Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

In this enlightening episode, Simone shares insights from her grandmother's memoir, "Memoirs of a French War Bride," which recounts her experiences living in occupied Paris during World War II. Malcolm and Simone discuss the hardships endured by civilians during this time, from food shortages and air raids to the constant fear of informants. They explore how these experiences shaped the post-war generation, instilling a sense of purpose and resilience that seems to be lacking in modern society. The conversation delves into the allure of teen dystopias, the dangers of dwelling on trauma, and the importance of opting into hardship to build the mental fortitude needed to overcome adversity. Join them as they reflect on the lessons we can learn from our ancestors and the need to cultivate a strong sense of purpose in the face of contemporary challenges.Simone Collins: [00:00:00] I think there may be this deep, subtle craving in the generation that really got into teen dystopias because there's this desire to live this life of deprivation and desperation, but more importantly, striving to survive, because given that opportunity.You do have motivation again. You do have a reason to believe and. I feel like there's this desire for that, When we think about everything that our ancestors went through and everything that they sacrificed to create a better world, because they did incrementally contribute to a better world, no matter how small it may have been, they did contribute.How can we complain about what weMalcolm Collins: have? like, if you're a cult and you're trying to break someone psychologically down, that's what you target for.First is their pride in who they are to make them think that they're nothing so that then you can brainwash them. And it's a naturally evolved mechanism. It's not like this was maliciously chosen by the left, but just the leftist traditions that did this ended up recruiting more people than the ones that didn't.And so now it's become the predominant strategy of the left within the [00:01:00] educational system within everything like that.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am very excited for this one. We did an episode called Kids Used to Like Their Parents. And it actually did fairly well. I strongly suggest people watch it. It is on a, a diary or autobiography I found of one of my ancestors.And today we are going to be diving into the autobiography of one of Simone's ancestors and the things that it has taught us about our modern society. So Simone, take it away.Simone Collins: Yeah, I my, my, I've read it before, but not since I was a teen. My grandmother wrote a book, an autobiography, or at least a portion, she read about a portion of her life in a book called memoirs of a French war bride, which had a limited publication release.And Doesn't it's difficult to get, but it's actually quite interesting. Because what she does is recounts her experience as a late teens. So [00:02:00] we'll say 18 to early twenties living in occupied Paris during world war two. And it really. Has made me think differently about everything from teen dystopias to dating in a way that I quite like.So I thought it might be fun to talk about. But the first thing that really did strike me was just how, how bad it was for, for people, even in just occupied areas of a nation. You know, this wasn't, this wasn't people You know, just dealing with a new regime suddenly coming in and being kind of mean it was people fleeing Paris in cars running out of gas and then driving along on roads that were constantly being bombed by planes.So my grandmother. And her, her two parents and her aunt fled Paris in an attempt to not die. When the Nazis came [00:03:00] in, they didn't know what they were going to do. But nearly died quite a few times because Italians and Germans would bomb the roads, major roads leading out from Paris, even though this was civilian traffic which is insane.I had no idea that that was happening. But imagine just trying to leave your city. And. Lying in ditches by the side of the road and having cars be bombed. At one point, a horse cart flipped over on top of her and she would have died. Had she not been in a depression under the road, they were machine gunning, civilians running into wheat fields from the road.So I just had forgotten how, because we mostly read in high school about frontline experience where we look, we see movies about what soldiers were experiencing when fighting in the war. I don't think we realized what it was quite like for civilians.Malcolm Collins: What I really like about this, what it reminds me, both writing my own ancestors accounts of the period right before this in history, and your ancestors accounts of this period in history, [00:04:00] is How history in the U.S., like secular U. S. education, has become so focused on the sins of, basically the sins of the white man. Like that is what the history is these days. It's just over and over again that, and then some stuff tied to frontline battles but very little on the average lifestyle of the average white man.Going through many of these events whether they were civilians or like, what was it actually like to just live as a normal person in the old west? Right? Like that's, that's what I was reading was in my family's account. Her family's account. What was it actually like to be a teenage civilian in. Paris during theSimone Collins: occupation.Yeah. Like what was it like to dance? What was it like to like, try to date?Malcolm Collins: DancingSimone Collins: was a really, yeah. So in occupied France, you could not convene with, with two, more than two people on the street, basically. So any sort of social [00:05:00] gathering for college students, which is what she was throughout this period.was completely out of the question, but that didn't stop anyone. So what they would do is pack themselves into a small Parisian apartment and dance with a record playing very softly and someone would wait at the door. And if anyone heard footsteps and they would all just immediately freeze, turn off the record and wait.And of course all the windows are blacked out. All of the windows are closed. No one has air conditioning. It's, it's, it's, typically like dead of heat in the summer. So these people are sweating like pigs. I, I, I don't know why you would bother dancing at all, but they really, really wanted to. And they would sometimes when she spent some time in the countryside outside Paris, there would be barn dances that were similar.Someone would be waiting outside and looking to see if any Germans were on patrol. So to think that people it's, it's funny now that like, people cannot be bothered to date at all. And yet here are these people in occupied Germany, risking their lives just so they could dance. No, we can't. Now we're [00:06:00] going in a totally different direction of Hikigomori.You know, people are not leaving their apartments. The internet has changed a lot in that respect. But what I also read about dancing during this period as a. We'll say sexual signalings, sexual display and and social compatibility tool is way underrated. And I didn't quite think about that until this book, even after the war.My, my grandmother ended up marrying. A lieutenant in the U. S. Air Force that she met while he was on a five day leave in Paris. And that is because the Red Cross would host these dances for soldiers and for local French women who spoke English just to kind of, I don't know, boost morale or something.And she described because she would go to these mostly to smuggle home donuts because she was really hungry and she liked donuts and they had them there. But she would go and, and the dancing, she described it as being in [00:07:00] this almost clinical way. Of, of, of how she would use a dance to judge potential partners.So it was, how did they approach you? Did they smile? Were they stuttering when they tried to ask you for a dance? Once you started dancing, did they get clingy and want to spend the whole time with you? Did they grab you too forcefully? Did they even know how to dance? Did they have the social graces to dance really well?How did they smell? I mean, like you, it's interesting to me because it is a really good way of judging personality and sexual compatibility without doing anything untoward. You know what IMalcolm Collins: mean? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's used so much across traditional cultures and it's interesting how much we have lost the traditional dance as a partner sourcing mechanism.Because, you know, you're not getting that with something like twerking or something like that.Simone Collins: No, no, no. Yeah. Dancing in a club, I don't think is quite the same thing.Malcolm Collins: But, but, but traditional line dancing and, and, and Kaylee and stuff like that is, is definitely of this variety of dance. There was another thing that, so [00:08:00] one thing I just want to, you know, as she goes over these stories about what her grandparents went through, like her grandfather also went through this horrible thing where he was lost in the woods during this period.And, and, and everyone on his plane died. And we might do a separate video about that. That would be like our version of a Mr. Bolin video. But I might pitch it to Mr. Bolland because it sounded so much like a Mr. Bolland story when I heard it. But and I tried to elevate this was with my family history is people look to their parents generation and say, look at how hard we have it in this generation.Oh, yeah, so laughable when World War Two was just our grandparents ago, when all around the world, imagine what it would be like, like, people are like, yeah, but that's not in the world today. Imagine what it'd be like to be in Haiti today to be growing up there to be a young girl there. All around the world today, people are experiencing these things.You in the developed world. Do not have a hard life. You just [00:09:00] don't, no matter how hard you think your life is. It is a joke easy compared to your ancestors. Well, this isSimone Collins: what made me think completely differently about teen dystopia fiction is I remember reading it when I was younger. I still sometimes read it because it's fluffy and ridiculous, but reading it, I get this feeling of, wow, like what a crazy sci fi world.Could you ever imagine something so horrible as this? You know, people spying on you all the time and you know, the, the horror of that or being deprived. That happened. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So in occupied France a lot, and because resources were really scarce, a lot of people In every local neighborhood decided to become informants to the Germans.And you could never really tell until you could who was an informant. So people were terrified to talk to each other. People were terrified to be honest about anything except with their closest family members,Malcolm Collins: the [00:10:00] bread wouldSimone Collins: have like, yeah, no. And it will, of course, yeah, the food rationing was terrible.And the, the bread that was left for the French people because everything was being sent to Germany. Was the worst leftover. It was mixed in with sawdust. They would find rubber bands in it, bits of mouse. It was just completely gross and disgusting. They were given half a pound of butter every month as a family to cook with theoretically, although they didn't always have enough coal to cook with.So, you know, my grandmother said that. When people greeted each other, it was never, Oh, how are you doing? How's the weather? It was, do you have enough coal to make dinner tonight? Did you actually get your food ration today? Because you'd be waiting in line for hours. You had to have a dedicated family member for it essentially.But. They, they tried to preserve their half pound of butter by making it float in a bowl of cold water because they didn't have a refrigerator. It was just so desperate and terrible. And the, yet despite all this, everyone continued to work. My grandmother went and got a law [00:11:00] degree and political science degree at one of the major Parisian universities.Everyone still had to live their lives. And. They, they came out so much better and I realizedMalcolm Collins: not working as well in this context.Simone Collins: Yeah. This, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Bizarre. All women had jobs back then. Like, I don't know what modern people, one of the things that you mentioned that I thought was really interesting is you were talking about butchers having this high class in this society because they could like smuggle meat.Beyond what was a lot of the people,Simone Collins: yeah, they did really well,Malcolm Collins: apparently the regular butcher's house and the man would do all the cutting and the woman would manage the, the, the books and the selling of the meat. And this is just the way things were historically. There were not like women not working.AndSimone Collins: this was this, yeah, this was like 1940. You know, late 1940s. So this was, this was rightMalcolm Collins: around Shraddwey's period. You know, her mom had a job. She had a job. The sister who was living with them had a job. Oh no, the mom didn't have a job. The mom's job was waiting at food lines, but you needed that back then.[00:12:00]But anyway, get back to the context of this as a teen dystopia.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, so it made me realize when, you know, she also described the, the ebullience in Paris and how happy and childlike everyone became when. The allied forces retook the city and how relieved and excited people were, but also how she felt in moments when she thought she was going to die when bombings were taking place or when she slow mo knew that a horse cart was about to fall completely on top of her and probably kill her, she didn't feel.Nihilism. She didn't feel malaise. She felt a desperate desire to survive and have a family and have kids and in some way, moderately contribute to the improvement of society, which is so interesting to me. And then there's, of course, everyone got this huge boost and motivation after. The war ended to go and do something and build the world and have kids and have a family and even families that suffered from infertility.It seems like there was a lot of adoption taking place as well. She keeps [00:13:00] mentioning friends who had adopted kids and it, it strikes me that there's maybe this craving for hard Simone, by the way. Yeah. Like war from, but also I can imagine a lot of people fighting in the war. We're exposed to so many really dangerous chemicals that they became infertile.My grandfather got every color of cancer on the rainbow. And I think a lot of it had to do with the stuff he was exposed to in the air force. But I think there may be this deep, subtle craving in the generation that really got into teen dystopias because there's this desire to live this life of deprivation and desperation, but more importantly, striving to survive, because given that opportunity.You do have motivation again. You do have a reason to believe and. I feel like there's this desire for that, although we would never choose it and no one ever wants these terrible things to happen. Well, no, no,Malcolm Collins: no. Individually, they don't want to, but I think that they, they fantasize about it more than I think you would admit.Both women and men, and it's [00:14:00] interesting that the way that each group fantasizes about dystopia, I think, is often somewhat different. Yeah. Then it is apocalyptic dystopia where they are rebuilding society, which you often have in the apocalypse narratives, likeSimone Collins: fallout zombie stuff. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Whereas with women, it's like French occupation, right?It's society is ordered. It's unfair. People are stratified based on their birth. You know, it'sSimone Collins: more, it's more handmaid's tale. It's more, hunger games, et cetera.Malcolm Collins: But these are both pretty horrifying. What's interesting is that these were often the roles because many of the women who were under these societies, like the men weren't there, they were out fighting.They were actually living a separate apocalypse. And so, we forget that the people recently went through these things and that in a way it made them better people. And they really seems to have parents generation. was the first generation to genuinely live in a post scarcity environment. And by that, what I mean is, you know, not starving to death [00:15:00] as like a major risk of everyone's life.That is what destroyed them to an extent. And this isn't to say that you can get around, you can get around this in this generation. There are solutions. It's called living with austerity. You know,Simone Collins: for a reason, though, and I think people have to live with austerity because we know a lot of so a big group that lives with austerity are the people who are trying to live forever, right?You know, they have these very strict diets. They're on all these vitamins. They can't, you know, eat at certain times. They have to work out in this very specific way. That is a life of deprivation. But I also don't see them as being terribly satisfied or content people in the same way that I get this feeling from post war boomers, not boomers post war greatest generation members.DoMalcolm Collins: you get that? It's because they're not living with A meaningful purpose, their purpose is a fear of yeah, so it's actually one of the funny things that we tweeted recently where I was like, it's funny that, and you and I have talked about this, neither one of us has a [00:16:00] particularly acute fear of death.Like, I really don't mind if anything, I look forward to eventually dying.Simone Collins: It's the reward at the end of this thing.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Once I finished all the tasks that I have, and keep in mind, we don't believe in a strict afterlife either. I just, you Don't really fear death yet. I am desperately excited to be alive.I love my life. It's awesome. It is, it is, you know, the greatest life I could imagine for myself. And yet when I look at the people who fear death the most, they often do not seem to enjoy life. A, a fear of death is to me, a hope of finding some meaning in the future because you haven't found it yet.You haven't, once you. know how great life can be because you are fighting for something that matters and that means something to you, and you know that your actions You know, if everything works out, end up having an impact on society that is like, you know, then, then you're like, okay, this is it.Like I've done the good thing. I just need to complete the good thing. Then I get to [00:17:00] die, you know?Simone Collins: Yeah. And one, another thing I think about too is aside from just this choosing deprivation and having a purpose thing. Now there's so much Abundance around us that we don't even realize that. I think we're so distracted by it that we can't get focused on it.Yeah. Like, so my, my grandmother, after, after meeting my grandfather, but before they got married, traveled from Paris to the United States to kind of decide on whether they were going to get married and get engaged and they did she, upon arriving in New York, Really sport splurges goes crazy, hog wild and gets.Some milk and two bananas and ate them both. Malcolm, she ate both bananas and Mr. Her was an insaneMalcolm Collins: thing. She ate twoSimone Collins: bananas and then after that, of course she had terrible indigestion, but she could not help but indulge in this [00:18:00] imported fruit that was just so luxury. , andMalcolm Collins: like the level of luxury is so obscene in our society.Yeah. And when we talk about austerity, the important thing about austerity, like, if you want to return to this date, because I feel like when I read the, the happiness that I see these people had and the sense of purpose these people had, and I look at somebody like my wife, she obviously has this. Right?Like, like, to me and my interactions with her, it's something I don't see in society that much, but she obviously has this. I feel that I have it too, and I just don't see it in other people that much. When people are like, why are you so excited every day? Why are you? And I'm like,Simone Collins: because everything matters!You did know. Personally, you did experience. starvation and deep deprivation and having your life at risk. True.Malcolm Collins: Which wasSimone Collins: fortunate for me. And I imposed it on myself. I, I literally starved myself. So I also know what it's like to obsess over food. Well, soMalcolm Collins: there's two questions. One is, [00:19:00] you know, do you actually need to undergo something like this to, to hit one of these mindsets?Or can you structure a, a A belief system and moral framework around this in terms of how we raise our kids. This is a little experiment with who will engage. And we'll have future videos around this, around some form of opt into austerity or deprivation for the kids, where the kids enter some state as a coming of age ritual that is designed.To genuinely allow them to test themselves in one of these really hard ways, but take ownership of that test themselves with the understanding of look at society right now. Like these people never went through this. You do not want to end up like 1 of the zombies, right? That's the alternative. And the alternative is scary to kids because kids see it.They see the nihilism that's pervading our world and consuming our reality. Like, like, It reminds me of in the in the never ending story. I don't know if you remember the, the nothing that's the villain and that the thing that consumes all creativity and, and, and happiness and joy which is [00:20:00] what, what's happening.This nihilism of our society People have begun to lose their hopes, and forget their dreams. So the nothing grows stronger. It's the emptiness that's left. It is like a despair, destroying this world. And I have been trying to help it. But why? Because people who have no hopes are easy to control.And whoever has the control has theMalcolm Collins: is really eating this for kids. And I see it in Gen Alpha and I see it in Gen Z. So create some defense around that. But. The way that you maintain that as an individual is individual austerity and austerity is not something that can be imposed upon you. Austerity is always living with less than what you have.So even if you're poor, that's not austerity. Austerity is choosing to live with less than even you are [00:21:00] making because you are living for something bigger than yourself. And a portion of your resources are going to see that goal.Simone Collins: Yeah. Austerity is not austerity if it's not a choice. Although here's the thing though reconcile this.Our, our ancestors didn't choose the austerity. I mean, my grandmother certainly didn't choose to have to live with this level of deprivation. After the war, she did. That's true. She continued up until the very end of their lives, they would pickMalcolm Collins: up. She had all this money turns out. saved up because she chose to live for something bigger than herself.And I think that that's the thing when you wake up in the morning, like, and you open your eyes. And I think that this is the biggest thing, like when, when you determine like people, like, how do I find purpose or whatever one pragmatist guide to life is totally dedicated to this topic without trying to push people in any specific direction.But when you open your eyes in the morning and you're like forcing yourself to get out of bed, like what's doing that for you, right? Is it just the. You're going to lose your job. Then, then what you are living for, [00:22:00] like your morality is just keeping your job, barely staying alive. Right. And that's pretty impressive worlds at like a turning point and you have taken it upon yourself to try to ensure that you can preserve the safety of all future humans and the vitality of the human species, you know, for us, that's what's, what's been, we're like, yeah.And if we don't do this, it all falls apart.Simone Collins: And I'll be honest. It's not always hope that Gets me up in the morning. Sometimes it's rage. Because I knowMalcolm Collins: you'll see the horrible things that are, that people doSimone Collins: to babies and young children and the injustice that children and babies throughout the world face.And I will spend entire nights crying about it because I literally cannot help myself. I think it's hormonal. But that rage is enough. And I think a lot of people were fueled by rage back then. I'm very, veryMalcolm Collins: angry that they can do something about all of this. I mean, one of the things that society has tried to do to individuals is to remove this internal locus of control.We're young [00:23:00] people today really grow up believing they can't do anything. And then many who do believe they can do something Like it's like Greta Thornburg. I mean, our job is to demand solutions, not to provide solutionsMalcolm Collins: And it's like, okay, that's really great. Like that helps you with social status within your community, but it's not a thing of utility.Simone Collins: No, I think there are always going to be people like that in society. And this showed up in my grandmother's book because she kept talking about all these various people, neighbors and friends and colleagues who joined the resistance movement, who are putting everything at risk, completely everything at risk.Because they believed in doing it. And then there were a bunch of other people who were just like, wow, this really sucks. I guess I'm going to go along with it. And then there were even a bunch of other people who were like, I'm going to become an informant. I'm going to help the Germans. So I think it's, it's not that we have a complete dearth of that.I think that maybe there are just fewer moral frameworks enabling people to come. To the conclusion that they can make a difference now.Malcolm Collins: Well, I think it's this [00:24:00] framing of them genuinely believing that their lives are hard. Like, like they genuinely believe this many people today, or that by just b******g about something, they're genuinely trying to make the world a better place.Like. That that's not the way it works. And so many people see this with our advocacy that it comes across as very weird to them. Like we never point out a problem we don't try to solve. Like at the moment we mentioned,Simone Collins: Oh, we complain about plenty of stuff. We're not working onMalcolm Collins: it. We're like, okay, fertility problems is an issue.Okay. Maybe we should try matchmaking our friends and see if we can come up with a sustainable system. Okay. That didn't work. Let's look at the other thing. And then this can lead to weird solutions. Like for us, one of the weird solutions is like, why are you guys trying to build like your own cultural framework?Doesn't that seem. More insane than just Advocating that the government gave half a million dollars a year to every prospective, like, marginal bank. I remember that time. That was like well, this could fix the problem. And I'm like, yes, this could fix the problem. In the same way when, like, Greta Thornburg is b******g about global warming, she comes up with Theoretical policy solutions, but they're never going to actually [00:25:00] pass.They can't actually solve the, like, like nothing that she's saying that could realistically get intoSimone Collins: policy. Yeah. And well, pronatalists arguing that, you know, everyone should just get 500, 000. It's like environmentalists or people fighting for sustainability saying everyone has to just stop eating meat right now.Yeah. Yeah, it could happen. It could happen. It's not going to happen.Malcolm Collins: And so people are like, why have you done something as crazy as trying to create like this own culture for your family? And it's like, look, I'm not saying that what we're doing is likely to succeed. Okay. But at least it's Possible that it succeeds of the various things that I can wake up and actually fight for every day, raising my kids in a way that sustainably works and replicates is one of the things I can strive for.And it sounds crazy to other people because actually trying something and basing your solutions around what might actually work sounds crazy [00:26:00] today. Yeah. But I think another thing that you said that I want to meditate on here is. If people actually had the full history of all of their ancestors, they would never be acting in the way that they're acting today.Simone Collins: Yeah, no, and it's, it's funny because I'd even read this book before. As a teen and forgot so much of it, so much of what my grandmother was amazed by, you know, bananas and, and what she'd gone through and that she, you know, even as a young woman would brave complete, like, Social rejection just to try to smuggle doughnuts back from a, for a Red Cross dance for her parents, for her parents.Malcolm Collins: Oh, another one that mommy say she goes into a bar at one point. Cause what were they looking for? They were looking for food. ISimone Collins: think. Yeah. So when they were fleeing, right, as the Nazis were coming into Paris, she and her family were driving and being bombed. And [00:27:00] then one night they tried to take shelter in an abandoned village.And she walked into a cafe because her family was asking her to find a place where they could get food. And she found a, what she thought was a French soldier slumped over on the bar, like the bar of the cafe or restaurant. And when she tapped him to ask him if anyone was there, fell over and was clearly dead.And she. That was her first time seeing a casualty from the war. And she also never told her parents about that. She just went back to her parents and said, yeah, it's closed. No one's there. And you know,Malcolm Collins: like PTSD, like symptoms from that or something you mentioned.Simone Collins: No, that's from the air raids every time.I mean, and this is, I'm sure so common for people who lived through the air raids, every time she heard a fire truck or alarm, she thought about those nights when she'd have to constantly, you know, wake up, put on clothes, go out to the Metro, wait there forever. Hope that your home doesn't get [00:28:00] bombed terrifying.But I mean, it's, I don't even know if that's PTSD and she certainly didn't frame it that way. She just, she mentions how later in her life. Like the one time she ever had to wait in a really, really, really long around the block line. She was reminded of waiting in food lines in Paris where every time she heard a siren, she was reminded of the air raids and it just kind of took her back there.But I think it also made her really grateful for what she had. And to your point, yeah, when we. When we think about everything that our ancestors went through and everything that they sacrificed to create a better world, because they did incrementally contribute to a better world, no matter how small it may have been, they did contribute.How can we complain about what weMalcolm Collins: have? Like everyone doing their thing for their society and their cultural group and having pride in that society and cultural group, which now the, the progressive specifically works so hard to destroy is our pride. Our pride in being Americans, our pride in whatever ethnicity we're a part of, our pride in whatever religion or cultural [00:29:00] tradition we come from which is part of, like, if you're a cult and you're trying to break someone psychologically down, that's what you target for.First is their pride in who they are to make them think that they're nothing so that then you can brainwash them. And it's a naturally evolved mechanism. It's not like this was maliciously chosen by the left, but just the leftist traditions that did this ended up recruiting more people than the ones that didn't.And so now it's become the predominant strategy of the left within the educational system within everything like that. But also what I really liked about this story of the dead person in the bar. Is somebody today online, they would say this is my source of trauma, and then they use this to like, if this is just one event of many that she went through, and they use this to justify, well, I can't do this, or this is why I can't go into bars, or this is why I have to be a dick at parties, or this is why, you know, they use it to justify all of the things that they wanted to do to begin with.And then they begin to dwell on the trauma. The trauma becomes a larger and larger part of their identity. Until it [00:30:00] eats all of who they are. And they are nothing but Trauma wearing human skin, because it is so easy to do that when you live for nothing but self comfort and self affirmation, which is what they're taught to do, because their mind isn't meant to work that way.And we see when reading these older stories, that This wasn't the way things were like this modern YouTuber who recently said the reason we have such a psychological health problem. You say that there's not enough psychologists. It's like, no, it is that there are too many psychologists. Is it when something bad happens to you?You don't just go Get the over it.Simone Collins: But I also, I do think, you know, I've been thinking more about what you're saying in terms of how we raise our own kids and what we can do. I'm thinking about different people that she brings up in her stories and her recountings of the war and how actually different people's backgrounds and how they were raised and the class in which they were raised, but also the hardship with which they were raised didn't really change their [00:31:00] outcomes during and after the war.For example, my grandfather. Like Malcolm alluded to was in a, in a plane crash and then abandoned or well stranded in the wilderness in Oregon during late November and he had to figure out a way to get his way out and survive and another person also parachuted out of the plane andMalcolm Collins: landed near him.First, because I think that this is important context.Simone Collins: Okay. Anyway he, he was, he landed in a place in the wilderness near where another person landed. Both of them were caught in trees. Both of them were suspended maybe 75 feet above the ground.My grandfather, instead of just, you know, Sitting there and not getting his way somehow out climbed up one of the ropes of his parachutes that was attached to the tree Pulls his parachute out the other side and then used a rope to shimmy down the tree And then he tried to direct the same well his his companion I guess the other guy who parachuted and landed near him to do the same thing and he [00:32:00] refused to he said he was just Too scared and too shocked but then when I think about The pre war childhood that my grandfather had, I think, Oh, wait, this was an opt in lifestyle that he had that made him the kind of person who would just kind of tough through a situation like that and just climb up the fricking tree and get down, even though it was a really scary.Now, what was that childhood? He lived in Oklahoma during the dust bowl during the great depression. This was a period where. Most farmers in the area just had this massive exodus that many of us as United States based students, former students read about in the grapes of wrath, where they just, they just all left because it was a desert.There was nothing, there was no food. Everyone was starving. So they left. My grandfather's family was like, no, we're cool. We're just going to, we're just going to stay. It's fine. Everything's fine. And they're in this run one room farmhouse with like an outhouse out back was very austere. But these are people who chose the hard path intentionally.So that makes me think that there actually is hope that [00:33:00] when you create a family that opts in to hardship, that chooses the hard path and lives lives of opt in to your point deprivation. When real s**t hits the fan, like you're in a plane crash and you need to survive in the wilderness, you're going to have what it takes to actually do what you need to do.Yeah,Malcolm Collins: well, and I think what's really interesting is we talk in one of our tracks about like the trial of the lotus eaters and stuff like that. And in a way we sort of are in a mass massacre of our species right now, of the weak within our species, the people who succumb to hedonism. And I think we forgot how recently, you know, before our parents generation in, in the second world war, we underwent a massive selection.You know, the guy who stayed in the tree ended up freezing to death. Well, no, he ended up breaking his spine. He was freezing to death and then he cut the ropes and he died. And so we don't even know exactly how, but that's how they ended up finding him. And when the grandfather was walking away, I mean, just as the ultimate dick move, he could hear the guy calling, like he changed his mind.He's like, come back, like, [00:34:00] help me. And the grandfather. Barely made it out of this situation alive if he had taken the guys actually to his best interest that the guy didn't go because he almost certainly would have died. Had he been taking an injured guy and trying to get to to safety though, toSimone Collins: be fair, my grandfather spent several hours trying to get the guy down, trying to convince him to climb up the rope.And then the guy was like, no, no, no, you should just go on without me and go get help and. So this was what the guy asked for initially. I justMalcolm Collins: need you to save me. Yeah. And then he burns the screens into the grandfather's memory when he's far away. He can't go back at this point. It's snowy. It's terrible.Anyway so, and we haven't gone through like everything he went through to get to civilization after that. It was crazy. And he had gangrene and he still insisted on going back out and looking for the guy. But anyway What was interesting about this is I think that we're sort of at this moment again and everybody can ask themselves this, you know, in this age of plenty, the people who are like, I just don't want to have kids or I want to justify this hedonistic lifestyle.I've chosen for myself. They're the guy who's [00:35:00] like. Hanging from the tree and it's like, you just have to go save me.Simone Collins: You're just gonna have to rescue me. That Cartman, CartmanMalcolm Collins: move. You just have to save me. Yeah, go, go, go, go save me and I'll wait here hanging in the tree. And the people who survive, the people who make this work, they're the people, Who do the thing that seems crazy, climb up the line to their parachute take it, turn it around.When she said she made it into a shimmy, she means like he made a thing that attached to one hand, threw it around the tree, attached to the other hand, and then used it like tree climbers do to, to climb down the tree. Not like he made a rope from it or something, like he had to invent a device 75 feet off the ground in a tree to get out of the tree.And then he gave that. The other guy didn't even have to figure out how to escape. He told the guy how to escape and the guy still couldn't do it, right? And that's sort of where we are in society. We have come up with some crazy solution for our family. It may work, right? I think it will. And we're just [00:36:00] out there to a lot of people and they're like, yeah why don't you guys just save civilization and I'll just stay here playing video games and eating cheese puffs and or, or worse, you know, the guy at the end when society realizes.Oh s**t, like they're actually going to get out of this. You know, why, why didn't you save me? Why didn't you come and do it for me? Why didn't you tell me that this was how I needed to get out of this situation? And it's like, we did, we told you everything. Like you just hated us for it. And then, and then yelled at us when we're walking away and it's working, whatever we're doing.And that's the way it always works. And that's the way it will work again within this generation. It's just, we went a generation without that. And because of that, people have become So weak.Simone Collins: The important takeaway too, is that we, we have to remember that it is often hardship that I think creates the kind of people who have that mindset.And I think if you're raised soft, or if you fail [00:37:00] to, as an adult who was raised soft, to find a way to make yourself hard. You're not going to have those resources when the time comes, and you can't just build those resources when the time comes. I, I get the impression that the, you know, the man in the tree who now is like our poorest scapegoater, metaphorical whipping post for all this he really didn't have it in him to do that.This is not something you can just suddenly become. You don't just suddenly become. a resilient person who can handle hardship and who can push forward in life. That's whyMalcolm Collins: genetic selection events matter. I mean, I think many people who realize the existential threat of perinatalism and falling fertility rates and the disappearance of their cultural group, they know that they need to do something about it.But they just don't have it in them. Like having it in you to actually go out and do what's necessary to move everything forward is a lot. And a lot of people are in that exact situation. And I mean, I feel for the guy, I can only imagine, you know, so many people are scared like that [00:38:00] in society right now.So many people want to adopt the nihilism of the cold and someone else will figure this out instead of just being like, no, no matter what it's all about. always up to you to figure this out on your own. And, and you are responsible for whether or not you and your group makes it out of this because we can't do it for you.We can only alert you to the consequences of staying in the tree, which is you're going to freeze to death.Simone Collins: Yeah. Hold on. Give me a second becauseis there anything else that I'd learned from her experiences?No, she was hypergamous though. She definitelyMalcolm Collins: said no to a bunch of people. No, I mean, she would talk. She has, she's like very classist as well. Talk down about something.Simone Collins: She was like, well, he was, you know, very nice for a farm boy, but you know, or like she refused to marry this one guy because he was.She was probably too dumb for her and also too bourgeois. She [00:39:00] didn't want to marry someone who is middle class, which is funny because I think when she met my grandfather and heard that, you know, his family had a farm in Oklahoma, she assumed that that meant that he was a landowner, like in Europe, which means something very different from beingMalcolm Collins: an Okie with a farm.Simone Collins: With a one one room farmhouse and an outhouse post depression in Oklahoma. Rolling in it. But yeah, that's, those are my big takeaways so far. I am now going to get to the second part of the book, which is about her experience as a French war bride in the United States. So I can't wait to reread her experience.I mean, sheMalcolm Collins: was an immigrant in France. She wasn't from there.Simone Collins: Okay. Can you come up here? I'll put on speaker. I'll leave it.Malcolm Collins: Great. Sorry, I was talking with a friend of ours who worked at Escalate on this issue internally.Simone Collins: [00:40:00] Oh, that's really nice of them. And wow, hope it works. Sorry about that. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into the world of incels, discussing a recent study that challenges the common perception of incels as predominantly right-wing. They explore the inherently leftist ideology of the incel movement, the dehumanization of incels by the left, and the role of female interests in shaping the left's stance on the issue. The conversation also touches on the historical context of how societies have dealt with incels, the potential dangers posed by the incel community, and the importance of addressing the root causes of the incel phenomenon. Join them as they offer insights on the complexities of the incel issue and its implications for modern society.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. It is great to be chatting with you today. I always love when statistics and new studies surprise me with information and help change my world perspective. And one such study came out recently on incels.And what it showed, . Many commenters have suggested a link between incels and the far right. However, using Pew Research's ideological consistency scale, this survey found that incels were slightly left of center on average.The exception was those who agreed with violence against individuals that cause incels harm or Often justified, these individuals were right leaning, though not extremely so.They held right wing opinions for 60 percent of the items in the ideological consistency scale, compared to 45 percent for the rest of the sample.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: And this is really interesting to me because, and this is one of those things where, you know, the left, they just take a group that's bad, and then they pretend that they are overwhelmingly right leaning. You know, as we always point out, until Obama was elected by [00:01:00] 538 polling, so mainstream Nate Silver polling White Democrats were less likely to vote for a black candidate as president than Republicans.So there is not a racist voting block on the right that doesn't exist on the left at about equal proportions. And it's the same with incels we're seeing here. Incels exist across parties. Generally, they're slightly on the left. But when they are more violent, which I guess would make sense if they're interested in getting guns and stuff like that and using them, they're going to come up as more on the right.ButISimone Collins: think that's the thing. It's when you see this in I can't use the word people ending themselves stats where women are far less likely to successfully end themselves. Whereas men successfully end themselves. I think a lot of it all comes down to Group efficacy. And I think that conservative groups have higher levels of efficacy and following through on things that are to them.Well, I thinkMalcolm Collins: it's more than that. I think if you think about what in cellism actually is, as you think about the ideology of the movement, it is an intrinsically far left [00:02:00] leaning ideology. So let's talk about this and let's talk about why they're not showing up as far left in the data. And just slightly left leaning.So specifically what an incel believes is that they are owed something by society that they are not getting from society and that the government should play a role in getting them that thing. If you look within incel circles, You know, what do they ask for? What they ask for is government mandated prostitution and government paid, like they ask for, and you, you see this within social communities, they want the government to find a way to deliver sex to them or to impose social norms Like forced marriages and stuff like that, which would give them access to sex, which are both incredibly left leaning ideas.The idea that you are owed something by your fellow man, and that those who have a poverty of that thing deserve the state to equitably distribute that thing, or have a right to use the state to equitably distribute that thing. I [00:03:00] And yeah, I mean, it's, it's, like, how is that not obviously a lefty position?And so then the question is, well, then why are they showing up as, as, as moderates on these surveys? And I think the answer is two things. I think that these surveys are wrongly, as I have pointed out, considering any racist views right leaning, when really they're not. And I do know that racism is really common within NSL communities.And they are accounting anything that's pro gun. As a right leaning viewpoint, which is also going to be common within himself communities, given their goals. And that's also why, when they turn violent, they come off as right leaning but this gets even more interesting. Well, first, I want to hear your thoughts on, on, on this.ItSimone Collins: makes sense. And also I learnedthe term incel was actually started by a woman in 1997 who created a group for involuntary celibates. So did you have conservative origins?Malcolm Collins: There's still this female incel movement, which is really psychotic, which we can talk about in the second half of this video is the female incels.Who are they and why are they so crazy? [00:04:00] Because it's, it's completely unjustified, but yeah, it was started by a woman.And there is a growing movement of female incels today that primarily kind of use the term ironically, but not really use the term ironically, because they still categorize themselves as this because they see the incel movement as having like a number of things that they are.Like they're, they're social outcasts who are nerdy and watch a lot of anime and write a lot of fan fiction and they're like, that's me. Like this is my broad set of social issues. And I have trouble getting a man. And when they say a man, they mean a man in a relationship, which they'll often explicitly say, like, they're like, yeah, of course I could get a guy to have sex with me.But what about a guy who, you know, wants a relationship or something like that?Hi everybody, I am Chloe, aka Boop Creates. For a period of time I was actually the top Google result for femcell , a femcel is a celibate woman,however, I think I recognize it's a little bit more complicated than that. Um, I think there's a lot of people that do genuinely struggle in relationships. [00:05:00] Um, and incels by kind of stripping down to like, oh, are you an incel or femcel by defining it as can you get just sex with somebody or able to have sex with someone is really, I think, reductive and not Not what I think the term originally meant, or really what it should mean, because I'd argue a lot of people can, you know, kind of get those things.Even guys, um, I'd actually hear more so about guys getting offered that kind of, somewhat randomly, a lot of guys that I know, um, than women.Malcolm Collins: And if you look at the women who identify with this community, they're often fairly attractive or like middling. Which to me shows that this isn't what's happening. It's more of like a cloud thing online that they're using for shock value.And that is being reinforced on them. And so they, they get affirmation from picking these perspectives by thirsty and sell men who are drawn to this because they think they have a shot with these women. It's like a specific type of being a pick me. But to correlate a [00:06:00] guy who, like, Cannot get sex at all with a woman's experience especially a woman who's not, like, incredibly ugly, is just Like insane if you look at the data they are not experiencing the same hardships at all.They do not have any understanding of what it would feel like to be a man in that situation at all. They are co opting another community's suffering for social points. In a way that, you know, could be seen as you know, it's like a dressing up like a Native American or something like that, right?Like, this is a group that is genuinely suffering, genuinely has high rates of suicide, which is talked about in the study genuinely feels wronged by society. And I think, In a part, rightly so, like, is society structured in a way that is systemically unfair to men who have low social skills and low attractiveness?Yeah. Do, do they have a right to be angry because of that? I mean, if you think that you are owed equality by society, as most leftist positions do, then yes. If you think that, you know, you just accept that not everyone is born [00:07:00] equal and that, that gives us different roles within society then no.And when I say equal, I mean equal in terms of competency or something like that or proficiencies where, where the fact that some people are born less attractive than others and you actually see this within leftist spheres within woman's fears, this idea of sort of banning even the concept of attractiveness, like everyone is actually equally attractive and the only reason why you see like fat women is unattractive is because of social norms.And then, you know, when in cells, you're like, well, what about us? And they're like, no, what we mean by this is fat women should be allowed to have sex with conventionally attractive men and get those men in relationships, not that we should have sex with men like you, of course.I think it's time for another adult pre K lesson. What do you think? All right, turn your listening ears on. Catch a bubble in your mouth. Good job. Okay, here's the thing. Having a preference is something like, I'm looking for a partner who likes kayaking or wakes up early in the morning [00:08:00] or loves pizza.But when your preferences exclude an entire group of marginalized people, that's problematic. Okay, that's not nice. That's not a preference. If you lump all fat people in one group together as though they are not very different individuals, that's That's fatphobic. Just like lumping all black people in one group and saying, I don't like black people is racist.Malcolm Collins: So, I mean, it's, it's very delusional when you get into these far lefty circles, they don't really have any sense of like.Of some sort of like real ethical core to them. They're just sort of, I want what I want and I'm owed what I want, which is a very easy sort of mindset to spread or disseminate. But this all gets interesting to me in framing because the left really dehumanizes themselves constantly.Simone Collins: Yeah. Which is weird because incels really represent that external locus of control and entitlement that.Epitomizes the left, at least per our perception.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so what's going on here? [00:09:00] I don't, I, I think that Well,Simone Collins: I think the left is anti male. Don't you think that's just the easiest, broadest answer? That the left is not pro male at all. I mean, when's the last time a man has been? TheMalcolm Collins: left will elevate, like, attractive men who, they will, even if they're sometimes.GiveSimone Collins: me an example of the left really backing up a guy. Okay. I mean, no, they don't back him up. Obama. They, they tolerate him. I'm talking about, you know, a, a not already famous leader. You know what I mean? A lot of theMalcolm Collins: leftist YouTubers are men. Destiny, for example. Would you considerSimone Collins: him leftist? HeMalcolm Collins: seems just kind of his own thing.Famously leftist. There's some other ones Vosh. Is, is a leftist. Yeah, but areSimone Collins: people backing him up? Are peopleMalcolm Collins: Well, no, the left always attacks itself, but it attacks itself with its women and its men, you know. The onlySimone Collins: time that I've really seen the left, we'll say, [00:10:00] stand behind men is when those men have been killed by police, like George Floyd or something.Well, I don't know if he was really killed by police, but you know what I mean. Where he He's dead. Otherwise they would never really stand by a guy. I just don't, I think this is a, is it's an anti male thing. And so IMalcolm Collins: think I've heard it a little differently. I think that the left the, the, the power circles within the left are controlled by female interests.Okay. Males have an intrinsic disgust towards men they see as being low sexual market value. This is just a thing. It initiates a disgust reaction. Most people, when they have a disgust reaction, they apply it. A moral negative to the thing that's eliciting the disgust reaction. This is why, you know, historically, like if you see somebody who's diseased or disabled, most people's natural response in a historic context is they must've done something sinful or wrong,Simone Collins: right?Yeah. There's something wrong with them. We need to stay away from them. Right. I mean, it makes sense too. If someone was really diseased or something, you probably wouldn't. Be well served by reproducing with them or gettingMalcolm Collins: well served by listening to them. You know, it makes sense [00:11:00] to listen to beautiful people.By that, what ISimone Collins: mean, historically speaking on average, evolutionarily speaking on average, et cetera.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So if I'm in a cultural group, right. And I am choosing which people I listened to for advice about like how I should prepare a type of food. Right. And one of those people looks a little off or deformed in some way, or not perfectly facially symmetry.Something in that food may have been causing some sort of level of toxicity. And, and so, I know that the people who are uniquely Adonis like are getting access to better health resources and better industry within society because they have more wealth and more power within society. So they are a better source of information.And so societies that elevated those individuals organically outcompeted the societies that didn't in terms of how cultural evolution went within that society. And so of course there's like a genetic reason to do this as well. So they, they see these discussed in the, when they're, when they're interacting with these men or even conceptualizing these men, but they associate the disgust with some sort of [00:12:00] negative morality.And then they say, well, all negatively moral things must be rightist because that's the way the leftist mind works is if something is bad, then it is right. And if it is left, then it is not bad. Definitionally, no matter how like. Beyond the pale or insane it is, it cannot be bad if it's left leaning.Simone Collins: Yeah, I could see that. I could see that. It's also just another example of the left completely screwing over another audience that broadly thinks that they should be represented by them, which is weird. ButMalcolm Collins: yeah, well, I mean, it's important to understand that all politics is like organically evolving opinions.This is our perspective. Like, it's not that I don't think that there are some malevolent groups trying to push politics in specific ways or that some foreign state actors have elevated specific political ideas. But I think when it comes to something like hatred of incels by the left or the dehumanization really of incels by the left I This is coming out of [00:13:00] organic action based on the demographics that control leftist mindshare.And that what incels really are is like simpy men who sent for lefty women, right? Like who are sort of in this Dom sub relationship with the other side of the leftist movement. Which is fascinating.Simone Collins: Hmm. Yeah. But I don't know. I mean, so there have always been incels throughout history. We can see genetically speaking.That in cells have been around because there were a lot of men who didn't get to enter the gene pool. We see a lot more diversity, right? From, from female genes indicating that there were a lot of men who just had a ton of partners female partners, and then way more men who just had zero partners. So why do you think that incels are more of a thing now or have on incels always been a thing and they've played a big role in the rise and fall of civilizations?Malcolm Collins: I think that different civilizations related to incels in different ways and had different cultural [00:14:00] technologies for neutralizing the negative effects that can come from incels because you do see negative effects from incels. Typically the more unmatched men you have in a society, the higher the rates of terrorism, you're going to have the higher rates of prostitution.You're going to have the higher rates of murder. You're going to have the lower rates of trust in business deals. There's been some studies on this. It's, it's really fascinating. And, and actually if you see like bouts of terrorism in the Middle East, they often correlate to economic problems that prevented people from paying their bride price, which led to a bunch of unmarried, you know, incel young men, because they're not having sex outside of marriage in these cultures.And so that motivates terrorism. And so, and it makes sense from a genetic level why it would like you, you, you go for broke, like your brain basically gets scrambled and you go for broke when, when it realized that it has no shot of reproducing. And, and then you're devalued by society. But in a historic context, we did not dehumanize.Most cultures did not dehumanize in cells to the extent that a lot of societies today dehumanize themselves. So, by this, what I mean is, you know, In Catholic culture, for example, if [00:15:00] you were an incel, you could always just join the church so it's priesthood, right? As we've mentioned, the church is priesthood is predominantly same sex attracted.It's like 52 percent or something like that. So that was both their solution to men who were born same sex attracted and men who otherwise couldn't get partners and now can join this like high status thing, which prevents them from, and that affirms it. was in their community, right? And it prevents them from taking negative actions because they're like, Oh, this is why I'm celibate.I'm celibate because I'm like a good person, right? Like I've done extra, this extra pious thing. Then there's other cultural groups, you know, like in Rome or something like that, like what happened to the insults that joined the military, right? There, there's plenty of graping to be had when you are on the war path.Or you die if you're unfit. You know, and this was seen in, in the military was lauded, you know, these men were seen as the best and the bravest and the best of the best and everything like that. So yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah. So what, we just don't have enough war and religion right now. That'sMalcolm Collins: our problem.[00:16:00] Yeah. We don't have enough war and religion that historically would have you know, yeah,Simone Collins: provided an outlet for men who. Apparently weren't going to end up partnered. Oh, I guess. Well, and, and religion also did something else, which was imposed monogamy in many cases. So there were other ways where you could just, you can either give something for your in cell population to do, or.You can lower the proportion of your incel population by reducing functional polygamy. And I think that's the problem is that even in highly monogamous societies, if you have enough sufficiently wealthy men, you're going to get functional polygamy, which I think people don't realize, even when you look at serial monogamy in the United States, like both our fathers.Yeah. Had children with multiple women. Not at the same time, but I think that happens a lot more than you would think. So it's not even men having side chicks, it's, it's, but it's still functionally happening. So you have to create a [00:17:00] society in which. Not only is monogamy normalized and encouraged, but also divorce is discouraged apparently, or at least remarriage among men, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and I think to, to highlight the danger from the incel community is it's 5 percent of the community did feel that violence was often justified against those who had harmed the incel community. And this was cross correlated with misogynistic views, feeling discriminated against and having poor mental health and a higher tendency to displace their aggression.So, so 5 percent is a pretty big number if you're talking about internally justifying harm. And then you get some sort of like self reinforcing community like you can get within you know, discord or 4chan. And these beliefs can begin to, while other people are treating them jocularly Can begin to feel like things that you will earn status for having within your community.And then you move to believing that you will gain status for acting upon them within your community based on seeing individuals. I mean, Elliot Rogers, definitely, you know, it's seen as a hero by some in the incel [00:18:00] community despite the horrible things he did. And that fact, which is just a fact, does motivate and justify other incels to commit acts like that, because they see that they will be lauded in the same way.And so I think the right approach to this is actually the Jordan Peterson approach, which is to say, you know, have compassion for the community point out that yes, it is unfair. I'm sorry that life is unfair. There's, there's nothing we can do about that except make future humans better, you know, make future humans less like.You which is a shame, but realizes if you look in in cell discussions where, you know, I've, I've done some lurking and stuff like that. A common thing that you will see is cursing their mothers for allowing an unattractive man to sleep with her. Because they see that as like what led to their existence, that they should not have been born, that the relationship that their parents had should never have happened because it wasn't genetically high quality enough.Because in intel communities, there is a big belief in like genetics heritability because it allows for this fatalism about their genetic [00:19:00] state in the world. Like they're, they're in a weird way, like aligned was the perinatalist community. And that they see it as part of their duty to not have kids to improve as they would see it.The human gene pool, not, not as we would see it. I mean, I, I believe that there are many in cells that likely do have something to offer the world and do have something genetically to offer the world. But if you're going to adopt a fatalistic philosophy, those sorts of mindsets, like actually, you should look for what you do have a value.And then when you see what there is to value in yourself, then other people will see what there is to value in you. But what you value in yourself can't just be self affirmation. It needs to be some form of genuine, you know, Industry or creativity or ability to move the world forward in a positive direction, which is the thing that women want most in a partner.Like it's not hotness or even social status. I mean, they like those things too. Well, some women like those things, but often not the women you want to marry. That's not what they're, they're optimizing. I mean, do you really want a thought? Like, do you really want a woman who's out there like banging chads [00:20:00] instead of looking for somebody who she respects?And they're like, all women are like that. And it's like, no, the techniques that you are using to engage women disproportionately sort for women like that. I almost never met women like this when I was dating. And I, I, you know, for my dating careers, dating five dates a week for like two years, like very rarely did I meet these sort of vacuous women that That in cells talk about existing.If you are meeting them, you are in some way sorting for them in what you are putting out to the world. Well, yeah, ISimone Collins: mean, to me, it seems that there are two types of insults. There are genuine insults, like people who really. regardless of circumstances are not going to be able to find a partner given the dynamics at play in society and given what they've been dealt.But then there are other types of incels where they're just looking for love in all the wrong places, literally. And had they been raised in a different culture, had they taken a different direction, they could be happily coupled and happily married. Do you think that's accurate?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I do think that's [00:21:00] accurate.What percentageSimone Collins: do you think we have in society now? I mean, I think the bigger problem and why we have an incel problem. Isn't that we have a lot, a bunch of men who really couldn't get married. It's that we have a societal problem. Fatalism, nihilism, infantilism, external locus of control. And looking and not knowing where to look, not being trained in dating and courtship and relationships and in marriage.Malcolm Collins: You're right,Simone Collins: which is, I think, and perhaps another reason why there are so many leftist incels. If you grew up in leftist culture, you're more likely to suffer from those attributes, right? You're more likely to have an external locus of control and be more nihilistic and not have. A structured society that taught you how to date and marry and, and engage in social graces.I grew up in a very progressive culture and I was not taught how to behave a certain way. You were taught how to [00:22:00] behave a certain way. Your parents told you, this is how you eat at a table. This is how you speak to girls. This is how you.Malcolm Collins: Well, they also taught me that I was always responsible, like, you know, you know, when I get in trouble or something like that, and I'd be like, well, things get really bad, you know, if I get kicked out of school again, I don't have a place to stay.Like you guys love me, right? Like you let me stay in there. Like, absolutely not. Like you, and I was like, well, what if it's not my fault? And they go, it doesn't matter. A lot of things happen to people in life. That's not their fault. You've got to figure it out on your own.Simone Collins: But I think it's a, it's an underrated factor here.Cause that's like, that's a conservative cultural view in my opinionMalcolm Collins: is, but it's, it's very healthy for kids to know that there is no backstop for them. Their parents do not love them unconditionally. Their parents will not. How dare you say that to your kids. So if your kid's like a serial killer, you're still going to be that mom.Who's like, I just don't understand. Little Tammy couldn't do that. No, I love my kids based on them being good people. And, and I'm sorry about that, but I want to raise good people. And I think that when you take this attitude towards [00:23:00] parenting you end up with kids who are much more likely to become good people, to not become serial killers or bad people.In cells for that matter because you know, I, I, or at least the fatalist type of in cell. I'm not particularly worried about any of our kids being the other type of in cell. They would need you know, just genetically it's unlikely. Because I, and I think the core thing that creates in cells, I should note is not that people are genetically unattractive, I think even very unattractive men can get women which I, we've all seen even unattractive poor men can get women.It is that they are genetically have a very low social intelligence and are just very bad at interactingSimone Collins: with them. That seems to be the correlatory factor because when we see photos of themselves. And maybe those are just the ones that are willing to share photos. They don't look that bad. So I, I totally agree with you, but I think that also has so much to say about society because yes, you can have low emotional intelligence, but you can also know you can be taught what to do.Just like through ABA therapy, autistic children are taught how to [00:24:00] fake it in society. And pretend that they have emotional intelligence. They're taught how to read facial expressions on a basic level. At least they're taught how to act, empathetic, et cetera, because it doesn't necessarily come naturally toMalcolm Collins: them.Yeah. Guys being like, oh, I'm too autistic for that. And it's like, no, no, you're not like if you're watching this channel, no you're not. You can get over it. You can get over it. You can get through it. And I say it's like if you're watching this channel, like if you are a big watcher of our channel, there's probably autistic.Well, yeah, but there's also a bar of IQ that's required to, to really, I think, understand the content or engage with the content. Well, no, it's true. You know, you can see on YouTube, if you search for most watch videos, they are for a much less intelligent audience. AndSimone Collins: Well, you mean ones that I created before this channel became Basedcamp?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that would be an example, but even those, I think we're pretty highbrow compared to you.Simone Collins: I don't think so. I don't think making bunny shaped hard boiled eggs is exactly high IQ content, but nice try Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: I love you too, Simone. You're an amazing woman and I am [00:25:00] so satisfied that I found you to marry and who knows in a, in a different reality, I could have been an incel.Never.Simone Collins: No, sorry. I know. I'm sorry, but that's funny. I thinkMalcolm Collins: it's important to sympathize with the plight of the imcel because it is a real plight and it's not always their fault. Yeah.Simone Collins: No, especially if you have a sex drive, man,Malcolm Collins: but sometimes it's their fault. I don't hate trans maxing as a solution.These are incels who are transitioning because they, they, they don't think they'll ever get laid. No, dude.Simone Collins: Preach. I love it. You know, like do what works for you in the end. Do what works for you. Yeah. Anyway, love you. Yeah. I love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the concept of behavioral isolation and its potential impact on the future of human evolution. They examine the differences between two distinct groups - the technophilic, industrially productive "elite" and the more traditional, less technologically engaged "Bergens" - and discuss how their divergent lifestyles and values could lead to a form of speciation. The hosts also delve into the importance of technological advancement and pluralism in ensuring the survival and autonomy of various cultural groups, and emphasize the need for a pronatalist alliance that rejects supremacist ideologies. Throughout the conversation, they stress the significance of industrial output and technophilia in maintaining cultural independence and avoiding parasitic relationships with the state.Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00]Hello, Simone. We had a reporting team over at our house from France that are doing a documentary. And they asked people, really nice people. Yeah. They asked a question that I thought was really interesting to us. Which was, are you concerned about some groups being like really high fertility?Are there groups that you want to be lower fertility? That scare you in some way. And this is a complicated question because the core answer is no, not really. But it's important to explain why the answer is no, because I think to a lot of people who are aware of we are genetic realists.Like I, I realize that there are things that are heritable within human populations and we do have A level of concern where I'm like, it's not really concerned. It's just planning for the future because it's just a truism and there's nothing that can be done about it. That one of the cultural strategies that is very good at maintaining high fertility rates in the world today are cultures that disengage from technology that engage in practices that make them economically less productive because generally in the developed [00:01:00] world, the less wealth you have, the more kids you have and that maintain their culture.intergenerationally with high fidelity, i. e. they don't allow their kids to be deconverted through xenophobia, through dehumanizing other groups. And so this cultural strategy has co evolved across many differentiated cultural groups. You'll see it in some Muslim groups. You'll see it in some Christian groups.You'll see it in some Jewish groups. You'll see it in some Buddhist groups. And invariably, these groups typically have much higher fertility rates than the individuals near them. And so people would think, oh then what you must want to do is a lower the fertility rate of these communities.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: And to me, that only really matters in so far as you live in a socialist system where groups are specifically building hacks that.Allow a group that is completely economically parasitic, high fertility. It can be damaging to other individuals and to state structures in a way that is [00:02:00] intrinsically unsustainable and will eventually lead to the collapse of the state.So people might hear this and be like, what do you mean? Okay.Imagine hypothetically there was a country that narrowed a group within it out. And this group was incredibly high fertility. But economically, totally unproductive. Technologically, totally unproductive and really did nothing to even contribute to the country's, military or defensibility, right?This group had Triple the fertility of their neighboring groups. Eventually, they would be the majority population in that country. Then the country intrinsically collapses because that country then cannot be, it cannot produce the additional goods and the additional wealth and the additional technology.Which is being siphoned by this high fertility community. And so either it ends this system or it eventually collapses. There is no other alternative. [00:03:00] The only other alternative I can think of is some faction within this parasitic community goes, Oh s**t, we shouldn't be doing this anymore because this is unsustainable and we're going to be the dominant group.And so we need to start doing things like start engaging in the military. We need to start engaging more with technological productivity. We need to start working more. But then it's then they're not like that group at all. And typically, even if a faction of this community does end up adopting these practices, fertility wise, they're going to be outcompeted by the individuals who just did nothing but pump out babies.So it really doesn't work unless you cut the state umbilical cord which ends up saving everyone because even the parasite ends up dying when the host dies,Simone Collins: Because no one's going to, no one's going to bankroll the parasites lifestyle anymore.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I do. Have some concern about communities like that.And they exist within many countries. Many people might think, oh, you're describing X group in my country. But the group that you are thinking of is [00:04:00] probably really focused on your country. And so you will see this as an attack. Just as actually, I don't want to name any groups here.I'm just saying because then people are like, oh, so see, he was talking about that group. But these people exist in France just as much as they exist in the United States, for example. But but they're everywhere. So I do, they do pose a threat in that regard. But if you live in a country like the U.S. where I hope or any, long term country that's really going to be a player like long term in terms of human history. Now that humans are super mobile, you're going to be dealing with countries that are much lower weight, i. e. they do not have these big state welfare systems.And so they might only be charter cities where you end up getting people attracted to, but they will be countries that are much lower weight. In those countries, when you have sort of true capitalism I'm really not concerned about these groups at all. And people are like whoa.Why aren't you concerned about them? Because they're going to have such high populations in the future. And the answer is in a future where these communities, and you do see this within these communities are [00:05:00] intergenerationally getting dumber. They're selecting for a lower IQ within their community because the individuals that are higher IQ are more pro social typically get deconverted from these communities at higher rates.They're getting dumber intergenerationally, and they're getting more technophobic, both biological, like a genetic level, and at a cultural level, intergenerationally. They are not a threat to families that are, through genetic alteration, becoming more and my kids will have technology we can't even dream of.So you're talking three or four generations down the line. Likely three or four standard deviations IQ higher. Then, the average person today and was like automated, as I say, like a, I kill drones like they are not afraid of people who are coming at them with, um, wet sticks and a case and this technological gap is widening and it's 1 of the things we're actually already seeing in society today.And this is where I wanted to talk about something that you noticed Simone. So there were two environments we [00:06:00] went to recently. One is a secret society. It's called Dialogue. She used to be managing director of it. It was originally founded by Peter Thiel and Aaron Hoffman. And it's a great group, it's for like, when I say secret society, it's an invitation only event for people who are seen as likely to influence the future of the human race.Simone Collins: Or who already do. There are different subsets.Malcolm Collins: Or who already do. Yeah, there's different. So this was one environment we were at. And then in another environment we were at, we went to Vegas. For a conference. And so we were hanging around like the typical type of person who goes to Vegas and stays at a Vegas hotel.Can you talk about the differences in behavioral patterns you noticed in these two communities?Simone Collins: Yeah, it was so interesting. So I need to always be moving, meaning that I need to go to a gym every morning if I can't walk around the streets and, in, in both instances, when we were at dialogue, we were in the middle of the desert most recently.And when we were at this conference in Vegas, we were in Vegas. So at five in the morning, I'm not going to walk around the streets of Vegas. So I look for a gym. In Vegas, there were no gyms open. At least at the hotels where we were. And I actually [00:07:00] walked to other hotels and tried to say that I was a guest there and ask them where their gyms were.And they're like, Oh yeah, our gym doesn't open until 9am, which is insane. Like at Paris, I asked that I walked over to Paris after our hotel didn't have a gym. People just weren't out, weren't up. These are not people who wake up in the morning and go work out. Not in Vegas. Nobody wasMalcolm Collins: like out around jogging.No one wasSimone Collins: no.Malcolm Collins: You go to the dialogue. So then you go to the gym. wentSimone Collins: to dialogue at the hotel gym in the morning. Every single morning, the gym is. And I'm getting up at four 30 to, to go work out in the morning and it is packed full of other dialoguers and only people from the conference, mind you, like anyone else in the hotel if there was any, they certainly weren't there.And these people are simultaneously just like me on their phones, doing work, checking in having short, but very professional chit chat sessions with people as they come in and leave. And actually working out pretty freaking hard, like doing full, this is my weight regimen.This is whatever. It's not [00:08:00] just like faffing about and it was such a difference in selection there where you could really see, and I brought this up to Malcolm and just, I was like, you can't experience these different Selective bottleneck kind of areas or zones in the United States and not start to think that we're speciating because when we just walked down the streets in Las Vegas, the way people looked, the way people moved, the way people talked was so different from an event like dialogue.It's like these people wouldn't know how to interact if they wanted to, which was really interesting. IMalcolm Collins: don't want to elevate what Simone is saying here. There were noticeable. physiological differences between these two populations that were much larger than the physiological differences I see between ethnic groups.Simone Collins: Oh, 100%. Yeah. No. This makes ethnicity, the concept of ethnicity of a joke. And then keep in mind in all of these, like in Vegas, You have tourists as one of the top tourist destinations in the [00:09:00] world. You have people from all around the world, just like a dialogue. They're very careful to try to be with the society as inclusive and diverse as possible.So you have every different type of group. But there is definitely like a clear cluster of what these people are. AndMalcolm Collins: I have a word that I want to use for this other group. Bergens. So in the Trolls movie, the, there's this villainous race that then becomes good guys,but they, these people, when I looked at them, like the average, the average VegasSimone Collins: visitor or the average dialogue,Malcolm Collins: average Vegas visitor.Okay. Look like a Bergen. The, they, and I'll put some videos on the screen here and people will be like, Oh, I know the type of person you're talking about. I know the Bergens. I've seen the Bergens. I'm looking this up because I don'tSimone Collins: watch Bergen trolls and I will make,I'm [00:10:00] feelin Can they be that close? Hey, Bridget! You still have time to run for it!Simone Collins: Oh God. Okay. So it's it's a rotund.Troll, like actually trollish looking troll with bad teeth somewhat malformed but also meticulously styled in a way where they think that they have a look, but it's a gross look. Trashy.Malcolm Collins: And so what was interesting to me about this differentiation is something that you highlighted here, and it's something that you see in the data already.Okay. Is that the middle income group is the really low fertility group. By the way, if you're wondering what people look like at dialogue like us, I guess I'd say like they look and this is true across ethnicities, right?Simone Collins: They look healthy.Fit, but not in a muscular or hyper, either hyper masculine or hyper feminine way.Just like that kind of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, like lean healthy way for the most part, but not too lean and not too thick. Just right. Because they're all very optimized. They're [00:11:00] extremely optimized. And they also do not address.They do not dress in a showy way. They do not dress in a sloppy way. They dress in the most inconspicuous, but you know it when you see it way,Malcolm Collins: yeah. Yeah, I guess I say. Look up a picture of what venture capitalists look like, and you'll immediately know this crowd, right? Like MarkSimone Collins: Zuckerberg that kind of look where it's, you wouldn't know unless,Malcolm Collins: And when you talk about speciation, one really interesting thing is, and I've talked about this before, there's two ways that speciation ends up happening within a species, either.It geographic isolation, like a river flows between them, genetically isolating the populations that previously weren't genetically isolated or like continents drift apart, or you get behavioral species isolation, behavioral isolation something changes. You get a mutation that changes that leads to portions of the population to begin to genetically isolate themselves.And this would be like one group becomes nocturnally active and the other group isn't nocturnally active. And soSimone Collins: neverMalcolm Collins: awake at the same time when [00:12:00] they would mate or they built mating practices. And we have toSimone Collins: think this is exactly what is happening with these groups. Keep in mind the, we'll say the dialogue or group, they're going to elite universities where they're only mixing with and meeting with other people.Then they're going to elite businesses where they're only mixing with and meeting with people. Specific people who also enter the elite universities who also have these really high credentials and insanely high levels of conscientiousness. And then on the flip side, you have this other group of people that is mixing with an entirely different population.So there is no, there's no touching. There's no touching. See thisMalcolm Collins: in the data.If you look at fertility rates, the two high fertility groups are the incredibly wealthy and the incredibly poor. And then in the middle, you have nothing written that Where you have that you right there in a graph, that is behavioral isolation.Historically speaking, the behavioral isolation wasn't that bad because you didn't have child support. But universally enforced child support increases behavioral isolation [00:13:00] because people stop meeting with outgroups. And this is what we talked about. You're not going to get the genetic drift between the incredibly economically successful population to the rest of the population, which historically you would have.Yeah.Simone Collins: I guess what's what needs to happen was like some men from, we'll say the dialogue group would sleep with some women in the Vegas group. Yeah.Her go!To better understand the sex addiction outbreak, we have been running tests on chimpanzees. You can see that this entire community of specimens are getting along normally. Some pairing off, others on their own. But now see this chimp here. An average normal adult male, blending in seamlessly with the others.Now watch. We're going to give it a lot of money. Go ahead.My God! MySimone Collins: They'd have some fun in Vegas. They'd ask, they'd have a kid and then, whatever, they'd have several kids, but now those men are just polyamorous and only still sleeping with and not having kids with other very [00:14:00] high power women who.are also willing to be polyamorous or unwittingly polyamorous as was the case with, um, Andrew Huberman and that big New York times explosion came out that he was simultaneously dating all these high power women. So that's more what's happening now. There's not that, that that mixing in between the groups, which yeah, you're right, makes it even more.Profound and more of an echo chamber.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think another thing that you mentioned here, which I thought was really interesting is that these groups wouldn't know how to talk to each other. If they met which is the practices like gambling, for example, I do not understand why you would do something where, you have a net negative utility outcome,Simone Collins: No, I disagree.Like a lot of these, the people in this group have their poker groups. They love, they fricking love poker. Poker is such a. Simone,Malcolm Collins: keep in mind that is not the same thing.Simone Collins: Yeah. It's not slot machines. That'sMalcolm Collins: no. It's not the same thing at all. It doesn't have a net negative utility outcome.So if you are playing poker with a group of friends [00:15:00] that has a net neutral utility outcome because you don't have the house.Simone Collins: I see. Yeah. Because yeah. Yeah. Like the people we know in our circles who gamble do so in poker tournaments or among groups of friends and not at casinos. Yeah. For the most part.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So consider the difference in that behavioral pattern here, right? Yeah. But even like the things that they engage with, the ways that you would talk to them, you are increasingly getting behavioral isolation between these communities. And I should know everySimone Collins: year more irreconcilable,Malcolm Collins: I am not saying this is a good thing.I am not saying I want this for society. I think it, it could be a pretty bad thing. I think it'sSimone Collins: a terrible thing. And you know where else you can see it these days. And this is so pronounced is when you look at streaming platforms. And then there's this like huge segment of shows where you're like, I don't get it.Who is watching this? Which is really interesting.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, I, I know if you want to see what we mean when we talk about this, go on [00:16:00] YouTube and sort for most ofSimone Collins: you.Or go on. Doesn'tMalcolm Collins: make sense to the type of person who watch our channel.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: It would be like, I don't like, what are these? I, why would somebody watch people like rolling a tire around?What would. Who is this appealing to, and people are like, oh, this is for children. And you're like, yeah, but clearly not all of this is children. Like, how are these getting these most viewed statuses? Um, and as a result I am concerned for these communities. I am concerned for their place in the future of the species if they continue to genetically isolate, like that's a going forward 500 years, a scary thing.We may be able to resolve any sort of long term damage that comes from this through genetic technology. Wouldn't you saySimone Collins: those groups are concerned about us, that we are these unfeeling, unempathetic pencil neck glasses wearing. These are the people who also see what we care about and what we value and are horrified.[00:17:00]I don't know.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Um, I can see why, but I'd say it's like functionally these groups aren't threatening to us, but I guess we are threatening to them. And this is always here. There's these individual, one of the individuals on YouTube is like humanity is going to divide into the cyborgs and the traditionalists.And he said, the cyborgs will try to stamp out the traditionalists. And I'm like, why would the cyborgs try to stamp out the traditionalists? The traditionalists are not threats to the cyborgs. The cyborgs are threats to the traditionalists. The traditionalists need the cyborgs to not come to exist if they want to maintain economic and political power.Because as the cyborgs come to exist, they will control an increasing amount of wealth. And even if they are isolated into a few City states, right? They still will control so much of the world's industry that they will have most of the negotiating power and most of the world's political deals.And the cyborgs [00:18:00] really don't concern themselves with the non cyborg. They just. Aren't that relevant insofar except insofar as those groups say you are a threat and I will work to stamp you out. And in that case, you're like, okay, either we need to move to a position where we're protected from those groups, or we need to but I don't see any reason to outwardsly project or.Do anything that would make us threatening to those groups.Simone Collins: And again I, we do not see these as groups that should not be reproducing for, as far as I'm concerned, aside from what you pointed out about certain groups that will cause political instability and their own society and their own group to fall because of the way that they're living the only people that we don't want reproducing are the people who don't want to reproduce.If you don't want to have kids and if you don't want kids and you don't feel like you can raise kids and that you're going to hate them and that whatever, don't have kids. That's, it's so simple. Someone commented on our video or one of our videos recently saying something along the lines of I'm going to make the world a better place by not having kids.And I'm like, yes, you [00:19:00] are. That's perfect. Exactly.Malcolm Collins: Probably is, it's something that is, it's interesting. You're talking about this whole pencil next aesthetic and everything like that. And you're like, how could. These pencil neck nerdy strategies possibly compete with other strategies, right?So a community that traditionally went through the pencil neck strategy was the Jewish community. You look at the cultural stereotypes, the OG pencilSimone Collins: necks.Malcolm Collins: If you look at like the South Park descriptions of Jews, like the Jewish stereotypes, it's like, like nerdy, can't play sport and everything like that.Oh, well, I grew up in the city. I really don't care for it. I come from a Jewish family, which of course you already know because Kyle's from the same family. I'd like to read, and I have these polyps on the backs of my hands, I don't know what they are.Oh, and I hope one day to be an investment banker. I wouldn't diss all that are available. I usually prefer the plastic ones because these give me splinters. I realize we're in the mountains, but do we have to freeze today?Now Kyle, I need you to be quiet. In my class, you need to be able to [00:20:00] concentrate. Concentration is the key to succeeding in my class. Maybe we'll have to send him to concentration camp. Dammit, dammit, dammit! Oh, my! I haven't seen a Jew run like that since Poland 1938. Dude!Malcolm Collins: Okay. And yet you look at the, like the Yom Kippur wars or something like that, where they, Stomp forces.Oh, revenge of the nerds, huh? Much larger than them.I think people. When they remember the young Kapore war. They are thinking of Israel today with its military today being up against this neighbors in Israel today. Yeah. It has a ton of money that has gone into its military is every modernized military fighting force. That was not true at the time of the non-prime poor war. The invading armies out, numbered the Israelis at a ratio of a hundred to one in manpower in 10 to one in armor and artillery. And since the bulk of the Israeli army is made up as reservists, it took two days for them to mobilize and deploy. To give you an example of one [00:21:00] specific, full link that they were dealing with in the south.The numbers were even more lopsided. Five Egyptian infantry divisions was nearly 100,000 soldiers. 1,300 tanks in 2000 artillery pieces launched themselves across the Suez canal against just some 450 poorly trained Israeli reservists. And they were being attacked from all sides at once. It was a surprise.So they didn't know this was happening. And all of the sites that we were talking to them had plenty of time to prepare and they dumped them. I will never get over people who say that Israel should give back land that they took during that war. Uh, no, they won that land fair and square. The idiots who attack them, lost it.Fair and square.Malcolm Collins: You look at the impact they have on the geopolitical landscape today, they stomp even much larger, much bigger powers. You look at groups that outnumber them, that come and attack them. And these other groups are all about, strengths and they're from cultures.They're all about how tough [00:22:00] you are and everything like that, and they just get smashed by a culture that was selecting for pencil neck nerds. Like why? Because it turns out that in the world of technology how good you are at fighting. We had an episode recently that touched on some of these topics on like the cultures that Andrew take it from and that he tries to elevate about how you want to be like the toughest person.It's like how tough you are doesn't matter when your opponent is an automated drone with a gun on it. Or worse. A gene engineered virus that is sterilizing populations that have outwardly threatens their neighbors. We are entering a world where your fists just don't matter that much anymore.Heh, heh,Malcolm Collins: And and we've already entered that world to an extent, so to ask why I am not concerned about these communities [00:23:00] and why I think it is always a bad idea to try to limit fertility of groups that you disagree with It is. I guess it's a thing, right? If I came from a different culture and my strategy was different if I was taking a traditionalist technophobic strategy, the way I beat my neighbors is by sterilizing them.If you're taking a because You're going to be at the same tech level as these other people. And so then it's the bigger number wins, right? But if you're going with any sort of a pluralistic strategy, that is incredibly technophilic you, the last thing you want to do is to try to sterilize other groups that are taking different strategies.Because that makes you a threat to those groups, which makes wiping you out necessary for those groups. Oh,Simone Collins: but also if you're trying to wipe out those groups, you're eliminating the very thing that you value. Which is diversityMalcolm Collins: within the human population. I think the strategy that I am adopting and that will end up winning we'll end up winning and I can be provably wrong here, right?[00:24:00] That's the thing. If the strategy that we are raising our kids within is not economically productive, is not technophilic, is not really engaged with technology. If it turns out that engaging with technology doesn't give groups in the future, a An enormous industrial and military advantage then my key theses are wrong and my group deserves to go extinct, right?Simone Collins: Yeah, and so also those who think that we're taking a dumb approach or who do not like what we're doing. Don't worry. If you think we're going to fail, then there's nothing wrong with us because we're going to fail and we won't be a problem for you.Malcolm Collins: Everyone wins. Everyone wins. Yeah. And I think that this isGod, I don't remember what I was going to say here. Do you have any further thoughts on this?I wouldSimone Collins: point out just one. One additional thing is anyone who believes that there are certain groups that should not be reproducing is truly by definition, a eugenicist because they believe in [00:25:00] coercive population level. Adjustments to certain groups. And we are actually quite against eugenics.So there's that I would just add it's just not something that we believe in. And, in the end, I think anyone, people, I think also often maybe I'm taking a dumb direction with this, but they associate. Some form of social or cultural Darwinism with eugenics as well of let the fittest survive, blah, blah, blah.You can't have real evolution when you are artificially messing with the system. So, anyone who actually believes in evolution or actually wants the fittest to win. Should not be intervening because only physics only like literally the technical mechanical limits on reality. Have the right, have dominion to determine who [00:26:00] is fit and who is not.You, as a human, do not have that right.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. And this is what really disgusted me was Europeans, laws that limit reproductive choice in order to sterilize groups like us. Because as one reporter in Europe, they were like if you do this in X many generations, one of your children are much smarter than everyone else.And it's like, why is that a problem? Our smart people today would our country be better off if we just didn't have smart peopleSimone Collins: really raising our crowd.Malcolm Collins: The inventor of penicillin. If we didn't have Einstein, if we didn't like, does society get better when you get rid of all the smart people, everyone is better off if you have some group that is ultra intelligent, so long as that group doesn't have a mindset that they want to get rid of people who are different from them.And I think that fundamentally shows how this urban monoculture has been able to maintain the harmony it maintains is by acting as if everyone really is exactly the same and through acting that way, through [00:27:00] acting as if there's no real differences in any individual They're able to keep this cultural detente and when we talk about things like genetic selection, like we do with our kids and they project that forward.They're like, oh, that could create humans that are. So different from other humans that our system of just pretending like everyone's actually the same won't work anymore. How does society work then? And it's Oh, I have a great idea. How about like we accept and value diversity, that thing that you've been telling everyone that you were doing, but you never were actually doing because.Everyone benefits in that system. Both the super intelligent they benefit because no one is trying to threaten them, right? And everyone else because of the technology and the industry that the, because keep in mind, what is industry? People hear industry and they say factories.Industry is you having a diversity of food on your plates. Industry is your grandparents not dying when they get old because there's no money. Like when people hear about like [00:28:00] industry or economics, what they think is Oh they're just talking about wealth. And then we're talking about people not starving to death.Okay. We're talking about the United States not turning into a Haiti. Most of the metropolitan area is controlled by around 150 criminal groups, which the government has failed to stop. Their members terrorize the population through kidnapping, murder, sexual violence, looting, and burning down homes.According to the United Nations, criminal groups killed over 2, 000 people and kidnapped more than 1, 000 others during the first half of 2023. Almost 200,000 people have fled their homes since 2022 due to violence. Many lack access to adequate food, water, shelter, education, healthcare, and other basic services.Oh, and don't even come at me with that nonsense. That Haiti is only poor because it had an unfair loan. You know, what other country had an unfair, large loan. It had to play. Yeah. Germany. Okay. [00:29:00] You don't get to just pull out that card, when it fits your narrative.Malcolm Collins: Okay. You can look at something like Haiti and I think it was 89 percent of college grads would. Immigrate out of the country. You do that for three or four generations.Ignore the genetics, just culturally, you're in a horrible situation that was almost guaranteed to end where it's ended. That is what happens when you strip industry from society. So we wrote a piece. For a Porya and the most, and we were like, we were talking about our solution and the religious thing that we were building and the most common criticism of that piece was why does industry matter for your culture? Like, why do you care so much about technophilia in industry as a cultural group?Why is it important to keep that intergenerationally? Why not just go back to one of these older systems and fix fertility rates by disengaging from technology and industry? And the answer to me was just so obvious. I don't know how they didn't see it. If you are a technomic, technologically or [00:30:00] industrially unproductive group, you live.at the whims and privilege of your neighbors. 100 percent All in this country are high fertility. But they are only allowed to maintain their culture and their cultural strategy because their neighbors have decided to allow them to do it.Simone Collins: Yeah, they live entirely at the whims of the U. S. government and in general voters being okay with them living their lives the way they do.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. Having cultural autonomy is completely dependent on your level of knowledge. of industry and technophilia when contrasted with neighboring populations. So if you find a cultural strategy that keeps your fertility rate high, and it is not within the global ecosystem on par with or greater than other systems in terms of technological output or industrial output, it will eventually [00:31:00] You will eventually be living at the whim of somebody else.Somebody else saying, I will allow you to keep living the way you're living.Simone Collins: Yeah. And I think there are plenty of historical examples that people can look at. of groups that were permitted to exist because they provided useful products and services for the rest of society that society was like I'm not going to mess with them because I want that stuff.I want, I need that thing.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This is, it's, it is interesting to me that people could be so blind to the utility of industry and technophilia. And it's also why, when I look at these groups that are like, no, just be tough, just go back to old masculine things and unga bunga your way through.It's okay, unga bungas, like you may exist in the future, but you will live at the whims of The cyborgs, as the one person calls it, at the whims of the people who through technological engagement and willingness to try to [00:32:00] intergenerationally improve you, and I hope, and what the pronatalist movement is really about is creating an alliance of those , technophilic and industrial productive cultural groups so that we do not hinder each other's goals and that we can create you know what we call the covenant of the children of man an alliance among us That we will never impose our values on the other groups that we will never uh even if we disagree with them, whether they take some, you know Incredibly technophobic stance and they go back to a really old way of living like amish or whatever like that I never want my descendants Threatening a group like the Amish, which are one of no threat to us to do not live off of the state infrastructure at all.They are, they don't even like, take like welfare. They don't take they are almost the ideal. I would say technophobic cultural group because the only way that they are parasitic [00:33:00] is in relying on. Not engaging with the draft and not engaging with the military. And even then I would just say, then just don't bother them.Don't bother them. It's really important to me that the winning group the people who comes out of this as this industrial and scientifically productive group has pluralism so ingrained in who they are that they, Never go and try to stamp out the others. And why is that important? Why is that existentially important?Because if you don't ingrain that in them, if you allow, racists or supremacists to come into this community and one faction of them becomes smarter than the faction that I'm a part of, i. e. They end up having better genetic technology or better technological technology, and they end up a few standard deviations smarter than my descendants.Then they'll decide that my descendants need to go because of they, right now, if you look down on other ethnic groups due to maybe marginal differences in various proficiencies if those differences became Actually [00:34:00] large and meaningful through technological engagement. Those individuals are going to look at my descendants the way that they looked at, unless my descendants happen to be in the most winning of winning groups, which I think is an unrealistic expectation of the way that they look at other ethnic groups today, which is why we have to be like the one area.We cannot really brudge on the pronatalist alliance is not allowing these individuals in because. As they become technologically and genetically uplifted, they become a threat to everyone else. If they have any of these sort of pre encoded, either culturally or in any other capacity, beliefs about certain groups being superior to other groups and having the right to impose their value systems on other cultural groups.Simone Collins: There you have it, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: Love you to death Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too. Okay, [00:35:00] I'm going to get the kids up for me. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into Andrew Tate's controversial proposal for solving the demographic crisis through polygamy. They analyze Tate's argument, which criticizes the Western monogamous model and promotes a return to a more traditional, patriarchal family structure. The hosts explore the cultural and genetic implications of polygyny, comparing Tate's Muslim-influenced perspective with the traditional American view of gender roles. They also examine the potential consequences of polygamy on both men and women, and discuss the importance of fostering independence and ambition in future generations. Ultimately, Malcolm and Simone argue that while Tate's approach may work for him personally, it is not a viable long-term solution for their own family or for society as a whole. [00:00:00]Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. This episode is going to be great because it's another Andrew Tate episode. So I need my sword again. Women won't respect him unless he is Physically threatening them with a sword.You got your sword.Your wife starts talking. You're like, shut up. She's got a sword. If every man on earth walked around with a sword, most of the issues of the world, would basically go away. We can fix this.It can all be fixed. You just need to carry a sword around your house.Malcolm Collins: And I need to do that too. That's how I keep my wife in line.Simone Collins: This, the sword.Malcolm Collins: , Andrew Tate has outlaid a plan for solving demographic collapse.Simone Collins: Are you serious? Did this actually happen?Malcolm Collins: I am serious. And it is as unhinged in a based way. Like I [00:01:00] like thinking outside the box, but it is very on brand. And I think it might be one of the most crazy things he said recently. That'sSimone Collins: saying a lot.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Dear white men, you're fucked. You're being replaced because none of you have children. Even those of you b******g about the replacement online like little girls don't find the gumption to f**k. I see white men bragging about having five kids as if it's an achievement.LOL 5 LOLOL per year, right? Oh, all you white boys lost control of your women, and now they won't accept multiple wives anymore. Now they tell you they don't want any more kids. One's enough. They don't want to do their God given job anymore. No, they want Instagram likes [00:02:00] instead. So your genetic potential is stumped by the whims of some singular female.A female who takes nine whole months To grow a single baby. Other races have multiple ovens for bread. We're not cucked. Some b***h is screaming at you about loyalty. And you're sitting there saying, Yes, baby. Jerking off to porn when she's asleep or maybe cheating with a side b***h. Condom on.Hold on. I love this because this is the take that we've had that non reproductive sex is just masturbation. It is a kink. And I love that he has correlated jerking off to porn as being just as disgusting as sleeping, cheating on your wife with a condom on. Great, take care of yourself, okay.Oh no! I couldn't get another woman pregnant? My wife would kill me! Exclamation [00:03:00] mark, concerned emoji. Total f*****g losers. Soon your race will be nothing more than a few pages in a history book. A lesson on what happens when you f**k with a female psyche. They're obsessed with money and social media, as opposed to being one of many baby factories for a king.30 children minimum for the Dons. White people, go talk to your quote unquote best friend wife about what you do this weekend. Maybe you can take a nice walk around IKEA. Enjoy extinction.Simone Collins: Okay. Wow, that's so great.Malcolm Collins: So first I want to point something out because I always tell people, Andrew Tate's idea about male and female roles is not the Western ideal and it is certainly not the Americana ideal.It is a Muslim ideal and they're like, no, Andrew Tate isn't about [00:04:00] promoting like the Muslim cultural idea of how you should structure relationships. I'm sorry. How can you read that? And think literally anything else. He does not and the Muslim ideal can work like and to be honest, like he's not promoting something that doesn't work or that doesn't lead to higher fertility within some cultural groups where you have the top men in a society having multiple wives and then using that to produce a huge number of kids, right?And it is a lifestyle that I love that he is undertaking it is not championingSimone Collins: note. He's like bringing, he's bringing polygamy into the modern internet world. This is some pioneering work here. What can we say?Malcolm Collins: And it like, I actually like with Andrew Tate, so we're, we have a video that's come out on Hamza.He's like another, like men's influencer. You know what I mean? Like leading with this male aesthetic. I don't really respect Hansa, [00:05:00] I think he had a perfect life with this woman, and he left her so he could go partying in cities with Instagram babes, and he even says that pathetic, honestly, pathetic, and I'm glad he's getting back with this woman, and I hope he can get himself sorted out.basically I'm starting the fatherhood chapter of my life. We're not pregnant just yet, but we've moved to the Scottish Highlands,The reason why me and my ex split up is I told her to sit down and to write down like her goals and I wrote, you know what, I want to move to like a big city. You will not find this kind of woman who will fit with this lifestyle in a big major city why?The women who are in the big cities are glorified Instagram prostitution.I actually want to have a few like, Sleepless nights.I want to have a few likes like sleep deprived nights where I stay up late bro for the last few years I've been to sleep at 7 8 p. m I've you couldn't imagine the amount of like parties and social events and dinners that I've missedI know what goes on in these parties And the issue was that the girls that I was meeting from these places, just like I, I was as well, um, We're all [00:06:00] low quality.It's a low quality place to be.. I wanted to be super social. I wanted to have some late nights where we stay up and we're social and there's a party that we go to and everything. But she saw it, and I'm not gonna lie, like, I could see how, like, offended she was. Where she was quite, like, pressuring, she was like, Wait, you wanna do this? Oh, you wanna do that? You wanna stay up late? But that's unhealthy. Those party girls, like the party, low quality, degenerate, TikTok type of girls.They are attracted to the party, low quality, degenerate, TikTok type of guys. Fine, like trash can stay with trash.Because for hers, she wrote that she wanted to do more of the things that we were currently doing. , it's wholesome as f**k, and you know that she's an awesome girl for that, she doesn't want to be around like, You know, like party girls and whatever I just realized like we're actually going into two separate seasons right now Fine, like trash can stay with trash.Malcolm Collins: When you Define your moral system around an aesthetic.It needs to be witnessed to have value. And when he got to the countryside, there was no one to witness affirmation from the social community [00:07:00] Witness me!Mediocre!This is the person who aesthetically wants to be a father that fits his ideal of where he should be going in life. But it's completely unwilling to make any of the sacrifices that are associated with that. That he's complaining about not being able to regularly leave the house after seven or eight.That is a normal part of being a parent he's not. Willing to make the sacrifices associated.Was transitioning to the next stage of his life, which will lead him down a path worse than being a Jeremy. which is what he calls like, I guess, losers. , he's going to become the crack Fox. Once upon a time, there was a fox and he was called Jerome. He lived in the woods in Elderberrywood. They spent their days punting down the lazy rivers of Cambridge Town. One day, whilst relaxing, he found a copy of Cheekbone Magazine. And he [00:08:00] read an article about London life. And then, decided he was gonna go to London.Three weeks later, he was off his tiny face in a gay club. But the party lifestyle took its toll. Eventually he ended up on the streets, begging for cheese and Alston.This is going to sound weird, you need to be hit in the face. I will repeat that again. As a young man, you need to be hit in the face consistently.Malcolm Collins: Andrew Tate he has chosen a different optimization function than me.Simone Collins: Yes. ButMalcolm Collins: it is not necessarily an incorrect optimization function. And it seemsSimone Collins: like the right optimization function for him. He doesn't seem like a monogamous, settle down, move to the countryside kind of guy.Andrew Tate. Is kind of a goofy guy. Was it different optimization function than us in a different cultural background than us? But I respect his level of baseness in his level to live a Grinch, the grain of [00:09:00] society. And his follow through and the things that he says Here is another great quote that he tweeted recently sexist for making children, any man who has sex with a woman because it quote, unquote feels good is gay. Oh, my PP feels so good. This is great. In fact, if you are at 40, with less than five children, you're probably gay. All that feel good.PPE sex. Sex and hardly any genetic legacy question, mark. I mean, to be honest, when we talk about changing culture, Right. It doesn't make sense. Like the reason why culturally, we used to shame people for being gay was because the cultures that did that ended up having a higher number of surviving offspring. 'cause they pressured the men who were born with same-sex attraction to have heterosexual relationships.What injury Tate is doing in this tweet is adapting that shaming and that cultural concept for a much bigger threat in society [00:10:00] today. Which is condoms. They're not ending up having kids for some other reason, which is just so intelligent. And in cool, even if it's the strategy that we would use.Malcolm Collins: yeah, and there's an analogy I came up with recently that I really like about male female dimorphism which is that human males and human females evolved differently.Like we are biologically and psychologically different from each other. You can think of this as like in a society where people are Everyone's assigned a swiss army knife at birth and they are slightly different brands of swiss army knife with different tools within them You know different size knives everything like that between cultures and then people take that to be like, oh, there's this morally correct way to deal with these differences That is not true, you know in a culture that grew up, you know near a coastal region It might actually be the thinner knife that's used for butchering animals and in a crowd that grew up in an arctic region where they were hunting like mammoth.[00:11:00]Oh no. The hunting group is always the one that had the thicker knife. There are many optimization functions that can even work within a single environment. And the ways that we use these tools are going to change over times. When we are a space during race, it may turn out that what was originally meant to be like a corkscrew in the Swiss army knife is now perfect for, um, handling some sort of like oxygen tank or something like that on the ship.And in our society right now, women being more like social, like in a historic context, that was totally different than them navigating the bureaucracies that they navigate today at a higher rate than men navigate. And so if we don't take that into account that contexts have changed and that so one, the way that we relate to gender changes over time, but two different cultural groups historically related to gender differently.And he's from a cultural group that really did relate to women in this way, much more in a historical context. And he's leaned even further into that with his recent Muslim conversion. But then, so the question [00:12:00] comes, Why don't we choose this strategy? Like, why do we think this strategy is bad?One thing he's wrong about, like Simone, would you be like, am I not allowed to marry another woman?Simone Collins: I wouldn't be into that. You could, you are welcome to be with anyone that you want. I hate people too much to have a household full of additional people. I'm sorry. It's not that I'm not willing to share you.It's that I cannot deal with moreMalcolm Collins: people. So you see, I am cucked by my wife, right? She says, I would be less happy if you married another woman. And I take that into account, right? But and here's the key thing. So why am I dealing with that limitation on my fertility?Like why would I do that?Why would a culture do that? AnSimone Collins: argument that I would make, and I imagine you're going to make this as well, is that if we want to, one, be among the cultures that is technologically dominant and intellectually [00:13:00] dominant, and that is to say, building the future, like literally the group that builds the infrastructure that takes us to the stars and ultimately runs it and decides who gets to go where you need to have maximum firing power on All ends.So both genders need to be high caliber and you're not going to create a culture with high caliber women. When the women are simultaneously subjugated in a way where they're seen as less and they're part of the stable and they're part of this harem or whatever it might be. So I think, we can't inspire smart, ambitious daughters who we want to have in our culture.To get married and have kids, if doing so involves being with someone like Andrew Tate.Malcolm Collins: And I think that's the key answer here, but I want to elaborate on it a bit more because then, it also has genetic effects and stuff like that. Like Andrew Tate could not secure a woman like Simone.Andrew Tate is always talking about how women are like, not as smart as men and blah, blah, blah, and the that they can't have [00:14:00] intellectual or philosophical conversations. And what this tells me, because I haven't experienced that in the women I'm engaging with or in the woman that I married, So why is it that I haven't experienced that, but he has, it's because what he was bringing to the table when he was out there trying to attract women to sleep with was specifically filtering for these women that were in an incredibly low intellectual caliber, because that's the type of woman that goes for a guy like that, that splits like that.And there's actually been studies on this. Yeah, there's a really fascinating setting. I've never been able to find it, but I remember going over it when I was in psychology school, like getting my degree in psychology and neuroscience that looked at. A culture that was polygynous where you had one men, man, and many woman,Simone Collins: andMalcolm Collins: that Women, they're like the top men in that society actually got lower quality wives than in nearby monogamous societies where these extreme top tier women were actually sorting for mid tier men in terms of like wealth and stuff likeSimone Collins: that.I think I've seen this, [00:15:00] but it's looking at it's looking at polygamy in Africa. So looking at the evaluations that women are making and specifically it, they have to decide, do I want. If I go for a high value man, I know that I'm going to have to share him. So I have to dilute his current wealth or value or power by the number of anticipated wives, even if I'm wife, number one, therefore a high value man is actually lower value because I'm actually going to get just one fifth of him, one 10th of him, one third of him.And so going for a mid tier man who you anticipate. To have only one wife . Could you know it, it could more So you see this in theMalcolm Collins: data is the point. Yeah. Like that they do get lower quality wives. But it also reminded me of something that Hamza said in one of his videos where he was talking about why he loves foreign women over western women.And he was like, oh. And they're short. It's so hot. How short they are. Oh my God, how no. I was like,Simone Collins: no man in this space who's even slightly adjacent [00:16:00] to the black pill space, could possibly say something like that. No. No man. That could ever. Actively tried to reproduce with a shorter woman because he understands how important height is for men.Unless he plans on doing IVF and eliminating all, likeMalcolm Collins: They deal with this cloud. They deal with this brain cloud, right? That's so weird. They don't understand that half of your son's genes are coming from their mother. When you select for women who are innately subordinate and who are dumb, you are creating sons who are half subordinate.When you have sex with short women, it's the same thing. This is something that was completely growing up, if you grew up in rural America and you can see this in America, I talk about this all the time on the podcast you see this in country songs, anyone who listens to them the women that you're told to look for are not the preening type.They are the type who hunt and fish and [00:17:00] get dirty with the boys because he wantsSimone Collins: guns who can do all that,Malcolm Collins: who can intellectually engage with it. But if you only know about Americana culture from country music, you don't see what it's like growing up. I grew up in Texas in a family that's been there for seven generations.So that's about as old as you get as terms of the Texas family. And it was constantly reinforced in me that when you are looking for qualities in a wife, that you are looking for the qualities you want in your sons. And this was actually a really interesting sort of, cultural hack that Americana culture adapted to subvert the misogyny that also is in that culture.SoSimone Collins: could it be though, I almost feel like men of the Andrew Tate type. That we're discussing here, just they've dehumanized women to the point where they don't really even see women as like capable of passing on these traits to men, if they're just like anything that's male obviously is to come from me because.The female is so foreign, so anti male that there's [00:18:00] just no point in even factoring her characteristics into what a son could be because she's not she could never be a son because she is a woman and women are not human. You know what I mean? There's the, even the way that he worded it, like pathetic nine months, gestating children.He just sees women as gestators.Malcolm Collins: I'm going to be more generous to him and say that I suspect that you are misunderstanding or not misunderstanding. But not valuing enough the fact that this is just his cultural background, he is from Eastern European cultural background. This was a common mindset in certain parts of like Southeastern European cultural mindsets.And because of that, he has adapted. This cultural mindset to the current like technological age that we live in, and I think he's done a good job of adapting it, but he just decides to bite the bullet on the downsides of this approach, because it is the approach that dispositionally works for him like he couldn't.[00:19:00]change himself. Andrew Tate could not change himself in a way that would allow him to attract high quality women.Simone Collins: And becauseMalcolm Collins: of that, from my cultural perspective and because of that there's no point in trying to, be what you're optimized to be. I don't think that Andrew Tate is making a bad bet given who Andrew Tate is genetically.No, I agree that he's doing what isSimone Collins: optimally best for him.Malcolm Collins: And when I look at myself, I have to admit there is a certain amount of cope in my position, right? There is a certain amount of cope and that you just cannot produce children at the rate that his women are going to be able to produce children at, right?And I can dream of a day where my sons can use You know, exo wombs or use by that I mean like external wombs or wombs that have been genetically, done in different ways that can produce children at a higher rate. I am so excited for that, right? And I will encourage them to do [00:20:00] that.And through that, they might be able to keep up with individuals using the cultural strategy that people like Andrew Tate are using. But it's just a very different strategy and we're going to do a whole video on this topic. But it reminds me of one of the things that people are always surprised of about us where they're like aren't you afraid of who do you think should have less kids?Aren't you afraid of these different cultural systems that are having just tons and tons of kids? And it's literally, no. Literally, like to me, they are irrelevant. If the cultural strategy they're choosing is one that is going to cause them to become intergenerationally less strong, less independent and less intelligent because in the future, their numbers don't matter if they are attacking my descendants who have, AI drones and they're coming at them with, AKs and sticks.They just. They can't even the differentiation between the human groups in terms of their [00:21:00] level of defensibility is exaggerating over time as technology becomes more and more advanced and advanced in an individualized context.I think that with us, we need to be aware of the downsides to our strategy, which there are.lower reproductive rate. Maximum, we were talking about it realistically, we're probably going to get 10 kids.Simone Collins: It's the classic K versus R strategy. Yeah, it's the classic KMalcolm Collins: versus R strategy. And so then the question is it with his strategy, what he should be totally optimizing around, like for him, genetic selection technology matters much more than it matters for us.Like IVF, genetic selection technology because he's dealing with a lower quality gene pool to start. So he's got to do more in terms of editing it down. And the other thing that he needs to really look for is how does he ensure that he is choosing women who are [00:22:00] the smartest among the pool of women he can get, which means that if you're going for his cultural strategy, you actually want to devalue attractiveness in female partners to some extent.So you are overvaluing the types of traits that you're going to find less of within the pool that he's able to attract and his sons are able to attract.Simone Collins: And if I'm looking at this from his perspective as well, I do think that there are some arbitrage games that one could play. As a polygamist to get smart, high value women who would still be open to being in a polygamist marriage.So if he plays, for example immigration arbitrage and cultural arbitrage, pursuing women who are otherwise very smart and high achieving and giving them basically access to a level of wealth and comfort that they just would never get at home. Maybe he can really get ambitious, smart people. To join his harem as it were and produce lots of tater tots because he knows better.And [00:23:00] he's certainly not against putting women to work. I think if he were a little bit smarter about how he managed his women, as it were and it had them doing, maybe he does, had them doing more interesting work than just being like a cam girl. He could create really interesting career opportunities for women and more operate like a weird harem corporate family, where he has like his female employees who have rewarding jobs that are ambitious and interesting and intellectually engaging who are also having his kids who are all enjoying living in this like really nice corporate campus.Heron palace, I could work.Malcolm Collins: You've got to keep in mind he has a hierarchy among the women who work for him. And the women who work for him are not cam girling. They are managing women who are cam girl.Simone Collins: Okay. Then. So you know, like he's competent.Malcolm Collins: But it's keep in mind. It's not just the women that he's able to secure.Another thing you have to keep in mind is for his strategy to work. It needs to work intergenerational. That means his sons need to be able to generate because to do this, like [00:24:00] huge wife pool strategy, you need to be able to generate tons of wealth. to implement this. And I don't think his sons are going to implement are going to I don't think he's going to be passing down this talent with the fidelity that I think that he assumes he's passing it down.Simone Collins: Yeah. What we see with many polygamous families, like when you look at fundamentalist Mormon polygamous families, for example it's super common for the men who don't get chosen to have lots of wives to just get kicked out, The majority of the boys, or at least a significant proportion of the boys just get, get punted.We saw this also with someone we met who grew up in a cult in Latin America, who was one of what, 10 kids and all of his brothers got kicked out of the cult. He was doing great by the way. He seemed very smart, very capable. But yeah, like I, that there is that problem of what to do in a polygamous, highly competitive culture.And family, when you have a lot of sons and you want to set them up for success, what do [00:25:00] you do?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And you've also got to think about his daughters, right? Are they going to, when they look at what their mothers endured within this lifestyle, and then they realize that they're going to, if they're going to culturally continue his value system endured that.But for a much poorer man, because there's not many men at Andrew Tate's income level, right? Are they gonna want that? And if they don't want that, then you get the Korea problem, where they just opt out of breeding.And revolution against him. And I'd say another thing, like a lot of people think that what I'm talking about here Is just the IQ of my wife and that's not it.Like it is one. I do not want a wife who is a naturally submissive person. I want a wife who submits to me, but I would find it very disgusting to know that my wife, like just culturally speaking was submissive more generally.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like aside from me being completely. Besotted by you obsessed with [00:26:00] you, creepily stockish about you.I am fiercely independent to the point where I don't even like receiving gifts or anything from other people because I don't like a feeling of obligation toward anyone. And I hate the idea of being subservient or associated with anyone. And I think that serves us and our culture, our particular culture really well.Because we want to breed this level of. independence and initiative. So I see what you're saying and I would want that in our kids as well. And I'm glad to see it in them already.Malcolm Collins: The level of ambition you have, the level of these are also genetically linked traits. If you have a woman who approaches life submissively and that has a genetic component to it that is not linked to her sex chromosome, which it probably isn't entirely, right?You are getting that in your sons. And I actually suspect that this is why polygynous cultures, typically the men in these cultures have such submissive roles to [00:27:00] their cosmology.Simone Collins: So I'llMalcolm Collins: explain what I mean by this. Typically submission to God is seen as much more within these cultures as like groveling.Like head in the dirt crawling on your knees submission that you don't see as much in cultures where, women aren't expected to be this level of submission culturally. And I suspect what that is a level of inherited submission within the males of this culture that needs to be masturbated in some way.And the culturally approved way of doing that Is to a supernatural entity whereas you don't see even within you look at Protestant traditions and many of them will say, I am worthless compared to God and stuff like that. But the, the way that correlates to culture isn't like groveling on the floor like a submissive wife, but I'm seeing that as a motivation to work to improve yourself [00:28:00] and as a sign of why you should be grateful for God's interest in you at all.Which is, I think, really interesting and a sign of how you actually, this mindset ends up breeding submissiveness into men as well.I thought more about this after recording and came to a new perspective.I think I might have been misunderstanding high female to male submission cultures or high female to male power distance cultures in that, focusing on the male to female dynamic is the wrong part of the relationship to focus on. It's throughout the entire family system that you have this increased power distance.You have the increased power distance between man and God, with like additional groveling on the ground and stuff like that, but also between a woman and her children, where, Children in these cultures are often expected to be much more obedient to their parents, wherein cultures like Simone and mine, growing up, , there was no expectation.Like, children were about equals to the parents. , and people in these [00:29:00] high power to sense cultures are often horrified by that. They're like, why would a parent allow their children to say, you know, No, or allow their Children to say, Actually, I have an alternative perspective on this. , and the answer from the perspective of one of these cultures on whether or not this is correct is just a matter of optimization functions.There isn't necessarily a correct outcome. Like reality is going to judge which of these cultures is right. But, , the logic from the perspective of the culture that I was told growing up and what Simone and I would tell each other is the goal of child rearing is not to break a child's spirit or to teach them obedience, but to foster a child's spirit and to teach them to stand up to authority.And if they just, , mindlessly obey their parents, then they are not learning that skill and they will be weak children from the perspective of our culture where weakness is defined by an individual's ability to stand up for their own beliefs, , against, , arbitrary authority.Malcolm Collins: And if you don't, we've done the video on like the noodling girl and theSimone Collins: tomboyMalcolm Collins: [00:30:00] apocalypse,Look at that. I think every fish I've caught this year has been mean. Look at that.Malcolm Collins: you look at this girl and this is not the type of girl who's going to go for an Andrew Tate guy.Yeah. The guy who she's going for is going to be like muscly and stuff like that. But this is a woman who has her own opinions. Yeah. And I think that is really interesting to me and you even see this, in like Amish groups and stuff like that. We've done a video where we have a longer Amish segment where you see a lot of them talking and you can see that women do have opinions within the community and their opinions are valued almost as much as the man's opinions.This perspective of women's opinions just don't matter is actually not like a historically American perspective or part of our cultural background. So it would be very hard for me to adopt to it in effort to have a ton of wives.Simone Collins: Yeah. Although it does depend on the specific American culture, right?When you look at like In early [00:31:00] America, there were some anti woman cultures. With the CavalierMalcolm Collins: group, which just, it didn't become that important in American society. Yeah, becauseSimone Collins: I inherently think that those cultures are less competitive. So just soMalcolm Collins: people know what happened to the culture that was more misogynistic, they became the Cavaliers, which is where good old boy, Southern hierarchical.Yeah, like deepSimone Collins: South. DeepMalcolm Collins: South hierarchical culture. So we need to be clear. two core cultural groups within the South. One is the cultural group that I come from, which is the rural group, which is where country music comes from, which is where the girl who goes fishing and hunting and is covered in mud and likes to, mud wrestle and play around with the boys and drink beers.That's one cultural group in the South. Okay. And that cultural group likes Strong women. Then there's the other cultural group in the South, which was the one that was like the slave owner plantation owners, everything like that. They were very wealthy. They were mostly from the sun owners of aristocrats and they make up a version of like [00:32:00] aristocratic Southern culture, which you still see in places like Charleston and stuff like that.This is where yeah. The Southern dandy comes from, the guy who rides on his horse and everything is about tradition and everything is about Oh, my lineage, I can trace it. It takes many things back, but this culture mostly went extinct. Most of the misogynistic interpretation in American culture today actually comes from immigrant groups that were more misogynistic in their interpretation, most of the, catholic immigrant groups were a bit more like the Italians and the Irish were a bit more misogynistic in the way that they treated women than the preexisting American cultural groups. And but they were never as far as like the Muslim or Eastern European cultural groups.Simone Collins: Although I want to be clear, I don't think that polygamy has to go Contrary to women's rights.And I think that there are many or not many, but there, there are quite a few instances of polygamy culturally and [00:33:00] Anecdotally, like on a one off basis where the women are really more like living almost like a quasi sister or lesbian collective where there's also just happens to be one guy. We've even seen some polyamorous subcultures Geographically locked that kind of end up looking like this.And so I don't think it's necessarily, sarily harmful to women or anti feminist to engage in polygamy. I think for us, for many people, it's preferred and honestly. In the end, you've got a bunch of women ganging up on a man, he's outnumbered. Keep that in mind when you're looking at these configurations, a man can only hold up his will so far in a household where he's just, outnumbered.And I think Andrew Tate by pairing up with his brother and other male compatriots in a household like this kind of gives him a little bit of a bulwark, but that is not the normal configuration. in mind. I think that ultimately. What makes polygamy not sustainable and more weak isn't that women are harmed by [00:34:00] it, and isn't that high value men are harmed by it, but that lower value men, less competitive men, are harmed by it.And that creates problems and instability in society.Malcolm Collins: That does create instability in society, but I don't think that matters in the current system. I think if you're talking historically, why were polygynous systems culturally selected against? Fine. But now society is becoming more atomized and it's really only the winners that matter anymore.And if we haveSimone Collins: AI girlfriends and, plenty of other distractions and video games.Malcolm Collins: And obviously the way that Muslim cultures historically dealt with this is if a guy was gay, they would just transition him. This is true in a lot of Muslim and polygynous cultures is it that, okay, a guy's gay, get him transition.If youSimone Collins: can't beat him, join him.Malcolm Collins: So I think that we both need to realize the downsides of our culture. So with his culture, the thing I would really focus on is you've got the number of kids down. Now, what you need to focus on is Two things, the quality of those kids and their technophilia, like how technically [00:35:00] savvy are they?And how technically productive are they? And how willing are they to engage in high tech systemsOne of the big dangers of his cultural system is that it genuinely believes that physical strength. And physical, like hand to hand combat styles. Has any utility in terms of modern conflicts?Outside of just making him feel cool about himself and maybe motivating people to exercise. And we'll talk about this much more in the followup video to this, but this is why a group that traditionally doesn't value something like hand to hand combat, like the Israelis in the young Kapore war were able to beat culture that did where those other cultures were fighting them. With a hundred to one manpower10 to one armors and artillery. It's not that it's bad to focus on fighting. It's just understand that it's just a game. It's a status toy, like a [00:36:00] Maserati don't accidentally bring your Mazda rati into a war because it costs the same as the tank. Just because you spent the same amount of time, effort and industry putting it together as the other culture did a tank, it doesn't mean it's realistically going to stand up to a tank.Heh, heh,And here I'd like to quickly address something that we often hear, which is that when I exercise. I feel better. Like it mentally makes me healthier and I perform a better on specific tasks. And this is true. This is something you see in the research. , and so we are not saying don't exercise at all.I mean, exercise. So my exercise is about five to six hours every day, but she does it well on an elliptical and also typing. , I think that it's very important to recognize the amount of physical exercise that is optimal to improve [00:37:00] mental health while not going further than that. In an amount that becomes. , really just hedonistic status signaling.And it's very easy to slide into that and to begin to justify that when you begin to engage in it for health purposes, because exercise has addictive properties. And also note here.The exercise does have some effect on the hormones that your body produces, which in men can be useful for achieving certain mental states that are conducive to productivity and good mental health.However, you know, this has taken a long ways, the exact same caveat that you need to look at the mental benefits you are getting versus the time trade-off. And the sort of sad thing about exercise. Is the, by the time you can really start to see in a mail that they are regularly exercising. They're almost certainly exercising far more than they need to [00:38:00] for just the mental benefits.At that point, it is four status signaling.And so there are general rules around personal austerity would apply, which is to say, you can do it if you want to. You know, I drink and I know it's not useful to me, but I also still recognize it as a sin. And I wouldn't recognize overly exercising or overly indulging in. Pointless arts like martial arts or something like that beyond the, the, , utility they might have, , in terms of mental health for some individuals. And I should note here when I say pointless, I don't mean that they have no utility at all in the modern world. I just mean that there is always something more productive you could spend your time on that would have more utility than them within the modern world.And finally here, what I note is the things like I suspect you in males have sort of different genetic patterns.And I think that some males may require exercise and, , fighting like regular physical combat for health, much more than other men do. In the same way that I [00:39:00] don't feel fully, mentally healthy. If I don't do manual labor a few times a week. Like exhaustive manual labor. , which would have been more in line with my cultural history. , as, as a way, a man proves himself to his family instead of fighting.Malcolm Collins: for us? Our kids, however many generations from now, if our culture keeps evolving in the way we want it to, they will be likely heavily gene edited. They will be engaged really heavily with.I these are individuals where of the incredibly high fertility cultural groups in the world today, they could have. A hundred members and they wouldn't be able to culturally impose on one of my distant descendants If we play our cards, right they could have 10 000 members and they wouldn't be relevant to one Hey AI swarm kill bot, you know Genetically augmented human with a IQ like five standard deviations of IQ humans today.Like it's just It would be comical to even think that they could pose a threat or imposition to these sorts of [00:40:00] individuals, which is why we just don't care about them that much.I love when Luddites are like, oh, that's just wild speculation around, what the future will be like. , no, it's not. We have AI right now and we know it's getting better And for the gene editing, all I can say is our position in profile. Gives us access to knowledge about parts of the state of this technology. The general public, even some scientists in the field. Wouldn't have knowledge of, because it's a field that intrinsically has to stayed very secretive. due to legal regulations and stuff like that before the technology gets perfected. What I can say is I am not being wildly speculative. I am, you know, like people are like HG Wells predicted summary.That is no simple submarines existed in his time. We're doing the same thing here. We are not making that outlandish of predictions. You are just not living close to the technology that we live close with.Simone Collins: proposing an alternative approach here, I think.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I appreciate the creativity and I [00:41:00] appreciate that he's living by his value system. And I For many, thisSimone Collins: is the best way. Not for us. Yeah.Now, I need to be clear here. This is not some kumbaya b******t perspective. I do look down on Andrew Tate from the perspective of my value system, and I would expect my kids to look down on him, and I would be disappointed in one of my daughters for marrying a man like him. I mean, you can just look at his perspective on something like why he tries so hard for the things he tries so hard for.when people say to me, Tate, you're obsessed with money. I say, no. I'm obsessed with not being in that position. Tate. I'm never going to let me live my, me live my only one life on this planet and waste my years of consciousness in that position.I don't want to be the guy who's 37 driving a f*****g shitty Citroen who gets pulled out on a girl who's too hot for me driving a car I can never afford who can call f*****g dudes psycho kickboxers with f*****g Lambos and asses to turn up and bust me up. I'm never going to be [00:42:00] that guy. I'm never going to accept that submissive position.And that's why I say when I talk about money and achievement and training and all these things, how important they are, because if you don't find those things important, well, then you're just accepting your place lower downTate is primarily motivated by and stresses about a fear of being powerless, and having other people lord power over him. And that is not what motivates Simone or I. We are motivated by trying to create a culture , and set of cultural interactions that can bring our civilization into the future.Essentially, bring together a group of rebels that can rebuild A civilization and world that appears to be spiraling into the abyss. When I go to bed at night, I don't think if I fail, then people will lord power over me. I think if I fail, then civilization as we know it collapses.When I look at my ancestors, that's what they attempted to do as well. very different optimization [00:43:00] functions than when I think about what I stress about. It's not about losing power, it's about giving people bad advice. I wonder if Tate Evers sits around stressing, it was one of the videos I did, uh, did it, did it lead someone to make poor decisions?I, I don't think he does. He's primarily motivated by how everything reflects on him. And to me, that makes him a lesser person than me. But I need to stress that is to me, because I'm approaching this with a different cultural perspective, the cultural perspective I was raised within. But that doesn't mean I don't hold that perspective.I do. I fully believe it to be the correct perspective.Malcolm Collins: I love you to decimum.Simone Collins: I love you too, gorgeous. What would you like to do next?Malcolm Collins: So there was another episode that could go as a,Simone Collins: Compliment to this? You've alluded to it. ComplimentMalcolm Collins: to this episode. Yeah. And it's on who do we not want having kids?Simone Collins: Oh, all right. Let's do it. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Link to Discord: https://discord.gg/UzUgHpuDVG In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm dives deep into the potential dangers lurking within Discord servers, particularly for young and impressionable minds. He explains how the platform's unique features, such as private channels, illusion of consensus, and mod privileges, can easily facilitate grooming, gender dysphoria cults, and echo chambers that distort reality. Malcolm and Simone also discuss the importance of parental oversight in online communities, the power of status-seeking behaviors, and the need for caution when navigating these virtual spaces. Join them as they explore the dark side of Discord and offer insights on how to protect yourself and your loved ones.Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Well, what I'm curious about is your theory as to why Discord servers specifically are so good at this. I'm assuming it's the fact that they're much more limited in what you see.So then ultimately the criteria that people are competing on becomes very very focused. Is that you agreeMalcolm Collins: then? So it's three things that lead to discord servers being uniquely good at this.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today is an interesting topic because I had never really engaged with discord as a platform that much before. As old people, I'd gotten into it a little, I didn't really see the point. It didn't seem like a way that I could build up any sort of large audience or advance my career. So I just saw no point to it because I, you know, I'm sort of past the point in my life.Okay,Simone Collins: exactly. So why do you play video games? This is, this is my thing with video games. Is this going to make me money? Is this going to advance my career? Then why am I trying to figure out this task when I have so many other tasks? Now you understand [00:01:00] theMalcolm Collins: low stress task where I know, you know, the input needed to succeed in social situations just aren't that way.If I'm engaging in a community like discord, you know, it hasn't been optimized to give me the right amount of reward for my effort. So. But anyway, this is why I hadn't been engaging with the community. Well, recently I started to, because we created a discord for this channel based on some fan created a discord for this fan created discord, and then I've been promoting it and it's doing Incredibly well, like three days after launching at any point day or night, there's always like a conversation going on.So we've got about 50 active members and yeah, I've been very surprised.Simone Collins: Cool people too, from what I've glanced at.Malcolm Collins: So that's, Which has led me to actually engage with discord as a platform finally, which is saying aSimone Collins: lot because you don't find most people worth engaging.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I, I finally reached a point where.In, in sort of working with the platform and using the [00:02:00] platform and setting everything up where I feel like I understand one, why people use it into how it works as a platform, but in doing that, I also begin to realize how extremely dangerous discord is as a platform. Much more dangerous for young minds than something like tick tock, for example, which I think would really surprise people who are not obsessed with the way sort of social interactions work and human emotions work and everything like that.Right? Like that's my obsession to anyone who's read our books on like governance and everything like that. When I'm building up how governance work, I start by looking at how do humans interact, how do humans judge status, what sort of motivates our base human. Actions because through understanding humanity, I can understand better why different mechanisms for organizing us will lead to different, you know, large scale macro outcomes.Well, with discord, I was looking at it and what really got me [00:03:00] down this particular rabbit hole is I also really like, tea videos if you're familiar. So when you watch them too this means like drama videos. Okay. That kind of tea. Yes. Drama about, yeah, you know, YouTube creators and other sorts of like celebs celebs.I really wish people would do one on us, but no oneSimone Collins: really has yet. Because there's nothing at, what are they going to talk about?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, I, Oh, they could come up with that. I've often thought the scene where, you know, You know, my kid fell in the water and I was like pretty lackadaisical and getting em out coming.Yeah. But that's notSimone Collins: filmed or anything. Like if that was something that No,Malcolm Collins: but I, social media viral on, I mentioned it on our channel. Mm-Hmm. And you know it, other TV videos, they're like, oh, the person, like when they saw their dog had been hit by a car, they shot it instead of taking it to the vet.And it's like, yeah, of course you would do that to a severely injured animal. Like, no. Well,Simone Collins: that's just the difference between. Progressive commentators and conservatives, which that itself, that incident online where I think a Christian influencer shot their dog after they [00:04:00] found it hurt in the streets was such a classic indication, right?If like one is actually just trying to be kind to a suffering person. Being that, that one loves and the other is trying to, it's, it's credentialism and trying to follow the correct, IMalcolm Collins: wouldn't even say that to the conservative, it is the dog's best interest that they care about to the progressive. The dog is a tool to modify their own self image and emotions.Therefore, they care not for the suffering of the dog. Anything that extends the dog's utility to them is warranted. Which and anything that makes them look good in terms of how they're interacting with it is warranted. What I'm saying is that we've said enough stuff that they could find stuff like that on us, okay?But one of the most common types of tea videos comes from people's servers and specifically their discord servers and these servers end up either being used as grooming platforms or becoming hotbeds of like [00:05:00] CP and like other sorts of bad information that really they should be doing a better job, like moderating or policing or something like that and this is obviously, like, a What I'm thinking when I'm putting up the server, like how do I keep this from being used as a platform for one of those types of things?And what immediately came to me was discord is almost set up from the ground level to encourage, grooming behavior virtue spirals, and the formation of organic cults. And this is something we talk a lot about on the show, is how you can get like these organic cults forming. And this is what we, a, there was little things that like happened within our server in its first few days.Like this is day three of operation, right? So I'm not an old server. And Some individuals started putting the number of kids they had after their name. So it's say their names and then a number and then kids. And then it became so common that people removed the word kids and it was just a [00:06:00] name and then a number, and then it became people shaming people for not.putting that in which shows sort of in real time how something like religious traditions can evolve, which is how social normsSimone Collins: are created. Released.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's like, it's like you, you, you left something under a rock and then you look in like some civilization has formed, you know, that classic trope.And you're like, Oh, I did not intend any of this. I was just pointing out that there was a server here and now it has social norms and Because I had made the admins. And it just give you an example of another social norm that formed a different color than the other individuals because I thought they should be rewarded if they're doing additional work.But then this caused the perception that they were higher status than other individuals. Well, if they doSimone Collins: more work, aren't they higher status?Malcolm Collins: I mean, that's the way I see it, right? But I hadn't chosen them based on anything. thing that I was really thinking through. I was just like, some people recommended them who had helped us with other things or who set up the server.[00:07:00] Most of them are just because the guy who set up the server said, these are good guys. And so I was like, sure. And then another person, two other people have reached out to me saying they really liked one of the admins. I think. Different admins as well that they were doing a good job, like in communications.I've had with other fans that I have regular email communication with. And so I saw that and was like, okay, things must be going well. Right. But anyway, so there was some anxiety around like status being inferred by the different colors. And next time I check the server, Moderators are all the same color as everyone else.And then so one of the moderators I had given authority to had made that change And they were also talking about like how do you which is I think goes with the spirit of the channel You know the level of like equality and free speech that we try to motivate within the channel But then there were other things that were really interesting.There was an instance of Oh, yeah, trying to decide how I make moderators and somebody proposed, obviously trying to look out for our best interest, that I should make moderators people who donate to the Collins Foundation. And I was like, well, only three people have ever donated to the Collins Foundation, to my knowledge. The person who did it to spite their super woke [00:08:00] D& D group the founder of Skype, and then ourselves.And I don't know if there are a couple of other people.Simone Collins: Yeah. A couple of other people haveMalcolm Collins: donated. Okay. Okay. Well, so we've had a couple other people, but I think that those are like the big ones in terms of like, and they don't use our platforms. They don't care. Like they, they don't care about any status within the discord service.But in addition to that, I don't want to create a pressure that would motivate people who aren't donating because they want the money to like go to good stuff, but are donating for some sort of social status. I don't want to create that, especially among people who have less wealth than I have. Like that seems actively immoral to me and it's something thatSimone Collins: also seems exploitative.I don't know. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. But if it gives you the idea of how people are thinking about norms, how they're thinking about rules, like the no racism rule, for example, that's a, how do you deal with facts that leftists would call racist, right? How do you like, and so, you know, there was some debate on how exactly that's going to work, you [00:09:00] know, and we, we decided that it's, you know, no motivated reasoning based on race, but you can, you know, if something's backed by evidence, you can investigate the evidence which is interesting.Yeah. Yeah.Simone Collins: So like, I can understand why someone suggested, you know, donations being, A sign of basically demonstrated dedication to the projects that this whole effort represents. So I also think that that's really admirable. It's nice. We just don't want. We don't want to impose on anyone. So everything isMalcolm Collins: logical.The truth is, the type of people with the time to be good Discord admins is probably going to be inversely correlated with how much money they make. Yeah. Because, you know, if you're making a ton of money, you know, you often Are considered more competent in the eyes of society by your resume and everything like that and therefore have more demands on your time.Which you know, if we're looking for competent people whose society hasn't realized they're competent yet, they're going to be less wealthy. So they're the very last people I would want to ask for money, you know. Which is [00:10:00] interesting, but I want to get into how discord is almost set up to create grooming.Because and organically forming calls. So one, I love the, the naming of discord that it's literally named after discord. Yeah, you know, yeah. The heiress, the goddess of discord and strife, right? Like, what a better name for it. I bet she'd be good at causing all kinds of destruction and chaos. I know. Isn't it cool? Yeah.Hi, Alice. Oh, poo! You tricked me, you bonehead! What are you up to, girl? Oh, just cooking up trouble, you know, having fun. And there's nothing you can do about it! IMalcolm Collins: But you've got to think about how the platform works. And this was one, the reason why I'm doing all the talking now, is because Simone didn't pre talk this episode with me, because she said she wanted to be surprised by everything I was saying, because she didn't know where I was going with this.But the idea being is that a lot of discord servers are based around a specific [00:11:00] individuals who are high status for some reason or another, either seen as running some project or they are seen as like a YouTube celebrity or something like that. Like that's where a lot of these T videos are coming from.Yeah. All theSimone Collins: servers that I know of. typically are built around either a cluster of people or a person and typically their podcast or a YouTube channel forMalcolm Collins: sure. Yeah. So just think about it like this, Simone, suppose you had a young guy, a horny guy, let's say a guy in his teens, like a lot of, you know, rising YouTube creators.And I have, I've mentioned in the past that when guys are in that page, a place in puberty, they often do things that are immoral in the pursuit of sex. Although, you know, you see women doing the same thing with like, Hypnotist Sappho is an example of a furry. What's the word? PDF file. And she targets, you know, young people through Discord.She might be trans, in which case, you know, what does that mean anymore these days? So, within the Discord server, by that what I mean is a lot of people who I [00:12:00] think historically would not have been called trans are called trans now and still have the hormonal profile of a male. And, and so, you know, that would still explain the behavior, but anyway, so you take an individual like that, you put them into an environment where people are talking and most people have some level of admiration for them, then you give them total control through admin privileges on discord of, Who gets booted from the group, what messages are seen from the group.So you can do sort of temporary punishments where I could like, for example, like shadow ban someone or mute someone they would say, or make it so that like everyone else is muted to them. Like weird things like that. As soon as you've done that, you've created an environment where somebody who is not mentally stable, it's a heavily.psychologically motivated with no real negatives at all to them for removing everyone who disagrees with them. Or everyone who disagrees with an idea that they are pushing forward. [00:13:00] This soundsSimone Collins: so stressful.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, go back to the comment I made about like, trans individuals today. And we've done the episode on like, is a cult using the trans movement for cover?Well, suppose you had a cult about affirming like some form of gender identity, right?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 hormone blockers at like 12.Haha, isn't that true for everyone? Don't worry, I'll make him into a good girlI know people may have thought that I was being maybe controversial or reaching. When I [00:14:00] said that a cult is using the trans movement for cover. But it's only natural. If you make some group a protected class in society that no one is allowed to criticize. Without being called transphobic the. Individuals with malintent, we'll start using that group for cover. And the most transphobic thing you can do is to not call out those individuals. Yes. There is really a group of people out there who uses the trans identity and the cover it provides them. In order to groom kids. And attempt to get them on hormones for their own sexual satisfaction. To be against fighting against this community is the most genuinely transphobic position I could imagine a person taking. Because to say that in calling out individuals like this. We are calling out all trans people. You are implying that all trans people are actually like this. And that if we prevented the protection, trans rights gives some [00:15:00] individuals from covering this community that we would be removing all of the meaningful protection.The trans rights activism is meant to achieve. Don'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.And don't give me that, oh, this is just like edge cases or fringe people in the community type of thing. Alack Vade minute who was put in out, magazines out 100. A hundred third, the top 100, most influential LGBT people that year said these days, the narrative [00:16:00] is that transgender people will come into bathrooms and abuse, little girls. The supposedly quote unquote, purity of the victims has remained stagnant. There are no princesses, little girls are also kinky.Your kids aren't as straight and narrow as you think.The community really does need a very serious cleanup and grooming is a theory as a problem. We might do another video just dedicated to this topic, but if you're like, well, I understand that some people are doing some bad things, but think of the damage this can do to the wider LGBT community. And it's like, bro, like, think about these messages. You're reading. What about the kids who are being convinced who are not actually trans to get on hormones at extremely young ages and having their entire lives ruined just so that they can be some creepy grownups sex toy. Like, do you have. Zero sympathy for these individuals.They can never come back from that and worse.Now, every time they hear about trans issues, they are just [00:17:00] reminded how their bodies were ruined for the gratification of some sicko. How often does this happen? How many more of these people do we need to catch it before we say, okay, some individuals are using this ideology for nefarious means. And we need to call it out that this can happen.The weirdos can use stuff like trans identity to go into restrooms and attempt to assault little girls. And do something about this. Although we are getting off topic here. So I'll see if I can find another way to talk about this issue.Malcolm Collins: So, so to make this more PC, like, suppose it's like a cloud gender community. Okay. Everyone who disconfirms cloud gender identity gets booted from the server. Everyone who in any way even questions themselves or isn't sure or used to identify as this but goes back is removed from the community.But there isn't a perception among people in the community that these people are being silenced or removed. It's not really super loud and obvious that this is happening. And a [00:18:00] lot of people may not care. They might say, Oh, well, we've created norms where disconfirming. Something is a form of violence to people, right?Like, and the, and the left often does this, right? But you could also see people getting a big head. Like, as I said, a popular male creator, a bunch of people are fawning over him in the server, and then maybe he creates a separate thread for the girls who like him, right? Well, now you've got a thread, which is private, and everyone in it is a girl who likes him.That creates within women, and you often see within women, of course they're going to end up finding him more arousing. You've created an environment where every other woman in the environment sees this individual as high status and arousing in some way, so you're going to get sort of um, a, a reinforcing loop of, oh, this is like, if you talk about like, hypergamy or whatever, like, obviously women like dating men who are higher status than men, men like that as well, but like, women like it a bit more than men like it.So, And this is in terms of long term partnerships whereas men they're often okay with at least having sexual partners who are lower status than them, but [00:19:00] long term partners, you know, they look for. So in, in this environment, you get these loops, like you have at concerts where like women cheer and then it just goes, Oh my God, all the other women are cheering.This person must be so hot. And then they end up like passing out because it creates a feedback loop that can't turn itself off. We have records of this happening to women going all the way back to lits MainSimone Collins: Lititz Lit Mania. What was it? Was it Hans Litt? I can't pronounce names. LIZT. TheMalcolm Collins: composer.Yeah. Yeah. And then we had it for the Frankie Sinatra. We had it like Frankie Sinatra whatever. Sinatra whatever. So we see this going way back into history. This isn't like a modern thing. So anyway, my assumption here is that as soon as you've created this and you've got some horned dog guy, you, and, and especially if it's the guy who has any sort of biological predilection for younger presenting phenotypic traits in females.Mm-Hmm. , or males, for that matter, if that's what he's into, you now have, if what he's seeking is sex, you now have the [00:20:00] perfect environment that one motivates him going down the path of attempting to groom people and the perfect environment for grooming someone. It would actually be almost kind of impossible for someone not to end up being groomed.Then you have the second problem. What if the guy doesn't want sex? What if he wants power? Like, what if he wants a common thing for young people? And we mentioned this in the book, there's a, a thing about this in in Japan, they have a name for it, which is I, I can't remember the anime about it though, but I'll, I'll edit it.It's called like Evil Eye something or like, thinking. But anyway what it meansAll right. Claude says the term you were looking for is Chimbu. Which literally translates to quote middle school, second year syndrome in quote, it refers to a common phase in adolescents, usually around the eighth grade or so. Hence the name where teens may exhibit delusions of grandeur, believing they have special powers, a secret identity, or otherwise exceptionally unique or important. Some comments and BuJo delusions include one believing they have a hidden supernatural power, like controlling the elements or reading minds [00:21:00] to claiming to be reincarnated from another world or to have a secret, dark past. Three using made up overly complicated names for everyday objects or actionsfor effecting a distinctive fashion style often involving Gothic occult or fantasy elements.Malcolm Collins: Is there's a trend in young people of a certain age to like, believe they have magical powers and like, that they, you know what I'm talking about, right? Like I'm actually an energy vampire or I'm actually, you know, if I do this ritual in the right way, the wind blows like this or like,Simone Collins: Oh yeah, like modern,Malcolm Collins: modern Wiccans.Yeah. Yeah, modern Wiccans would be a great example of this, but they're not all Wiccans, you know, some of them do that with a Christian lens, some of them do it with some sort of other esoteric or mystical lens around it, but it's a very common thing for people to believe because these power fantasies just really appeal to people during these ages where they're attempting to find their identity if they have a community that will affirm them.Well, if you've created an environment like this, and I'm sure this happens much more in, like, female dominated discords, you know, why [00:22:00] not? Once you've gotten a group around you that you can just remove anyone from who, who defends and you've created like private channels around this, why not try to get them all to worship you or something, right?Like, if that's what gets you off, if that's what your desire is and It would happen organically, right? Somebody might have a few ideas. I actually think, to an extent, this could be what we're seeing with you know, Rubey Arden, one of Alt Hist, if people have seen his CIA video which goes in a very mystical direction.And he talks about thinking that he is getting like that he has supernatural perception of the world. And that this is also supported by evidence and historical tradition that some people just have this supernatural perspective of reality. And this might be a true thing. Like I don't want to s**t on his, but, but let's assume that it's not, let's assume that every now and then people just get this inclination that they have a supernatural perception of reality around a certain age range, which, you know, he falls like 22.And Then he is in a community where he drops this [00:23:00] as an idea. And of course people are going to feel uncomfortable. I mean, he's the big guy. He's got half a million subscribers on an unconfirming that. And some of them might be like, actually, I have this too. Right? And then it begins to create a snowball effect where.He feels encouraged to, and, and I'm not saying that this has happened to him yet, but I'm just saying you can see how somebody who starts in this position in a completely like goodwill position to be increasingly encouraged by the way server dynamics work on discord to make more and more extreme claims about supernatural abilities or something like that.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, it seems like. This kind of community set up is a likely to create an echo chamber effect for any group or any behavior where it's very easy once you establish what it, what makes you higher status, then that thing is [00:24:00] going to get out of control because then people are going to chase after that thing and need to augment it or emphasize it in order to maintain.higher relative status, right? There's no way around it. Whether it's the number of kids you report you have next to your username or how supernatural your abilities may be,Malcolm Collins: I guess. Yeah. Well, I mean, keep in mind that a lot of people don't sort for status in the external world. I think a lot of people think that most humans are driven by the affirmation of other individuals.When the reality is, is that a huge class of sort of, I'd say the unthinking masses are more driven by their perception of how other people see them. And they are totally okay with cheesing that perception when it benefits them emotionally. So have you ever been, and I'd ask the followers, you know what I'm talking about, someone like.When you're in a conversation with maybe like an old person and they're telling you a story and they're trying to be like a mentor to you and it is very obvious to anyone who was actually interested in your perception of them that they would [00:25:00] know that they're just like you don't think very highly of them and you are amusing them so that they feel like a mentor because you know it's important that they feel like a mentor to their continued patronage of you.Well, or or, you know, it's like a parent, right? And they're giving you some long narrative that is more about telling a narrative to themselves than it is about actually altering the way that you see them. It's more about telling themselves how you see them than it is about altering your own perception of them.And people can do this very frequently. And I think within, you know, communities that go into a mystical direction you can really easily get spirals around this where an individual wants the people around them to believe that they have power and they want to believe that they believe the people around them are powerful.Believe they have power more than they actually want the people around them to believe they have power. If you understand what I'm saying. And this can create spirals that go really far, [00:26:00] really fast. To the point where now the person is, and one of the reasons why this is so dangerous is because now the person is drawing information about reality from unreal things, from internal intuitions, which end up being confirmed by a community and end up creating these sorts of.cults. And I think that this is where one of the places where you get these gender cults, the, the, the, the extreme, like, right leaning and left leaning gender cults. You know, when you get something like a trans community where everything is about gender expression, I mean, what is looks maxing, if not an obsession with gender expression, which is often more right leaning.They begin to define their, or, or like these workout communities or like these you know, I think that some iterations of like the red pill community went a bunch of different directions. Some of them were sane, and then some of them I think are more just like gender dysphoria cults. But they're, they are trying to affirm that they are their birth gender.And people can be like, why so frequently do. On both the left and the right, do you [00:27:00] get these gender dysphoria cults within these sorts of feedback environments? And there's a few reasons. One is that gender is the thing that people are most frequently uncomfortable about when they're going through puberty, which is the age at which people mostly choose a new religion.So between 15 and 21 is when most people leave their birth religion or culture. So, it's a primary thing of interest when you're most likely to get recruits. The other thing is that it's very easy to get into what I'd call like gender spirals where like you just have to, you know, fit this identity that you've created for yourself as like the correct way to be who you are.And if you can't do that, you just might as well die. But Simona, you wanted me to not prep you on any of this. What do you think?Simone Collins: Well, what I'm curious about is your theory as to why Discord servers specifically are so good at this. I'm assuming it's the fact that they're much more limited in what you see.So then ultimately the criteria that people are competing on becomes very very focused. Is that you agreeMalcolm Collins: then? So it's three things that lead to discord servers being uniquely good at [00:28:00] this.Simone Collins: Well, what I'm curious about is your theory as to why Discord servers specifically are so good at this. I'm assuming it's the fact that they're much more limited in what you see.So then ultimately the criteria that people are competing on becomes very very focused. Is that you agreeMalcolm Collins: then? So it's three things that lead to discord servers being uniquely good at this. One thing is, is it's very easy for a person who is high status outside of Discord and otherwise being normal outside of Discord to be completely weird within a Discord server without that much risk of it leaking.I mean, obviously it does leak, but, but they can feel like it, but like, you know, I'm talking to like two, three people here in this private channel, like, I can see everyone who's in the channel. I might have a longer relationship with them. So, it's a lot harder. It's a lot easier to go sort of crazy or to go sort of like subtle abusive without being a fear of it coming back to haunt you or being called out on it.AlsoSimone Collins: the level of online dating then in, in the [00:29:00] way that with the advent of swipe based dating, things also fell off the rails and. We actually sawMalcolm Collins: quite different from that. Oh, really? Yeah. So consider it. Well, this is where the second thing is discord is really important. The, the illusion of consensus because it allows a mod was in a server to always create the illusion that there is consensus with anything that they are saying more of their status vis a vis the world.Right. And so with swipe based dating and stuff like that, everybody still knows that they need to judge whether this person is worthy of their time, the person who they're interacting with. That is somewhat taken out of individual's hands within discord servers to an extent. And so I think that that's what makes it quite different from thoseSimone Collins: environments.It's this added tyranny from various mods that makes it extra.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and keep in mind, I don't think a Discord server like ours is really at that much [00:30:00] risk. Because one, we would, like, our goals are not aligned with this. We're an older married couple that's like, not out there looking to groom people.We really, I think already as shown by our actions, are not interested in, like, Money, particularly or at least money from our community, right? We're not interested in, like, like, there's just a lot of the motivations in this extremist, anti mystic stance we take on everything, which we've done in order to protect our kids prevents a lot of the sort of self self care.power fantasy spirals which can become really easy if you allow for mystical thinking. And finally, we, I don't really act as an active mod within the server, and the people who are active mods are sort of active around, actually, it's a great Test, I'm going to say, so, you know, like within the discord server, we're, we're actually, you know, halting the track series for a while because it's a lot of extra work.And Simone is, you know, about to give birth. So we just didn't want to do it for now. And. In halting that, like the videos don't do as [00:31:00] well as our other videos, but and they take a lot more time, but they're much more popular among the type of people who use our discord server. So it could be the type of environment where if we have set these social norms around belief systems with something like that, we can see, do they actually protect against weird sorts of spirals?I mean, one of the things that we've already seen within our discord server Which I don't know if it's a positive thing or not, because we've talked about, you know, making it high status for people to have more kids is going to encourage higher fertility. I don't know. A lot ofSimone Collins: people who are active on the server have zeros next to them.And I think most people in the prenatalist movement, the model, modern technophilic one, they Are younger and they don't have kids yet. IMalcolm Collins: IAnd, I understand. So the question at hand is, should we say that this should not be a social norm with within the community? Should we say that you shouldn't put the number of kids you have?Or is it good that we are constantly, in terms of every social interaction, reminding people This is the goal, this is the goal, this is the goal. I mean,Simone Collins: I, I do [00:32:00] think what I like about it as something that's present and what I'd love about seeing more about this in modern society is that it does give someone.A reminder that having kids has some kind of status bump to it and that it is an asset to you and it is a cool thing if you have kids because. in many circles now, if you have kids, it's just assumed that you are now less fun, less cool, more poor, more stressed, more sleep deprived, all these bad things.It is a drop to your status. So yeah, I would say anything that indicates no matter how many people have zeros by their names, that having a higher number could increase their status is fantastic.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's an interesting thing that was going around the discord server today. And I was wondering if you had thoughts on this, they were asking.What happens if the discord, because apparently discords can get banned for like bad political thought, like, QAnon boards got banned and like anyone who has friends was members of QAnon boards got their boards banned.Simone Collins: But aren't they private? I mean, [00:33:00] there's noMalcolm Collins: like. No, no. They say that once you get over 500 members and we're already to 203 days.Simone Collins: So that means an outsider will join it, flag it, and then it gets.Malcolm Collins: No, not an outsider. The mobs at discord often monitor the service. And they say definitely once you get over a thousand, which is what we're really aiming for. Okay. So join, we're going to have the link in below. But yeah, it is actually a really cool group.Like I like interacting with it and I did not expect to. So that'sSimone Collins: cool. The air question is what happens when it gets banned?Malcolm Collins: Well, so I would tell them this, you know, if they're signed up for our sub stack, they get an email every time we do an episode. So that's really easy to track. But. I don't know, like, if, if we get banned on a few platforms, we'll find a way to tell you where to find us on one of the remaining platforms.We're on so many platforms.Simone Collins: Yeah, but they're referring to a place to chat and hang out because you can't Right, well we wouldMalcolm Collins: create a new community and some other, I don't know, more right wing app or something like that. I mean, I'm sure you could have something like Discord that is totally Crypto based or something like that, you know, like blockchain based.And that is [00:34:00] difficult to meddle with, but I don't want to deal with that right now. I've looked at some of those communities and they're actually pretty hard to use. So I just haven't dealt with it. But they, they exist if we have to go that route, but I think that we do a pretty good job of not crossing the line.So, unless things get like really crazy, I mean, we are primarily on a Google hosted platform, so I can see the fear here, right? But yeah, so I'm wondering if you had any final thoughts on this theory.Simone Collins: It makes a lot of sense. It makes me want to keep our children off Discord, so.Malcolm Collins: I would definitely say, I would, Discord will be strongly disallowed for our kids.I, I think it's incredibly dangerous, except for our server. They can join our server, nothing else. Well, no, I mean, I, I can just see how easy it would be if you are following one of your heroes for them to heavily begin to twist, because the thing about Discord is, is, is, is, it's not like Reddit or Twitter where you're like acting in a larger ecosystem you can go in every time you go to that [00:35:00] server and it feels like a friend group.And yet it's actually being heavily moderated. Everything that you're seeing within that community. And so you can feel as if you're getting true friend information when it is actually an incredibly twisted interpretation of reality.Simone Collins: So it's like mainstream news outlets. I mean, welcome to the club. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But I think people know to be like when you're a young kid, right. You don't get a lot of your perspective of the world from mainstream news outlets. You get it from your peer groups. Yeah. And it, it unlocked for me a big understanding of why individuals who I think pretty obviously are not trans are transitioning now.I mean, why part of the red pill movement has become this intense gender dysphoria movement for, was like look smacking and, and work out everything and like gender displays and, and like, Oh, this is how to be the man of the perfect man. Right. Like it's a, it's a big issue for them is because That's an incredibly appealing way to brainwash a young person.And now you've given them the tool to do it. [00:36:00]Simone Collins: Gosh, well, that's scary, but it's cool that the discord server is picking up and I had no idea that discord could be so fascinating, but I think it's another important thing just to walk away with is that I think it's underrated. How many people navigate the internet through private chat channels?Not necessarily just discord, WhatsApp groups, other things like that. Remember when we met the woman who runs an NGO that teaches people internet literacy and how to like start businesses and do basic project management. The key thing that she found was that. People in refugee camps, people from less economically advantaged areas didn't use the internet the way that we do.They don't use internet browsers and Google things and ask questions and reference Wikipedia and articles and whatnot to understand reality. They navigate the internet and reality through [00:37:00] Instagram, through WhatsApp, through Facebook, and through other text based groups, probably like Discord, but whatever their local version of it might be.So I think it's important to keep in mind that these dynamics that you're seeing with Discord aren't just showing up among super nerdy communities that use Discord servers. This may just be how many, many groups, especially low tech groups, are just understanding reality in the world inMalcolm Collins: general. Well, and I think this brings me to a final point is just as discord can be used to draw people into cultural groups that they do not intend to be drawn into.I think that they can also have this secondary counter effect of protecting kids in a way. So if you're controlling the discord groups, your kids are like, if you are a Catholic family and your kids are in discord groups for young Catholic kids where their faith is part of the social status of the way the discord server is run.And you have some level of adult supervision within these communities, it could be incredibly powerful at preventing them from deconverting. Same with like our [00:38:00] wider community. I mean, we've created a set of structured cultural norms, which is why I feel so safe with my kids in our discord server, because I know that it's going to reinforce the cultural values that we try to Preach on this channel.And through that, it creates one, this sense of community for them but also a values aligned community that they can return to. So I think that there's a high utility for something like this for child rearing. It's worth us continuing to grow it where we can and not get it banned because it will have utility to our children in terms of not getting sucked out into the world.Simone Collins: Yeah. That makes sense. And well, I'm glad you brought me up to speed on this because sadly I do not have time to really check it out myself, but I'm glad you're there.Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you to decimum. Love you too, Malcolm.If you want to check out our discord servers, you got the link and I put it in the comments.Simone Collins: had anything to do with it. [00:39:00] Don't you dare demonize cheese. Ever. I mean, when has cheese ever made someone sick at least come on? Well, our, our ancestors have been eating off cheese for,Malcolm Collins: Yeah, she's referencing, I have food poisoning right now and we're trying to determine the culprit. I suspect it was old sausages.It was old sausages. I could have been cheese 'cause I eat a lot of cheese. And I was thinking today actually was milk. 'cause I was like, well, can I trust the milk? And I was like, milk is a great food because you always know when it's off. Yeah, but youSimone Collins: have a god tongue with milk. Well, I can't, right?I'll drink expired sour milk forever because you somehow are so prissy with your milk, but I'll happily chug it. It just has a patina, you know, it has a bite at that point, you know, it's partially fermented. What's so wrong?Malcolm Collins: Well, we'll get started on the episode and I'll move this bit to the end. Okay. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the surprising ideological shift that has occurred within the Republican Party, transforming it into a haven for anti-establishment and anti-globalist sentiments once associated with hippie culture. The hosts analyze the factors that led to this change, including the Democratic Party's success in capturing major institutions, the ideological capture of corporations, and the rise of global bureaucracies. They also delve into the historical context of party realignments in the United States and the current state of the Republican base, highlighting the disconnect between influencer opinions and voter preferences on key issues like abortion.[00:00:00] Hello everyone. We are excited to be doing an episode today on hippies being. Republican now,. This is a really laid back place.Oh wow, you guys shouldn't be doing that. Don't you know what you're doing to the world? You're playing into the corporate game. See, the corporations are trying to turn you into little Eichmanns so that they can make money. Who are the corporations? The corporations run the entire world, and now they've fooled you into working for them.Are you serious? We never heard that. The government is using it's corporate ties to make you sell magazines so they can get rich. Those dirty liars! This is a really nice town you have here, that's why the corporations are trying to use you to take it down. Just hang with us for a bit. We'll fill you in on everything you haven't been told.It is wild, how we have met this exact archetype of person and had these exact conversations that couth park, used to use as the stereotype of what was annoying about hippies.At a number of Republican conferences this [00:01:00] year.Would you like to know more?. We have been to a number of Republican conferences this year. I'm going to break them down into really three major ones. ARC, which was of UK Republican elites.Yeah, yeah. Then there was the one in New Hampshire that was for Libertarians. And then there was the one that was for the new underground sort of dissonant right group which was re platform. . So what was really interesting is, yes, the Hoity Toity UK one didn't have this hippie class as much. It definitely had a portion of them, but the other two were just. Pure, like most of the lines I would see in this South Park, making fun of hippie attitudes we saw in this environment.So if I'm going to go over some, one is the globalist theory, I guess I'd call it, which is to say that there are a number of elites who run large companies [00:02:00] and ostensibly run world politics and the globe. And that you are playing into their hand. If you go get a normal nine to five bureaucratic job.And that this group has a secret agenda, which is just to use you for your labor. And then in the episode, you might've noticed, Oh, they've come to your town because you have this nice small town and they want to ruin it. So not only that, but that they disproportionately target. Nice, healthy communities which is definitely something you often see in these circles.And that a lot of people in the world are brainwashed and that if you just hang out with them and they're sociological and ideological bubble, that's how you get out of this brainwashing. And another thing that I think is really interesting is the mood and the vibe from the hippies, especially this era of hippies as depicted by South Park is much more similar to Republican conferences and stuff I've gone to than Democrat ones.With Democrat ones, it is very [00:03:00] gatekeepy when you enter a community. They want to make sure that you are the right kind of person with the right kind of ideas. Where at most of the Republican conferences, it's more of a, I'm eager to share with you this theory I have about how the world works. Or basically a conspiracy.Yeah. Very much like in the clip, like you gotta know don't you understand? Like they're trying to turn you into tools of the corporation, man. Yeah. They're trying to, they're trying to save you from something that they think is harmful. And then the second clip I'll play it here, which I think is pretty elucidating.Right now we're proving we don't need corporations. We don't need money. This can become a commune where everyone just helps each other. Yeah, we'll have one guy who, like, who, like, makes bread. And one guy who, like, looks out for other people's safety. You mean like a baker and a cop? No, no, can't you imagine a place where people live together and, like, provide services for each other in exchange for their services?Yeah, it's called a town. You [00:04:00] kids just haven't been to college yet, but just you wait. This thing is about to get huge!So in this clip, a misunderstanding of economic systems and a belief that the economic systems we have now exist just to screw over people. And that through, Essentially rebuilding these systems, we can have something that works. Now this isn't as pure was in Republican circles as it was within this isn't as pure an analogy to the older hippie movement.Because these groups often want to move to, I mentioned a goal, Simone at someone at the libertarian event paid me was like a gold slip of paper. And literally a laminated piece of gold leaf, if I understand correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where they are trying to reprint currency, like recreate currency, but I guess have it be backed by something is the idea.Just literally paying with gold. Yeah, but it's the gold in it isn't worth the price of the currency. They inflate the price of the [00:05:00] currency. Oh, I see. Okay. Like that. It's just not even it's weird. It's just a currency again. That's what they've done is they've recreated currency. The gold standard. No, it's not the gold standard because the gold standard was, it was pinned to the price of gold.Yeah. It is pinned under the price of gold so that they can make a margin off of selling the current. Oh, I get it. I see what you're saying. Okay. Okay. So it's not the gold standard. No. She's a little dense. I'm sorry, Malcolm. But! Why are we seeing these convergent beliefs? How did this ideological system that is conspiratorially minded, believes in a globalist conspiracy, believes that the globalist conspiracy is disproportionately targeting otherwise wholesome areas and believes that by working bureaucratic jobs, you are serving that global conspiracy and that the world's economic systems in service to that global conspiracy or globalist conspiracy.How did that move from being a democratic [00:06:00] movement to a predominantly Republican movement? All right. I will give my assumption, my, my hypothesis, and then you'll tell me why it's dumb. Okay. I think it's because ultimately the progressive movement. Democrats, et cetera, were too successful. And because they became so successful, especially among college educated elites and keep in mind a key punchline in the South Park clips is, Oh, you just haven't been to college yet.You haven't been educated. So we are talking about a group of people. Who went through institutions and also became commercially financially successful and influential within various institutions. These people, they went to college and then they went on and they became lawyers, government workers, policymakers, bureaucrats.We have another podcast on this where we discussed with Tracy Woodgrain's, how the Republican party is boned because. Basically anyone who can implement policy within government to be a bureaucrat, to be a legislator is probably someone who's gone through this [00:07:00] university system and become progressive.So it's hard to find like the talent you need to get things done as a Republican, if you are in a position of power, you have a mandate or a majority. I think what happened is Democrats and progressives became too successful. Then their mindset shifted away from this anti establishment mindset because they became the establishment.Now when I go to more progressive gatherings and meetings, and when I remember the ones that I attended throughout my college years, when I was still, Very progressive and very Democrat. It was all about, we have to get the institutions to do this. We have to get corporations to do this, to execute better on our mandate.We have to get governments to execute more effectively on our values. And it wasn't, you can't trust them. Stay away from them. They're trying to manipulate you. We need to build an alternate system because they own the system. That. is an interesting point. There is an element. No. I think there is an element of truth to that [00:08:00] world framework.A framing I would add to that world framework is that the parties flipped and a lot of people American parties flip all the time. When rarely. A lot of people say that they flipped from when the Democrats went from being a predominantly Southern party to a predominantly Northern party. When the Democrats went from being seen as the party that was pro civil rights to the anti, went from anti civil rights to pro civil rights.They went from being a party that was you They just changed in a lot of ways. Not in every way. A lot of people get this wrong. In the early nineties? When? When time wise?Claude's answer to this question is the general consensus among historians. Is that the Republican and democratic parties underwent an gradual ideological shift. Often referred to as the quote unquote party realignment or party switch over the course of several decades in the 20th century, particularly between the 1930s and 1960s, one of the most significant turning points in this alignment occurred during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a [00:09:00] Democrat Roosevelt's new deal policies, which expanded the role of federal government in addressing economic and social issues began attracting more liberal voters to the democratic party, including many African-Americans who previously supported the Republican party.Since this. The civil war era. However, the realignment process continued through the 1960s, particularly during the presidency of Lyndon B Johnson. Also a Democrat Johnson supported the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 for this solidified the democratic party's alignment with the civil rights movement and led to a backlash among many Southern white conservativeswho began shifting their support to the Republican party.It's important to note that this realignment was a complex and gradual process and there is no single president or event that marks a definitive quote unquote, switch between the parties. The ideological positions of both parties have continued to evolve since the 1960s. I can add more specifics after, afterwards in editing, but. Perfect. Did you not study this in school?No, dude. They stopped. [00:10:00] right before the Vietnam War after F basically after World War Two, they were like, okay, or the but anyway the point being is when you point out to Democrats today that they were the party of the clan and that they were the party of slavery, they're like, don't you know that the parties flipped?And it's important to understand what they mean when they say that they mean flipped on a few issues that allows them to disavow the tendencies that have reconverged on racism within the party. But when you go through party flips, historically speaking, you don't actually flip everything. You don't actually flip your whole constituency.You don't actually flip every member. You flip everything. In a few key ways that then become really important to the party identity, history, and narrative going forwards. And this is where the confusion happens, is there is a belief that when the pro slavery party [00:11:00] flipped that It do in part, and we need to say this in part to some civil rights issues that it became holistically the pro civil rights party.And this is just wrong and not aligned with historical reality. The parties did not flip in every one of their beliefs. They flipped in a few key beliefs. In the era of Trump, we saw this again. The party's flipped in a few key beliefs, but there was a Trump flip that no one talks about. They don't talk about it now, but they'll talk about it in history books.A lot of people are like, Oh, the left me, you, you hear this line all the time.Where there's the famous comic of the guy standing in the middle and then the left is just running away. And now that's it. Oh yes. Against him. And he put, he pushes the guy, he's or there was the one where the leftist guy like pushes him and he's like, why are you standing over there on the right now?Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.And both of these, I think, [00:12:00] cover a key idea, which is a lot of people that identified part of their personality was a liberalist framing of reality that people should be allowed to live and let live, that we shouldn't have any sort of racial hierarchy within this country that people should be allowed to practice their own beliefs at home so long as, it wasn't hurting anyone else.They identified these beliefs with. The Democratic Party. And yet these beliefs are now really not at all on the Democratic side in terms of policy and sort of key Republican events belief systems in the post Trump era. And they don't know how to deal with this. Like the media doesn't know how to deal with this.The media will lie to people and pretend that there's like these big racist Trump factions, which we've pointed out is just not really true. The, and I will Say this statistic until the cows come home. By 538 polling, Bionate Silver, a mainstream polling organization, more white Democrats than white Republicans said they wouldn't vote for a black president until Obama was elected.This shows that they, Dems never [00:13:00] really fully stopped being the party of the Klan. And what happened is the media decided that they were Democrat, decided that racism was bad, and so they began to. We've a narrative that meaning in the public bought that the Dems had stopped being the party of the Klan.And a lot of whether you're looking at base or policy, is it really reflected in how these parties govern? So a great example here that I always point out is Republicans up until Trump were not the party of small government. They said they were the party of small government, but they were not the party of small government.And so let's talk about the things that's flipped during the Trump era. You had the Republicans become a much more dovish party and the Democrats becoming a much more hawkish party. This used to be the antithesis and this is a major foreign policy flip. I wouldn't say dovish, I would say isolationist, but yes, I agree.It's the same thing, but yeah, that's what the Democrats used to be. It was, don't, we shouldn't be the world police. That was the Dems always [00:14:00] complained about during the Bush era. Yeah, but it was more from the place of like. How dare we commit these atrocities and tell other people how to govern their countries instead of, I don't want my tax dollars going to that.It was, we shouldn't try to be the world police. Yeah. Okay. And Dems now explicitly believe we should try to be the world police. Now the other thing. Unless it comes to helping Israel. No, they think that we should put our thumb on the side of Gaza. They think that we should assist Gaza.Act to help Gaza?We should be okay if we run together, of course I will! Because youNo. What do you think that they're protesting for when they say , from river to sea, and they're protesting a university. They think Gaza is going to get the Israelis off the land? No, they're talking about us. Oh s**t. I think that people don't understand how crazy the people who actually control [00:15:00] leftist policy have gotten.But anyway, sorry, we have to go back here. So that was one thing that, that flipped. Another thing that flipped was protectionism versus free trade. Republicans were classically the party of free trade. And Democrats were classically the party of protectionism that completely flipped the other was, which was the party in some ways, right?Because Democrats are still super pro union and I see that as an inherently protectionist policy. But now I as we've discussed with Svee, when we were talking about the shipping policy that the Jones Act that now keeps me up at night there, there are so many globalist, default democratic policies that ultimately hurt unions and are, they run counter to progressive values, which is really interesting.Yeah and another is, which was the party that was about enforcing a set of the dominant cultural system in the country's values? On other people without their consent. Cultural supremacists. So you can take [00:16:00] something like gender identity, right? So historically the Republican party was about enforcing the dominant cultural group in the country.This was. The Christian cultural framework beliefs around things like gender and sexuality through the school system through laws. And now you have the opposite happening where, because the dominant cultural system has changed to the urban monoculture, and that's the culture that's represented in the democratic party, they will do things like say If your kid doesn't conform to the way that your culture sees gender, then we get to take that kid from you, that's a CPS offense that say, this never would have happened in a historic context.Dims would never say that it is our job to police the way another family see something like gender or sexuality. Or police what other people are doing in their bedrooms. And yet now you have these ridiculous ideas among Democrats, like that a person can revoke consent after sex. Is there anything [00:17:00] more policing of bedrooms?It's saying that our social norms around sex apply even post facto. Within a legal context, which is insane. This is never the way dims were historically. And I think that just as much as many Dems feel bewildered as the parties have switched positions, we also see some Republicans feel equally bewildered and acting I'd say pathetically.There was one, well known podcaster who I was looking at doing something with them, but they just have an extreme antagonism. Towards us and our beliefs, because they see us as sort of part of this previously democratic faction that is moved to the Republican side of things. And they're like, but they don't represent our old values and they're polluting the Republican party with this value system and what they mean by that is just like the Democrat who doesn't realize the parties have flipped, they don't realize the parties [00:18:00] have flipped either.And they're here thinking that the Republicans parties. Job is to impose upon the population a theocratic value system that aligns with their interpretation of Christianity. And it's I'm sorry, one, most of the people who have this perspective are Catholics and Catholics were actually, always on the outs.Like when my family was fighting the clan, one of the main reasons we were fighting them was because we had Catholic friends who we wanted to protect. Like the Catholics were never an accepted theological framework in when Christians were a dominant group, I guess maybe for a brief period in like the nineties, but not really.So one, they're fighting for a fantasy in the past. It didn't really exist. If we went back to those time periods where the dominant cultural. Form of Christianity was being enforced. It would have been being enforced in a way that was detrimental to their kids. But in addition to that it like no Christian group in this [00:19:00] country, no theological group in this country has enough voting power anymore at the federal level to win elections.The idea that they can enforce their minority culture on the mainstream Is just as insane as like a Muslim America trying to enact Sharia law in our country. It doesn't make sense. And this also gets me to something that always just boils my blood when people say America was created as a Christian country with a Christian value system.I'm like, no.It was created as a Calvinist country with a Calvinist value system, and then the Calvinists basically died off due to low fertility rate, and you, other Christian groups, with radically different value systems, came in like a hermit crab sizing up a shell, and then, Play this little shuffle game where you go back and you're like, look, they were technically Christians at the founding of America.And you can look at the heritage study.Hey study titled almost comically to prove [00:20:00] my point. Did America have a Christian founding? A lot of people don't know this, that it was something like 60, 75 percent or something of white Americans during the founding of America, especially the ones in positions of power were disproportionately of the Calvinist cultural group. And if they weren't at the Calvinist cultural group, they were mostly like Quakers.They were not the, Perspectives on Christianity that people have today in America. These have very different framings around things. Probably one of the biggest, which changes the way they act from a legal standpoint is the belief in predestination. And Irresistible grace. But both of which basically mean the not limited atonement. I feel like limited atonement is a bigger policy. Yeah. Limited atonement as well. But together, what it basically means is the people who are going to go to heaven have been.Pre chosen to an extent. So there isn't as much of a reason to go out and proselytize and it's okay to live alongside Jews or Catholics because they were born to go [00:21:00] to hell. There's no reason for you to really disrupt their lifestyle. It's much more important to focus on you and your own community. Which makes them much more similar culturally to like the way Jews are today, where Jews might not go out and try to impose their cultural value system.And here, like Orthodox Jews, not reformed Jews, which are a totally different thing. But. Like ultra Orthodox Jews are not out there trying to turn you into an ultra Orthodox Jew because they just don't think that you are meant to live correctly. And what this means from a legal perspective is that they set up a legal system that was meant to be culturally pluralistic.Whereas the What we would call dominating cultural systems, some of the more modern Christian systems are that think that everyone is meant to convert, and it's their job to convert everyone have a very different view towards this, and things like separation of church and state can seem really weird to them.And they're like they didn't mean separation of, no, what they meant, was separation of every individual church and state. Yeah, they didn't mean that [00:22:00] the state should be wholly secular. What they meant is that it shouldn't be any one denomination of Christian in a time period where the denominations of Christianity were blindingly different from each other.And they believed this because they didn't believe as Calvinists that they needed to go out and convert the other denominations. And Quakers felt largely the same way, but for different reasons. So this Sorry, that was a huge tangent there. What it means is that there's this fantasy among this part of the old holdout of the conservative party before you had this flip in cultural systems.They. can realistically turn the conservative party into a system for imposing their denomination of Christianity's value system on the country in a legal and school system methodology, and that's just not going to happen. That's a completely unrealistic vision of what can be achieved with the current demography of this country.And keep in mind, if [00:23:00] you look at Gen Alpha, they are becoming de religious at a much faster clip than other generations. Like they are. Losing right now. Like it is getting worse for them as time goes on. Not better.Okay. At least in the short run, eventually they'll come back. As we pointed out was fertility rates and everything like that.But in the short run, it's just not a winning play. And so now let's talk about the hippies. Where did they come from? Like where did the anti globalists come from and how did they find themselves on the conservative side? Or the anti corporates or the anti whatever, right? So there's two core events that happened.One was the corporations being ideologically captured by the dominant cultural group in society which Created these sort of memetic viruses as we've talked about them as transmissible cancers, which is these DEI departments that are meant to ensure ideological conformity within these large companies, even when the base turns against them.So you can see this in the gaming world right now. It's very obvious in Gamergate 2 right now with the Sweet Baby and Controversy and everything like that, that the general public. is [00:24:00] not on the side of wokeism anymore and will likely not buy games that are in any way involved with wokeism. And yet large corporations like Xbox are doubling down.And people are like, why? The way that this ideological virus works makes it very hard for any large bureaucracy to escape from it. Even when it's obvious that it's not with the public, it's not how you sell to the public anymore. And it's not how you appease the mob anymore. Okay, problem number one is that so the corporations are now legitimately against legitimately aligned with the urban monoculture, meaning anyone who's anti sort of a consolidation of power at the global level is going to be antagonistic to them.But then you have the second problem. Which is one of the goals. So in the old system, when the Republican party was quote unquote, controlling the world, they were doing this through clandestine operations, FBI, CIA, stuff like that. But it was being run out of the United States.The way that the left has tried to [00:25:00] consolidate the world is different, but equally scary to people who don't like this sort of. Unelected consolidation of power, which is a giant global bureaucracy with a bureaucratic and unelected bureaucratic class that is put into position due to their ideological conformity, really, and to some extent abilities to navigate bureaucracies and that then make decisions for everyone else in the world from the position at the top of ivory towers.And So if you were somebody who in the past would have been antagonistic to the consolidation of global control by a shadowy unelected cabal this previously would have put you squarely in the leftist movement and now puts you squarely in the rightist movement. But what's interesting is the way that these two parties aesthetically relate to these ideas.And it, then in, in a sense, the South Park college educated hippies haven't gone away. It's just that their message is more [00:26:00] refined now. It's not corporations or the government, whatever is not to be trusted. It's that the wrong corporations are not to be trusted. The wrong groups are not to be trusted.I I think that they changed. I think that the people who were hardcore old school hippies like that I don't trust the government, have largely become rightist. Maybe. I mean I, I feel like I have seen this. In terms of like older individuals I know. Yeah the one thing that isn't happening though is people aren't going to university and just deciding that Corporations are.Corporations can't be trusted. Bad and can't be trusted. And the government is bad and can't be trusted. No. Now it's the poor are bad and can't be trusted. Oh, sorry. They don't call them the poor. They mean the rural disenfranchised are bad and can't be trusted and corporations are our tool to fight them.But it is fascinating that we've undergone this party shift and like collectively, we're pretending like it didn't happen. Yeah. [00:27:00] And I don't understand I, I do understand why, right? Like people don't like admitting it. And both parties try to hide that it happened because they want to maintain as much of their old voting base as possible.They don't really stand for what they stood for in a historic context. Trump, sorry. And a lot of Republicans are like, no, Trump's a hardcore old school Republican. I'm like, what? Do you know what Republicans stood for in the 80s and 90s? This guy was a Howard Stern appearing New York elitist liberal, okay?In the clearest form of this, all right? And not many of that views have changed. I think this lack of realization that things have changed is one of the biggest threats to the Republican party's efficacy now, because for example, all of this, and this has been decades of work, for example, to overturn Roe versus Wade, which of course like was legitimately overturned, but still to make reproductive [00:28:00] choice an issue at the forefront.That isn't really, this, as you were pointing out earlier, social coercion element of the Republican party is representative of what it was pre flip. And now the biggest thing killing it is this coercive element that doesn't even really represent what it has become since. Yeah. And people who don't understand why she's going on about this, there's a few things to note about Roe v.Wade. We do think that abortion restrictions should be tighter in our state, for example. Although we also think that some states go way overboard in the amount of control that they're exercising over this. Yeah. Considering, fetuses, a human life, when You know, even famous Catholic theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Augustus of Hippo wouldn't have considered it a living person until 30 days after conception.Yeah. Or just basic humaneness and suffering where it's obvious that. Any, the baby is not viable, that the baby will die in excruciating death shortly after birth or leading up to [00:29:00] it. If you don't abort sooner yeah, some states are taking that way too far too. Yeah. But the point is that this is not in line with the desires of the current, at least at the federal level,Republican base which is.really interesting.To give you an idea of the statistics here. Uh, these days around 66% of the Republican base in the United States thinks abortion. Should be legal under certain circumstances. And I think shockingly to a lot of people, nearly half of Republicans under 30, say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. So for Republicans of our age range, we are actually right. Leaning on our views around abortion It's actually really gets my goat when I'm talking to other Republican influencers. And they're like, well, you guys are really sort of Democrat in a lot of your perspectives and there'll be pointing to positions that we have that align with like the midline of Republican voters in the United States.And I'm like, no, [00:30:00] you have just been cocked because you are drinking from a fire hose of extremist opinions and you haven't taken the time to actually connect with the Republican base in this country or.. We're look at any recent statistics for what young Republicans actually think in this country. So, let me be clear about this as I can. The average opinion of Republican. Influencers. Is not the average opinion of Republican voters. Yeah, it's just an inertia thing that has ended up really slapping them in the face, like stepping on a hoe. Like people who don't know how badly they lost in the last midterms because of this. It was bad. And it could completely like if the only reason Trump will not win this cycle is that for people who have looked at the data we know this because Simone's running for office.That and the election integrity narrative, which is totally the hippie thing, right? Can't trust elections. Yeah, can't trust elections. They're all rigged. So that is the new wave. [00:31:00] And yeah, I would say both Hippies used to say that all the time, by the way. Yeah, so I'll say the old version of the party is going to kill it.And or the new version of the party is going to kill explain why the election integrity will kill it. Yeah. And so we're seeing it this local meetings too. It's incredibly frustrating. So there is concern about election integrity. Of course, there are issues with election integrity.Everyone's cheating. But. There are limits to how much you can cheat, meaning that if a district or an area gets more votes than there are registered voters, clearly voter fraud is taking place, meaning that the amount that someone can cheat is limited. And the way that you overcome that is by overwhelming your opposing side with votes.It's all about getting out the vote. Unfortunately, what's happening is in our area and all around the United States Republicans that are concerned about voter integrity. Our election integrity are going out and telling people about how, Oh don't vote at this time and don't vote with this way and this way, because people are cheating this way and people are cheating that way.And here's all this proof of the cheating. [00:32:00] People are just not going to go out to vote anymore. They're just, they're suppressing. This is active voter suppression. That they're doing right now. And I were looking to like mess with the, this year's election and you would elevate these narratives. I would want a hundred percent elevate voter integrity concerns among Republicans.From a native perspective, obviously yeah, man, can't trust the booths, the technology, the internet, the wifi. And I want to be clear. We're not saying that votes aren't manipulated. We're saying that you can win by overwhelming them. But, and they are manipulated in both ways, I'd point out, there have been election fraud cases on the right that have been proven in the story.Everybody cheats because it's part of, when it's possible to cheat without getting caught, people are going to cheat. We're gonna try. Yeah. Yeah. But again, the margin of I would rephrase that. I would say some people will cheat when they think it's possible to do so without getting caught.If you're talking about this at a national level, of [00:33:00] course, you're going to see cheating. And sometimes, now keep in mind, it's not like this is some top down order from some Republican or Democratic, high up party operative. Often this cheating comes in the form of literally like older, 65 year old people who care way too much about their party and have become totally myopic and don't care about the democratic process and start, doing a Little mess in with stuff, but then there are more organized efforts to whatever, but the point is that the cheating, the amount of cheating you can do is inherently limited.And the way to overcome cheating is not to spend all your time fighting cheating, which is going to happen in a system like this. There are going to be bad actors when it is possible to act badly. The point is to overwhelm that bad acting. You should try to fight cheating where you can, but you also need to be realistic, which is to say that it is important that in the way that you are fighting, that you don't disincentivize your [00:34:00] own base from voting.Which is what the Republican party is doing. What local, very well meaning Republicans are doing. It drives me nuts. Yeah.Anyway, that was really interesting. I enjoyed the conversation and I'm surprised that despite the fact that you've basically had no sleep in a very long period of time, you are somehow still awake. Maybe I'm talking with a sleep talking Malcolm. Maybe one day I'm not even, I'm not even drinking now.That's how little sleep I've had. Oh God. That's bad. I haven't had anything to drink in days. This is getting terrifying. How about you hit the hay? And I'll make dinner for the kids. I love you. I love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this captivating conversation, Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with journalist Suzy Weiss to discuss her in-depth article on the Spoonie community, a group of chronic illness sufferers who have created a unique online subculture. Weiss shares her insights on how the Spoonie movement has evolved, the potential dangers of building an identity around illness, and the parallels between this phenomenon and other youth subcultures. The hosts and guest also delve into the broader implications of a society that increasingly valorizes victimhood and self-diagnosis, and the challenges of protecting vulnerable individuals from harmful online communities.Suzy Weiss: [00:00:00] A Spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers.What some people have described as Munchausen by internet what happens when your identity becomes illness, because how are you ever incentivized to get well?Malcolm Collins: , if your community identification is defined by How ill you are then a status hierarchy is going to begin to form based on illness and people being people, they are going to have a motivation. To exaggerate their illnessWould you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: I am so, so, so excited for our special guest here today. Um, easily our favorite writer. It's on the show today. This is Susie Weiss. We mentioned her in a number of episodes as just a writer who we really respect and does really, really interesting, deep based pieces that explore subcultures that are weird, which is like our [00:01:00] favorite thing.Today we are going to do the first piece of hers that we really got into where I was like, Oh this changes my thinking on a number of things About how like memetic viruses can form was in current online environments and how we're gonna raiseSimone Collins: our teenage daughters Like it completely like it gave us a new model for female adolescence.This was it was a game changerMalcolm Collins: Oh, and where we should send people so this snoozy weiss. It's her twitter account. So go subscribe there. Although that You That never really converts as YouTube to Twitter, but what I can say is the Free Press her sister, Barry Weiss, runs it and she is a writer there and that's where you can find her stuff, so you should definitely go and subscribe to that.Suzy Weiss: Thank you guys so much for having me. I feel like when we discovered each other, it was like, There are others. I'm so happy. And then, of course, I included you on a story I did about tech messiahs who wanted to live forever, which I loved your contribution because you were like anti live forever, which I think is like a weird, whatever.We can get into that later, but I love that. Did you end upMalcolm Collins: talking [00:02:00] to that other girl we introducedSuzy Weiss: you to for that story? She, I never talked to her because she just I think yeah, she was intense. SheMalcolm Collins: recently did a post where she bragged about how she convinced a woman to break up with her husband for another woman and get an abortion on her three months pregnant.term fetus. And this was like a huge win for her is talking someone into an abortion. That's pretty late stage, right? Or that earlySimone Collins: is it's on the older side of fairlyMalcolm Collins: horrifying. We were trying to get the perspective of an extremist antinatalist. Oh yeah. SheSuzy Weiss: was, yeah. She's a major antinatal.Yeah. I guess that's a win. Take the ones where you can get them.So the F the full post she wrote went one of the grossest and most faileo centric types of misogyny to me is males who are fine with, or even encourage their wives or girlfriends having sex with other women. Porn sick bros was Heron fetishes. It's an ugly and very clear mask off on how they see women.They [00:03:00] feel so superior that a girl f*****g, their wife doesn't even count as sex. And that's cheating. Lesbians are just quote unquote girls having fun. That we do to please their stinky cheese Cox. And few things are, as satisfying is seeing their wives realize they can do better, divorcing them for their girlfriends and living happily ever after without a sexist leach in their life.Two months ago, I convinced a girl who just married and with actually three months pregnant to get an abortion and divorce and continue dating her girlfriend, who the male picked for her, but who she fell in love with. They are engaged and I am so for it, heart. Uh, in case you can't tell she is, uh, a lesbian, maybe even a political lesbian.Um, and an extremist feminist, as well as an anti natalist.Simone Collins: Yeah. She's in favor, I think of even post term abortions as she puts it. Some murder. Yeah, some murder. Yes. Yes. But baby murder. So it'sAll: baby.Simone Collins: It's murder.Suzy Weiss: It's murder. It'sAll: [00:04:00] murder. Yes.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, so, Spoonies. Spoonies. Spoonies. Go. I am so excited to dig into this.Yeah. Well,Simone Collins: first off, what made you decide? Explore this world. How did you even learn? Sorry,Malcolm Collins: the audience needs to know what they are first. So I'm letting her describe that before we go into questions like this.Suzy Weiss: Okay, so what is a Spoonie? A Spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers.They're mostly women. From what I could observe. They're mostly white women. The term comes from, I believe it was like a 2013 or 2014 blog posts by this lupus blogger. And she had a well friend who asked her, what is it like to be sick? And she took all the spoons. I just reread the post last night.Cause I wanted to be reminded of it. And it's strangely like cinematic. She's like with tears in my eyes, I held the bouquet of spoons. And I don't not believe her, but it's just interestingly written. And she describes that like normal people have unlimited spoons, people who are sick have a fixed number of [00:05:00] spoons.So, let's say you or I, we could, get up and shower and make ourselves breakfast and go to work and we don't have to think about it. Someone with, let's say, six spoons has to portion them out. So two spoons to wake up and get dressed. One spoon to make lunch. Do you have enough spoons to work?And I think it is like an effective way for people to think about other people who have limited resources. But since then it's been co opted into a cottage industry, a world, a community of people who suffer from these sort of amorphous and hard to pin down illnesses. So Ehlers Danlos syndrome POTS autoimmune diseases, ulcerative colitis.You name it. And they're calledSimone Collins: pots is included in that. I have pots. That's crazy. Yeah. Well,Suzy Weiss: Spoonie. Yeah. You could be a Spoonie and you would find a lot of like minded Spoonies out there and you could, buy different products with your Spoonie codes and learn how to. lie to a doctor which is apparently like a moral thing in this world.So yeah I was interested in what some people have described as Munchausen by [00:06:00] internet and like this, where the psychosomatic, I guess what I was really interested is what happens when your identity becomes illness, because how are you ever incentivized to get well? And I spoke to a lot of people and doctors and that's the story that you're reading.Malcolm Collins: So I want to talk about that, but before we go further, I'm going to take and just word this a little differently. Yeah. Essentially what happened and what created the Spoonies is that if you have a, either a chronic illness condition or a short term illness condition where you are frequently going into a medical setting, of course you are going to tweet about this and find other like minded people.Now, like any social community. Hierarchy within a community is often determined by things that differentiate you from mainstream society and make you more aligned with that community. Within a goth circle, if I'm meeting a goth I haven't met, the more gothy they dress, the higher status I assume they are, because they are othering themselves from mainstream society in a way that shows dedication to a community.Well, if your [00:07:00] community identification is defined by How ill you are like if that's the what correlates the community, then a status hierarchy is going to begin to form based on illness and people being people, they are going to have a motivation. To exaggerate their illness find ways to get on more visible forms of treatment.A lotSuzy Weiss: of it is about externalizing because a lot of these illnesses that I listed, they're invisible illnesses. You can't see them. So a lot of these women will use crutches casts, tourniquets, not tourniquets, but like you got like ways to show, to pick lines, like food yeah, feeding tubes. To show that they're sick.So I, I think it's really interesting. And it, yeah, sorry. I don't know.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and then doctors will say well, you don't actually have these illnesses. And so then they need to make the doctors for the community, the villains.Simone Collins: Right. Wasn't there like a word that they used, like zebra? ZebraMalcolm Collins: something?Suzy Weiss: Yes. So that's an old medical [00:08:00] adage. If you hear hooves think horses, not zebras. So, if someone's coming, it's like the real world. It's not an episode of house. Not everyone has the like deep cut, weird disease that you can own, that no one's seen a case of in a hundred years, but the spoony mantra might be, I am the zebra.I am this rare thing. And it has to do, I think, and you brought up a teenage girls, like kind of this need to be special. I was thinking about it this morning. Eight or nine years ago, there were these movies like mural in the dying girl, a fault in our stars, like that sort of romanticized illness and being sick and dying.So there's a lot that goes into it. And what you were saying about like hierarchies and structures, I think a lot of the Spoonie world dovetailed with the me too movement that kind of became really suspicious of let's say male dominated hierarchies and created a world in which Patients were being victimized by doctors.It's left when QAnon, it's and they're trying to take away your agency and power. I see a lot of overlap.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and it makes sense that something like this would [00:09:00] organically form within young female communities that are looking for affirmation. And I think in, in, in a sense of community and they get affirmed by the community, but then they begin to do things like you talk about in the article, like pill pork, like right.Pills and there's like special status if you need tubes and there's and if theySuzy Weiss: up your feed That's like a bad thing because it means you're getting better and that you might one day get off the tube And like I want to be clear like and this is a really hard subject to write about I think these girls are actually Feeling pain.I don't think they go into their bedrooms and shut the door and jump out of their wheelchair and say ha I tricked another doctor today. I do i'm not sure that their pain You is a symptom of what they think it's a symptom of. I think that's the best way to put it. But yeah what you said is correct of the need to externalize and differentiate and make unique according to your illness.Malcolm Collins: Also, when you're looking at this from the context of young girls who are coming at this, they're beginning to try to find themselves, they're going through puberty a lot of the times. And I think that female [00:10:00] sexuality is broadly misunderstood in our society. And I think part of what we're seeing here when women first go through puberty Is a need to be cherished or treated like something special and a fragile that is cared for which this self framing elevates.So you almost get this perfect storm of hierarchy, affirmation. That's a HUD. victim of this and I'm unique to such an extent where when I was reading your piece, I was like, how do I protect my own kids from this? It seems like such an effective package. So I'd love it if you could talk a bit about the people you interviewed, people who got out of it and what you will be doing for your own kids.Suzy Weiss: Yeah. It's interesting. You bring up teen girls. This is like a theme I come back to in my writing all the time. Like I, I actually think teen girls might be like the most potent, if you could harness the energy. And like the intensity you could power like cities like that is like the power of a collective of teen girls and i've done a lot of i'm not a lot.I mean i've done reporting on eating [00:11:00] disorders on cutting you see the different waves of what that is I think the conversation about gender dysphoria actually fits into this in a certain way.Malcolm Collins: I think it fits into it in every way. I think we're looking at two very similar phenomenon on and it's one of the things I point out.I'm like, okay, kids are going through puberty and there's a community out there that says, if you just do this, you will be comfortable with your body. And that affirms you obsessively whenever you're around them, like in the same way that the fact that some spoonies are being talked into this or, don't have these conditions, that doesn't mean these conditions don't exist.It doesn't mean that POTS isn't a real condition that there aren't really young girls who have chronic medical conditions but when you create a community that affirms them around this, you have the potentiality of the psychological exasperation of You know prodromal or low level tendencies in these individuals, which I think you see within different youth communities with gender [00:12:00] dysphoria and I should point out not just on the far left but also on the far right, Right These Andrew Tate following guys, a lot of them seem to have a form of gender dysphoria, where they want to define who they are based on their gender identity.Suzy Weiss: I also think there's like kind of a reflex to categorize everything. Like you can't just be tired. You have to have chronic fatigue syndrome. And like to answer your earlier question about how you protect against this, I'm one of four girls and female puberty is brutal and your body betrays you.And you're it's really confusing. And I think and you see this with anorexia and maybe there's like an aspect of this with the spoonies. It's the want not to grow up to have your mother take care of you to go to 0 to not be so wide. And I think as much as we can encourage people And except when someone says, you know what?I'm really I'm feeling lazy. I'm feeling down. I'm feeling tired and not be like, you should go to the doctor and get a pill for that. That is something that must [00:13:00] be categorized and medicated. And more deeply understood because it's a pathology of some sort. I think that's 1 thing to do. But teenage girls, the Internet did not invent it.Like teenage girls cracking up around the age of 14 or 15 that, that is going to be forever. But the internet does do it amplifies it and it incentivizes it in ways that I find interesting.Simone Collins: Well, to your earlier point to the suffering that many of these young women are going through. feel is real, even if they don't technically have the actual condition they may think that they have.All: That,Simone Collins: A lot of it then they psychosomatically give themselves that condition, and the same can happen with therapy culture, or this is controversial, but we would argue with gender dysphoria as well, where you may not actually be trans, or you may not actually have Post traumatic stress, or sorry, post traumaticMalcolm Collins: trauma, just generally the community, a large one that is, I'd say adjacent to the community but still distinct from it where the hierarchy is based [00:14:00] around a trauma or something traumatic that happened to them in their childhood.And they begin to create these communities where there is a huge incentive to to Imagine trauma that didn't happen, but then thatSimone Collins: creates real pain, that trauma, like you are making it worse by leaning into it. But then also you end up in these communities where people use that to your point as well, to virtue signal.And they, it's bad because you turn to it naturally as a solution. This is a problem I want to solve. I don't want this. This is bad and I need to get through it. But then you subconsciously, especially if you're a teenage girl, get sucked into the social dynamics and then you're in this like status hierarchy game fighting for higher status without even knowing it.Because of the way your brain is wired at the time.Suzy Weiss: Right, and I'm sure you, you were a young girl I was obsessed with holocaust books, and I didn't understand trauma, or horrible things happening, and so, there's this want of to go on chat roulette, and see someone masturbating, even though you're scared of it, you also want to see it, because you want to [00:15:00] know what's happening, and you're afraid if you don't see it someone's going to make you watch it it's so confusing and intense, and to your earlier point of Or I don't, I think a lot of how we got here in terms of the conversation about everyone's traumatized, every, I think it has to do with the spectruming of life.So, sexuality is on a spectrum, Kinsey scale, I can get behind that. But now aggression. Is on a spectrum microaggression, macroaggression, autism's on a spectrum. So it's if everything's a spectrum and we're all on it, we're all sick. Cause sickness is a spectrum. So I think as right.As I think a lot of. Nuance is in terms of sickness, in terms of sexuality, in terms of a lot of these human experiences. I think for an undeveloped brain, it can also trick you into believing that you've been a victim of something and you're never not gonna be a victim of that thing, if that makes sense.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Well, and something that we have an episode on that we've filmed, it hasn't gone live yet, is on the idea of how our grandparents [00:16:00] generation essentially lived in a teen dystopian. And that'sSuzy Weiss: like their boyfriends went off to war and stuff.Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I recently readSimone Collins: my grandmother's autobiography during the occupation of Paris when she lived there and she's describing like fleeing Paris while the Nazis are coming in.Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The roads are being bombed. She is driving her car across bridges that are actively being bombed. You're thinking, I'm going to die. Watch theMalcolm Collins: episode for this topic. Yeah, there's noSimone Collins: food. But it gives us the impression there's maybe this need to have difficulty in life, that the hardship is real.Also part of a good upbringing and we don't have it now so we crave it and we read these teen dystopias and we subject ourselves to these stresses and we try to find something that's wrong because we need something that's wrongMalcolm Collins: But the point being is that I think people undersell if you go back to our grandparents generation or earlier how insanely quote unquote in modern standards traumatic the average human life was and that the anathema now is [00:17:00] people living in environments where there is not genuine scarcity.And because of that, I think it's causing sort of psychological haywire ness almost to the extent of being like raised in a cage or something like that, where they are seeking out forms of self victimization and trauma, where that is a thing of status and allure. And they read about it and they fantasize about it, which is just really fascinating.And I don't think that we expected humans to be like this.Suzy Weiss: Right. And then for us to put ourselves in the cages, it's let me sedate myself and let me come up with a justification for watching cartoons all day as like a grown woman. You know what I mean? Yeah,Malcolm Collins: your Herkle Derkle story. Yeah, exactly.Suzy Weiss: Exactly. It all comes back. It all comes back to Herkle Derkle. But yeah it's, I it's such, it's amazing because it's very understandable wants being, I think manifesting in a sort [00:18:00] of, what am I trying to say? It's manifesting in a way that it's self sabotaging ultimately. And that's what's sad, but I think it's so interesting.Abigail Shrier has like just such a brilliant book out of called, Oh God, what's it called? I feel like we have it here. It's about therapy culture and and it's just really interesting and how. Therapy is it's a medical treatment and hundreds and millions of kids are getting this medical treatment through their schools through online kind of unbeknownst to the parents.And it's shifting who the parents are. Is it the state? Is it the school? Is it? Your mom and dad and you see this I won't ruin it.Malcolm Collins: We talk about this a lot in other episodes, the cult of therapy and how it's transformed. It's building dependency with his patients and it's training them.One of my favorite lines that I just keep repeating that there was a popular online YouTuber that was like, don't people know about the number of young people with mental health issues? This is because we don't have enough therapists and they're not inexpensive. [00:19:00] Oh my God. Do you think that our grandparents generation had therapists?Do you think in the Old West, there were therapists running around to kids, especially? Being like oh, 10 year old, we need to talk about your feelings. It's do you think that maybe that could be the problem? This correlation you're seeing here? And they're like, no, you don't understand, I'm traumatized.It's no, you don't understand. All of Europe, like, all of our grandparents generation who was in Europe, went through a form of trauma that you can't even begin to conceptualize outside of fantasies. And they didn't go to psychologists about it. They didn't, it's wild. Yeah.Suzy Weiss: Which isn't to say they aren't traumatized.And I think the thing with kids is like, as an adult and Abigail talks about this, you can push back on a therapist. You could say, and she says this Hey, it's enough talking about my mother in law. As a child, you want to please the adult that you're in the room with. You don't understand that there's like a service being offered.You think you're in trouble. And I think therapy on adults and therapy on [00:20:00] kids are very different propositions. OhMalcolm Collins: yeah. And when, especially the State sanctioned, almost ubiquitous thing that's happening now and I would strongly recommend parents not send their kids to therapy.I've gotten to the point, it's not that therapy is bad it is very useful for some people, but the I think that the vast proportion of therapy that's being practiced on kids these days is not of the safe variety. And so it will likely on average make things worse rather than better. Or even if it's a minority of cases where it's making things worse, it makes them so much worse that it's not worth medically, yeah, medicalizing the rest of your kid's life over.But I want to talk about some of the interviews you did, some of the spoonies you got to know what were they like, describe these experiences.Suzy Weiss: It's interesting. They were so open with me, first of all, which is always something I'm so grateful. I'm a stranger on the internet that I'm reaching out and I'm like and you said this ruined your sex life.Can you talk a little bit? It's crazy. But one of them, this quote that really struck me was that someone had asked [00:21:00] this girl who had this really rich life in college is who she is outside of being sick. And she said, my jaw hit the floor. I didn't know what to say. And that's someone who was able to go to college, was able to leave the house and then all it all goes backwards and everything is in reverse.Which I thought was interesting. Oh my God. It was so long ago. Who else did I talk to? Well, the main girl I talked to, Morgan she described, opening up an Instagram page, wanting to be like a spoonie influencer. I have a piece coming out that I'm editing about unwellness influencers.Like we all know wellness influencers with their Ayurvedic smoothies and whatever. But what about the unwellness influencers that just Encourages you to hurkle durkle and everything else. But this girl, Morgan, she was in a hospital bed. I think she had been there for months. She had to gain weight, but she wasn't gaining weight.She had a PICC line. She had mouths. Nothing was working. She had stomach pains every time she ate, which got worse from the feeding tube dah. And then her mom came in and plucked her cell phone out of her hand. And that became that was the moment that she started to get [00:22:00] better when her mom cut her off from a community of people that she believed to be her friends.And I'm sure they were her friends. It was a Snapchat group that she had like in 1000 day streak with or whatever it was. And it gives you this sense of being understood. But you don't realize that you're, You're there are like weights on your ankles. While this is happening, it's like when you freeze to death, you feel warm at the last second or something.But yeah she was really interesting. And she described she didn't say Oh, I made it up. And I don't think she did, but she was able to have awareness about how this community has a really dark side and a side that. That doesn't encourage you to get better.Simone Collins: Well, one thing also that I think is really interesting, and I was mentioning before we started recording is how pervasive Spoonie language is, even if people don't know what the community is. I had heard before I read your article about spoons and then we were like, Oh, this friend is a Spoonie and this friend is a Spoonie.And some of them have even used these analogies with us and we just didn't realize it. And then once we read your article, we started [00:23:00] seeing. this culture and bits of it everywhere. What scares me is that I think a lot of people fall into it without knowing what it is. And I think most Spoonies fall into it without knowing what it is.When you discovered it, because you really, you write about it as a cohesive thing and from this very sober minded perspective of an outsider, how did you manage to not Just immediately fall right into it and fall for it. Like I think most people do even people who are like, otherwise we'll say very critical of maybe we'll say like therapy culture or trans culture or anything.I think a lot of people still totally fall for this.Suzy Weiss: Right. Is there anything that. Yeah. Cause it's such a taboo thing to doubt someone's lived experience of their illness. Yeah. That's that horrible thing that I had to do. It's a good question. I think. Everyone always says follow the money and when you have someone saying Hey, if you wear compression socks and you have to drink salt water all the time, and your doctor says, do you faint even if you haven't fainted, [00:24:00] maybe just tell him you fainted and also buy these 40 blue light glasses.I really have no problem getting into it when I feel that there is like quackery and people wasting their money on things that are ultimately harmful to them not to say that every person who identifies as a spoonie is trying to sell you like weird electrolyte tinctures But I think that's part of it.And then I think throughout the whole internet, there is this like trauma porn or horror porn masquerading as raising awareness, the two most abused words in the English language. And I don't know, I call b******t.Malcolm Collins: I love because I'm thinking about this in a historic context, like this historically just would have been described as hysteria.Like, why is it? That these women have this affirmed in them. And what you said at the beginning is why this has been allowed to get out of control like this is doubting. Someone's lived experience is a sin within the shadow religion or whatever you want to call it. This alternative religious and theological system that exists within our society.Because there's no reason for that to be an intrinsically wrong thing. [00:25:00] I call BS on what you're telling me. It sounds self indulgent. But you're not allowed to say that, but that's like a totally reasonable thing in a historic context to say to a teenage girl, I think you're being a bit of a drama queen.Simone Collins: Go back to Jane Austen novels and like a common feature in them, like a common trope, it like the gay best friend of its time was this sickly mother or something who was just always taken to her beds and swoons. Yes. That was a thing. They were totally spoonies. There was a spoonie flare up during Regency era.England among wealthy people. And again, it was wealthy white women doing it too, which is hilarious. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I want to elevate something else you said that I thought was really interesting, which was the thing that broke her out of it is what is your identity outside of being sick? And I think that this is where the, what you discovered in the story, I think is so useful to people, even who would never be at risk of becoming a Spoonie because as our society has moved to A secular [00:26:00] place or a post religious place, when people think about who they are, we are not given a good framework for determining that within our educational system.And so some individuals like Simone, I, yourself, probably thought a lot about who am I? What do I want to be in the world? Like how do I define which actions I take versus which actions I don't take? Like I built some sort of like core moral framework that I'm living around. But some people, if they're just walk into this without thinking, it's very easy to accidentally say, Who am I?Like, how do I define good action? I guess I'm this illness because this is what I get a firm for in my community, or I guess I'm a woman, right? And therefore,Simone Collins: like you were pointing out earlier, right? I'm a, just a manly man.Malcolm Collins: I'm a manly man. And I be myself by being a manly man, but this can also be political parties.The person decides I am a conservative and therefore all the opinions I hold, everything I do during the day. And while not all of these communities are intrinsically as damaging to [00:27:00] an individual as the Spoonie community they fall into very similar psychological loops, which we are all susceptible to if we don't take time to have a firm understanding of what heuristics we are using to make decisions in our lives and choose a self identity.Suzy Weiss: Well, this is why I love you guys so much and love talking to you so much, because you're one of the few. People who actually believe things and I know it sounds silly and are willing to say what you believe and it's like we believe in having lots of kids. You may not, but that is the thing we and it's you're not trying to say you're both.And I think a lot of these communities like that the Andrew Tate manly men, they're defining themselves based on what they believe the culture has done to them. It's a grievance culture. And, same thing with Spoonies and you brought up that this is, whatever, filling the God shaped hole in all of our hearts.I do think there's a spiritual aspect of there is badness. It has migrated to within me. I am dirty. I am sick. [00:28:00] I must be cleansed. But none of it's my fault. It's like a little confused, but yeah, I think defining yourself based on lack, based on the fact that, It's harder for you to run a mile because of your condition is not a recipe for a good life.Malcolm Collins: Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the spiritual part, because one of the things that I often say is like these evolved religious traditions, like they came with a lot of Malware, but they were the only mimetic antivirus we as a species had. They were a bad antivirus. They were a heavy antivirus.They were like old school, McAfee or Norton where it slowed down your computer by 60%. Right. But it still fought the viruses and when you completely remove it, you get these very simplistic mimetic viruses that certain people are just incredibly susceptible to.Suzy Weiss: Right.And cer certain people who I would argue are.Very sensitive and open. I don't think they're like necessarily maladjusted. I just think, We've taken all the guardrails off. And here's what happens. I think a lot of [00:29:00] these women might have been, in a committed relationship if men could get it together. So there, there are a lot of factors that make it spin out of control.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, if men could get it together, and this is interesting is that in a post scarcity world, finding your purpose and I want to go back to this. Because most of the developed world, and especially the people who become Spoonies, are living post scarcity lives. Middle class white women, that is a post scarcity lifestyle.You're not really going to starve or anything like that. There are things you want that you can't have, but those things are primarily status symbols that you primarily want, because they have Generated value based on the fact that a lot of people want them and therefore you can't have them, aSuzy Weiss: nice car.What's in it? What's an example?Malcolm Collins: Like a nice car or designer clothes like nothing intrinsic about them. You can get clothes if you want clothes The reason why nice clothes are something you can't get Is the very reason you want them like they wouldn't be a status symbol if you could trivially get them if you want a computer you can get a [00:30:00] computer from two years ago that costs like 200 bucks, right?The things are always accessible to people. Smartphones are accessible to everyone. I think, what is it like 89 percent of homeless people have a smartphone now? We are in an extremely, housing is probably the only thing of real scarcity in our society. Yeah. Interesting. But we suspected as we transitioned to a post scarcity ecosystem, that people would begin to indulge in hedonism.And instead what they indulged in with self victimization, which allowed the removal of. Personal responsibility, which is in a way one avenue is spoony ism. But indulging in self victimization doesn't feel like indulging in self victimization to the individual. It feels like highlighting the parts of themselves that differentiate them from society and thus make them.Special and I think that you see this even within communities that I consider myself, like I'm a pretty big supporter of the gay community, for example. And what [00:31:00] was really interesting is one of the things we mentioned is gay men, we've mentioned this before, 45 percent of gay men voted for Trump in the last election, like the gay male community has changed 45, 45%.Yeah. So much since I was a kid, when I was a kid. You had this hierarchy within the gay male community where you would act like more of a gay male to move up within this hierarchy. And so you had these very flamboyant gay men that have disappeared as part of our culture. Because being a gay male, especially a gay white male, no longer really others you in our society in the way it used to.So there is no longer a reason to build your identity around it in the way that Minnie Young Mid did when I was growing up.Suzy Weiss: Right. I think, I think about this all the time. Like I'm the first woman in my generation or I'm the first generation of my family as a woman who got to move to New York City, got my own apartment, got my own job, had my own money.Not because the women before me, they were smarter than me. They were totally capable, but it just wasn't [00:32:00] done. They got married early. They had kids. They had probably a better life than me. But I like the so quickly. And I think with gay male culture, everyone was dying. 35 years ago, everyone was dying.And now it's basicallyMalcolm Collins: a genocide. It was theSuzy Weiss: craziest thing in the world. And then it's you shoot to the top of culture in this way. That's almost, it's incredible. It's a miracle, but it also, I think induces some sort of like cultural vertigo of okay wait, where do we stand now?Who are we? It'sMalcolm Collins: taken over by marginal portions of the LGBT community. And now you are the oppressor.Suzy Weiss: Right. Exactly. But even like a. Let's just say like a gay guy 25 years ago wouldn't really dream of having a husband and kids and a white picket fence. My the gay dudes of my generation, that's exactly what they want.They're getting married before me. So, even a 10 year difference has totally changed what was, What's possible and therefore changed how, what behavior you model.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When it really messes up the way adults are [00:33:00] interacting with culture, like even us, we did an episode where we were talking about I grew up where we're gay men were genuinely impressed, oppressed, beaten up.If they were found out, like it was very rare that someone would come out. One of our listeners who was a gen alpha person was like, it's so weird to hear you say that because. Yeah. When I was growing up, being gay was a status symbol.All: Oh, yeah.Malcolm Collins: It was in school and it gave you special protection from teachers.It gave you special access to things. And Yeah, it justSuzy Weiss: means you're like vicious and fun.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah and that the older population doesn't realize how much the pendulum has swung. And so they think that they are affirming an oppressed group without realizing they are pedestalizing the group that is at the top of the status hierarchy which is really fascinating.Suzy Weiss: Right. And then of course, with Gen Z who are having way less sex, queer just means like straight with weird hair, like straight with the right politics or whatever it is. Like it's the whole [00:34:00] decoupling your sexual identity from what kind of sex you have, I think, is really interesting. Because you no longer have to have gay sex to be gay.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we always point out that we are technically trans by LGBT ideology, because we are agender. I don't care what gender I am. If I woke up a woman tomorrow, it would not genuinely affect my life that much. He'd work it. You're just a,Suzy Weiss: you're just a brain in the head.Malcolm Collins: Right, right, I'm just a brain and a head, and that makes me agender from the perspective of trans ideology.Well, being agender is a form of genderqueer. Genderqueer is a form of trans. So we are not incorrect in saying that we are fully trans within a trans moral architecture. And they'd say, well, no, you're not. And it's well, then why, no, am I not? And it's because your politics aren't trans. Because, We have turned these into political identities.Suzy Weiss: It's interesting, too, because this almost goes back to the Spoonie thing, because it's like these are invisible illnesses. I don't need to look sick to be sick. I don't need to tell you my diagnosis to be sick. I can self diagnose and be sick. I don't even need to go to a [00:35:00] professional.Similarly with gender ideology. You don't have to present as a woman to be a woman. So it's all internal, but there's still this need to like signal to everyone else, but you don't need to do that because that has nothing to do with it. And it's it's, I don't know. I think there's some sort of connection there where it's yes, you, a transmit, a trans person and me like a deathly sick person, even though observably, none of those things are true.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but you're treated the same with society. In both cases, society doubts your, and the supposed authorities within various professions doubt your lived experiences. And so you can come together under this umbrella of never doubt what I say is true about my experiences of reality.Suzy Weiss: Who coined, we have to find who out who coined lived experience.Yes, it is like the trick of the century.Malcolm Collins: Well, this has been such an engaging conversation. I almost feel like you could be a third host of the show. You are, I get along with you so well. And for our fans who [00:36:00] say that there are not Unmarried, like super, super eligible women. Now she, I think she's dating and stuff like that now, but she doesn't have a ring on it yet.And this means you should be sending applications because attractive based and super intelligent. Okay, last one, ladies and gentlemen, getting kids. And so I don't care how that happens. My kids need people to marry. I always say this, that's encouraging. So, this call has been absolutely fantastic.Please check out her stuff, create a Google alert with her name. If you want, do you have a Google alert with her name, Simone?Simone Collins: No, because I just subscribed to the free press. Yeah. Subscribe to the freeSuzy Weiss: press. That's the best thing to do. Go to the fp. comSimone Collins: slash subscribe. All the content's really good, but Susie's is the best.And you, man, I want to see more at, every time I see the free press, I'm like, is it Susie? And not enough. Come on, man. All right. Thank you guys so much.. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

The podcast delves into Hungary's pro-family policies and their impact on fertility rates, revealing discrepancies in reported numbers. It discusses the dangers of manipulating data for narratives, the complexities of demographic collapse, and the implications of misleading fertility data. The hosts advocate for evidence-based solutions and integrity in societal movements.

The podcast explores how winning the lottery affects men and women in terms of marriage and fertility. Men tend to marry and have more children, while women's fertility remains unchanged, and low-income women may even get divorced. The episode delves into the biological and social factors behind these trends, the importance of collaboration in marriage, and the role of income and status in shaping fertility decisions.

Male influencer Hamza discusses optimizing his life around masculine aesthetics, contrasting American and Eastern European views. The hosts explore gender identity struggles, the importance of intrinsic values, and finding a compatible life partner. They caution against defining morals based on aesthetics and maintaining false frames in relationships.