of this ideology.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah,Hell do you think you're doing? This is the girls bathroom! Alright, I need to tell you something, I'm trans ginger. What?! Did you notice the bow? It's okay Red I can take a s**t here.I'm a dumb chick, too. You are not transgender, Eric. You don't even know what that means. Yeah, huh, it means I live a life of torture and [00:41:00] confusion because society sees me as a boy but I'm really a girl.Trust me, you don't want this hot potato. But this isn't a hurting, confused child we're talking about. This is Eric Cartman. Nobody else is gonna know that. You better just give him what he wants. All you gotta do is just read the words on the teleprompter here. Heh, okay. Let's see how theTransphobes. deal with this.You know, some people say there's no proof thatNot transitioning children. kills. I guess I'm the proof. By the time you see this commercial, I'll be dead.Dead? That was fantastic! , what does that mean, I'll be dead? That was very good, Eric. Here, eat this cupcake. It has sprinkles. Do you know what a hero is?A hero is somebody who sacrifices himself for the good of others. You can be a hero, Eric. . Jesus Christ!Benjamin Boyce: That's I was interviewing somebody for I've been doing some [00:42:00] interviews with my spiritual group and, just different people's stories and stuff.And I was interviewing somebody who's deeply involved in the in the deep state, literally, like they worked in Congress for years and years under Pelosi, under all these people. And we got to the idea of the trans kid and this person just was so on fire to protect the trans kid that they, I just saw in this.Yeah, I just really saw like what Yarvin talks about or what other people talk about like the global empire like the global american empire like we want to eat all of your culture and the trans kid Is the one thing that can just put these women specifically these bureaucratic women on fire to go and you know Love everything about a culture except completely destroyed that facet of the culture that replicates the culture, which is the cultures where culture plugs into sex, which is what we call gender.And these women want to destroy that gender thing, which allows that culture to replicate. And they think that they're like, it's so the fire in their [00:43:00] eyes, this crusade. And the trans kid idea, I think is the most satanic idea. Like one of the most satanic ideas of this particular century.Malcolm Collins: No, I was saying it's really interesting.So contrast this idea with a kid consenting to PDA file ness. So in one case PDFBenjamin Boyce: files? Like the Adobe? NoSimone Collins: he's trying not to use Man boy loving.Malcolm Collins: ManSimone Collins: boyMalcolm Collins: loving? Be proud to be a man boy lover. This is from the old, this is the skit they used to do on Howard Stern, where a guy would come up and go, I'm proud to be a man boy lover.Anyway the kid sleeps with somebody who is older than them. That's bad, right? And I would say a kid shouldn't be able to consent to that. But what the result of that is, is a single traumatic experience. If a kid consents to puberty blockers, or gender transition, that is a [00:44:00] lifetime commitment of potentially negative experiences.And not justSimone Collins: biological, financial, and cultural, and social. It's all of these things. There is no escape in life.Malcolm Collins: I can say, no, my 13 year old daughter, I don't care that you find this guy attractive. You cannot, or, or my 15 year old daughter, you cannot sleep with him. You're, f**k off.That's obviously a bad idea. And I'm going to prevent you from doing that. Yet if you do that in this other category, it's considered like a protected class. And I'm like how?Benjamin Boyce: Yeah, it's just it's people haven't thought through it. I was I'm just transcribed an interview with a young man who went on puberty blocker It went on.Yeah, puberty blockers by reluctant. I think it's called and estrogenized hormones at 14 so he was essentially frozen and the data's not it But we were pretty sure that the brain has very specific windows when it develops and if you miss those windows It doesn't go through these development phases.[00:45:00] So we're literally retarding You Brain functioning for these kidsMalcolm Collins: And animal models. It's about a one standard deviation decline in IQ to be on puberty blockers. Yeah.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. Anyway, so he, he was a very effeminate gay man. He goes on these hormones and stuff. And then he become, he comes of age 18, 19, but he's still like a little boy and he gets swept up in, in gay sleeping around round culture.And I'm listening to a story. I'm like, wait, they were, it wasn't just a gay thing. Like they had a young boy. It was basically legalMalcolm Collins: PDFBenjamin Boyce: files?. Because he was, he had all the attributes of, he was locked at 14, but he's 19. Oh, that'sSimone Collins: so gross.Benjamin Boyce: So they're like, he was preserved and then offered on the altar of this stuff.Simone Collins: No. Oh no. No.Malcolm Collins: So actually a lot of people like. And I know this is something that again, I think there is a real trans community, but I think that sex pests took over parts of the community because they realized they wouldn't be criticized if they just claimed to be trans and they can be [00:46:00] sex pests all they want.But this isn't a hurting, confused child we're talking about. This is Eric Cartman. Nobody else is gonna know that. You better just give him what he wantsMalcolm Collins: That actively targets underage kids. For this stuff if that is their thing and I'll put a from Turkey, Tom did a great video on one of these people.Has he started hormones yet? Yes, but not effectively. I guess that's what you'd expect just telling a r to buy hormones. They bought estrogen, but no anti androgen. It would have been more fun if he started hormone blockers at like 12.Haha, isn't that true for everyone? Don't worry, I'll make him into a good girlDon't blow up our spot, bro. All t slurs are like that. You can trust me around your kid. It'd be transphobic not to. Me with daycare tots. To Orion, and many of his associates, their identity was little more than a political shield.It clearly worked, given he publicly fantasized about assaulting women in bathrooms. Me when transphobic little girls ask me what I'm doing in the women's restroom when I'm obviously a woman.Malcolm Collins: And I'll put a quote from that video here because people were like, no, you're making this up. And it's no, like this is [00:47:00] a real thing. It doesn't matter if it's a minority thing.What about those kids? Do you not care about them? Because some of this is sexually motivated and to pretend it's not, is just to ignore what the trans people are saying.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: We're considering trans people.Benjamin Boyce: So I would, I was at a, when I embarked on this series of interviews, I was really open to the idea.I had no idea what I understood. I had a friend who was trans and then over the course of the years, I see this, my friend just never stops transing. It's like there's always one more thing to trans about themselves. And so I just, I have a hard time, especially with the idea of trans kid is a mutation from a trans person.So I really have a hard time at this point in time, really thinking of transness as anything other than something that one does. Like I am a Smith. I am a Miller. I'm a content creator. I am trans. It's the answer. There's no such there's because you can be a gay person that makes sense to me because it's, and you can argue, I [00:48:00] try to understand the argument of the Christian argument or the religious argument.Even if you are that doesn't mean you should act on it. That's a whole other conversation. But you're built in. That's an emergent property of you to be gay, to want to have sex with men. If you're a man or woman with women or be actively it. by the opposite sex, but transition there's gender dysphoria and active Dislike or hatred of one's own body, which is a mental condition.And then there's steps to cause that body to become in the likeness of what you want, which is a medical procedure. And that's, it's an elective cosmetic procedure. And then the hormone stuff, the endocrinology on this stuff, it's so messy. These systems, these are endocrine systems are way too complex.Injecting cross sex hormones affects the entire system. Not just your secondary sex. Yeah. It affects your brain development. So I just, I there's the libertarian argument about you're a grown adult. If you're [00:49:00] consent to this, you should be well informed. But the idea of transness is where it just, it's a big black box and it's really easy to swallow because it's inclusive.It's you do you, but what, but how does that not turn into trans kid? If there's a trans adult, then they were a trans kid. They were always trans, which means that they're always born in the wrong body.Malcolm Collins: This is the thing we don't we don't say, oh, you're a gay kid, go out there and have sex with guys while you're underage and I think that we should treat gender transition the same way I can admit I'll be like, okay, trans people were at one point kids.And that is okay. But So what do youBenjamin Boyce: mean by trans people then?Malcolm Collins: I, look, it, The human brain is very obviously gender. There is very obviously a male and female brain. My wife does not think like me. That, in some small portion of the population, I don't know how small, It could be very small one, 0.1 percent that they are born with a brain that is gendered more like the opposite sex, [00:50:00] especially when we look at endocrine disruptors in pollutants, which seem to be affecting this. I can see that being some portion of the population and that these people might realize that they are in this group before they go through puberty.The problem is, there was a great study done in 2023 that looked at gender non contentedness in 11 year olds, and it showed that by the time they were 23 More or I'll put it this way, less than one intent of them, one intent of them was still in the gender non contented group. The other nine plus were entirely happy with their birth gender.And so the problem is that when people go through puberty, there is often an illusion of gender non contentedness, which is created by puberty itself. And people are like what if I am that one in 10? And it's unfortunately there's no way to know if you're that one in 10, at least with current research.So you're better off just banning [00:51:00] everything before the age of 23.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. It's hard. Yeah I it's just, it's a, it's really odd. issue to talk about because it does take into account, like the idea of what should other people be allowed or not allowed to do? And I, do I have any right?Do I want to make laws? Do I want to, you go in another direction, the same topic, like pornography, do we ban pornography? Like how do we educate around pornography? But we know that pornography is a scourge. That it's doing a lot of damage to a lot of relationships, a lot of people.It's, It's poison. But do I want to not drink anymore? Okay. Do you just let the world eat people alive, in all these different ways and let people like, just give themselves over to this or that affliction and let God sort out.Malcolm Collins: You're right. One of the things that always concerns me is with conservatives, when they're like, we need to get these, trans teachers, we can't have them talking about it in school.We got to get these trans books out of school and you are, because they're afraid for their kid's [00:52:00] safety. And it's not that their kid's safety doesn't matter. Like in my state recently this to me, what is obviously a cis guy pretending to be trans use that cover to attack young women and nearly killed one and had another on a kill list.So he had, That's theBenjamin Boyce: real trans genocide. It's just happening in the otherMalcolm Collins: direction. And he wasn't able to be fully punished because people were like he's, she's trans, we can't punish her. She can go into the women's restroom and attack them. She had aBenjamin Boyce: woman moment.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Women be crazy.Probably. It's so sexist. No, you want to talk about sexist? It's so incredibly sexist. Star Wars Acolyte. We're about to, we'll end this interview soon so I can get our Star Wars Acolyte video in. Yeah. I don't mind. Favorite moments in the episode three was the two less actually, no, Simone, I can't talk to you.Spoilers. Spoilers. Oh no. Okay. I watched our Dark and Light episode. We're not going to talk aboutBenjamin Boyce: scissoring on this show. No. You're going to wait. Stay tuned for scissoring next on Based Camp. [00:53:00]Malcolm Collins: What was I going to say about the Trans peopleSimone Collins: being sexist, Malcolm.Benjamin Boyce: Or yeah, this issue being sexist.Oh no, there wasSimone Collins: a trans person in Pennsylvania who caused the suicide. Oh yeah,Malcolm Collins: No but for a lot of these people it's just, cover to do whatever. Like it's cover for aggressive, sexually aggressive cis men to do whatever they want. And manipulate and brainwash a lot of, Oh yes.I remember what I was going to say. It's about targeting young people. So they're afraid that what's going to happen to these kids is that they're going to be attacked by these trans individuals. And I think that is fundamentally wrong. Like mostly speaking, while there are a few of these cis male, aggressive people who attack kids, the real risk you have is in being converted by these individuals when they're not actually trans.And so you get rid of the book, you get rid of the teacher. You haven't gotten rid of the risk to your kid. And the only way you really protect your kid is with sex education.Simone Collins: Yeah. Never shelter annotate.Malcolm Collins: [00:54:00] That is the biggest defense you have against all of this. If your defense is. Trans people are evil or gay people are evil.Then they meet a trans teacher and that person doesn't appear to be evil. And now you have lost all of the defenses that you have built.Simone Collins: Yeah. YouMalcolm Collins: need to annotate.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. Run toward the information. Information is your is the truth shall set you free. Yeah. The truth shallMalcolm Collins: set you free. Exactly. The truth will defend you.Benjamin Boyce: Malcolm, can I ask you one more question before you hastily end our delicious talk? Thank you very much for having me on. Oh, no problem. At the end of our interview, which I love, I'm going to have you back on and Simone, I'm really looking forward to having you on.You and me.Malcolm Collins: You'll have fun.Benjamin Boyce: Was, you said that in millions of years, so I'm like, okay, what's your transcendent goal? What's the one thing? Cause you're like,Malcolm Collins: love is s**t. Love is death. Love is a cul de sac and it's going to end you. Puritan dating joke, [00:55:00] which I saw recently, we put it in our last episode.And he goes to his partner, roses are red. Violets are blue and both are useless. So grow wheat. Utilitarian. Yeah, for sure. All the way down. You saidBenjamin Boyce: something about the eventually in millions of years, humanity is Going to turn into God or something. I can't remember exactly how you phrase it, but you said you it's did you have a vision of that?Do you have you had like aMalcolm Collins: beliefs watch Gurren Lagann?We evolve, beyond the person we were a minute before! Little by little, we advance a bit further with each turn! We humans used to have somebody much greater than us! For his sake alone, we'll keep on moving forward! The dreams of those who have fallen, the hopes of those who will rise. Those two sets of dreams weaved together [00:56:00] into a double helix, drilling a path towards tomorrow!Malcolm Collins: Gurren Lagann is a very good representation Oh, i'll send you aSimone Collins: you didn't have a vision. He watched anime, which is what? You know what? It wasBenjamin Boyce: 50 50. He's gonna turn into a twink or he's gonna turn into a pronatalist, father of eight, and you broke fertile.Malcolm Collins: So here's the thing. Gurren Lagann it like treats people who believe that Earth has a what's the word they use here? A population threshold? airing capacity. And it treats them the same way Captain Planet like treats polluters as like these evil bogeymen who want to suppress human potential.And a lot of people saw Gurren Lagann and they didn't realize how pertinatal it was. And then as if to slap them in the face and wake them up, they made A second show recently called Darling and Frank's which we have an episode about as well, which is about mechs, but they can only be piloted by a cis man and cis woman [00:57:00] piloting them together and the evil villains in it are the life extensionists.Not being subtleSimone Collins: with the propaganda here. No,Malcolm Collins: the propaganda of Studio Trigger is not subtle. It is breed. So they brainwashed me into their insane ideology of humanity is a good thing. And that every so in Gurren Lagann, it's even more than just this idea of a, Carrying capacity, they divide humanity into two factions, one faction, which is the goal of humanity is to always improve ourselves, every generation become better.And then the other faction, which is like an alien faction is like every race that does this must be eradicated because don't you understand if you're always improving yourself, that eventually spirals out of control and destroys the universe. You cannot keep. becoming better. You cannot keep improving yourself.You need to find some sort of harmony or stasisBenjamin Boyce: or [00:58:00] accept yourself for who you are, what you were talking about in today's episode.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Accept yourself for who you are. And that's the way I see it. That's why I see these concepts of love and self acceptance is like the purest form of evil that humanity has contacted.And it's like pure. From my perspective,Benjamin Boyce: I wonder what your Valentine's day is like. Simone,Malcolm Collins: you should our wedding during our speech we said insteadBenjamin Boyce: of flowers, it gives you like some sort of Neuralink implant or something. It's I love you so much here. I want you to thinkMalcolm Collins: implants.By the way, that was my first job. I just, the technology wasn't moving fast enough. Not at Neuralink, but at their predecessor companies, the predecessors of that technology. Great. But so for Simone, I told her when I was getting married, I was like, look I cannot promise to love you because love is an emotion outside of my control, right?But I can promise to keep improving myself every day and keep pushing you to improve every day. And I think that [00:59:00] push that we have within our relationship exists towards humanity more broadly. Love is just this evanescent thing, it's like a genetic scar. And one day A genetic scar? No theSimone Collins: post ceremony reception was fantastic.Cause everyone, we passed around the fried haggis balls. Everyone's that was just so you.Malcolm Collins: A dangerous genetic scar that can be used to hijack us. And one day, mankind will be freed from love and happiness. And all of these useless concepts. We'll be able to put little chips in our brain. Yeah. If somebody was like do you want to get rid of them entirely? And it's no, like the Mechanicus I can tell that my brain is outputting grief, but this is not useful in my decision for what I do next, so I won't do it.That'sSimone Collins: how it works in I'm Obsessed with Iain Banks Culture Series, and none of these feelings. Oh gosh, you have to, yeah. The Culture Series by Iain Banks. I think it starts with Use of Weapons, maybe? Anyway, continue. [01:00:00] You can have what's called a neural lace in your mind, and it fully integrates you with AI and the internet or whatever, right?Tech. And you can also set up your body where you can feel everything, emotions, pain, physical, mental, etc. You can also turn it off whenever you want. So let's say you're in a very violent car crash like an immediate emergency system turns off the pain, but it's there's pain here, there's pain here and you can do the same with your emotions.And that's, ultimately when people talk about mastering their emotions from a much more woo standpoint, it's all about, you feel the emotion, you let it pass through you. The thing is that we just our wetware is not that good. And so it can be really difficult to be like, I feel the pain and I let it pass through me.You're like, no, it still really hurts. And I just can only think about this thing. And then you're non functional. And really pain exists as a signal. As soon as you've got the signal and you are changing your behavior as you need to, based on that signal, You should not be so distracted by that signal that you literally can't change your behavior appropriately.And so that's how it should be. We definitely [01:01:00] respect emotions and we respect why they are there, but I think to be ruled by them or to see them as inherently valuable is incredibly dumb. So that's what we're trying to avoid here.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. I don't know. God loves you guys. Both of you. Every cell, every moment.Malcolm Collins: I know he does. He is a big fan of ours. He really loves God too. I like that we're on the right side of God. Okay yeah. Keep on theBenjamin Boyce: right side of God.Simone Collins: Yeah. That's a cute thing.Malcolm Collins: It's actually something I was talking to Simone about recently, where I was like, It is remarkable how stupidly good our lives are.We might not be stupid. Super rich or anything, but I have everything I could ever want,Simone Collins: we're always freaked out because we're, our life looks like the B roll from the before disaster scene. I'm like, we're like the beginning of a punisher movie, whereMalcolm Collins: everything's taken away and I'm like, we only get to keep this if we keep fighting this culture war on full battle, because God has only gifted this to us because we are making sacrifices that give us no financial or [01:02:00] public sector benefit.Yeah, it's very nervous making.Simone Collins: I cannot wait to talk with you again. You are so thoughtful and you,Benjamin Boyce: that's all I share. I just play one on tv. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: channel. Stay for us chatting that we did before, before the episode.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. Thanks for having me on, guys.Malcolm Collins: And where can people find you?Benjamin Boyce: Benjamin, A Boyce on YouTube and Odyssey, et cetera, and calm conversations in your podcast stream.Simone Collins: Excellent. How frequently do you publish?Benjamin Boyce: Every other day, sometimes more, sometimes less,Simone Collins: two orBenjamin Boyce: three times a week. Yeah. You have to keep the wheel spinning.Malcolm Collins: Hardcore. Like this podcast started every other day. And then I made a fateful decision of deciding every day at one point. You canSimone Collins: alwaysBenjamin Boyce: take a break.Just do seasons. You can alwaysMalcolm Collins: do seasons.Benjamin Boyce: Hitting it.Malcolm Collins: soSimone Collins: much. Much and I felt so sick, but it was so worth it. Sometimes it's just worth it to be in that much pain. And a bucket of sour [01:03:00] cream and onion fried chicken is one of those things. By the way, we take this banterMalcolm Collins: atSimone Collins: the end of episodes, but yeah. No, more like I say something embarrassing before I know Malcolm's going to record and then he'sMalcolm Collins: no, no wing bucket has sour cream and onion fried chicken wings. It's a good, and it's in the center of downtown Dallas. Now, is it still there? They were actually talking about franchising it the last time I was there. And I don't mind investing in that.Simone Collins: Every time I go, there's people there. It is worth it.Benjamin Boyce: You guys have a lot in your heads. How old are you collectively? Collectively? I don't know. 60? 65? More than that.Simone Collins: We're 70, 73 together. That's theMalcolm Collins: point of marriage, right? Collective age.Simone Collins: Collective age. I likeMalcolm Collins: that. That's good. Yeah. Collectively. But no, I'm always thinking about, oh, okay, what's going to be a good, investment or whatever.And How manyBenjamin Boyce: franchises have you bought into? None.Malcolm Collins: None. None. Oh, wait. There was the one. I don't know. Did we invest in Jonathan's? [01:04:00] Or did we just talkSimone Collins: about it? No. No. We never got the opportunity. We would if you let us. Yeah.Benjamin Boyce: You have five shares in staples or something like that. All right.Malcolm Collins: No.Okay. So there's this weird phenomenon where if you are like I'm sure you'll get to this. Have you had people offer you equity in their companies yet?Benjamin Boyce: No.Malcolm Collins: Like you're more famous than us on YouTube. So I would figure,Benjamin Boyce: yeah, but you're plugged into that whole technocratic set, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I guess it's a whole techno nerd thing.Benjamin Boyce: No. Yeah. You guys are all in the, up in that investment community. You're part of a clan. I don't, I'm not, I'm trans clan. If I'm trans anything, it's trans clan,Malcolm Collins: I was talking to Raziv, and he's Oh yeah, that happens to me all the time. So it's definitely part of like our scene. Okay.Valley adjacent. Yeah. Anyway. So I'm going to wind down here on the no.Benjamin Boyce: Go flow. No, I'm going to doMalcolm Collins: the part where we're going to start the episode. And then this gets plugged in at the end of the episode, just because we don't want random chatter And during this, like the opposite of me, I justBenjamin Boyce: let it roll.Simone Collins: See I, that's how I am. I love [01:05:00] when a podcast begins. I mean Red Scare, they just begin in the middle of God knows what. And I'm here for it. I don't knowMalcolm Collins: how they got popular. Like I don't get it. Like sometimes I look at a popular podcast and I'm like, I don't get how you're a popular podcast.Simone Collins: Because they're internet mean girls and you're sitting in their cool person room and you want to sit there with the cool girls.Benjamin Boyce: They're cool. They're cool. They have a nice voice. Yeah. It's a pair of voices.Simone Collins: It's very relaxing. It's low energy, but in a very relaxing way.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. Kind of club girls, but they don't have a hangover, but they haven't started partying.It's like this nice little between zone. Yeah. It's beautiful.Simone Collins: Luminal. It's yeah. Intellectual liminal space. Very calming. Yeah. Like ASMR, but not gross. Really nice.Benjamin Boyce: Yeah. No, it is very SMR.Simone Collins: YeahMalcolm Collins: Okay. I'm not I'm actually do it now. Do it. YeahBenjamin Boyce: You're fine Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the controversial portrayal of a lesbian cult in the latest Star Wars series, The Acolyte. The couple breaks down the problematic elements of the show, including its misogynistic undertones, bizarre plot devices, and the implications of the cult's reproductive practices.Malcolm and Simone discuss how the show's attempt to introduce a powerful female-led community ultimately fails, as it relies on harmful stereotypes and illogical plot points. They examine the cult's use of the Force to impregnate women, drawing parallels to the immaculate conception of Anakin Skywalker and the troubling notion that men create children while women merely carry them.The conversation also touches on the decline of the Star Wars franchise, with Simone sharing her personal journey as a fan and pinpointing the moment she lost interest in the series. Malcolm and Simone explore the idea of Jar Jar Binks as a Sith Lord and the prevalence of racial stereotypes in the earlier films.Throughout the discussion, the couple shares insights into the challenges of creating conservative-leaning content in the current entertainment landscape, drawing from their own experiences with a canceled documentary project. They highlight the role of legal departments and institutional bureaucracies in stifling diverse viewpoints within major streaming networks.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] It would be like, if you wrote a biblical fan fiction and you knew the Jesus story, And you were like, and there was this whole other town, this whole other town of lesbians where everyone just prays to God and gets pregnant in the same way Mary did, hold on. This is where it gets insane and misogynistic.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: There is a famous scene in this.Carry themMalcolm Collins: which implies that men create the child And women carry the child. This is even more misogynistic than real human earth biology.So she's actually,Actually I inseminated you. Therefore I created the child. Therefore I am the dominant partner in this relationship and make all child rearing decisions.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: I am so excited for this episode.Simone Collins: Yes. Okay. Let's doMalcolm Collins: it.Simone Collins: Let'sMalcolm Collins: go for it.Yeah. This [00:01:00] is going to be the worst. Yeah,The worst! She's the worst person in the world. Huge skank. Terrible. What did I tell you, huh? The worst!She's the worst in the world.Malcolm Collins: I gotta put the word team here because oh my God, does this deserve it? Two things that is going to make this somewhat unique when contrasted with other discussions of the Acolyte. One is we have some interesting insider industry information, given that our own documentary was recently cancelled, about how decisions are being made inside of Hollywood right now which can help you understand how something as insane as this could have gotten greenlit because that is something that before we worked in Hollywood, genuinely perplexed.Why is this getting greenlit? It's obviously not good for the industry. But then the second is how absolutely misogynistic the ideas presented in the [00:02:00] Acolyte are. But wasn't it like produced by women? Yes, it was. They were trying to create something that was misandrist. A world, and I want to get your reaction to the world.Start with one of the most controversial things. So let's get your real time reaction to this. Okay. Because no one knows what happens.Simone Collins: Yeah. Tell me about the Acolyte. I didn't know what is out. I did not know there was more Star Wars property to enjoy. So I have not watched anything.I have not seen a single thing. So itMalcolm Collins: takes place during the High Republic. What is the HighSimone Collins: Republic?Malcolm Collins: A long time before most of the stuff that you've seen. So preSimone Collins: Queen Amidala, or before. Very before that. Long before. Before,Malcolm Collins: yeah, this is in a time when there were lots of Siths and lots of Jedis before the Rule of Two.Simone Collins: Living in harmony? There wasn't a split timeMalcolm Collins: the different era of star wars. The point being, this is an important to the show right now. So the point being into the high Republic it follows two twins an evil twin and a good twin, but goodness, there'sSimone Collins: [00:03:00] an evil twin.Malcolm Collins: It reminds me of that scene.I've got to post it from Sky High.What if I said it's not just her twin, it's her evil twin? This Friday you say? Medulla, you dog!Malcolm Collins: Sky High is so undersold as a show. It really is. Do you want to go? Because it's about a world of superheroes. And it plays with a lot of tropes from that. And one guy asked the other guy, do you want to go on a date with twins? And what if I told you she was the evil twin?It's such a great scene. I canSimone Collins: already tell that this movie is very unique and bold in its writing. Hold on. I haven't gottenMalcolm Collins: to the insane part yet. So episode three is the one where everyone goes crazy. So episode three takes place in a backstory where these two girls were raised. Okay. They were raised.In a lesbian cult or religion. Oh [00:04:00] okay. Everyone's a woman. It's run by a strong black woman. So don't worry about that. Good. Okay. This is very South Park predicted this. Put a ticket in it and make her gay! Uh, yes, Mrs. Kennedy, uh, some of the execs are just expressing that maybe Well, that maybe we should go a different route than we did with Indiana Jones.F**k Indiana Jones! Put a ticket in it and make her lame and gay! Any diverse woman in it, make her gay! But Mrs. Kennedy, Bambi's a baby deer! F**k baby deer, put a chick in it, make her gay! Linguine and clam sauce. Uh, excuse me, I believe I asked you to put a chick in this and make her gay. Uh, yes, the chef was a little confused what you meant by that.It means put a chick in the linguine and make her f*****g gay! It's lame!Malcolm Collins: and I think that's why she was so mad. I was probably, this was already so well under production at that point that she couldn't stop it, but they put a chicken in her and make her gay and lame.Simone Collins: Oh no.Malcolm Collins: Was [00:05:00] being a meme, when this thing had been greenlit and funded and she couldn't get out of it. Lesbian cult but,Simone Collins: Were they trying to play it off like Amazons? AmazonMalcolm Collins: warrior much more Wiccan ish than that. If it's very clear, there's this one scene where they're all chanting and very Wiccany and Oh, they call it a force, but we call it a thread.If AmazonsSimone Collins: were really mystical.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I got to get your reaction to this. So how do you suppose this tribe procreated in the star Wars universe?I'm by the way, I met Simone in her pictures on her dating profile. She wore film grade stormtrooper armor for 7 division, like very into Star Wars back in the day.We still have Star Wars art on our walls from back when she was younger. This is something that she identified with, but hasn't really watched any of the recent stuff because why haven't you watched the recent stuff?Simone Collins: It started sucking. I don't like it anymore. How do you supposeMalcolm Collins: this lesbian cult was [00:06:00] reproducing?SoSimone Collins: They would cut off one of their breasts, like Amazons, and then the breast would form into a new child. No. No. Okay. They would form a Wiccan circle. They would form a Wiccan circle. No. They couldn'tMalcolm Collins: know about Star Wars lore. No. What could be the most sacrilegious way they were reproducing to the lore of the Star Wars universe?Simone Collins: They they killed baby Yodas to create genetic material. TheyMalcolm Collins: were using the force to impregnate other women., the way Anakin was born and only Anakin was born. And that made Anakin unique and special in the Star Wars universe?Oh yeah! Was Jesus'd! Yeah! That's how they make All of their kids in this community. Oh, okay. It is very Jesus..But this is and I actually like it with biblical fan fiction. It would be like, if you wrote a biblical fan fiction [00:07:00] and you knew the Jesus story, And you were like, and there was this whole other town, this whole other town of lesbians where everyone just prays to God and gets pregnant in the same way Mary did, because they're all sinless.That's basically what they did was this. Isn'tSimone Collins: that kind of a lesbian dream? If you could just have kids without male involvement.Malcolm Collins: Hold on. This is where it gets insane and misogynistic.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: There is a famous scene in this.Carry themMalcolm Collins: where the one lesbian is saying to the other lesbian, to try to say that I should be the one who decides how they're raised.She goes, I carried them. And then the other lesbian, the strong black woman, she replies, I created them, which implies that men create the child And women [00:08:00] carry the child. This is even more misogynistic than real human earth biology.So she's actually,Actually I inseminated you. Therefore I created the child. Therefore I am the dominant partner in this relationship and make all child rearing decisions.Simone Collins: It's worse that the analog for the male here. is the force. I just, wow. Okay. This is, did they need to they need to have sensitivity readers, but they're just normies.Because I don't. They wereMalcolm Collins: so woke. They didn't even think to have sensitivity readers. No. SensitivitySimone Collins: readers are the most woke. So that's the problem. I think the problem is that like a normal person reading thisMalcolm Collins: would be like, this is very misogynistic. Yeah. Bye. You think that men create the child and women just carry it and therefore men should have dominance over all family decisions?Simone Collins: There was a period in human history where that seemed to be what people believed. [00:09:00] Yes.Malcolm Collins: And this is actually interesting. It shows that like when you're in these ultra woke circles, cause you cannot criticize strong black female writer or whatever, whoever wrote this, like that no one they're just so unaware of how genuinely toxic their views have become.In terms of misogynistic aspects of their views, because nobody's willing to challenge them.Simone Collins: Yeah. What I am, that really happens in the,Malcolm Collins: I'm gonna, I'm gonna put the shot in this show. I created them, therefore I win. Okay here's, so we gotta keep going with what happens to this temple.Simone Collins: There's more.Malcolm Collins: Before we get to our insider story here. Yes, there is more.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: They try to brainwash the girls. Now in the show, it's they're the good guys and the Jedis are the bad guys, which is f*****g stupid.Simone Collins: So wait, so the, again, we're back to the lesbian A Jedi [00:10:00] commune and they're raising the female Amazon younglings.Okay. Great. And they are talking about theMalcolm Collins: Jedi's think, and this is framed multiple times that we are using the dark side. Now, keep in mind, we know from the series. So if you were taking this from the outside perspective and you were watching this, the way I think it should be watched as in universe fascist propaganda.They admit that the Jedi say that they're using the dark side of the force. They're like, some would say the way we're using the force is dark sided. There is only one way to dark side use the force, which is to use the force to control and manipulate other people to force the force to act by your will.Wait, but Jedi do that all the time. The whole like, no, the Jedi are supposed to be enacting the forces will on reality. force helps them do that. The darksiders have their own will and they use that to exercise the force on Riel. Yeah, but howSimone Collins: is, how are darksiders using their own will? Is that not just the force using them to use their will?Malcolm Collins: No, that is not the way the dark [00:11:00] side is seen in the universe. No. And this is also why the dark side isn't intrinsically negative. It's just, do you relate to reality via harmony? Which of course we would see it's a mystic pathway. So in many ways, from our perspective, the Jedi's are the bad guys. Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil! From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.Malcolm Collins: They are fighting for a mystic pathway, whereas the dark siders are, can be fighting for a monotheistic pathway.I've been teamSimone Collins: Sith since you met me, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: But in this context, it means something quite different because this is like a coven of witches. And we are seeing that the girls are trained from a young age to just not trust anyone outside the group to not trust and to believe that they're a persecuted minority.And are they raisedSimone Collins: with a certain imperative? Is there a raison d'etre they, Yes, we areMalcolm Collins: a persecuted minority. Everyone else is a bad guy.Simone Collins: But so is their job to Eliminate all other people. So what do they do? They exist to defend themselves and just exist.Malcolm Collins: Here's this f*****g insane.Okay. They exist to defend themselves, [00:12:00] but, and it's all and we need to use the force to procreate. These are the only two children in this giant commune of women. Okay. Oh, so there's not. Okay. Like a regular thing that they do. And I think that this shows the way progressives view children.They're like, if we have two children for 80 women that can save our culture, that'll do well intergenerationally, that won't do especially what happens immediately after the children leave this culture.Simone Collins: Isn't that more of an indication of the short term thinking of progressive culture in general, that there's a complete lack of longtermism and it's really about what's happening now.There's a myopia.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So then next what happens, because we got to go over what happens in this episode because it's insane. So they live in this like old base on a mountain in an abandoned world and it's this giant stone semi circle, like you would see in a lot of Star Wars stuff. Okay. Oh, yeah.Cool. Yeah, cool idea. Problem is they light it up like a freaking Christmas tree. So it would be [00:13:00] obvious to anyone when they're trying to hide their kids from this Jedi thing. Don't you understand? Women need good lighting, Malcolm. Even after a lifetime of brainwashing the evil one wants to stay.The good one wants to go as a Jedi, or at least this is the way I'm reading it. I, it might be the other way around, but yeah. And, They're twins, I'm sure they're hard to tell apart.Simone Collins: Do they dress the same?Malcolm Collins: No, this group tells her to lie to the Jedi. That's how she's gonna stay. She needs to lie to the Jedi in order to stay in the group, and she doesn't want to.And she doesn't lie to the Jedi, by the way.Simone Collins: So they're trying to take their two young and use them to infiltrate an existing Jedi order, correct?Malcolm Collins: No, they just don't want the Jedi to take their kids at all. Oh, okay. And so they tell the kids to lie to the Jedi.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Except the kid wants to escape them.The kid clearly seems to understand that they're abusive and wants to get away. Which is interesting that they don't see the coding in this. But it's very clear. The kid, you can read this separately. The kid wants to join the Mormon missionaries who have come to [00:14:00] their house. And the, oh, there's spaceSimone Collins: Mormons in this too.All right. So we've got some starship troopers going onMalcolm Collins: here.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So, they, she's been coached to lie to them, coaching children to lie to space CPS, basically. That is fantastic. But she doesn't cause she has a moral conscience. And then the other one, the evil one is I won't let you leave.And she's what do you mean by that? And she's I'm going to kill you. Like immediately to 11, right? That escalated.It's also like, it's very clear that this giant group of women who is only raising two kids by the way, is not at all qualified to be parents. If one of their kids is already. Trying to murder the other one and torturing animals. That's how, by the way, it's established that she is the bad, the evil twin is that she tortures animals. I'll do it like, no, this is fine. ,The space CPS does need to come and take these kids.Malcolm Collins: And she lights this girl's diary [00:15:00] on fire. And then locks her in the room and throws it on the ground and what happens next? The giant stone fortress burns down.She burns the oopsies. She burns down. Now, keep in mind that in the episode before this this is like why you need mansplaining, many people are like. In the episode before this, there was a fire in space, a campfire in space. Outer space. With no air. And in this episode, a giant concrete slash stone fortress caught into a rapid fire.Simone Collins: Oh, I was going to ask. I figured it just, it'd be more like the Globe Theater or something, fully wood. No. It's completely concrete and stone.Malcolm Collins: You don't see I don't even, yourSimone Collins: space rocks are flammable, Malcolm. Stop telling women how space rocks are made.Malcolm Collins: It'sSimone Collins: made of potassiumMalcolm Collins: infused rocks.Yeah, duh! It's combustible. Yeah. So one this is why you need a sarcastic conservative man on every [00:16:00] set. If you would like to hire us for anti DEI consulting, we are starting a firm to do that. Just let us know.Simone Collins: Sarcastic conservative man.Malcolm Collins: Why, of course they should. I know, no, I, there actually should be and we can clear up all of these problems you might have on the cheat. We'll just fire people. We'll only take a percent of the money we save you. SoSimone Collins: that's actually a good business model. I know it is.Malcolm Collins: And the company would be run technically because you are a trans ace woman.By their perspective, you're disabled.Simone Collins: I'm autistic.Malcolm Collins: You're autistic, right? So who better to be making these decisions? Um, so anyway and I haven't, MBA from Stanford. I'm qualified to do this. I've run big companies. I've been, a director of strategy at a major VC firm. So anyway we are at this point, the whole thing's burning down.So all of the lesbians. As they're leaving, because of course the Jedi save the good one. They run by the Lesbian Oh, what happens toSimone Collins: the evil twin whose diary was burnt?Malcolm Collins: She teleports outside somehow, plot armor. It's insane. [00:17:00] It's genuinely insane. But anyway the, but she, the good one thinks she's dead.And I'm assuming it's a good one that goes with the Jedi. If it's not, I haven't watched the episode because I will not torture myself with this or pay for Disney plus. I've watched a lot of reviews and they haven't clarified this point yet.Simone Collins: Okay. Gotcha. It doesn't matter. Does it? No. Doesn't matter.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Doesn'tSimone Collins: matter.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. She what was I going to say? She runs by this room and all of these lesbian witches are dead.Simone Collins: Do they all murder suicide orMalcolm Collins: what? We don't know. It's, it doesn't look like they burned. The room isn't on fire. MaybeSimone Collins: they didn't know about crawling on the ground.Malcolm Collins: The bad fire training. That's what killedSimone Collins: her. That's it's deadly. Maybe Disney just wanted to use this as a teaching moment to remind everyone to, to crawl on the ground. For a friar.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and it's interesting that this cult is supposed to be, like, way more powerful than the Jedi.Make that clear. That lesbians yeah,I love this comment here, by the way. Okay.The witches are [00:18:00] so powerful, they can easily kill a Jedi using the thing they said wasn't a weapon. I should note here that they said that the Force isn't a weapon. Okay. That's what they're saying. No one can use the force as a weapon, or at least you're not supposed to use the force as a weapon. Yeah.So the witches are so powerful that they can easily kill the Jedi using the thing that they swear is not a weapon, and no one should use the weapon. Then they all died, at once, by a fire, caused by a single girl, in a giant fortress made of stone, with people inside the fortress, who can project barriers, and control gravity.Simone Collins: Flammable stone, and Not necessarily smoke barriers,Malcolm Collins: potassium.Simone Collins: It's.Malcolm Collins: Plausible. Plausible. So now we get to talk about our own little private story with Hollywood. Hey, let's see if you have some final comments on this. And do you think that like Star Wars Zorro is recoverable at this point?Or anyone's going to give it a chance again? When did you stop watching?Simone Collins: I stopped watching after [00:19:00] The pod race. That's really by stop watching. I still went through the motions of trying to watch some of the properties, but I have no memory after that. So even before it went woke, you stopped in theMalcolm Collins: prequel.Simone Collins: Yeah. The last good moment for me was the pod race. And after that, everything was so traumatically bad as far as I'm concerned that I literally have no memory of it, but pod racing is cool. So that's okay.Malcolm Collins: You watched the first and the second of the new movies was me. We, we didn't watch a return of whatever.I do not that one with the Palpatine movie. You don't remember it.Simone Collins: I remember being happy and in the one. No I've literally blocked them out and I wasn't even drunk. Remember I used to try to get blackout drunk to watch things with you. Cause it was really fun. And then I'd forget them and then I could watch them again.But now. No, yeah, sorry. It just, I don't know. They just got bad. I liked the camp. And the camp went away when it became corporate. So that's where I lost it. Woke wasn't even [00:20:00] what killed it for me. It was the loss of camp. Wait,Malcolm Collins: Jar Binks wasn't camp enough for you?Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess he's pretty camp, but that, it felt more cringe than camp. And of course now he's gone through, he's gone through the gauntlet and now he is, Sith Lord Jar Binks. That's cool. That's not canon, that's fan That doesn't matter because it's just obviously true. Come on, Malcolm, there's no way it's not.Malcolm Collins: But People who aren't familiar with the Sith Lord Jar Binks theory, it's that Jar Binks was actually very powerful as a force, and was a Sith Lord who was tricking Jedi and creating these events. And it actually makes a lot of sense given all of his canon appearances. And there's an easy way you could craft a narrative around that.And I would love to see Disney do that but they won't do anything that interesting.Simone Collins: Yeah. No, everything about Jar Binks points to that. It is irrefutable truth. Whether or not the creators of Jar Binks realize that is not my problem. He's a racist stereotype. That makes it even better.It's he's also [00:21:00] this like anti woke, like I'm going to even mock, like every concept of you thinking you're, like it's just everything about it, this, it's incredibly like racist, evil character. It's like a a white minstrel performer. That is also incredibly evil and trying to ruin all the forces of good.What better character could there be? But yeah, I loveMalcolm Collins: the Star Wars. The old Star Wars went hard into racial stereotypes. Oh my God. Remember the Jewish character, the floating guy was the long nose who owned slaves and was like, trick people. It was games and he wore like the old timey like medieval Jewish hat style.Yeah, Anakin 2 boss. And he spoke in that accent. Oh my God, that was horrifying. I was like, whoa! It was extremely.Simone Collins: Racist movie.Malcolm Collins: And I've always said that the original Anakin slash Darth Vader stereotype was obviously a Calvinist stereotype from older media. It [00:22:00] was all of the pain obsessed, minimalism obsessed, single minded focus, moralizing I know what's right, everyone else is wrong.And the super manic, it's like a young person. And then the older iteration that's okay, I'm just going to carry out my mission no matter what. Yeah it's interesting. The whole thing was built around stereotypes and I think that. Made it better, to be honest, I think the stereotypes fit snuggly was in our mind.Simone Collins: What are you saying? I guess there are still very offensive stereotypes, right? So there was the offensive Jew stereotype, the offensive, what was it supposed to be? Jamaican stereotype. And now we have the offensive lesbian stereotype and it's fine. Lesbians who,Malcolm Collins: because it's not like lesbian, it wasn't interesting lesbians.This is another thing where they're like, they tried to make this movie a palatable to women by putting a bunch of lesbians in it. That is not what women watch.Simone Collins: I don't know. No, there are some, a very small handful, but there are some good lesbian shows according to lesbians.Malcolm Collins: But this is not what the mainstream woman wants.Simone Collins: The mainstreamMalcolm Collins: woman wants Bridgerton. Okay. [00:23:00] Yes, she does. You could do this with Star Wars. You could have a bunch of nobles with hot, masculine buff men interacting with women and saving them. And I was actuallySimone Collins: going to say though, here's the thing, and this is actually even more accurate. Although Bridgerton is very accurate. The mainstream woman wants yaoi. And then you have a, yeah, you have a man on man action devoid of women. I'm sorry, but like putting a bunch of chicks in it and making them gay is not the answer. Unless you're actually like really good. You have to be really good.And these are likeMalcolm Collins: old women, by the way, this isn't like hot lesbian stuff. See that's yeah.Simone Collins: Okay. Like at least make them hot, at least make them, fun for the whole family. But yeah, that's, yeah, I guess go ahead. AndMalcolm Collins: But, okay, so people might not understand how this happened, and now I need to tell a personal anecdote that happened to us recently.Simone Collins: And this is speculative whatever. Speculative,Malcolm Collins: and I'm not going to give names or companies, so you guys can ignore that. But we have been trying to make a documentary, or a lot of firms have been trying to make a documentary about our family for a while now. And prenatalism in [00:24:00] general.And it's generally the same story over and over again, which is it gets approved by the creative department and it gets shut down by the legal department.And we've had this at major streaming networks multiple times at this point. The most recent excuse for the shutdown was that we practice corporal punishment. And that caused problems for legal. Now, this is very confusing to me because it's legal in our state. So it shouldn't have anything to do with legal except that maybe it affects ads, but that's not legal department.But in addition to that, it's something the majority of Americans do. And it's something that the most recent research backs, you can look at the giant meta study done last year parental punishment. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater 2023. Those two things being the case, why would it be shut down by legal?And this is where I realized something, there hasn't been a single right leaning show that has been greenlit by a major [00:25:00] streaming network in about the past 10 years, where characters are shown in a somewhat right leaning light as positive. And people can say, what about Tiger King? Which you might not be familiar with as Tiger King was actually pre produced and then bought by a studio, which seems to be okay for conservative shows.You just cannot have the studio produce it itself, which shows me that the legal departments of these studios after they have been ransacked by DEI departments are the core problem. It is not the DEI departments themselves. And unless you can influence legal departments of the major studios, you are never going to get anything passed through, but also these departments and the managers.Who do not get fired when they make bad numbers. They get to fire the creatives, right? But they have incentivized the creatives to make these sorts of things by canceling everything that comes through the pipeline. That isn't far left. These [00:26:00] are the same companies that let. Forward videos that have a literal like PDA file content in them that have it is insane the stuff that they are greenlighting, right?Dear white people, for example, right? Yet slightly conservatively coded content ends up getting killed. And the reason is because the institutional bureaucracies of these structures are structured in a way where the urban monoculture has such control of them that deviating from it.Even in ways that the majority of the American populace, the vast majority of their audience deviates from it in is unacceptable.Simone Collins: Now, of course caveat, there are exceptions to this. There are some streaming platforms or networks that do have shows that that showcase conservative people. No.Have you looked at thatMalcolm Collins: big conservative show that did? You're looking at like duck dynasty. And that was well over 10 years ago.Simone Collins: Welcome to Platteville.Malcolm Collins: Welcome to Plackville. Plackville. [00:27:00] I've never heard of this. Where is it streaming?Simone Collins: TLC.Malcolm Collins: That is not a major network that we've talked about.Simone Collins: Oh yeah. No, we.So that's interesting that there are. There are exceptions,Malcolm Collins: but I think that kind of proves our point. If that's what you came up with as your example, when historically speaking, there were lots of conservative leaning shows like duck dynasty the fact that this exists, or do you guys remember the man show, like this was a thing that existed for a while.Do you remember spikeSimone Collins: TV in general? Which was like, yeah, everyoneMalcolm Collins: watched it because itSimone Collins: was fun. Yeah, they had a lot of fun stuff.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I likedSimone Collins: it.Malcolm Collins: I remember that this one a skit where the little kid, this the Spike TV boy would go into his quickie mark type things and been like they'd be, he'd get alcohol and they'd say, can you show me your ID?And he'd go, can you show me your green card?Simone Collins: Oh God. Yeah. [00:28:00] Back when jokes were jokes. Back whenMalcolm Collins: jokes were jokes, you can never do that today. I'll tell you what. It's notSimone Collins: it's not funny anymore because people have made immigration. Lame and not fun. Scary.Malcolm Collins: Can you show me your ID? Can you show me your green card? I just can't. But yeah, no.So the problem is that it's systemically even lightly conservatively leaning things cannot be shown at these platforms, even when what makes them conservative. Is opinions that are held by the majority of Americans.Simone Collins: Yeah. And when there's probably a pretty big market for it there are only a small number of channels that appear to be actively catering to that market, which is interesting.Even though honestly content about conservatives is equally entertaining to both conservative and progressive markets, because it's one of those things where you're either like, Oh, these people are great. Or you're like, Oh, these monsters are hilarious. And so either way you win. But I think this is, this makes me think, of course, of Tracy Woodgrain's sub stack essay on how [00:29:00] Republicans are screwed.How, when you look at a lot of the executional apparatus that is being minted by universities, and this is lawyers, this is legislators, this is, the people who functionally get things done within large bureaucracies, because these institutions are so progressively coded. I got it designed at this point to mint progressives, even if centrists and conservatives enter them, only progressives can come out to a certain extent, unless you've been totally radicalized against it.And there may be more of that backfiring. Benjamin Boyd seemed to be radicalized in the other direction by his brush with the progressive institution. But yeah that just means that you're not going to have. A lot of conservative lawyers and producers and, people who can grow within these really large networks.So of course you're going to have conservative, independent filmmakers and conservative entrepreneurs and conservative, anything that's small scale, but when you get to the big bureaucracies, it's going to be, AI isMalcolm Collins: going to change this game, I [00:30:00] think. And I also, when we can do AI, Automation of shows or animation.It's going to completely up in this model. And withSimone Collins: Sora and other Sora like competitors, you can already make really amazing film content. It's only a matter of time until.Malcolm Collins: Yeah so the final point I'd end on is we have been told that if, and this is just a thing, if somebody wants to invest in this, They can I don't really care one way or the other way.But if we created something like a Tiger King for our family, right? Like of our family it'd probably do well in the film festival circuit and then we could get it onto one of the streaming platforms and you'd likely make a good return, but it's going to require a pretty hefty investment, like half a million dollars or something like that.So if anyone is interested in doing that let us know, but only if you're like, You have the money to do something like that. I don't want to fan raise money for something like this. If somebody is doing it, I want it to be an investment that they plan to [00:31:00] make a good return on. And then we'll do our part to ensure that you make that return.But outside of that, yeah, tough situation.Simone Collins: But that might help to explain why. The lesbians didn't know basic fire safety.Malcolm Collins: Not fire safety. Living in a f*****g concrete building is fire safety.Simone Collins: Not when the concrete is obviously flammable and they probably knew that. I don't, where did the good slash evil twin get an incendiaryMalcolm Collins: device?She just left fire on the ground. She's a little lighter. So they had fire there. Yeah, in the building full of flammable stones. It hadn'tSimone Collins: burned down yet for some reason. I you've left so many loose ends with this fascinating show. I feel like now I have to watch it, but I'm too busy watching Bridgerton and their ridiculous costumes.Cause here's what Bridgerton actually is. Bridgerton is not a historical romance. It is the [00:32:00] season in. The capital of the hunger games, which is what I always wanted. It is literally the dating scene. You could have that in Star Wars. You could have a Coruscant movie. You could have a Coruscant. Yeah, for sure.But honestly, Bridgerton just did that. Bridgerton sci fi practically. It's not actually like period dress or anything. And, it's it's great. So personally, I think I've got what I need media wise. So I'm glad I'm watching that. AndMalcolm Collins: I have seen that there are a lot of Sexy men in Bridgerton.Are you watching too many sexy men being sexy? NoSimone Collins: one watches this for the men or women in it. They watch it for the costumes. 100 percent is the costumes. They're really pretty. Yeah. I love them. I love them.Malcolm Collins: I love you.Simone Collins: You too. Still a lot of poop. This was the big one. I'm still I'm on my way. I'm nearly done. Okay we're getting cleaner. This is getting good. So the situation is improving. I'm almost [00:33:00] done. There's still a lot of wiping happening. It's okay. We have plenty of time for the episode. Hang in there. We can do this.Hold on. Hang in there. Okay. Almost done. And I'm getting the diaper now. Fresh diapers come in, and I'm doing this with one hand, so it's a little awkward. Hold on. Okay. Getting the diaper installed. It's happening. Oh boy. I've discovered more poop. And I'm wiping it off. Alright. And the diaper's coming on.Other diaper's going into the trash. I'm nearly done now. I'm on my way over. I'm definitely on my way over. The diaper is being affixed. One tab is on, now the second tab is on, I'm almost there. She's looking very serious about [00:34:00] this, Indy. I'm putting out the fluffs, if you don't put out the fluffs, the next diaper's blowout, almost guaranteed.And now, I'm tucking in legs, checking to make sure that there is no fecal matter on my hands. And I'm making my way over okay, I'm almost there. Almost there. On my way right now. And I'm walking over. I'm walking over. I'm walking over. I'm sitting down. I'm here now. I have the baby. I cannot hear you yet.I am Putting her down. The poop has been removed and I will soon be able to hear you. And I'm super excited for this. The yes. Okay. Oh, okay. Sorry. I didn't want you to give up on this just because we had another diaper. No. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone Collins introduce Techno-Puritanism, blending Christianity with futuristic beliefs. They discuss rejecting texts, prophecy, intergenerational improvement, sacrifice, and service. The couple seeks logical and fulfilling faith, drawing from Puritan traditions and Victorian optimism. They explore personal belief evolution, evidence-backed faith, and the transformative power of choice in improving life.

Prolific demographer and data analyst Dan Hess, aka Morberths, joins Malcolm and Simone to discuss the impact of marriage, urban density, living arrangements, and sexual history on fertility rates. They explore the rise in average marriage age, the role of suburban living in boosting fertility, and the implications of young adults living with parents on reproduction.

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect the inner workings of Leverage, a now-infamous Silicon Valley cult that operated from 2011 to 2019. The couple delves into the group's origins, its novel business model, and the factors that led to its eventual downfall, highlighting the dangers of mysticism and the importance of grounding one's understanding of reality in objective truth.Malcolm and Simone examine Leverage's initial goal of creating highly effective, cooperative individuals to solve global problems and generate revenue for the organization. They discuss how the group's embrace of mysticism, led by its charismatic leader Jeff Anders, ultimately undermined its mission and led to psychological damage among its members.The conversation also touches on the vulnerability of certain communities, such as the Effective Altruism and Rationalist movements, to cult-like influence, the ethical implications of Leverage's power dynamics, and the potential pitfalls of well-intentioned individuals who prioritize their own subjective experiences over objective reality.Throughout the discussion, Malcolm emphasizes the critical importance of basing one's understanding of reality on confirmable, rule-based knowledge rather than mystical experiences, arguing that even the most well-intentioned individuals can perpetrate evil if their understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed.[00:00:00]Malcolm Collins: You then have somebody who is supposed to constantly be watching over you, who is allowed to have sex with you, because that often happens, she mentions it in pieces, that people who, We're other people's direct subordinates. So you needed to meet with them. You needed to do these life counseling things where they would debug you and you could get fired if you didn't please them and you would lose a home and a source of income and have a big blink spot on your resume.You think that didn't create an intrinsic pressure to have sex with them?Simone Collins: Well, when you put it that wayMalcolm Collins: The, the thing that I find interesting about leverage about the only thing I find interesting is the novel business model novel business model for a cult, but, but the novel business model itself was sort of cheesing the Silicon Valley environment at that time period. Everybody has the intentionality of being a good person. How good you intend to be has no correlation with how good you are. How good you [00:01:00] are is dependent. On your understanding ofSimone Collins: reality.Oh, and that's, you know, a really good example of this because we don't just have to s**t all over mysticism.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: So Malcolm, since you were, oh, we lad you had always wanted to start a cult and run it and it's so sad that you have not realized that dream. But you still studied colts a lot.And so I thought we could go over a recent colt that formed and fell apart and theoretically is reformed and is still alive and operational today. And I can get your analysis.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So this is going to be the leverage video. Now something I should note to our audience about us and leverage. Is we have a lot of connections to leverage, like I know at least a dozen people who were in this cult, in it or just involvedSimone Collins: or they knewMalcolm Collins: someone involved or in it.So yeah, so I, I, if you were in the [00:02:00] effective altruist community or the less wrong or rationalist community, In the Bay Area in the like well the period I was there, God, if I can remember when that was like early two thousands. I wanna say.Simone Collins: We met in 2012. You were there from 2012 to 2015.Malcolm Collins: No, I was there before we met Simone for years.Okay, soSimone Collins: you were there, you well then, no. You graduated college 2010. So theoretically you were there from 2010. Dates didn't really matter. 2015. And leverage during, we'll say leverage 1.0, which is leverage and paradigm. Failed cult that we're going to be talking about existed from late 2011, early 2012 through 2019.So there was definitely. Overlap while you were in the Bay Area. PerfectMalcolm Collins: overlap while I was in the Bay Area. I now a few things that you should note is a big fallout of this is a lot of people in this cult take umbrage. Was it being called a cult? Which is actually now, was it publicly being known as a cult?Which is interesting. Some peopleSimone Collins: openly call it a cult. Most seem to not.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, no, you, you, people who are in it actively. [00:03:00] I should note that normatively, like, of the time when I was in Silicon Valley, and everyone I know after my time in Silicon Valley, everyone who touched it called it a cult. While they were involved? Yeah, that was common. You're like, oh, I'm going to go hang out at the cult headquarter. Yeah, this, this, we're not a cult is some new, they like, well, at least the younger lower order members knew it was a cult, but like, Who joins a cult as a lower order member knowing that it's a cult?Well, for the same reason that I'm interested in cults, in a way. Oh. They have this idea of well, maybe we can construct a true metaphysical understanding of reality and like a better way of ordering our brains and the way we relate to reality. And through that improve ourselves, like when I studied cult psychology, the thing that interested me about cult psychology is I was like, these people are able to significantly alter their self identities.[00:04:00] Maybe that could be used for benefit. Like if our self identities are that malleable, then why not build a framework that an individual can just sort of pick up and use to rewrite who they are in the same way cults do that to people. And that is, that is what really interested me about, about the topic.And I think that they saw the same thing and there was this sort of cool Underground stigma to talking about it that way, or thinking about it that way. Like, Oh yeah, I hang out with this cultist, you know, Eric'sSimone Collins: saying that you're, you're in a gang. Maybe it's a little cache. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So I, I will note that this modern framing of we're not a cult is just out of nowhere and likely due to the negative repercussions they've had of being likened to a cult instead of saying, well, we are a cult, but we're cool.So that'sSimone Collins: so interesting. Cause I, I, I wasn't. One, you were there, you were in the Bay Area during early leverage days. So maybe at the end of leverage, when things started to fall apart after 2015, things were different. And they started getting a little more self conscious, [00:05:00] but yeah, it's, I had no idea.That's really fascinating.Malcolm Collins: So read to me, I I've been watching some leverage content recently, so I have some idea but read to me.Simone Collins: So to really understand how things went off the rails, which is where I think Malcolm really wants to delve in here and where I think things get interesting. It's just best to turn to Zoe. K. Medium write up my experience with leverage. I'll give you some highlights just to give you a picture of how this went off the rails and why this was a cult from Zoe quote people, not everyone, but definitely a lot of us genuinely thought we were going to take over the U S government.One of my supervisors would regularly talk about this as a daunting, but inevitable strategic reality. Obviously we'll do it, but, and succeed, but it seems hard. Another supervisor bemoaned with some performative unease that the necessity of theories about violence and military skill because they just couldn't see any other way we could get to world takeover level.So here's an organization. A, a cult, it turns out, as you would say, [00:06:00] that is keen on taking over the world. That, that's its plan. Which actually isn't necessarily a red flag.Malcolm Collins: So a lot of people here people in my organization, we're talking about eventually taking over the world. Look, the world needs taking over.I've got a plan to take over the world. So you're, you're, you're flagging this as not bad. Not bad. No, again, this is one of those categories where like, fine, you want to take over the world? Take over the world. And you do need to, but, but I would say that the group was stupid. It like, like actively stupid.The more you'll hear about this group, the more you'll be like, Oh, wow, there must have been a really large number of stupid people in like the early singularity EA and rationalist community. And it's like, there still are. Yeah. But like astoundingly stupid like the idea that you're like, okay, well, we're going to take over the world one day.So let's study military tacticsSimone Collins: like that is not that was one person. And this was a minority. I'm just saying, but they were there were people who had their own opinions in there. And yes, it was, it was a thing, but yeah, so that, that is one place where it went [00:07:00] off the rails and that is a spicy detail, but I guess you're going to play Liz Lemon in this and be like, is it a deal breaker?And this for you, not a deal breaker. Yeah. Domination. Also, I think it's, it's uniquely ballsy for a cult. Normally they're just like, we're all going to go to heaven or something, so good for them. Zoe also very conveniently has a numbered list, which is, I think, very EA rationalist community, of a taste of how out of control this got.So I will read to you. To give you a picture of where the culture eventually ended up, here's a list of some of the things I experienced by the end of my time there. One, two to six hour long group debugging sessions in which we as a sub faction alignment group would attempt to articulate a demon which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our system using debugging tools.Malcolm Collins: Deal breaker? Well, no, so this is actually interesting to talk about [00:08:00] debugging. So something you'll often have in groups that are attempting to. Manipulate you psychologically and it's important to know because like, okay, if you could actually rework your personality in your brain, which I believe you can, like, would you not want access to those tools and somebody else to make sure you didn't utilize them in a way that was deleterious or cause negative downstream effects?Sure. I think the real core is who's setting the goals. So with something like debugging, it is very easy to brainwash someone. If you are in the room with one other person who is asking you about your past and who you are expected to often admit sins to, that's another thing that's really important.Especially if you have to look at them in the eyes for long periods of time this can very easily brainwash people. All right. It was a technique that I looked at, I learned, I was like, could I, like, where should you notice this? So whenever you're in a group and this is something that's happening that [00:09:00] group has developed, often organically, a form of brainwashing.Oh, so withoutSimone Collins: intending it, this can all be Yeah. Sometimes it just happensMalcolm Collins: accidentally. Like you have a group of people who are trying to like talk through things, right? Like trying to work on themselves, like do interpersonal work. And so they get in groups of two where they talk through things.And then, Oh, accidentally they decided to do this in a hierarchical way because they wanted people who were more competent. To be sort of helping the people who are less competent. And now that hierarchy ends up self expanding because everyone who's doing it is supposed to recruit more people to do it.And now, oh, you accidentally just evolved a cult. Cults do not need to be started malevolently. Now in In Jeff's case because I know a lot about Leverage, I do believe that he intentionally googled brainwashing techniques. Oh gosh. Just because they, they look like they were a collection of obvious brainwashing techniques.But yeah, this is why you see this in Leverage right here, which is actually very similar to Theaton readings.Simone Collins: [00:10:00] What's, yeah, debugging sessions sound like audits from Scientology.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Or CatholicSimone Collins: confessions, I guess.Malcolm Collins: I'd say they're quite a bit different from Catholic confessions. Actually, I can go into how they're different from Catholic confessions and why Catholic confessions are so uniquely healthy among cultural subgroups.Simone Collins: Oh yeah, let's compare and contrast.Malcolm Collins: When you go to a Catholic confession, you are Taking the things that you, like the sins you feel you committed. Okay. You are volunteering those to a external party who you don't know. So you cannot accidentally become influenced by them as an individual, which is very important.You are unloading them more to like an amorphous entity. The church. No eyeSimone Collins: contact. You can't see them. You don't. Theoretically know who they are, but you probably do.Malcolm Collins: It's pretty hard for an individual priest to use this system to manipulate an individual. So that's, that's one thing that's really important because of how [00:11:00] simplistic the interaction is.I give you my sins. You tell me what I need to do to make them not important anymore. Now, psychologically, this has a lot of benefits doing this because now you're taking the things that are psychologically weighing you down and you are, Giving them to an external entity, but they are not saying those things don't matter, or you should learn to not care about those things, which is what modern psychology does, which I actually think is pretty psychologically unhealthy.Those things do matter, and here is how you play pennants for them. And it's an easy physical act, like saying a prayer a number of times, or doing prayer beads, or something like that.Simone Collins: It'sMalcolm Collins: a very eloquently and well designed psychologically healthy system. Now, psychologically unhealthy systems will often have you in these stories do full personal narratives, often with the goal of discovering quote unquote trauma or where thetans bind it to you.That's what they do in psychology. You mean Scientology. Scientology, that's what they're [00:12:00] looking for, some sort of inciting event that they can then say, Ah, this is why you have these problems, and you need me to deal with this inciting event. They will usually choose something tied to your parents or birth culture as the inciting event, because it makes it easier to draw a distance between you and your birth culture.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: So if you, if you see a group that's doing that, what they are trying to do is drive a wedge between you and your, your support network while also recontextualizing yourself as needing that group being dependent on that group. All right, keep going with the list.Simone Collins: Well, you haven't even commented on one of the most interesting elements of this, which I think is the group faction that she alludes to here.Keep in mind that Zoe is talking about how the debugging sessions weren't just this type of audit that you're describing, Scientology style, but this is one in which the alignment group of which Zoe was a member was attempting to articulate a [00:13:00] demon That it infiltrated their psyches from one of their rival groups.Do you think that these rival groups were intentionally created? They, I don't, I've not heard of them in any cult environment, but I have heard of them in that one psychotic study where they took a boy's camp and made them hate each other and things got so violent they had to stop the study. You recall this, right?Malcolm Collins: Very interesting. So, I know. I think that the rival group thing naturally evolved. And it, it actually evolved because sort of an inefficiency and the way the group, the organization was created.Side note here. I find it odd that they thought that they could create these. Ultra. Cooperative and efficient humans with their techniques. And yet the people acting within their organization that were demonstrably less.Good at cooperating with each other and less efficient than people outside of their organization. Like to see around you, everything collapsing and not realizing that the [00:14:00] psychological techniques that you are implementing. Or. Markedly worse. Then even the terrible psychological techniques that pervade our society today.,Malcolm Collins: so first we should talk about the demons. So they believed in two types of things at different parts of the, the story here.One was demons and one was objects.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: They are both Basically, like, concepts that one person can create and plant in another person's mind. So it's like memes or ideas, or even moods. Yeah, there's, well, you and I would contextualize them as like a packaged meme, but they don't. They sort of see it more like a bomb or a security camera that somebody placed in their brain that is like watching them and will like give them like vibes of like who planted it there.Or that demons I think also can enter from the other world and, and engage with them. So something that is very important in understanding leverage is you wanted to create an integrated philosophy of everything, right? [00:15:00] And Jeff AndersSimone Collins: did, yes.Malcolm Collins: Jeff Anders did. And The way that he decided to do that was what I would actually call sort of bog standard mysticism.And so what is he combining? Which is bog standard mysticism. If people know what I mean, bog standard mysticism is the belief that there's some sort of supernatural like extra Real reality that's beyond our fabric of reality and that is also God, that extra, that, that medium, that ultra reality is actually God, and that, that reality can be engaged with through certain types of corrupted mental states, what those states are depends on which group of mystics you're with and He came up with honestly pretty bog standard mystical beliefs, like demons exist and stuff like that.The core thing that makes Leverage different from other groups in the way that it formed and the way that it was structured is that it paid its members to be members. So Leverage would pay you to live in a Leverage house and you had to commit to live in a Leverage house for a year. And So who's going to do that?[00:16:00] First of all, you know, it's, it's, it's people who are already, you know, on the outskirts society. Often, you know, they don't have a family where they're living. They don't have a you know, a support.Simone Collins: Common themes seem to be that these are recent grads who may have had some short term jobs, like Zoe, for example, had done some acting.She'd done some admin work and that was kind of it. So she didn't have a big career already started. No one who could do something easily. That'sMalcolm Collins: what you think. No, she was, I can tell from the profile. She was a quote unquote actor who was paid to give acting classes once a week. No, she was being paid around.Keep in mind, these were all like big polyamorous houses. She was being kept for, to be used for sex.Simone Collins: Well, I have to say legally, this is all very alleged. And you'reMalcolm Collins: No, no, I'm telling you, like I underSimone Collins: I'm saying from a legal standpoint, Malcolm. Okay, yes. This is alleged and we are not slanderingMalcolm Collins: Are like competent individuals, like many people in these groups, they would get.So it was hard to get into leverage. Because you know, [00:17:00] it, it was a closed resource. It was like a cult that paid you to be a member, gave you housing and gave you access to well connected wealthy individuals.Simone Collins: Okay. Well, and people, I think genuinely thought they were saving the world. They didn't think that they were being used for things.Malcolm Collins: It, it was a cult playing on the easiest difficulty conceivable. So it did a lot of inefficient things that a normal cult that couldn't afford to pay its members wouldn't have done. Now you're asking, how did a cult get a bunch of money to pay its members to participate because they sold itself to wealthy people as a group that was going to do, like, systemic functional research on this mystical realm.Like, mystical perennialism is a thing. Fairly common philosophy, even what is mystical?Simone Collins: Wait, define mystical perennialism. This is new to me.Malcolm Collins: Radialism means they believe there is some truth in every religious tradition. Mysticalism is [00:18:00] that your fabric of reality thing I mentioned before. And so they basically told these wealthy people, we are going to do systemic research.this other side of reality on like you know, mystical truths. That is not like a terrible idea if you're actually going to do like evidence based research, but we're doing evidence based research. The real con, and this is interesting, this caused the whole thing for the structure to be inverted, if you are contrasting it with a traditional cult.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: A traditional cult recruits people and takes their money.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The source of income,Simone Collins: Comes from the recruits, the converts.Malcolm Collins: Right? Yeah. They used converts who they were paying to be converts and paying to house to sell a product up to wealthy people. Part of this product was you know the research that [00:19:00] they were doing.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But part of this product was also the humans that were being brainwashed.Simone Collins: Yes, and we should clarify that. The mission of the, well, obviously the mission of the cult was to save the world, but the general project that they established at least for leverage 1. 0 leverage 2. 0, who knows was to create extremely highly effective people who are also cooperative.So apparently it's a misnomer that they're trying to learn how to sort of mint Elon Musk's because Elon Musk is not very cooperative. But they were trying to basically. Meant very highly effective people. And there was this premise, at least stated that it would be possible to take the right type of person.And they apparently vetted people for this before offering them these paid positions and housing who could, through all of this coaching, through this, these, these debugging sessions, et cetera, become these people [00:20:00] just. To provide context. So theMalcolm Collins: goal, I, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, so the, the, basically you can also give it as a cult startup.It was pitching to these rich people, yes, we're going to do this mystical research. And that was what most of the rich people who funded it were actually interested in was the mystical research.But they also were pitching it sort of like a startup, like, well, we're going to figure out how to make these ultra effective people who then send money back to the central organization. Like that was the idea when they say cooperative, they mean subservient, like that they're going to continue to support this organization and its mission that turned them into these uber mitches.What their goal was, was to create spiritual uber mitches that could out compete within competitive capitalist economies. Other individuals. And that was like their game plan. Well, of course they failed to do that because they, they, they, we can talk about why they failed, which I think it's actually a very specific reason why they failed.And they have changed their business plan with leverage too. They've actually moved to a crypto product. And so what they do is this crypto [00:21:00] product. Is they have moved from because most of the wealthy people that they otherwise could raise money from like they could with leverage one Now know that one they are a cult to jeff is just an incompetent buffoon like i'm, sorry, like everything i've heard about him his theories.They are bog standard mystic cult they are not sophisticated ideas They are not even sophisticated. It's like a guy picked up a book on brainwashing and then read a few. He is not a bright guy. He's reallySimone Collins: charismatic enough to get all of these people to sign on, to get all of these people to hold him with a very high level of reference and to raise a Enough money to do multiple timesMalcolm Collins: hard if I wanted to start a cult by brainwashing people in the way He started this cult.I could have done that ages agoSimone Collins: Why didn't youMalcolm Collins: because my goal was always to free people?Simone Collins: Hmm. It was all right. Yeah your whole Yeah, the thesis was can you use cult methods on yourself to become a better person not? [00:22:00] Coerce other people, right?Malcolm Collins: Not coerce other people to be your servant.Simone Collins: You're ruining our evil reputation.Stop.Malcolm Collins: I know I will actually, well, people could argue like, remember, like a lot of people know, you know, I flipped with over a hundred people. I got really, really good at getting people to sleep with me. One of the things I implemented in that process were some of the brainwashing techniques. Oh, okay. Okay, there you go.Simone Collins: Bringing it back. Thanks, Malcolm. Bringing it back home. Bringing it back. Well, it's not that IMalcolm Collins: never utilized these techniques in my life. Yeah. I just had no interest in creating a self replicating memetic set. Yeah. I may have to some extent, you know like when I was younger and horny, all that, I was not the most ethical person in the world.Like I could definitely be a better person. You're an addict toSimone Collins: anything you will do on ethical stuff. And I think most young horny men could be argued. To be yeah, soMalcolm Collins: I look at these these sort of sessions that he's talking about and I did this With girl very easy like like and then and then you realize oh like and this happened to me [00:23:00] When you can get sex whenever you want with anyone you want it gets really boring.And you think that's how he turnedSimone Collins: to world domination?Malcolm Collins: No, I don't think he, I, I, I think that we'll talk about what, what he screwed up. It wasn't the world domination that screwed up. It wasn't even the goals that screwed up. It was the touching mysticism that ruined everything.Simone Collins: Back to the themes.Malcolm Collins: Well, if you look at the things he did, when other people would give an idea, he would always shoot it down and then maybe like give it again, repackage to the next week or something. Only ideas that came from Jeff were allowed to be thought of as serious ideas was in this group. Yes. According to Zoe, but that's what I've heard as well.Yes. So if this is true if, you know, Jeff just shoots down ideas all the time and everything like that, that's very easy to do when you adopt a mystical framework. It is one of the core problems with mystical frameworks. If your access to truth is supernatural, i. e. it is achieved through states that only you can achieve, well, this causes a [00:24:00] problem.Either you can't communicate with anyone else's source to truth, So there's no cross interpretability, or one individual has access to a source of truth above all other individual source of truth. So if Jeff sort of disagrees with your belief about like the way psychology works, or the way whatever works, because he has mystical fortification for these beliefs, he's able to just lean on that.And so, there can never be any real study or advancement in a meaningful context. That could be the way that you see this as a secular person. And like, people need to understand my hatred of mysticism is both theological and secular. Clearly, that's why mysticism is so bad. But from a theological standpoint, I could say, well, okay, so suppose they had good means and they were trying to tap into this mystical realm.Why did it read with like, everyone I know who was involved in this was like, this really messed me up. Like, [00:25:00] this is not just a her thing. Like, Everyone I've heard of who's involved with it. It's like, yeah, this was really,Simone Collins: even, even the, those who seem to be defending it. Report having gone through a lot of healing after it and are no contact with most of the people who were involved.So yeah, kind of damning.Malcolm Collins: Yeah so no, I don't think, I, I, I, and you don't just get this here. I actually argue that Stanford has a weird evolved cult in it called Touchy Feely. It's a, yeah, it's a classSimone Collins: that basically is a cult. You are.Malcolm Collins: I started it and I was like, wait, you're trying to brainwash me. You started taking class.Simone Collins: You didn't start the class.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I started taking the class. And I just was like, these are all brainwash techniques from the eighties that you're using right now. And if you talk to people who completed it, they'll be like, it's the best thing ever. It transformed me for life. It blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, because there was a bunch of brainwash techniques from the eighties that like, we are taught now in psychology.Make sure you never do this. It can cause dependency. And keep in mind,Simone Collins: these are, they were uniquely long classes. They typically took place at the end of the day. They would, people would come [00:26:00] home crying, that kind of thing. This is not a normal class. No, no,Malcolm Collins: no, no. They, they would intentionally sleep deprive you.They were at the end of the day, they were in an incredibly emotionally charged situation where like you really couldn't win. It was, it was stupidly, obviously just brainwashing. And I do not know. I wanted to bring this up, but I knew I couldn't bring this up because so many people have gone through the brainwashing session that if I was like, you know, that's a brainwashing seminar.You sent me to, they'd be like, but all of our top staff at Stanford business school has gone through the brainwashing thing and they love it. They say it's actually become the focus of their entire lives. And I'm like, okay, well. Listen but touchy feely isn't as bad. It's just brainwashing to indebt you for your entire life to a corporation.The Stanford business school, but leverage is bad because I actually don't think that the type done within Stanford causes that much damage. The type done within leverage is incredibly damaging. Because it's mystical brainwashing [00:27:00] that levels one person's personal and subjective experience of reality above other people's, which always leads to deleterious outcomes and prevents any real research from taking place.That's why all they have are their quote unquote notes and they've never gotten better at anything. And it's such a shame too,Simone Collins: because that whole apartment building they were living in could have been this incredible. Psychological research study.Malcolm Collins: Well, no, but what's really cool. You can still do it, like find all their notes and then do a study on it.Cause it's interesting. But if you look at, um, the theological perspective on the mystic, it's like if their hypothesis was true and you could study the mystical realm and use it to improve people. People like these would have ended up all successful, or at least some success cases, instead of all severely psychologically damaged.So if I'm outside of my Some have gone on to beSimone Collins: successful, I think.Malcolm Collins: Not wildly as far as I've heard. I've heard of people like getting out. I don't know anyone who's successful and thinks positively of it.Simone Collins: You're going to take this part that I'm about to say [00:28:00] out, right?Malcolm Collins: That doesn't matter. I said, anyone who's successful has a non positive perception.Simone Collins: Oh, okay. I thought you were saying anyone who came out wasn't successful. That's what I heard.Malcolm Collins: No, no. Okay. Anyone who came out, I should clarify the successful people who came out of it typically have a negative perception of it.If it was able to work. So, so then the question is, and they would say it did psychological harm to them. So then the question is, okay, if they're right in these mystical beliefs, because they actually are contacting some sort of, then what they have demonstrated is you should never attempt to do this because you will release real demons.Simone Collins: Well, actually funny aside, and I feel like this must be some kind of Bay area contagion. I feel like my father participated in things almost exactly like this in the seventies and eighties in the Bay Area, like in the same, like five mile vicinity of leverage. Because I remember my dad, one, like he went to these like psychic worship workshops.And he was in a, he went through Est which is a little cult like as [00:29:00] well. And I remember him telling me at one point when I was a kid, when I was trying to ask him about all this psychic stuff, he's like, yeah, man, like we were messing with some pretty dangerous things. You have to keep in mind that when you open your mind to these things, like they can get in.And I just took that away to like, I, I contextualize that as a kid quite helpfully is this is what happens when you allow yourself to believe something and fear something that then it actually you get really afraid of it, but I think he actually got, I think these people thought bringing up demons and I think having leverage.Why is this always in the Bay Area?Malcolm Collins: Most long lived philosophical traditions culturally evolve prohibitions against this form of mysticism. Now, you can say that there is a theological truth for them or you can say they did this for secular reasons. But it's just, oh, by the way, people might be like, not Jews.I'm like, actually, yes, Jews. If you look at the Kabbalah. Sorry, hold on, what's the word I'm looking for? If you look at the word Baal Shem you get the Baal Shem Tov, the guy who originally started the, the [00:30:00] recent Hasidic sect, Baal Shems used to be thought of as mostly con artists within Jewish communities, and were generally looked down upon.That's why he's called, like, the, the good Baal Shem. Like the, the, so, so when Kabbalah originally started, it was fighting against an upstream fight not Kabbalah, but when the Kabbalistically, the, the extremely Kabbalistically influenced sects of Judaism began to gain prevalence they were fighting against evolved mechanisms that said you should think of these sorts of things as huckstery.They just overcame it. But generally, every group in, in history is like, yes, if you touch the realms of chaos, your mind gets corrupted. Don't do it. And that's a good theological framing for a secular truth, which is when you engage with these sorts of mystical concepts, it always leads to negative externality.It just doesn'tSimone Collins: go well. Yeah, justMalcolm Collins: don't do it. And people will say, when I'll talk to religious people about this, they'll be like, no, it causes negative externality. Fanaticism. It causes a fervent belief. It causes, you know, visions, which [00:31:00] reaffirm a person's face. And it's like, yeah, but all those negative things are happening in leverage too.Like all of the good stuff you're getting is getting from the non mystical side of things. The mystical, like those things, the fanaticism, which is created by whether or not it's this realm of evil, or it's this realm of mental corruption, or it's this just completely, you're allowing some people to say that their subjective experiences of reality trump other people's subjective experiences of reality and everyone should be engaged in their own.It's always going to lead to these negative externalities, which is why I'm so anti mystic. But something that's interesting here is the framing of this for a lot of people. I think the, the people who are at the high levels of this. What they see as the collapse reason is that they accidentally unleashed a bunch of demons.Simone Collins: Wait, people actually believe that? They don't just think that people devolved into weird social What's the word when you have a schizophrenic break? Psychosis?Malcolm Collins: No, no, outsiders who are secularists believe psychosis. And, [00:32:00] and if you look at what they did, it was basically like a house. Insiders who leftSimone Collins: don't think it was psychosis?Malcolm Collins: I'll explain.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: So basically everyone involved was like a house where almost everyone else, they were the strict hierarchy and within the hierarchy, people were just constantly watching you, taking notes on you as if you were their test subject. So they had this sense of superiority over everyone else.Well, in many cases,Simone Collins: their financial compensation and role in the house was contingent on them working on you. So yes, they kind of had to do it.Malcolm Collins: Yes, yes, but but keep in mind this cycle if you know that like everyone you're interacting with is like writing about you at the end of the day, like, oh, here's this and trying to understand you and your motivations if you can't see how that would be psychologically harmful in mass, like you just don't understand human psychology, like, of course, that's going to lead to negative externalities.Of course, it's going to lead to everyone attempting to you. sort of overanalyze everything they're doing in the movement, having this sort of panicky self reflection and an existential dread, [00:33:00] and it will cause the creation of little cabals that are going to fight against each other because Wow, henceSimone Collins: these, these groups,Malcolm Collins: yeah.Because you need teammates to sort of protect you and everything like that. In this incredibly hostile environment where everyone is constantly psychoanalyzing you, but is untrained to do so. Well, so then I can giveSimone Collins: you, I can give you a quote from a taste of how out of control this got, which is number two, which is related to this.Just to give an example to people from a firsthand account, quote, people in my group commenting on a rival group having done magic that weekend and clearly having. Powered up and saying we needed to now go debug the effects of being around that powered up group, which they said was attacking them or otherwise affecting their ability to trust their own perceptions.Number three related as well. Accusations of being thrown around. Oh, sorry. Accusations being thrown around about people leaving objects similar to demons and other people and people trying to sort out where the bad object originated. [00:34:00] if it had been left intentionally or malevolently or by act slash subconsciously.Malcolm Collins: So as, as a secularist, when you put on a secular hat and you're approaching any of this, it's very obvious that this would lead to psychological breaks. Yeah. Like this is obviously a psychologically unhealthy environment. However, these people are not secularists. When you have entered this community, you have accepted that there is some other Like supernatural realm that you are studying.Yeah, well, she gave theSimone Collins: definition of objects. Would that be helpful?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, go for it.Simone Collins: Objects were something that became a topic of study at leverage, about which Jeff gave presentations. Aside from Simone, do you think Jeff intentionally created the concept of objects? Or this was just something that he No, it'sMalcolm Collins: a stupid, obvious concept.Okay. Jeff is just not that bright. I'm sorry, but anyway, continue.Simone Collins: They were considered to be sort of like autonomous psychological bits that you could accidentally or purposefully leave in another person's mind to affect or control [00:35:00] them. If intentional, it might cause them to subtly view you a different way, make more real or less real certain concepts, change their experience of the passage of time, say, or make them more susceptible to mind reading.Attempts in the future, et cetera.Malcolm Collins: This is just meant to stoke paranoia. Like, I don't think that he, he may have been trying to snook paranoia, but it's also just not a particularly novel or complicated concept he he's describing like a self replicating memetic package, like a, a meme bomb basically, but that's not the way he sees itSimone Collins: as a mystical.To your point of things going off the rails because they went mystical. I think it's also helpful to give these additional examples. She presented. As an example, just how mystical they got. Cause some of those could probably be construed as, Oh, they're doing this weird psychological research. They're just trying to use weird words to explain a phenomenon that they're trying to coin as psychological researchers and they'll publish it.But here she says. [00:36:00] And number four, people doing seances seriously. I was under the impression the purpose was to call on demonic energies and use their power to affect the practitioner's social standing. So seances, she also has number five, former rationalists clearing their homes of that energy using crystals.And this is where I think your point about mysticism is really strong, Malcolm extra strong because rationalists were, it was like, it was like a different Bay Area cult, but the standard of that religion. Was just how much based on scientific research, your life was being lived to a great extent, you know, just how completely reasoned and non mystical you were and the fact that someone could go from being a rationalist to using crystals to clear their homes of bad energy.That'sMalcolm Collins: wild. Well, I mean, but that can happen. When you engage with the mystical, you allow for forms of truth to come from [00:37:00] things other than objective evidence and objective reality. And so you're like, wait, really? People who were in this, even afterwards, still believe that they were just attacked by demons?Like, of course they do. As soon as you open yourself to these sorts of explanations, and you're trying to explain why these bad things happened to you when you were engaging in these environments, you're going to come up with mystical explanations for it.Simone Collins: AndMalcolm Collins: that's what they did. They thought they were attacked by demons that they had accidentally summoned.Oh,Simone Collins: yeah. And what's so notable too is that, This was so damaging to the members of the group. So to provide her number six, seven, and eight on this list, which give, I think, good illustrations of how people came away damaged to your earlier point and prove your earlier point. Number six, much talk and theorizing on the subject of intention reading.Which was something like mind reading. Jeff gave multiple presentations on this, which of course, like you said, would have people acting [00:38:00] weird and feeling paranoid seven, I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded. My only source of help for this became the leaders of my own subgroup who unfortunately were also completely caught up in the mania and had their own goals and desires for me.That were mostly definitely not in my interest. Eight, I personally prayed for hours, most nights for months to rid myself of specific demons. I felt like picked up from other members of leverage. If this sounds insane, it's because it was, I was completely. Oh, It was a crazy experience unlike any I've ever had.And there are many more weird anecdotes where that came from. Again, it's a really good read and you should read it the whole thing. But yeah, but I think, yeah, this, this hammers home your entire point, that it was the mysticism that brought them off. This isMalcolm Collins: why you don't engage with mysticism. You could have done something like this.That could have been quite interesting without the [00:39:00] mysticism.Simone Collins: Well, and to that point, I'd love for you to open up. A one of their very, very early plans. It's a, it's a flowchart.Malcolm Collins: Open it up hereSimone Collins: because I think this can show how such a well intentioned and Widespanning projects that I'm sure this was pitched to some of the people who donated initial funds to leverage 1.0 got really excited about. And the plan Malcolm, you'll probably include some of this on the screen. The, the end, the goal was global wellbeing. So yeah, they, they probably really did intend to take over the government cause you kind of can't do all of the things that they wanted to. Which includedthey were going to really solve everything. Education, ensure universal access to excellent educational resources. They were also going to cure disease and ensure universal access to recreational and artistic opportunities. They were going to provide basically universal basic [00:40:00] income and access to social goods.And they were going to. Eliminate all harmful governments somehow which is probably where their whole, we have to take over the government thing came over and reduce risk of global catastrophic events, which also would probably need to involve governmental control while also minimizing harmful norms.That is to say, quote, have everyone choose to remove all harmful social rules that can be removed, unquote, which is, you know, Also very coercive and creepy, per our standards but still, like, these people basically just wanted to fix the world and make heaven on earth, right? Like, that was it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, I, it's very clear.Their, their plan is eventually, I mean, they were trying to create a memetic structure, very similar to, to what I'm trying to do, in a way that could eventually become the dominant memetic structure on earth. When instead, what I'm trying to do is create a memetic structure that can become a a reach a stable optimum with other rheumatic structures that allow people different from them to exist.Which is, [00:41:00] which is quite different from their goal in that respect. So it's not true world domination. And the, just the core difference is, is they engage with mysticism. They engage with saying we're going to do all this, but we don't need to have the secular backing. Like whenever I give a theological position, I always say, and here's the secular reason you would take the same position.They didn't need to do that.Simone Collins: They didn't. And when you look at this flow chart, there's nothing, at least I haven't looked at every single box on it, but there's nothing to me that reads mysticism in the beginning. In fact, it, what it seems to more or less be is we're going to make the world perfect by our standards at least.And we're going to do so by creating incredibly effective people and have those people create nonprofits. And businesses. That get more resources and get more control until eventually we run absolutely everything and have infinite resources and can solve all the problems. That was it. [00:42:00] And of course they started with trying to create the world's most effective people.Cause they felt like that was the most limited resource. You couldn't start an amazing nonprofit. You couldn't start an amazing business and solve market problems and find arbitrage opportunities if you didn't have these high agency cooperative people. And so. And it seems to, IMalcolm Collins: disagree with you on that's why they started with that.Simone Collins: Really? Okay. Why do you think They sold them as aMalcolm Collins: revenue source. That was the core reason they wanted to create effective people.Simone Collins: Well, that's part of it. Yeah. Is that they would generate the nonprofits and the companies that created revenue, but those were also supposed to be the nonprofits and the companies that did the research that cured disease and created amazing education.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it was a plan for creating power based on the hypothesis that if they expose people to the mystical realm, it improves them instead of destroys them. And what we saw is the hypothesis, the opposite turned out to be true. When you, it engages mystical realm for both secular and theological reasons, it destroys your soul.Whatever you want to say, or your brain or your ability [00:43:00] to think rationally. And so now we need to look at what they've become with leverage 2.Simone Collins: 0.Malcolm Collins: So leverage 2. 0, because now most competent, rich people who are in any way connected to Silicon Valley ecosystem, you know, they know that this doesn't work at the very least.They know that whatever Jeff did last time, summoned a bunch of demons, you know, even if they believe that everything else happened and they're just not going to work with him again.So now he needs to find another way to get money to fund this. Now, he is not quite smart enough to start a real cult to start a real cult.He'd have to start a group that, you know, funded from its members, like the people who were going through it were both competent and believed in enough to fund it. Which is, which is a hard thing to do. You know, one way you could do that is exhaust your members. Well, it's like them to give everything to you when they joined the cult.But then you need to constantly recruit new members to keep things basically running and that's stupid Like if you're going to create a really effective cult, you need the people to be able to earn money while still paying it. Now what he's doing now is a crypto iteration where he is trying [00:44:00] to build the cult into the product, you know, still pay people to be a member.And then fundraise through making the product exclusive and cool enough that people want to engage with it, you know, through this belief that they're going to have a lot of access and everything like that in the future, which is doable when you're dealing with. You know, bog standard mystics. I think when people begin to see mysticism, like leverage and stuff like that, coming from an external force, they can begin to see why I have so much, ah, when I see it was in their own world, right?Like they see me walk up and encounter mysticism and, and whoa. And they don't get why I'm doing that because they're like, but this has been here for a couple hundred years at this point, you know This has always been part of this tradition. They're like, no, it just came a couple hundred years ago. What are you doing?That's the dangerous bomb you're wielding. And with leverage, it's the same, right? Like or not with leverage, it's the same. With leverage, it's a good external way to [00:45:00] see how mysticism can destroy otherwise well intentioned individuals. The problem is that if you move, remove mysticism from what they were doing, then what he was doing was just psychology and education, which is sort of like what we're doing, right?If you look at the Collins Institute, it's like, how can we at scale create more effective people, but we are doing it with a completely different framework than him, which is saying, but what if we can do it in a pluralistic way where they're able to maintain their birth culture? So, so instead of doing what he did, where like you go into his educational system, you go into his psychological framing and you need to adopt Everything he subjectively believes about reality, you need to presume is true.Simone Collins: Yeah, everything he did seemed to be very unifying and unified.Malcolm Collins: Whereas, and this is the problem with mysticism, you know, it leads in that direction, right? Like, well, if this is ultimate truth, then everyone has to believe it. Whereas we take the exact opposite of that. We're like, well, [00:46:00] truth emerges from different ideas competing in an ecosystem.And so that, that, that causes us to say, well, we'll create an education system. We'll eventually take over the world with the Collins Institute. It's called the Institute at that point. You've got leverage versus the Institute. But we will be able to be efficacious in the way that we lay this out.You know, I think we make our fans lives better because we basically lay everything out for them. Like when he would do something like do all the things and that could potentially brainwash whatever I suggest, like brainwashing techniques. I'm like, this is a brainwashing technique. Here's how you might be able to use it to benefit yourself, but be careful.But yeah, to, to the mystical thing, I think through leverage, somebody can see why They may have blind spots in things that are just like culturally and ancestrally close to them and not understand why we view them with such antagonism and fear and, and genuine fear. Like, like I, I view mystical engagement as really dangerous.And I don't think that [00:47:00] everyone who engages with it is like permanently damaged. But I think that when you, when you like at the community began to engage with it like this and certain individuals can like Jeff can then utilize this to brainhack people pretty quickly. And then there was a pushback, which was like, this isn't a cult.It's a, here's all the cult things we do.Simone Collins: Why do you think they started trying to distance themselves so vehemently from the cult branding if you indeed are correct about them being so open about it in early leverage?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, now keep in mind, a lot of groups, you go to early Singulitarians, they're like, we're a cult.You go to early, they may have meant it kind of jokingly, but with leverage it was taken differently because like they obviously were a cult. And keep in mind, you know, these are, everyone has to live in the house. They're all poly, or a lot of them are polyamorous. And they're being paid by the house and you could be fired if you don't please your superiors.Like to, you don't [00:48:00] see how this would basically lead to a garden of sex slaves. There's really nothing else that could come out of this. That was the, always the end state. As soon as you structured things this way well, I mean, no, just think, I'm not saying like, everyone in Leverage is a perfect saint, okay?You then have somebody who is supposed to constantly be watching over you, who is allowed to have sex with you, because that often happens, she mentions it in pieces, that people who, We're other people's direct subordinates. So you needed to meet with them. You needed to do these life counseling things where they would debug you and you could get fired if you didn't please them and you would lose a home and a source of income and have a big blink spot on your resume.You think that didn't create an intrinsic pressure to have sex with them?Simone Collins: Well, when you put it that way,Malcolm Collins: and then the house is run by this stud, right? Who's like, well, You know I am the number [00:49:00] one, you know, enlightened guy of all enlightened guys, and I have access to truth and I can basically kick anyone out who disagrees with me in any meaningful way.The, the thing that I find interesting about leverage about the only thing I find interesting is the novel business model novel business model for a cult, but, but the novel business model itself was sort of cheesing the Silicon Valley environment at that time period. To hustle ultra wealthy people not, you know, it's that impressive to me that somebody was able to hustle ultra wealthy people with bog standard mysticism.Like, no, no, not really. Are ideas like objects, sophisticated ideas? No. Do they give you a better understanding of reality? No. Like nothing that came out of leverage was sophisticated or, Like, even from a completely malevolent perspective, other than his marketing and sales skills. [00:50:00] But that was mostly cheesed by the environment he was in and all the dumb EA people.And this is the other thing about like the EA community. The EA community singularitarians, they like think of themselves as smart but they get brain hacked way too easily. They're like one of the easiest communities to brain hack. And this is what I see with the AI apocalypticism movement. Actually recently I've been trying to understand that movement better and we'll do a different episode about it.But one thing I've noticed is I started to be like, There's these people who I respect and see as smart and they believe this person who is obviously a charlatan and does not think using logical structures. And so then I dug into it and I was like, Oh, everyone who I respect who believes in is autistic and he's just hacking their autism.Simone Collins: Oh dear. I don't think that Zoe comes across as autistic.Malcolm Collins: I don't think that this was totally that, but it was like, I'm a well meaning person who wants to make the world a better place. Okay. Come into the system. And then they [00:51:00] begin to define truth differently than the way a person who is a steeled in the monotheistic traditions would, which is it's, it's about rules and laws and predictability and using faith and, and, and your ability to understand reality, to better predict future states of reality.They just throw all that out.Simone Collins: They say.Malcolm Collins: Truth comes from your subjective experience, and now when our subjective experiences clash, truth comes from the hierarchy, where the subjective experience of the person at the top of the hierarchy matters more than the subjective experience at the bottom of the hierarchy.And that's really what I mean when I say mysticism. So when people are like, what do you really mean when you say mysticism? I mean all truth. And all philosophical systems where an individual subjective experience of reality has more truth than their objective engagement with that reality.Simone Collins: Interesting.I think one of the final things that you often say about people going off the rails [00:52:00] is that when people believe that they're good and they're right that they're far more likely to end up doing very evil things. So, I don't necessarily think that Jeff or other leaders in this organization is wrong.Meant to do harm or to act selfishly. In fact, a really common theme among everyone writing about their experiences is that they legit thought they were going to save the world. They were going to go down in history books. They were doing such important work and it was really scary to them, this concept that they could be kicked out because then it's like you could have mattered so much, right?And, and what makes me think that that. Kind of mindset really pervaded this is the fact that in her account on in defense of attempting hard things Kathleen writes. About her current state, her current life. Quote, it's painful for me to share all of this. And it's also inconvenient. I have important work to do on my current project that a lot of people are counting on me to do [00:53:00] carefully and quickly, which is already pretty overwhelming for me in my current state.And which unfortunately can't be paused while I figure out What might make sense to say publicly that will steer people toward what seems to be more accurate beliefs. And you can just see this sense of urgency and importance and everything that she's writing, that she thinks that she's doing something urgent and essential, and it's weird reading it because I, I read it and I think, Oh, you're in leverage right now.Right. But no, she's not, she's no contact with leverage people. She's doing her own next thing now, but she still maintains this mindset of, well, it almost seems like someone who's like, On 24, you know, who's like, they have to save the world. The world's about to blow up and it only depends on me and everyone's well,Malcolm Collins: you're believing her that she's no contact with leverage.She might still keep in mind, you know, if she's defending them, this is why I don't, I don't know anyone who contacted leverage that defends leverage. Everyone I know who was involved with leverage said either one of two things, either. It [00:54:00] was a deleterious cult, or it was all real, but they let demons into the world.Those are the only two opinions I have ever heard. Oh no. I have never heard anyone be like, Oh yeah, it was a good project, just a little wrong headed in a few areas. But this is aSimone Collins: sentiment that I see pervades rationalism, effective altruism, AI apocalypticism, that I am right, I am fighting for good.Anyone who thinks that I'm doing the wrong thing or whatever is, is wrong, misguided, evil, ignorant, et cetera. And that there's a lot less internal criticism, even though everything about leverage was about questioning yourself and breaking yourself down to build a better self, which is really interesting to me.And I just feel like that perception that you're fighting on the side of good and that you're doing good. Can be really dangerous or even if you just think that you're, you're out to do good because Zoe in her account keeps talking about these instances in which people kind [00:55:00] of accused her of, of placing bad objects in them, you know, and she was seen with a lot of suspicion after a period of time.And 1 of the reasons her experiences were so bad was that the community really started to demonize her and fair her to the bottom of the social hierarchy. Okay. And accuse her of all sorts of things. And she genuinely believed it because she was in this terrible position. And she was like, Oh God, what have I done wrong?I can't believe this. But I think even she thought that she was a good person and that may have just led to this. led her to be victimized more. I don't know, but I just feel like that's another theme going on here. ThisMalcolm Collins: is the problem. It's people fighting to be good people that creates most of society's problems.You should be a great person and a great person is often a bad person.Simone Collins: AMalcolm Collins: great person doesn't care about what is good and bad. They care about what must be done. For what must come to pass. Alexander the Great. You know, Catherine the Great. These are not good people. Or evenSimone Collins: Ivan the Terrible.[00:56:00]Malcolm Collins: But that'd be fun. One day I'd become the type of Malcolm the Great. But no, you want to be a great person, you know, that requires, and this is, this is Like, I understand what you're saying, but you can develop this sort of mindset around anything. You can develop it around climate change. You can develop it around, you know, the question is, is are you basing your beliefs about the world?And this is, this is the problem. It's too many people decide how good they are of a person based on their intentionality. Hmm. Everybody has the intentionality of being a good person. How good you intend to be has no correlation with how good you are. How good you are is dependent. On your understanding ofSimone Collins: reality.Oh, and that's, you know, a really good example of this because we don't just have to s**t all over mysticism. We [00:57:00] can also s**t all over antinatalism is the Sandy Hook shooter. He thought that he was doing a favor to all of these young children who were tragically shot because. Life is suffering and it's terrible that their parents brought them into the world and it would be terrible if they lived full lives and were exposed to all the horrors of being alive.And he thought he was doing good, right? Hitler thought he was doing good too. I don't know if Genghis Khan thought he was doing good though. I don't know about that. This isMalcolm Collins: why it's so important when people are like, why do you care about all this philosophy stuff? Why do you care about like the nature of good and evil?The true nature of reality, et cetera. That needs to be like your top question because how good of a person, how good your life ends up being, ends up not being determined by how good you tried to be. It ends up being determined by your understanding of reality. You know, I was just on a show and somebody was like, and we'll do a longer episode about this.But he asked me, well, there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for [00:58:00] love in your system. And I said, yeah, there is it. Because love isn't a compass that points to good love often points to evil. And if you're using the wrong thing as a compass, no matter how hard you follow it, you could be the most evil person ever.People who live for love often end up living lives of evil. Okay. Because they misunderstand reality. They misunderstand the consequences of the things that they're doing. And that's why this is so critical. And it's so critical with these people, whereas they thought they were good people because they were trying to be good people extra hard without understanding everyone does that.You need to understand. When I say understand reality, I mean, understand society, understand the way other people think, understand philosophy, all the things we talk about on the show that is understanding reality, right? If you're understanding there is wrong, then you end up evil every time.[00:59:00]Simone Collins: Depressing, but still fascinating. And a dumpster fire that I wish I was able to watch more closely. Probably not though. Actually, it seems to involve a lot of socializing.Malcolm Collins: And this, this comes to why the mysticism thing is so important to us. Because if we have this framing, if you are getting an understanding of reality from a non confirmable space, from a space outside of rules and reason and knowledge.Oh, thenSimone Collins: there's no way you'll know when you teeter into the world of evil.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. So you always do. Anyway, love you.Simone Collins: I love you too. What would you like to say? Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider discusses parenting in a changing world with Malcolm and Simone Collins. They explore cultural identity, the role of reason in traditions, and the value of diverse belief systems. The trio also talks about the Collins' unique parenting approach and the importance of thoughtful innovation in the face of cultural upheaval.

In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone delve into the fascinating world of paraphilias, more commonly known as fetishes. They explore how these seemingly unusual attractions can provide insights into human neurology and evolutionary conditions. The couple examines the prevalence of "monster girl" fetishes across various cultures and historical contexts, and how they relate to super stimuli and innate disgust responses. Malcolm and Simone also discuss how certain physical traits, such as hair and eye color, may have evolved due to extreme mate selection in specific populations. Throughout the conversation, they emphasize the importance of understanding and contextualizing one's own sexuality to avoid shame, addiction, and harmful behaviors. Join them for this thought-provoking and educational discussion on the complexities of human sexuality.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous. Hello, Simone. So this is the subject that I particularly find interesting. And a lot of people are surprised. They're like, why are you interested in obscure paraphilias, which are more commonly known in the public as fetishes? And the answer is, is because it tells us a lot about human neurology, human evolutionary conditions, and the way humans think more broadly.And people might be like, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean by that? Right? So if you see an impulse that exists across a broad breadth of the human population, but doesn't appear like it would have been selected for in an evolutionary context, like it wouldn't have increased the number of surviving offspring they had, you have found One of two things.Either you have shown that you misunderstand the [00:01:00] environmental context that humanity evolved in and that something that seems like it would have been a maladaptive behavior was actually a positive behavior, which is very interesting if you find that but then the other. thing that you may have found is you have found a way that the brain essentially breaks or a pathway doesn't work correctly, but doesn't work correctly in a way that happens over and over and over again in different humans, which tells you something about like if trains keep flying onto a road at a certain point you can tell broadly, at least in one area.Where a train track is likely supposed to be and like the speed of trains on that train tracks and where trains are turning on that train track. Now, this becomes especially interesting in the world of fetishes and paraphilias. Because this is a very common area where you see something [00:02:00] that is very clearly a hard coded biological instinct in individuals. Cross culturallyWould you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: , people will say, Oh no, well this is all like modern internet stuff that's causing this. And we'll get into that argument in a second. Well, I can get into it right now. It's just very obviously not. If you look in a historic context most of the paraphilias you see today, like sadism and stuff like that, you're going to see in like the Marquis de Sade, for example, which was definitely in a pre internet context, or you see in the British vice, which was a so common a fetish among British people.They called it the British vice, which was men who liked being spanked by battles by women.Here is James Joyce writing about farts. Big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little Mary cracks, and a lot of tiny little naughty forties ending in a large gush from your wholeI think I could pick hers out in a room full of flirting women. It is a rather girlish noise, not like the wet, windy fart, which I imagine fat [00:03:00] wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty. Like a bold girl would let off in fund in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face. So that I may know with her smell also, so people will be like, oh yeah, Weird stuff like farting pouring that that's like from weird Brazilian.No. It was around the time of James Joyce.Malcolm Collins: So, if you see a fetish today, you will. That is common. You will almost always see it in a historic context. And today we are going to discuss the concept of Monster Girls because Monster Girls and Monster Boys are something that you see pretty frequently in pornography.And Hint High. However, it is also something. That, like, doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary context. Why would you be attracted to something that's not human? And a person can go, Oh, come on, this doesn't appear in historic [00:04:00] stuff. And I'm like are you not familiar with your Greek myths?How seriously talk about like the plurality of sex that happens in Greek myths, the swans, the cows, I would say like a good hat or various monstrous creatures or height. Yeah. Or people are like, wow, but it didn't happen in the medieval period.And I'm like, you are clearly not familiar with medieval fairy tales or medieval sort of folk horrors.You know, it was actually folk horrors. Folk horrors. Incubuses, succubuses, stuff like that. They didn't look like humans. They'd have like, various animal body parts and stuff like that. And people will be like, okay, well, how common is this stuff really? So if you look at like. Oh yeah, like theSimone Collins: folklore.Like marrying a mermaid and a seal woman or whatever. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So when we did stats on this vampires 21 percent of females consume erotic content, tied to the 7 percent of males werewolves, 14 percent of females, [00:05:00] 2 percent of males. An Android 7 percent of females, 8 percent of males, an alien, 13 percent of females, 8 percent of males, a dwarf, the fictional race, 8 percent of females, 7 percent of males, a dwarf, the fictional race, 2 percent of females.Four 8% of males, goo people 2% of females, 4% of males. It's a deep cut furries, 5% of each half human, half animals 7% fe females, 4% males 7%.Simone Collins: I mean, wow. Yeah. So we talking half like a horse. What are they called? Horsemen or half of them? Yeah. SoMalcolm Collins: if you're like, Oh, well, that's a small number.Well, if you contrast those numbers with the numbers who, for example, consume erotic content with two men having sex, that's 21 percent of females and 7 percent of males. Yeah. So it's about as common as watching, for example gay male porn. You know, ISimone Collins: don't know, like [00:06:00] there in this, we should probably someday do a whole deep dive on.The genre of yaoi in Japan too, and yaoi isMalcolm Collins: boy love stuff, which is, and you can see what I think would surprise people is the majority of people consume, consuming man on man porn are women, by more than double.Simone Collins: This is both straight and lesbian identifying women. Of course, we argue that women don't really exist on the Kinsey scale.They exist on a dominant submission scale.Malcolm Collins: But people can look at our book on sexuality if they want to read more on this. But this brings us back to the question of monster women, right? What could be causing this? So you can come up with a few hypotheses. Maybe this was about and this is sort of how science is done, right?Like if people were like, how do you do sort of gentleman science in your book? So you could say, Well, maybe it's correlated with like a village was raided or something like that. And so you would [00:07:00] see the Raiders as monstrous, but need to be attracted to them to be able to survive the raid. Right. And it's like, well, if that's the case, then you are likely to see two things.One is a cross correlation between this and masochism. And this is more prominent dramatically in females than males. But this does not explain, therefore, monster girls. Well, no, it could explain, but the problem is if monster boys were more common than monster girls, this would explain that. Exactly.The problem is that that's not what you see outside of something like vampires, but vampires don't really look particularly different from humans. And so they probably falls more into just pure dominance.Simone Collins: Yeah. WhichMalcolm Collins: would fit into this system, but you don't see the cross correlation between these attractiveness and other attractiveness.So then you're like, okay, okay, okay. Great. Back to the drawing board. Well, let's look at some other things that appear where a human [00:08:00] appears to have non. human body proportions. Okay. Oh, like really tiny women and really big women, really tiny women, or it could be women with giant breasts. Disproportionate.So, let's see if I can find that on the chart here. Okay. So, well, a good example here would be a giant penis longer than two feet, 7 percent of women, 4 percent of men, giant breasts larger than a quarter of total body weight, 4 percent of women, and 17 percent of men. So wait,Simone Collins: so normally I'm 120.Jesus! That's a lot!Malcolm Collins: These are like, these are impossible for a normal human to have. Ugh. Well, people have gotten plastic surgery to do it. Surgically implanted, but they don't, when women have that, they do not look human, they look deformed. Yeah. To a, to a, a normal person, but 17 percent of men are still consuming this, this content.So what, or, or you could say people who are you know, amputees and stuff like that or [00:09:00] in some other way don't look like a normal human would look. ButSimone Collins: around that, didn't you argue in the book that this is more of a super stimulus thing? We'll get to that. We'll getMalcolm Collins: that concept in a second. I'm just describing hypotheses here.So you actually do find a cross correlation here, and we didn't just find this cross correlation in our data. When Ayla ran the stats with a completely different data pool, she also found this cross correlation here. So this, verifies this hypothesis that there is something where some humans have a looser bound on the human form when they find it attractive.So let's talk about how this could work and how we can verify if this is the way that it's working. Okay. So super stimuli are a very important concept when you are studying sexuality. Okay. So a super stimuli is like if you have a bird that evolved to sit on blue eggs, but there were never like giant blue rocks around its evolutionary environment.It never had a pressure to not sit on [00:10:00] Something that was larger than its normal blue eggs or bluer than its normal blue eggs. And so if you put a giant blue rock next to it, it will always choose the rock over its own eggs. This is just a very common thing you see throughout evolutionary biology.And it like makes sense as to why this would be a thing.Simone Collins: Yeah. If, if X is good. X squared is better.Malcolm Collins: X squared is better. Yeah. So with human sexual drives, well, males and females are both to an extent attracted to the average, like if you were going to like pre code them to breed with a thing that is likely to lead to offspring you would pre code them with look for the things that gender differentiate males and females and then target individuals who appear to have these traits.These would be secondary sex characteristics. So with women, these would be breasts, butt, hips. With men, this would be Height you know, the male stature triangle mask. Yeah. Et cetera. So, and, and you did a deep voice and you do [00:11:00] see an attraction to these traits, but what is more interesting is we didn't have super stimuli of these traits in our evolutionary environment.We did not have women with super normally large breasts in our evolutionary environment.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, unless they were. You know, some genetic abnormalityMalcolm Collins: is eased in some way or something like that, right? But what I'm saying is it just didn't appear that much there was not an evolutionary reason for anyone within the population to evolve Disgust to that trait Even though I and most men actually do reflexively feel disgust When they see a woman who looks non human in For her gender dimorphic anatomy even something as, as I think some people would consider a small is like Caitlin or what's her name?The Caitlyn Jenner's family member who has a giant, but no,Simone Collins: they've reduced that big butts are [00:12:00] out. Heroin chic is back in. Yeah. Kim Kardashian.Malcolm Collins: Like, I find her quite repulsive. Like, like a visceral level, I find her repulsive. ISimone Collins: think that's cultural because you go to Miami, you see giant asses and women wearing ass padding underwear to try to create this culture affectsMalcolm Collins: what you find attractive, much less than you would think.I could go into so muchSimone Collins: difference between the body type that you see pervasive among Higher status women or, or we'll say image conscious women in Miami versus Los Angeles for this appears toMalcolm Collins: be an evolutionary thing. Well, okay. So I guess I can get into this cause we do go into this in our, in our books.The core thing that differentiates. So with men, you're going to be attracted to, there's sort of two ideal feminine traits that you could be attracted toSimone Collins: or female dimorphism.Malcolm Collins: Yes. You could be optimizing for fertility window, or you could be optimizing for I'm absolutely certain this is a womanSimone Collins: well,Malcolm Collins: these two sets of optimization [00:13:00] functions actually require you to optimize around different traits because the traits that are associated with youth in women are smaller breasts and a smaller butt.So you are, you are actually Optimizing for almost the exact opposite thing. So who optimizes within a monogamous culture for fertility windows over ensuring that the person is a woman. It is somebody who has access to high resources and love behold in our data. We see this, I mean, it's a huge difference.We have a video where we go over this in more detail, but it'slike 10 fold or 20 fold increase in liking this you know, flat justice body type. For wealthy men versus the poorest groups have been but you also see this just, I mean, if you're looking like you don't see people like, you know, Elon or Bill Gates or something like that, dating these women who look like super, super, super feminine.Instead the women that you see them dating. Is are [00:14:00] often very well, more androgynousSimone Collins: looking because they were androgynousMalcolm Collins: looking. Yeah. Whereas when you see wealthy men date these women they are wealthy men who appear to have an extreme level of status anxiety which shows that like biologically, they don't see themselves as wealthy.Trump would be a good example of this. If you look at the way that he accessorizes and the lifestyle he lives in when he's been or something like that there is clearly a. fairly large level of status anxiety there, which is likely driving his reproductive choices that make his reproductive choices much more similar to a lower economic status.WhichSimone Collins: ultimately made him a man of the people. He's a poor man's idea of a rich man, even in his own mind, because of that anxiety.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So, so that's why you're getting that. Okay. But let's go back to and by the way, you can look at cross cultural. OhSimone Collins: s**t. Okay. So you're, you're saying that big asses are a thing in Miami because, because they're poor.Malcolm Collins: Well, because they're poor and there's more [00:15:00] status anxiety. You see these giant butts, where do you see them in the highest. It's the deadest anxiety environments in the world, by any other way. That'sSimone Collins: interesting.Malcolm Collins: And it's also why I think you see the PDA, you know, the PDA files appear disproportionately within elite circles.There actually is a higher rate of PDA files in those communities, but now back to Monster Girls. Really? Yeah. So, with, with it, we appear to, humans appear to have a secondary system that overlaps their attraction system that's meant to prevent them from having sex with non human things that are non efficacious in terms of sexism could lead to diseases and blah, blah, blah, right?So how do they determine non human things? It's likely that there is a level of innate disgust that you're Average programmed human has two things that look sufficiently different from the average human form. And this is why your average human has a level [00:16:00] of disgust to things like bestiality to think like, uh, you know, you know, extreme breast size and stuff like that.HoweverSimone Collins: You could call it deformity.Malcolm Collins: You could call it deformity. Well, it appears that certain ways of altering a body do not count or do not trigger this instinct in a large portion of the population. So first, let's talk about the, the, the huge chunk of the population, which is a fairly big chunk, that does not appear.To have this disgust reaction,Simone Collins: the boob guys,Malcolm Collins: 17 percent of men who are still into enormously large boobs or what was it? Women penises over two feet.That was, I don'tSimone Collins: understand. Okay. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: . 7 percent of women. Okay. So if you have a hundred women, seven of them will have consumed erotic material that consume this, that portray this.So, what's going on in these. These individuals. Well, if you have any of these [00:17:00] systems in the same way that our predominant arousal system sometimes breaks, right? Like, sometimes men are predominantly aroused by male characteristics in their partners. I, gay people sometimes women are aroused by female characteristics in their partners.Like clearly evolution. Wasn't strongly sorting for this. You know, you're, you're just getting a broken system. Sometimes individuals you know, you, you see get turned on by feces, right? Like this is clearly something that's meant to create in an evolutionary context, a disgust reaction. So what it means is there's two ways this disgust system can break.One is it just doesn't activate at all. These are the individuals who I think are mostly into you know, generally large, but not monstrously large breasts or generally large, like the two feet penis and stuff like that, right? Like these are individuals who are interested in something that is outside the normal bounds, but isn't like specifically stimulating the system.Then there's another thing that appears to happen in arousal patterns, which [00:18:00] is that arousal and disgust Get flipped, because we argue in great detail in our book that arousal and disgust are actually the same system. When you are aroused by something, your eyes dilate, you breathe in, you look at it longer, you want to get closer to it.When you are disgusted by something, your pupils contra contrast, you hold your nose, or you hold your breath to not smell, and you Instinctively look away and try to get away from the thing. It's just the same system with a negative modifier. And anything that causes an innate disgust within some portion of the population will be a fetish for some other person.And people are like, well, everything's a fetish. No, that is not true. That is just patently wrong. If you take things that don't cause disgust but are tied to other innate human impulses like a fear of heights or a fear of fire, for example there is not a community, or at least a large community consummate with the, you know, Insects or poo or, or, or farts tied to something like [00:19:00] fire arousal or falling from high locations, arousal.So it's not just like all of your systems can break in this way. It is one system. Right. And it's the same with arousal patterns. Pretty much anything that can arousal. population is going to disgust a subset of that population. Well, you can also get an inverse system where the thing that's supposed to identify things that look inhuman ends up accidentally arousing a small portion of the population instead of disgusting them.And this is what I think leads to full on bestiality and stuff like that. But then there's a second category here, which I would call like the cat girl phenomenon. Is aSimone Collins: cat girl, a monster girl in this world?Malcolm Collins: No, not exactly. I think it's arousing a different system because that what I mean is if you look at the popularity of this stuff in anime, so I would categorize, there, there are a few anatomical differences which do not appear to trigger the, this is inhuman, I now generate disgust.Fluffy earsSimone Collins: and tail are just cute. SoMalcolm Collins: [00:20:00] yeah, there's, there's a few that don't, don't appear to broadly generate this. Now in some humans they do, but broadly, sharp teeth don't appear tothe vampire thing is really, really big in the population. EspeciallySimone Collins: if it's just the canines.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Different colored Eyes, different shaped eyes don't appear to trigger this.Different colored hair doesn't appear to trigger this. Totally. So hair that is like anime hair. Let's, let's go there, okay? Another thing that doesn't appear to trigger it is small Cosmetic modifications such as tail, ear differences those sorts of things don't seem to broadly trigger this.A great example, here would be elf ears slash Vulcan ears on girls., I have seen so many guy thirst after elf flesh, Vulcan girls.Malcolm Collins: And then another one that's really interesting, if you're going to stretch, is Broadly, if you're dealing with a biped, with breath, or a T shaped male figure, like human, [00:21:00] female male, human secondary sex characteristics for either males or females for a large but smaller portion of the population, this also doesn't seem to trigger this monster girl.Basically,Simone Collins: furry, fursonas.Malcolm Collins: Well, that fursonas I think goes a little far. Here I'm thinking more likeLola Bunny, for example. Oh, okay. YouSimone Collins: know,Malcolm Collins: This is something that I think is broadly, like if someone's like, I thought Lola Bunny was hot, like, you're not going to get a lot of people being like, yeah, Lola Bunny was not hot at all.Yeah. They're like, okay, yeah, that was clearly sexualized and, and, and meant or designed to be An arousing character. So why wasn't it triggering these here? We're going back to evolution again, because we can actually see the genetic results of this arousal pattern being mainstream within specific populations.So if you look at regions of the world, where you have a high degree of mate selection, either [00:22:00] because there were periods where all the women died pretty frequently, or even more common when all of the men died pretty frequently. But, but you see this in either area, you begin to get the evolution of monstrous traits, traits that you do not see in default human populations.Simone Collins: Oh, because of inbreeding?Malcolm Collins: No, because people tend to select for people with extremely novel traits. In a society with no catgirls, this shows that the catgirl might be considered uniquely attractive. In a society where nobody had, like, naturally occurring pink eyes or something like that, the one individual with pink eyes or skin or something like that might be considered uniquely attractive.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And you can say, What are you talking about, these monstrous traits that appear almost nowhere in human populations except for areas that underwent very strict genetic selection over a long period of time? Well, the reason you don't [00:23:00] notice them is the populations that had them have dominated the globe.Oh, like redheads or something? Redheads exist all over the world. Almost nowhere, outside of extremely cold regions, where you had an ext In fact, not just redheads, any human hair color but black, is incredibly rare, if you're talking about the broad, Initial ethno groups that would have existed in the world that like would have evolved out of the initial human sample size and you go back a thousand years ago, the populations that had non black hair only lived really in Arctic regions.Or extremely. Yeah, the world also was a lot older,Simone Collins: to your point. AnotherMalcolm Collins: trait is, and they're like, what are you talking about? Pink eyes? No one would select that you are forgetting. Very nice that all eyes, other than brown eyes are actually an incredibly rare trait. If you go a thousand years ago and [00:24:00] only really existed in arctic environments where you had extreme levels of mate selection and then people were like, well, different skin colors.Gingers basically have a unique skin tone with their extreme level of freckling. This would have been considered if you took one of them and put them in ancient Rome, they would not be particularly dissimilar to an ancient Roman than to us, a person with pronounced canines would look, or a person with cat ears, or a person with a tail would look.In terms of that subtleSimone Collins: standing out. Still human, but different human.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, a subtle but standing out actually wins the genetic lottery when you are dealing with a really high level of skin. Sexual selection, determining which genes win and which genes lose. So we do actually have a real monster girls among us.They are [00:25:00] called gingers.Simone Collins: Or women with green eyes or blue eyes or possibly blondes too. So what are yourMalcolm Collins: thoughts? SoSimone Collins: the, the Dallas blonde. which is classically a woman who's not naturally blonde, they just dye her, they dye their hair blonde, is essentially trying to be a monster girl.Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I mean, I'd even say more than that.The girl who dyes her hair blue or something like that in order to appear unique and quirky is a modern version of this. And If people are like, come on, sexual selection, selecting for nonhuman like traits in an individual or slightly nonhuman like traits, even in environments where they didn't evolve this, they adopted this culturally think about the many African tribes that adopted rituals, which.Turned their body into slightly non [00:26:00] human Oh,Simone Collins: like elongated necks or Giant loop earrings orMalcolm Collins: giant things in their, their cheeks. Now, when I see these women, I actually get the same form of disgust that I would get from looking at an actual monster. Like, like something that is genuinely non human.So I assume that they likely co evolved with a damped down form of that repulsion selection. You in their cultural groups which could mean that if you were to do studies on these populations, you would find much more attractive to things that the like, like monster girl type pornography.That isSimone Collins: fascinating. I really like this hot take.Malcolm Collins: Well, and here it gets more interesting. Okay. So if you look at cultures that deviate from normal human forms, think golden lotuses, for example. Oh, you mean like a Chinese foot binding? Here you see this in a culture that valued extreme levels of femininity and what you have there is a gender dimorphic trait, foot [00:27:00] size that is being created at an extreme level.Yeah. Someone was in a woman havingSimone Collins: extreme plastic surgery to have large breasts. Yes. And it's another version of that. from childhood with intense pain. I guess also having large breasts is probably intensely painful.Malcolm Collins: Yikes. And so this is all that people are like, why does all of this matter from human?Well, when you understand things like that, what arouses you is based on gated metrics, was it discussed in arousal system that are likely the same system, which work was in certain windows. One you can better control your own involuntary arousal pathways by contextualizing them as what they are random switches in your head at birth.When you contextualize them as like weird addictions and stuff like that due to, you know, things you were exposed to on the internet, then you would relate to them as an [00:28:00] addiction. And the thing is, is people rarely win against addictions when you relate to them as just a standard, like a switch thing that happened at birth, then you can more easily be like, Oh yeah, I'm just going to choose to ignore that.Like other things I choose to ignore that I, like, for example When I am around a friend or something like that, and they have a hot wife, like I am pre evolved to want to sleep with or hit on their wife, but I choose not to hit on them. I don't view that as like an addiction or something. I'm just like, yeah, I choose not to find that person arousing.I choose not to hit on them. When you understand these systems and contextualize them for what they really are, it's much easier to not have them influence you. And so if you have any paraphilias, which Most people have, but people are like,Oh, that person has a fetish. How weird. I'm like, actually, if you look at the data, if you have no fetishes, you are the weird one that you are in a vast minority.I can't remember if there was like 8 percent of people have like no fetishes at all. In our data set, [00:29:00] like you are the weirdo if you have no fetish. It is not the people with a fetish who are weird.Simone Collins: Which I just want to clarify. Cause you know, anyone looking at Ayla's stats is going to see the vanilla stuff is obviously the most popular.You. Very well are probably going to be aroused, but most of the vanilla stuff and then also have these fetishes. JustMalcolm Collins: no specific fetish is weird, but understanding how these work and we could do other videos and we've done some videos in our early videos. If you've only watched our recent podcast, because you know, we went over some of our theories from our sexuality book and more recent stuff.I mean, in some of the early stuff that we did you can get a deeper dive on some of these topics, but. Knowing about this doesn't just help you, but also being able to teach your kids about how human sexuality actually works prevents them from contextualizing things that they don't have control over.It's either shameful or worse than that, because if it's shameful, then they hide it, overindulge in it. You see this in the statistics. When people [00:30:00] think a portion of their sexuality is shameful, they actually indulge in it more than when they don't.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But worse than that, they think it's something they can't talk to their parents about.So they see themselves as discriminated for it. And then they begin to contextualize it as part of their identity.Simone Collins: TheMalcolm Collins: very most dangerous thing is that your kids grow up and not understanding how human sexuality works. And then they begin to categorize some paraphilia they have as a portion of their identity.And then their core identity becomes something like for. Furry or, you know, whatever. Right. Yeah,Simone Collins: way worse. I mean, yeah they're very high profile examples of religiously, very conservative families having certain members do terrible things, probably because they weren't, yeah, given context, given a way to understand what they felt and what they were tempted to do.So they just. Exactly. Oh boy. Yeah. Well,Malcolm Collins: I, it, it, you know, truth is the purifying light [00:31:00] that burns away our genetic scars in pre programming. When you study this stuff, knowledge burns away temptation and sin. More. than hiding from something. When you hide from something, when you make it magic or addiction or something like that, you give it power.When you say it just is what it is, a genetic scar, crossed wires, it is much easier to work around than when you don't. Well, and this stuff can become a huge problem if you miscontextualize it and somebody happens to have one of the really damaging one of these, like the, the sadists who think that sadism is actually a part of their personality, or the PDA files who think that that is actually a core aspect of their identity.And then that leads to incredibly immoral action.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. I'm really glad that, I mean, we've already ruined [00:32:00] sex for our kids. Thank goodness, you know, because we talk about it way too openly and they're going to hate that. And so they're probably going to be virgins until they're mid twenties, but I'm glad they'reMalcolm Collins: virgins their whole life if they want to be so long as they have kids that are genetically theirs.Simone Collins: Yeah. For, for, for non sex negative people were so surprisingly We're pretty sex negative.Malcolm Collins: We, we, we are sex, we are open to sexual investigation, but I would think most people reading our book would say, you know, I say objectively, human sexuality is pretty disgusting.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Even vanilla straight sexuality, people are like, no, in a loving marriage.It's like,Simone Collins: it's gross. Just the sounds ofMalcolm Collins: sex. If you, if you removed your pre coded addiction to like pre coded predilection for these behaviors and you think about them like you think about it in isolation.Simone Collins: Yeah. Then it's like,Malcolm Collins: these are like oozing organs, like, you know,Simone Collins: but I mean, I mean, also when you think about other very basic human functions [00:33:00] like eating.And you know, you think about finessing eating a digestive food and But I think whenMalcolm Collins: you contextualize it in that context, it also helps you understand that you know, this is just sort of a pre coded thing into you, but it doesn't define who you are. It's an accidental evolution.Simone Collins: Well, and similar to eating, right?You know, it's, it's, we have a language and we have a means of explaining to people that you may really like this one type of food, but it's not good for you. And that doesn't define you. You know, you're not, Whatever type of food person, whereas with sexuality, unfortunately it has been turned into this identity thing, which it seems to even worse now.So, this was fascinating, Malcolm. I'm so glad we did, cause I didn't know what we were getting into with this. I was like, monster girls. Where are we going to go here? Man, we went down a lot of listening to theMalcolm Collins: monster girl rap, which I'll play after this. And then we should go check out the the guy who makes the videos.Cause we, we added one after the tomboy apocalypse video, one of his, his songs, which is also fun. But yeah, I, I absolutely love you, Simone, and I am so honored. To be [00:34:00] married to you. Because you are my fetish.Simone Collins: I'm gay for you, Malcolm. I don't know why it is that I find you sexy and nothing else, but I'm glad we found each other.We're weirdly compatible. Oh, that'sMalcolm Collins: great. Right. All right, guys. Have a wonderful day and remember the things that arouse you and your gender are not your identity. They are. Accidents of evolution over focusing on them in terms of your identity will lead to immoral behavior. And if you end up over focusing on them with your children, it makes them very susceptible to gender and sexuality cults and a lot of cults.He's sexuality, even sexual shame. I mean, this is how the eight passenger situation started. Really was this woman who started it who, who roped in the mom had a thing where basically she kept trying to brainwash people by convincing them they had porn addictions.Simone Collins: And by porn addiction, it was like, you've looked at porn.Malcolm Collins: You've looked at porn. Yeah.Simone Collins: Which welcome [00:35:00] to humanity. I don't know what kind of world she came from, but.Malcolm Collins: Well, I think that she learned that she could use that on any man because she was her Mormon culture. And so when she was trying to get something over on them, she could broadly assume that any man, even if they're Mormon has consumed some amount of porn, And then just say, I know you're a sinner, even if you don't know you're a sinner and all your behavior comes from porn.And therefore, you know, then use that to, to build a, like a knowledge hierarchy over them. Well, and a wedgeSimone Collins: specifically between them and their wives, which is terrifying.Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this insightful discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the evolution of cultural frameworks in modern society, tracing the transition from disgust-based morality to cringe culture, and ultimately to the emerging age of vitalism. The couple delves into the factors that have driven these shifts and the implications for our understanding of morality, identity, and social norms. Malcolm and Simone begin by examining the era of Protestant Christianity's dominance in the United States, characterized by a disgust-based moral framework that often led to the persecution of marginalized groups, such as the LGBTQ+ community. They argue that the recognition of the flaws in this system led to its eventual downfall and the rise of cringe culture, which relied on secondhand embarrassment and conformity to shape social norms. The discussion then turns to the emergence of vitalism, a cultural framework that celebrates individuals who unapologetically embrace their identity and break free from the constraints of cringe culture. Malcolm and Simone highlight examples of vitalistic figures, such as Tiger King and Donald Trump, and explore the potential benefits and drawbacks of this approach. Throughout the conversation, the couple emphasizes the importance of personal choice in belief systems, the value of austerity, and the role of faith in shaping one's outlook on humanity's future. They also touch on the concept of anti-racism as an ontological framework and the potential for anti-DEI consulting to promote meritocracy and combat bigotry in the workplace. Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I think it was the recognition that disgust based morality was leading to immoral actions. Like the persecution. No, hear me out here. I genuinely think it was the disgust based morality caused the persecution of LGBT individuals that led to the destruction of that system. Because That's notSimone Collins: just how ridiculous it ultimately was.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Cause many people were like, why am I attacking somebody for something about themselves that they can't change? I think it's the new cultural framework that is going to dominate in the next age, which is the age of vitalism. So vitalism I would define as A cultural framework that sells itself with a love of existence and a love of being who you are unapologetically. One of the problems with the vitalist system, I'll also explain why it's going to potentially eventually crash, is often the people who care the least about how [00:01:00] society judges them like us, for example because of that, they lack a general moral framework and they'll just do narcissistic stuff all the time in a way that like the Tiger King or Trump does, right?Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. We are going to be discussing a very interesting topic today, and there's going to be a long amble at the end of this because sometimes we just have casual conversations before them. And we had a really interesting one before this episode, but I'm going to be discussing a concept That I have been thinking about personally, and a fan sent me some ideas that actually helped me flesh out this concept into a broader concept about how our society functions and where we are moving as a society and a, a realistic path through the pervading nihilism of our current age.This story starts in the age of our childhood or our parents when the [00:02:00] dominant cultural group in the country was Protestant Christianity. These were the days of the satanic panic and a lot of the anti gay stuff and stuff like that.Simone Collins: We're talking the 80s, early 90s.Malcolm Collins: There was, and I love this.Some people still think we're there. Like they still think like the Republicans are like the anti gay party or something like that. It's freaking insane. Like I cannot, it's insane. 45 percent of gay men voted for Trump, by the way. Like we are no longer in that the gay party and the non gay party.Society has done a 180 since then. But anyway, back to what we were saying here. Or at least that was one study. Some people go, it's only one study. Yeah, because it doesn't agree with what you want to believe. You just throw it out. We need to take it back here. In that world, While there was a philosophical structure for what the conservative ideology was, like the Christian philosophical structure, everything like that, it wasn't that [00:03:00] philosophical structure that motivated individual action.Voting and decision making among the Republican Party when they were communicating was the mob, I guess you could call it. Specifically, the way that they communicated was through disgust. And by that, what I mean is they're like, doesn't it disgust you when you see gay people kissing, for example?Therefore, we should ban that. Doesn't it disgust you when you see, X or Y, like that is how they motivated the export of their cultural value system. And in reaction to that interestingly, the far left begin to deify. Things that disgusted them. That was how they fought this.And you actually see this in leftist art. One thing I always mention is that Van Der Hoeven, he's being interviewed about Star Trek Troopers. Really, you should watch our Star Trek Troopers video if you haven't seen it. I think it's one of the best that we've done. But in the interview, he was like, I was [00:04:00] surprised that people didn't realize it was supposed to be a parody against ultra right wingism.Because everyone I casted in it, And I thought that people would recognize that meant that it was supposed to be evil, like they were supposed to be evil, like bad guys. And I just love this world perspective of, if a thing is beautiful, it is therefore evil. And you actually see this in a lot of post modernism and stuff like this.And it actually helps me understand a little bit of the hatred of us. We've gotten online hate for naming our kids after bad guys. Romans like Octavian, for example. They're like, this is a sign. We're Scandinavians.Simone Collins: We get heat for that too.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The Roman one is more interesting to me because we actually do have Scandinavian heritage.That is your family's original last name before Ellis Island. The Roman one is interesting because I don't have Roman heritage. Romans were not white Romans, subjugated and enslaved white people. They were a Mediterranean population group. I guess if you want to call them white. You can.Historically in the United States they were not treated as white. Italian immigrants were not treated [00:05:00] as white immigrants. They were treated very badly. YeahSimone Collins: Irish weren't treated as white immigrants either, in many ways,Malcolm Collins: and this is why, probably, the Hispanic immigrant group today that is seen as a separate ethnic group is not going to be seen as a separate ethnic group.They're no less white than Italians. But anyway yeah, Italians had a problem with organized crime and everything too so remember that. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah but why do I elevate this cultural group that stomped mine, right? That civilized us, right?They took us when we were savages. In the woods, worshiping stones and stuff like that. And they brought us a different system. And I think that system made us better. And then we went out and we exported that system all over the world. This was period of imperialism. And a lot of people are like, Oh, that was such a horrible thing.And I think that they capture something true about us when they're like, why do you look up to the Romans? We don't look up to Romans because we are the Romans. We look up to the Romans because they showed strengths, competence, and [00:06:00] beauty, and the things that they created. Especially in contrast with our ancestors of the similar period.And When they are looking to people to uplift from that same period, if you look at like the far progressive mind, you're looking at somebody like Bambi Thug where she is uplifting like wicked and this neo paganism where they are looking for the weak group of that period. We're the older conservative systems uplifted, beauty and demonize things that disgusted them.They also uplifted strength the problem that those systems have is that they communicated this to the mob through disgust systems, which can allow for people to be victimized. And it's very easy to mistake disgust, an innate reaction that we evolve to try to help us have more surviving offspring, either through not engaging in reproductive behavior that will lead to lower offspring.I think that's why we have disgust towards things like male relationships. I want to support gay people, and I think a lot of gay people don't recognize this I could not be more pro gay. I lived throughout my entire high school career [00:07:00] with a gay roommate. Not living with my family or anything like that, a GSA.And then in college, my academic dad was a gay guy, that's your core like social community. And these were communities I was choosing, but even with that, I still like my brain still instinctually exports a disgust impact like export when I see men kiss it. That is something that I can't help, but feel.Okay. And that's just the way human sexuality works. It includes arousal and it includes disgust.Simone Collins: And you don't get to choose what arouses you or what disgusts you. It's just, it'sMalcolm Collins: just important that I don't confuse. That was a moral intuition. And that's something that Christianity also was figuring out in the eighties and nineties.I think that is what mother Teresa represented for a lot of people is that when you see somebody who has leprosy. Your average person sees them and their brain exports disgust because it's trying to get them to not interact with somebody who might be diseased. But a lot of people in these older moral frameworks confused that [00:08:00] disgust with a lack ofSimone Collins: morality, with evil.Malcolm Collins: was evil. Like they must be immoral if they are causing disgust. Yeah, or they have sinnedSimone Collins: in some way, or this is a sign of their sinful life, or depending on your religious framework, sinful past life, etc, right? It's veryMalcolm Collins: important that our society moved past disgust. as a metric for morality and immorality.But during that period, the seeds of the worst impulses of modern progressivism were sowed, which is a cultural group that in the figures in history that they worship and look to with reverence and within modern times, they worship and look to as reverence, is a weakness and ugliness are seen as signs of greatness, which can seem like a very, bizarre philosophy, but it makes sense if you look at where it grew, which was originally in opposition to a moral framework that was using disgust to shape things.Fair. But then we move from [00:09:00] this disgust framework to another framework that is I think equally bad. And it's the framework that we're just now leaving now. And I would say thisSimone Collins: spans from late nineties to through 20, 2020 pretty much, right? Basically likeMalcolm Collins: just now seeing emerging from it just now emerging from it.And this is the era of cringe motivating mass action,Simone Collins: which is very different from disgust, which isMalcolm Collins: very different from disgust. Yeah. Cringe is second hand embarrassment. And it is embarrassment about somebody breaking social norms that they may not have recognized were social norms or something like that.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: This motivated during the dominance of the urban monoculture in our society when we switched from the Christian group having control to the urban monoculture having control, this largely progressive group. They [00:10:00] motivated mass action through cringe, cringe in others, and fear of cringe yourself.Yeah, whichSimone Collins: is why when you look at polling, for example, there are fewer people now than at least ever before in this polling that are willing to not only express their views on controversial subjects, but express their views on any subject at all. The extent to which people are afraid of criticism, is off the charts now.And I think that's a product of the era of cringe, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When I think that was the result of cringe, which now people are recognizing as bad when you use cultural conformity as your primary method of communicating with the mob, eventually, intellectually alive players are going to be like, yes, but the end state of this is everyone thinks the same.Everyone acts the same. Everyone's afraid of being. creative or interesting. And I think that almost you can see as a perfect counter and reflection to this BAP, Bronze Age Pervert, who [00:11:00] I mentioned in another recent video, where I think he is his entire thing is like a performative artistic statement against the dominance of cringe culture.Simone Collins: And I think so out there, so flamboyantly unapologetic in stances that are quite colorful.Malcolm Collins: And they break every one of the cringe culture's frameworks. So you can contrast him with somebody like who I actually used to respect as an intellectual. I don't like the path that he's gone down.! Milo Yiannopoulos!Simone Collins: Oh! Okay, who would have Yeah, like these No, more like he would have give speeches and then get cancelled and then have people come on stage and freak out.Yeah. Milo Yiannopoulos.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but Milo Yiannopoulos Was actually still operating under cringe culture like he liked it being a shock jock But he never actually really broke the rules of progressive society He was still operating under the cringe framework He was just trying to [00:12:00] show that it wasn't logical or logically consistent Like that was his whole thing BAP who I think is equally as colorful as Milo So I don't think it's just that he's colorful that makes him this through the cringe to based because based as we've said on our episode You know, you need to pass through the tunnel of cringe to get the base.Yeah. And I really truly believe this. I think that all based is intrinsically cringe because to be based, you have to go against the dominant cultural framework, which is what's cringe is a secondhand embarrassment. And to be based, what it really is To and I actually this is really interesting and I think how we got to this sort of based culture, which is the perfect anecdote to cringe culture, Which is people can't feel secondhand embarrassment for us Not easily because we take ownership.We know we are breaking cultural norms We know where the cultural norms are we are breaking and we are doing it Intentionally and take pride in those decisions because we believe that those cultural norms are bad cultural [00:13:00] norms Where Cringe exists, right? Like where you can get cringe and breaking cultural norms is you break cultural norms just because you're not aware of them.Or you break cultural norms because you're part of a separate cultural group and you just don't see them as normative. So you're just doing your own thing. And for those individuals, they can be like, Oh, they didn't know poor child. I actually think. Trolls does a great job of showing the racistSimone Collins: movieMalcolm Collins: trolls.Well, trolls world tour and showing the racism intrinsic. And I'll put the clip here in this cringe world perspective where she meets the country trolls, great, the rural poor for the first time, and she's shocked that their songs are sad. And she goes, don't they know that music is about making you happy?And they're just like, Oh. They must not know. And so she's going to go tell them to erase their culture in favor of her culture because her culture is obviously correct in the way it relates [00:14:00] to the arts and their culture is obviously wrong in the way it relates to the arts because it's different, right?Song is so sad. Yeah. It's sad. Different. Oh, they must not know that music's supposed to make you happy.Ah, that's awful. Now take it easy, Growly Pete. I feel bad for them. It looks like they got beat up by a rainbow.Malcolm Collins: And I think that movie also, I'll have the other clip here. They do such a great job in that movie of showing the sin. Of progressivism. The sin of progressivism. The sin of progressivism actually being about cultural imperialism. Where she's we can make us all the same.Like she's we can understand that we're not really different. And then one day we can all come together. OhSimone Collins: dear.Malcolm Collins: Our like, anything but that. That is our differences. And this is what I think, in this new conservative movement, the recognition that progressives claim to love diversity, but don't actually think anyone's different.Men and women aren't different in their perspectives or proficiencies, [00:15:00] different cultural groups, different ethnic groups. Why would diversity matter if no one's different? But if you elevate the differences, if you're like, it's actually good that we're different and that people with different perspectives, we can achieve better outcomes.But to do that, you need to recognize that we are actually different and that different cultural groups are actually better at different things. On average, not everyone in a cultural group, but on average, they have slightly different proficiencies and perspectives.If we combine our music, she'll see that music unites all trolls, and that we're all the same, and that she's one of us! Mean, no disrespect, but anything but that. History is just gonna keep repeating itself until we make everyone realize that we're all the same. But we're not all the same. Denying our differences is denying the truth of who we are.Simone Collins: Just out of curiosity, what do you think brokered our shift culturally from Disgust to cringe.Was it the fact that content creation became pervasive online and a bunch of people who [00:16:00] weren't subject to public scrutiny before suddenly were?Malcolm Collins: What, what changed? So no I think that it's people like us in BAP really. So it was the key. No. I'mSimone Collins: referring from disgust to cringe. This isMalcolm Collins: oh, disgust to cringe. Yes. I think it was the recognition that disgust based morality was leading to immoral actions. Like the persecution. No, hear me out here. I genuinely think it was the disgust based morality caused the persecution of LGBT individuals that led to the destruction of that system. Because That's notSimone Collins: just how ridiculous it ultimately was.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Cause many people were like, why am I attacking somebody for something about themselves that they can't change?Simone Collins: So essentially there was enough of a recognition of the lack of truth and impracticality of disgust based reactions and in general support for progressive causes that caused an [00:17:00] elevation of.Honestly of disgusting things that people found disgusting. And there's the whole like Mary Harrington conspiracy theory that I love of the reason why children's book illustrations now are so ugly, more tracks with the rise of progressive culture than anything else. And it's almost like a psyop that's encouraging people to normalize ugliness as part of this embrace to your point of disgust.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Any normal person she would invoke. A strong, immediate instinct of disgust, but progressives have learned to treat that emotion as a sign that something is more morally pure and more worthy of engagement. And there was a period in which it was useful to counter that feeling of disgust, but the disgust should just be ignored, not elevated.And I think now people realize that's stupid. And the key that broke the lock of this second system Was the based individuals who previously when they were dunking on cringe, it's people like Chris Chan and stuff like that. People who just had no clue what they [00:18:00] were doing and we're breaking cultural boundaries because they were usually like mentally ill people.Or like actual races or etc. Then we're like just behind the times. But you can't argue that BAP or us are behind the times. Like we break it. The key that breaks that lock is people being like, wait, these people. are subverting the culture but have pride in who they are, right?And I actually think this is what led to Trump winning the election. And I'll explain what it is because I think it's the new cultural framework that is going to dominate in the next age, and I think it's a sustainable one which is the age of vitalism. So vitalism I would define as A cultural framework that sells itself with a love of existence and a love of being who you are unapologetically.And I think that this is where we see individuals like Tiger King exploding onto the stage. [00:19:00] Tiger King did so well because he ignored You know, in the past, that is what would have been called cringe. But in our time, he knew the cultural norms he was violating. He just had perfect ownership over who he was and was proud of who he was.And even though he was a genuinely reprehensible person, that is no longer the way people relate to others. I think Trump, for example, while I think he was a good president, I think he's a morally reprehensible human being. I think he is a bad human being when I look at the way he's treated his wives, when I look at the way he's, it's just gross to me but in the age of vitalism, what we're going to see, and I think that this will scare a lot of people, is a lot of reprehensible human beings are going to be elevated through vitalism because One of the problems with the vitalist system, I'll also explain why it's going to potentially eventually crash, is often the people who care the least about how society judges them like us, for example [00:20:00] because of that, they lack a general moral framework and they'll just do narcissistic stuff all the time in a way that like the Tiger King or Trump does, right?And so we need to then. transition from a purely vitalistic system to a vitalistic city on a hill system, which I think is our end goal.Simone Collins: That's fun.Malcolm Collins: The idea of we are trying to create something that's beautiful in the future. Like this consistent striving, not that we are the city on the hill right now, but the city of the hill that will exist in this vision of a more perfect humanity that we can strive towards restitutize the, Es Aristotelian.Byrd I was looking for was eman nest. Dies. TheWhich means in political theory and theology to M and S ties. The edge ton is [00:21:00] generally pejorative phrase, referring to attempts to bring about utopian conditions in the world. And to effectively create a heaven on earth. Theologically, the belief is akin to post millennialism after reflected in the social gospel of the 1880s and 1930s era, as well as Protestant reform movements during the second.Great awakening. In the 1830s and 1840s, such as abolitionists.Malcolm Collins: I'll add it in here. Yeah. But and I think it's bad to think that you're like living in that now or that there's ever this perfect society that you can create, because that leads to things like communism and stuff like that. But I do think a moral system around it ever improving society. is the way to go.And when people look at like the way that we're framing our public images, it is with this based vitalism in mind. Our end goal is president, what will I get there? I don't know, but that's where I'd like to end. Okay. Sorry. I shouldn't say that's our end goal. That's like our mid goal.End goal is, I should say we live in such an early time in human history. We haven't even lived through a period where one human ruled a planet yet, [00:22:00] but question Simone, what are your thoughts?Simone Collins: I think the transition tracks I can intuitively feel a shift from disgust to cringe, and then I also can feel that shift from cringe to based slash vitalism, which I'm seeing even now, for example, I keep hearing people talk about hate following or hate subscribing to people who, Originally they might argue or cringe.And then after spending more time, hate watching their content, and this happens with us to a certain extent, because we do get emails from people about this, they, at least either they actually come to see their views as being legitimate and joined their side, or at the very least, they start to envy the fact that they have this very vitalistic life that they Hold to their morals.They're very happy in pursuit of them. And they envy [00:23:00] that confidence and lack of cognitive dissonance that these people were just so confident in their lifestyles, however wrong these hate watchers find them to be are. For example, I hear one person I follow online, hate watches, a bunch of.Mormon influencers who live out in Miami, or not Miami, sorry, in Hawaii. And this person hates everything about their values and their lifestyle and never wants to have kids themselves, et cetera, but then can't stop watching these wholesome Mormon families. And then we're going to see more and more of that.And this is where the transition starts to happen is that the more you start to question your own lifestyle and see that other people, no matter how much you disagree with them, are experiencing a level of vitalism and success and happiness that in your entire pursuit of happiness, you could never achieve.It's going to get you thinking differently, and I thinkMalcolm Collins: that's interesting. Yeah I actually think that's a really core point, and it's why based, wholesome baseness was the [00:24:00] key to always defeating cringe culture, is that cringe culture motivates individuals to watch these individuals outside their cultural framework because that's where they're getting the satisfaction.At least I'm not like them, the secondhand embarrassment. Yeah. Look at how backwardsSimone Collins: and dumb these people are.Malcolm Collins: But then they look at, look how, you get this sort of look how backwards and dumb these people are. It goes from, haha, look how backwards and dumb these people are.And then they're watching like the wholesome worm and family. And they're like, what, look how backwards and dumb these people, wait a second. Wait a second. Am I the backwards and dumb one? What happens first? Doesn't have their s**t together. Do these people have their s**t together? What happens firstSimone Collins: is they just hate them and make fun of them.Then they start to critique elements of their lifestyle. Oh the trad lifestyle. That's not really what trad is like these trad influencers are just showing a caricature, but then they're more like, but the trad lifestyle in general, I kind of support. Like you have to find new reasons [00:25:00] as to why these people are cringe that aren't actually Related to their lifestyle and I think that's where the adoption starts to take place It'sMalcolm Collins: one of our things is be so wholesome.It's cringe you know, in the way that we relate to each other and our kids and everything like that. I think one thing that was said when you were talking about this, and I think that this is a broad thing that people are going to realize, because we live in a secular society now, and a lot of people are brought up secularly.They can only think of religion in this dehumanized context of like religious, insane extremists, instead of people who still have a spark of light in their eyes, and that if you're like, what do I mean by the spark of light? Talk to an Amish person or something like that.Somebody in one of these communities where they're really. And you will see this light of human dynamism in their eyes that you just don't see from these ultra woke individuals, which just look, I almost say like soulless when you're interacting with them. And a lot of their content feels that way.It just feels like it lacks any passion anymore. And it said, religion and faith are a choice. [00:26:00] And that was the core thing that sort of we realized when we're putting together this faith system for our family, is we made a choice to believe these things.Simone Collins: We were justMalcolm Collins: Yeah, let's try it. And I think that's a really interesting thing about faith as a concept that people without faith don't understand.They think that faith is blindly believing things that don't have full evidence to support their frameworks, right? When, what faith actually is making the choice to believe those things. And when you reach a moment, As like a hate watcher of a wholesome Mormon group or something like that, where you're like, Wait, I can just choose to be like them?The problem for a lot of people with something like Mormonism is they're like then I have to make too many sacrifices around Things that I want for logical consistency purpose and [00:27:00] everything like that. And that's the core purpose of our tracks videos. If you haven't seen those, it's like our own religion that our family has that we're trying to put together.They will get back to. It's one of my favorite projects, but it requires a lot of intensity in terms of mental effort to write one because I need to think about how it could be misinterpreted. If this ends up working and becomes a religion 500 years from now, how could this be misinterpreted to cause, hatred or bigotry or mass, negative action and stuff like that? But I'm also trying to create it as a genuine descendant of the Christian and Jewish and Muslim traditions, mostly the Christian tradition, mostly my Calvinist ancestry. And it's hard to think of it as a form of Christianity, but it requires less I think you don't get the benefit of antiquity with it.So a lot of people are like, okay antiquity, but a lot of these older religious traditions don't really have that much antiquity in the way they're currently practice. Anyway even Judaism, right? The Kabbalah was only added about a thousand years ago. You're only about aSimone Collins: thousand.Goodness. Great. IMalcolm Collins: mean, if you look at Christian frameworks, like a lot of the [00:28:00] Protestant beliefs rapture are fairly new.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: Debatably but most scholars think that it's a fairly new belief. So these religions evolve all the time, And we simply see ours as the, but then we choose to believe things that don't make sense to people.We're like, yeah, God is real. Which is interesting that we call ourselves atheists, but we believe in God. Like our Wikipedia says we're atheists, but I'm like, but I also believe in God. And people will be like how do you square that? And I'm like, because I don't see God as supernatural. I think God like is an actual being that physically exists just at a different point in time.In a way that we may not understand, in a way that we may see is supernatural from our own perspective, but not in some other mystical realm, physically real thing. But in a way that we may not be able to touch or something like that, but physically, within our physical constraints, the physical constraints that our reality operates within.But anyway yeah, I think Oh, there was another thing I wanted to say here. So one is belief of the choice. We just try to make that choice come with as few sacrifices as possible for broad secularists. While [00:29:00] still motivating the core thing that religion motivates, which is austerity.I think that just, you don't need to make all of the individual sacrifices, so long as you're making sacrifices across your entire life for the greater good, and genuinely living with those sacrifices. People were so shocked, they're like, oh, they stack their kids in a barracks, like behind me right here.in the dad's office. And they, they don't put their heat on in the winter. And it's yeah, living with austerity used to be seen as an intrinsically good thing. It's part of human vitalism. But the final point I want to make here is in response to a question that somebody was asking me that I found really interesting and got me thinking where they're like, why?Do you think humanity is a good thing? Like, why are you promoting this ideology where like humanity and the human potential future is a good thing? And I said,Simone Collins: Journalists just asked me that yesterday and I'm like, the,Malcolm Collins: it's an irrelevant question because groups that don't think that humanity is a good thing are going to turn nihilistic and cease to exist.So it's [00:30:00] not like mimetically an interesting question to me. Obviously you need to somehow convince people of this. But. Two, because it's a choice. I have faith in humanity. I have faith that we will continue to improve and I think if we look through history we do continue to on the broad scale improve ethically I think eventually biologically, technologically, in the way we relate to our reality.And this is also why I love pro natalism because I see the next generation is better than the last generation. Totally. Always. And that's why I'm okay with death. That's why we have this weird pro death stance. I don't want people to live forever. I think that people after a certain age do not change their mind as much as young people.Cannot recontextualize reality as easily, and this leads to negative externalities. But, realistically, my kids will be able to call up an AI of me whenever they want, because I've created so much content. We already have some of our fans creating AIs of us that they can interact with, which I've actually found really cool.To use we can't show them yet, but you can [00:31:00] put yourself on a list of them. For dating advice and stuff like that. They're like trained on specific side segments of our content. And I just can't tell the people who are doing this, how much I appreciate that they're doing it because it's one of the goals of the creation of all of this for us is to have a, but then, presumably my kids will be so much better than me in a few generations that they would just see no reason to ask me questions except as a historical curiosity of what someone of this previous period would have thought, not as like a.Fountain of wisdom, which I think is the way that we would see, if you could summon an ancestor's ghost from, 400 years ago, are you really going to learn anything about reality from them? Not really. It's an interesting historic curiosity but I think that's what the life extensionists are creating, but then they're going to, consolidate power around them, which creates all sorts of negative externalities because generally the longer you've been alive, the more you can consolidate power.And we've seen this with boomers, not letting the next generation rise up and creating it. Intergenerationally worse society. And I just think rumors are the worst. Like the generation before them was awesome. The generation before them was they underwent so many hardships, and they became better as a [00:32:00] society.They begin to really challenge some of the systemic wicked problems of society. And actually, begun to fix him, like racism. And then boomers are just like, let's go back. Let's become like fully racist, but this time against like white people and Jews. Like it's wild. And it's been carried on the mindset that started with him in some of these younger generations, but fortunately in the factions that are going to die out.So I love humanity. And I think that promoting that love and being exciting to be excited to be a human and excited to be alive and excited to create humans. I hope that this can be the thing that like gets people interested in the future, people being happy with who they are rather than this constant struggle to be happy of who you are, whether or not you're happy with who you are is a choice.And it is not one that you should always make. If you are a terrible person that needs to improve, you shouldn't work on trying to be happy with who you are. You should try to. Work to change yourself into somebody who deserves to be happy with who they are.Simone Collins: I think that's [00:33:00] why we're going to end up in a future with people who are like this, those who are nihilistic, those who can't bring themselves to imagine why humans should exist in the future, aren't going to have kids and their views won't be represented.So I think it's going to be just fine. I think what we're trying to fight for with pronatalism, though, and what's interesting to me to bring this back to the theme. That you've highlighted is that what we're trying to fight against is a return to the discussed system, because that's what a lot of the numbers look like when you look at which groups are going to continue to reproduce and what's going to happen when the woke monoculture essentially.picks off anyone who's more open minded or pluralistic from those groups.Malcolm Collins: I also want to be clear that a vitalist system is not a pro beauty system necessarily. No, it's aSimone Collins: pluralistic, enthusiastic, high energy system. What you're talking about is So if IMalcolm Collins: could describe the difference between these two systems.There, in the past, were some Pro beauty systems, right? But pro beauty systems are [00:34:00] intrinsically, I think, over exclusionary and overly culturally conformist around what is beautiful.Simone Collins: IMalcolm Collins: keep an eye on the time. Whereas the discussed,the vitalist systems, think of them as the guy who rides into a room on a lion dress with an American flag with a torch in one hand and an AR, 15 in the other hand, shooting into the sky thing in the national anthem.That's what I want to be. Dressed in cyber armor. I'll put all my Corgi picture on the page here. Oh my god. That's what I want you to represent. This low culture love of true Americana. Yeah, it's not beautiful, it's notSimone Collins: ugly, it's just extra. I love you, Simone. I love you too, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: Although it's proud of who it is, that's what we need is pride in who we are. And we've stamped that out outside of specifically approved subcategories.Simone Collins: Totally. Yeah. All right. I'll see you in the Google meet. It's in the calendar invite. Yeah.How are the kids this [00:35:00] morning?Malcolm Collins: Great. Sorry. I was just checking to make sure I didn't have something, but I've got one at, yeah, it was Wednesday.Simone Collins: 11 a. m. is when we have the.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it's before that. I was going to talk with the guy from side scrollers about working with him on the business idea of the anti gay consultancy firm, cause he used to run a large, like a gaming company type thing.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So he'd be, a great, I was actually thinking of reaching out to James Lindsay about doing something on this too, cause I thought that could be. He seems really sane and educated. And he could be a good person to, to rope into an anti wokeSimone Collins: consulting team.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And the goal would be to fight anti meritocratic behavior, bigotry behavior that, that, dehumanize those specific groups or just, it's wild when you think about it, that there's progressive organizations, that organizations have like this one body was in them, the DEI department.That is specifically about exporting progressive cultural values. Like it's a progressive department meant to make sure the company never doesn't act [00:36:00] too non progressively yet. They don't have a parallel conservative department meant to make sure they never act too out of line with conservative values.I thinkSimone Collins: they see DEI. As resolving a wicked problem in society at the level of the corporation, because to the point of anti racism is that it's popularized in many spheres. You cannot just not be racist. You have to be actively anti racist. If you're not actively solving the problem, you're part of it, which somewhat, I would say shores up with our philosophy in the sense that We agree that if you see a mess, it is your responsibility to clean it up.I don't care who spilled the milk. You need to wipe it up. But what's reallyMalcolm Collins: interesting is we'd actually talk about this in video that I don't know if it's going to go live. So I'll briefly mention the idea here because I think it's a really interesting concept. Okay. And this will be put at the end of the video instead of the beginning, but the anti-racism, what it really is remember how we divided ethical systems into consequential list?Like the consequences of your actions or the, [00:37:00] you judge the morality. Yeah, the ontological. It is the rule system of that determines your actions. Like lying is bad, therefore don't lie. And then aesthetic, which is about ma and every decision you go, what is the most masculine choice? What is the most Right?You know exactly these people. What anti-racism really is it's a. Logical framework for interacting with reality where with every decision you need to ask, what is the most anti racist, choice I could make?Simone Collins: Yeah, or what is the most performatively inclusive? Woke position I could possibly take but it is misused frequently.Malcolm Collins: No but I think that shows how you get bigotry as an end result of that. When you do not include because you're creating a hierarchy of groups within their view of what racism is or certain groups are more worthy of human dignity than other groups.Simone Collins: This is actually really interesting.There was recently this scandal with a very progressive library that after A cis white man leader retired for that library. They hired the perfect DEI, not only a very well [00:38:00] credentialed and qualified woman to take the position, but a woman who was not white and where things went wrong for her and where a huge sort of campaign against her was created I think probably started when she.I think let go of some underperforming employees who also didn't happen to be white which I think shows where DEI has gone wrong which is that true DEI, which is what this woman was practicing is. Yeah. When they were looking for someone who's qualified they chose to hire someone who also, brought in a more diverse perspective.Then when she actually focused on. The outcome and mission of the organization over performative preferential treatment for groups that have historically been discriminated against. Then she was defenestrated.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So it's just bigotry, but hold on a second. I got to get something. AllI'll get started on the piece here. And I think what's great [00:39:00] about anti DEI, I'm going to keep pitching this to people, is that it actually increases profits. If you had allowed her to do her real job, which should be anti bigotry you increase the meritocracy within a corporation.When you're doing DEI, you are intrinsically decreasing the efficiency of a corporation. Because you are, maintaining like under employing employees and stuff like that. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe