Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone explore the complex relationship between human predilections, such as arousal patterns and food preferences, and the cultural norms that shape our attitudes towards them. They question why it's socially acceptable to shame certain food choices but not sexual orientations, and delve into the historical context of how sexual compatibility became a key factor in modern relationships. The couple also examines the formation of subcultures around shared experiences of societal othering, and how these communities can become intrinsically tied to one's identity. Throughout the conversation, they touch on topics such as the AIDS epidemic, the conglomeration of the LGBTQ+ movement, and the potential risks and benefits of gender transition. Join Malcolm and Simone as they navigate these sensitive issues and share their personal perspectives on fostering a supportive environment for their children.[00:00:00] I don't know where are you're gonna go, so let's dive right in. It's something I've been thinking about recently., there are many things that humans have predilections for, whether those predilections are genetic or due to our environment growing up. Two broad categories where I think humans have a varying predilections that are both genetic and environmental are the things that arouse them and the flavors that they enjoy.That's true. Yeah. Okay. Huh. So the question then becomes why is it that I cannot impugn someone if I'm like I don't like this particular food I don't think that cake is healthy, I don't think you should eat cake every day, I can understand that my kids might even like the taste of cake, okay?But I am going to shame them for eating cake, I am going to withhold cake from them, Yeah, or soda or alcohol. People are very passionate about these things. Why is it that as a society, that's a totally normal thing to [00:01:00] say, but if I come from a cultural group that has similar beliefs around something like gender transition, that's same sex attraction that's seen as homophobicWould you like to know more?Our family doesn't particularly like Italian food. Like I find it to be carby and honestly a little bland for my taste. We don't serve it a lot to our kids. Okay. Now some, a family that likes Italian food that like receives pleasure when they eat Italian food and really enjoys that.I understand that there's other families like that. I just don't want that for my family. Right now, this is a totally normal and inoffensive thing to state. No one is going to say I'm a pasta phobe when I state something like this. Yeah. That's just not for you. What is really fascinating is when I correlate this with something like sexuality, you would get an extremely negative response.because a lot of people they will attack our [00:02:00] position on gayness, which is to say that I, as a family, like in my kids were born, same sex attracted or due to environmental conditions become same sex attractive.I'm not going to shame them because I think that we have other solutions to have families right now. And I think that, that the cost of shaming them are less than the benefits from a cultural perspective. But I hold. Nothing against the cultures that do. And I can understand why from a historic context, especially if they have other cultural solutions for same sex attraction.The and a lot of people are like, all conservatives have the same solution to same sex attraction. And it's this is just objectively not true. So if I'm just contrasting three groups here traditional Catholics, traditional Muslims, and traditional Protestants traditional Catholics who are born same sex attracted.If you look at the Catholic priesthood, some studies show that over 50 percent of the priesthood is same sex attracted. It is, they get a, position of status, but they just have to maintain celibacy. That's actually a pretty good trade off and not particularly inhumane. It's like ethically sourced eunuchs.You go to, obviously it has led to some negative externalities for altar boys. Yeah. I was going to say, not [00:03:00] always eunuchs, but if you look at rates within the Catholic church versus other professions where people interact with kids a lot, like public school system, the rates of molestation. You guys know what I'm talking about, or higher in the public school system.Even on a per teacher basis, a lot of people don't know this. And this was a report done by the Clinton administration. So get off me on this. Protestants, it is you just suppress it, but isn't that what I tell people with cake? Isn't that what I tell, just suppress what many cultures say with something like alcohol, or cake, or some foods that we might think are culturally distasteful, some cultural groups like Oh don't eat frog. Yeah. No, Jews, for example, or Muslims, for example, don't eat pig, right? It's not for any specific health reason. It's just don't eat pig. This is a control and you're like pig is good. I like eating pig, but that doesn't mean I have anything against Muslims.So I'm starting by just laying out the problem, right? That's interesting. Yeah. So the question is, Why is this the case? And people are like people are really forced to live. Oh, and I forgot the Muslim [00:04:00] solution. The extremist Muslim solution is gender transition, which is actually really funny to me.The gender transition progressives are like accidentally discovering conservative Islam, which is you have a gender confused young person who seems sex attractive and it's just transition them. No more gay. It's An interesting cultural solution. And we can get into briefly as to why I think you see this within Islamic populations and not in other populations, is it solves the sex ratio problem you have within Islamic populations because you have religion within Muslim populations.Because some people have multiple female partners. Yeah. You have more unattached males in this culture. So there's more males who will just never get a partner. So it does make sense to transition. Greater societal stability. Yeah. People. Get married. Yeah. Because also one of the, one of the big things I would say is, if you can't, if you decide that, you live in a society that is anti carb and you fricking love carbs, like, all right, that's tough.You'll adjust. But when you live in a society that doesn't let you, Choose the life partner that would that you'd be sexually compatible with and for some people that's really important part of their [00:05:00] relationship Why is that an important part of their relationship? Like it's an interesting thing to note, right?Like historically this was not an important part of relation compatibility. Yeah, that is an interesting thing That's its own like huge Pandora's box right is why Do we care so much about sexual compatibility? There's an evolutionary argument to be made that at least when it comes to male female pairings, which are, reproductive in nature, it could matter because studies have shown that people, when they just smell sweaty shirts or something are more likely to be attracted to people with whom they would be genetically more compatible for whatever reason, right?There's factor you can see these levels of, but I'm talking historically throughout most of history. Most people, yeah. Typically around people with whom they're fairly well genetically match. You're marrying people who you've never had sex with. Yeah. Who you've likely never even kissed, you've never held hands with, this is historically the norm.Even if you're talking about many indigenous cultures which you had, I'm sorry, progressive. Elevate indigenous cultures. So I'm just [00:06:00] saying that even among the cultures that they elevate while you can find some that are outside of this actually historically No, you were not having sex outside of marriage that frequently except in rare anthropological cases and this is especially true of the successful cultures the cultures that ended up conquering their neighbors and forming long lived empires.So the question here becomes this is weird, right? And I think that you came up with one of the answers. The elevation of sexual identity to something that was critical that a person lived out came downstream of sexuality becoming key to a healthy relationship. And sexual compatibility becoming key to a healthy relationship because in a historic context, it wasn't.And I actually think relationships are worse off for it being elevated. Yeah. And when you look at subreddits, for example, like dead bedrooms, it's, yeah it when you make a relationship about sex and then the sex almost inevitably changes over time as people have kids and hormones change and things get [00:07:00] mismatched.Yeah. Like you're setting yourself up for failure. Yeah I'm with my wife because I respect her as a human being. That was what I was looking for. Somebody can screw, I'm with you because you're freaking hot. But, whatever. But like i, IE your your effect on my arousal patterns is like the last thing that I'm thinking about in terms of what recommends you as a wife.100%. Yeah. If we got divorced, it would never be over sex. It would never be over sex. And it's the same with our kids. When I'm elevating, when I'm telling my kids the type of person they should be looking for in a spouse, I would not elevate that. So I think this is one thing, is the perverse elevation of sexual compatibility within relationships.Yeah, that's interesting. And just, honestly, sex within relationships. It's people approached diet from only the perception of dopamine spikes hold on, also It's really, you should probably approach diet from the perspective of, are you surviving, are you healthy and functional.Yeah but the other thing that led to the elevation of this as an identity, so we're gonna talk about this, is the elevation of casual sex. [00:08:00] There was no real reason for gay men outside of like married gay men going to gay bathhouses occasionally, which historically was very normal. To when I say married, heterosexually married gay men just going to get relief occasionally outside of their marriage.That as soon as you had casual dating was in these communities and it was expected that everyone in high school was sleeping around to some extent and everyone in college was sleeping around to some extent, which is a very new thing. Which is very new, then, yes, for these people to indulge in what was giving them arousal, they needed to go out and engage in a way that was public.And people could say, admittedly right away, like, how dare you compare this to stuff Cake. And stuff like that. Being gay has no negative health consequences. And here I'd be like, REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE RECORD SCRATCH excuse me. Record scratch, that sounds more like an autistic re right there.Oh, re, record scratch. Are you do you not remember the [00:09:00] AIDS epidemic? It nearly genocided the entire gay community. Because intrinsically you are going to get more STDs passed by anal sex than you are through other forms of sexual contact because it leads more blood to blood contact.Duh, there is a reason why cultural groups culturally evolve, the iterations that shun this behavior had more surviving offspring than why you see a level of homophobia in almost every long lived widespread culture in the world today. Okay, now we have scientifically gotten to a point where we can get over that, but if you're talking about like when the gay movement was first blossoming, no, we had not yet gotten to a point where we could get around that, and the families of these people who told them that, It was better to live a closeted lifestyle than die of AIDS, which was the alternative for many of these people.You're probably right. That's a horrible f*****g thing to say, but it's also [00:10:00] objectively true if you're talking about the early gay movement and what happened to many of these people. Yeah. Really sad. And I appreciate what they went through to normalize their community.But then you have the other thing, which is to say, whenever you take a community and you say you can't do this and we will shame you for doing this and the desire is strong enough to do that, that a portion of people are still going to indulge in that, then you will get a subculture that forms around that.Then why isn't there a subculture for people who cheat on their partners? Because that is like historically men wouldn't have same sex liaisons. To a lesser extent and also men when you're cheating on your partner, but we'll get on that in a second I actually think that Portions of the modern poly movement evolved out of this subculture.No interesting. I like that take that's what we can get on this in a second so we need to go back to If you had something like spicy food, everyone in society who eats spicy food is going to be punished. Okay? You would get a subculture of people who like spicy [00:11:00] food and they'd hang out in places and then they'd begin to use words like, oh, that's spicy to mean that's cool and stuff like that because their hierarchy was in their culture begins to become determined by how Much they are willing to other themselves in mainstream society to fit in with that culture in the same way that like two goths meet each other and they've never met each other before their relative hierarchy is normally determined by the number of like body modifications or outfits or knowledge they have of obscure bands that would other them in mainstream society or tattoos or whatever right so you begin to get pep like tattoos of chili peppers and like certain jewelry configurations that mean like when you meet someone oh you know this is another spicer spicer i like that they begin to talk among themselves and they begin to develop Alternate ways of speech and stuff like that, because they're talking within their own communities and they need to signal to other members of their community.And then, oh, wouldn't you know it, there's this much rarer group of people but they really eating salt and they're also shunned by mainstream society for their salty taste. Now, this community is also an underground [00:12:00] community, and they just find it's more convenient because both groups are hated by society for things that they do with food to meet in the same locations and everything like that.This is Largely what happened with the gay and trans movement. These movements have no real reason to be connected. But from sort of the economies of scale and resources perspective, it just made more sense to share some spaces. Yeah, in the early days. But they are as biological phenomenons, I think almost completely unrelated.There, one's an arousal system thing. One's a gender system thing. Even if it is an arousal system thing, it's a much more specific arousal system thing. It's not the same kind of a thing, but they judged themselves by the people who hated them, because people always do that. When you are othered by society, you go where the Critical mass of cultural inertia is, and that's where you begin to identify, and that's how these various movements that really didn't have any reason to conglomerate began to conglomerate amongst each other into what is [00:13:00] now LGBTQ which is interesting and take that to mean whatever you mean, but what then ended up happening is people begin to define their identity By this subculture, and this always happens with subcultures.I remember how personally hurt I was as a kid when I was dressed as a, like a seamster, basically, not true seamster, but like my own take on it. And somebody was like, Oh, I love that seamster look. I used to be a seamster too. I had a seamster phase a few years ago. And I felt so hurt by that. I was like, this isn't a phase.This is my identity. How dare you? People always think that their community right now is their identity, right? You see this in the right as well, individuals who are like in their, Andrew Tate phase think that this whole man masculine thing is like their identity or this whole MGTOW thing is like the core of who they are or this whole red pill thing.And it's no, trust me, bro. This is a phase. This is just the community that you are identifying with right now. And you have identified a sense of self around this community. community. [00:14:00] Now, certain communities can exist throughout your entire life if they become stable cultural units, which is what happened with the LGBT culture.But that doesn't mean that it is intrinsically part of a person's humanity other than any more than like the foods that you like are an intrinsic part of your humanity. I think that's what we're looking at here is we, and then people can be like what is, your human identity really?And I can say that of all the things that are not your identity, the things that I am extra sure are not your identity are the things that you didn't choose about yourself. The things that are just biologically coded into you. Like how much of a sweet tooth you have, your sexual orientation, et cetera.Your gender. Your arousal pathways. Yeah. Your race, your like these things may cause society to treat you differently, but they're all things that you didn't choose about yourself. And therefore you have less ownership over them than the things that are a [00:15:00] result of who you differentially are. Oh, I like that.Yeah. So the point you're trying to make is, That what we should use to define ourselves are the things that we are our prefrontal cortex courtesies essentially would say are ours that we own them. We didn't inherit them genetically deterministically. It was inevitable that we were going to hold these stances, but at least their stances that we intellectually own instead of stances that we.Just genetically, hormonally inherited, right? That's cool. And I also think that you can see that, we talk about things like shaming, eating calories, right? Somebody's would a sub community, because we definitely do that, it would a sub community form around that has its own social norms and everything.It's yes, that's what the Hades movement is. Where they pretend that eating too many calories isn't unhealthy. Oh, but then there's also the pro ana movement, which is, all about the opposite. But with the Hays movement, what's interesting is there are social norms within the Hays movement, where if somebody begins to lose weight, or if somebody begins to suggest that, being healthy may [00:16:00] this may be incompatible with being healthy, they get shunned and shamed by the community.Oh, yeah. Which is just what you're going to see within things like the trans movement. And keep in mind, I think Trans is a real phenomenon, but I also think that a portion of it has gone off the rails right now. But if you are within the trans movement and you point that out, you will be completely excluded and ostracized from the community.Which creates a really toxic environment within the community because people can use that identity to hide negative behavior patterns. Then I think the bigger question or takeaway I have from this is Yeah, okay. So yeah, it's There's no reason why, because we feel a certain orientation or attraction to things that we should necessarily indulge in them, but then the question is, what is ideal or justified in terms of denying yourself a craving versus not?Because a lot of these things are cultural. Like you say, a lot of food prohibitions are based on very old religious traditions that originally may have [00:17:00] evolved to help with sanitation, food safety, but now don't really have a place in society. When how does a person individually thinking for themselves decide If they're going to act on certain sexual fetishes or arousal pathways or not?I think that's a great question. And I want to point out here because one thing that I'm sure I'll get criticized for is people saying that the gay individuals are responsible for the AIDS epidemic that, that ended up hurting the community. No, that's not what I'm saying here. If you look at early things like early food prohibitions may have been around health reasons. Okay. If an individual eats those foods and gets a health issue, because they were eating those foods, I am not here saying it's their fault, like whatever, but it's it's an objectively true thing that these things are correlated.And so then the first question is, are they still correlated? Are the reasons why we shame things like. gayness, right? Still correlated in our society. Does it still hurt people in the way it used to hurt people at the same rates? And the answer is no. [00:18:00] So within my cultural group, I will not shame my kids for doing it because everything you would potentially shame your kids for is an avenue other cultural groups can use to break your kids out of your cultural group.Yeah. And it's a rebellion. Trigger it's a rebellion trigger So you are creating mechanisms for kids to leave your family with every one of these you stack up So there is a very strong motivation to remove these stacks Because when a kid and anything around sexuality is an incredibly powerful one to people to use Because the age at which kids Most deconvert from their birth culture, i.e. their religion is between 15 and 21. That's also when they're going through puberty. That's also when they're experimenting with these things for the first time. This is the candy the man in the van can use to lure them to take them to the second location if you don't want them to go. So if you can destigmatize these within your cultures, you actually get a lot of additional cultural protection.However, Transness, now this is a different thing. I [00:19:00] actually, when I look at the trans community, when I look at the data around the community, I think that it leads to more mental health problems. Whatever we have in terms of gender transition technology right now, and this may not always be the case, I think it's causing more problems than it's fixing.And and I think that there was this great recent study done by a very respectable researcher which really showed this, that a lot of the narratives we've been getting around transition being the solution to gender dysphoria were just not long term data based. And This then leads me to say with my kids, would I warn them against that community?Yeah, I would say that it is probably true that some portion of humans do have an incorrect sort of gender modifier in their brain, but they happen to be born with that. I do not think that gender transition is the cultural solution that we would recommend for them. Yeah. Which, for some people it sucks, right?I don't know what to say. Like it's, somebody has a gambling addiction. It hurts them to say, yeah, you shouldn't be gambling. And [00:20:00] they might defy a lot as a gambler. They might really like doing it. They might have a biological compulsion to do it, but at the end of the day, it just seems to be correlated with long term negative outcomes.So I wouldn't recommend that. And that would be the heuristic I'm using, whether it's food or arousal patterns or anything like that. And this is why we are generally very open to things like fetishes and stuff like that on this. This show where people can be like, why are you so open to these sexual things?And it's because that provides our kids with a level of protection. Yeah. And generally with rules, what we've seen from the research is it really is best to have almost no rules and then just the. One or two rules that really matter you hold to them fast, and you never make exceptions, but yeah The moral rules have a religious community that can back all of your rules And this is the other thing about predilection shaming and stuff like that.I will never impugn another culture for their practices. Okay, I'm not gonna say You don't get to practice these [00:21:00] practices. Those are not my kids. That is not my culture. And people will say what if it leads to those kids committing suicide? What if it leads to them being depressed? And I'm like okay, let's look at the data people.It turns out that people who grow up outside of hard religious cultures or are very religious cultures have much higher rates of depression and suicide than people who grow up in very religious cultures. So does that mean we should like, does that mean we should get rid of those groups? No, of course not like It's absurd, right?This, oh, what if kids end up committing suicide because of this actually ends up giving more power to the ultra religious communities and less power to the secular communities. When you look at the data like the overall sources of data outside of edge cases like gender transition and stuff like that.But they selectively apply the data only where it allows their. community or group to impose their ideology on and their moral framework on other cultural systems, which I see as immoral. [00:22:00] Yeah, totally. Oh, I, any final thoughts? What about you? What about me? Like where I stand with all this?Yeah. On our kids, et cetera. Yeah, in general with our kids, I just want them to be safe and I want them to ideally have kids that they give great experiences to. So the way I look at it is if there seems sex attracted, not a problem, just, make sure that you freeze your sperm or eggs, early.And when you find the right partner, do IVF, whatever it might be, I think that's all fine and good. And the cool thing about us having a bigger family too, is let's say that we have a same sex attracted kid and they want to have kids that are closer to biologically them instead of getting a sperm donor or an egg donor.Because let's say we've, two girls who turn out to be a girl who turns out to be a lesbian, she could just have her brother donate sperm and then have kids that are quite biologically Similar. So I don't know. I think that [00:23:00] there, there are fine solutions and we don't actually have a lot of logical reasons to be pretty specific about people's transitions.I don't think collectively we're even against our kids transitioning, but though we would probably say, wait until you're of age, like you're an adult 18 to 21 before you actually do it. We're not going to support that before. Yeah. Ideally fully myelinated before you actually start transitioning.I know that's tougher to hormonally to do that transition later, but still deal with it. And then before you transition, freeze your genetic materials, eggs or sperm ideally as embryos. Yes, but I would add that I do not think that the long term outcomes for these individuals are very good. If you look at the real data rather than the data that they're.Yeah, but when you're looking at and I think it varies too. You really have to look at the actual community. If we have someone with rapid onset gender dysphoria It's a very different story from a kid that we have who from the very beginning. No, I agree. As parents, I think it's funny.If you had parents who are actually supportive of this, they could actually tell you, which I've often seen with kids [00:24:00] is they'll go to their parent and they'll say, Mom, I've always acted like a girl. And the mom's I have raised a girl. You have not always acted like a girl. You have acted very differently from your sisters.You have acted like your brothers your entire life. It's just, this community is good at getting people to recontextualize their entire life history through their own lens. And so if they knew that they had a family that wasn't going to be reflexively anti supportive, so I do agree with that, to give them honest information about whether what the community is telling them about their relationship.Personal autobiographical history is actually accurate. Yeah. I view it, this sounds terrible, but I view transitioning similarly to how I view suicide. If someone for 20 years has wanted to end themselves. Yeah. You know what? Like they've been consistent about that. They've not flinched. They've been committed to it.They've planned around it. They've held their stance. We've checked with them a billion times. Let them go for it. Same with transitioning, it's, these are like, typically if you're doing it all the way, which should, if you're going to do it permanent irreversible changes. So if you're committed and you're ready to go, [00:25:00] so I would just say I would take the same approach that we take to food, which is.Generally, we're pretty permissive, trying to go against really strong, like need pathways often backfires as you see with diet culture, right? People who go on diets, inevitably slingshot back as soon as they lose control or stop being on Ozempic or whatever, right? They run out of their meal packets and I think the same goes for sexuality.So in general, unless you feel like there is a very severe, Risk to a particular food or arousal pathway for example, if someone decided that they were super into eating humans, I'm sorry, we're going to draw a line there. And if someone, has specific, very illegal arousal pathways, and I'm not going to mention those words.Nope. Sorry. That's just not going to happen. So Speaking of this is something you get with vegans as well. I don't say vegans are like anti meat eaters, right? I don't say they hate, and I understand why they might practice that as a family for, cultural reasons. And I support that.It's just not my choice. Yeah. Yeah. Even, yeah. As long as it doesn't hurt a [00:26:00] baby, I don't know enough about the research around vegan infant formula, for example. I worry a little bit about that, but whatever. Yeah. As long as I love you too. If it doesn't work, they'll die out.So whatever. No, nothing that can hurt babies. Never. I will find them and kill them. Like that dream I had last night where someone was threatening Indy who right now is dreaming very vividly in front of me in her crib. And then I, just beat this person up ruthlessly screaming at them.People around me watched. I can't. Instinctually, I have dreams about hurting people who hurt babies. I cannot let that happen. But anyway, I don't, I'm sure vegan formula is probably, I love you Simone. I love you too, gorgeous.Oops. Sorry. Okay. [00:27:00] We're recording. So you suggested as a topic, quality in food, which I find so intriguing. All I can think of immediately is this one scene from the Japanese film Tom Popo where there's this one couple that their entire, like all of their romantic liaisons is based on really weird food stuff.This is gonna go in a totally different direction than you think, then. Yeah. I don't know where are you're gonna go, so let's dive right in. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the recent controversy surrounding the attempted cancellation of YouTuber Wendigoon by the channel "In Praise of Shadows." The couple examines how this incident serves as a disturbing case study of the rise of extremism and dehumanization within certain ideological groups.Malcolm and Simone analyze the rhetoric used by "In Praise of Shadows," drawing parallels between their language and tactics to those employed by the Nazi regime. They discuss how the dehumanization of perceived outsiders, the justification of violence against them, and the attempt to police and purify communities are all hallmarks of fascist ideologies.The conversation also explores the importance of intellectual diversity, the dangers of ideological echo chambers, and the need for a sane and principled opposition to counter the spread of extremist views. Malcolm and Simone emphasize the value of cultural sovereignty, pluralism, and the fight against bigotry and radicalism from both sides of the political spectrum.Throughout the discussion, the couple reflects on the broader implications of this controversy, the state of online discourse, and the potential for a return to civility and understanding in the face of increasing polarization. They also touch on the importance of holding individuals accountable for their actions to discourage future attempts at cancellation and dehumanization.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] The horror community, being a normal welcoming community, welcomes people with all ideological perspectives into it. But once you get a critical level of this ultra progressive, ultra urban monoculture perspective, they now think they own the entire cultural category, in this case, horror.And they now have a duty to police entrants into this community. Only people who one think like them and fit their cultural rules belong in this community, but then he also reveals his hand about what he thinks about general society is at first he says, they should not be welcome in our space, but then he says they should not be welcomed in public in general.Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. The argument being that they. spread harmful messages, presumably?Malcolm Collins: No. I, he said we'll get to the arguments that he might use to justify this in his head, but generally he sees them as subhuman, not deserving of the same dignities of other human [00:01:00] groups. And that they should be treated as such.And a lot of people don't understand how people can walk towards something like a Holocaust and society may not recognize that they're walking in that direction. Society where people like this person are tolerated. Is a society that is walking towards a holocaust.Simone Collins: Yeah, but dehumanization is the first step of any of this.You can't do these things to people. AndMalcolm Collins: elevating the murder of this family just for being in the wrong area, as a positive thing. But the most important thing in understanding how this larger memetic structure works is for a medic structure to stay stable like this. It needs to not encounter pushback, right.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone!I am excited to be here with you today! We are going to cover the recent controversy around the attempted cancellation of Windagoon by In Praise of Shadows. However, we're not going to just spit the facts of the case and then react to them, I think, like a lot of people do. I want to be very based in the way [00:02:00] we do this.I have a very unique take on this. And I think that there is a unique takeaway and a pretty big one to be had by this. Honestly, I found learning about this case it's just some of my perspectives because I think it's perfectly encapsulates two things.One is how the mind virus of the urban monoculture works. How it has looped around from general progressivism to basically just being Nazism or at least a form of fascism. Although I think now that they've become anti Semitic, it's hard to call them anything other than Nazis. But anyway so how it has turned into this fascist Nazi ideology but also how individuals within it can't see that this has happened to them, even though they've taken these extremist positions.So an example Of one of these positions that this guy took. So I'll just give you a few. One was, he talked about in a previous video, the Hills Have Eyes movie and that's what motivated this video. The people didn't like his [00:03:00] take on that movie from a couple years ago or something, and his channel wasn't doing as well as it used and he was bitter about that.But anyway his take was that it was good that these white middle class people were brutalized because they had entered into another cultural group's territory. And then he analyzed that cultural group, like the crazy mutant savages in that movie with Native Americans. And he's so this is a good thing.It's them taking back their,In Praise of Shadows: further adds to the commentary that this family doesn't belong here.Just by the way that they look, you can tell that they do not fit in with this vast desert landscape. They are an economic invading force. What is both home and hardship to one is a curiosity to pose in front of and take pictures to a group of others from a wealthier background. On the most basic, surface, superficial level, this is a film about cannibals killing and eating a family who get lost on their summer vacation.And psychologically, most, when they watch this, will be on the side of the vacationing family, and wish for them to survive and make it out and get back [00:04:00] home. And, well Why is that? Because if you look at this from the perspective of the Hill People, they are only defending what is theirs, this land that they call home.The Carter family would have never been killed if they had stayed in that monstrosity of industry that is New York, that their own kind created. It can stand in that way as a bit of an allegory as well, of that fact that even though we are housed under the umbrella of America, we are many different countries comprising of many different people that do not get along or like each other.To say that the Hill People and the New Yorkers are of the same nation would only be true in the strictest definition, in that they happen to live within the same borders, but culturally, they couldn't be more different. The Hills Have Eyes is a clash of when you take two types of people who hold absolute contempt for one another, and then you proceed to call them both American and equals, who supposedly have the same opportunities at birth. Father Jupiter and his family are filled with murderous rage, [00:05:00] but why shouldn't they be? Do you see the surroundings that they are forced to put up with? At one point he says to the father, Bob Carter, Your dog made sport of my blood, you pig.I'm gonna kill your kids for that. You come out here and stick your life in my face, stick your fingers in my pie. That was a bad mistake. I thought you were smart and tough. You're stupid. You're nothing. I'm gonna watch your goddamn car rust out. Yes, I will. I'll see the wind blow your dried up seeds away, I'll eat the heart of your stinking memory, I'll eat the brains of your kids kids.There is a tangible fury here, a pure, unadulterated need for blood, and through that, vengeance. Vengeance at their situation and the systems in place that have forced them into this. In a way, are they not justified for their actions? The Hill People can be representative of anything that you want them to be, really.They can be Native Americans, and the Hills themselves can be allegorical of them being forced back onto [00:06:00] reservations. They can be black Americans that have for hundreds of years been forced to live within a dehumanizing system that has balances in place that assure that they never get aheadMalcolm Collins: and people were like, one, It shows the level of dehumanization he has of both groups, both of the native groups to see them as like these monstrous individuals but also the level of dehumanization he has of people he sees as representative of his cultural enemies which, generally conservatives, and you actually see this throughout the book.a lot of stuff that he talks about. So in one part, when he's talking about how you know that Wendigoon is a bad guy in part he says it's because he's from Appalachia and you need to assume that every white person you meet in Appalachia is a racist unless they actively prove to you that they aren't.In Praise of Shadows: He has said many times publicly that he lives in East Tennessee. It is about as white as you could possibly get. Deep Appalachia is very white country. And for the most part, is exceptionally racist. Genuinely in this part of the country. You have to assume that any white person you [00:07:00] meet Is racist, unless they show you otherwise.Malcolm Collins: Which is a remarkably racist take. And I think a lot of leftists initially when they took this position that you can't be racist against whites and stuff like that. That they didn't understand that when you remove groups like this, like when you remove protections around groups like this, that these protections existed for a reason.Like we did in the 90s when I was growing up, we understood that you shouldn't make large bigoted assumptions about a group. That has like deleterious externalities and that's why racism is bad. For the leftist framework to work, for it to dehumanize people outside of its framework so much that memetic sets from those groups can't reach them, it absolutely must fully dehumanize those groups.Simone Collins: Yeah it feels a lot like Tucker and Dale versus evil, which we've referenced heavily in another podcast.Malcolm Collins: our Tucker and Dale force versus evil problem. It is [00:08:00] about the way that the people from the urban monoculture dehumanize other people outside of the urban monoculture to such an extent that they can only see them as like freaks and murderers, no matter how nice they're trying to be to them And end up like murdering themselves in the processOh, good, look, your friends are here! Hey!You're supposed to want to have children. And this is your ultimate goal in life. It is a very archaic idea and old idea and representation of a woman. So you you're getting people to sign a petition.pledge, basically saying that they will not have Children until the Canadian government takes serious action on climate change.Is that your blood? What, no. No, it's college kid blood. And how many people have signed on so far. 1, 381 as of right now. I know what this is. This is a suicide pact. Oh my god, that makes so much sense. , we have got to hide all [00:09:00] of the sharp objects!In Praise of Shadows: genuinely in this part of the country. You have to assume that any white person you meet Is racist, unless they show you otherwise Holy mother of God! Some kid, he just hucked himself right into the wood chipper! What? Head first, right into the wood chipper! It looked like it might have been one of the college kids..Malcolm Collins: Yeah which is actually Tucker and Dale versus evil talking about conservative horror. Another really interesting thing is the way that he tries to other conservative groups from a community that he has claimed ownership of, that his cultural group has.So in the movie, he says that the horror space is a progressive space. Oh. Which is he calls it punk and dissonant and everything like that.In Praise of Shadows: horror is an intrinsically left, punk, anti establishment, counter cultural art form that is primarily concerned with social issues and pushing boundaries beyond what is deemed Acceptable by traditional, more conservative, polite society.Oh, he's just [00:10:00] a YouTuber. Why does it matter? Or, so what if he's a conservative? Is that a problem? Which, the answer to that is yes. But the reason that I care is because this does not belong in horror. Or anywhere. I care deeply about horror, and everything that he does has demonstrated so far in his career that he should not be welcomed in our spaces.Or even, you know, just in public in general.Malcolm Collins: While also noting that there are two types of horror content out there. Because he's there are talented right wing horror creators.And we need to be vigilant for them so we can expel them from our space. Oh lord. And then he categorizes horror in two broad categories. One is horror made for artistic to give people an alternate perspective on the world and give them access to minimized perspectives. This is the progressive lens, like a horror made for art.And then he's, and then there's this horror that's just made to be entertaining to watch. And that's human centipede. I don't think that's entertaining for anyone to watch.The day started off so what's your [00:11:00] favorite film?She you've been sent to be, Gone ironically. She said, The costume design was a highlight. I like it for the plot. Tell me what the plot's aboutMalcolm Collins: No he's talking about horror. Where like specifically he was talking about how in a movie that was released recently they took out some violent stuff because then it could get a PG 13 rating and reach a larger audience.Oh, okay. It's an intrinsically conservative thing to do. Like making your movie entertaining and fun to watch, for him, puts it in this negative category.Simone Collins: So it's okay, horror with broad appeal, but if it's more like horror that's like a documentary that teaches people, then it's, Okay. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Artistic merit to it from his perspective, but if the artistic marriage is in service to a conservative message like Tucker and Dale versus the force of evil, which is about how people in the urban monoculture dehumanized conservatives so much, the American rural poor so much that they can't see them as anything other than worthy of death and basically inhuman.In Praise of Shadows: [00:12:00] genuinely in this part of the country. You have to assume that any white person you meet Is racist,Malcolm Collins: And you'll see that this is his very much his perspective, um, which. So he first, and this was really interesting. So the, I was talking about how he's we own the horror space and we should not allow voices like his in the horror space. This is a really interesting thing to say, and it shows how this memetic virus works.It begins to infect a community. When I say infected community, what I mean is. The horror community, being a normal welcoming community, welcomes people with all ideological perspectives into it. But once you get a critical level of this ultra progressive, ultra urban monoculture perspective, they now think they own the entire cultural category, in this case, horror.And they now have a duty to police entrants into this community. Only people who one think like them and fit [00:13:00] their cultural rules belong in this community, but then he also reveals his hand about what he thinks about general society is at first he says, they should not be welcome in our space, but then he says they should not be welcomed in public in general.Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. The argument being that they. spread harmful messages, presumably?Malcolm Collins: No. I, he said we'll get to the arguments that he might use to justify this in his head, but generally he sees them as subhuman, not deserving of the same dignities of other human groups. And that they should be treated as such.And a lot of people don't understand how people can walk towards something like a Holocaust and society may not recognize that they're walking in that direction. Society where people like this person are tolerated. Is a society that is walking towards a holocaust.Simone Collins: Yeah, but dehumanization is the first step of any of this.You can't do these things to people. AndMalcolm Collins: elevating the murder of this family just for being in the wrong area, as a positive thing. And then he's also talking about [00:14:00] who is the other? Because he segments. It's. Christians. He's this is how we know he's bad as Appalachians.This is how he's always bad. But the most important thing in understanding how this larger memetic structure works is for a medic structure to stay stable like this. It needs to not encounter pushback, right? A normal human, like if he had ever interacted with like normal human content, or normal human beings. Somebody would put a mirror to his face and be like, you are becoming a Nazi. You are becoming the thing that you say you hate. And he would then have this moment of self reflection and maybe move away from these perspectives. Or double down, whatever. But it keeps them from seeing that.And keep in mind, I don't think that these memetic structures are designed or they're done with self interest. It's just that certain iterations of the structure spread better than others and are extinguished. better than others, by preventing individuals in those groups from interacting with anyone who might reflect back to them what they are becoming.Anyone who might disagree with this extremist progressive view. And the [00:15:00] way that they identify these individuals is just general bigotry, like Appalachian's bad, Christian's bad, etc. But then also, if a person has ever interacted with anyone else who they have identified as immune to this memetic structure, then that person also cannot be interacted with.And the reason I think that this has gone viral is actually this. It was his list of associations of Wendigoan, and he saw these associations as tainted. OhSimone Collins: boy, yes. And therefore,Malcolm Collins: Wendigoan cannot be allowed at horror conventions.Cannot be allowed. To create horror content without being dogpiled on. They want to expel all memetic structures that are antagonistic to theirs from any community that they have infected. And and keep in mind, people can be like, why are you calling it like an infection or something like that?Isn't that dehumanizing? And it's like, when you have a group that so dehumanizes other individuals, whether it's Nazi, like traditional German Nazism or this modern [00:16:00] form of Nazism It there is a reason that you need to go back and look at it like, like it's working, which is as a memetic virus.Because I don't think any human comes to these views intentionally. I think if you played back this video of him today to him when he first started encountering these progressive views, he'd be horrified. He would recognize that for what it is, which is fascism, traditional fascism. But what's really interesting, what I always actually really hurt me.Whenever I was watching, because I watched tons of videos on this to, to prep for this. Is Wendigoon's list of friends, he's yeah, his friends was like, Shoe on head, and Mr. Ballin, and Brandon Buckingham, and Okay, what hurts me is I'm just like, wow, this guy is so cool.In Praise of Shadows: Wendigoon is a horror conspiracy theorist YouTuber with several million subscribers. Has a dark past with deep ties to far right extremism. Wendigoon is very publicly friends with Turkey Tom. He is friends with Mudahar. He is publicly friends with Shu on Head, who is a conservative masquerading as a leftist.Malcolm Collins: Could I ever be that [00:17:00] cool to hang out with all of these famous YouTube personalities who like, I have parasocial relationships with through watching tons of their content.Like, Mr. Ballin, what a bro. Everything about Mr. Ballin is the nicest thing ever. And he's so cool. And then he calls, and this very interesting is the way he attacks Shu on head.In Praise of Shadows: He is publicly friends with Shoe on Head, who is a conservative masquerading as a leftist, who has built a career off of lazy anti woke content, complaining about SJWs.Who says stuff like, Karl Marx rising from the grave, finding out his movement has been taken over, by fat, ugly, mentally ill losers. I mean,Malcolm Collins: God, I'd love to do something with Shu on head sometime. So shoe on head he said that she's a fake liberal and she's actually a conservative because she's anti woke extremism and this shows how this sort of extremism medic structure works is somebody like shoe on head who broadly from our position perspective, it's pretty far progressive.She isn't, [00:18:00]Simone Collins: please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm so bad with names, but isn't shoe on head like one of the OG bread to people?Malcolm Collins: A lot of people consider her that, but I wouldn't call her a breadtuber. I generally don't like breadtubers, and I like SheWanHead. She's actually an OG atheist skeptic community person.Oh, wow, okay. Who then later became a leftist who isn't left on the crazy left positions. And the fact that he felt that being friends with her was a cancelable event, that's really interesting to me in how this memetic structure works. Yeah. And that it's not just anti conservative, it's anti anything that isn't extremist.Simone Collins: He's Robespierring, honestly.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, Robespierring. So explain what you mean by that.Simone Collins: You could think of Robespierre in the French Revolution as being one of the leaders that's associated with all the winch hunts and the beheadings and what happened with the French Revolution.Very broadly speaking, I'm butchering this. Ha, pun intended is that after basically all of the usual suspects and obvious people were beheaded in the French Revolution, everyone just [00:19:00] started turning on each other and it was chaos and, suddenly no one was really safe. And I think this is already happening and this is maybe what's indicative of what's happening now within the woke movement is having run out of conservatives to cancel Or centrists who are open about their opinions to cancel, they're left cancelling or attempting to cancel or attack people within their own, we'll say like broad culture because they're the only ones left talking.They're the only ones left standing on. I think I don't thinkMalcolm Collins: that's what's happeningSimone Collins: here. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: what's happening? I think what's happening here is. They see Shu On Head, even though she is culturally aligned with their interests, as being immune to the memetic architecture, which makes up the virus. And because she is immune to some elements of it, it's best to just remove her, excise her, and anyone who interacts with her, because in any of these alternate memetic structures that she clearly has [00:20:00] access to that have given her this immunity, it's Or going to enter and potentially destroy the cohesion of their community.Which isn't like, I can see why you'd have an evolutionary pressure to move in that direction.Simone Collins: She's being so cute. She's like smiling and stuff. I don't know if you'll be able to see, but we're getting more and more smiles each day, Malcolm. I'm so excited.Malcolm Collins: Oh, I love that. You're so sweet. But anyway, so another thing that's really interesting is how he justifies his dehumanization is very Nazi like in structure.So a lot of people don't know, but he literally accusesSimone Collins: him. of being a Nazi for associated with people who at one time have owned or had or held guns that Nazis used? He's really grasping at straws here. No, not guns that Nazis used, just had guns.According to one YouTube analysis of this I've heard, at one point there was one person who had or used a type of gun that Nazis used at one point, and that was enough.Of a tenuous [00:21:00] association. Of this YouTuber comparing it to arguments of Hitler breathes air, so do you, therefore you are like Hitler. This guy wore Hawaiian shirts. Oh, how dare, how very boogaloo, this is terrible.Malcolm Collins: This guy has repeatedly denounced the group, no, you can't not denounce the group.If you have any association, it's best to just remove you, only pure people. And this is interesting, right? Even if somebody now agrees with most of this guy's positions they lack purity. You could only. Be allowed in their spaces or at least have a loud voice within their spaces if you are pure and it really reminds me of this sort of idea of aryan purity and everything like that But it's more than that because I want to talk about how the nazis actually began to talk about the Jews and the groups that they would eventually cancel.And cancel, sorry, genocide. Is that what we're calling it now? We got to cancel them. So they would say that these groups were a threat to them. And I think that's what people forget. They said that these groups have taken most of [00:22:00] society's wealth and that they control all of the businesses.And that they now utilize these this power to be a threat to us. They caused us to lose World War II. They've been sabotaging us. And it's really reminiscent of and I should be clear, Jews in Germany did not do this. That this is very reminiscent of the way that he, because he identifies as queer, who even knows if he's gay.He's probably one of those, What we would consider as somebody who actually supports the real LGBT community, fake iterations of trans or it's like a cis guy who just identifies as whatever, non binary so that he can get access to spaces that really he doesn't have any business being in.But anyway identifies as, queer, and he sees Republicans like this alternate group as trying to exterminate his group, even though we haven't seen that at all, and people are like, Oh, but what about all these anti trans laws? And I need to be clear. And we talked about this in other videos.There is a huge difference between [00:23:00] being a against people who are born in the wrong body and want to live their own lives, and people who are actually sexualizing minors, who are actively, which is happening, you can't like say this isn't happening, like it is something that's happening, I can post a clip here from a turkey tom, oh turkey tom was another person who got mad at the guy for knowing, a turkey tom Such a leftist.He actually annoys me at times.it's genuinely really good grooming advice. On April 4th, 2023, Postcard reveals he's in contact with four minors. Age 9 to 13. I've so far sent it to four minors between the ages of 9 and 13. I hope it encourages them to transition. When the Anka Zone animation became a meme, they got excited over its virality among kids. Mana Drain and Orion also fantasized about getting kids on hormones orion was the manager , coercing him every step of the way. This is apparent by how he talked about him to others. 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 [00:24:00] 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. the two fantasized about assaulting J. K. Rowling's grandchildren. Not letting teaslers get with your kids is transphobic. Someone should Harry Potter woman's grandkids. Orion then goes on to call them turf meats.Malcolm Collins: But anyway Turkey Tom talking about this guy, he's yeah, we want to target these underage people and try to get them to convert for our sexual gratification. Like, this is something that's happening and conservatives are trying to prevent this because you don't want these types of people in and around kids.And some of the ways that they try to handle it might be ham fisted. But it's not, I think, wrong headed. And I think that if you actually cared about the trans people [00:25:00] who are just trying to live their own lives, you would see that this group of people who is using the trans identity to protect and to resist actions is a genuine threat to real trans people.They're a genuine threat to lesbians. They get in lesbian spaces and they, Harass them constantly and beat them up. We have, we'll have another video on this. They are a genuine threat to real gay men. 45 percent of gay men voted for Trump in the last election cycle, at least according to the one poll I could find on this.They don't identify with this. And yet they get smeared and they have to deal with the negative consequences of these types of individuals. So the point being is that there isn't actually. a right wing attack on the queer community at all. If anything, the group most defensive of the real OG queer community, people who just want to live their own lives instead of, aggressively forcing ideology on other people which is more of an ideological movement than a movement about just let me be who I am.That is the right leaning community because they are doing what they can to fight the mal actors. But anyway think the, they have it's just that the [00:26:00] structure of their arguments and the way they've been able to motivate this fear and justify these immoral acts in their community are so reminiscent of Nazis and the way that the Nazi movement came to power.And it is interesting that they have no internal reflection on this. That at no moment does he Wait, I just said that all of a population groups thinks a certain way or acts a certain way, or I just said that all of a certain population group shouldn't be allowed in public. And this group includes things like Christians.That's a religious culture. Like, how can you say that's any different than saying Jews, right? Oh my gosh. Christians have structural power and money in our society. And it's that's what the Nazis said about the Jews. Like that is the way this is. No, I don't think it descends directly from Nazism.I just think it's a convergently evolved memetic structure that is very good at purifying spaces. They enter a community. And this is also why you've got to be so vigilant within your communities about individuals like this. Because they enter a [00:27:00] community and then eventually they say, no, this is.And the best way to fight against this, and this is the other thing I've really found interesting about this whole event, it's very much like Tom and Jerry like shooting himself in the face. Um.Malcolm Collins: Trying to Jerry bends the gun back and then it shoots him in the face. I said it completely backfired on him.And he's being hard canceled right now, and I don't think this would have happened a year or two ago. I think a year or two ago, something like this may have been partially successful. And so I think that we are actually seeing, even from within leftist spaces An understanding of the toxicity of this extremist memetic subgroup and an isolation and quarantining of it, or at least a shaming of it to the extent that other people will stop doing this.I don't think they do it so sloppily. This is very [00:28:00] sloppy. Yeah, but that's how you end cancellations as a concept.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Like we might be seeing the beginning of the end of cancellations. This could be the last cancellation. I'm not saying it's the last, but look, last weekend, somebody tried to cancel us, right?There was an article on us and people tried to cancel us for using corporal punishment with our kids. Very light corporal punishment with our kids, which it's like 75 percent of Americans do and the research backs and we've done episodes on this. But. There was old research in the eighties that didn't back this, but I love how so many people are like living in eighties world where they're like, the world population is growing forever.Republicans hate the gays or I'm like, bro, like none of that stuff has been true for a long time at this point. Or. What was I talking about here? Or corporal punishment. Everyone agrees that's bad. Instead of, large amount of studies showing no, actually it's probably lightly beneficial.So, you where were they going with this? So what we could see is society corrects. We get a sane Republican base again and a sane progressive [00:29:00] base again. And I really like to see that. And that is when people say what? Is one of our core agendas and it's something we talk a lot about internally is to create a sane Republican,A Republican party that has a philosophical consistency throughout it, like a larger philosophical underpinning behind it instead of the broad populism.And I'm not saying that that's all Trump is these days. I actually. I think he's a great president. Speaking of gays, the first president in American history that supported gay marriage when he was elected Obama didn't do that. So let's be clear here. This is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about like their old narratives are just off.But I think that. The larger structure of there isn't a deep philosophical sophistication behind the new cluster of ideas that's making up the modern Republican movement. And I think some individuals trying to bring that in who I like, like BAP, Bronze Age Pervert, I think is fantastic. I think he's like the artsy [00:30:00] version of maybe what we're doing.And then there's individuals like us and, before us, like Curtis, who have been trying to, I think, create a philosophical theory of the modern or post Trump Republican ideology which for us is very much one, bull moose Republicanism, all, not just big government bad, but, like, All large bureaucracies bad, big companies be everything like that bad, and that we should see the conservative movement as a diverse, pluralistic alliance against the urban monoculture, against unanimity.This idea that this other guy's pushing for that everyone needs to think the same, everyone needs to act the same that there should be allowed to know diverse perspectives. And that is achieved through cultural sovereignty, through allowing for homeschooling, allowing the money to follow the student, allowing somebody to not take a vaccine when they're when they want to, it's allowing this cultural autonomy.that I think can drive this next iteration. So a hatred of large bureaucracies and cultural autonomy all above all else. And I think you can build [00:31:00] a larger cultural framework around that antagonist to the urban monoculture and the pluralist alliance against the urban monoculture, which is driven. By an undercurrent of vitalism fighting the nihilism that we increasingly see on the progressive side.Now, I think that the nihilism on the progressive side can be subverted, and I'm, I've really been heartened by the progressive response to this guy because before was progressive. What we saw was Gamergate one and Gamergate two. I've always said that their biggest mistake is that they don't.They always back the bad guy. The Five Guys girl, who was colluding and sleeping with people she was writing stories on, was clearly the bad guy. She did not deserve to be defended. Sweet Baby Inc. was clearly the bad guy. They were Creating bad games they were destroying franchises.They were, I've described it as like buying somebody's like childhood home. And people can't understand why people hate like remakes and stuff like this, where, it's a bunch of woke stuff. They're like just don't watch it or something. I feel like if somebody like bought your childhood home and then covered in banners about how much they hate you and [00:32:00] how much, how stupid you are and how racist you are, even if you're not racist, how homophobic you are, even if you're not homophobic, you'd be like, and then put like blaring signs around it and walked around shouting mean stuff about you all day.That would have the nostalgia mixed with the degradation would hurt, and it's designed to hurt. And yeah, I can understand people's reaction to Sweet Baby Inc. And the bigotry of Sweet Baby Inc. These are people like the people who are running it said a lot of bigoted stuff against white people.And I think that this is the other thing that the Republican Party, we were looking at starting an anti DEI consulting group. And what we're looking at is like anti bigotry or something like that, because that's what I see that says, and I think that's what Republicans need to stand for going forwards is fighting bigotry and radicalism.And I think that when you are fighting bigotry and radicalism you are fighting DEI, you are fighting people like this who represent, I think, forms of bigotry that everyone across the spectrum can agree is morally abhorrent.Yeah,Simone Collins: it's encouraging. I love not only though, that we're seeing this backlash, [00:33:00] but the politeness of the backlash.And I feel like Wendigun's response to this. Was so gentlemanly in such good form that it also gave me a lot of hope because it's one thing for there to be a backlash.It's another thing for the backlash to represent civility, cordial behavior. Kindness, understanding, empathy. And that's all stuff that was present in Wendigoon's response, because obviously, a witch hunt to solve a witch hunt, isn't really going to make this problem any better. And one of my concerns recently with regard to the backlash against woke has been that as much as there is an increase in pushback, really what we're seeing is not a return to some kind of normal, a market correction of society.So much as it is increased polarization and just that more people are moving to the other pole because they're getting rejected from one. And this suggests that we might have some hope of [00:34:00] reaching a new equilibrium of broad sanity instead of just extreme polarization that just gets worse and worse over time.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, and the goal of everyone, like us trying to make the conservative party more sane, I think that most progressives should be doing everything they can to cheer us on for what we're trying to do, right? We accomplish their aims much better than they do, but for us, the progressives that are fighting against him also are accomplishing our aims better than we can within the progressive side.Because what we want America to become is too progressive. parties that are having a disagreement over the best way to run the country.Simone Collins: Yeah, we don't care. We don't care. We want good outcomes. It's not like people areMalcolm Collins: acting in bad faith here. But when you get groups that genuinely want to exterminate another group, you can't relate to them in that way.When you get people like him who so dehumanize me that he would be excited about our family being murdered. That is because, we see in a family like the hills have eyes that I also think that also the [00:35:00] rules that he was using there are interesting. That it was okay for them to be murdered because they had encroached on another cultural groups space.Yet, He thinks nothing and so one, that shows his justification of what he thinks is appropriate to do when conservatives enter progressive spaces that he believes they have ownership over, like the horror community. But in addition to that it shows how much the rules apply to you, but not me.He thinks his cultural group should be able to invade anyone's space, because it is the correct cultural group. He should be able to tell other people, which he does in the video, how they should be able to use Native American words and stuff like that, even though, Wendigoon actually does have Native American heritage and this guy doesn't.Oh, really? He should be able to police the use of the word Wendigo, because he has the right views, the progressive views, and therefore he can encroach on native ideological spaces and weaponize them for his agenda. Which just shows [00:36:00] the way that I'll add the clip from my favorite, Gap year song.I was in Africa in Tasna I saw this woman, Malaria And she looked at me with this vacant stare As if to say, despite our differences, you and reminds me of this time, oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. I was in South America. In Prague. Prague. No. Pura darling, Pura. Peru. Oh yeah, Pura, Pura, yeah.Wonderful country, you know, beautiful people, yeah. Um, yeah, I knew. We were drinking in the Andes, and the sun was just rising and glinting off the snow, creating a sort of ethereal haze. And I really got a sense of the awesome power of nature and [00:37:00] the insignificance of man. And then I just shuddered.Everywhere.Malcolm Collins: That progressives relate to other cultural groups of beautiful people. Oh, lovely country, beautiful people, like tapping them on the head like just completely dehumanizing them. He sees them as nothing other than set dressing for his ideological perspective. Instead of this is what we say about progressives.Like they, they think that everyone's the same. Like, how can we, how can diversity have value? Everyone's the same, right? Diversity only has value because we're different in our proficiencies, perspectives, et cetera. Yeah. And and that all of these have a value until they reach a state where their goal is to erase everyone who's different from them.And I think that this is actually really interesting, is if you look at these two ideological perspectives, they can be like, Malcolm, aren't you doing what he's doing? I'm like, no, I am okay, and we've always said this, with every group, no matter how distant they are from us existing, so long as their end goal isn't to erase every other ideological group on earth.Now [00:38:00] this puts us at odds with some Christian groups and stuff like that. And we're able to work with them now because we have short term reasons to work together.Simone Collins: So to keep in mind we're also not trying to dehumanize those groups. Those groups are in some ways less of an a*****e than our groups.And in some ways more of an a*****e, which is to say we're in the mind of. Not everyone can be saved. People, who are not among the elect are just goingMalcolm Collins: toSimone Collins: These other groups are like yes, we want to save everyone but therefore everyone has to be like us Which is both not assholey because they care about saving anyone everyone but assholey because it's also veryMalcolm Collins: similar to his ideological So if he can hate these christians who are like we're just trying to save your soul, man, He thinks that if everybody acted like him and was part of this cultural group, and that's what we talk about is when they attack us for spanking, we're like like 90 percent of black families fake, and they're like, oh obviously, my criticisms of you don't apply to them.It's but secretly they do secretly. You do plan to wipe out that practice in their communities. [00:39:00] Even though it is what's culturally normal for them you have this actually notSimone Collins: even been secretive about that. They're just like, Oh they're just less educated because I'm watching the discourse online.Often people are saying yeah, and that's not acceptable either.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so they do have this cultural imperialism goal, but they believe that there's this positive end state from their goal. And then if they come to us and they're like, how are you so sure there isn't a positive end state for my goal?And I'm like, bro, have you been around an ultra progressive community? You guys want to have terrible mental health. You're riddled with anxiety. You're riddled with depression. You're constantly infighting. You are barely staying stable without your like, weekly visits to psychiatrists, which you're not seeing in conservative communities.It's clear that this sociological structure that you've built, it doesn't work. And that's why we don't want you spreading it to our kids. They're like, Oh we're going to rescue your kids. And I'm like, what the hell? You're not rescuing my kids. I have seen how terrible this structure you have built is.Maybe in the nineties, you could have claimed that it would work [00:40:00] if enough people tried it. But I think that's lost plausible deniability at this point.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And yeah, but I do believe that there is a seen progressivism, like shoe on head progressivism. I think that there is a place that they can go and wouldn't it be so great if this isn't the first of the cancellations we see blow up in someone's face.And I was mentioning, yeah, like the cancellation on us, it basically just increased our public footprint. That was it. That's what came out of it.Which we are incredibly lucky that happened.Simone Collins: Yeah. That'sMalcolm Collins: exciting. What a good development. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, so go to more cancellations, and hopefully one day, if any of the people mentioned in this video, other than the in praise of shadows guys, he just seems to be completely are like, Hey, I watch your content. I'd love to reach out sometime. Please do. Because this guy seemed to have the coolest group of friends ever. And I'm jelly.But then I reflect on like our group, we've got like pearly things watches us and we've done her show before. She's one of our subscribers. I don't know how much she actually watches us. But I like her a lot. It'd be cool if we did more stuff with her. And then we've got the normal [00:41:00] crew.I guess some people are like, Yeah, but you get to hang out with Scott Alexander and Richard Hinenia and all that. And I'm like, yeah. The and Curtis Yarvin the nerd crew. Which is really cool. What? It is. But I love how within the online influencer spheres, there's like our sphere, which is like nerdy intellectual dissidents.And then there's like the cool popular dissident circle. The non rationalist adjacent. Yeah. The non rationalist adjacent. The people who lookSimone Collins: more like the popularMalcolm Collins: kids. And I really see them as that. Like he's listing off his list of names and I'm like, Oh, that's like the aspirational, sane, popular people.Anyway. I love you to death Simone. You are amazing. And I really appreciate you. And do you have any final thoughts on this?Simone Collins: No, I'm glad you shared the story with me. I had not heard anything about this. So love me some internet gossip. All right. Have a good one.One quick side here where I would actually criticize wind to goons response to this. Is, he was very big on saying that people should [00:42:00] not attack this person for what he's done. And I appreciate the optics of that statement. But if this man is not seen as being attacked for what he has done, Then more people will attempt this sort of behavior in the future. It is very important, not from the perspective of this person being hurt, which I think is bad and everything like that because, you know, clearly he's just a mentally disturbed person. , at this point, You know, but that mental disturbance that he has is a contagious one. And if the public doesn't see that there are negative repercussions for these kinds of actions. Then this is going to happen more in the future to people who may not have so many high profile friends. And so it is very important that publicly this guy gets taken down.Do it. And let the English see you do it. And I will say in the response to this, if you're like, , maybe with a good person, maybe with an off day, he said, my heart was in the right place.You know, you can't know whether [00:43:00] your heart is objectively like a good or bad heart, but you can know the heart you really have. And what he said was that is I still believe in my heart of hearts, that what I did was right. And as such, he shows that who he is in his heart of hearts is just a black heart. He is. , bad a person at this point.And I don't know, I don't think he was born a bad person, but he has gotten to that point. I don't think that Nazis were born bad people necessarily, but that's where he is today. He was susceptible to a certain self-reinforcing set of mediums that has led him to this point.And yes, he can break out of it, but it would be the equivalent of cult deprogramming at this point, which is very hard in a society that's controlled by a particular cult.Malcolm Collins: I hate episodes where I have to have my notes up because your picture is smaller.Simone Collins: Oh, you are so romantic. How did I on earth earn someone as wonderful as you? Although, you know what? We've gone kind of full circle with me dressing weird. You met me when I [00:44:00] dressed like a weird ass hipster.And now I'm back to dressing like a weird ass hipster. IMalcolm Collins: don't think you look like a, you look like a, I'm probably going to label this video something like tradwife reacts or something like I did with the What was it? Gamergate 2 controversy. I was just watchingSimone Collins: a YouTube video commenting on tradwives and kind of the one of the big points they were making is Tradwives don't publish content about actually being tradwives like they never actually show themselves vacuuming or anything.It's always, preparing elaborate meals or talking about serving their husbands. And I should just create a Treadwife series where I'm like, this is me wiping up s**t again. Here's me pulling pebbles of s**t out of the bathtub. Here's me scraping s**t out of underwear.Malcolm Collins: Most of a trad wife's life is just around cleaning s**t off of things.Simone Collins: Yeah. Here's me using a a tool to get s**t in between the floorboards.Malcolm Collins: Oh my god. I am just delighted to be talking to you because today we didn't do our strategy walk,Simone Collins: I missedMalcolm Collins: it. And [00:45:00] I'm putting all this at the end like I normally do, like our just chat. You don't haveSimone Collins: to put it in at all.No one needs to know about how much s**t I put up with.Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. We want to make being a parent look good, right? We got to, yes,Simone Collins: you got to make fun. This is why tried wives don't publish that and or hire people to do it for them. Unlike us. Cause we're too cheap to do that s**t. Plus we don'tMalcolm Collins: shoot.What was this guy's channels name again?Simone Collins: Oh, the one that that talks about when to go, it'sMalcolm Collins: In Praise of Shadows. I'll compose myself for this, because this is one where I'm not probably going to put hot takes at the beginning, because I'm going to start with Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with renowned physicist and science communicator Sabina Hossenfelder to explore some of life's biggest questions through the lens of physics. Hossenfelder, author of "Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions," shares her insights on free will, the nature of time, and the challenges of understanding reality.The conversation delves into the implications of determinism and randomness in quantum mechanics for the concept of free will, the consequences of Einstein's theories on our perception of time, and the role of emergent properties in grasping complex phenomena like consciousness. Hossenfelder and the Collinses also examine the importance of predictive models in defining understanding, the evolutionary biases that shape our perception of reality, and the potential risks of misaligned AI in the context of branching timelines.The discussion also touches on the challenges of incorporating cutting-edge scientific knowledge into societal frameworks, the importance of science communication, and the need to address issues within academia while maintaining public trust in the scientific method. Throughout the conversation, Hossenfelder emphasizes the value of curiosity, tolerance, and the pursuit of understanding in navigating the complexities of reality.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone Collins, and we are joined by today, I think one of the best science communicators, if not the best science communicator on the internet, Sabina Hassenfelder. You can go find her on her YouTube channel. I suggest you check it out and subscribe, or you can check out her books, one of which, and when I read the title, everyone's going to know oh, that's why she's on the, yeah, that's why you're excited to have her on.But she doesn't have a giant, like 1. 3 million followers. It absolutely huge platform for. hitting people with reality, which I love, but the book's title is existential physics, a scientist's guide to life's biggest questions. And what I wanted to talk with you about on this episode is where you see the limits like what does physics answer?How have people misapplied physics potentially to try to answer life's biggest questions? I think a lot of people will. sometimes try to do. And yeah, just what are [00:01:00] your thoughts on this field as someone who is so knowledgeable in the best understanding of the fabric of reality that scientists have today?Would you like to know more?Sabina Hossenfelder: So maybe I should first explain what I mean with existential physics. So that though, that's a little bit weird because actually I didn't come up with the title. My, my editor did. So the original title of the book was more than this because I wanted to say that physics is more than. What you learned at school, it's not just about how atoms move and the ideal gas law and, switching the light on electricity, all that kind of stuff.Physics is actually a tool that tells us something about our own existence because it's about discovering. the fundamental laws that the universe works with, and we're part of the universe. So it tells us some, it tells us something about us. And so existential physics, the way that I understand it now, even though I didn't coin the word is that it's about what physics tells [00:02:00] us about these big existential questions.Like for example, does the past still exist? What really is time? What is this moment of now that we experience? How did the universe? begin? How will it end? Do we have free will? Are we really just big bags of atoms? And so all those big existential questions. And sometimes I come to the conclusion that actually physics can't really tell us anything about it.But in other cases, I think physics does tell us something.Malcolm Collins: I would love to dig into your thoughts on free will from the perspective of physics, because that's the topic we talk about a lot.Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah. So this is what got me onto the entire topic in the first place, because I made a video a long time ago about yeah.free will. I think it was taught, you don't have free will, but don't worry. And I think it was one of my first videos that attracted some attention, mostly because it pissed off a lot of people. So it's always a good recipe. But give us the short [00:03:00] version here. Yeah. The, the short version is this is not a ground groundbreaking new insight, but I think everyone who's, fundamental laws of nature, which you find in physics comes to the conclusion that it's basically a combination of a totally deterministic evolution law, like determinism all the way down.And then you have this occasional random element that comes from quantum mechanics, and that's it. So now I ask you exactly which part would you call free will? So to me, it's the There isn't anything that makes sense to call free will. And so this is why I'm saying I just forget about the thing with free will.It's useless. It just it gets people upset basically. Now I understand perfectly well that there are very renowned renowned, I always mispronounce this word, which is it? Renown or renowned? Renown. Yeah. English is a terrible language. Renowned. Philosophers who have found ways to define [00:04:00] free will in such a way that it's compatible with what we've learned in physics and this is what we've learned in physicality.And, yeah and it's, I don't have a big problem with that. I just think that it makes the entire phrase free will meaningless. But yeah, so basically that's the summary of the video.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it sounds very similar to videos that we've done on the subject where I often point out, it's humorous to me that in the world that people who don't like my definition of free will would want, I would feel like I have less control of my thoughts.By that what I mean is I'm like, so if the next action I take is not determined by my life history and my biology, then it's determined by randomness. That isn't empowering. That's not an empowering thought. And people will be like you believe that the, because I don't know if this is what current physics says, but my understanding is that there's some level of randomness within quantum events.And so that doesn't mean that the future is predetermined. And I'm like, yeah, but even if that's true, that doesn't augment the fact that the [00:05:00] decisions I'm making aren't necessarily heavily affected by any choice that sentient part of me has made affecting this probabilistic thing. Therefore it is irrelevant from the topic of free will.And I'm wondering, is that sort of your take or do you have a different?Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, that's basically that's the core problem like it's like you can't have it both ways like it's either free or you wilt it, but it doesn't fit together. And I think the way that most people try to accommodate it is that they have this idea that somehow this random element from quantum processes, so it's questionable whether these even play a role in the brain but that's another story.They were willing to buy them after all. Sorry.Malcolm Collins: I was just promoting your video on the subject. You did one on it recently.Sabina Hossenfelder: Yes, about the quantum effects. Yeah, that's quite a long story. It just exactly what's the role of quantum effects on the brain. say it's very controversial. [00:06:00] Basically how much does it play a role for consciousness?These quantum coherent states. Yeah, so it's an active area of research. Maybe they don't open minded about it, but either way I'd say it doesn't really give you free will. And the reason I keep talking about it, why it matters to me is that because they believe in free will, a lot of people seem to think.They're much less affected by their environment. They're much less influenced by what happens in society around them than is actually the case. And I've been trying to, convey the message like, you have to be careful about what kind of information you share. In just basically because once it's in your brain, you don't get it out.It'll be there forever. And it will affect you. The kind of stuff that you listen to you, the kind of stuff that you read it will affect you. And you also have to be aware that the culture that you've grown up in and the society that you find yourself and will affect the way that you think about yourself and what's going on this planet.Simone Collins: I really appreciate that you come to that [00:07:00] conclusion and advise people. In that way, after coming to this deterministic conclusion, because I haven't finished it yet. I've started Robert Sapolsky's determined. And there's a lot of people discussing this and a lot of people saying, Oh, it's dangerous telling people this because it could affect their behavior, but taking it that one step further and just saying one, okay, you don't have free will, but you do have control over every action you take.So functionally, depending on how you look at it, you're still responsible for everything you do. And you can 100 percent shape who you become by choosing what you're exposed to. And I like that you take a message that would make a lot of people feel hopeless and make it quite empowering in the end.Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, that's a, that's an awesome summary of exactly what I was trying to do with my book. I was trying to say, okay, so we have arrived at this conclusion. Like you don't really have free will because physics, blah, blah. But let's take it one step further. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And a point that I want to pull out here because we've mentioned this a few times, and I've noticed the way that this is often misapplied by people.[00:08:00] And for me, it's one of the most frustrating misapplications of physics is we will admit that quantum states can affect it. Potentially the way that neurons work and may even have like instrumental effects to the way neurons work, but that doesn't mean that a soul or intentionality can hide within those quantum effects.Those quantum effects are happening in your brain the same way they're happening all around you, which is mechanistically, if randomly. If they are affecting your neural architecture, it is in the same way they work within a quantum computer, which is with a level of, anyway, does that make sense what I'm saying there?Because that's something that always annoys me when I hear this.Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, no, that's basically also my attitude to the thing. It's the one point where I disagree a little bit is exactly what those people mean with quantum effects in the brain. And it's not just. Anything that's quantum, [00:09:00] because strictly speaking, everything is quantum anyway.So that it just becomes totally empty phrase. The brain is a quantum computer because it does something with quantum. Oh yeah. They're referring to normally certain types of coherent state or certain types of entanglement. So part of the problem of this field, which is called quantum biology, is that everyone has their own definition for exactly what they mean with a quantum effect.So in this recent paper, which I talked about, it was some kind of. big coherent state loosely speaking. And but yeah, like this isn't anything that's specific to the brain. Like actually I think in the paper that I talked about, they didn't even do it in the brain. They just, they bought a box of certain molecules and put them to a petri dish and there's some chemistry going on and I'm not part of it.much of a chemist. Don't ask me. And so they produce these kind of bigger molecules and then they shine light on them and it's nothing to do really with plates. It's just quantum chemistry.Malcolm Collins: I would love to go further on [00:10:00] your ideas around time. This is an area where I could use some education on what the state of the field is right now.So what did you talk about in relation to what we know about time right now?Sabina Hossenfelder: This is actually really old story. This is all based on Albert Einstein's theories of space and time. It's just that I think it's really hard to understand and just what are the consequences, what the consequences are of this theory hasn't been really sunk, it hasn't sunk into society by large, because the theory is much weirder than you might think.And one thing that Einstein worried about a lot is that his theory doesn't distinguish the past, the present, and the future. You just have this one thing, this space time. And the entire universe is just one thing. There's a special moment in it. And so this worried him a lot. It's now called the problem of now, like what's this thing that we call now?And it's just [00:11:00] mathematically, like if you look at the theory and derive the equation, that's on it. It's quite simple to see where it comes from. Like there, there is no way to consistently define a moment of now that everyone agrees on. So that's the problem. Like I can define my moment of now.You can define one and you can define one, but in general, we wouldn't all agree. It'sSimone Collins: everything, everywhere, all at once.Sabina Hossenfelder: Exactly. That's a brief summary. So now for practical purposes, since you and I, so I don't know exactly where you are, but you're probably not moving with close by the speed of light relative to me.For practical purposes, it doesn't make any difference, our nows are pretty much the same. But if you want to understand it on a fundamental level, like what is this thing called time? How can we make sense of it? You have to think about these sorts of problems. And so this whole line of thought, which comes out of Einstein's theory just said that everything exists [00:12:00] at once.This is the only way you can make. It's of existence and that it's hard to spot it.Malcolm Collins: It's interesting. One of the things that I actually forget which one of Einstein's theories this was where he's Oh, the theory would predict this, but I'm just going to assume this never happens.And then it, because it would be too weird if it did. And then later it turned out the thing that he assumed never happened is something we observe. Yeah, that might be what it is. Yeah. And so even other places where he's no, this is just too weird, but the theory predicts this it may turn out that it's just right.It's just not the way we perceive things. And I think when we're talking about things like time and physics, it's interesting that when you went into science, you wanted to understand, I think, like the nature of reality. And so you went into physics. And when I went in, I wanted to understand the nature of reality.So I go into neuroscience because I'm like what are we? We're the brain. So I want to understand how that works. So I can understand. But where these two fields differ is really interesting to me in that if you're looking at psychology or the way we perceive [00:13:00] reality as humans, The ways that we evolve to perceive reality don't necessarily have to align with the physical reality within which we live.They just have to be optimal from an evolutionary perspective. So probably the most important factor here is humans neurologically Appear impossible, just incapable of conceiving of emergent properties. And this is hugely important for understanding reality because a lot of reality is made up of emergent properties.So I'm going to quickly go over an emergent property here. It'd be something like you can conceptually understand the way that H2O molecules interact, but you cannot get from there to wetness within your own brain. Okay. In a conceptual framing, this creates a lot of problems around questions like sentience or consciousness or big problems of the [00:14:00] universe, because just there was no evolutionary reward for being able to understand these sorts of emergent properties.And the same is likely true with time. If time, like the past and the future aren't particularly different from each other, if even a mono directional pathway through time isn't even possible. particularly unique, there would have been no evolutionary reward for being able to conceive of that, which means that we would have an evolutionary bias against reality.And I think looking for the areas that we might be evolutionarily biased against reality is really important when engaging with physics.Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah. So I think I agree with. Most of what you said. I'm not entirely sure about the emergent properties because I think that what we do in physics, I mean you might be saying like you, you can't intuitively understand it.Like you either have this one picture like it's molecules bumping into each other, or you have this other picture and it's like a fluid and it flows [00:15:00] and so on. Yeah. Mathematically, we certainly have certain examples of emergent properties where we can understand how they come about. Now, you could say maybe I don't really intuitively understand the mathematics, but I can certainly use it.I can use those equations like, I don't know a lot about fluid dynamics, but I'm more familiar with Might be a conductivity, the conductivity of a metal or the optical properties like this is stuff which people now heavily study with metal materials. If you've ever heard of those, like the custom designed materials with very specific emergent properties, like the way that they react to certain sound or absorb it.And I'd say that people who work on metamaterials must have a pretty good understanding of emergent properties. Now that said, sorry, I know you, you want to say something, but I think you're quite right when it comes to this notion of time. It's something about the way that our brain works that we have this experience of the moment of now being [00:16:00] special because we need to deal with what's going on, basically, we actually had a memory of the entire past, like it'd be a mess.Like, how would we know what to do? So I think there's a strong evolutionary incentive to to do something. You blend out all this stuff which happened in your past, except for some very special memories that you need, traumatic experiences that you need to be able to call upon very quickly.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, so by the way, I completely agree with you. The reason I was using the fluid example is because like we understand the mass of fluid dynamics. Like you can mathematically describe something, but this becomes important in the field of consciousness, which is one that I'm really interested in, which is to say that even if we could mathematically and mechanically describe exactly how consciousness works, a person looking at that description wouldn't necessarily like immediately go.Oh, and obviously this explains sentience. Because we would say, oh, sentience is downstream of all these [00:17:00] equations and all these understandings of neural interactions, but it's not going to immediately click for most people, but it might for some like geniuses that I'm not part of that class.Sabina Hossenfelder: I think it comes down to the question what do we even mean by understanding? I get a lot of people who are like, but we don't really understand gravity or we don't really understand quantum mechanics and that kind of stuff. And I'm like if we do have the equations, and we know how to use the equations and we can actually make predictions that agree with reality, what does it mean that we don't understand?To me, This is what it means to understand some, you have the mathematics, you know how to use it. Like we can discuss how well the mathematics of quantum mechanics actually works, but that's a different story. So I don't necessarily so on. I understand that people probably mean on an intuitive level, they look at the equation, it doesn't tell them anything, because you must have worked with them for a long time to understand how it works.But to me that I'm, I'm comfortable with that kind of understanding that we have the math and we [00:18:00] know how to use it.Malcolm Collins: I actually want to elevate this question here about what does it mean to understand something? Because one of the things that we've been building out, the Collins Institute, which is an alternative school system.And it's one of the questions that we've been asking, a lot to ourselves is how can we get objective measures of understanding within subject domains? And the definition of understanding that we came to is that it is knowledge that helps an individual. Through understanding through knowledge of an environmental context, predict future environmental states and that the better if you're judging better understanding a person was more of whatever this measure is, can more accurately predict future environmental states.And this is something that is as important from physics as it is to more controversial topics like. Politics or economics. And it's why was our school. We're actually partnered with Metaculous, but we haven't done anything with them yet because we haven't gotten to that level of our development, but [00:19:00] it's a prediction marketplace.So we use prediction marketplaces. Students ranking was in prediction marketplaces. To then judge the quality of questions that we're asking them. It's a very, Yeah.Sabina Hossenfelder: I'm surprised, but I actually pretty much agree with what you say. I would have put it a little bit different. I'd say it's the ability to create a predictive model of a certain system.This isMalcolm Collins: just,Sabina Hossenfelder: speak like you, you collect information from by learning and you create a certain model of how the thing or the field or whatever you want to talk about works. And then you're able to make predictions from that. I think actually a good example of this is what It's like college is called a theory of mind.I think basically the way that it works is that you observe other people and you figure out, how do they react to other stuff and you create a theory of how their mind works. Absolutely. And if you study them for long enough, you can. You develop a more or less predictive model about how this person is likely to behave in certain [00:20:00] circumstances.Malcolm Collins: Oh, and this is actually a great thing to elevate here because it's one of the ways that evolution sort of messes with our brain. So we can think of a theory of mind if you've worked with computers for a long time, it's like an emulator that's running a separate operating system and a little sectioned off placed of your operating system, but humans evolved to be very good at creating these emulators to the extent that in a video that I haven't.I haven't gone live yet where I talk about because one of my fields of expertise used to be schizophrenia is that in schizophrenia, my thought is what's happening here is these are actually just hyper stimulated little emulations that are running that we evolve for Syria of mine, but it also creates a problem with human, which is, this is where a lot of magical thought comes from, where people intuit intentionality behind either global events, which can lead to conspiracy theories or behind weather patterns, which can lead to theology Or behind the way things are arranged in a shop window is that we, we always want to interpret unexplained patterns through a [00:21:00] background intentionality instead of through alternate models, because it's if your brain's a hammer, everything's a nail.Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, that's right. I think there are many other things coming in there. Like a lot of people, I think they don't like uncertainty, so they can't just let it out. We just don't know what happened there. We don't know we can't explain it And so they have this need to have an explanation And I think this is also one of the factors that creates a lot of conspiracy thinking.Malcolm Collins: Yeah here's a question I have for you. Do you think that like what is the state of physics right now? on Timelines is it would if you were to guess do we live in a branching timeline or do we live in a single timeline?Sabina Hossenfelder: You The person that I call me in a single timeline, phrase this very carefully, because if you're talking about these branching timelines, the question, what do you even mean by you becomes a very difficult to answer am [00:22:00] I the thing that would be branching over all these timelines if they exist?And then what does it mean that they even branch? All of them. So that's weird. But as I go on in my book, existential physics, which we started talking about is that you can't ever confirm that these other timelines exist. So to me, it's a little bit pointless to even go on about it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So Simone's theory on this particular topic or the way that she conceives of herself, which I found to be very useful because it wasn't the way that I did when I met her, is to only think of herself as existing in any particular frame of time. And all future iterations of her are fundamentally a different person.But this is just a framing. Obviously, the concept of self is a semantic construct that we use in terms of communicating with people to compress information, which is another problem about how we communicate. A lot of these concepts is that as humans, because we verbally communicate, we need to collapse ideas, which [00:23:00] Perhaps could be more nuanced or just there's this definition of self and there's this definition of self and neither one is superior.But people need to choose one to more efficiently communicate with other people, which causes disagreements, but you may disagree with that.Simone Collins: I would just add that. I think the more important thing is how this, how the framing that you choose affects your behavior to your earlier point, like the point of the book is depending on how you view yourself you are going to behave very differently.Like psychology studies have found, of course, I don't know if they've been replicated but they found that when people are primed to think about their future selves, They make different decisions in the present, and they like see older aged versions of themselves. So they've gone through an exercise in which they're encouraged to think about, future Sabina, future Malcolm.And so I think it does matter how you ultimately choose to frame things because it will significantly affect your behavior. And if you see yourself as one ephemeral person in service to a larger identity, which is what I do, it helps me make more responsible decisions. Versus sort of things [00:24:00] just being like, I'm me here and now.Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, I agree with that. Certainly important.Malcolm Collins: I'm gonna I'm gonna give an example of where it could matter tremendously in that it could lead to the destruction of life on earth. If you don't consider this question. If it turns out that the physical models that we're dealing with right now.Point to a branching reality. If you tried to create an aligned a I and you align that a I around a topic like, maximizing human happiness over time, and that a I then comes to the conclusion that we live in a branching timeline, it would exponentially rate the happiness of humans in future states over the happiness in humans in Today, because those humans would exist in multitude compared to humans today, leading it to make decisions that no human would ever make, given that we experienced timeline as a single through fair.Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, that's basically the problem that long [00:25:00] termists have run into, right? So yeah, you come to the conclusion that basically, it doesn't matter what we do now, because there'll be, hundreds of billions of people coming later. And there's so much more relevant. Yeah. So this is a big can of worms.Like, how do you even quantify happiness? Is this something you even want to maximize? Is this a good thing to strive for? There's a lot. of big problemsMalcolm Collins: that I think we're not going to sort out. We argue no very strongly on our podcast. We're hugely anti utilitarian. I don't understand basing your life around things that were just like environmental rewards that caused your ancestors to have more surviving offspring than they're competing individuals.I often tell people that a human optimizing their life. Around happiness or like a group of humans up saying, okay, we're gonna be, generally, utilitarians is like a group of paperclip maximizing ais, creating a moral system off of how many paperclips exist in the world. But that's my thought.I'm wondering what your thought is. How do you judge [00:26:00] moral goodI,Sabina Hossenfelder: sorry. I try to stay away from discussions about morals. I have my own ideas what. It's good and isn't good. I guess I'm more focused on trying to avoid evil, trying to avoid suffering. But I'm aware that this also has, you don't want to optimize avoiding suffering because if there aren't any people, then no one will be suffering.But yeah, I guess in my personal life, I think it's like first do not cause any harm. It's certainly something that I live by. Live and let live. I tend to be fairly flexible about, other people have grown up in, in other societies, other cultural contexts, and they just judge things sometimes dramatically differently.And I'm trying to be tolerant of it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And it reminds me a lot of like one of the core things we dedicate a lot of our channel and our personal thought to. Is how do we create cultural systems that have external rules but that these [00:27:00] rules harmonize with the current state of physics and can evolve as the state of physics evolves but still lead to positive action.I'm wondering if this is a topic you've ever thought about in terms of raising your own kids, because I know that you've been, lucky.Sabina Hossenfelder: When it came to raising my own kids, I have not. exactly thought about the rules dictated by physics, to be honest. Like if you're talking about the rules of science more specifically more generally, I actually think that society general has been, has a problem with incorporating new scientific knowledge.And it's something that I certainly try to instill in my children, like a general desire to find out how things are going on. So like we're certainly nourishing this natural curiosity, I'd say. So my husband's also a physicist, so it's not that difficult.Malcolm Collins: I love it. Yeah, no I love it.If you could talk more about [00:28:00] where we as a society, because I have my own thoughts on this, but I'd love to hear yours fail in terms of the way we engage with cutting edge science and overly incorporating it into our cosmological frameworks.Sabina Hossenfelder: So it's a little country dependent. So I think the, in the United States, there's a lot of effort being made in the direction of science communication.And in Europe we see far less of this. And I think it's a big problem because there are lots of people, they just get left behind, they want to understand how science works. There's really a lot of desire but there aren't enough people to explaining it to them. in such a way that they can actually understand it.And I recently made a video about this, why I'm worried about flat earthers, because to me, they're like the cannery and the coal mine. Because I think what's really driving this problem, like how can people, believe that the earth is flat, like we're living in in, in, in the year 2024, how can this kind of thing happen? And [00:29:00] And I think they're just totally disconnected from how modern science actually works. They just have no idea how far behind everything they are. And the issue is now that flat earthers are just an extremely weird example, but we also see the same thing with vaccines, of course, new methods of vaccinations.People are like, I've never heard of this before. It's certainly some evil stuff. And lots of other things like genetically modified crops and all this sort of things where people are just like, don't understand how it works. I want, Nothing to do with it. And this is a big problem, which is only going to get bigger.And so we, we need to find some way, to, to at least communicate the basic stuff somehow. And not on, on a level where we just say, don't worry about it. Go away. Just believe us. It's not going to work.Malcolm Collins: I actually find the three groups that you highlighted here. Something that I could do even a whole other video on because It's so interesting the ways that they're different from each other and their motivations.The flat earthers, I don't know if you've ever looked at [00:30:00] them, but the thing I actually find most interesting about the flat earthers is that they are really dedicated to the scientific method. If you watch the ways they try to prove the earth is flat, they rely on traditional scientific method and experimentation in their attempts to prove the world is flat.They just disregard all expert consensus. And if you look at something like the GMO people they often seem to have more of, okay I'll use as a middle ground the anti vaxxer people. They seem to have anti vaxxer and GMO are actually very similar. They have often almost theologically driven concerns which are driven by a desire for things not changing or a suspicion of change.Combined with a suspicion of the way that powerful interest groups that have the ability to make a lot of money if certain things are communicated as true. You're missing a key pointSimone Collins: though. And just like in between cries, she's getting hungry. I just wanted to point out that I think all three of these [00:31:00] groups have been empowered because of a crisis of reality where they feel like they have been lied to, and there have been real instances of misrepresentation or obfuscation of information, or just well meaning groups and experts coming to the wrong conclusion in the middle of trying to figure things out, like during the pandemic.And so because there was this one crisis of faith, Now, suddenly they feel like they cannot trust any expert consensus. And I think that's the one unifying bond that they all have. Malcolm, you're absolutely right. And they have these different little flavors, but still, I think that's aMalcolm Collins: really major, this is something we talk about in the terms of what we call the academic reformation, where we say that in society today, we have structured truth in a system where you have an a large bureaucracy, which certifies is, and affirms individuals that have better Knowledge of what's true.And then you have another group that says, yeah, but that central bureaucracy is prone to corruption. I don't hate the scientific method. I'm just pointing out that the central bureaucracy is prone [00:32:00] to negative externalities and corruption. And we went through this before, and that was the reformation.And we are seeing. And one of the things I talk about is the negative externalities of this particular battle we actually saw was the reformation itself. For example, the Protestant groups would go much more extreme in their witch trials because they didn't have a centralized organization to prevent sort of conspiracy theories from spiraling out of control, which is what with the academic dissident groups now with things like Q and stuff like that.But anyway, I'm not going to pontificate too much further. But you are a guiding light. In this, in that you are so un if you watch her channel, she is so unafraid to just say this is what the evidence actually says. Without any pandering towards any type of audience preference or anything like that.So I, I see people like you as the light through this tunnel that's not taking sides.Sabina Hossenfelder: Thanks for the kind words. There's another aspect of this, if I may briefly mention [00:33:00] this, which is that it's actually two, two, that the things going wrong with academia and with science, and a lot of scientists don't want to talk about it exactly because of the problem, which you just mentioned, because people will throw out all the babies with the bathwater.They're like, was this one scientist who said a wrong thing? Therefore, all of science is wrong, right? And so every time I talk about problems with science and academia, I get emails from physicists who are like, you shouldn't talk about this, because, people were just distrust scientists. And so I insist on talking about it anyway, because I think that the attempt of sweeping it under the rug just makes things worse.Malcolm Collins: This has been an absolutely spectacular conversation and I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time. And I really hope people check out your channel as a good place to learn what is cutting edge in science these days. Which can feel like we know some friends were just like, I don't [00:34:00] trust any science after the eighties.And I'm like, no, you go to her channel and you can get a fairly honest and sober minded view of what. And specificallySimone Collins: that is science with Sabina. Check that out on YouTube. Also check out Sabina's books, their Existential Physics and Lost in Math. Existential Physics is what we were discussing today.The Lost in Math is also fascinating in its premise. And then of course you can find Sabina on Twitter at S K D H. Sabina, thank you so much. You are amazing. Lovely to talkMalcolm Collins: to you. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the controversial topic of corporal punishment and the latest research challenging the mainstream narrative. They examine a groundbreaking 2023 study that found previous research on spanking relied on unadjusted correlations, ignoring crucial factors such as child behavior and genetics. The couple argues that the evidence supporting the benefits of mild, immediate physical correction has been largely overlooked due to ideological biases and the categorization of spanking as a human rights abuse.Malcolm and Simone also explore the potential psychological damage caused by alternative disciplinary methods, such as emotional punishment, and the evolutionary basis for physical communication with pre-verbal children. They emphasize the importance of cultural diversity in parenting practices and the dangers of imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. Throughout the discussion, the couple shares personal anecdotes and insights from their own parenting journey, advocating for a more nuanced and evidence-based approach to the spanking debate.Malcolm Collins: , [00:00:00] A really big study came out in 2023 that basically went through all the old research and showed that, yes, I was right to think it was sus . Now, you would assume at the very least, they would be correcting for child behavior, right? In these giant samples. I hope so. Yes, basically, they didn'tAnd they just used a giant sample size to push under the table that they weren't correcting. If you can't understand why this would be so insane and why this would obviously show that spanking had all of these deleterious outcomes, consider our family. We do not do any form of corporal punishment with our daughter.Because she just doesn't misbehave in the way our boys misbehave.In these studies, she would be in the category of non spanking, and my sons would be in the category of spanking, and then they would be like, look, spanking is causing more bad behavior.I was like, no, you [00:01:00] idiot! 2018, the A. P. A. Task Force on physical punishment of Children recommended an resolution opposing all physical punishment, although the task force cited it. Okay. Thank you. Five meta analyses, they relied almost entirely on Gorshov and Gorgon Kehler's 2016 evidence against physical punishment, which came exclusively from unadjusted correlations.EXCLUSIVELY from unadjusted correlations The task force ignored two stronger meta analysis that went beyond correlations, these other meta analysis concluded that harmful effects of physical punishment were, quote unquote, trivial. However, the randomized trials find spanking has a slightly positive effect. .Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. As we are now widely publicly known as the Abusive parents for our bop strategy to parenting.Bop It. Twist It. Soccer Boppers! Soccer Boppers! You can sock all day, and bop all night!Malcolm Collins: LikeSimone Collins: soccer [00:02:00] boppers. Yes. It's more fun thanMalcolm Collins: a pillow fight. This actually brings me to one of the first things that I've really noticed in the few days, because I didn't really think anything about the bop when it happened, and in the few days, in the while, since the initial event, I have now been paying much more attention to how I physically interact with our kids, and it's now really apparent to me, like, how rough I am with them normally, when I'm, especially with the boys, that ISimone Collins: But In a positive context, I would say like of all the physical interactions we have with our kids, the bopping is probably the lightest and gentlest.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like I, that was the thing that sort of surprised me and made me realize why I didn't think anything of it, that I like regularly punch the kids while playing or throw them across the room and they just find it hilarious. That doesn't sound very good,Simone Collins: but aren't we very rough andMalcolm Collins: tumble kids?I don't know what to tell you. Anybody who has worked with toddler boys knows that punching is like a cheat code with toddler boys. It's like one of their favorite games. And it doesn't [00:03:00] lead them to like playing rough with each other. I just want to be clear. We actually don't have that problem, but anyway,Simone Collins: They don't.They wrestle all the time,Malcolm Collins: but they don't play rough. Before we go further. One of the things that I love is the piece was like, he hit him so hard with an open handed slap that I could hear it on the recording. And I'm like, do you know, like the sounds that hands make when they hit things? This is like clapping.You can hear clapping on a recording, but you don't say he was repeatedly beating his own hand. It's just something that makes a sound whenever you do it, not, you don't need to hit something hard. Like that. Yeah, I'm sureSimone Collins: her recorder probably also picked up the sound of your phone being placed on a table every time you put it down, but that didn't come up.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But so I what I wanted to do is this episode, cause I found it really interesting is in the last episode I was like, okay. I just look at the research as somebody who has a training in science and it looks us. And this is where we were when we actually did our research to decide how to parent, right?I was like, the research [00:04:00] looks us. I think it sucks. Yeah. So I'm going to ignore it and look to other models to see if I can find a better way to do this. And we'll try different methods to see what works for our family. And what works for each kid? Um, it turns out that since I had that intuition, A really big study came out in 2023 that basically went through all the old research and showed that, yes, I was right to think it was sus and the conclusions were morally guided, and that if you did good research which they did, and they did like a meta study on the good research.It seems that the majority of the evidence right now shows that spanking is slightly positive.Simone Collins: And by that you mean immediate physical correction? Yeah,Malcolm Collins: immediate, light, physical correction. Interaction. It doesn't need to be immediate in their studies. So they looked at both immediate and delayed, but I would imagine from other animal models, immediate is really where you're seeing the positive effect, which is why I [00:05:00] suspect they're only seeing a slight positive effect.Just so you can know why we would think that when you are doing training in other mammals, delayed negative feedback is pretty much never works. So it'd be really weird if it worked in humans. It justSimone Collins: intuitively, it would make sense that, If there's some kind of delayed repercussion for anything, actually, this showed up Spencer Greenberg a while ago, did some research on.Whether or not gut response or intuition is a reliable thing if it's real, essentially. And what he found was that yes, intuition is real if or when it is related to activities in which you get, Repeated in high volume, regular and immediate response and feedback which goes to show that basically you can't train someone to instinctually change their behavior or responses if there is a lack of immediate feedback.And that is why immediate feedback is important. So you can see cross disciplinary patterns or echoes here. It'sMalcolm Collins: really important because this means that. [00:06:00] Through immediate negative feedback through something like a bop, you can create moral intuition in an individual, i. e. they will develop an intuition that is immediate and instinct around the world.Simone Collins: I shouldn't run into the street. I shouldn't hit my sister. I shouldn't, et cetera. Yeah, basically in the most important primary source of information, we have the Bop It commercial.If you can't keep up, Twist It. You lose! OnceSimone Collins: If you're too slow, you lose. YouMalcolm Collins: lose! If you're too slow, it doesn't count. And also Richard Hanania did a tweet actually before this whole incident happened that I really agree with.So he said one thing I find weird about the quote unquote spanking debate is that we assume if you hit kids, it should be on the behind. Why? Seems to introduce needless humiliation. There are a lot of other ways to hurt children that seem less problematic. Slapping, wrestling holds, etc. Oh,Simone Collins: people have done long histories of the Of spanking and just how fetishized it [00:07:00] was and how much it's aMalcolm Collins: no, I it is.I think Downstream of fetish communities more than people realize because one of the earliest fetishes was what was called the british vice Which was based on the type of ritualized spanking they did at british boarding school with the paddle Yeah,So it I don't think that the parents who spank realize they are doing something that is partially downstream of a very ancient fetish culture, but they are and it is a little weird but that's why it's weird.Okay. So I'm not, I know some parents are like the face is a sacred area. I would never do that. I would only go for the butt. We choose to only go for the butt. Okay. Less pain to have the same interaction. To have the same effect of shocking and reorienting attention, but I need to get to the research here.And Emil Kierkegaard famous for his very naughty opinions, which we do not endorse all his opinions, but he's not a bad like he is capable of stringing [00:08:00] together useful research, especially when it's in a field that everyone's afraid to talk about. ISimone Collins: love his sub stack personally. And he's also just made some amazing reference guides, how to find.The original full print of a peer reviewed journal article. I remember I wasMalcolm Collins: talking with someone online who's don't you know, this is bad. And I was like, Emil Kierkegaard actually did a great piece on this. And she goes, I can't read that. He's all right. He's officially banned. No he's dead.He's definitely verboten. But he's. This is the way the urban monoculture works. That prevents you from listening to any information from somebody. Once they are put on the immune to the urban monoculture list.And. Then you are no longer allowed to anyone who has interacted with that person.So we are not claiming to have interacted with him. But I think he puts together the information here fairly well. So we're going to go into his piece. Okay. So he starts and I'll put on screen here, all the countries that have made even mild corporal punishment of children illegal.Simone Collins: And this was news to me since the guardian article, I did not realize that corporal punishment was literally illegal in so many places.That is what [00:09:00] you didn't realizeMalcolm Collins: it because it was an incredibly recent trend. Okay. With almost all of these happening after 2005 and most happening after 2014.Simone Collins: Wow, so after we graduated from high school and most cases. Many cases.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This was like a recent and actually crazy change.And we'll talk about why it's crazy, but I want to read his piece here, right?Okay. Why was it banned? I think there are two parts. First, the academics say it's bad and they point to correlations between the use of corporal punishment and aggression in humans. Second, it's easy to find horrific situations of parental abuse. As you can imagine, the evidence about causality is not strong.How do the researchers know that corporal punishment caused the children's latter problems and not poorly behaving children causing their parents to punish them more? In general, they don't. They just assume this in line with their blank slate ideology.We could, however, draw up a diagram to make things more clear. And this was something I had pointed [00:10:00] out. I was like, I bet they're approaching this with a blank slate mindset. That's how they're getting these giant sample sizes. Cause I went up to one thing I noticed on a lot of the research that people were citing to prove this banking was bad is they had absurd sample sizes, which typically means they're not doing filtering.And if they're not, and this is Of all topics, you would need to filter this one the most in part due to this chart I'm going to put on the screen here. So to our podcast listeners, I'll basically explain. So you go from parental genetics, then through other parenting factors to child with poor behavior, which is influenced in part by the child genetics, which is influenced by the parent.Genetics, but the parents genetics also influences bad life outcomes. But then you have the cross relationship with corporal punishment. Then you have poor adult behavior. And then all of that leads to bad life outcomes. And so the idea is, can you sort out which of these is influencing the parents genetics?Bad behavior. Now, you would assume if you had trust in science, you're like, at the very [00:11:00] least, they would be correcting for child behavior, right? In these giant samples. I hope so. Yes, we're going to keep going. But basically, they didn't in the giant studies that everyone has been basing all of their research on.They didn't. And they just used a giant sample size to push under the table that they weren't correcting. If you can't understand why this would be so insane and why this would obviously show that spanking had all of these deleterious outcomes, consider our family. We do not do any form of corporal punishment with our daughter.Because she just doesn't misbehave in the way our boys misbehave.Simone Collins: Yeah, she's very emotionally sensitive. And like any sort of, if we looked at her the wrong way, like disapprovingly, She'd start bawling. Yeah, like that's the thing is some kids, all they need is a frickin look.Malcolm Collins: In these studies, she would be in the category of non spanking, and my sons would be in the category of spanking, and [00:12:00] then they would be like, look, spanking is causing more bad behavior.I was like, no, you idiot! Obviously, if you don't sort by but we'll keep going here. I'm just skipping ahead a bit here, but how can we be sure? And here he's talking about the genetic effects, because obviously these are going to be huge as well. And most scientists don't like to admit that kids inherit behavior from their parents. But then he points out that there actually was an experiment that looked at this. So the study was called the effects of spanking on psychosocial outcomes, revisiting genetic and environmental co variation. this study was trying to find out how much of the negative effects that were being measured were genetic in nature. And it turns out that it is around 60%. So the majority of any effect that was being measured in previous studies was just. Are these the type of parents who obediently listen to quote unquote the science or are these the type of parents who say, or for whatever [00:13:00] reason, either because they don't aren't aware of the science or they are people like me who are just like really anti authoritarian and like that looks sus or is it, you know, and I'll put some stuff on the screen here.It was the risk of depression was really heavily linked in this study as with delinquency and to a lesser extent alcohol.So then he says later, are there some brave souls that went against the flow and looked at the causal evidence and maybe. Even evidence that spanking might actually be good. Yes. And this is the key, really big study. And it was actually a very well done study by Reitman, Ortez, Cox. And it was done in 2023.And it's titled, Parental Punishment, Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater.. So to read some quotes from it over the past several decades, the use of punishment as a strategy to discipline children has fallen into disfavor in popular books among many parenting researchers, other well respected researchers point out [00:14:00] important instances where punishment can be beneficial if implemented appropriately together with positive reinforcement.In this chapter, we summarize the research on punishment, ranging from parental use of time out. to clinical use of mild electric shocks to treat severe self destructive behaviors that are otherwise within to change. We find that the bifurcation of research into causally informative studies, clinical child cases, and correlational studies of more representative samples have prevented progress on how consistent mild punishment can enhance positive parenting techniques, such as, reasoning and negotiation, especially in children with oppositional defiance, which given my genetics, our boys are very likely to have and do.Very likely. It'sSimone Collins: confirmed.Malcolm Collins: We need better punishment research to help parents, because most of them will use some kind of punishment sometimes. And then he said, they begin by discussing the role of the American Psychological [00:15:00] Association advocacy behavior in 2018, the A. P. A. Task Force on physical punishment of Children recommended an A.P. A. Resolution opposing all physical punishment, concluding that the quote research on physical punishment has met the requirements for causal conclusions. In quote Gershoff 2018, although the task force cited it. Okay. Thank you. Five meta analyses, they relied almost entirely on Gorshov and Gorgon Kehler's 2016 evidence against physical punishment, which came exclusively from unadjusted correlations.EXCLUSIVELY from unadjusted correlations is what was used to ban this in all these countries. Those in the studies, or if they had just looked at our family, would have put Titan in the non correlations. Spanking category and Orson and Octavian in the spanking category.Simone Collins: MostlyMalcolm Collins: 55 percent cross section Gorshov and Gorgon Taylor.The task force ignored two stronger meta analysis that went beyond correlations, either by [00:16:00] controlling statistically for pre existing differences, Ferguson 2013, or by comparing effect sizes of physical punishment with those of alternative disciplinary tactics, Lorenzi and Klune 2005. These other meta analysis concluded that harmful effects of physical punishment were, quote unquote, trivial.So they had access to these, and they were bigger at the time. Ferguson, 2013, or limited to severe or predominant use of physical punishment, Lorenz and Kuhn, 2005. As we've said, in the large meta studies, in the field they were showing That spanking caused no negative effects or had positive effects.No, I need to note here, the studies that came out and showed a slight positive effect. And the studies that showed a trivial effect did not control for in the moment, negative feedback versus delayed negative feedback, nor did they control for the genetic effect, which we [00:17:00] know is having a large 60% or so effect in the opposite direction. Which means that what they are actually showing it taken in light of all of the evidence we have here is a massive positive effect. From corporal punishment where it is needed.Malcolm Collins: But again, this is, and I'm going to keep going with this, but this is something that people should have intuited, like just at a base level. One, I mentioned all human cultures co evolving this tradition of course, but then two, you've also just got to think about the L evolutionary context here. If you have a pre fully verbal human, in that age range where you can't. them that this might kill someone and therefore you shouldn't do it. You are going to partially physically communicate with them. That is one of the options with you. You have the option for verbal communication and you have the option for physical communication.And you as an adult have the ability to physically communicate with a child in a way that gets their attention, but doesn't. Cause any long term damage or any real long term [00:18:00] pain, but still is an additional type of communication. You have access to it. Seems insane to me that we as Children wouldn't have evolved to pick up on that in a really intense way.And the way we see in other animal models and that we as humans wouldn't have just been doing that all the time in our early environment, leading to evolutionary feedback for Children to have an evolved mechanism around learning from that. Like it's just Yeah. Absolutely insane that you wouldn't have that.So in a way, I would argue that people who parent without spanking when a child leaves. Not every child needs some form of corporal punishment, but without any form of physical communication with the child. It is almost like deciding to parent to a child without talking to them for like certain formative years of their lives.You can do it, like you can find ways around them and they'll learn to speak through other mechanisms, but like it is pointlessly tying your hands behind your back in a way that like would almost never happen in an evolutionary environment. So I just, that, that was the thing that [00:19:00] really got me because I was they're obviously doing harm in these countries but they're doing it because they first declared, as I said, first declared spanking a human rights abuse.Then they decide how I'm going to research it. I'm going to determine stuff about it, blah, blah, blah. So this study, then amazingly, after this, they performed their own literature review that I'm going to put on the screen. screen here. What the results said. So in the weak designs cross section longitudinal, we see that the use of corporeal punishment, spanking, non physical punishment, e.g. timeout, grounding, both associate with later worse child behavior. However, the randomized trials find the opposite results. Maybe even the spanking has a slightly positive effect. . But yeah, so what are your thoughts, Simone? And now that we actually had somebody who did like a huge amount of research on this and was like, yeah, you're right. They, like the research was brilliant. And I really need to point this out for people like when to say research is stuff or suss somebody's like all scientists agree [00:20:00] and they're talking about a psychological issue and they're not discussing any edge cases.That means that there is some sort of, or there was for a long time, some sort of large motivation in that field to agree. Look with spanking. Where could that motivation be? Oh, spanking is categorized as a human rights abuse by numerous large urban monoculture organizations. Of course and I think that if you also want to talk about how psychologically damaging other parenting techniques are, that's another thing that's not really talked about here.That's what I wasSimone Collins: going to say is the thing that we've been talking about offline that I think is really underrated and that I wish people were actually talking about was, and this is something you first articulated really well to me. When you are choosing discipline or not disciplined, like when a kid does something that is unacceptable or unsafe.You are always going to be choosing between evils. There is no correct way. And it also depends on the situation and the child, and your current resources at the time are you in a quiet place where you can stop everything? Or are [00:21:00] you in the middle of moving in a vehicle or something like that?And. If you choose not to bop a kid, you are then choosing to emotionally terrorize them or verbally castigate them or do absolutely nothing, which could cause more long term damage in the future or make them feel rejected by you by totally ignoring them. No matter what you are going to be doing something that isn'tMalcolm Collins: No, but it's important to understand how not great this is.To a young child, historically, even fairly recently, because we were talking with a friend whose family had a history of having done this,Children who overly misbehaved were often abandoned. Or sent to an orphanage, or Sent to an orphanage where they'd often die at a very young age. And so abandonment of a bad kids was something that was done historically and children, anyone who has children knows children have an evolved reaction to this.When you emotionally escalate with a kid you are [00:22:00] essentially going Oh, I don't want to cause mild physical discomfort. So I'm going straight to. At an evolutionary level. I am convincing my kid. They're about to die. A slow and painful death. That is what emotionally triggeredSimone Collins: that feeling in them.Let's trigger thatMalcolm Collins: feeling. It just shows where they develop these arbitrary rules, make no painful physical contact with a child. And as a result of this rule, they then justify behavior that most sane people would be like, that is a horrific Behavior to normalize.Simone Collins: Yeah, it reminds me a lot of diet culture, actually, how, for a while carbs are bad.And then, then for a while saturated fat was bad. And what did we do? We replaced that with trans fat, which is a lot worse for people in the end. And I feel like a lot of the punishments that, or lack thereof, ofMalcolm Collins: It's like in clueless when she's eating gummy bears and she goes they're like carb free or something.They're fat free. They're fat [00:23:00] free. Yeah, no, but ISimone Collins: really feel like the lack of punishment or the emotional terrorism that, that parents are putting on, we'll say non corporal punishment parents are putting on kids who otherwise would respond well to corporal punishment is the trans fat of discipline.They think that they're doing the healthy thing. They think they're doing the right thing. So they're acting in good faith. They're just causing even more damage than they would be if they just lightly swatted at their kid and said, knock it off, you little s**t. And so we are hurting people and that's bad, but here's the other thing too.It's, I can't even be mad. At the people who are, for example, shitting on us online, sending us hate mail in the end. I'm glad that they're doing it because it means that there's a very strong instinct to protect children from harm. And I love that. I feel the same way. I go mama bear. If I think that someone's hurting kids, I can't deal with it.Like I will. I will, but, and they think we're hurting kids because the media is framing it like, again, you backhanded Torsten and he flew against a wall. They're not [00:24:00] being like, oh, he lightly swatted. It's, they're most of theMalcolm Collins: articles that re quote, they do say that it's just not the way people are interpreting it.Yeah. They'reSimone Collins: interpreting it in the least charitable wayMalcolm Collins: because they want to, they don't like our other ideas. They don't like what we're forcing them to recognize about themselves. They want you, but if youSimone Collins: believe that You should be really angry at us. If you believe that we're actually abusing our children, I am glad that people hate us.IMalcolm Collins: think that you are misunderstanding their motivations because we've seen it in the other things they accuse us of. And I don't think anybody honestly. Oh yeah. Like the fact that we're like,Simone Collins: people assume that we're Nazi, racist, eugenicist. Monsters to, yeah, I dunno. So I thinkMalcolm Collins: what you're missing, Simone, is you're overly kind interpretation of people.leads you to miss what's really motivating their action. They don't like the truth is that we're forcing them to confront, which that piece is really good with. It lays out the hard truth of what they're doing. The that they're victimizing developing countries, which are dealing with their [00:25:00] own problems by outsourcing our fertility problem to those countries by taking their residents, and they're like, I don't want to deal with this.Or even with the slap where people would just get freaked out, right? Be like if you're calling people who practice corporal punishment, like inhuman monsters, keep in mind, by that 2011 study, 89 percent of black families in the United States practice corporal punishment. And then they're like, what, you can't, you how could she slap, how could she slap, yeah, we'll have that.Yeah. You, what I liked about the responses we got to that statement was like, you can't say, ah, it was like pure progressive, like brain fire because They realized that I was right, that they had just said something racist, and they were on the racist side of this argument. I'm justSimone Collins: trying to bright side this.I'm just trying to say we can be united and caring about children.Malcolm Collins: I don't think so. You don't think they care aboutSimone Collins: kids?Malcolm Collins: No, I think it's a bad instinct to focus on other people's kids. Because then you always lead to cultural imperialism. You're like, oh, cultural [00:26:00] imperialism. We need to use that more.That's what I mean. It's what it is. It's how can they circumcise their kids? Don't they know that hurts their kids? And I'm like, no, it's their cultural practice. They get to choose it. They had it chosen for them. Who better to choose to circumcise their kids than somebody Who lived, you as an external person should have no right in this saying.And then somebody's I was circumcised and I didn't like it. And I'm like then did you have kids yourself? And they're often like, no. And then I'm like, then why like clearly they're part of a living cultural tradition and you're part of a dead one and you're trying to enforce this dead cultural tradition onSimone Collins: them.Malcolm Collins: And this is why this idea that you have, or this intuition that you have, that you should have the right to deal with other cultures, kids, I just think is. Totally wrong headed. Cultures have the right to protect and deal with their own kids. And it's not even culturally wrong headed. It can be used to hijack people to do stupid things very easily.This whole like starving kid in Africa thing that we had to deal with in the nineties, that was like every TV break for awhile and they're like, now give us your money[00:27:00] Not from disease or war, but from hunger. You see, here in the middle of Africa, food is extremely scarce. Does it look like she's having any trouble finding food?For just five dollars a month, you can sponsor a child. That's stupidMalcolm Collins: I loveSimone Collins: that the running theme of this episode is nineties commercials. What's going on?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, when almost all the money was just going to these large bureaucracies that had found out how to brain hack people,stupid. !Yes, Soda Starburst! You guys! Soda Starburst is holding food fromMalcolm Collins: the large bureaucracies in ant faces that have found out how to brain hack people with other people's hurt kids. Even now when you're looking at something like what's going on in Gaza and stuff like that, it's just so easy to focus on kids that you have no cultural responsibility to.And that by, and the moment you feel you do it it approves atrocities on your behalf because now you're like I said, because of the kids, now I can do whatever I want. And I just don't think that's a helpful instinct and it's one that can [00:28:00] be easily hijacked by nefarious forces.But I will say for the beginning here, like we've gotten through like a whole week of how can she slap?Simone Collins: It isHow can you slap? How can you slap? Are you mad or what bloody? How can she slap? How can she slap me? HowMalcolm Collins: absolutely wild. But the other thing I wanted to note here is. The science does eventually get this stuff right often. If you take long enough, somebody's oh, this is a fun area where I can overturn the field and do something that is controversial and interesting.But also keep in mind that you didn't hear about this giant meta study that had carefully analyzed the field and found out that actually spanking seems to have positive effects and certainly doesn't have negative effects. You didn't know that the better conducted and larger study showed no negative effects.AndSimone Collins: sadly, the person who's providing thoughtful and useful translation to the average lay [00:29:00] person. Emil Kierkegaard is someone that most people who've ever heard of him on Twitter, for example, are like, Oh no, he is a forbidden person. I'm never going to engage with anything he ever publishes, even though he constantly publishes super interesting stuff.So yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah and this isn't to say that we agree with everything he publishes, but that doesn't mean anything is not worth intellectually engaging with.Simone Collins: Yeah, just because someone says something that you disagree with in one realm doesn't mean that if they say the sky is blue, you're like definitely the sky's not blue.And I should point out that the big study wasn't done byMalcolm Collins: Emil.Simone Collins: He just brought it to our attention. He was just going over the existing research. That's why I'm saying he's really good at it taking issues and saying here's what I'm seeing. Here's this study. And then, here's actually how it was conducted.Like he typically goes into the mechanics of what's going on behind the research, which I'm really bad at doing.Malcolm Collins: This particular study was really good because It was big and it showed how biased these institutions are. [00:30:00] And this is the way the urban monoculture acts is it is at its core imperious. It believes it has the right to all other cultures, to everyone's kid.And it will use any means it can to exercise that even if anyone who was logically thinking would recognize, oh, you're hurting kids in banning this sort of, moderate behavior. As a final note here, I actually, love the idea that this has gone so viral because I hope that we get seen one day as like parenting influencers for parents who want to be like sane and cut through the BS and okay, these are people who really understand the science, who are very smart, who are very considerate, and they're going to provide me with this is what you actually need to worry about.This is what you actually don't need to worry about. Yeah. No, there's just so much stuff. So many, like the whole freak out about breast milk, for example, it's like breast milk has some positive effects for early diseases. Specifically gut health in the early years, which can affect nutritional uptake and can have minor effects in a [00:31:00] few areas, but if it's massively inconveniencing you, it's not really worth it.And the. Effects become marginal from what I've seen in the research that I actually find believable after a few months. And a lot of people are like, you can't say that. That's not what we're supposed to believe. And it's yeah, but it's what I'm seeing in the data. So we'll call it BOP style parenting.I think that's what a lot of and I also love another really funny thing. It's a lot of these writers who are writing about us are younger than us. So they don't know Bop It. They don't know, I think that's anSimone Collins: interesting thing that millennials get that no one else is getting because the term Bop during our generation was associated with playful, light, physical contact.There were specifically two toys. One was called the Sock and Bopper. It was like a blow up. Punchy thing.Soccer Boppers! Soccer Boppers! You can sock all day, and bop all night! Soccer Boppers! Soccer Boppers! More fun than a pillow fight! [00:32:00] Blow em up, put your hand inside, Get ready to have the time of your life! Soccer Boppers! Soccer Boppers! Sock em once, and bop em twice! Soccer Boppers! Soccer Boppers! Soccer Boppers!More fun than a pillow fight! By Big Time Toys! Soccer Boppers!Simone Collins: So basically, toy makers realized, Oh yeah, kids like to punch each other a lot. Like our boys do all the time when they're playing around and Oh, maybe we can lessen the impact. So we'll make a balloon that goes on your hand.And then there was the Bobbit, which is just a toy that you smack around.Hey! Wanna play Bop It? It commands you obey! Bop It. Twist It. Pass It. If you can't keep up, Twist It. You lose! Once you get your hands on Bop It, You're not gonna wanna stop it! Fast Talking Electronic Bop It. Batteries not included.Simone Collins: I actually want to talk to theMalcolm Collins: Talkin Boppers because this is not a toy that could go popular right now.Simone Collins: Oh heavens no. To encourage children to punch each other? How could you? [00:33:00] But itMalcolm Collins: shows how much things have changed.That we used to understand that boys play and learn rough. Yeah. Like when a boy's being a, a Why do youSimone Collins: think boys get in trouble so much more at school?Malcolm Collins: That's theSimone Collins: thing. Our society doesn't permit them to be themselves.Malcolm Collins: Slugs and snails and puppy dog tails. Is what little boys are made of.They're not made of the same things as little girls. And this is an interesting thing. I can already see the difference in, in emotional needs of my kids. With the male kids, and we'll probably do a full episode on this one day. The male kids really play fighting.Like me getting on my knees or on the floor and play fighting them is probably the most fun they have in their lives.And this seriously, I don't think anything, any activity I do with them is nearly as fun for them as play fighting with their dad. I love it. But the girls or the one girl who's really, able to engage right now,Simone Collins: old enough for us to see a sample of,Malcolm Collins: when we're play fighting, she'll sometimes engage, but mostly she's off doing her own thing.But what she really loves is [00:34:00] just being held and hug. She is very needy in terms of hugs and stuff like that. And it's just a different way of engaging with the world. And I've noticed a lot of these people who are like, Oh, I would never do use any sort of corporeal punishment with my child.I'm like. They either have one or fewer boys.Simone Collins: Or yeah, if you have a girl, I would totally understand that intuition. Yeah, this is averages. There are some rough and tumble girls. There are some very sensitive boys. And so we're not saying that any of this is well, another thing that IMalcolm Collins: found very interesting and I might just go to people going forwards that do this.Cause one of our friends pointed out that like their sibling had said some mean stuff about us online over this. And they were like this person has two female kids and one of them is already on Xanax. And not, what was it? Not Xanax. It was Zoloft. One of them's already on Zoloft. And this is actually important to elevate.Is that a lot of the people who criticize us and I actually would ask people going [00:35:00] forwards. If they're criticizing us for this, I'd say, okay, how many kids do you have? Or rather, how many boys do you have? Is the more important question. And then the second question I'd ask is, okay, how many of your kids have a mental health issue or taking medication for mental health issues?And of course, then they're going to go, they're immediately going to be like, I can't tell you that. And I'm going to be like so that. An obvious sign that one of your kids definitely has a mental health issue. And you cannot tell me that your parenting style was superior to mine when it led to deleterious outcomes.And then if not that, then I say, then how long a week do you actually spend with your kids? Because this is another thing she was noting. This person who was complaining about us, literally only spends weekends with their kids. And it's they have no idea how to parent really. And that's the problem.A lot of quote unquote, parents don't have to actually parent. And so they come up with insane ideas about how parenting works. We don't have nannies around most of the time when our kids are with us, we don't have any sort of help like that. And so we have to actually parent and these people don't, they have somebody to [00:36:00] pin down every child in their house.If all of them are. Playing bad at the same time. And so they never need to learn real parenting techniques.Simone Collins: That or they treat parenting like helicopter parenting. And for sure, when any of our kids are with us one on one, I don't think we've. Ever been in a situation where we would need to bop one of our kids when it's us and one of the kids.So like probably if we had only kids, this would never be a thing. It only really like kids only seem to our kids at least get really riled up and out of hand. When they're feeding off each other and things get chaotic. Which I like.Malcolm Collins: I like that they're able to get chaotic and out of hand.Simone Collins: Yeah.But it sometimes means that they aren't hearing us when we say they need to simmer down. And, only physical questions. You did knock it off, youMalcolm Collins: little s**t. I'm almost sad that I behaved so well in the moment that I was like, Torsten, daddy loves you. I immediately did all this stuff, kept him in the circle of love without making him feel expelled, but let him know he had crossed the boundary.I [00:37:00] almost wish I just said, knock it off your little s**t.Simone Collins: We don't do that though. Like we want our kids to not feel rejected. We don't do the whole emotional terrorism thing, which is. I think favorable, that'sMalcolm Collins: not too right. Yeah. I think, I hope that we can I would say all kids are different.Learn yourself, we'll be parenting influencers as well, I suppose in terms of parenting methods, because I, I. I think that it is important to cut through the BS that is being put out there by ideologues as science, but doesn't actually have data behind it. I love you, Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: And I love our kids. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this insightful episode, Malcolm reflects on his 10-year Stanford GSB reunion and shares valuable lessons about pursuing your dreams and finding the right partner. He discusses the importance of living a life dedicated to your values, rather than simply chasing prestige and wealth. Malcolm and Simone also delve into the challenges of finding a compatible partner, especially after achieving financial success. They emphasize the significance of starting to work on your dreams today and the power of marrying someone who believes in your potential. Join them as they explore these thought-provoking topics and offer practical advice for living a fulfilling life.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] One of the, a few of my classmates got a company. It's easily a billion dollar company now. . And I was talking to one of the guys because, when you're working on a company like this, you are stuck 24, seven, basically tied to your desk.Extreme working hours. . So I was like, so what are you doing now? And he goes, Oh I left to start another company. And I don't understand it. I don't understand why, like for me, startups were not the point of the startup. The startup was to get you financial freedom or to get you the freedom to do what you want to do. if you have dreams about one day doing some big project that you haven't started on yet, you're never going to do that project.So go out and start today or it's never going to happen. I'm just telling you that right now. It's never going to happen if you aren't in some small way working on it right now,Simone Collins: jump out of the plane, pull out the parachute. No. You are the only person who can decide that. And I think that's important for everything.When it comes to getting a partner, when it comes [00:01:00] to having a kid, you have to just throw yourself out of the plane. There's never going to be a time where you really feel ready.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: All right, Simone, it is wonderful to be chatting with you again today. Today. We are going to reflect on my 10 year Stanford GSB reunion. For those of you who don't know, that's the Stanford MBA program. It's generally, I think, about the hardest program to get into in the world.Harder than Harvard, right?On We went viral for one thing or another on Reddit once and some people were like, Oh, he misleads people in the way he talks that makes it sound like he got a neuroscience PhD at Stanford, but he only got an MBA. I'm here fuming because it is much harder to get into the MBA program than the neuroscience PhD program.I am like, what? Anyway because I could have done that. I actually had applied to both of them, but I withdrew my application when I got into the MBA program. Cause I was like, what's the point? You get into the MBA program [00:02:00] and you can basically write your own check in life if you get into a Stanford or Harvard MBA.But what I want to talk about in this podcast is a few things. One, the utility of an MBA in today's market economy. Cause I've seen some heavily overlapped YouTuber to us was like, MBAs don't matter anymore. And I was like you don't know what you're talking about. Like I am fairly against the university system.But he's just unaware of the opportunities. The doors, itSimone Collins: opens the network. It's insane. Like basically when you were there, the most prestigious companies out there just lined up to try to hire you.Malcolm Collins: Included Eric Schmidt and Connalisa Rice. AndSimone Collins: The people that could bring in for your classes,Malcolm Collins: like Chambath would come in and like yell at everyone in our class.And these are small classes too,Simone Collins: when Evan Spiegel came in and soar a lot in front of your class.Malcolm Collins: So I want to be clear that and people are like, oh you get high profile people that didn't know what really you do. The [00:03:00] classes don't matter. It's the alumni network anywhere afterwards.I guess I can start with this. When you cold email people, especially like right around graduation or for the first few years after graduation, and you include that in your subject line, you get like a 50, 60 percent response rate actually, especially from high profile people, because they're often looking for bedded, hungry, young people that they can Put into positions is sort of gophers because what you begin to realize is that from the perspective of many of the quote unquote elite in our society, what there is a shortage of is competent, self motivated young people.Who don't just dismiss them or arrogant or working on their own projects or something like that. And to an extent they're right. If you're in our current economy and you are competent and ambitious it's a big question as to why you aren't just starting your own company. No, seriously, like, why aren't you so this helps that for them, that sliver of competent and ambitious people who aren't just immediately doing their own [00:04:00] thing which is high utility for, Groups like that.Also for venture capitalists, it makes it much easier to raise money, et cetera. You're basically putting a modifier on everything. Now, this is not true for all MBA programs. This is basically only true for Harvard and Stanford. And to a lesser extent Wharton and then after Wharton. MBA is just not worth it.Because MBA program isn't like an undergrad where it like declines in quality on a linear basis. It's like a logarithmic sloop down. And the reason is because you're sacrificing two years of your career that you could be using to put yourself into a higher position. So basically withSimone Collins: our kids you're going to tell them, unless you get into Harvard or Stanford.Maybe Wharton, probably not. Don't bother, right?Malcolm Collins: Don't bother. Yeah. That's what I'd say.Simone Collins: By the time our kids are going to university, you're going to tell them not to go to university. Probably.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, because it's okay, you sacrifice two of your career years for this. So you better be getting an actual big boost, which is what causes this logarithmic scale and MBA program quality.But anyway, The [00:05:00] reunion, because this was really interesting because I got a chance to compare myself to how other people were doing. And it highlighted to me how unimpressive the people who are objectively more successful than me are to me these days. And the catastrophically poor life choices that people even in positions of Economic privilege end up making and it's worth highlighting this so I can go over like a few anecdotes that really got to me.One of the, a few of my classmates got a company. It's easily a billion dollar company now. This was started by four or five of my classmates. And they've all moved on from it at this point, but they started it. They've made enormous amounts of money. And I was talking to one of the guys because, when you're working on a company like this, you are stuck 24, seven, basically tied to your desk.Extreme working hours. The team, they worked really hard to make this [00:06:00] happen. And it was an incredibly. Boring logistics based company on like the way that code travels between various like high performance apps.Simone Collins: And this was after a ton of pivots, not just from the, this first company, but from other companies they started.Oh, they workedMalcolm Collins: so hard. Yeah. This is the first company they started with actually about dog monitoring. And then another one was about photo books. They were relentless. They done. I'm going to describe the two bad idea companies that they started first. The first was not necessarily bad ideas, but just gives you an idea of how entrepreneurialism works.They started a company that was for monitoring people's dogs for like really obsessed dog moms that were like a baby monitor for your dogs that would monitor their health. I could see that doing well. They just didn't get any market traction. Then the next was like automatically printing out your Facebook pictures as photo books for elderly relatives.Not a terrible idea, didn't catch off. We actually have ordered one.Simone Collins: We liked the one that we were like, I think we should have the one that weMalcolm Collins: got products. And it didn't cost that much. You could do it for 50 bucks. But then the final one that they went into was for [00:07:00] deep linking code between apps for I don't exactly understand it, but if I was going to try to explain it, it was like, so that Facebook could like deep link contact to another system without using a normal type of URL deep link.I don't understand it. And anyway so we're talking to the guys who founded it and he was like, yeah. So I was like, so what are you doing now? And he goes, Oh I left to start another company. And I was like, what does it do?And it was something equally boring, like not world changing. I can't understand debting yourself to a company. If you're like trying to change the world or something like that. Or if you have full control this time, but no, he raised money from VCs. Again, he has yet a save to the entire cycle.Again, it's like you sell all any, he was still living in like Palo Alto, right? Not dating, not going out, and I was I don't understand it. I don't understand why, like for me, startups were not [00:08:00] the point of the startup. The startup was to get you financial freedom or to get you the freedom to do what you want to do.And this was actually very similar to a conversation. Just so you know, I didn't actually out anyone with this conversation because Five people from my class were founders of that company so that doesn't really narrow it down. But this was very similar to many conversations I had at the class.And actually, somebody simply similar were said on a couple occasions. So another one of my classmates who actually was the most similar to us move to Napa works around wineries, some sort of like winery consultant thing. And her husband does like wine sales. That sounds verySimone Collins: romantic.Honestly. Yeah. They'reMalcolm Collins: not making a lot. They're probably making around what we make as a family, which is.Simone Collins: We should point out that what you, you kept telling me while you were there, because I stayed home being postpartum and all that with the kids Oh we're like the least successful in our class.Everyone's more successful than us. And by successful, I ultimately found out you meant. In terms of earning and in terms of the histogram of [00:09:00] earnings from Stanford grads, you were off the charts, like twoMalcolm Collins: standard deviations from the mean. Yeah, basically average, you're impoverishedSimone Collins: among class.Member of myMalcolm Collins: class I think is earning somewhere half a million a year now. Can you imagine that's so much was within one standard deviation in the top range was well over a million a year per individual. The, again, this is the how useful anSimone Collins: B is. right? This is what Stanford grads are earning that the average is 500, 000 shows you how valuable that MBA is.Malcolm Collins: So they had told this other person in me on different cases Oh, you guys must be like the most successful people in our class because you are doing what we all want to do after we make enough money. And this is where I was like, wait a second, you know that this other person in the class who's doing this and I, we are like off the chart in terms of the low income group of the class.And then it got me thinking about the way people structure their lives more generally. [00:10:00] And it made me realize that this is the way so many people structure things. Is there like, oh, I'll go out there and get rich. And then I'll use the fact that I've gotten rich to live the life I want to live without asking themselves how much does it really cost to live the life I want to live?What is the ideal life I have? And pursuing the lifestyle in concurrence. With wealth and prominence and everything like that with the understanding that while you are living a lifestyle you want to live, that is going to hinder your, we'd be making so much more if we were living in like San Francisco or New York, but the quality of life in those environments is terrible.And alsoSimone Collins: just, it's so ugly in the Bay Area. And I don't think people realize that. They think San Francisco, you think of the most beautiful streets on San Francisco, you think of Coit Tower, Lombard Street. You don't realize that most of what people are living in around Palo Alto in Oakland, around [00:11:00] California, even in San Francisco is just ugly suburban sprawl because soon tight Indy.It just gross looking houses that aren't getting updated because zoning is so terrible. It is not a pretty place to live. And even if you have a ton of money, the best you can buy with that is not very nice. So it's just a terrible area. Like the cost of earning that much is basically living in a gross area.Malcolm Collins: this brings me, one of the classmates I was talking to became like a real of her type guy. And he did New York real estate was one of the things he worked under. He was one of the, I assume less successful people, but you can make a lot of money in New York real estate. Who knows?And he. Was telling me that in the New York real estate market, you would always see the same story. People would come into New York and get a house that was like cheap and small and far away from the center of the city. And they'd be like I'm just getting here to, find a spouse [00:12:00] and earn some money.And then I'm going to transfer from that into. Um, then leave and live the lifestyle. I actually want to live, be financially unconstrained. And he goes, and the same thing always happened with follow ups. He goes, once you got somebody into the city, they're a repeat customer.Simone Collins: Within city purchases. Like they don't, yeah. WithinMalcolm Collins: city purchases, no matter what they tell you, it's always I want something a little closer to central park. I want something with a little better view. I want something a little bit bigger, two, three years. And it's just, it's, cycle that once somebody gets into the cycle, they can't break their mind out of the cycle because of their immediate goals.And I think that this is the problem with the way goals work in somebody's mind is that their immediate goals are usually structured around doing what they're doing now, but higher prestige and slightly better. And sometimes their long term goals are a Like leap step away from that. If you understand what I mean, it's [00:13:00] like a completely different type of a thing.It's likeSimone Collins: a lateral move in life. It's a very different career and move. And I think one of the things that's getting in people's way is they know what they know. So the startup founder example that you gave to us. He knows how to start companies. He knows how to work his ass off.He doesn't know how to necessarily become a writer or a philanthropist or whatever. It's just so different. And I think there's also this big fear of potentially failing, especially once you've been so successful. I think a lot of the people who get into one of the most prestigious schools in the world, like Harvard or Stanford, and then they graduate and then they continue to succeed.The cost of then trying something new and failing, I think becomes higher. So this is along the same lines of how they say, you should never tell a kid, Oh, you're so smart. Oh, you're so smart. Because then they're going to stop taking risks because it risks them losing their identity of being the smart one.Instead, you have to be like, [00:14:00] Oh, you're so hardworking. Oh, you're so creative. Oh, you're so whatever. Because that. That encourages them to take risks and try different things. And I think because these people are so successful, they are trapped in their gold plated chains, they're trapped by their success.And the cliff that they could fall off becomes higher and higher. And so they don't really want to make these crazy lateral changes, even if they like have nothing to lose, because they've already made it because they've also built this life around prestige and success.Malcolm Collins: That, but I think it's more than that.And I think that this message is actually transferable outside of the Stanford circle. I think the Stanford like MBA circle just shows the comical extremes this can take in somebody's life. And I think sometimes you need to see the comical extremes to understand personally. Oh, what am I doing?Because we've actually seen this in our fans where we talk to our fans and I go, why aren't you looking for a spouse right now? And they go, I'll look for my spouse once X milestone has been reached and then I can achieve higher quality spouses. [00:15:00] And I'm like, I literally in my entire life, I don't know a single person who has taken that approach and ended up married.Not in a happy relationship, married at all. When I actually when I was talking to the startup guy and I was like, okay are you going to go look for a spouse or are you doing that? And it's oh, when I'm done with this next startup. And I should be clear for somebody to be like maybe he just really likes Startups like the grind and he told me explicitly.No, it was hell. He was like I was working so hard I'm gonna try to take it a little easier this time. And I was like, why did you do it then? Why did you start it again? And his response was I wanted to prove to myself that the first time wasn't random chance And I think that I totally get that there's a there's like this honor in that right?Okay, you ended up one of the most successful people of anyone you've ever met and now you want to prove to yourself that it wasn't just a fluke which is okay, but if it wasn't just a fluke, then maybe have [00:16:00] success in a different domain next time. But also it precludes and this is where like the pragmatist guide to life, our first book, I consider it to be such a rudimentary book when I'm recommending it to people.I'm almost embarrassed. But cause I'm like, this is something that most people should be thinking through while they're in high school. Yet they don't and essentially what it prompts you to do as an individual and it's got an audio book that comes for free with the 99 cents ebook.So like you can get it. It's very easy to get. So it's but if you want it on audible, you can get it there. It's just that we can't. Keep the price that low on Audible. So anyway, Pragmatist Guide to Life it's a book around determining what has value to you. And then living a life in dedication to that.And we try not to steer people towards any specific answers. On our show, we have a strong bias against specific answers, like utilitarianism or hedonism on the, in the guide, we don't. Like utilitarians will read the book and they'll be like, Oh, you were trying to push everyone to be a utilitarian.And I'm like, actually, we have a pretty strong stance against utilitarianism. But It's useful because then once you adopt a framework like that, whether it's [00:17:00] a utilitarian ethical set or, like us, like trying to in expand human potentiality. Then you can be like, okay, now that I have achieved X, if I am doing Y next in life, how do I leverage sort of the inventory of things?Skills and advantages and resources. I have to most accurately and efficaciously have my moral system enacted upon reality.And that can be like a religious system, for example, that can be a there's all sorts of questions here, but I don't think for anyone, especially if it wasn't making you happy going back to start another startup, it's the right.Answer.That is more just like your on rails and your availability heuristics around the types of things you could do or attempt to do better is anchored to the last thing you were doing. And I think that this really comes to the New York housing market. You may in your mind be like, one day I'd like to live in the mountains by a stream, but.When you're thinking, what can I do next? Your next promotion is [00:18:00] like marginally an easier thing to to achieve and think about, or the house that's slightly closer to Times Square is slightly easier to, or not sorry, Central Park. Nobody in New York wants to be near Times Square. Sorry about that.And to just elevate how, Attainable. Our life is we live in a house that a lot of people would think of is quite large. It is 1700s, beautiful, old, all brick. We are surrounded by a state park and then a national park that surrounds the state park. Thousands of miles of walking pathways and a river right in front of our house and a creek next to our house.And we got this for like around half a million, 500k for this in the house next door. And and that's for the house next door, which we can use to pay taxes, which we can use to, make this lifestyle even more sustainable than it was. That is what the average classmate is earning in a year.Okay? That is so like when I'm talking about sustainability of a life like this, like literally anyone from my [00:19:00] class could just duck out and then start rebuilding from an environment like this. But I think I also see this in how they're approaching partners. They look for partners who are.Absolutely perfect. Because I one thing I will say is that my advocacy apparently has had a big effect on my class. 82 percent of my classmates have had kids. Which is actually, when you're comparing it to the general population, a really high number. Extremely. A lot of them joked that it was my advocacy.So I'm not even hated by them, being in the urban monoculture. Although I did get in a big fight with one of their girlfriends. Because I'm so pro Israel in this war. And she was pro Hamas. And pro Hamas, she did not think that Israel should exist as a state and all the land should be given back to the Palestinian people.And the Jews should be deported. I obviously. got in a bit of a fight there. And I could tell the, it's one of the things where it's so this is a system where I guess they should have been more biased against me, but they weren't because they know me or they're like, Oh, this is the type of weird thing Malco would do.Simone Collins: You would always say things that were controversial.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I think it's one of those things where if you've [00:20:00] seen our podcast you'd be like, Oh, yeah. Like at first people like, hey, watch us. And then they're like, Oh yeah, I get it. Of course they would promote this. Is this totally within their but what are your thoughts on this?Like living the good life, Simone and how to approach it.Simone Collins: Yeah. I think most people are not actually trying to live the good life. I think that. Especially when you look at high achievers, many of them never really sought to live a good life or even pursue happiness. The objective function that they have typically without ever thinking about it, it just worked out this way and was part of their disposition as well, is that they are you could say prestige optimizers or achievement optimizers where they've just always done the best.Okay, I'm in the school system. I have to get an a, I have to get a, 5. 0. I have to get into the best college. I have to have all the best extracurriculars, win all the sports games, win the science fair, whatever it might be, right? Always win. Always be number one. And that's, what's happening now is they're making a ton of money.They have their Sanford MBAs. They have their kids, they, they've like literally like their their [00:21:00] prestige or achievement maxing essentially. No,Malcolm Collins: you're absolutelySimone Collins: right. And that is not. That is not having an objective function that is not having a moral framework that is not knowing what you want and really pursuing it.It is just being an optimizing machine. They're almost like a eyes and we all are like a eyes, but they are a eyes with an objective function of paperclip maximizing. Yeah, but Achievement maximizers. They're the paper. But this isMalcolm Collins: actually a really interesting point that you're making here. And I want to be clear about what I'm saying with this is that they, like, when I'm like, I am less impressed.Like we have, um, the people who we give our apartment next door to, who are helping getting, get on their feet and start a company. And they've, recently come out of the prison system, which by the way, they were okay with us saying, because they said it on the pitches. So I know they're okay with us saying that now.And people would be like. I genuinely, when I hear their story, I have more respect for them than many of our classmates. And people would be like, why is that? And it's because I [00:22:00] judge a person by their future and not by their past. And when they are thinking about their future, they have a cohesive plan of how they're going to build a good family and a good life that is realistic.And they are ambitiously trying to do it.Simone Collins: AndMalcolm Collins: that makes me. Proud for what they're attempting, right? So I, but with this other group and this is, with classmates and stuff like this, when I'm like, I don't like respect what they're doing, it's not a difference in value systems.And I need to be very clear here. I, as people know from this podcast, I'm actually pretty open to many different value systems as, and I will rank them. I'm open to many different value systems. It is that they do not have a value system. There is no value system that just says like this logically consistent, that just says more money, better.And here I'll play a clip from an old video game where a guy goes bury me with my moneyMURRY ME WITH MY MONEYMalcolm Collins: where it's [00:23:00] a, when you die and you're on your deathbed and you're reflecting on your life, from all of the various things you could have valued, whether it was charity or religion, or family, or even personal hedonism, like I can respond At a higher level than I can respect this sort of like mindless prestige optimization, people who optimize their lives entirely around hedonism, because at least they have some like a logically consistent value system.They're optimizing around whereas so many people, I think, even the people who are society sorting is like the best of the best per generation, which, okay, I'm not saying that Stanford is perfected to it except, but it's certainly accepting, the top fraction of a percent of the population.In terms of like just definitionally in terms of various measurable tests and looking at where they'd gotten in their first few years of their career. That within that population, being able to think outside of, I just want more prestige is actually, it seemed pretty uncommon [00:24:00] to me, like maybe only 50 percent of the class was doing that.And I think it shows when people are like, why do you look at so much of society's like actions is just mass action, right? Like I don't really ascribe that much to malevolent individual players behind the scenes. And I ascribe a lot to just sort of social pressures that lead to evolved cultural subsets, which lead to a sort of broader societal action.And I think it's because you don't realize how much of the society is quote unquote elite, i. e. the people. In the positions to change things, to move things, to deploy capital are really just operating on autopilot to an extent. And here I should know when people are like what makes you so happy about yourself?If you have so little money? I look at what I do have. I have financial stability for now and into the foreseeable future, which I established before putting on a podcast and everything like that. And this is financial stability that I can't be fired from. So I can't be canceled easily or anything like that, which was also really important to me that I would never [00:25:00] require because there's two bad ways that this can go.Either you're afraid of saying something that gets you canceled, right? Which leads to a form of audience capture or you. Always are pandering to your audience because you've been canceled and now you've got to appeal to a specific kind of audience. And that's another type of audience capture, which is limiting my personal freedom, which I didn't want to have.I am living a life where through the building of the school, through the building of this sort of content, I feel I am doing a thing of value for the world. So every day I feel like I'm living a life of value through writing the books through, the media appearances through our pronatalist advocacy.And I have. a decently large family for society today, four kids and going and a wife who I have a, I don't know, I have literally no qualms about our relationship. I could not, I genuinely just adore everything about her.Simone Collins: Yeah. We're all right. We're all right.Malcolm Collins: And all of this is on an upwards trajectory.It's like, why would I want money for [00:26:00] anything other? If I had more money, I would only want it for more advocacy. Like we already donate like about 50 percent of what we are into charity when we can. If I had more money, it would just be for more charity.Simone Collins: I think the big takeaway you got from Stanford was from the 10 year reunion was that you don't.Have to first be successful in a career or insanely wealthy to pursue what it is that you care about most that if you very intentionally set up your life in a way that allows for a sufficient amount of financial freedom, you're not running away from debt. You are able to pay for health care and your basic living expenses.You can pursue what you want. And this is, I think this is only really something that's important for the. those who are lucky enough to be a little bit wealthier. This is a problem of wealthy people and not of your typical person. Because the typical person is like totally just going for that, but I'm not [00:27:00] sure. What do you think?Malcolm Collins: Here isn't a problem of wealthy people. And this is a very important takeaway is it was the way that many of my classmates who were still single were relating to finding a partner. Never ever say I will find a partner when. You will never find a partner if that's what you are doing.And this is especially true for men. It just does not work that way. You want the type of partner who can see the potential in you and is excited to bring that potential out. If you are looking for partners and somebody can't see potential in you, but they would marry you if you had already achieved objective success.That relationship will not be a happy relationship in a big way. The very fact that you are securing a partner before you have your wealth is securing a [00:28:00] better partner than you can easily secure or source after you have your wealth because when somebody is marrying somebody younger or somebody was big ambition or something like that, Their ability to vet you by your dreams and competency is part of your vetting process of them.Are they the type of person who is going to make the sacrifices with you to get your family to the place it needs to be? And if they are not, Then what you are going to end up with is one of these bimbo hussies who is really marrying you for your money.Simone Collins: I would just more broadly, once you become wealthy as a male or female, I think finding a partner who isn't after your money is really difficult.That's just a truism.Malcolm Collins: And yeah, it is a truism and the types of partners who are after your money are lower quality, often personality wise. And I've seen this, I've seen the people who marry after they got [00:29:00] wealthy and the people who marry before they got wealthy. The here's what I think is happening though.And this isSimone Collins: really interesting is I think after people get wealthy, they subconsciously think that they can date out of their league. That is to say, they think that because they have more money, they can get someone who is more attractive. Then what they would otherwise get. However, the more attractive people that they're able to target, who are willing to date them, even though looks wise, they're out of their league are people who are only interested in money, the people who are more attractive than them, but also in their league, financially, professionally, or intellectually would still not be willing to date them.Because then at that point, that person is still under their league looks wise. So what you end up getting is someone who's. The things that matter lower quality, but you still have this assumption that, Oh because I'm successful now I get to marry someone who's more attractive than I am.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.And I would elevate this. The thing that I have seen is that if among our friend group, everyone I know who married somebody after they got wealthy. And it clearly wasn't, now [00:30:00] there's some people were like, clearly they knew this person beforehand. That's not like a supermodel or something like that.I'm not counting those people. I'm talking about the people where it's this person is clearly more attractive or uniquely young compared to the person they married.Simone Collins: I doMalcolm Collins: not know one of them was a happier marriage than the wealthy friends I met who married somebody before they got wealthy.All of their marriages are pretty much terrible.And it's generally because these people who they marry have very bad objective functions. They're typically around wealth or status, and you never want to be married to somebody like that. Or they have a very poor mental health which can just make a relationship absolutely like a trap.Or they are, um. Dumb and not able to have intellectual conversations with them. And so in a way, yeah, you're actually hurting yourself further. So I say that, and then the other thing is that if you have dreams about one day doing some big project that you haven't started on yet, you're never going to do that project.So go out and start today or it's never going to happen. [00:31:00] I'm just telling you that right now. It's never going to happen if you aren't in some small way working on it right now,Simone Collins: people wait for permission, right? This is something that we see. We experienced when we were, for example, looking for a company to acquire, we assumed that we would know what a what the company was when our investors would say to us, Hey, yeah, I like this.You should go for this. And then we realized eventually that our investors were never going to say that no one was ever going to say, now you're ready. Now you should go for it. Okay. Jump out of the plane, pull out the parachute. No. You are the only person who can decide that. And I think that's important for everything.When it comes to getting a partner, when it comes to having a kid, you have to just throw yourself out of the plane. There's never going to be a time where you really feel ready.Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. I, hopefully this has inspired somebody, whether it's a book you want to write or a company you want to start, you need to do it in some small way, the minimum viable product of it, the minimum viable version today.Because there's no level ofSimone Collins: achievement people have [00:32:00] reached as Malcolm has found where they feel like they're ready. There are people who are making insane amounts of money, who have all the power, who have, All the connections and they still don't feel ready. There's just no point at which you're going to feel ready, really.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it's the same with finding a partner. So often when I find with the people who are, who have turned who don't have partners and Oh, you just can't get a partner. They've turned down perfectly good partners. It's their homes that you can watch our homes a video. If you want to see the story of somebody who did this it is very easy.If you aren't really dedicatedly looking for someone to marry and you are looking for the perfect person to marry, not just, the whatever, right? You're it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen.Simone Collins: Yeah, I'm glad you I'm glad you went for it. I love you,tooSimone Collins: Yeah, let's see if I can adjust myself a little. All right. Is that okay?Malcolm Collins: You look stunning.Simone Collins: Oh, is this [00:33:00] better? No.Malcolm Collins: Stunning, not brave.Simone Collins: Stunning not brave? Stunning not brave? StunningMalcolm Collins: not brave.Simone Collins: Oh no.Malcolm Collins: That's the way we ask ourselves if we're looking good to go.Do you look stunning or brave today?Simone Collins: Yeah. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Journalist Suzy Weiss joins Malcolm and Simone to explore internet subcultures like 'Hercule Derkle' and tradwives. They discuss the misappropriation of ancient concepts for modern hedonism, the allure of communal living, and the future of reproduction in an age of artificial wombs. The conversation dives into contradictions of feminism and societal shifts reflected in online phenomena.

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone explore the shifting landscape of internet culture, focusing on the decline of "lolcows" and the concept of cringe. They discuss how the politicization of online spaces has changed the way people engage with and mock individuals who deviate from social norms. Malcolm argues that cringe is now seen as a "boomer" or "Gen X" phenomenon, with younger generations finding it distasteful to laugh at those with mental health issues or who are perceived as weaker. The couple also delves into the idea that one must pass through the "valley of cringe" to become truly based, using examples like the Tiger King and Donald Trump. They contrast this with figures like Carole Baskin and Hillary Clinton, who represent a desperate attempt to fit mainstream societal expectations. Throughout the conversation, Malcolm and Simone ponder the future of internet culture and the emergence of a new type of "lolcow" – those who come from privilege but fail to achieve happiness by adhering to the status quo.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Cringe is over. Cringe is boomer. Cows are like cringe is actually it's probably more Gen X, both of them. Yeah. Boomers just shorthand, I think forSimone Collins: old.Malcolm Collins: You cannot be based.Without being cringe.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And by that, what I mean, we're basis defined as without fear of societal expectations, do what you think is right, say what you think is true and interpret reality in a way that is logically consistent within whatever value you set, you have determined for yourself.I actually think that we saw this reflected in the Trump Hillary election.Trump was cringe. In many ways, it is almost impossible to say Trump isn't cringe, but he passed through the valley of cringe to base where he combined cringe and self comfort. The comfort was the ways that his value system was different from society's value system.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! It is wonderful to be talking to you today!Simone Collins: Hi, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: Today, I am [00:01:00] going to be talking about something that one of our fans said in the Discord when I was chatting with them, and it really led me to reflect.I was talking about lolcows and like the joke that, oh yeah, we want to be lolcows, surprising that we've never had like a kiwi farm made about us or something like that, given the number of times we've gone viral. We have two know your meme entries about us. And but we've never really done anything actually egregious.It's more like we are egregious from an extremist leftist perspective, which just Doesn't really make us traditional lull cows anymore than, I don't know, some other individuals like Ben Shapiro could be seen as more lull Cowley than us, to be honest. But it got them talking about low cows and they're like, low cows are so boomer.And I started thinking about it because I interact with a few different, types of communities online. I see the way different people interact online and I realized I do not see lolcow discussion amongst gen alpha or really amongst, younger gen [00:02:00] Z people. And then it got me thinking, wait, why is this?So first let's talk about what lolcows are. Do you know what lolcows are Simone?Simone Collins: My understanding is a lolcow is a, an online figure, someone who's public enough online to be fairly well documented. Who has done enough cringeworthy or egregious things that the community on Kiwi Farms has decided to begin creating detailed posts, categorizing and cataloging their various embarrassing behaviors and exploits so that everyone can sit and laugh at them.Yes.Malcolm Collins: Yes. It is so there's a couple of categories. There's lull cows and there's horror cows. Horror cows are like, they're just truly a horrifying human being. And then lull cows are, they are, funny. Chris Chan is probably the number one lull cow, although I think he kind of borders on a horror cow now with the, you heard what happened to him, right?Simone Collins: No. [00:03:00]Malcolm Collins: Oh so he was in jail for a bit. I think he might be out now. Oh dear. But he was in jail for sleeping with his mother. Oh! No!Simone Collins: No!Malcolm Collins: His dubious consent, it looks his very elderly Oh!Simone Collins: Oh! Oh! That'sMalcolm Collins: where somebody becomes a horror cow.Simone Collins: I think I'm going to vomit.Malcolm Collins: But anyway, Oh God. Um, but it also brought me to another topic, which I think, so there's like, why do people engage with these sorts of people?Like, why do they watch them? And it is because they like the emotional subset that these individuals trigger in them. And I think that there's a few Justice that a bad person had bad things happen to them. An opportunity to troll someone that you see as lesser than you. The feeling of cringe at another person.And the feeling of disgust at another person. And also the feeling of learning how fringe [00:04:00] psychology is. Individuals, which is actually the thing that's most interesting to me. So I'll explain what I mean by that's interesting to me. I find it very interesting to study how the human mind works when it is breaking, because through that, like through studying how something like a car breaks, you can understand how the car might be put together.neuroscientist who specialized in like abnormal psychology and stuff like that when the evolution of the human cognition this is really interesting to me because it does help me understand, when I see novel conditions where, especially where I see convergent behavior patterns across different locales, I can be like, Oh, this is an unusual behavior pattern, but it comes to convergently.So something in our society must be pushing it, or it must be some sort of pre evolved pathway or a way that some system can break, which can then give me more insight into myself. But the other subsets I think are what draw most people, the cringe and stuff like that.Simone Collins: Which I never got. Also you [00:05:00] don't, even if you see cringe comedy, for example, in a TV show, both you and I can't take it.So I think it's something we have a lot of difficulty taking. I find itMalcolm Collins: very painfulSimone Collins: toMalcolm Collins: watch. Yeah. And then this brought me to another thing, which is the statement that I was thinking and I was like, this is true. Cringe is over. Cringe is boomer. Cows are like cringe is actually it's probably more Gen X, both of them.Cringe is Gen X and cows are Gen X, which we've got new boomers, right? Yeah. Boomers just shorthand, I think forSimone Collins: old.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But remember when like our cringe used to be a thing and like things being cringy used to be a thing and you just wouldn't hear a young person call something cringe.cringe anymore. Like we interact with young people and they don't use the term that much when they're talking about things. And so I think what we're seeing here is a cultural shift where when the internet first began to proliferate and the first [00:06:00] generation of genuinely online natives, which was really our generation.We realized Oh my God, you can find people doing crazy, insane things on the internet. And then a culture arose following, mocking. And we're laughing down at these individuals for the generation under us. They don't find this to be the novelty that our generation did, and they find the behavior patterns around this to be quite disgusting.Like you could say, I don't want to say like low class, but pathetic, like laughing at somebody who barely has their life together and clearly has major psychiatric conditions is not. Cool, though, within Gen Alpha. Ah, yes. It's very You speakSimone Collins: like the young people do, because they say things like, Cool, hey,Malcolm Collins: I gotta make up terms, because I don't know what they're saying. Yeah, we shouldn't evenSimone Collins: try.Malcolm Collins: But that makes sense to me, when I think about the things that Gen [00:07:00] Alpha values.This reactionary Status hierarchies built around mocking those who are weaker than you is just like, why would you do that?I think from the perspective of this generation.Simone Collins: I think part of it's also because poor mental health has proliferated so much that there's this I'm not okay either. Why would I? I, who identifies as someone who's struggling mentally, take pleasure in seeing the mental languishing of someone else.I think it has something to do with that. Yeah, but you've also gotMalcolm Collins: to think about the politicization of the online space into leftist and rightist spaces. was not as much the case when we were younger. And as the online space has become politicized most spaces and most status hierarchies was in most places identify as either left or right leaning status hierarchies.Which means you're now playing by the moral codes of each of these status hierarchies. And while they are different moral codes, [00:08:00] neither of them would elevate targeting the status hierarchies. an individual who is, mentally unhealthy and doing cringey things. On the left, this would be seen as bullying a disabled person, right?Why would you do this? Like you're a horrible person and you are like the definition of evil. On which is often, there's lots of performative masculine communities. There's lots of communities around self improvement. There's lots of, but if you're in like a self improvement community You think that they're going to elevate you for saying that somebody is cringy for anything other than their like political beliefs or failures at self improvement?No, they're going to look at you like, why would you do that? Like why are you just randomly targeting someone? You should be focused on yourself. Which is why I think that you've got the elevation. Of the Hayes community is still one of the low cal communities that it's seen as really acceptable to hate on because it's acceptable to hate on it within this self improvement niche as they are seen as the antithesis of self [00:09:00] improvement.And for people aren't familiar with the Hayes community, it's a healthy at every size community. Which promotes the idea that no matter what weight you are, you can be perfectly healthy and that you should do things like intuitive eating, which just means eat whatever you want whenever you feel like it and that you will be more healthy if you are doing that because your body knows what it needs, and obviously these things are true, and they represent a complete Sort of mirroring of what everything you get in within these fitness circles.So they, they make fun of these communities. But then you also have the masculine, the performative masculinity, right leaning communities, like they're not going to like laughing at the low cows. So you're not going to get it there. You're not going to get it in the intellectualist communities.Because why does that help anyone in that community? They're like, why are you doing this? This is a sociopathic waste of your time. And so I also think, ironically, as the internet sphere has become politicized, there just are not spaces where this is elevated as much, [00:10:00] except when the lolcows are explicitly political or explicitly high profile.Simone Collins: I have a slightly different theory. Can I share it before you go forward?Malcolm Collins: Okay, great.Simone Collins: My slightly different take on this is that. Lolcows or cringe watching has shifted into hate watching, but hate watching And love watching are closely related and often simultaneous. So I don't really hear about people doing much cringe watching anymore, but what I do hear from people again and again, as they're commenting on others online is, Oh, I follow this person or this group or these types of people online religiously.Like they're always following them on Instagram or YouTube or whatever it may be. And I hate them. But I love watching them and I also now have this parasocial relationship with them, whereby I care about them. And I think what's going on here is that yes, we're in this [00:11:00] highly politicized world and yes, we do like to look down on other people or feel superior about ourselves, or at least feel like we're reinforcing our own identities and political identities, especially.However, there's also this extreme craving online and in the world in general for authenticity. And so these people that you can watch to hate, they are typically very authentic. They're very vehement in their beliefs. And often you watch them because they're vehement in their beliefs, which are in political opposition to your own, right?So they're like the based Mormons and you're the progressive. And you watchMalcolm Collins: historically, we're not about political beliefs.Simone Collins: Yeah. They were more just embarrassing people online. And now people are watching their hate, watching people who are politically very different from them. But thisMalcolm Collins: would go into my political theory, so this would argue that it's something different is going on here.Which is and with this topic we don't have an answer. Like I'm very open to Yeah, this is conjecture.Simone Collins: Most of what we do is conjecture, we just sometimes feel very confident about it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I feel [00:12:00] uniquely unconfident about this conjecture, but it was something I wanted to think about and pontificate on with you, because this podcast helps me think through things.Which was, I think it is, political lullcows are seen as okay because they are You can hate on them within the other political sphere. And we believe that they are not like mentally ill people often. They are just people doing active harm to the world, out of arrogance, in not being, in a lack of open mindedness.And both parties now just think the other party isn't open minded. The left is no, the right isn't open minded about these topics. And the right's no, you're not open minded about ideological diversity. And. Diversity of cultural spectrums. And so both groups believe the other groups is small minded.And could, if they, tried to look outside their bubble, see the world as it truly is.So not being open minded. That, and then the other thing is I think that punching up is seen as very okay. So lull cows that are famous in some way. Are seen as okay [00:13:00] to laugh at still and okay to focus on.So a great example of this would be the Shia LaBeouf flag thing, when 4chan was chasing around as a great internet has to ran on it. Um, because Shia LaBeouf is technically a famous actor, so we can, low cow him all we want, or the Johnny Depp divorce thing, right?Like I think people really focus on that because that woman, whatever her name was. Yeah. And not only was she hateable, but the form of hate you had for her fell into one of the political niches was in the online, i. e. was in like red pill communities and stuff like that. And so this then goes to reinforce the reason why cringe stopped is you needed to be cringing specifically at an otherwise mentally competent person now, because it's just not funny to, Cringe at the mentally disabled anymore, which like, yeah, sure.Like online culture has grown up. And they need to be in opposition to something. One of your community stands for what do you think?Simone Collins: Yeah, that, that [00:14:00] sounds about right. I think now there's also this need to add to what you're saying to virtue signal. In addition to be smug and cringe at someone. Whereas in the past. It was just fun to, to cringe and laugh at someone who was just incredibly mentally ill or just really stupid, which seemed to be the most common themes.Now it's more appropriate to cringe or laugh at someone who's just very, will say morally inferior per your cultural group, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I also think it's that we have moved away from a society where the lull cows were seen as violating societal norms that everyone agreed to.And that's what made them cringe. It was like this cringe that everyone could agree on, but in the modern context, that's [00:15:00] not what we're looking at. We're not looking at it because people don't longer believe in like a default set of social values, the social values in the online left and the online right, because they've drifted apart so much are unique and differentiated, which prevents generic violations of social norms.As othering somebody from specifically one of those two communities. Where do you think the future is going to go with this stuff?Simone Collins: Oh boy. That's a good question. Yeah. Who will we demonize and make fun of in the future? I could see. Apostates being the next top targets. So both because what we predict right demographically is that there's going to be this increasing xenophobia in high fertility groups, plus.increasing levels of extreme predation from the urban monoculture as it needs to get more converts, which means that there is on both sides, we're going to see more [00:16:00] xenophobia. And then on both sides, the ultimate enemy, the people that are the worst are those who detract those who leave the home culture or those who leave progressive culture.So like the transitionersMalcolm Collins: and stuff like that. WeSimone Collins: transitioners religious people who convert to atheism. That those people will be seen. So right now, for example, there's a lot of people we follow online on YouTube who are like ex Mormons, for example, who do a lot of commentary on Mormon culture. I could see there being this sort of movement of now a bunch of Mormons just really enjoy following.Those ex Mormons and seeing how miserable their lives are and how childless they are and how, fat and ugly they've become as soon as they leave the religion whatever, right? Like that. I could see them going for those sorts of things. On the other side, I could see, people, and we're already, I think, starting to see the forefront of this, the bellwether of this.I'm starting to see. Religious people doing things like that, and I'm also starting to see progressives doing things like that with trad wives, for [00:17:00] example oh, now she says she's a trad cat. Now she says she's this and look, she's going to lose all her money and she's going to be so miserable and she acts as though she's so perfect, but she's really not and I think that we're going to see more of that.And specifically from people who deconvert and not just from people who happen to be on the other team, we're gonna increasingly ignore those people.Malcolm Collins: So I hear you. That might be what I have a different take of what might happen. Tell me which is if you say, and we've done a tweet to this extent, you cannot be based.Without being cringe.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And by that, what I mean, people be like what do you mean by that? You cannot be based like you cannot we're basis defined as without fear of societal expectations, do what you think is right, say what you think is true and interpret reality in a way that is logically consistent within whatever value you set, you have determined for yourself.So just. Uninfluenced by society or a desire to status signal [00:18:00] or, what's going on around you just take a straight narrow path there that will lead you to make decisions that, it will axiomatically lead you to make decisions that go against mainstream societal values. And where cringe is an individual, quote unquote, not recognizing mainstream societal values or going against mainstream societal values.You are intrinsically, you must pass through the valley of cringe to get to based. And as such. And I'm going to get people might be like, come on, you're not really, you can't be saying that lol cows are the new base. And I'd say, actually, I think so. I think that we live in a society right now that is so starved for vitalism in people that it might admire.Or model itself on that it is looking for these post cringe individuals who demonstrate, having something together in their lives. It's this Paul of nihilism that flows over the generations who [00:19:00] are comfortable with who they are and who they are is not about fitting some social trope around them.And somebody can be like who are you? Talking about here, who would fit this? I say the Tiger King is a great example of this. In any previous generation, the Tiger King would have been a lull cow. He is almost the perfect representation of a lull cow. Ha, look at this cringy, he's a bad person.He's cringy as hell at everything he does. And yet you watch him and he is the hero. Yeah, very obviously. You can look, and he seems like a genuinely pretty bad person, and yet you find yourself, and I think society found itself, loving him, and then hating the alternative, Carole Baskin, which was somebody who tried to play by all of society's rules.Somebody who tried to fit this default social like idea of I am a good person. Please like me.Simone Collins: Subset of the Tiger King [00:20:00] watchers though, that, that was pro Carol Baskin. I was under that impression that there was likeMalcolm Collins: the far progressive ones, because what does she represent? What do progressives represent?But just going along with the dominant cultural group, right? And I think that what they miss is that the average person, the average American who isn't one of these progressive intellectual circles, doesn't like people like that. I actually think that we saw this reflected in the Trump Hillary election.Trump was cringe. In many ways, it is almost impossible to say Trump isn't cringe, but he passed through the valley of cringe to base where he combined cringe and a self satisfaction with self comfort. The comfort was the ways that his value system was different from society's value system. Yeah, and then onSimone Collins: the progressive sideMalcolm Collins: You had Clinton who was just Carole Baskin.No, yeah no.Simone Collins: Clinton did not pass through the Valley. She was still in the uncanny Valley of not of cringe. That's what I'm saying. Like the guy who sat in the cold and is old. Oh, [00:21:00] Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders. He passes throughMalcolm Collins: the, yes, based with a complete ownership of the ways that he is different from a hundred percent.Yeah, mainstream culture. And here's where I think you have the new lolcow. The new true lolcow, the person who everybody agrees that they hate, is somebody who both comes from privilege and structures their entire life around fitting the mainstream societal exception of idea of this is a good person and is clearly unhappy at the other end of that.And so I think the ideal, who do you think I'm going to say is the ideal new lolcow?Simone Collins: It's a couple. Okay, so for a formative virtue signaler, a couple?Malcolm Collins: Comes from a position of power everything they do is about just showing the world you know who they are.Simone Collins: No.Malcolm Collins: Harry and Meghan.Simone Collins: Oh gosh, of course. Yeah, sadly.Malcolm Collins: I think it's the new perfect [00:22:00] lolcow. They are like the Carole Baskin or the Hillary Clinton on crack. Where every little thing about their lives is structured to try to earn mainstream societal normie acceptance. Normie points. They don't realize that the normies don't exist anymore. They are yelling into a cloud that doesn't, to avoid and everybody thinks everything they do is truly detestable because it is so focused and so manicured to not be cringe.Simone Collins: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I think it's so interesting and I think intuitively confusing to people and I can't really understand it myself because they do represent the, Some fairly average and mainstream views and they're always trying to jump on things that the mainstream has already jumped on So that's where it's weird.Why would we find that so cringe and yet we do? I wonder what's going on there Why it would be so rejected because intuitively it seems like it shouldn't be that [00:23:00] if they just glom on whatever the current thing is That they should be celebrated for that and yet they are not why do you think that only people who are more?BecauseMalcolm Collins: I think that the dominant cultural group in our society has been so aggressive and so abusive to its neighboring groups that the only people who really follow it anymore are the ultra elite. I. e. people who own media companies, people who control our school systems, professors, stuff like that.And everyone else basically sees it as this stupid culty religion. And if you're like Harry and Meghan, all of your friends are in this cult, so you don't understand that the general public basically sees it as a joke now. Even at the age of Trump, when he was first running, we had already, I think, begun to enter that.Where everyone was just like, yeah, at least he's not doing what everyone else is doing, and I think with Bernie, you catch on to the same thing here. People want something different.Simone Collins: [00:24:00] Yeah, it could be. Yeah. The biggest thing is a dissatisfaction with everything. And then understanding that our current stances don't equal a solution and maybe, yeah it's part of a flailing for hope, but that's interesting.I guess we'll see how it plays out who the future targets of ridiculeMalcolm Collins: will be. Yeah I'm very interested to watch this play out. And I think it's a positive societal shift and I think that there is a hole within the current memetic landscape for individuals who can, it. Who are happy with who they are, who show a sense of vitalism and optimism for the future and who are cringe in that they are differentiate from like mainstream social expectations, but take complete ownership of that.And I think that, this is best represented in the traditional Adams family, like the nineties Adams family, where, I always say that the monsters were monstrous because they represent, they were monsters trying to live within the dominant social [00:25:00] culture. Where the Addams Family were monstrous because they were normal humans who differentiated from the mainstream societal culture so much that it made them more culturally similar to monsters than the society around them.With the joke constant throughout the old Addams Family being that Despite that, they were happy and satisfied and had healthy relationships that no one else was able to capture in their society by following the rules. And in a society that is so nihilistic today, in a society that has so clearly failed people and with social expectations that so clearly do not work within this new economic and social context that we're in, people want a real Addams Family.They want a real family who your average Boomer is like, Oh, they're weird and cringe, but then why are they happy? And that reflects on the real Boomer that maybe they're right and you're wrong, and everything that you are teaching as [00:26:00] a society right now is a necrotic rot of the human soul. And that when you look at something and you react, eww, that's so silly.You are merely showing That you don't understand how to achieve happiness and you genuinely don't or satisfaction or a healthy relationship and you have no future plan for where we are going as a species that breeds optimism anymore while these weirdos do, and that humor. I think that contrast I think is what we hope to drive was the community that we build and why I think that it isn't just random cringe alternative.And I love you for creating this with me, Simone. Thank you for not caring.Simone Collins: Oh gosh. I'm very happy with what we've done and I really don't care what other people think, but that's probably the autism,Malcolm Collins: but I care what you think. Yeah. All right.Simone Collins: Have a good one. Simone, you too. [00:27:00] Gorgeous. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone Collins discuss their unconventional parenting approach, 'bopping'. They debate discipline vs. abuse, set boundaries, and defend their methods rooted in cultural and evolutionary psychology. They challenge traditional parenting, research on corporal punishment, and emotional discipline. Their belief in the right to raise kids with cultural values is evident in the podcast.

Malcolm and Simone discuss France's fertility policies, critiquing fertility checks, birth leave schemes, and the role of fathers in single-parent families. They explore cultural factors, equitable divorce laws, and the importance of valuing family formation over misguided policies.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone delve into the reasons behind the far left's visceral reactions to traditional, wholesome lifestyles. They explore how the ultra-progressive ideology views emotional pain as a form of violence and how this leads to a disdain for happy, heteronormative relationships. The couple also touches on the concerning trend of trans activists targeting vulnerable communities, particularly lesbians and autistic children. Simone shares her unique perspective as a former progressive woman now living a fulfilling, traditional life with Malcolm. Join them as they unpack the complexities of this controversial topic and shed light on the importance of specialization and trust in healthy relationships.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] any form of emotional pain is considered a form of violence and something that should be systematically avoided. So if itSimone Collins: causes you pain through cognitive dissonance, like maybe I would have wanted to have, we're goingMalcolm Collins: to get there. We're going to get there, but you jumped to the answer, but we got to get to their point by point. I was watching lesbians complaining about their communities being invaded and I just can't imagine What it would feel like . Imagine you're living in a society wherelike space Marines exist. Okay. There are these people that are 20 percent larger than you, five times stronger than you.. But now these people who are very sexually aggressive are demanding that you suck their penises.And now everyone who you thought before was like part of your safe space is now saying that you're a bigot and you're not really straight because you won't suck these men's penises and so now you're kicked out of even these safe [00:01:00] spaces. Honestly, I think that'sSimone Collins: how it feels.That's how it feels to them, for sure.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be here with you today! And I want to talk about an idea that I had recently, and I actually had it a while ago, but it's something that I've really been reflecting on in my thinking, is the vitriol we see certain, far left, urban monoculture activists react to wholesome things with.Simone Collins: And how do you find wholesome here?Malcolm Collins: What you're doing right now, being with your kid, they'll see a loving family. Or they'll see. They're like, that looks so heteronormative. That looks so no. You see this, you'll see a trad wife and they'll be like, this isn't a, this is misogynisticSimone Collins: forMalcolm Collins: her to be living this life or for her to be in a happy relationship with a [00:02:00] straight white man and here I can put the, I've been attackedYou went out with a white male? I was a freshman. Fresh personMalcolm Collins: and I have been thinking why this.Extremist reaction to this. And it occurred to me that from the perspective of ultra far left ideology wholesomeness and a wholesome lifestyle. is literally a lifestyle of violence. It is a form of violence against marginalized communities from their perspective, they would call marginalized communities.HowSimone Collins: so if it's 100 percent sovereign in one's ownMalcolm Collins: house? Exactly. How because that is an interesting question. And so we need to go into their world structure. So the first aspect of their world structure that we need to understand is it is a cultural system that is completely defined. And I talk about this all the time, so I'll be very quick in summarizing this.Defined around any form of emotional pain is [00:03:00] considered a form of violence and something that should be systematically avoided. So if itSimone Collins: causes you pain through cognitive dissonance, like maybe I would have wanted to have, we're goingMalcolm Collins: to get there. We're going to get there, but you jumped to the answer, but we got to get to their point by point.So you look at something like the Hayes movement, the healthy at every size movement, why would you hide from women mostly that being overweight. Is has negative long term health repercussions because it causes in the moment pain and therefore it's an evil thing to do because in the moment emotional pain and they force the evil thing to do or you tell them, your lifestyle will not lead you to long term happiness.That is a form of violence against because you have caused this emotional pain to them. This is where things like misgendering and stuff like that, they're like, this is a form of violence and it should be outlawed. Like it's obviously not a form of violence. So then how are they defining violence?They're defining violence around things that make them feel upset with [00:04:00] what they've allowed their lives to become. To call somebody out for their own failures as a form of violence.Simone Collins: Wow. I could see that when our kids fight, it's typically because one kid sees the other kid having a really good time with a toy.And then suddenly their entire life is misery because they do not have that one toy. And we even, for example, have bought copies of some toys. We have bumper cars, for example, and we have. Two identical orange bumper cars. Cause you very intelligently. The kids have noticed they makeMalcolm Collins: slightly different noises.Simone Collins: Yes. So they're like we're like, there's another bumper car. Just get in the empty identical bumper. Cause they're like, no, and they see it. And yes they experience real pain.Malcolm Collins: Actually, before we go further with this topic, I would like people to reflect on this in their own life. How much of the things they desire is just because they saw somebody else having fun with it.And now they [00:05:00] want it. Keep in mind, I thinkSimone Collins: everything makes a lot more sense though, once you've had toddlers and siblings,Malcolm Collins: yeah. How hard coded this is in us, this world of status signaling. And I saw somebody else who had these things and they are either high status or seem to be happy.Therefore I want these things. That's why I need thatSimone Collins: thing. Yes.Malcolm Collins: The trad wife marketing works so well to market an idea and a lifestyle, right? ButSimone Collins: we'll hold on though, because for whatever reason, trad wives don't appear to be watching. the progressive YouTubers and the progressive commentators and going, Oh, why don't I have my, I don't know what do they have?Malcolm Collins: Nobody wants their lives. Like I, I look at the, these ultra progressive lives. I just don't think anybody wants them. They're like, yeah, but I get to do whatever I want and be affirmed for being whoever I want to be. And we're, meanwhile the other side of the aisle is like, But won't that like really mess up your head and cause a lot of mental health issues and make you fundamentally unfulfilled and they're like don't [00:06:00] say that's violenceSimone Collins: because intuitively I would expect like when I model my progressively raised self, I would assume that when people from more conservative cultures see my progressive lifestyle of getting to do whatever I want in the moment that feels good.That they would be jealous Oh, I'm fasting on Sunday. It's conference Sunday and I can't eat or whatever. And then Oh, look, they're eating pancakes at IHOP, but I'm so jealous and whatever, right? Like you think they'd be jealous. And it's interesting to me that doesn't seem to be taking place that we look at.Malcolm Collins: I think the progressive model of the conservative mind is just tinged by bigotry. Where bigotry is, prejudgment and dehumanization of another group that they don't understand from the perspective of conservatives that they get to, masturbate all day, whenever they feel like and eat all the foods they feel like whenever they feel like, and, um, we're not looking at that was envy.We're like, Oh, like that's sad. Which is [00:07:00] also very interesting from, Progressive mindset when they're looking at these videos and they're looking at these ideas and you have created this cognitive dissonance in them like the wholesomeness is literally a form of violence against them.Simone Collins: It isMalcolm Collins: literally hurtful to them because it shows. That two groups promised two different things. And both said, this thing will give you happiness. There's two different cultural assumptions around what gives a person fulfillment and happiness. And they need to believe that the other group was lying because they know that there's no happiness at the end of what they have.And I will say, Okay. There is definitely a form of the trad wife, like the ultra strict trad wife. We've done a different video on this. That is a complete LARP and it is it does lead to unhappiness. Ultimately, you work at a, a relationship like Stephen Crowder's or something like that, where he's bought into this ultra traditionalist mindset that is not really, [00:08:00] it has like genuine misogyny as part of it.Or, Lauren Southern who got the divorce after, trying trad wife lifestyle. And just seeing that, you need a real traditional relationship. So I'd go watch her video on that and I'll post the title card on the screen here.So it's easier to find. But this is interesting because it provides an explanation for something that I think can be confusing to conservatives, which is. Progressives for so long said they just wanted the government out of their house, not regulating them. Why now that they are in power, are they trying to disintermediate anyone from seeing these sort of conservative messages?And are they so antagonistic to these have to be healthy, heterosexual relationships and marriages? And even wholesome gay marriages. So we have gay friends who are like conservative leaning and have kids and have structured this very wholesome lifestyle for themselves. And they confide in us that they actually deal with a lot of ostracization [00:09:00] from the gay community and are seen as being traitors to the community.And you actually see this within a black community as well. For example, like you can ask, like, why are so often these wholesome, two parent black families seen as race traitors, seen as like othered by the black community? Like you're not really black, they'll say these things that they vote conservative and move into these conservative mindsets.And part of it is that they are a form of violence against the iterations of the black community you. that went with other cultural hypotheses like the dissolution of the family unit, which I should say is being pushed very hard. It's like a key aspect of Marxist philosophy is the dissolution of the family unit.And so they've worked really hard in the communities where they have more sway, like the black community, to actively dissolve family units.Simone Collins: Wow.Malcolm Collins: And so like the huge percentage of black kids that are being born, andI'll put the statistic here into single families, that [00:10:00] is an active campaign by.Certain extremists, like priest factions within the urban monoculture.And I also think that this comes to another thing where they're like you guys are often defying at far, progressives and stuff like that and getting worried about it. Like, why are you doing?That right and I should point out here that we don't like you'll never hear us on our channel like Attacking like gay men, for example, or even really gay women on our channel but you'll often hear us complaining about the trans community. So what's the difference between these various groups, right?And it's that the trans community is really actively targeting individuals who I do not believe are actually trans. And most of them are individuals who are have mental health issues. Really disproportionately, they target autistic children, which our children have fallen in the category of and attempt to, I actually had a joke recently that I was going to put on Twitter or something where I was like, we have [00:11:00] autistic children.Or as they're called within the trans community eggs. Do you know what an egg is in the trans community? That's a target that they think might be potentially trans that needs to have it shell cracked. And if you look at the recent research that's been coming out, we now know that of 11 year olds nine out of 10 of them who identify with the opposite gender are going to detransition within five years.are going to no longer have that predilection within five years. Yeah.Simone Collins: They're doing irreparable damage if they're getting some kind of intervention.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And if you look at the long term medical issues that people who transition have and stuff like that. So that's why we focus so much on that community because it's actively doing harm to other cultural groups and survives through this active form of harm.Which actually brings me to another thing I could complain about right now on this episode because it was really getting to me today based on some episodes I was watching of de transitioned individuals and lesbians complaining [00:12:00] about their communities being invaded and I just can't imagine What it would feel like I understand where some TERFs are coming from what it would feel like to be a lesbian woman and have this movement that was moving to like women only spaces where you could go and dating apps and just as the rest of the gay rights movement is really getting together now, all of a sudden, if you're a lesbian woman on a dating app, everyone who's reaching out to you is a non passing trans woman.Every single person that's reaching out and you are being called a bigot for not going on dates with them.We're keep in mind, a lot of these women have fear around getting graped or something like that.Simone Collins: Or they're just in terms of sexual orientation, uniquely turned off by male characteristics.That's totally a thing that exists.So a couple of things I wanted to go a bit deeper on here. One of the things we talk about in the pragmatist guide to [00:13:00] sexuality. Is that human arousal when it comes to gender. He is not divided into male and female. It's divided into specific environmental stimuli. I E seeing a penis, seeing breast, seeing the male form, seeing the female form and it exists on a spectrum of arousal to discuss.So in some individuals seeing one of these gendered things can generate a very large amount of disgust in them. The exact opposite of arousal. Actually, we argue that it's literally the opposite of arousal. Um, when you are aroused, your pupils dilate, you look at something longer, you typically breathe in.When you are disgusted, you typically look away from something as much as possible. You want to get away from it. And instead of go closer to it, your pupils contract. , and you hold your nose. We suspect they're operating off the same system, but anyway, , you know, Th th they are experiencing an extreme amount of disgust when they're seeing these individuals.And we'd also note. [00:14:00] The, , trans. Individuals. You know, People born men who are going into these lesbian spaces, they are not the normal types of trans individuals. You see, they are,Well, the creepy ones, the ones who don't have any sort of. Normal social consideration and no sort of boundaries. And this is the thing where a lot of people are like, come on. Are you really telling me that? If you gave creepy, sexually aggressive men. , way to predate on women, just by lying about their gender, that they would do that. That that creepy, sexually aggressive Ben would lie to try to sleep with lesbian women. And then of course I, you reflect on this for a second and you, of course. Of course that's exactly what creepy, sexually aggressive men would do, especially if you gave them a social cheat where no one's allowed to criticize their behavior. All the men who claim to be lesbian are AGP. 100%. Because they're heterosexual, right? If they were gay [00:15:00] dudes who were trans, they wouldn't even be anywhere near lesbian spaces. I have never met a transbian that was not an autodynophile. And that is I think even the worst part of this. Is we are getting the sickest and creepiest dudes.This isn't the what most people think a trans woman is, I think the most average person who's just not involved in this thinks a trans woman is a super effeminate gay man who transitioned fully, and they're like, Oh, she's okay, she can use the bathroom, which is, and it's that is not the majority of what's happening here. Hi, my name is Luz. I'm a trans and polyamorous therapist in Texas, and this is my therapy theme of the week. This week's theme honors Lesbian Visibility Week.As I myself am a trans lesbian, this is what I want to say about lesbians. One of the reasons why I love being a lesbian and I love lesbians is because we get to show the world that it is possible to [00:16:00] love outside the dimensions of patriarchy. We, with sapphic love, create an entirely different dimension, an entirely different way of loving people.and living, and it's so f****n beautiful. It's as important as the sunshine. I want to say that a lot of lesbians, particularly cis lesbians, initiate flirting with other women is through eye contact you can just tell in the eyes oh, they're into you.As an autistic trans woman, that doesn't work. Because for one, I need people to be very direct with me, because I don't like to make assumptions about their intentions. By default, most trans women have their walls up and are ready to brawl because if a woman's staring at us, there's just this innate fear that they're gonna, that they've clocked us and they're gonna say some TERF b******t and we gotta start thre Who the f yeah, you're gonna be clocked.Look at you! Have you seen yourself? Is there a mirror in your house, sir?Malcolm Collins: [00:17:00] Yeah. And so if I was going to convey to a straight guy, how this would feel okay. Imagine you're living in a society wherelike space Marines exist. Okay. There are these people that are 20 percent larger than you, five times stronger than you. And You had decided that you only liked women.You as a guy only like women, right? You like having sex with women and you really don't like penises or anything like that, but now all of a sudden, a category of the space Marines who are all male, okay, they all have penises. Everything like that has started saying that they're women on dating apps.They're the only group reaching out to you. They go into what used to be space like safe spaces, because you used to have these private spaces where like only men could go before. But now these people who are very sexually aggressive are coming into these spaces and they're demanding that you suck their penises.They are demanding, and now everyone who you thought before was like part of your [00:18:00] safe space is now saying that you're a bigot and you're not really straight because you won't suck these men's penises and so now you're kicked out of even these safe spaces. Honestly, I think that'sSimone Collins: how it feels.That's how it feels to them, for sure.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's how it feels to them. It's either you suck space marine cock or you are no longer a straight male. Like you'd be like, just one of the fear that you would live with every day when you go to one of these spaces. And then all of a sudden this 12 foot tall person marches in with 10 times your muscle mass.And this formerly was a community where you felt safe talking about what it feels like to be a non space marine in a space marine society. Um, I feel so bad for them it's not that I don't also feel for actual trans individuals, which I think is a real thing, I think some individuals are actually trans individuals, but they can't understand why women who were born women would want spaces where these other category of person isn't coming into or [00:19:00] because men are like people who are born men are much more like sexually aggressive on these apps and stuff like that.And now there'sno like female only dating apps or women who were born women, like CIS women only CIS lesbian women only dating apps that just doesn't exist, like even her and stuff like that is now regularly promoting like.You can get categorized and kicked off the app for being a quote unquote turf for saying trans women and then you can get kicked off Tinder for this. You can get kicked off of,First I got kicked off of Tinder for putting that I was I think I put female only. Cause I know her used to be pretty specific for women, and then they released the whole, uh, thing like their whole policy basically saying, Oh we don't discriminate against anybody and everybody's welcome.And then at that point, you're like then it's not. Lesbian, like it's not for women. Her has even had, I don't remember the exact wording, but they've had like kind of pop up announcements on the [00:20:00] app about TERFism and there's this specific category to report people for being TERFs on what supposed, what started as a lesbian dating appMalcolm Collins: and so all of the people reaching out to you. And so you just become like an incel, like if people say incel women don't exist, like this is a one category where it'd be like, there probably are actual in cell lesbians just because you can't go into any public space without being hit on by like hundreds of.What to you? To me, I've got nothing against trans people doing what they're doing, but would I sleep with one of them? Especially one of them who doesn't pass? As a straight man most straight men are like, viscerally, yeah, I get it, lesbians. I get why you're having this visceral reaction to this. Then to have this entire safety net. So there's that, but then there's also this hatred of wholesomeness that we regularly see because of the explosion of mental health issues in these communities that sought like a constant hose of dopamine just do whatever I want, [00:21:00] whenever I want.Simone Collins: And there's a lot of cope that comes out of that too. One of the most common responses appears to be, Oh this is all a lie. It is all an illusion. I think this is one of the big reasons why eight passengers crashed and burned so publicly is that at first you had this large trad family. That took a more conservative approach to parenting.They were harder on punishment, et cetera. And then finally they just went off the rails, crashed and burned. And it allowed a huge portion of the community, the progressive community to say, see exactly every family, every conservative family that appears wholesome. In the end, it turns out that the mother has joined some kind of psychologist cult and is leaving the father and the kids are being You know, horribly treated and all of these things.And that's a huge message that I see as well. So it's not just framing it as an attack. I think a lot of it also is just turning it into cope because even acknowledging that it's an attack acknowledges that. [00:22:00] You wish that you had that for yourself.Malcolm Collins: So as a former progressive woman who grew up in San Francisco did you think relationships like ours existed or did youSimone Collins: know, of course not,Malcolm Collins: you've seen pretty deeply into both the lifestyles, be the person who's just being like, honestly, this is how it is.Like what are your thoughts? Thoughts like, is it really as good as they say it better than they say it is? Is it, yeah. What are your real thoughts?Simone Collins: The mindset that I was raised with, if I were to see a trad wife and I'd never encountered a trad wife, so I would have thought that it was fictional first would be that this is someone who's extremely sheltered and doesn't know any better.So they've just been essentially robbed of a series of opportunities in their lives and they are a trad wife because that is all that they've been exposed to. Which to be fair is how many people are raised. Ayla was raised in an environment where she was just told that, like, all of her education was so she could be a good homeschooling, stay at home mother, and then she leaves that world and realizes that she was robbed of a lot of opportunities.And that's a very legitimate [00:23:00] complaint. So I think the. The perception of the world that I was raised with is not totally wrong. And I think that's one of the reasons why this kind of mindset, this view that a lot of people in this position are being lied to are just missing a lot of opportunities that they otherwise would have pursued is because a lot of the time it's true.I think that the big thing that's missing is that progressives don't grow up understanding fully the supportive role that traditional cultures play. And I definitely grew up. Really envying and really missing this concept of having traditions and having holidays and having a cohesive culture and having a, we do this, we stand for that.This is what we're all about. And even the books that my parents read to me as I was a kid, it seemed like this fantasy that was so appealing, that was so cozy, but that had gone extinct. So I could see. People [00:24:00] who are progressive now looking at a trad family and saying, you are just cosplaying as this thing that isn't real anymore.And it can't be real. And this is really offensive because I want it to like my parents and many people went through this. They were read. Little house on the prairie by their parents. So they read those books as a kid and they loved this life. That's actually quite austere. That's quite difficult.There's disease, there's danger, there's deprivation, but it's one of the coziest book series you could possibly read. And there's this perception that just. It's something that could happen in the past and couldn't happen now.Malcolm Collins: And I think that, people hear that I have final say on all things in our relationship.And I think that there's the assumption that then I must be like as a person living in this relationship where it's like an actually healthy sort of trad life relationship. Do you feel like the misogyny, I think you would assume as an outsider, like of me having final say in everything do you feel like you're not consulted in decisions or that I,Simone Collins: Not at all.I think what people miss when it comes down to [00:25:00] hierarchies in a relationship is that it doesn't feel like a hierarchy. It feels it feels like specialization of labor. It feels like an economic decision and choice. Someone that I was corresponding with who followed this podcast was telling me this is someone I admire deeply.She's amazing. A homeschooling mother of seven kids. That's what we always call it. We're not going to name, we don't name anyone. Cause we're not going to reveal anyone, but she was talking about how people really misunderstand trad relationships and that this whole concept of people exerting their dominance is like pulling rank.And whenever you're pulling rank. You are essentially like paying capital. You are you're demonstrating the fact that you didn't have that rank in the first place. You're trying to reassert something that you haven't earned. And that in a true relationship where you have a hierarchy, because it's naturally sorting, you have specialization of labor and you never have this feeling of maintaining frame or pulling rank or s**t testing, because it is just so clear [00:26:00] that.You are really good at this. I'm really good at this. We're going to do our jobs and we trust each other to do a good job because we see that the outcomes are ideal when we trust each other, that you earn that hierarchy, you earn that position. So I think that's also something that's not really seen in.In progressive circles, when they look at traditional circles, because one relationships have been so broken down that it's just understood that people are in these atomized relationships where they don't really have, no one has a specialization. No one has a role. No one has. Everyone has to be able to do absolutely everything by themselves.Their finances are by themselves. Their careers by themselves. Their friendships are by themselves. So there's no specialization. And then there's also this really huge misrepresentation among so called conservatives who constantly talk about maintaining frame and constantly talk about s**t tests and constantly talk about their dominance and constantly are pulling rank.And they totally mess, like they [00:27:00] act as though that they are, they represent trad life when they are 100 percent not at all representative of trad life.Malcolm Collins: I completely agree with you. And another interesting thing that I wanted to highlight here because our eight passengers video never is going live because we did film one on it.I said on that video a long time ago right after the eight passenger situation happened is. I looked at some of the stuff. So people who don't know, she basically fell into a cult with this other lady who started living with them. And I looked at pictures of her and I was like, this lady's a lesbian.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And then I'll put pictures on the screen.If you grew up around a lot of gay people, you can like. Tell like she sets off the gate or to such an extremeSimone Collins: that even people with no gate are like, but that'sMalcolm Collins: a lesbian, right? Yeah. Her actions make sense now. So what she would do is try to break up men and tell them that they were addicted to porn of women.And I think it's because she was. And so she just learned she could say this to any guy to break up. Like her whole thing was attempting to break up straight. I don'tSimone Collins: even, I don't think necessarily she has [00:28:00] to have been addicted to porn to do that. I think she discovered that it was very easy to do that too.Assert her own dominance within a relationship and disintermediate the husband and wife. It was actually worthMalcolm Collins: doing a whole video on how she brainwashed people because it was a really interesting tactic. Comment below if you think so. Yeah. And it sounds like our kids are back from the park.Oh my gosh. I love my wife. I love my kids and I love this life you have created for me. We need toSimone Collins: do some wholesome family time. I'm looking forward to it. Am I making, we're making you beef bulgogi tonight.Malcolm Collins: Bulgogi and then corn ribs.Simone Collins: Yes. Oh myMalcolm Collins: gosh. Ribs are, but I saw them at Trader Joe's and I was like, let's try it.Simone Collins: Let's do it.Malcolm Collins: Let's do it.Simone Collins: Yeah. AllMalcolm Collins: right. You are a very special and amazing woman. And thank you for committing violence against the urban monoculture every day by enjoying your life and broadcasting. for,Simone Collins: Asserting your dominance. Through your natural superiority. I love you so much. Maybe [00:29:00]Malcolm Collins: this is tied to women online all the time.Always posting their losses. Like everyone's always talking about women posting their losses. That might make another video. There's this trend online of like women posting like really horrible days or when they really screwed up or when they really like just Oh, this horrible thing happened to me.Men don't do this very frequently. Yeah. I'll pull up a compilation on it. It's an interesting phenomenon.Simone Collins: I have not fallen down this hole yet. Okay, cool. Looking forward to it.Malcolm Collins: I've got the kids.Simone Collins: Thank you. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe