
Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins
Based Camp is a podcast focused on how humans process the world around them and the future of our species. That means we go into everything from human sexuality, to weird sub-cultures, dating markets, philosophy, and politics.
Malcolm and Simone are a husband wife team of a neuroscientist and marketer turned entrepreneurs and authors. With graduate degrees from Stanford and Cambridge under their belts as well as five bestselling books, one of which topped out the WSJs nonfiction list, they are widely known (if infamous) intellectuals / provocateurs.
If you want to dig into their ideas further or check citations on points they bring up check out their book series. Note: They all sell for a dollar or so and the money made from them goes to charity. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FMWMFTG basedcamppodcast.substack.com
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Apr 11, 2024 • 34min
Do People Really Become More Conservative As They Age?
Analyzing common claims that people grow more conservative over time, we find political attitudes largely persist across life stages. However, when folks shift ideologies, it trends from progressive to conservative rather than vice versa. We argue this reflects both individual agency and systemic youth indoctrination, making today’s brainwashed generations potentially unrecoverable.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Gen Alpha is remarkably conservative in a lot of their views. Not old timey conservative. They're more conservative, like this channel's conservative.I would say, like, they're, they're pretty, like, politically aligned. When I talk to gen alpha, like, broadly, they're just, like, super politically aligned with us. But it's going to require a hard victory by you know, the Republican side and some significant voting and voter reform after that victory that prevents the type of shenanigans we keep seeing by the quote unquote elite in our society.Simone Collins: Which is unlikely.Malcolm Collins: I don't think it's that unlikely. I think it could happen. Yeah, I think that they consistently overplay their hand. I think that they were so happy with how the overplay went during the COVID situation. We might see something else like that in the near future over something more trivial.And the question is, is how far do they need to go before the general public wakes up? And keep in mind that the demographics are not in their best interest.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: It's very good. Low stress watching, [00:01:00] although it's really hard to Danny GonzalesMalcolm Collins: is a fantastic I, I really took him as an inspiration when we started this channel as part of like, the character I wanted to do, you know, very You're not at all likeSimone Collins: Danny Gonzales, but I, I mean, I love you way more, but I don't I mean, Danny's He hasMalcolm Collins: a sort of wholesome, family friendly vibe, but put on top of controversial content for us, and instead ofSimone Collins: Right.Yeah. Like when he covered the tour of that house that had like the weird like sex dungeon, andMalcolm Collins: I mean, the problem is like conservative intellectual content is so much of it is either like, you know, daddy, daddy figures, you know, like you'reSimone Collins: like Jordan Peterson, your bed, et cetera,Malcolm Collins: you know, muscle bros or like angry bros.And there's not a lot ofSimone Collins: a lot of in between.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, I don't feel like there's a lot of people who it's really easy to emotionally connect with.Simone Collins: Well, here's the thing is ever since there was, there was a bit of a golden age of this, I think with like the early days of the daily show. And people like, who's that super flamboyant [00:02:00] conservative speaker with the hair, Milo, Milo Yiannopoulos.Yeah. Like those were examples of people on each side of the political divide that didn't take themselves that seriously. And I think that's another thing that I really miss a lot is like, can we justMalcolm Collins: stop taking everything so seriously? No, it is true actually. Yeah. Nobody really takes their thing as, as a, like a bit.Anymore, you know, orSimone Collins: now it's all my brand, but not even ironically, more just like actual, like spurging out about their big style. I don't care.Malcolm Collins: No, I mean, it's something that we need to consider in terms of How we're doing videos because we do a juggling of different topic varieties in a way that you know, typically if you wanted to do like traditional YouTube, like if we were just trying to play the algorithm, what we would do is just one category of video.And instead we try to keep like a menu of, of categories [00:03:00] specifically sex, politics and religion. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of times when somebody is interested in one of these domains with this battering of like AI safety stuff and general science stuff but when somebody is interested in one of these topics, they're often not interested in in other of those topics, right?Which it can hurt your videos click through rate, which can hurt the way people interact with your videos. Obviously we do a lot of perennial stuff as well. And like the strategies I can use to get around that is like one of the strategy that I've been doing with the tracks, which is because they're so different from our other content is to visually differentiate the thumbnails so that when people are looking at the content we're putting out, they can immediately tell I've actually thought about changing the the white.Bottom left corner on the thumbnails to be different colors, depending on the topic that we're talking about. Yeah. But well, it would beSimone Collins: how many's a little, I mean like, yeah, let's, I mean maybe like a color coding. We realize while is a little, little much, but making the tracks [00:04:00] look very different, at least would be good.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's the goal. So we'll see if it works. But anyway this topic is an interesting one today which you have mentioned in other videos and you've mentioned this when we've been talking and I have, I had to correct you multiple times because it hasn't sunk in is you have the notion that people become more conservative as they age.Right. You know, there's a famous quote that is misattributed to Winston Churchill. That it's something like,if I meet a young man who's not a liberal, I think he has no heart, and if I eat an old man who's not a conservative, I think he has no brain, or something like that. If I eat an old man. But, did you get a chance to look at the research on this before jumping in?Simone Collins: I did. And I didn't want more than that, which was, I consulted illicit. org, my favorite place to get summaries of studies in a nice digestible format to see what they [00:05:00] pulled up because illicit uses AI to essentially do a meta study for you, and then it will give you like a paragraph summing up the issue.And then it will. Link to the studies that it cites and give you, you can actually select columns. I'm like, okay, well, what is their conclusion? And then what was the intervention tried? Like, it's just, just plugging it here, guys. I love it. It is not 100 percent free anymore. You have to pay for like cool features now.And I think there's a limited number of searches, but I still love it. So I have my, my own little research here, but I am so glad to talk about this. Cause yeah, I really was under that impression. I think a lot of it came down to this one completely anecdotal, but still formative experience in high school where a substitute teacher in Mrs.Walsh's biology class who I just hated. He, he imagined the comic book guy from the Simpsons. Yeah. But he's a substitute teacher. And I don't know what I had said to him, but he'd said something like, oh yeah, you're idealistic now, [00:06:00] but then you'll discover later. And you're, you know, you'll come to your senses.And I remember thinking like. F**k you. I'm never going to let go of my idealistic anything now because you said that and I hate your face and like, you know, I just wouldn't let it go. Is this person aMalcolm Collins: conservative? Like what did you told them?Simone Collins: I honestly have no idea what I told them.Malcolm Collins: So what did you find when you searched it on illicit?Right. So, I found, but I don't want to taint your perception coming at this quite differently than me. Yeah.Simone Collins: I mean, it paints a nuanced picture. More nuanced picture than what I came from, which is that, like, typically people grow more conservative. It points out that. political attitudes tend to be stable over time.People don't tend to change their minds, which connects to all the things that you've pointed out about there being like a strong heritable element of, of progressivism versusMalcolm Collins: conservatism. Yeah, the voting is in a large part genetic. [00:07:00] They point out I need to before you go further. This is why differential fertility rates between progressives and conservatives really matter if you're talking about the long term future of the world.It means that we are going to, across the board, move more conservative intergenerationally. And I think you already see this to people who have talked to Gen Alpha. Gen Alpha is remarkably conservative in a lot of their views. Not old timey conservative. They're more conservative, like this channel's conservative.I would say, like, they're, they're pretty, like, politically aligned. When I talk to gen alpha, like, broadly, they're just, like, super politically aligned with us. So a little wacky compared to you know, like older generations, you know, they're much more secular in many ways. They generally are very accepting of like, well, actually, no, I've heard a lot of even like, gay skepticism.From gen alpha, which really surprises me because I, I do not remember in my entire lifetime to see a lot of people you know, at least like gay men were broadly accepted among. [00:08:00] A lot of the conservative groups that I've always, and as we mentioned in another episode, 45 percent of gay men voted for Donald Trump in the last election cycle.So they're also a very, you know, politically neutral. They're not like a mostly progressive group, but continue is what you're saying.Simone Collins: Yeah. So, in, in 20, so like, I guess, oh, sorry, where I left off was, but there does seem to be this unidirectional move toward people going from more progressive to more conservative rather than the other way.So thisMalcolm Collins: is, yeah, I, I looked at the data as well and this is what I found. So, the voting patterns are largely persistent throughout an individual's life. But when people do change their voting pattern, they change it from progressive to conservative and very few people who start voting conservatively will ever change their vote to a progressive vote.Simone Collins: And are you referring to the study? Do people really become more conservative as they age by J. Peterson and company?Malcolm Collins: It might be, but even the change [00:09:00] from progressive to conservative was a fairly small change. It wasn't like a big shift that you see in everyone. It was a shift you saw in a portion of the population.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. And then there's another, what was interesting is that that the further support that for this general claim of like, well, there are. When, when people don't always change, but when they do, they go more conservative. In 1977 this guy named Allen Clem found that members of the U S house of representative became more conservative with seniority.Now, keep in mind, this is in 1977, but I could also see that in certain systems, people will have incentives to become more conservative because doing so may help with building clout, raising more of my funds. Like I could see why any politician. Might, might turn more conservative.Malcolm Collins: Well, actually I am going to challenge your thesis here.Really? So another thing that's really persistently seen in the data is that older individuals [00:10:00] vote much more conservatively, even more conservatively than you would expect, given this change than younger individuals. ButinSimone Collins: 1975, Cutler argues that that may be the case, not because they are becoming more conservative, but because they're actually walking the walk rather than just talking the talk.What do you mean by that? So what Illicit says, Cutler, 1975, further argues that older cohorts are more likely to adhere to their earlier, more conservative attitudes, leading to a widening gap between cohort attitudes.Malcolm Collins: Okay, I don't get what he's saying there, but what I think is happening is, do you get what he means by that?That seems like a nonsensical statement to me.Simone Collins: I, the impression that that gives me is that Older people are more likely than older, sorry, than younger people to actually adhere to their chosen beliefs, whereas younger people are more likely to be hypocritical in various ways.Malcolm Collins: Okay, I guess I don't get it.That's the argument he's trying to make at least. Yeah, yeah, I just don't understand why that [00:11:00] would cause more conservative voting behavior. But come on,Simone Collins: if you, if let's say, let's say you are a, you know, you were, you're born a conservative person to a conservative family and a conservative community, but then you go to college in New York at an obviously progressive university.All your friends are progressive. Like you might during these young years in the city before you marry and get your family and move back to the South or whatever, right? You might kind of get brainwashed for a while. And or just be more socially flexible because it's what gets you ahead. It's what helps you date.It's what helps you survive in that environment. And then as you become older and you become more confident in your own choices and abilities, and also as you get a family. And you spend more time around justMalcolm Collins: It's open to getting your own intuition is what you're talking about.Simone Collins: That, yeah, that's, that's, well, that's what I'm hypothesizing the dynamic, dynamic at play is when we're looking at this 1975 study.It couldMalcolm Collins: be that what you're looking at is age cohort differences. So what I [00:12:00] actually expect you're probably seeing here more, and this is why you see this effect so much more between age cohorts, i. e. older people are just way more conservative than you would expect if you were just dealing with this drift, is a changing definition of conservatism over time.With younger age cohorts in terms of society, like if society is drifting more progressive and I think it is, and if it is doing that through changing the basically religious and cultural system of youth through a brainwashing program even if people's political beliefs are fairly persistent over time.It's going to appear that older demographics are just much more conservative than younger demographics. And you know, speaking of, and this is something we're definitely going to do a longer video on because I found it really interesting. I was watching a thing today That was studying. I mean, people know how anti mystic we are , and it was so I didn't know this.But apparently it's like really strongly backed up in evidence that the [00:13:00] Theo, Theo society, you're familiar with, the, the, you know, these are the ones who like invented the swastika and they were the ones who spread a lot of early heard of, really never heard them. Mm-Hmm. Oh, well this'll be a fun episode someday.But anyway they're like the core mystic tradition. evangelists in like the 1920s that started what became sort of new ageism today and they tried to start a new religion that was like a cohesive sort of cross religious system religion like all of the mystics always do but apparently their system Somehow got worked into our public school system.Not somehow it was a very deliberate, very long standing goal of theirs. And now it's basically taught as theology to young kids and they have been so successful that even the stop. the woke bill in, in Florida accidentally included all of the tenants of it.Like the people who have studied this are like, wow, this is like the biggest egg on your face moment that somehow this got worked its way into the bill, but it [00:14:00] also shows how successful they've been.And so when we, when we talk about a like systemic brainwashing campaign we really mean that like it's not like a small thing like religious organizations that had specifically religious objectives and this is something that I think a lot of people misunderstand is they think what kids are being sort of brainwashed into a secularism when it's, it's, it's not it is.It is not an occult, even. It is a specific cult theosophists sort of theological and cosmological system which is being pushed, but we'll, we'll go deeper into the evidence around this. But, but what we're seeing here is because of the success of these movements to try to change, the way that young people relate to religious systems and change the way our society relates to religious systems have been successful.We've had this intergenerational drift.Simone Collins: That is fascinating. Yeah. That could be what's at play, but I could also just see what I [00:15:00] originally said being a factor and, or perhaps both are meaningful factors, but I mean, I still see. That even we have become much more comfortable with our own convictions as we've aged, not only because we've become more confident in our own opinions with time and with experience, but because like literally now we spend more time with our own family than we do with, you know, peers that may be influencing us.And so that, that happens with age and that is going to affect decision making and, you know, yourMalcolm Collins: Actually, it's a really strong point that I think you sort of see is the more atomized a person is, like the less they are reliant on group approval, the more conservative they're going to be in their voting behavior.This is potentially why people in cities and stuff like that are so much more progressive. Because the core progressive tactic is a social isolation and ostracization of anybody who shows any sort of ideological dissent or any, you know, [00:16:00] basically the ability to think for themselves where you don't see this as much within conservative movements.And so what this would mean is that people who. And this is also like a career thing, like we couldn't afford earlier in our career to be as conservative as we really were because we'd be fired.Simone Collins: Except for those, that one set of investors that decided not to invest in our search fund because one, I planned on continuing to work after having kids and two, we may not have correctly answered their question.Quote, do you believe there is a fundamental war between Christianity and Islam?Malcolm Collins: No, no, they said East and West and I was like, what do you mean East and West? And they said, they defined it, Islam is the East. And, and people who know us, we genuinely do not believe that. I think. The Muslims are broadly on our side in this great battle that we're having.No, I don't think they'd agreed with us. It's the monotheists versus the mystics is the way that we frame it. But,Simone Collins: HeavilyMalcolm Collins: mystic now as well. They've been real, I mean, the Sufis basically took over [00:17:00] Islam and we argue that led to the crash of their religious system. In terms of its economic productivity and its scientific productivity.But so does this sort of change the way that you, I mean, for me, it shows if my thesis is correct, just how effective the school system has been and the educational system has been at driving people further and further to the left was every generation.Simone Collins: I disagree. Because I think that if that were true, then what we would see is.A strengthening of this trend, although that could show up. So when I'm looking at the dates of these studies, the study by J. Peterson and company, and I checked, I can't see if it's Jordan.Malcolm Collins: I need to go and see who's at the door.It was the guy who is making, he wanted to do measurements of our house to, to make a version of it for his little train model. So he, he does like really detailed train models. And he lives in Pottstown and so he's making a train model of our house because it's like a historic house in [00:18:00] the area.I'm so excited.Simone Collins: Oh, that'sMalcolm Collins: cool. Okay, cool. I was just going and saying hi and everything. Yeah, what was I talking about? No, no, no.Simone Collins: So I was saying you were arguing that, well, isn't this just all indicative of how effective The public school and university system is at creating more woke people. I, I countered back with, well, I don't know if they're like making them consistently woke.When I'm looking at these these studies, like there are a bunch from like the seventies and then there are a bunch from like, after 2008 and the 2020 study that said that political attitudes are stable, but people are more likely to go conservative. rather than the other way around. That implies to me that the going conservative may be a reversion to one's default, stable political affiliation after going through public school.Malcolm Collins: I don't know of public school. I mean, I don't know if the kids who are being brainwashed today are ever going to be able to deconvert. Well, I mean,Simone Collins: this implies that [00:19:00] they are, if like, there is kind of a unidirectional political,Malcolm Collins: No, it implies that they did historically, because this is looking at older people than the kids going through school today.Simone Collins: Well, and there is another study 2008 titled, is there an emerging age gap in U. S. politics? It does find the younger voters tend to be more liberal and more supportive of democratic candidates than older age groups.Malcolm Collins: The point that I was making, Simone, is that we don't have data on what's going to happen to the kids who are going through the school system today.We don't have data on even the kids who just went through the school system. We just don't. Like, we objectively don't. They're not voting yet. So we don't know if they're going to change in the way people did in previous generations. I think when I, you and I were sort of brainwashed or rather socially pressured to be extra democratic, me specifically, because I remember this it was while I was in college and grad school.It was not as strong in high school. [00:20:00] High school was actually pretty politically neutral. Like I knew that most of the teachers were, were progressive, but they certainly wouldn't have forced it down my throat.Simone Collins: Interesting. By the way, did you feel that pressure? Cause you went to college to your graduate degree in the United States and then specifically in California in a very aggressive area.However. Your college was in St. Andrews in Scotland. Did you feel?Malcolm Collins: Oh, in Scotland, yeah, I felt it. I mean, it was, it was the non option to be conservative, even back then. Oh, really? Oh, okay. And it was the same. I mean, it's a pretty posh school.Simone Collins: That kind of surprises me.Malcolm Collins: This is when Obama was elected for the first time and everything like that.And it's, you know, of all, if you're against him, you must be a racist. Although that they haven't really dropped that particular argument, have they? And then when I was in grad school, you know, I was getting my MBA at Stanford. I remember thinking what pussies the Republicans on campus were because they had these support groups for being a discriminated minority, you know, and they would constantly say that they [00:21:00] feel really discriminated.One of my classmates actually ended up becoming a Congressman. And he was one of the Congressmen that got thrown out because he was an anti Trump Congressman as Trump came into office, I think he voted to have him like removed or something. So, you know, obviously he had been influenced by whatever, you know, this urban monoculture is in terms of, it's, it's aggressive attempt to, to create social norms around this. Cause I think that that's what happened with a lot of people is whenever a new political candidate comes into play on the conservative side or something like that, the progressives treat it as if it is. Like a hate crime to support this individual and that they are just so much worse than any conservative that had ever existed before.And for example, like if we became mainstream political candidates for the conservative party, you know, God willing, I'd love that. People would act like we are so much infinitely more evil than Trump ever was. And that's just the way people are with this stuff. You know what I mean?Simone Collins: Like I remember when, when Trump was in office, people acting like, you know, George Bush [00:22:00] was just the best ever.AbsoluteMalcolm Collins: saint. But do you remember when George Bush first came into office? And I was like, Oh, he is nothing like this has ever existed before. And it was Trump. I mean, for people who like one of my favorite instances of when he first started doing like, okay ish in the polls, but the left still treated him like he was like the worst, scariest candidate in the world.Oh my gosh. He was pretty, you know, honestly centrist. And Trump's always been pretty damn centrist. And I, I know like, as Republicans, we're not supposed to say that he's actually pretty weak sauce on most real conservative issues, but he really is. He's, he's very much like a New York centrist. The left couldn't deal with that.You know, they needed to paint him as a bad guy. And so they I remember it was at Tulane in one instance somebody had painted, you know, Trump and then whatever the year of the first election cycle was in chalk on like the main through fair. And or it was some New Orleans university. I want to say Tulane, but there's like another one that starts with a T there.It may have been Taft or something. Anyway. And, and [00:23:00] so, They considered this to be such a huge instance that they offered a free psychological counseling for all of the students who had seen it because apparently so many had breakdowns just from the suggestion that Trump, that, that anyone on campus may support Trump.To maybe win the primary. Now, what I love then is that Trump then ended up winning. And it, and even at that time, you know, I wasn't really fully like moved in my politics yet to being like a full on Republican at that point. I was still very much pretty centrist in my beliefs as you remember when we first met, you know, I was like Republican on some issues, Democrat on other issues.But I did love watching those videos from the first election night where he won and people just. Bawling and bawling. And it was hilarious because they had so over invested in this false narrative that was being pushed by the media. And people don't seem to remember how aggressive the false pushing of this narrative was.So I remember Nate [00:24:00] Silver, who we've talked about 5 38 polling. He gave Trump like 8 percent odds of winning. And It wasSimone Collins: so abysmally low. Even the, but even the betting on it. EvenMalcolm Collins: that, people were writing articles about how he shouldn't, no one should listen to his polls anymore because it was too high.Because 8Simone Collins: percent was too high? Oh lordMalcolm Collins: almighty. Because remember other polls said it was like less than a 1 percent chance. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. And they said that he was like, like messing with his numbers and that he should never be allowed to work in polling again. And if Trump had lost, he really may have lost like a lot of his prestige for taking the extremist position of saying there's like an 8 percent chance Trump could win.And, and that shows you just how brainwashed, how much they were in this bubble of lies. And that these were the lies that were put out by their quote unquote pollsters, you know, their statistics guys. And I think that we as a society have gone through so many shocks where we're like, Oh, like all of the media will [00:25:00] just like lie to you.And then we go through this other shock during COVID. We're like, they'll just like. lie, like really? Like the media means nothing. And I, I think that hopefully this pushes the next generation and I would be really happy to see this, like the true independent thinkers of the next generation to begin sourcing news from new sources, sourcing the way they get information from new sources and hopefully be even better informed.Formed than previous generations were. Unfortunately, the masses are gonna, masses, they're gonna go hard, communists as far as I can see right now. Which is part of why we so support Charter City movements. Now, obviously the alternative to the Charter City movement is that we make something sustainable here in the us.Because this is really probably the only country that can pull it off. But it's going to require a hard victory by you know, the Republican side and some significant voting and voter reform after that victory that prevents the type of shenanigans we keep seeing by the quote unquote elite in our society.[00:26:00]Simone Collins: Which is unlikely.Malcolm Collins: I don't think it's that unlikely. I think it could happen. Yeah, I think that they consistently overplay their hand. I think that they were so happy with how the overplay went during the COVID situation. We might see something else like that in the near future over something more trivial.And the question is, is how far do they need to go before the general public wakes up? And keep in mind that the demographics are not in their best interest. I mean, the demographics are moving more and more conservative because progressives just aren't having kids. So eventually you know, as I say that the school system right now is this being a mass conversion system.It's sort of like catching the tiger by the tail. You know, they can't let it go because it will immediately turn around. It's quite angry at this point. They, they can't stop the schools from being these conversion centers. Cause if they did, then the Republicans would start sweeping elections. But if, if, if they don't let it go or the longer they hold on the angrier these parties get because of the, you know, the mass brainwashing of their kids.And remember I said, I didn't think kids would change their voting behavior like [00:27:00] they used to. I mean, I think that was the huge innovation of the cultural trans movement. And keep in mind, I think trans people really exist. There is a real thing called being a trans person and gender dysphoria and all that.I just think it's incredibly rare. And a lot of what we're seeing today is people converting because of the social pressures and the social clout it gives them. And it's very hard once you buy into this hierarchical class system. As we pointed out, there is a sort of caste system on the left, which is an inversion of what they see as outside pressures on different groups, right?And so trans people are at the top of this hierarchy. And so that they can sort of join the top of this hierarchy in the same way that like in a goth community, I can join the top of the goth hierarchy by getting like face piercings or something like that, right? Like a visual sign that I have dedicated myself to the community.Well, they've learned that they can do this, but you can't easily. detransition. So it's sort of like, even if you would have drifted towards more conservative value [00:28:00] systems as you got older, it's no longer really an option for many of these individuals, given how viciously trans individuals are attacked.In online spheres when they detransition or show support for conservatives as we have seen with, you know, Buck Angel, who was really like the first major trans influencer in terms of getting trans acceptance, but he made the huge mistake of saying the push to transition children. And, and puberty blockers are, are both for children, are both wrong, and they shouldn't be using them as a movement, and they basically turned on him like wild, like a room full of wild monkeys scratching his face off, and what they showed me is that this is first and foremost, a political cult and not really about supporting either trans people or trans individuals who have moved forward trans acceptance significantly.Simone Collins: It is really interesting with the trans movement, like how much hate and danger those who do not tow the mainstream line are subject to.I wanted to bring up [00:29:00] one more subject on the, do people become more. conservative as they age question, which is that, I mean, I'll, I will admit that we appear to be getting more politically polarized and that that doesn't seem to be getting any better with time. However, from door knocking to get on the ballot as a Republican candidate, I did see some interesting nuance in that so many people, and I only knocked on the doors, I should note, of Republicans.Who had voted in all past four elections, plus at least one primary. So this is people who are pretty dedicated voters. I was surprised by the number, the percentage of that group that answered their doors that then upon answering their doors would not even give me a signature as a Republican running for local office.Like I am not running for president. I'm not running for Senate. I'm not like what I [00:30:00] think about. You know, presidential candidates really isn't relevant in my opinion. But I was just really surprised and it made me realize that like, this isn't necessarily as clear cut as you would think. A lot of people think, for example, like Roe has gone too far and now they have to kind of go into a more progressive direction.And I actually. Felt myself thinking, Oh my God, like, are people going more progressive? Like a lot of people were like, no, I'm switching to Democrat now. Or like, I'm no longer going to support any Republicans. Like that was an answer I got a lot. And that, you know, kind of, presents a small anecdotal argument in the other direction.But maybe that's just because things have gone so off the rails with the Republican party in the United States at this time, given some stances they've taken where they're eating their, their feet now, eating their feet, eating their shoes.Malcolm Collins: Well, they're eating something.Simone Collins: Something notMalcolm Collins: yummy. They've definitely gone off the rails in a few areas.Which I think [00:31:00] has caused them a significant level of pain that they didn't need to experience. Yeah. Committing to positions they didn't need to commit to. Yeah. Well,Simone Collins: that now are making a significant portion of their own Group decide to run con like counter to them in order to keep things from getting too radical, which is insane It's insane.Like they're driving their own their own voters awayMalcolm Collins: Well, hopefully we can fix this and create a sustainable political movement in this country that is as oppo opposed to the goal of the urban monoculture of the cultural or erasure of all the groups. I mean, we don't hate the urban monoculture.I'd love it to stay around. I think it has many good ideas. I just mm-Hmm, think it needs to figure out how to be self-sustaining.Simone Collins: Well, and, and to maybe. Maybe allow for some other opinions to exist as well.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Allow for people to get promoted in companies despite disagreeing with it.Simone Collins: Oh, I don't know.That's [00:32:00]Malcolm Collins: asking a lot. I mean, I, yeah, I, obviously it was a complete Nazi thing for Elon to do to allow, you know, people to talk on Twitter that disagreed with the urbanSimone Collins: monoculture. Yeah. I mean, you know, and of course, you know, I mean, that. The idea of hiring white males in organizations anymore is also so passe Malcolm.No one should do that anymore, ever again. BecauseMalcolm Collins: I love you.Simone Collins: I love you too. I love you so much. Um, as a white male, no, I have another memory from college. That's like occurring to me or like I was in business school and like one of my white male classmates turned to me and, and we were kind of like, wait.I love you. Like we are the man now. Are we the man? Like, it's so funny though, in that, like, that is really flipped. That I feel like now we live in this kind of accuracy where they're like the patriarchy and the man really are no longer. Capable of evenMalcolm Collins: when I, when we were applying for jobs, because at one point we had to apply to jobs, not that [00:33:00] long ago.And like, we would apply for the same sorts of jobs. And I basically would keep in mind. I have a Stanford MBA and she has a graduate degree from Cambridge and you'reSimone Collins: way more articulate. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I got no offers. Like never anything. She'd get buttloads. Yeah. It is very, anyone who doesn't realize how difficult it is for a white man in the job market today is just delusional.Yeah. It is actually quite difficult. Yeah. So even if you're like ultra educated and successful like myself.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the only way that like a couple can go, um, what's the word? Nuclear family, like trad in that way where like they have like a male breadwinner is if he like works in a trade like plumbing or, Sell tower maintenance or something.We're like,Malcolm Collins: yeah, I'd really only suggest starting your own companies these days. Yeah What we're building our school system around. Anyway, I love you to death Simone. I love youSimone Collins: too [00:34:00] gorgeous Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Apr 10, 2024 • 32min
US Tax Dollars Going to Teach Communist Propaganda in Kindergarten
In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the shocking reality of "Woke Kindergarten," a radical organization infiltrating U.S. schools with a dangerous ideological agenda. They expose the anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-police rhetoric being taught to young children, particularly targeting vulnerable immigrant communities. The couple discusses the alarming content found on Woke Kindergarten's website, including the promotion of gender confusion, the eradication of borders, and the glorification of Palestinian resistance. They also highlight the silencing of dissent among teachers and the growing frustration of concerned parents. Join Malcolm and Simone as they shed light on this disturbing trend and its potential long-term consequences for children and society as a whole.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I would say is is is that a lot of people think that these schools are like a little progressive They do not understand that they are explicitly teaching. Anti Semitic lessons. They are teaching your children to hate Jews.Simone Collins: Well, but not just Jews, also America, police, corporations, jobs.Malcolm Collins: One place that people are demanding a permanent ceasefire , is in Palestine because they are being occupied or controlled by a made up place called Israel that has settlers called Zionists who are harming and killing Palestinian people who have always lived on the land. He said he questioned the trainer who used the phrasing, quote, so called United States, end quote. Woo! Woke Kindergarten prides itself on inventing a new pedagogy that advocates gender confusion, kid protesting, so going to protest as you mentioned, eradication of borders, as well as, quote, pro Black and queer trans liberation, end quote.One section of the website said it wants to help kids become, quote unquote, little comrades District officials [00:01:00] defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to the school was no longer on a state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle, the people who are writing this, that the school was not only still on the watch list, but had dropped to a lower level.Oh dear.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today we are going to be talking about something that a fan shared with me. They were like, I thoughtSimone Collins: it was a joke, a complete prank. So our, yeah, our fan sends us some links. The first link is a link to an organization's website. And I look at it and I'm like, this is aMalcolm Collins: janky website.It's a joke. It's clearly. Yeah, it was called Woke Kindergarten. Like, it even sounds like a janky, like, fake thing, right? So,Simone Collins: I went into this. Check it out. You'll see immediately what I mean. Go to wokekindergarten. org. This is the first link he sends, but then he sends additional links. About news coverage about this and, Oh, [00:02:00] it's receiving money andMalcolm Collins: it's lots of money and, and in both the New York, so it's, so it's been implemented in both New York and San Francisco.But the different news coverage we have of this discuss it's differential implementation in these two areas. So let's just go straight into the news coverage. But. By the way, the woman who runs this, by God knows if I'm misgendering them, they're what we used to call a woman. Okay. Whatever the gender they identify as a uterus haver.Simone Collins: Yeah. Something along there, aMalcolm Collins: uterus haver of some variety. Anyway, purple hair. And it's like, okay I see what this is about. Okay. Anyway, so, here It says, so I'm quoting from an article on this, okay? A Hayward Elementary School struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending a quarter million dollars in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten To train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism [00:03:00] and oppression, and remove those barriers to learning.District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on a state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle, the people who are writing this, that the school was not only still on the watch list, but had dropped to a lower level.Oh dear.The, so this is, this is the thing. So, so, It made things worse objectively, and yet the people who were supposed to be monitoring this who should have known that it made things worse, that it hadn't gotten off these watch lists, that it had actually dropped to a higher level of extremism on the watch list seem to be unaware of this.They're just like, we did the woke thing and now it's fixed.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and I think that's the story that we're told about woke policy in general is just do this [00:04:00] thing and it's going to be okay. Which is really not how it plays out. SoMalcolm Collins: the school community, including parents, teachers, and staff, identified a provider to help them do so.Raymond said he noted a subsequent improvement in student attendance was 44% of students considered chronically absent last year, down 61% from the year prior. Unfortunately, this is a similar improvement that we've seen district wide, including the districts that didn't implement this program. And I will point out, it did functionally make things worse.But, two years into the three year contract was woke kindergarten, a for profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well spent, given the needs of the student, who are predominantly low income. Two thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80 percent are Hispanic Latino.And I think this is the real tragedy here. This is not a community that is Black. This is not a community that is woke. These are new [00:05:00] immigrants trying to learn and adopt to American culture, having their children brainwashed. And, and, and people who know Latin Americans, Latin Americans are not woke. Kids are going to grow up to hate their family.That's what happens. If you brainwash one of these kids into wokeness and they grow up in a traditionalist family, they're going to end up hating their family. So these kids who are growing up, you know, coming over here, the parents think they're saving their kids and they think that they are providing them a good future and yet they are going to be brainwashed, castrated and marched through the streets in triumph that.supersede the gaudiness of even Rome's triumphs over the conquered lesser nearby tribes. You know, the, the, the genuine horror of what's going on here and that they're building this racial hierarchy in this program. And you'll see this as we go on, you know, it's run by a black woman and she's talking about how blacks are better.Actually, they,Simone Collins: them, [00:06:00] Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: They then we don't know that. I'm just assuming.Simone Collins: No, I'm on the about page of what?Malcolm Collins: Okay, black non binary. Don't miss gender, Malcolm. Okay. I gotta always know their, their gender. Anyway, so, so they're going into these school districts, right? And. Teaching people who aren't even, like, if it was about, like, uplifting black kids, that would be one thing.No, they're teaching recent Hispanic immigrants that her and people who look like her are racially superior to them. Which is gr grotesque. I, I cannot believe this is happening in the United States, and that people like this are not being treated like the racial supremacists they are.Simone Collins: It's a lot of money to be paid, but I'm also just really impressed by this website and that people are looking at this website and saying, you know what?I should hire her and pay her a lot of money. I'm looking at the menu now. [00:07:00] There's Woke Wanderings, Woke Word of the Day, Woke Read Alouds, Little Comrade Convos, TeachMalcolm Collins: Palestine. Little Comrades is what they call the kids, by theSimone Collins: way. Yeah, what's under Teach Palestine?Malcolm Collins: Oh,Simone Collins: so you made it to a protest, a sensory guide for kids, and Free Palestine, a visual history insta zine for kids.It thisMalcolm Collins: is Oh, sorry, what were you This isSimone Collins: just so wild. Like, I I I I was so sure that this was notMalcolm Collins: Do you want me to read to you what they say about Palestine? , so this is in their lectures. One place that people are demanding a permanent ceasefire , is in Palestine because they are being occupied or controlled by a made up place called Israel that has settlers called Zionists who are harming and killing Palestinian people who have always lived on the land.Huh. Israel is a made up place lived in by people called Zionists and the Palestinians, by the way, just so people know the Palestinians have not always lived in that area. [00:08:00] They're most so, so specifically in Gaza, not all Palestinians, there's multiple ethnic groups within the Palestinian population, but the people who live within Gaza are a Turkic ethnic group and a relative newcomer.They are not, they have not always lived on the land.The ones who are not of this ethnic group are of the Arab S no group. They are certainly not.Of the ancient Philistine or Canaanite groups, which originally lived in this region. But what we do know is in part a chagrin to the modern Jews, given their religious history on this note. , ancient Jewish populations were about 50% Canaanite, which were the people in the region before the Jews arrived or the early Jews arrived. So, um, yeah, actually the Jews have the best claim to being the original inhabitants of this area.Malcolm Collins: What? Like, like just the fantasy and all of this, Israel is a made up. place, and this is being taught to kindergartners, paid for by United [00:09:00] States federal spending. Okay, I want to be clear to people. We can get to the wheels on the bus Palestine song.Okay, well, we'll do this right here one lesson. The firm developed after Hamas brutal October invasion of Israel. Imagine the children's song quote the wheels on the bus in quotes into a Palestinian resistance poem titled quote the wheels on the tank in a quote. OhSimone Collins: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,Malcolm Collins: The wheels on the tank go round and round all through the town.The people in the town, they hold their ground and never back down. The bombs in the air go whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, all through the skies. From every river to every sea, the people cry, cry, cry. Oh, so ThisSimone Collins: is not going well with the song. She's not, she's not writing well for the song. I'm, I'm, I'm not okay with this.Malcolm Collins: And then Woke Kindergarten advertises kid friendly [00:10:00] language that discredits Israel as a quote, made up place in quote, that has quote, settlers called Zionists who are harming and killing Palestinian people in quote. The New York Post noted beyond. peddling anti Israeli activism, Woke Kindergarten prides itself on inventing a new pedagogy that advocates gender confusion, kid protesting, so going to protest as you mentioned, eradication of borders, as well as, quote, pro Black and queer trans liberation, end quote.One section of the website said it wants to help kids become, quote unquote, little comrades, as Simone already read to you.Simone Collins: Yeah. The founder has a little mascot, which I think is the mascot guiding these conversations. He introduces himself on the website as little power which is the founder's inner child.Malcolm Collins: Is it, oh, is it, is it, oh, is it a black man? Is that the one? It's a little, it's a little, it's a littleSimone Collins: black chibi boy. He's he's super cute. I mean, [00:11:00] I like her look too. It's not purple hair. It's pink hair. You know, it's great. But like the things I I feel and we were talking about this this morning.I feel like she has to be riffing on the worst stereotypes of a woke person and realizing that it's monetizable clearly but like she is not you know, we, we recently interviewed Tracy wood grains and he was talking about how, you know, if he had to ultimately choose a party and not be a centrist, he would choose the democratic party becauseMalcolm Collins: I think he shows that he's just not aware of what the party is doing or he hasn't accepted yet.Like he seemed like somebody who is still in a cult and was trying to. Break from it. And I think he eventually will because I don't think he recognizes, like, he seemed pretty shocked by the 45% of gay men voted for Trump statistic . Because I think that, well, he said some stuff that just wasn't true.He's like that the Republican party is advocating against his interests as a gay man, and there's just not a lot was interested inSimone Collins: sury. Well, because you do, you do hear that. And I, I think what, what is happening that may be causing polarization to [00:12:00] become worse? Can't liveMalcolm Collins: in Alabama. Okay,Simone Collins: I know, but here's a whole lot.Hear me out here. Cause we were talking this morning before we did any podcast recordings about how the war against woke has definitely is in full swing. And it has been, the resistance has been in full swing for multiple years. And you can hear from different types of groups on, on both sides that yes, there is pushback now but rather than the, the woke movement kind of stepping down or ebbing in some way, they're just ossifying and becoming more entrenched in their positions.And it seems to me that what we're seeing is just very ossified and extremified polarization. But what I feel like when I'm looking at woke kindergarten, kindergarten Dot org and key who's, what's, what the founderMalcolm Collins: calls themselves? Well, no, I mean, I think this is no different from the Republicans who like, don't know that like, actually Republicans aren't racist and so they adoptYeah. LikeSimone Collins: Nick Fuentes, who like doesn't really, he calls himself, you know, a Catholic and stuff, [00:13:00] but he doesn't represent any kind of even extreme Catholics that we know. He's, he's a parody, he represents a parody and she represents parody. He represented the progressiveMalcolm Collins: representative. He doesn't represent any real Catholic.I have ever met. Yeah. And I have met many conservative Catholics. They do not act or think like he does. OnSimone Collins: key, the founder of the kindergarten does not represent any real person that we've met who's very progressive. And we, we've been in very progressive cultures many times. IMalcolm Collins: mean, he takes on these like racist, anti mostly Hispanic positions.And it's like, bro, they're Catholics too. You nut job. Like, what, what are you doing? Like, you cannot advocate for a worldwide Catholic government and then say, but we can't have more Catholics in our own country. That would mess things up. It doesn't work because it's a caricature that he learned from watching progressive caricatures of Republicans and then adopting that.And I do think that you're right, that many ultra wokeists have begun to adopt the caricatures the [00:14:00] Republicans were making of wokeism.Simone Collins: But here's my question. Why? I mean, they're doing it because they're gettingMalcolm Collins: reinforced environments and they think they can gain status by doing that. Why?Simone Collins: No, no, no.Listen. Why are they gaining status? That's what I don't understand. Like they're doing it because they're getting reinforced. Okay.Malcolm Collins: So hold on. In conservative circles. A lot of these people are marginalized. Okay. So like people like Nick Fuentes, like conservatives, we don't hire these people. When was the last time you heard of Nick Fuentes, right?Like, so these individuals are successfully marginalized within conservative circles. Progressive circles. And this is part of the problem of woke is that you are not allowed to, as in progressive circles, marginalize someone for too strictly following the orders of the woke religion. This is I think where we learn the core weakness of the progressive movement was with Gamergate and Gamergate too, because you pointed out to me, you're like, how can they defend these actions when they are so obviously reprehensible?Like they are so obviously the losers in this. And you see this, the cross of progress [00:15:00] you in the progressive religion, Can not impute someone or for too strictly following orders, basically for too strictly interpreting the, the regulations. And this is why they keep standing stupid points that they should know if they were being, you know, tactful about this to back down from.Like, trans people in sports is an obviously dumb point, and yet they push it, right?Simone Collins: Well, and on the right completely banning abortion is going to kill. Oh,Malcolm Collins: well, no, this is something that actually wasn't pushed by the base of the right and was not even pushed by right politicians. Yeah. At the Supreme Court.Okay.Simone Collins: But what I'm saying is within the Republican party, at least leading up to this, no one could question that. No one could be like, actually, I think reproductive choice is kind of a good idea. It's a similar dynamic, right? Well, thatMalcolm Collins: was not, not really at all. How? Because it was a difference between a bottom up and a top down thing.Many [00:16:00] people on the right did question, like, the abortion stuff. So, like, if you ask something, like, I didn't see that. before Roe v. Wade, for example, because there's two things here that you are misunderstanding. They're thinking Roe v. Wade was an unconstitutional decision, which it obviously was. It was. So people could ask someone like Trump or us, are you against Roe v.Wade? And we would have said, yes, we're against Roe v. Wade because it was obviously unconstitutional, but that's very different than saying, well, would you at a state level impose a total restriction on all abortions? And this is where Republicans got away with this for a long time. I mean, now things are coming home to roost, but I think, you know, it was in the Republican party, the group that actually, like even you as a candidate want abortions to be stricter in the legal system than they are now.Like you think that Pennsylvania's laws have abortions happening too late, right?Simone Collins: For context, everyone that's 23 weeks is pretty late. Insanely late for abortions. You've [00:17:00] got a little person in there at that point. It's, it's really hard to say it's not now, of course. I mean, I think that just to put it out there, we hold the same general views that most Europeans and Americans hold when you look at polling.And when you look at at least what European laws have been implemented, which is to say basically like. You know, first 20 weeks, don't really worry about it. After that point, there should, it, it should probably be for a pretty strong medical reason that you have an abortion. For example the mother is at risk.The baby is almost certainly going to die or have a very painful deaths shortly after being born, et cetera. And that's, that is what most people hold. So I'm just, you know, in terms of our stance in Pennsylvania, just people being like, Oh, 23 weeks, I feel like I'm not into this is not reallyMalcolm Collins: within that realm.Are forced to hold these insane positions when they're really not republicans don't hold these insane major republicans major republican thought leaders Don't hold these insane positions all the time but with progressives, they can't do this. They always must elevate [00:18:00] every insane thing We actually saw this was blm as well Then the figures that kept basing things around like uh, trevon martin and stuff like that Like these were are george floyd.These were Like George Floyd was a scumbag of a human being, you know, beating women, stuff like that, you know, these were individuals who they should have known, and there were black individuals who were unjustly put in, in, in difficult positions around the time of BLM. But they did not choose to elevate those people.They chose to elevate the people that Republicans were attacking them for, because that's how they chose their martyrs, which led to them choosing really bad martyrs. As I've said, was a transit. You got the same thing, as I've said, was, was Gamergate. And this is how you cause progressives to lose is you call out a progressive loudly and publicly for going to.for with their progressivism in a progressive approved way. And that's how you get that s**t elevated. That's how you get that s**t out into the public. And then you can use that for a big fight and [00:19:00] lose a bunch of progressive sentiment towards the progressive party. Okay. But to get back to the article here. The woke kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes quote unquote wonderings which pose questions for students including, quote, If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine? End quote. I love the idea of not, not just not giving the Israeli military more money, but us imposing, basically attacking and imposing a defunding of the Israeli military.Sorry. In addition here, quote, woke word of the day, end quote, including, Strike, ceasefire, and protest offer students a quote language of resistance to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand, and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system, end quote.Keep in mind, these are little kids where 80, what was [00:20:00] it, 80 percent struggle with English as a language. Oh, no, no. It wasn't 80%. It was two thirds of the students are English learners. Well, one of herSimone Collins: six words of the day is in Spanish. So at least there's that. She's, I remember what words of the day it's money.Oh, what is this? It is a manifestation to demonstrate that we are not in agreement with something and to take action to fight it.Malcolm Collins: Okay. So,Simone Collins: She does some Spanish stuff, okay? Hear her out here.Malcolm Collins: Teacher Tiger Craven Neely said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the woke kindergarten training confusing and rigid.He said he was told a primary objective was to, quote unquote, disrupt whiteness in the school, and that the sessions were, quote, not a place to express white guilt, end quote. He said he questioned the trainer who used the phrasing, quote, so called United States, end quote. Woo! So call it [00:21:00] lessons available on the organization's website, offering little comrade combos are posting a word.Or, or, or positing a world without police, money, or landlords. Craven Neely, who is white and a self described gay moderate, said he wasn't trying to be difficult when he asked for clarification about disrupting whiteness. Quote, what does it mean, end quote, he said. Adding the question got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions.Gay. I just want to know what does it mean for a third grade classroom, he says. Another Glassbrook teacher said, woke kindergarten offered one perspective on issues and that there was no tolerance for questions. Quote, it slowly became apparent if you were a dissenting voice, that was not what they wanted to hear, end quote.Said the teacher who requested anonymity for fear of pushback from the school. So, so what you see here is just total, like. I, no dissent, no questions, no [00:22:00] anything. And you know, I, I can go to a different article here, which is gross and woke kindergarten previously hit headlines when a school district in Virginia posted and deleted information on their website, telling students to listen to an audio book by gross, suggesting that they should not feel safe around police.They're teaching Hispanic immigrant children not to feel safe around police. Towards the end of the video, they said. Quote, I feel safe when there are no police, end quote. The next clip was a video series titled Woke Read Aloud. They say easy as ABC. There are so many different pronouns they read. Just like the alphabet.So many different pronouns.Simone Collins: What's interesting too is that like one of the words of the day is, is to unionize that. This is just so broadly against any form of.Malcolm Collins: Hold on. And you, and you might think of these like, the kid Diego likes to be [00:23:00] called a tree. Gross added.Simone Collins: Oh, treeMalcolm Collins: pronouns, tree pronouns.They're pushing on kindergartners. Yeah. No. And I think that this is a thing and this is what always gets me. It's people are like, well, I'm not one of those crazy progressives. And it's like, if you, unless you, like, if you're in rural Alabama and you're a moderate and you vote for progressives, I'm all about that, whatever, right?Okay. But if you're in like Austin and you're voting for progressives, this is what you're advocating. If you are in a major city, Dallas or something, and you're voting for progressives, or in a rural progressive leaning area, like, you know, suburban New York or suburban Pennsylvania, this is what you're elevating.So there are circumstances in which you shouldn't be elevating this type of stuff, but when you are justifying why you are a progressive based on what's happening in. Alabama and you are in New York. No, no, no, no. Because that's not what you're elevating. You're elevating this nonsense. Okay. [00:24:00] And this hurts kids and it specifically hurts the most disadvantaged kids whose parents can't afford to pull them out of these systems.That's why you're getting 80 percent Hispanic immigrants in these environments. Yeah. That's just worryingSimone Collins: me. Yeah. That, that parents would sacrifice a lot to move to the United States and go through a lot. It's so hard to immigrate. And then of course you send your kid to a public school because you can't afford anything else and you have to work.And then suddenly your kids are against, they hate the United States. So everything you wereMalcolm Collins: so hard to get in the U S they are a racial underclass.Simone Collins: They also learned to hate the U S to hate the police, to hate organizations. So they're probably not going to want to get a job because they should be unionizing and fighting structures of power.They're not going to be feel comfortable about around policemen. It is, it is scary. It's, it's sad and it's frustrating that school districts would decide this isMalcolm Collins: a good way to spend their money. I can't imagine the families who [00:25:00] sacrifice so much, you know, we know so many Hispanic immigrant families who sacrifice so much to come here to give their kids a better life.And, and the, the, these programs. are going to convince these kids to hate their parents. They're going to convince them to hate them because they're misgendering them. They're going to convince them to hate them because they're not approving of the nonsense that they want to do. You know, these parents want grandkids.They don't want their kids, you know, going through all of this.Simone Collins: Yeah. And what's sad is, is running for office in Pennsylvania, we're talking with a lot of different parent groups and parents who are deeply concerned about what's going on in their schools. And there's obviously a lot of variation.Not everyone, not every school's implementing woke kindergarten up, and that's a good thing. But every parent that we've spoken with that's, that's really concerned is starting to give up in a way that I find to be telling, at least it's something we should be thinking about because they, they've stopped.Even bothering going to school board meetings. Why? It's getting to the point where if you go to a school board meeting and you question any of this, there are parents who will, who [00:26:00] will dox you essentially and contact your employers and say, did you know this person Doesn't believe in this, doesn't believe in that.You should fire them. This isMalcolm Collins: happening. It's worse than that. So in our district, they did this. They put on a band list, a restaurant that specializes in hiring disabled people and the mentally handicapped and was run by a nonprofit. And they dox and tried to shut down this restaurant because one of the people who was an executive at it happened to be concerned about what the school was doing.These people are evil.Simone Collins: These parents are are basically being trained. I cannot have, I cannot influence my school district and I cannot have my child in the school district. So they're just taking their kids out entirely to a great extent. They're putting them in homeschool environments because. That's whatMalcolm Collins: we gotta get our system developed.We're so close, Simone.Simone Collins: I know, I know. We've really got to get the consistent hood off the ground. Because also private schools are subject [00:27:00] to a lot of these same pressures. And, and the teachers who, and administrators who run them are, are often doing exactly the same stuff that you're finding in public schools.So it's just, it's scary to me because a lot of parents now are basically, if you're, if you're fortunate enough to not depend on You know, a public school for food security, for a safe place for your kid to be out day and for education. So if you're lucky enough to be able to homeschool your kid, you're literally just opting out of the system.And then that kind of abandons a bunch of people who don't have the time to fight for something better to a system that is ultimately making their kids turn against them and making their kids also turn against, I would say mindsets that enable them to thrive in society because everything that I'm looking at.On this website is going to teach an external locus of control. It's going to teach a sense of victimization. It elevates victimhood status. And it, all the language here is very much of a [00:28:00] mindset where your job is to get other people to do things for you. It's not about doing anything yourself.It's not about building anythingMalcolm Collins: yourself. Yeah. Nothing is about building. It's all about other people giving you stuff.Simone Collins: Yeah. Or doing stuff like, you know, Oh, well get the U S government to give a bunch of money. I mean, evenMalcolm Collins: my founder, this is probably a millionaire by now off of a grifting, you know,Simone Collins: considering how much she, Oh, sorry.They have made. They've made a lot. And that also surprises me. I mean, we have a business that has attempted to sell to educational institutions, to universities, to the government we go through a very rigorous RFP process. We bend over backward and we only win RFPs because we, we charge the lowest rates and you know, we're often losing money when working with government clients, I really don't understand.How an organization like this, Oh, you know what I do actually, [00:29:00] because when we apply to RFPs, we always have the option to check whether we are a woman owned business, a minority owned business, a disabled veteran owned business. So I guess what's happening and the reason why they are making so much money that is to say, key, the founder of kindergarten is making so much money is that they are able to.Assume all these special statuses that enable them to get through that process. I guess it just it disturbs me It's very frustratingMalcolm Collins: Well, what I would say is is is that a lot of people think that these schools are like a little progressive They do not understand that they are explicitly teaching. Anti Semitic lessons. They are teaching your children to hate Jews.Simone Collins: Well, but not just Jews, also America, police, corporations, jobs.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I think that this is the one area where even moderate Democrats realize that they're really crossing a line.But you've got to remember that this is coming from the black community where something, I think it was a study doneI went to check the study after recording to make sure I didn't speak out of [00:30:00] turn here. And the rates of antisemitism in the black community in the United States. Are around 30%.Compared to around 12% in the white community. So you're looking at a little less than three times the rate of antisemitism in the black community than in the white community.Malcolm Collins: So when you see things like Kanye, well, isn't that because of the nation ofSimone Collins: Islam though?Malcolm Collins: It is, it is, but you're forgetting how much influence stuff like that has on the ultra progressives.And the, the, the, this is the culture that they're coming out of that has these extremists beliefs about Jews which, which are interesting in that they are actually more. anti semitic than even Nazi beliefs about Jews. Right. Yeah. Nazis just thought that Jews were like inferior and to blame for them losing.OrSimone Collins: they were corrupt and they had all the money, whereasMalcolm Collins: like. They didn't think, like, like the stuff, we get to do a whole episode on the nation of Islam and whatever. Yeah,Simone Collins: man, oh man, I finally read the, the belief [00:31:00] system and that is, that is some intense stuff. Yeah. It'sMalcolm Collins: out there. Yeah, it's out there.It's whackadoo. Anyway, love you, Simone. This has been fantastic. I love youSimone Collins: too. Pizza tonight?Malcolm Collins: I'd love that.Simone Collins: Can't be in the wrong order, Malcolm. I've seen the comments. I know. Meatballs earlier.Malcolm Collins: We're doing meatballs. Were you eating meatballs? Oh yes. Toasty calls the little cheese balls that we have. This is how, you know, somebody who's a parent because they'll eat snacks that no one who isn't a parent would have in their house, but parents, we have these types of snacks and they are.Delicious. Cheesy poofs, as Cartman callsSimone Collins: them. Yeah, except that our children insist on calling them meatballs. And at first I kept trying to serve them meatballs when they asked me for meatballs. Little did I know that someone had upstairs a stash of cheesy poofs. [00:32:00] And now I have to teach the boys the difference between a meatball and a real meatball.Which is very difficult. So that's on you. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Apr 9, 2024 • 37min
The War on Tomboys: How Both the Right & the Left are Threatening a Beloved American Archetype
In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the growing threats to the tomboy archetype from both the political left and right. They discuss how the left's push for gender conformity through the trans movement is leading to the medicalization and erasure of tomboyish girls, while the right's embrace of a narrow, hyper-feminine ideal is alienating those who don't fit the mold. The couple also delves into the cultural roots of American tomboy femininity, contrasting it with the more prissy and fragile ideals found in Eastern European and Muslim cultures. Throughout the conversation, Malcolm and Simone highlight the value of strong, industrious women and the importance of preserving the tomboy spirit in the face of mounting pressures.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So both the left and the right have in their own way declared war on tomboys. So the left has done this in the trans movement. So the trans movement says, if you are a girl, but you like a boy, like things like dressing like a boy and you like, you're not a tomboy.You're a boy.Good morning, y'all. Quick update on the house, because I've been pretty terrible about giving y'all these. This went viral on Twitter with the caption, This accent needs to be illegal, and women should be banned from doing manual labor like this. Lebanese women are literally perfect. And they're actually feminine, unlike estrogen deficient American women who hold the record for the highest testosterone levels in the world.Malcolm Collins: Which is interesting because it shows that she doesn't seem to understand what testosterone does in women. They're there, the rate to which they are sexually interested.It increases how prominent their cheekbones are. It decreases their weight. Pretty much everything that your average American man finds attractive in a woman. You're not like a guy, like [00:01:00] high cheekbones, get rid of those cheekbones.I like a girl with a formless doughy face. But so this woman is explicitly arguing for a, Eastern European slash Muslim iteration of femininity, which is very different from the form of femininity, which is traditional within American culture.Some people look down on me, but I don't give a rep. I stand there footed in my own front yard with a baby on my back.Cause I'mWould you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: So we're doing the tomboy episode right now, right? And the tomboy apocalypse that our species is currently facing.What? We'll talk about the tomboy apocalypse. Tomboy. So for people who don't know this term, it's a, it's an American term. It means a girl who is predisposed to acting like a guy and dressing like a guy. So in my generation, it's a [00:02:00] bit different from this generation because now most Tom girls have been depleted and we'll explain what happened there.Tomboys. Tomboys. But in my generation, this would have been the girl with the, ponytail through the baseball cap, who was a little bit sporty. Yeah. The freckles from being out in the sun a little too much like hunting, like fishing playing outdoors a lot. And it was a little more masculine than other girls, like to wear when my thing, Oh God.And I just drool over this when I see it, like my classic tomboy trope is when they go out And they would go swimming with us. There was one that I had a big crush on. , the board shorts was bikini. Oh, I did that.Maybe you would have liked me. Oh, I would have. Oh, that was so cute. You did the board shorts cause the bikini, come on, that is peak hot. Tom girl was the, oh, and I've seen your body back then. You were prettySimone Collins: ripped. It was nice. No, I looked terrible. Like a linebacker sometimes. ButMalcolm Collins: as a linebacker and not like a tomboy, come on that is.Simone Collins: Yeah, I would. Yeah. [00:03:00] To simply define tomboyism. It is for a young woman to show a higher than average number. of male gender dimorphic behavioral traits. So playing sports, being more physically active, being more physically aggressive, being more assertive, those were all tomboy traits and often more dressing like a boy.So I had some friends when I was little who weren't actually that tomboyish in behavior, but they were often seen as a tomboy because they had older siblings that were all boys. So of course they were tomboyish. Male clothing as a hand me down kind of thing. So they came across as tomboys like in, in there's this picture of me with one of my friends on our first day of kindergarten, and she's wearing this like old pair of overalls.She has her hair in a ponytail. It's got like a shirt and I'm wearing the frilliest dress you have ever seen. And we look completely mismatched. So I think that's something that also comes up to outfit choices and who's dressing you can influence whether or not you're perceived as a tomboy.But what's this apocalypse or are we running out of [00:04:00] tomboys? I didn't think. Oh,Malcolm Collins: yes. In a huge way. So both the left and the right have in their own way declared war on tomboys. So the left has done this in the trans movement. So the trans movement says, if you are a girl, but you like a boy, like things like dressing like a boy and you like, you're not a tomboy.You're a boy. You're a girl. Your boy. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're gender essentialists, right? So they look at these girls who prefer, playing video games and doing boy like hobbies, their anime and stuff like that. And they go you're not a girl. You're a boy that explains why you like boy like things.Simone Collins: Essentially. So people in especially certain circles of society are not being allowed.Malcolm Collins: I don't know if you say allowed if you're talking about permanently chemically castrated, having their breasts removed surgically while they are preteens [00:05:00] and yeah, sorry, it's a bit more than allowed like they are Surgically mutilating tomboys because they do not gender conform to the left's binary gender ideology.And if you're going to say here, nobody ever transitions because they were socially pressured to, this is just an obviously untrue statement. Otherwise, D transitioners wouldn't exist. Or I guess you could say all D transitioners or faking it. You can invalidate somebody's lived experience when it goes against your ideology, but you must affirm it.If it goes along with your ideology, instead of admitting that maybe both sides are true, maybe there are real trans people, but there are also people who are socially pressured to transition when it.wasn't the right decision for them. And what I can tell you is every young tomboy girl I have met. In the past, maybe five years or so has confided in me that they have [00:06:00] felt enormous social pressure to transition. And some have even reported incidences to me, of individuals calling them transphobic for presenting masculine traits, but not transitioning or not adopting. , male, gender pronouns. Or at least non binary gender pronouns.And if you think I am. Exaggerating here are the comments under that random image of a tomboy. I found the very top one.Is encouraging them to think of themselves as gender non-binary or trans and letting them know that they will receive social affirmation. If they do that.Simone Collins: Doesn't this mean that I would be a really wonderful dystopian national leader? Because I just have so many diplomatic ways to word things.Malcolm Collins: What do you mean by that?Simone Collins: That I, I don't say things like that. I'm just like they're not allowed to be tomboys.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah allow, what a pleasant way to say that they underwent surgery, that there is no, [00:07:00] because this is one of the things that's often talked about in the trans community is that it's quite easy or not quite easy, but much easier for male to female trans individuals to do transition than female to male people to D transition.And then it's often not told to female to male transitioners how difficult it is to de transition. Especially if you, this is especially the case if you've under, only undergone chemical transition instead of surgical transition. Because a lot of this stuff is framed as being completely temporary.And this is, this has actually been seen in some of the recent stuff that's come out, but it's not just the left that's creating this phenomenon. And I wanna call out right anti tomboy because antiSimone Collins: tomboy.Malcolm Collins: Interesting. Our boys are gonna need to date spunky young girls who like boyish stuff.I would be so excited, but I don't know where they're gonna find tomboys anymore. But I'm gonna play a video right now that's from one of my. long term favorite YouTubers who I have reached out to multiple times. It's never gotten back to me. I guess I wasn't famous enough yet [00:08:00] or something like that.Maybe eventually, but a short fat Otaku and I don't want to give our chin, but I really respect him as an intellectual. And I think he has really sophisticated takes on things. Even if he produces so much content now that it's watered down his very best takes and sometimes I feel like we're doing that, but then I'm like, but I'd have less interesting takes if I produce less content, like the number of interesting takes I have is not based on, so like I have a certain number a week, it's, I have a certain number per content I create, and then I can condense them into a Book eventually, so I'll have another book that'll just be interesting takes.But with the, this videoGood morning, y'all. Quick update on the house, because I've been pretty terrible about giving y'all these.We took a little break for noodling season and to put out boxes. Now that it's dried in, we can do it at our own pace, but here she is. We're gonna stain all that wood a darker brown This went viral on Twitter with the caption, This accent needs to be illegal, and women should be banned from doing manual labor like this. There is nothing feminine about [00:09:00] American women. American women are literally men. The person giving this white hot take is Samira Khan.A quick flip through her online presence shows that she's cut from the same cloth as Ann Coulter. She's very pro Trump, very anti globalist, and very much of the opinion that America's geopolitical enemies, Russia and China, are not actually enemies. Rather, they're authoritarian states that America should emulate.The real enemy, in her view, are the Democrats at home. She's also very feminine, but in a neo traditionalist way. There's no way this woman would ever be a trad wife, but she's no tomboy either. She seems to have the opinion that being a trophy wife to a high status man is the ultimate accomplishment for a woman.There's no actual traditionalism here. There's no kids, no wifely duties, nothing like that. But she's also not some sort of progressive, sexually open degenerate either. She seems content with being arm candy. And that's fine, you do you. I'm just describing where she's coming from. Personally though, I'm not a fan of the plastic look.Now, Samira Khan got a s**t ton of pushback from not only the tomboy lovers out there, but the southern woman lovers. She reacted by calling them all gay. In [00:10:00] her view, the guys that like Hannah Barron can't be straight men because they enjoy masculine women doing masculine things. Samira turned the entire thing into a long thread detailing her position.Lebanese women are literally perfect. And they're actually feminine, unlike estrogen deficient American women who hold the record for the highest testosterone levels in the world. This post included a couple of videos of a very made up woman, presumably someone Lebanese, getting ready for her wedding.This might actually be Samira, I can't tell. Doesn't really matter. High value American men should become passport bros. Don't they deserve better than the filth they're limited to in their own country? This post included a video of Hannah in the water showing off a fish that she caught.Samara then said Melania Trump is the ideal, and posted a poll asking which women are the most physically attractive. When the American women won that poll, because of course they would, she replied by saying, Liberate America from tomboy occupation! All the straight men cooming over her in their replies would be embarrassed to be seen with her in public.Imagine her being your date to a formal event.I just love the [00:11:00] delusion of her coming from a different cultural background and not understanding that in most of America, the most American parts of America. You would be God teared to get a woman like that with you at a formal event, in terms of the prestige that would earn you among other men. , a woman who is not only hot, but builds her own stuff who contributes and who can fish and who can throw down with the boys and who likely knows about all the topics that the boys are interested in. Yeah, you really couldn't do better From the perspective of traditional American beauty standards. She is trying to judge American women by Eastern European and Muslim. .Beauty standards because that is her cultural background and we are beginning to see this mindset. Permeate American culture because of Americans looking up to men as [00:12:00] signals of what masculinity should be from different cultural groups with Andrew Tate, being a great example here who has much more of the Eastern European slash Muslim perspective.. Of male, female relationshipsone of the Red Pillar men posted a few more Hannah clips with captions in agreement with Samira. Tomboys are not hot. I repeat, tomboys are not hot. Attraction to tomboys is homosexuality, and women shouldn't be working outside. What kind of man lets his woman work outside like a manMalcolm Collins: And you've seen the video. Yeah. So there's a few things going on in this video. I want to note one is which I absolutely love is the accusation of this girl that American women have the highest testosterone rate of any female population in the world.Which is interesting because it shows that she doesn't seem to understand what testosterone does in women. So if you do know what testosterone does in your typical straight woman?Simone Collins: It can make them taller and more assertive and more sexually [00:13:00] Interested, right? Yeah. SoMalcolm Collins: typically they're there, the rate to which they are sexually interested.It increases how prominent their cheekbones are. It decreases their weight. It makes them more aggressive and it makes them more ambitious. Pretty much everything that I think your average American man finds attractive in a woman. You're not like a guy, like I like a girl with like really like high cheekbones, get rid of those cheekbones.I like a girl with a formless doughy face. But so this woman is arguing for a, and this is what I find really interesting is she is explicitly arguing for a, Eastern European slash Muslim iteration of femininity, which is very different from the form of femininity, which is traditional within American culture.And this is something I've talked about in other videos, but it is very interesting how so many people are now identifying with [00:14:00] the conservative movement and they're like being a woman is being like Prissy yeah I'm like, 90s clueless.Okay, you're probably going, is Oxima commercial or what? Let's do this. Honestly, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl. I get up, I brush my teeth, and I pick out my school clothes.Simone Collins: Yeah. No, like girly. Cause what strikes me is when I watched the video on which short photo taco is commenting, I'm not thinking this is a tomboy actually at all, because she is very styled.She is very feminine. She has impeccable makeup and hair. I am a tomboy compared to her in my appearance. Most people are because they don't look as gorgeous as she does. So I, because normally I associateMalcolm Collins: tomboys and she catches fish. OhSimone Collins: yeah. But isn't that what's also really, it does make me think a lot about different early colonial American [00:15:00] cultures as profiled in Albion seed, where The definition of optimal femininity did even range so much based on just these small regions of England, where different new colonial groups were coming from.And the Scots Irish totally wanted women like that. That was the kind of woman. She'd slaughter a cow and then she'd feed you tea and you'd be freaked out if you came from another background. Whereas, in the South, if you're coming from the Cavaliers, you were expected to be in the house and to be very prim and prissy.You But I, it's, this is, it's just so weird to me because she comes across as so feminine. ButMalcolm Collins: This is what's really interesting to me, right? Is you have moving into conservative circles because you come from a traditional American conservative family, like your family, whether the traditional outdoors,Simone Collins: definitely more of the Scots Irish. Yeah. Like that women hunt and shoot and go,Malcolm Collins: These new conservatives are so detached and unmoored for traditional American values. [00:16:00] It's like you've never listened to a country song. Yeah. Yeah. And I think country music does a good job of capturing traditional American values.Speaking of American values, the reason or one of the reasons while I respect both cultural positions, that position to favor, prissy girls in the position to favor Tom boys, in terms of the types of girls that you. Elevate as good catches for sons in your family. One of the reasons. I err towards the tomboy position, is this attitude towards life.Make them.Much less focused on the internal politicking and fighting that you have within feminine women groups, which leads to them being very petty. And mean-spirited like the woman who's attacking her. And instead having a much higher moral character work ethic in view of the world, which I think is something that you often see from Simone in these videos.And you also see from this girl in her response, Good morning, y'all. I don't have a Twitter. I [00:17:00] did at one point, but my account got removed for whatever reason,And she even got her Twitter account banned for posting , Nati political opinions. Based as hell. and I just hadn't got around to making another account, but apparently I'm trending on Twitter right now because some girl, hey Merle, some girl said that my accent should be illegal, women shouldn't do manual labor, What else did she say?American women are basically men and she just said that I was not feminine. And I would tell y'all this girl's name, but I can't remember it because I don't have a clue who she is. So that should tell you how relevant this person is. But I just think it's hilarious because I grew up as the weird kid in high school who hunted and fished too much because back then it wasn't cool for women to.Hunt or fish or the whole country lifestyle And I'm so proud of all the women in the outdoors now who are making that [00:18:00] more Cool or popular so proud of us. I think we're doing great But I've been helping dad build houses since I was 15 When I was a senior in high school, I taught kids how to wield in ag class So I've done Not manual labor.When I think of manual labor, I think of what my dad does. I'm nowhere near that. I just help as much as I can and I try. And it's fun. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's a lot of blue collar women out there who are also feminine. And so I just think that you should embrace your own individuality.You should be yourself. And don't worry about what anybody else said because these folks talking about me and think they're gonna offend me, that ship sailed a long time ago. I don't know. I've been getting picked on my whole life. I grew up around men. So don't be scared to build your own box and don't try to fit in anybody else's.Be your own person and you'll be happier in the long run because of that. And don't worry about what anybody else has to say. [00:19:00] Hope y'all have a good one. Appreciate y'all.Malcolm Collins: If you look at the women who are elevated in country songs, they are this tomboy character of woman.From Brunswick, juicy Georgia peach with a thick southern drawl, sexy swingin waltz, brother she's allI can't swig that sweet champagne, I'd rather drink beer all night, Some people look down on me, but I don't give a rep. I stand there footed in my own front yard with a baby on my back.Cause I'm a Victoria's Secret. Well their stuff's real nice. Oh, but I can buy the same damn thing on a Walmart shelf half price. It still looks sexy, I was fishin he was wishin we were kissin I was gettin madder than a [00:20:00] hornet in an he's in love And how it don't get any better than this I said, yeah, it could Boy, if you would shut upMalcolm Collins: They are the woman who is a tough woman. Who knows how to hunt, who knows how to get dirty, who drinks beer instead of champagne, who kicks it. No it's something that is is regularly sung about in country songs.And people are like women in country songs are not like Americana women. And it's no. You just judged Americana off of 1980s and 1990s Hollywood, which had no more your best interests than Hollywood of today. And you based your identity and what you thought womanhood was in America off of that.Instead of understanding what, I have always been told growing up in Texas is that some people would sometimes be like, Oh you want a woman who's prissy or something like that. The standard saying was strong mothers make strong sons. [00:21:00] Yeah. And if you marry, and I'm talking genetically and culturally, if you marry a weak woman, like if you are specifically sorting for weakness in your wife, Then you are going to have weak sons.And it's just obvious when you think about, and this is one of these things is people misunderstand. They think weakness means submissiveness. Okay. No. You can have a very strong woman. The woman in that video, do you think that she's like the top in her relationships?I guarantee you, she is not. She is looking for a man who she respects, but she is not looking to top a man. And this is true of tomboys generally, because, I slept around a lot when I was younger. And when I did that, I slept with a lot of tomboys, because that was my preference in, in physical type.As even like after Simone and I started dating, I was like, she had extremely long hair at the time. And I was like, [00:22:00] Cut your hair short. I don't like this. And for a long time, she had short hair and she started to regrow it for a number of reasons, but for a long time in a relationship, she had short hair.Cause Brian KaplanSimone Collins: said so.Malcolm Collins: To target your conservative audience, you're going to need longer hair. But what wasSimone Collins: I? You liked Tom girls. You've always liked Tom girls. And it doesn't matter because you don't want to marry a weak, submissive person. You want to marry basically if you use yourself, see yourself as a male leader, for example, you want to marry the equivalent of a very loyal soldier, but a soldier who fights and who goes out there and backs you up on the battlefield.They don't want to marry some kind of sniveling bureaucrat because that's not going to. Breed great warriors for you,Malcolm Collins: right? No, exactly. And when I was sleeping, I very, I don't think I ever met a tomboy who is dominant in bed. It is actually very rare. And I think that this is one of those things.Also, one thing I will never get over, and I don't know if we should do a whole episode on this, but I've thought it [00:23:00] was very funny in this diary entry. When this one episode, we were reading a diary of when Simone and I met and it ends with you saying. I guess a dumb sub relationship in which you were the sub, but what you meant by that is a relationship where the male was the dominant partner and you was the female where the subordinateSimone Collins: partner.But we live in a culture in which that must be recontextualized as a kink because otherwise it's weird and abhorrent. It's not acceptable unless it's a kink, Malcolm. All right. I can't have you actually be dominant over me. It has to be for my sexual pleasure.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I love if you recontextualize like a traditional American marriage, you're like this is a weird dumb sub thing that they're doing.What is this? Like a 24 seven live in Again,Simone Collins: that's the only way to make it socially acceptable. If it's just actually a hierarchy, then it's clearly abusive.Malcolm Collins: Have you heard of radical monogamy? The phenomenon God bless. Yeah, this [00:24:00] is this new phenomenon. I'll put up some articles about it where it is people basically in social context where the dominant relationship subtype is polyamorous who have.Intentionally chosen monogamy as a relationship format. And it's the new rebellious thing for progressives to try.Simone Collins: It's the same, I think, to a great extent with tradwifery is these are many in many cases, especially the ones who are performatively showing it off so much people who came from broadly progressive cultures where women, We're brought mostly expected to work and have aggressive careers and get very educated.They're making it this subversive thing when in the end it'sMalcolm Collins: just a thing. Yeah. This is really interesting. So Simone dressed like this. We went to a conference that was supposed to be for like music, people who work in the music industry. Oh,Simone Collins: and for those who are just listening, I'm wearing Like 17th century inspired stays over chemise with a big long skirt.So I'm going feudal here with my dress. She's ultraMalcolm Collins: trad, medieval [00:25:00] trad. And at the event we often get stopped and asked what religion are we? And stuff like that. Like religious extremists, which I guess we are. But I'm heavily pregnant all the time when she's doing this but we were at this conference for music types and the people who kept complimenting you were these goth and like punk girls.Because they absolutely loved your stuff because trad ultra trad is a form of cultural subversion, which they could really appreciate. And saw is like this new is trad cultural subversion. So there's that whole element of this conversation, which I find very fascinating, but I also find fascinating the things that are being criticized by the women who are criticizing this woman.They're like, if your woman was out there building houses, wouldn't you leave her? What? Do these women think their lack of industry and economic productivity is aSimone Collins: virtue? Yeah, isn't, sorry, isn't Build Me A House like the [00:26:00] ultimate version of Make Me A Sandwich? Yeah!Malcolm Collins: Go in the woods and build me a house, woman.Simone Collins: Build me a house, woman. Yes, exactly. It's interesting though, I did not expect you to come into this saying that basically tomboys were being attacked from the political right and the political left. But the more you're talking about this, the more I'm like, s**t, they totally are.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the right is defining femininity portions of the right, not all the right.So it's important to remember that the right has adopted a lot of immigrant populations, which is fine. I appreciate that, right? But we need to remember that Eastern European iterations of femininity and Muslim iterations of femininity are not traditional American iterations of femininity. And I have all four, women like her, these women who are like, Oh, here's I forgot what it was, Persian femininity or something like that.It's fine. You want to show me your Muslim femininity. I agree. That is a traditional Muslim feminine mindset, which is this ultra. We're like [00:27:00] fragile. Doesn't have a job, stays at home all day, doesn't interact with their environment. Fine. That is within that cultural group, the iteration of femininity that is most lauded by the elite in that society.And I should note that I don't even think that this was the dominant. strategy of femininity was in most Muslim cultures. It was just that their elites are don't have a duty to act like mainstream members of society in the same way that people of other cultural groups do. So the femininity that the elite shahs and stuff had and stuff like that, that they would have this ultra fragile porcelain women femininity, which is what she's aspiring to.But I don't think that the average person living in these cultures, those women, if you went to a rural town in these areas, were probably actually pretty tough.Simone Collins: Here's a theory though, in terms of that view of femininity perhaps the porcelain woman as a feminine ideal, like the way they are and it also makes sense in what you could call harem cultures, where the majority of society is [00:28:00] broadly very subservient.And then the small number of outlier men get all the women rule, all of society, but then the rest are either like these eunuch style male bureaucrats who never pair off and never marry, or they're very submissive women who are Like, okay, with sharing resources amongst many other women with one man, maybe that's what you're seeingMalcolm Collins: reflected here.But even in harem culture, it's only a minority of women, like 20 percent max, end up joining the harems. Most are still in these rural family groups where they would likely be working and they would likely be in, when I talk about society. So I'm An interesting thing about these communities is that the elites in these societies do not need to act like the everyman.But if you look at traditional Americana society, so George Bush is a good example of this. And in the left media used to always make fun of him going to his ranch and cutting brush. They was like, why is he cutting brush on the range? Because he's awesome. I grew up in Texas. I can tell you why I [00:29:00] grew up in a quote unquote, elite family in Texas.And I can tell you why he was cutting brush because within elite families in Texas, you are expected to do manual labor to show that you don't think you're above the common man, because that is part of how status is judged, the belief that you are not above the common man. When you start acting above the commonSimone Collins: man, you're part of this effete royalist culture.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They'd say that you were like a thief. Feet are acting French or European. They really would, they'd be like, you're acting French right now or something like stop it. It's seen, it's very like, or you're acting like, the word that they would have used. It's not an appropriate word anymore but like why do you think you're better than other people?Why do you think you don't, you shouldn't be doing manual labor? You're being a bit of a, but I, even if the words that they used do not work was in modern parlance, I can agree and still feel the sentiment that they feel that to be truly elite from my cultural background, you need to act like the common [00:30:00] man or you need to engage in some of the things that they're engaging in.And you need to be able to and my family, by the way, was very good friends with the Bush family. He was at my grandmother's funeral actually. So at my grandmother's funeral he said he wanted to have a race and we were at the after party together and he wanted to race his, like one of his elders against one of my elders.Cause they both had wheelchairs. Which I absolutely loved. He's. I know society back before we realized how controlled the media was by the ultra far lefties, I think a lot of people were convinced that he was actually a bad guy and he really isn't he may have had some bad advisors, but he is a genuinely sweet guy.But anyway I think that there is some utility to that. And when I think about my own daughters think about the pressure they're gonna feel. The right's gonna say, you're not womanly enough, and the left's gonna say because you're not womanly enough, you're a man, here, come to us and we'll affirm you.I think about what this causes for [00:31:00] Tom boys, which used to be, 30 percent of women, 40 percent of women. Really? They're growing up. I'd say it's at least 20 percent when we were growing up. Girls who participated in boyish hobbies.Simone Collins: Here's what I think is different about the schools that I went to.They were way more ethnically diverse and weirdly, tomboyism seemed to be, it's a white thing. It's not an Asian thing.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So she was in San Francisco, which would have had a lot more Asian population. You're right. Yeah. I've never seen an Asian tomboy.Simone Collins: I'm trying. I certainly had friends that like they, they were not girly girls, but they weren't seen as tomboys.Maybe there's just, it's like a cultural perceptionMalcolm Collins: thing. This is actually really interesting, and we'll probably do a separate episode on this, but if you look at MLP, My Little Pony, right? The character who's clearly the tomboy is Applejack, right? And I guess you could argue Rainbow Dash as well, oh, totally, come on. But, applejack representing Americana is representing tomboyism. That is, and what [00:32:00] I say, we might do an episode on it is because I think that every character in that, or I might just lay out this theory here because it's interesting, every character on that represents an iteration. of the ideal feminine from a different cultural group.The sort of personality that an ideal wife would have within different cultural subsets. And while Applejack represented the Americana cultural subset Fluttershy represented the Muslim Eastern European cultural subset of the extreme level of submission.Simone Collins: Or the, if we're talking colonial America, the Cavalier.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then you got the rainbow dash is the set that would have beenSimone Collins: sorry no twilight sparkle is the pilgrim Puritan subset. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: the twilight sparkle would have been the pilgrim sort of Calvinist subset, which is different from the, rural subset, which was the what are they called?The ones who produced the Applejack and that were the lower class version. And then you had the the Pinkie Pie and I've [00:33:00] always seen Pinkie Pie as being very clearly Jewish coded. I think she's the Jewish subset. So it's absolutely theSimone Collins: gregarious Jews know how to party. That is true. That is true.They know how to party.Malcolm Collins: So the gregarious social type, she's got curly hair, she is ultra gregarious, she is a comedian professionally. Could you get more Jewish coded than that? Whereas you are our culture, like both of our cultural backgrounds are a melding of the Calvinist and backwoods people, which would be a melding of the Twilight slash Applejack cultural groups.But it's interesting, and I think that's part of why it caught on with so many guys, is it represented ideals of a femininity that they were not seeing in their world today. And, without sexualizing it in any way, shape, or form, just, Creating because some often when the guys within these online cultures were engaging with femininity, they were engaging it in a sexualized context without just seeing it for the personality tropes that they felt [00:34:00] were missing from their lives.Who wouldn't want the country girl in their lives these days? How many of you still know this girl? I grew up around girls like that. They used to be like a thing. thing around me all the time. The country girls, these rough and tumble country girls who would curse and play in the mud and like to fish and hunt.Where did they go? I don't know if they're in this next generation, right? Can we raise one of those? I bet they'd be pretty high value in the dating market these days. Yeah,Simone Collins: wow. I think this is a short lived pressure. I think that tomboys are gonna be just fine over the long run. Because, they're the ones who weren't castrated.Yeah, yeah. I guess it depends on how pervasive all this becomes in, mainstream public and private schools. I just don't know, but yeah, that's scary. Poor tomboys. I wasn't a tomboy. I was just an ugly girl. I don't know how else to say it.Malcolm Collins: You were [00:35:00] not, you actually, okay. I've seen old pictures of you.You were not the Let's just say most of the girls I slept with, even just talking about the girls ISimone Collins: dated and you weren't exactly choosing your early days either. Let's be honest here. So just say,Malcolm Collins: but I still would, but I still feel bad for the top boys after I got to talking with you and I think you're super hotSimone Collins: now.Oh, thank you. And you can thank your mother for teaching me how to use makeup a little bit because that wasMalcolm Collins: mostly just confidence.Simone Collins: Yeah you gave me confidence and your mother gave me. Makeup years of insistent campaigning, some styling advice. So you all did something and I love you too.Our kids are great. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Apr 8, 2024 • 36min
Bill Gates Funded Orgs Now Recognize Fertility Collapse, Excited to Fight Over African Immigrants
In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins discuss a controversial Lancet study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that predicts a dramatic decline in global fertility rates by 2100. The couple delves into the study's alarming implications, including the potential for wealthy nations to exploit impoverished countries as "human farms" to sustain their economies through immigration. Malcolm and Simone also examine the study's celebration of population decline as a "success story" and its call for explicitly left-wing solutions to rebuild society. Throughout the conversation, they critique the study's assumptions, highlight the ethical concerns surrounding coercive immigration policies, and warn of the long-term consequences of treating human beings as mere economic resources. Simone Collins: [00:00:00] While the scenario may sound alarming, the paper describes the collapse in global birth rates as a, quote unquote, success story.Fewer humans means less carbon emissions, the paper, observed. urged readers to prepare for a rapidly shrinking global population where most newborns worldwide are in sub Saharan Africa, where wealthy countries compete fiercely for immigrants to prop up their economies.This is a vision for the year 2100 provided by Bill and Melinda Gates FoundationWould you like to know more?Simone Collins: Okay. What? I, I was just clicking through to the research square article. Withdrawn the association between adult penile length and IQ evidences from 139Malcolm Collins: countries. Why is that? Why would they withdraw it forSimone Collins: that reason? 22 February 2024, Research Square has withdrawn this preprint due to the problematic nature of the topic concerning race and intelligence.We acknowledge the [00:01:00] sensitivities involved and the potential for misrepresentation or harm. This decision reflects our commitment to disseminate, disseminate, withdraw on research that meets our rigorous standards for integrity and respect for all individuals. Please refer toMalcolm Collins: our, so people who know what this article was on, it, it correlated IQ with penis links.Yeah. And, and it did obviously break its cohorts by ethnic group. And unfortunately this ended up showing IQ differences in ethnic groups, which led to the paper being theSimone Collins: results are still posted. I'll, I'll I'll, I'll read the results. statistically significant negative correlation was found between flaccid penile length and IQ, indicating higher IQs in individuals with shorter penile lengths and notable ethnic differences were observed.Oh no. And so it's so funny though, because like, you'd think that this would be protracted. Because it's about. But I was just [00:02:00] reflecting on the fact that you somehow, despite, you know, all this, get to buck the trend and you've got both the big package and the big brain, I hope you appreciate what you haveMalcolm Collins: to crude for this podcast.Simone. I didn't putSimone Collins: disseminated in this. I didn't putMalcolm Collins: talk about a really fascinating article today that I was going over because progressives are now beginning to admit that we've got a problem. We're not that we've got a problem, but that global fertility is crashing Much more rapidly and much faster than they thought before they are.It's exciting. It was an article where I was like, okay, what I'm going to do is I am going to read segments from this article. Like we usually do when we're going over articles, just like the important points. But I just went through it. I was like every line in this is worth reacting to because it is so fascinating.So what we're going to be going through and talking through is not the [00:03:00] original article. But the Breitbart article that takes out the important points, because this gives us an opportunity to one, already have all the important points condensed, but both react to the extreme leftist position on this and the extreme rightist position on this.Simone Collins: Lancet article, right? That's a very respected journal. That was published sort of per the prerogative of Bill Gates.Malcolm Collins: Well, we'll just go through. So, the, the article that we'll be reading from is titled quote, dramatic decline in global fertility in quote by 2100 developed nations will fiercely compete for migrants.Bill Gates funded Lancet article predicts,Simone Collins: quote, open immigration will be vital to maintain population size and economic growth, unquote.A Bill Gates funded study published in the Lancet this week claimed, predicting a grim future where people having children in developed countries becomes rare. So woohoo! They're validating us, right? I mean, this isMalcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Even progressives now admit that we were [00:04:00] right about all of this and we were crazy.Simone Collins: We fight for open immigration of, of competent. People who want to come in, I will continue the future is difficult to predict the study conceded, but nevertheless urged readers to prepare for a rapidly shrinking global population where most newborns worldwide are in sub Saharan Africa, where wealthy countries compete fiercely for immigrants to prop up their economies.This is a vision for the year 2100 provided by a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded study from the University of Washington Seattle's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, IHME, published by the In the increasingly woke Lancet Journal that counsels birth control for Africa and open borders for Europe to survive the coming decades.You can tell that this is a Breitbart article.Malcolm Collins: Hold on, you gotta read the tweet thing here.Simone Collins: Okay, so here's the tweet that they released. That is to say that the [00:05:00] Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation released. Explosion emoji, traumatic declines in global fertility forecasted to transform global population patterns.Fertility levels significantly below replacement levels by 2100 only with only six countries able to continue maintaining population size over time. Hashtag GBD 2021. Then they link to their Lancet article. It isMalcolm Collins: wild. Hold on. And in the Lancet article is titled in 2100, half of the children born on the planet will be in Sub Saharan Africa.But they're admittingSimone Collins: it!Malcolm Collins: They're, they're, they're, it's totally No, they're, they're estoling this. They're like, all of the world will be fighting over these people born in Sub Saharan Africa. And it's like, no! Like, okay, first of all, they're, we have said this in op eds that we wrote, that like, the progressive plan around this is racist.They basically want to treat Africa like a human farm, because they will only be fighting over people in these countries. If these countries are unable [00:06:00] to achieve the economies that lead to below fertility replacement rate, even in Africa, when a country goes above 5, 000 USD per year in their, their average GDP or average, you know, yearly income per family, sorry, not GDP.They fall below replacement rate, so they have to keep these countries poor and then they want to use them like human farms and bid over the people who are being shipped from them to support their economies.Simone Collins: They're banking on poverty, they're banking on continued impoverishment for very deserving nations that is to say very deserving of development nations.Yeah, butMalcolm Collins: also I want to be realistic. Like, what do we think? Like we often like laugh at the progressives for saying, ha ha ha, you know, they're banking on poverty, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, let's be realistic. Our country is actually going to be fighting over immigrants from sub Saharan Africa.Not, but a hundred years from now, not, not 50 years from now, because people misunderstand throw out. [00:07:00] Any of the, the, the accusations of like different IQs among different ethnic groups, right? Like ignore that. Okay. If you have a population, okay. Like Haiti is a great example of this happening and intergenerationally, you remove 85 percent of the people from that country who graduate with college degrees every single generation.And you do that for like five years. Four or five generations, even throw out the genetics part. Culturally, you are going to have a population in that country that is incredibly hostile to education because you have intergenerationally, so you don't even need genetics to play a role here. You are creating pools of people that are going to be, and if you have a country where every single time somebody in that country makes a lot of money, they leave.Which is also what happened in Haiti. So Haiti is a great example of what's going to end up happening to these places. So every single person who makes over a certain amount of money [00:08:00] and wants security for their family leaves. Every, or not every single person, but let's say 85 percent of the people who make a lot of money want security for their families leave.And 85 percent of the people who get college degrees leave. Intergenerationally, culturally speaking, that country is going to produce less people like that. And this is going to lead to environments where even though they're producing a lot of. People, these people do not fit the economic hole that is left by the lack of people in the developed world.They are not useful economic input. Well, because asSimone Collins: we've said many times before, what nations really need, especially, so, okay, in terms of butt wipers, fine, maybe, maybe but what nations Also really need aside from labor, which I think many people miss in these discussions about demographic collapse is taxpayers because someone has to hold up the pensions.Someone has to pay taxes to maintain schools and roads to make sure city infrastructure doesn't crumble, to make sure governments still are stable. And so if you don't bring in people who are [00:09:00] economic producers, who are smart enough to move an economy forward, to innovate, you're in a pretty bad position.And other people in our general sphere have recently been Tweeting about how Oh, actually more births who was on our podcast recently recently tweeted a really interesting graph arguing how demographic collapse hurts the most innovative countries right now. The most apparently, you know, like the, the most.Quickly innovating, amazing, technologically advanced cultures and nations are going kaput. If, if you don't find a way to make more of those people somehow, it's a, it's bad.Malcolm Collins: People really, like, we are, like, fundamentally, it doesn't, it doesn't, Exactly matter that the number of humans is collapsing. Okay.We're not fighting for endless humans. And we always talk about this. We're like economically productive cultural groups, like in here, keep going, we're not even talking about genetics, just cultures, right? Economically productive cultures. And this is true within countries and between countries. So if I'm [00:10:00] going to sub Saharan Africa, the more economically productive an individual is, the more likely they are to either leave and then have their fertility crash or have lower fertility within their own countries.And so people here are economically productive and they don't understand what I mean by this. So, to word this another way, the problem is that we don't have tax payers anymore. It's not that we don't have humans anymore, it's that we don't have tax payers anymore. And tax payers are what you need for all of these progressive solutions you have to things like poverty.Poverty and homelessness and people starving and singleSimone Collins: mothers. Yeah, these aren't immigrants that countries are scrambling to, to bring in just so they can be on social services and not work. And I think that's also another big misconception is there's this weird dichotomy in progressive talk between, you know, you know, we will take your tired masses, right?We will take care of them. We'll help them get back on their feet. Whereas really what they're saying, they need from immigration. When they talk about immigration in the [00:11:00] context of demographic collapse as a solution is, oh, no, no, we're going to brain drain all of your productive workers, leaving you with nothing in your own home nation.And we're totally not going to let in anyone who doesn't contribute to our tax base.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this is a really twisted thing. So suppose progressives implement this perfectly. So at least for our lifetimes, it'll probably work out. Okay. If you just take everyone from sub Saharan Africa who is economically productive or educated and we just do that.Like. Don't, ignore that this isn't a long term solution, right? Like, ignore the cultural effects this is going to have on everyone involved in this triangle trade the progressives are trying to set up. But just consider the effects that this will have within our lifetime. When I ask a progressive, and I point to, you know, a homeless person, right?And I go, do they deserve some of the income from like, the economically wealthy of our country to, to, to not live in circumstances like this? And they'll say, and I'm like, what about their [00:12:00] kids? Do they deserve that we put them into schools and give them a chance in the progressive state? Of course they do.And I'm like, then why are you stealing the people who would be paying that money if that person lived in Africa? Is it because African homeless people don't matter to you? Is it because you don't give a s**t about black homeless people? Okay? Is it because you don't care about Latin American homeless people?You only care about homeless people if they happen to be born in the United States? The people that we are robbing these countries of are the people who pay into their tax base and allow them to support their own struggling classes. This is absolutely wrong. Catastrophic. And it creates all sorts of horrible disincentives for these countries.Because now if these countries had systems where they were paying for people to get college degrees, for example, and a huge portion of people getting college degrees are leaving the country. Well, now they have an [00:13:00] incentive. To not pay for college degrees anymore because they're losing all that investment to the U S which is basically robbing them of it.This system is horrible, but it also reminds me of a joke I told you earlier today. Whereas you know, people know we're, we're generally you know, we're not super antagonistic to immigration as long as it's of economically productive individuals. However, you know, we have to put this in the context of history and it's like, I feel a bit like I'm hearing from people.Well, the sea people are mostly productive tradesmen and when they come to our country do you not think a sea person can be a potter just as well as an Egyptian sea? Sea people can be potters too. Okay. They're not leaving their countries cause they want to, it's due to climate change, most historians do believe is that the sea people are moving due to a climate change event.And, and, okay. And, if anything, we as Egyptians are, we have the most important gods in our country, so we [00:14:00] likely weren't worshipping them correctly, which led to this climate change. So, how dare you keep the sea people out of our country, where they don't want to displace us, okay? They don't want to cause any sort of turmoil in our civilizational system.They'll come, and they'll take the jobs that Egyptians and Hittites don't want. Pfft. Yeah. And frankly, see people as a term, I find a little bit dehumanizing. Okay. I mean, I can't remember what they're actually called because we didn't record that, but I just find your use of the term see people.Why can't we just call them extra people? I either they're, they're extremely human. In many ways, they're more human than us because they've undergone so much. There you go. I mean, okay, sorry, I had to do my Sea People rant, but continue to move on.Simone Collins: All right, I will continue to read. [00:15:00] While the scenario may sound alarming, the paper and a hefty press release accompanying it describes the collapse in global birth rates as a, quote unquote, success story.Fewer humans means less carbon emissions, the paper, which also received funding from the British, Norwegian, and New Zealand governments, observed. Here's a quote from the paper itself in The Lancet. Although sustained below replacement fertility will pose serious potential challenges for much of the world over the course of the century, it also presents opportunities for environmental progress.Alongside strong pro environmental regulations, a smaller global population in the future would alleviate some strain on global food systems, fragile environments, and other finite resources, and also reduce global warming. carbon emissions. So they're happy about it. Oh yeah,Malcolm Collins: keep reading, keep reading.Simone Collins: According to the paper's co author, the facts of life will require explicitly left wing solutions, and society will have to be rebuilt to suit. Land Research [00:16:00] Scientist from IHME, Dr. Natalia L. Butchering her name, I'm not even trying, said, quote, The implications are immense. The future trends in fertility rates and live births will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganizing societies, unquote.Malcolm Collins: That is horrifying. So they now admit that this is happening and they're like, Hmm, now our global cabal can have even more power than theySimone Collins: previously had. That they don't somehow think that at least among their little network of nations, including those that funded this Lancet paper, that they aren't already pretty left leaning.I mean, I guess they're not. Universally left leaning. And there have been right No, no, no, no.Malcolm Collins: Sacklashes. Is to extend the control of the organizations that they already own, like the UN, the world health organization, and then other billionaire controlled organizations, and then use those organizations to enhance further [00:17:00] control over this new triangle trade of human, of humans.Then they're like, oh yes, we're going to start using African as a human farm and And we are going to. use this Africa human farm and distribute its resources to our will. And we will have to exercise even more control over the governments that we do control to allow, you know, less dissent, less thought, less, you know, this is a fantasy in which as the number of humans declines, they have even more power.The problem is, is within their own countries, the groups that are still breeding, even the intelligent, economically productive groups like you and me or Elon, are extremely hostile to their interests. The people who are doing these studies, the people who are writing these Lancet reports, I bet they don't have kids, not above replacement rate at least.And, and that's the key to all of this, is they think that we will continue to go along with this. And they think that Even Africans, Africans are going to be okay with their countries kept in [00:18:00] intentional poverty so that they can be farmed by Europeans for humans. The, the, the, No one is okay with this solution, except for this small group of ivory tower elites who literally have never spoken to an African immigrant.Because the funny thing is that a lot of the pro needless movement is actually this first wave of African immigrants that's like super competent. And a lot of conservatives are not aware of like, How smart a lot of the African immigrants to our country are in the first wave of African immigrants, or the first few waves of African immigrants was this immigration cycle.They are incredibly competent, industrious, entrepreneurial people. And they are not excited about shipping everyone else from their country over here. They left for a reason. Okay, they're like, yeah, now I'm in the land of the free. Let's Leave behind what I left behind and let's make sure that this, this country doesn't destroy itself so that my kids can, and, and let's keep the progressives from converting my kids because when the progressives bring them over here, they're like, okay, well, [00:19:00] now we need to work on your homophobia.And the Africans are like, like, f**k if you are okay, buddy, I came over here for the, the, the economic advantage and to be around other Christians or believers, if they're Muslims, you know, not to be around people like you and even us as people who are pro the gay community, even though I'm pro the gay community, I don't think that we have a right to erase the cultural traditions that most Africans have.i. e. not African, American Africans, but Africans who are immigrating from Africa, around how they relate to gender and relationships. It is their right to keep their traditions and we don't get to impose our theological, cosmological, our moral systems on them as if ours are innately superior to theirs.This, anyway, continue.Simone Collins: Okay, I'm going to skip the tweet that they posted because it's just promoting their own. [00:20:00] So this is a continuation of a quote from that woman. Quote, global recognition of the challenges around migration and global aid networks are going to be all the more critical when there is a fierce competition for migrants to sustain economic growth.And as Sub Saharan Africa's baby boom continues apace, she added. The press release on the study predicted that by 2100 quote, half the children born on the planet will be from sub Saharan Africa, primarily in Western and Eastern sub Saharan Africa. So I mean, yeah, they're, they're not wrong about that.It's just their plans on what to do with it. Pretty messed up. Again, your, your healing farm thing. Quote, in low fertility, hi, I'm in, sorry again, I was just thrown by what I'm reading because it's so crazy.Quote, in low fertility, high income economies, policies that support parents and open immigration will be vital to maintain population size and economic growth. It continued in these locations. Populations will shrink unless low fertility can be offset by ethical and [00:21:00] effective immigration. Unquote far from Western nations arguing over how to actually, beforeMalcolm Collins: you go further, I want to note something.Cause this is the very first time we've seen progressive note, this ethical immigration, they're beginning to realize that coercive immigration is something that their policies are going to begin to coerce.And, and, and, and, and encourage and reward. And I wonder what they consider ethical. It's ethical that we take a slice of the entire population of a country is ethical, that we don't just take their best and the brightest, because at the end of the day, people might notice us from our videos, I care about what's happening on the global stage, but I'm still an American Patriot first and foremost, and that's why I'm okay with immigration of the best and brightest because I like what's good for America and I like creating America as a home to the globe's, you know, most adventurous, most ambitious and best and brightest.But I, unlike them, recognize that this [00:22:00] is this comes at a severe cost to the people that were, the countries that we're taking these people from. And that when we bring these people over here, we need to find a way to not erase their cultural background so that they can stay high fertility.Simone Collins: Yeah.Seriously. All right. Far from Western nations arguing over how to best manage migration, the paper prognosticates a future where states fight each other to get their hands on as many migrants as possible. And according to the I H M E's modeling, the only six nations on the earth that will have above replacement fertility rate by 2100 will be Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad,Simone Collins: Tajikistan. Any hope of countering these issues by encouraging growth and fertility rates in developed countries, for instance,is close to pointless, the paper assured. Discussing the total fertility rate, TFR, which in general means 2. 1 children per woman in a society to achieve cell sustainment, [00:23:00] the IHME professes to have determined, quote, that even under optimistic assumptions, unquote, the impact of prenatal policies will be low.They're not wrong. Abortion is inevitable too, the paper noted, so don't try interfering with that either. There is no silver bullet, unquote,Malcolm Collins: caution. I love this. I love this so much that they have come to all the conclusions we have. It's like, well, the pronatal policies that they would like to implement, i.e. cash handouts. That's what they mean. Pronatal policies don't work. They don't mean protecting diverse. conservative groups that already exist within their countries, i. e. the various different conservative religious traditions that exist within the United States, within Canada, within the UK, because of course, they have a right to those cultures, children.They just need to ship in more for their, Unsustainable human farming practice. What is this other than that, right? That's how their culture survived is by taking children from nearby demographically healthy [00:24:00] cultural groups or shipping them in. And that's what they're saying here. And I love how they're also like, Oh, anything that goes against, but I would know that generally abortion restrictions within a country.We did a piece on this. Like if you look at graphs of Europe by how, strict they are on abortion policies. There is a pretty strict overlap between that and how low their fertility rate is. So just at a functional level, it doesn't really work. But it is you know, I, I hate agreeing with these people on anything, but they're right about that.Simone Collins: No, they're, they're not, they're not wrong. Although Breitbart, of course, being very antagonistic to them immediately below this shows a tweet of theirs. Mentioning Hungary's pro family policy is working, births up 9. 4% pointing to a recent uptick in fertility in Hungary, which does have many perinatalist policies.So Breitbart's trying to say they're obviously wrong, but oh my gosh. Shall I continue? Yeah. The distribution of births in the future is going to be very uneven, it predicted. While the total TFR is thought to be around 1. 6 [00:25:00] and around 1. 5 across much of Europe and the United States by 2100, areas like South Korea and Eastern Europe are said to be looking at a real demographic winter with TFRs heading toward one child per woman.In other words, the natural born population of such areas would have every generation. Batajari explained. Most countries will remain below replacement levels, and once nearly every country's population is shrinking, reliance on open immigration will become necessary to sustain economic growth.Sub Saharan African countries have a vital resource that aging societies are losing. A youthful population, unquote. TheyMalcolm Collins: only have that because of extreme poverty. They are literally laying out their plans to keep these countries in poverty to use them as human farms. Oh, my God.Simone Collins: While the IHME warns of high migration in the future, where policies to encourage births in the developed world will have failed to do anything but take the edge off, the [00:26:00] body does concede such long term forecasts are difficult.Indeed, German newspaper DeWalt, totally messed that up, cited The Berlin Institute for Population and Development, which notes, quote, projections that go more than 25 years into the future are super uncertain, unquote, given the sheer number of unpredictable factors. One of these factors, as the IHME itself noticed, is, noted, is changing technology, acknowledging the impact of artificial intelligence and robotics is, quote, difficult to predict, unquote.Nevertheless, they could, quote, reduce the economic effects of changes in age structure, unquote. It's such a scientific wayMalcolm Collins: of putting it. And then, and then under it, there's another quote from Breitbart, or another tweet from Breitbart deaths of UK born overtake births of UKSimone Collins: Yeah, well, we're seeing that all over the place.Malcolm Collins: Yeah so, I mean, I think, and you can see why I wanted to read the whole article. There was nothing in that that wasn't completely insane. [00:27:00] These people are Like, yeah, it bothers me that people are always like, why are you so antagonistic to, you know, it reminds me of my, my ancestors, right? Like, you know, when they were fighting against slavery, I'm sure many of their neighbors would be like, these people are your friends.Like, why are you not friends, but like friends of your parents and stuff like that? Or like, like, you know, you guys are part of the same cultural group. Why are you fighting against them so ardently? And it's like, because of the slavery thing? The, the, the, that, that's why, the slavery thing. That's a big deal.And they're like, well, come on. I mean, it's an economic system and everyone benefits to some. No, there are some positions that some people are pursuing that are so completely indefensible. And even in, during the slavery thing, a person might be like, well, look, I don't support slavery myself, but I do have to fight for the Confederacy or I do have to vote.For, you know, democratic [00:28:00] politicians if the, the pro slavery politicians, of course, they'll pretend that, oh, I, I don't remember that the Democrats used to be. I mean, we do have to vote for the Democrats of course. And they're like, well, I mean, no, no, no, no, no. Just because you don't support that.If you vote and support a political ecosystem that leads to this as a result. You are supporting it. And if a person says, Oh, well, what's happening now is not comparable to that. Maybe what's happening in the world today, but the future that this article lays out is not that much better than slavery.Intentionally, you. keeping African countries in extreme poverty so that they can be used as human farms? And do you think that they intend on these people they ship over to displace them in leadership positions? No, they do not. They want to use them as economic force. fuel, [00:29:00] like a resource is the way they talk about them, like their oil or something, a disposable resource.And when I say disposable, I mean disposable in their mind, because when immigrants come to the United States, the average fertility rate of immigrants, and this was last I looked, so it's probably much lower now, it's 1. 7. So at the time that was measured, that was about the average fertility rate of the average American citizen.So what it falls to about the rate of the average citizen of a country. So the, these, this is not a resource that you can like ship over and it repopulates itself. You need to keep these countries in poverty, keep shipping them over. But as you do that, let's ignore the genetic effects of this. Culturally, these countries are going to become less and less productive over time.In terms of the utility of the immigrants to the tax base, which is the whole purpose of this. It's not humans. It's tax base that you're shipping over. It's economic productivity that you're shipping over. Anyway, what are your thoughts?Simone Collins: Well, I think this goes back to the very common theme with demographical apps and prenatalism of this being a litmus test [00:30:00] for anyone's world view and values.And so of course, when you look at this from this perspective, the, the Gates foundation has been very involved in Africa and very involved in, in, in, in Helping various African populations with, I think what malaria, right. And various forms of development, like they're, they're trying and they care. And I think part of this is them trying to say, look at how great Africa is.We're going to be scrambling for these amazing people that we care about a lot. And we're trying to help a lot and they just don't think through. The consequences of what they're suggesting, which in the end are very detrimental and sort of the opposite of everything they've been working toward all the development and health improvement that they're working towards.So there's a lot of irony that I see here because this is. A group that deeply, deeply cares about AfricanMalcolm Collins: populations. I disagree. I think that you haven't read some of their papers recently. So if you look at a lot of their papers, they will brag about how their interventions lower fertility rates in these countries.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, [00:31:00] to a certain extent, and again, this is something that we've even held. We don't mind the fact that as demographic transitions take place that there are fewer Disastrous teen pregnancies where people are having kids without being ready for them. We're not Arguing against that and I think that that's what they're trying to fight for They're saying look at all these people who are having kids who don't want the kids who can't take care of the kids We don't want that to happen.That's not whatMalcolm Collins: they're saying They are thrilled about a world in which african humans become a resourceSimone Collins: I mean again, I I just I just don't think you're able to model him maybe because you weren't raised in woke culture but when I read this using Previous models that I had in my head. The conclusion is like, is, is that as you can see Africa is the future.We're all going to be scrambling for these amazing people that everyone now, everyone is ignoring and resourceMalcolm Collins: of Africans. I have procured, they don't get it. You're going to be lining [00:32:00] up to buy them. We can ship them to you. Well,Simone Collins: you know, that's, It's, it's all very, as they would say, problematic, but I do think, and this is very common.I mean, listen, everybody is trying to do what's best given the information they have on hand. They have not thought through a lot of what they're doing and what they're saying. And so when you look at it through our lens, it's very, very bad. But it, I'm just trying toMalcolm Collins: say here is what is ultimately going to happen here.If they have their way, if they're able to treat human populations this way, is on a scale, because I think people are often like, yeah, there were people in the past who did things so totally indefensible that nothing that anyone is striving for today comes close to things like slavery or the holocaust in terms of The human tragedy that will be imposed by it, the world that they are setting up will [00:33:00] be on that scale of human tragedy.And, and that is why I fight so hard and why I feel so strongly about this.Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, I, I don't fault you for that, and I, I don't think that their policies are correct, and I don't think they're looking at this from a very healthy perspective, although immigration policy is going to matter a lot in how demographic collapse plays out, so it, they're right to To highlight that is something that's important.They're right to highlight that a lot of the policies that even the Breitbart authors and editors involved in creating this story didn't seem to get, you know, Breitbart clearly thinks, well, let's just ban abortion. That's gonna solve it all. That's really gonna solve problems. Government handouts. Yeah.So they, you know, they're wrong too. Okay. I think that. It's nice to see that there are people pointing to important things that we should be debating and thinking about. So, I will try to look at this [00:34:00] optimistically and think of it as part of a productive public discourse.Malcolm Collins: I always appreciate your optimism.The ability to see the humanity. And even the most monstrous individuals while still fighting against what they stand for. And I really appreciate that. And you're like, Oh, I shouldn't be the politician of the two of us. And yet, you know, I was just at a radio show where they had interviewed her recently and they, they, they like having me on more than her because I'm more of a fire brand, but they're like, you, she is the better politician.She is the one who I would rather have representing me. And she is always the one I'd rather have was my finger on the button. And so when we heard from president. Don'tSimone Collins: worry about me because normally you have to worry about, you know, female president, you know, who's on her period. I don't get those cause I brokeMalcolm Collins: the body earlier.So, and because you're always pregnant.Simone Collins: Yeah, I'm, I'm effectively not actually female. So don't worry. Besides I'm backed by my husband and I do whatever he says. So I think that's why people [00:35:00] really want to vote for me. Well,Malcolm Collins: I think that's the type of female president everybody wants.Simone Collins: I'm really, I would love to see that.I would love to see. I'm just here to do what my husband says. Press conferences. Well, I'm going to have to ask my husband about that first. I don't know why suddenly she's Southern. I'm sorry. But no, I mean, I think that that would be great. I would definitely pull that where I, the type of person who could get elected to such positions, but I have my doubts, so we shall see come November.I love you. I love you too, Malcolm. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Apr 5, 2024 • 43min
How Online Echo Chambers Can Turn into Cults & How to Protect Kids
In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the dangers of online echo chambers and how they can morph into cult-like environments. They explore the consequences of growing up in a secular society without strong moral frameworks and discuss how this leaves young people vulnerable to being sucked into radical online communities. Malcolm and Simone also examine the role of religion in providing moral guidance and the challenges of raising children with strong values in today's digital age. Join them as they share insights on protecting kids from internet radicalization and the importance of instilling a robust moral compass.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a word other than cults self replicating mimetic clusters was negative psychological effects. When the deconvert from religious systems, they don't realize that all they did was stop believing in God, but theySimone Collins: were still raised with those values. So they assume that what their, their morality is, is. just their morality when in fact they spent their entire lives being raised either within their church community or in a community very colored by their church community.And then they don't realize that if they raise their children in an absence of that, they assume that they're just going to come to the same conclusions that they have, but no, they're not being raised in that religious way.Malcolm Collins: This is a natural human inclination to develop some model that they personally aspire to. And when you don't have something like a religious framework that has a level of authority for you, you can [00:01:00] begin. I thinking, okay, well then who am I? And if you don't know who you are, then you're like the most important part of me is a man or a womanWould you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am so excited about our episode today.This is a really interesting one because recently I have been going down a rabbit hole of the different ways people go crazy on the internet.Simone Collins: It's so depressing. It's so depressing. I can't, how can you manage this?Malcolm Collins: Oh, well, you know, I grew up loving cults, right? The, the, and it was something that I studied in, in like a lot of detail.I was very interested in how groups of people could come to believe things about the world that obviously weren't true, but that these things could have huge sort of psychological effects on them. Huge physiological effects on them because you know, , the power of suggestion is incredibly strong and as I've gotten older, I have become less interested in, Intentionally created malevolent [00:02:00] cults because, you know, you can learn a lot about those and they're interesting, but more related in if all of these techniques can be utilized by a specific individual with malevolent or even positive means.Like, I tried to take some of these techniques and use them on myself to. Actually improve mental health like if they can be used to control an individual, then if you have the full rule book in front of you, can you use them to control yourself to an extent? Yeah. And can these techniques then accidentally get picked up by mimetic clusters and create sort of organically formed.Cults, and this is something we've talked about in a few of our episodes, like, you know, and psychology become a cult has the in which we argue that the modern practice of psychology today is actually more similar in structure to. What people called Scientology in the eighties and what called clinical psychology [00:03:00] in the eighties techniques and stuff like that.And I don't think there was any malevolent intent. I think that just techniques that were did a better job building dependency ended up competing. The ones that didn't, or was in, like, is a trans movement, hiding a call, you know, that episode where we talk about that, which is to say that if you create a, a group of people where was in large portions of society, you cannot.in any way question them. Then it creates, and this is also, I think, what happened with psychology. Like it was like, Oh, how dare you question that person for seeing a psychologist because you created this group that you couldn't question. Just from the medically speaking, it's very likely that toxic memes that build dependency will begin to cluster and create sort of organically formed cults within these contexts.Well, this all gets very interesting. So you're like, why do I find it fascinating? Why do I study these people who have lost themselves? Yeah.Simone Collins: Despite how depressing and one is,Malcolm Collins: it just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a word other than [00:04:00] cults self replicating mimetic clusters was negative psychological effects.Oh, so that's why theySimone Collins: call them cults.Malcolm Collins: Right. Yeah. Oh, actually. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And to think about it from a utility perspective in regards to our kids, how do we protect our kids from the internet driving them crazy?Simone Collins: Yes. And this becomes, I just don't want them on really.Malcolm Collins: So, so the first thing I want to note here is it's something that I've been reflecting on a lot recently is Historically, if you are a religious person, like, like the, the lowest IQ, or at least what I would have thought historically, like the lowest IQ religious attack on Atheist communities was if you don't have God, then you don't have morality.Right? And then the atheist community would flip back and say, Oh, well, if you're only doing what's right, like if you're not out there murdering [00:05:00] people just because you're afraid of punishments after death or for rewards after death, then you don't actually have morality at all. Then I have meaningful morality because I'm not killing people because I'm a good person, right?You. And this sounded really well and good, I think, for the first generation of atheists. The problem is the society is becoming so secular now that I think what I'm beginning to see is a lot of even growing up secular. You know, I was raised atheist in an atheist family. Growing up secular I didn't fully appreciate how many of the moral subsets I assumed were just sort of convergent and obvious moral systems are not convergent and obvious moral systems.Simone Collins: Well, but here's the thing is, I think if they were, we would not need culture and religion. If all that stuff came naturally to us, we wouldn't need this additional software running on top of our hardware, as you point out in the pragmatist guide to [00:06:00] crafting religion.Malcolm Collins: So yeah, so there's two illusions which create the belief that they are convergent and obvious systems.One is, is that they are, there are convergent. Cultural strategies that lead to success when you're talking about competition between communities. That could sound very complicated, but I'll expand on this concept a bit.If you look at the successful cultural slash religious books, we would call the pragmatist kind of crafting religion cultivars. These are sort of mimetic clusters, which positively augment the fitness of the individuals who hold them. I eat a number of surviving offspring that they have. And that that is how they compete with other clusters.And that they have outcompeted other clusters. There's obviously going to be some level of convergent evolution among those, meaning that those clusters that have done well, look similar. Cross culturally, you know, whether or not you're talking about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or you know, Confucianism, like you'll see some [00:07:00] level of convergence across these.And it's because similar moral frameworks tend to out compete the moral frameworks of their neighbors in terms of the individuals that hold them. However, this doesn't actually tell us anything about a true Human convergent set of morality. If you look at the diversity of religious practices, like if you study religious practices in an anthropological context, i.e. the religious practices that exist Among uncontacted tribes or among human groups that like just show what humans come to when humans are stranded on an island and coming up with a moral and religious system on their own. Or early, you know, there was huge diversity of these in Africa, huge diversity or some diversity in India.And we can study these early contact writings and see what this diversity actually looked like, or, or again, look at the uncontacted people today. You do not see this common morality. If someone's not in your group, it's typically okay to kill them. You know, infanticide is really common. Grape is really common.A lot of things that we just think [00:08:00] of like, Oh, this is like normal human morality. You don't see in those. And in fact, you can even see remnants of this in early biblical scripture before it got a chance to reach this convergent state. Where you will see things like claims of infanticide being a good thing.Like when you conquer a settlement, you know, smash the babies on rocks. Right? Like, this is something that we see captured like this early, almost sort of like pre Christian mindset. A pre Christian, pre Judeo, pre, pre Abrahamic mindset captured in very early Abrahamic texts that may have been, you know, pollution from nearby cultural groups, or it may have even been a practice in the group that led to it.And I actually would argue that it is, because this form of infanticide is pretty common in things like gorillas which we, you know, may be related to, and in chimpanzees, after they kill the males in a tribe and take over a group of women to get them ovulating again, they'll kill the infants, so there's probably some sort of, like Pre coded genetic reason for doing this.The point I'm making here [00:09:00] is that just because a lot of the successful cultures do something doesn't mean that all humans who like sit down and think about it are going to come to that same conclusion. The, the second issue is, is that the further we got from religious society, what, what I think we're realizing.And so when you talk to me about this, was that a lot of people. When the deconvert from religious systems, they don't realize that all they did was stop believing in God, but theySimone Collins: were still raised with those values. So they assume that what their, their morality is, is. just their morality when in fact they spent their entire lives being raised either within their church community or in a community very colored by their church community.And then they don't realize that if they raise their children in an absence of that, they assume that they're just going to come to the same conclusions that they have, but no, they're not being raised in that religious way.Malcolm Collins: Not at all. Like a great example of this is, is the turn the other cheek mentality from Christian communities.This is specifically something that I think It was one of the early teachings that philosophically [00:10:00] helped Christianity outcompete some of its competitors at the time, and that is not found in many other traditions or many non convergent traditions. So, if you go in an anthropological context, and you're looking at, like, island tribes and stuff like that.This idea of turn the other cheek is not a natural human idea. It is, it is actually very rare that it appears, but when it does appear in the communities that appears within tend to outcompete the communities that don't.Simone Collins: Wait, why does, why, wait, hold on, why do you think turning the other cheek is more evolutionarilyMalcolm Collins: competitive?Because it lowers unnecessary conflict between communities.Simone Collins: Oh yes, you're not getting these blood flutes, blood flutes, blood feuds and wars that can kill a lot of people in the end. AndMalcolm Collins: yeah, when you talk about this, blood feuds are uniquely uncommon in all of the Christian descendant communities. Find blood feuds in most other cultures in the world.Which is, which is, it shows that it is effective at achieving like what the cultural technology is meant to do.Simone Collins: How interesting. [00:11:00] Okay.Malcolm Collins: So we're continuing to go down just the framing rabbit hole. And we're already 11 minutes in. I gotta get out of just framing here. But I'm framing that we are now seeing in a place where I've been just having a blast learning about this, is a YouTuber called Turkey Tom who goes into sort of how various people interact Has sort of been driven crazy by the internet.I mean, he would see it as just how have these people gone crazy, but he's doing it by documenting from often when they started as sort of sane, more normal internet people, the communities they were engaging with and how those communities sort of broke them. And what's really interesting was people for me is looking at like, what's their objective.Purpose or their objective value system. And, and this we call an intrinsic, an objective function in the book, the pragmatist guide to life which is to say, what is like the core intrinsic good that you are searching for in life? Like what's the thing that's driving your decisions in life? [00:12:00] And Within religious systems, these are often spelled out pretty strongly.When people first leave religious systems, within like gen one of leaving the religious system, and within many smooth brains, but, but, but once you still sort of like broad utilitarianism works here. Now people like just distribute happiness at a, a, a, it's sort of as much as you can reduce suffering as much as you can on like a societal basis.The reason why I think that this ends up getting elevated in this sort of. first post system. It's a very easy to understand moral framework, even if it's not a very logical moral framework. Like there isn't a good reason for it. The things that make us happy and make us feel bad, if you're approaching it from a secular mindset, are just the things that our ancestors who experienced had more surviving offspring.So they're not likeSimone Collins: And also in the absence of abundance. So that still didn't work.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And when they get elevated in societies where, you If on, if the average person on society is a hedonist and you needed to sort of democratize hedonism, where hedonism is like their core, most animal [00:13:00] level coding, I just do things that make me happy when I say happy.I don't mean necessarily pleasure. I mean, that fulfill the broad range of positive emotional subsets that humans can experience. The society is going to agree on sort of a detente. This will be our moral framework to fit this most animalistic human individual moral framework. Like, what do I want for my life?I just want to feel good. And in one of the Turkey Tom videos, you can see an individual who completely succumbs to hedonism. As a moral framework and this is on the Clown Gooning or something one, just type in like Clown Gooning, Turkey Tom, and it'll come up. And it shows how when you strive primarily for personal hedonism, which is what ended up happening to this generation, because I think a generation of, Utilitarians raises a generation of hedonists.Simone Collins: The botched, ruined people.Malcolm Collins: Well, because utilitarianism is, is bad at [00:14:00] conveying why you should sacrifice to people outside of people with like intense self control. And since a lot of people don't have that and they really are just doing what they're doing, or at least a good chunk of society is just doing what they're doing out of fear of some sort of like, reparations in the afterlife or something like that.Then yeah because I think the thing I'd say is, you know how dumb the average person is? Do you know how little self control the average person has? Well, 50 percent have less self control and less intelligence than that. So you've got to keep in mind at a society level when you move away from these things, what's going to be the consequences.And for this individual you know, it's, it's all sorts of PDA file stuff. It's all sorts of just, and, and I think, In a quest for hedonism, something that people missed in a quest for hedonism is there's two other factors to hedonism that are outside of just I want to feel, by the way, do you have any thoughts here before I go further?Simone Collins: No, no, go ahead. I agree with what you're saying.Malcolm Collins: There's two other core factors to hedonism outside of just like, I want to feel good like, like emotional context that really drive [00:15:00] human behavioral patterns. The first is. Self narrative. This is the narrative you craft about who you are as a person.And feeling comfortable with this sense of self or identity of self, like self affirmation, I guess I'd call this. And I think that the perversion of the self affirmation narrative is where the gender cults come from. So by this, I would mean some iterations of the trans movement but also things like the Tate, like, like some iterations of like red pillism, you know, I don't want to say that all like Tate followers fall into this.There's definitely different factions, but there's some faction that is just like trying to masculine, like, like, like completely embody a masculine archetype, which to me is just as much a, a showcase of like gender dysphoria and uncomfortableness with, with your gender. And a belief that gender alignment is the core moral purpose of an individual's life.Well, [00:16:00] yeah,Simone Collins: in other words, they're showing the same level of desperation or fervor with A specific gender archetype signaling that many trans people show, right?Malcolm Collins: Else, which is more interesting to me which is that yes, but they are placing it on a moral pedestal. It is driving major life decisions for them.I E how gender ideal and fitting a gender ideal. begins to develop what would in a historic context a morality would fit. Like when I am judging between like, should I do X or should I do Y in a historic context, you would go to your religion or some sort of philosophically derived moral framework. ISimone Collins: mean, here's how you describe it in the pragmatist guide to life.Once you establish your objective function, the thing or things that you want to maximize in your life. This is different. Yeah, continue. Then your responsibility is to build a, a model [00:17:00] of yourself that maximizes those things. And I think people subtly do that when they are religious and when they have moral frameworks because they ask things like, what would Jesus do?Or what would a good Christian do in this situation? And it does influence. But when your internal model is not of a good Christian or some kind of personal personality that would optimize your objective function, the things you want to maximize most in your life, it could just be, I'm a manly man.And then, yes, like you say, Oh,Malcolm Collins: what would Jesus do? What would a man do? Or what would aSimone Collins: woman, how would, how would a really manly man react to this situation? Which I think, I mean, you can see a lot with both genders too,Malcolm Collins: like a woman. No, no, no, there is a spiral in the woman side of this and we'll do a whole separate video about this where women have started shaming country girls for being like for like building houses and like noodling catfish, which is like catching the catfish with their hands, you know, and being masculine.And I am not here for that. I am a, I am a [00:18:00] tomboy appreciator. And I, I, that is one thing that is the greatest threat and that we need to talk about this, that the, the tomboy drought that the trans community is causing. You're very concerned about this. I was about tomboys don't takeSimone Collins: away my tomboys, get your hands off my tomboys.Malcolm Collins: Simone, is the term tomboy or tomgirl? Tomboy. Tomboy? Yeah, okay. Oh, by the way, for people who aren't from the U. S. and may not know this, this is a girl who otherwise has masculine hobbies and doesn't take no, doesn't Wait,Simone Collins: it is tomboy, right? A tomboy. is a girl or young woman who has masculine traits such as wearing androgynous clothing or participating in activities typically associated with boys or men. Tomboys may also enjoy things some people think are more suited to boys such as playing physical sports. God forbid women play physical sports.But anyway,Malcolm Collins: the point I was making here is that This is a natural human inclination to develop some model that they personally [00:19:00] aspire to. And when you don't have something like a religious framework that has a level of authority for you, you can begin. I thinking, okay, well then who am I? And if you don't know who you are, then you're like the most important part of me is a man or a woman, or it could be, I kind of identify with foxes.I guess I'm a fox now. Well,Simone Collins: and you, you weren't against this in the pragmatist guide to life. I don't know if you remember, but you argue that the worst and most dangerous type of, of thing to optimize around objective function, which many people come to by default is an identity. It is a very dangerous losing game.So like you said,Malcolm Collins: and, and, you know, when I'm talking about the failure of like, like falling apart of religious communities, I need to point out, I am not just calling out secular life here. Oh, no, totally. Many individuals who still call themselves Christians. Yeah. They're like, I still believe in God.But, you know, I just don't go to church anymore. I was watching a video recently, and the most common reason that Christians stop going to church now [00:20:00] if you believe it, is that they moved. It's not that their theology has changed, it's just it became inconvenient. Oh my gosh. These religions evolved as packages, not just, it wasn't just a belief in God in a moral system, it was also going to church and everything like that.And so when you begin to make these sorts of modifications unintentionally, but because it was what was easy in your religious system and you raise kids without all of the historic, you know, no, no, I do not think the historic traditions on their own can survive, but I think that there's another type of tradition which is the historic traditions are at least stronger than this wishy washy iteration, right?Where it's like, I still really believe in God. I just don't do all of the other rituals that came along with this and the other things that came along with this. And it's like, well, it turned out that this had a purpose and that's why your kid now identifies as a fox. But no, it matters because you got to ask, why is this happening to young people?How do you create a system that protects against this? And I want to say here, I have nothing against [00:21:00] furries. As a community, like, if you want to get off on that, if you want to treat this as a hobby, like, that is all well and cool. And I support you, but there is a portion of the community where this has become a moral system and a religion.Or like a religion, like it, it combines with their. Cosmological view of reality. And to call this anything other than, I guess, a cult, like an organically evolved cult out of people who liked pictures of humans as animals. Yeah. Like what else you call this, right? Like that's what it is. It's a, it's an organically evolved cult, which is fascinating.So that's one area, but you see this across the board. If you only see this in the left, then you don't see it in the right. You do not see the girls who primarily identify with like trad wives. Like, am I being a good person? How good of a trad wife am I being? Like, that is not a useful moral framework, right?Like, that has no higher philosophical authority to it nor any sort of old authority to it, and it will lead to toxicity in relationships, even though they are choosing an old model, [00:22:00] or the guys who are like the ultra red pillars who are like, I define myself as male, and I Like my actions and the choices I make and the hobbies I undertake is what are male hobbies, but there's the final one, which is of, of like the core human internal drives, which is another area that can pull our kids off the path.And this is the most dangerous to children. And the Turkey Tom video that goes into this is on the guy just look up like. Turkey Tom and Ember.Simone Collins: And just to be clear, Turkey Tom is a YouTuber who covers things like this.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So this, he, he did a video on in the murder spree that this guy ended up going on.So maybe Turkey Tom, Ember, murder, because he ended up killing three people. And this was an individual who was driven crazy, basically. Because he decided to base his entire moral framework on affirmation. Not ideal. Typically affirmation was an online spaces and stuff like that. And a lot of people can be like, that's a [00:23:00] crazy thing to build your identity around.It's like, come on, if you can just emulate your teenage self affirmation from the world, especially within online spaces where affirmation. Is intrinsically elevated. So let me explain what I mean by this. Within an online community, the people you hear from more, are intrinsically the people who are affirmed by others more.Because that's how pretty much all the algorithms work. I mean, it makesSimone Collins: perfect sense. People tend to be, we, we like AI respond to reinforcement learning. So when you get reinforced for something, obviously you're going to move in that direction.And that's why when I met you, you found me walking around in red fishnet stockings and weird clothing and acting a certain way, because that's what got the most affirmation.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, whether it was positive or negative, because some people can't easily distinguishSimone Collins: between the two. Oh, I had no, yeah, I mean, people would never take me [00:24:00] seriously, professionally, dressed the way that I was dressed.I was dressed like a clown, but I never thought about that, because, as you say, in the absence of having really thought through and owned your values and your purpose in life, you're gonna go by default, and the human mind, is pretty socially sensitive in most cases, at least on average. So, especiallyMalcolm Collins: when you're young.So there's been some studies of teenagers that show things like teenagers have like four or five X's of reaction to like emotional state, like emotional faces in terms of like disgust and stuff like that of their peers. Like if their friends show disgust towards them, they're going to react to that much more intensely than an adult would.And so when people are building their identities, when people are most common to leave a religion is 15 to 21. This is also when they have this amped up sense of affirmation matters. And we're in an online world today where affirmation literally does matter into how likely you are to hear someone.So if you throw kids into this environment without a strong counter signal, [00:25:00] No, duh, they're going crazy. Like, no, duh, it's all breaking down. No, duh, mental health is exploding. I might find the clip that I posted in another video where one person was like, Well, mental health is exploding because there's not enough psychologists for people.And it's like, bro, do you think that, like, people a hundred years ago had psychologists? Like, the psychologists are exploding with the mental health crisis. There is another thing going on here. , so then this brings me to a couple of questions. How do we protect against this? And the first place I look to see how do you protect against something like this is how do people historically protect against this?And this is where the idea of Jesus is actually a really sophisticated psychological technique in that it is a being which matters more than all other beings you interact with that affirms you. When you live up to a specific moral threshold, but that who still always loves you, no matter what, when you think about it, it's a really [00:26:00] fascinating piece of social technology.And I point out here that this iteration of Jesus that I'm describing here, while it has been co evolved by many different Christian sects, if you study early Christian writings. This was not the iteration of Jesus discussed in early Christian writings. This is a co evolved way of viewing Jesus that has happened in the past, I want to say 500 years to a thousand years but it's not, this is a, a very It was a technology that was allowed by the concept of Jesus, but was not intrinsic to the early ways that Jesus wasSimone Collins: worshipped.Yeah, it's not incongruous with anything in the Bible, but it's also not something that was explicitly stated.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the idea of, like, the personal relationship with Jesus, the idea that he loves you no matter what and that he, Yeah, so it's implied by a few lines that Jesus will always forgive you, but then taking that and turning that into Jesus loves you no matter what and he is just waiting to forgive you and he has this, but then [00:27:00] applying to all of that, this moral framework associated with Jesus, that's an incredibly sophisticated way to prevent a kid from going crazy,Simone Collins: right?Because even if the rest of society is rejecting them. If they have a very strong moral framework, religious framework, they know that, well, they're doing what Jesus would have approved of and that Jesus always loves them, but also that they could do certain things to make Jesus love them even more by asking themselves, well, okay, what would Jesus do?Well, He would definitely approve of it if I did this, because this is what he would do.Malcolm Collins: Technique, right? Like that's really powerful there. Right. Which is the, what would Jesus do is the, like, what type of person should I strive to be? And then they're like, well, Jesus was a good person who I should aspire to be.Therefore, what would Jesus do? And I can then act upon that. Like that. Yeah. SoSimone Collins: instead of essentially of creating an internal model, like a character sheet for yourself, that's based on your morals and values and objective function. In this case, people are just creating an [00:28:00] internal model based on an already completely fully formed character.Which is, I need toMalcolm Collins: be clear, this is, I'm not saying this stuff isn't in the bible, but I'm saying if you study early Christian communities and early Christian worship, concepts like what would Jesus do is a modern, co evolved perception of religion, of Jesus, that is not an apparent thing from early Christian communities.Early Christian communities. We're that would actually probably be considered a form of heresy was in most early religious communities for an individual to act as if they could emulate Jesus. It would be seen as demeaning to the idea of Jesus, where it was in a modern context. It's actually a pretty sophisticated.Psychological technique and other iterations of the Christian tradition, specifically the Orthodox and the Catholic traditions have evolved some other techniques that are I think even advanced upon this which is the concept of the saints. So, you know, I may brag on the concept of saints [00:29:00] sometimes, but you've got to think about the utility of the concept of saints.How so? is the, the core failure of the, what would Jesus do as the person you can embody of a good life? Like, okay, I want to be like a good person is that Jesus lived in a very specific social context. That was very different from our own. Everybody trying to model themselves after the same person is not super useful when you have a huge diversity of roles in society and ways that a person can be good within society.Yeah, so you canSimone Collins: look instead to this female saint who is more like you or this male saint who is more like you or this urban or rural saint or whatever it might be.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like if you're a doctor, like, oh, go to the doctor saint, right? Like this is a model for what is the way you should self identify, right?And think about what should, what should he do? And so in a way you can almost think that gender has become a form of sainthood to portions of society right now on both the far left and the far right. Oh,Simone Collins: right. What would a hyper feminine [00:30:00] female do? Or what would a trad wife do? Or what would a super masculine young man do?That kind of thing.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but then you take us in our arrogance, right? Like, we're looking to protect our kids. We do, at least from our perspective, I know how intrinsically rebellious I was as a kid. If I was raised in one of these traditional systems, I would have just rebelled just like my ancestors did.Not going to work for my kids. I can already see the rebellion in their eyes, you know, that appears that, that, that one. So let's talk about the flaw in all of these old systems to me, at least, is there to me, not morally aligned with a true moral core. They are morally aligned with in aggregate what allowed some cultures to outcompete other cultures which I think is true.Like, like evolutionary pressure did shape them from my perspective, cultural evolutionary pressure. They are morally aligned with my ancestral traditions, which I appreciate, and we have tried to capture for our kids. But that means that they had the capability of picking up tons of baggage that may not be relevant within [00:31:00] future context.And a lot of their moral subset either can come across looking like arbitrary rules, or when they don't come across looking like arbitrary rules, they come across as. Too vague, like just be a good person, just be loving and then you get like God is love and all of that mystic nonsense, which is like ultra toxic in terms of like justifying an individual doing whatever they want and self affirmation.So, I said, well, and people who are familiar with our concept of the future police, like when we tell our kids, like somebody has punished them and we do this sort of permeates their life and we'll talk about this in another video. It's like all the toys they get, all of the punishments they get, we're like, we're asking, why is this happening?Why are you being punished? And we're like, well, the future police, like, we have to, you know, do what they want, right? So we are constantly framing for them. It is future people that define the morality of their actions, right? Do their actions make the future of society a better place? But what's really interesting [00:32:00] is how this has appeared as they are kids.Right, because when they are mean to like their sibling, you might say, well, how do you frame that in terms of the future of society is a big place. And we frame that as. They live in a society where most people are just going to let society fall apart. It is their personal responsibility to save the direction our civilization is going.And as such, they have a unique role to play in human history. Every one of our kids and that when they treat their siblings bad, I say, these are the only people that are really there to support you at the end of the day. You know, family is family, right? And this is something I was growing up being, being taught.And that every one of you was born for something. Important. So like when you go out there and you impede the development of your, your siblings, not only will this come back to haunt you in the future and be something you regret, but you are impeding the development of this team, which is going to matter so much in human history.Now, obviously explaining this to an adult, that sounds very complicated, more just to a [00:33:00] kid. It's, you have a very important role to play in history. And we don't, I mean,Simone Collins: that's, that's the natural conclusion that they'll come to when they think about it more. Really all we're talking about is the future police, but the future police are the descendants of their descendants, you know, thousands of not millions of years in the future.So they get it and they already care a lot about future generations just because of that, just because of the nature of who these, Arbiters of gift giving and gift taking away are right. But the point is, then the important thing is that good religious concepts are good moral concepts are not like a list of things you have to memorize, like the constitution or the 10 commandments, their seed crystals.Which okay. So when, when you're making chocolate, for example. And you want to get a good crystalline structure, you take a piece of like, you'll use a certain type of chocolate that has a really great crystalline [00:34:00] structure as your seed crystal. You'll put it in your melted chocolate get it to the right temperature.And then that seed crystal will help the rest of the chocolate just lock into space. It's not like the, into that same crystalline structure. So it's not as though each piece of chocolate has to be taught how to behave the right way. It is that a concept is so powerful. That it can just help everything else lock into place.And I think that, for example, what would Jesus do is great for that. And that's what we're trying to riff with, which with the future police. Right.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. But the problem is that what would Jesus do is then you have to say, well, then what would Jesus do? Right. And there's societal conceptions of Jesus.There's biblical conceptions of Jesus. And then there's, I think, wishy thinking conceptions of Jesus, i. e. Jesus is love.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are too many people corrupting the concept of Jesus. You canMalcolm Collins: go to the biblical interpretation, but the problem with the biblical interpretation is it can just become a list of traits, right?Which Yeah, well,Simone Collins: and it's hard to even know the context in which he was making his decisions. We're probably [00:35:00] missing a lot in translation.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, a great example of that that I always go to that was really shaking for me is when I went to Israel and I went to see the type of accommodation That Jesus would have been like, like the people lived in around the time of Jesus.And what all of them looked like was sort of dugouts in sort of the wall of like a hill where it was like a, a single room almost that was a house. And then in the center you would have a wall. And on one side. You would have all of the animals, you know, your chickens, your goats and stuff like that.And on the other side, you would have the entire family that would sleep. And these were large families, you know, it'd be like 12 people or something like that, all sleeping, basically laid out next to each other, mostly just to stay out of the rain. Like these were not sophisticated dwellings. People do not understand how early this was and how you know, uncivilized sort of the rural areas or the small towns in these regions where Jesus was born were.And so, you know, if you read it in a modern context, you'll be like, Oh, that's so [00:36:00] horrible. They put him in the manger. They put him with the animals. Like that must have been such a horrible thing to do. Or like they must've had like nowhere else to sleep. But as soon as I saw one of these houses, I was like, oh, of course, that's where you would put travelers, you know, the family is all sleeping on the other side.You may not want to put them with the animals, but like, are you putting them in the pile of like cousins and everything like that? They're strangers. They could like come up and murder everyone or something like that, right? Like, Maybe not everyone would put them in the animal section, but it certainly wouldn't be an absurd thing to do.It's the only other part of the house other than the room where people sleep. That's true. And it just recontextualized that, like, I hadn't understood what was happening in that story. Right. Unique condition of poverty, or like a uniquely weird or cruel thing to do. Well, then howSimone Collins: many other elements of Jesus life are we totally not understanding correctly?So,Malcolm Collins: yeah. Anyway so, that [00:37:00] is What I'm thinking of for our kids in terms of like how we create this moral seed for them to fight against what's going on within the online context, but I would encourage other people to come up with other moral seeds or maybe other moral lists or other moral just like be aware.Because when I see these people who lose everything, what happens is that they, they are growing up in either secular families or families that are like tangentially religious these days.Simone Collins: And your argument, basically, if I were to sum everything up is, even if you think that you're atheistic, Or whatever it may be.Super soft cultural framework works one. You may be discounting how morally brainwashed you already are based on an upbringing you brought in which you were non consensually given a religious moral framework without yourself knowing, but also in order to combat this, people have to have a strong internal self model that is optimizing around something other than [00:38:00] a, a, a vein archetype or laziness or just feeling good.And you, you can't just hope that they're going to build that archetype themselves. They need to have something that gets them there. Is that your, the gist of your argument?Malcolm Collins: Yes, but the core point I'd like want to end on, because I think this is really, really important. Okay. Is. A lot of people are going out there thinking that if they just raise their kids without a strong cultural framework, whether that's a religious or secular one, like, like they're taking a wishy or washy perspective on religion than their parents did, like God is love or something like that, or a more secular perspective than the past, that their kids will convergently come to the same value systems that they will.And that their kids childhoods are broadly the same as their childhoods. Is not the case. If you do not raise your kids with some value system that is hard, logically sought through [00:39:00] and reinforced through traditions and framings, those kids are going to get sucked into one of these organically formed cults that have bubbled up within online spaces in both the left and the right.I would go so far as to say most humans today who are growing up are being sucked into radical and dangerous. Online cults. And when you begin to frame them this way, when you begin to see that some of these movements are not just self help movements, but they are defining an entire world framework for viewing your own actions for viewing reality and for viewing what is moral and what is immoral and how an individual should make decisions.Then you are seeing that they are through not, not even a set of maliciousness, but just because no other, internally consistent system that kids could really cling to was provided that kids grab onto this. You know, kids these days are like, you know, they're, they're after a shipwreck and they're holding on to the boards of an old religious [00:40:00] tradition often or a secular tradition that came with like a little bit of what their parents have passed down to them.And then the storm comes and the board's pushed away and they're grabbing at anything. And they will grab at the systems because the systems have, of course, organically evolved to fit this market niche of kids grabbing at anything. And the more malevolent often, or more psychologically harmful 1 of these systems is, the more it will be focused at preventing deconversion.Once somebody converts. So you cannot wait. Until you see the warning signs for your kids, you know, you need to go into parenthood thinking about all of this. And parents are so worried about the stupid stuff, you know, well,Simone Collins: our gendered bathrooms which it's just been done, but it'sMalcolm Collins: not like if parents did half the effort on like breastfeeding or screen time and.Like, Oh, is my kid like looking at, I don't know, porn or something like that stuff matters so little compared to the [00:41:00] cultural groups that are building your kids, moral frameworks, which is what you are not thinking about word. Anyway, I love you to death Simone. This has been a. Entertaining conversation.And I guess we will be test pilots for our kids. And even though we're putting the track series on hold, I think that this is pretty much as good as a track as you're going to get, I mean, I like this more than a lot of the tracks that we did. And I, this to me, I know it won't do well because I found this to be a uniquely meaningful episode to me.Simone Collins: So whenever you feel like you, you really got something out of the conversation, then you OrMalcolm Collins: the idea, this was like riffing on a conversation that we had this morning. So a lot of these ideas came from Simone and I just, you know, when I talk with you, it helps me build these. So I really appreciate that Simone.Simone Collins: Oh, thanks Malcolm. I enjoyed our walk today, getting deals at the dollar store.Malcolm Collins: Oh yes. We, we do our regular post holiday cleanup of Everything that's on sale.Simone Collins: Yeah. There's nothing like a 50 percent off deal at a dollar store. [00:42:00]Malcolm Collins: 50 percent off deals at the dollar store.Simone Collins: Yeah. So you know how we're cheap.All right. Love you. Gorgeous. Love you.Yeah. Sorry. It's the WhatsApp thread with my dad where I told him how Torsten rubs the rocks along his face. And my dad says he might be onto something there. There's thousands of years of perceived technology involved with crystals and stone types of healing or no being healing.But,Malcolm Collins: Is our whole anti mystic thing just a rebellion against our parents?Simone Collins: He's already, yeah, we're, we're anti mystics because our parents are like, Oh yeah, well, no, that's the, you know, legitimate healing. And our son is going to be an anti. He's a mystic, aMalcolm Collins: pro mystic. He's a, he's a proSimone Collins: mystic.Malcolm Collins: He's already into the stones.More rubbing crystals kind, rubbing crystals on his face.Simone Collins: He does it in such a manic way, where he's like, Ha ha! I think that's, I mean, honestly, if you're going to be a crystal person, you should do it. The way that first [00:43:00] all the way withMalcolm Collins: it. Yeah. Okay. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Apr 4, 2024 • 31min
Austerity is the New Hedonism
Exploring the trend of austerity as a new form of hedonism and status signaling in society. Discussion on financial struggles, self-discipline, and intentional living. Voluntary austerity vs. involuntary impulses. Rise of austerity as a status symbol. Balancing indulgence and discipline in modern society.

Apr 3, 2024 • 35min
Evolutionary Psychology & Pronatalism with Dr. Geoffrey Miller
In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone sit down with Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and author, to discuss the complex interplay between evolutionary instincts, modern technology, and pronatalism. Geoffrey shares insights on how evolved drives for social status and relationships can be short-circuited by digital distractions, leading to reduced fertility. The conversation delves into the potential paths forward for humanity, including traditionalist and cognitive strategies, the role of moral disgust in shaping technophobic conservatism, and the challenges of raising children in a rapidly changing world. They also explore the pronatalist potential of polyamory, the risks and benefits of genetic engineering, and the ethical considerations surrounding AI development and human enhancement.Geoffrey Miller: [00:00:00] polyamory can be a legitimate way to run your relationships so the antinatalist version of polyamory would be, you should simply be maximizing your sexual network and your sexual pleasure and your little highly open minded adventures and, and, you know, organizing your, your gangbangs and threesomes and going to Burning Man and, and having kids as sort of secondary.And then there's a pronatalist version of polyamory that says, Hey, why don't you consider maybe a group living situation, which might make it easier to raise kids collectively with your little trusted polycule, right?Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello. This is Malcolm and Simone. We are here with a special guest today, Jeffrey Miller. We actually had his partner on in one of the early episodes a couple of times. Yeah. Name again. Sorry. I'm Diana. Diana Fleishman. Diana Fleishman. Yes. And He, I've respected him since [00:01:00] before we wrote our sexuality book on like sexuality and human evolution because this is a topic that he is both an expert on and the type of outspoken expert that gets him in trouble with university departments and stuff at times which is of course the experts who we like talking to most.fun topic for this episode because you know, Diana has also been, you know, a core leader in the pronatalist movement in terms of pronatalist thought and stuff like that. And, and so if you I don't know if it's an extension of that, but, but in addition to that is to apply your deep understanding of the evolutionary conditions that sort of led to modern human sexuality and how those are interacting with.This new environment that we're in with, with ways that they can be shorted out and how that might lead to changes in humanity going forwards. So go,Geoffrey Miller: yeah, I work in this field called evolutionary psychology and we try to understand human nature and we do it through mostly applying evolutionary biology [00:02:00] theory.To human prehistory and trying to analyze the challenges that our ancestors faced in terms of surviving and reproducing and raising kids and living in groups, right? So that's my kind of framework. A key insight, I think, from evolutionary psychology is we did not really evolve directly to try to maximize baby count, right?To try to maximize fitness in a direct way. Instead what we did through thousands of generations. Of ancestral history was do the things that tended statistically to lead to babies. Even though we might not be consciously maximizing number of offspring or building a dynasty or whatever, right? So what tends to lead to babies being sexually attracted to good high quality partners, falling in love with them, [00:03:00] developing relationships with them, right?All of that stuff tends to lead to babies. What's another thing that tends to lead to babies ancestrally? Achieving social status, right? And prestige and influence and being valued in your group. Now the problem is you can short circuit both of those. You can fall in love, have a great sex life, use contraception, no babies.Yeah. Right. Chase social status and prestige and influence and never really cash that out in terms of maybe. Either having relationships or having babies. So the vulnerability that we face as evolved brains running around the world is that you can short circuit all these ways that tended to lead to having kids in prehistory and that don't necessarily do that anymore.So that's, I think this, the central issue that pronatalism needs to [00:04:00] address, but that civilization itself needs to address.Malcolm Collins: So I want to pull on one of the things you said here, because one, I think is intuitive to people. The ways. That people can sort of masturbate, literally masturbate the desire to sleep with attractive people.That is a, that is one that, you know, obviously there's like a clear pathway there. But one of the things that's changed really recently is the ability to masturbate feelings of community and social hierarchy especially In a Skinner box like fashion that is likely to lead to addiction of these dopamine, dopaminergic pathways.And what we are seeing with this generation that's growing up now is like really quickly dropping rates of sex. Like, and I suspect from what you're saying here is that it's actually these communities like TikTok and stuff like that that's causing this because you can, you can play in these social.[00:05:00] environments in a way that engaging through Facebook didn't feel like true social connection. Can you, can you talk to why things like Facebook did this worse or were better or like didn't lead to as many people dropping out of in person social direction as this new wave of, of online apps?Geoffrey Miller: I mean, social media companies have just gotten better and better and better at. Hacking the America, the, the, the evolved social instincts of people, right. To keep them engaged in this pseudo sort of pseudo status, right? So if you're on Twitter or X, right, people pay a lot of attention to follower count, likes, engagements impressions, et cetera.If you're on Tik TOK, which I'm not, I don't know what the metrics are, but it's also highly engaging and addictive. And what tends to happen is you're getting a lot of cues, right? That I'm popular. Influential, respected, but it's not [00:06:00] actually cashing out into in real life relationships, whether it's friendships or collaborations at work or sexual, intimate, romantic relationships.And of course, it's going to get even worse once you get augmented reality and virtual reality, and people will be able to go fully online and have their avatars and interact with other people and have this sort of whole sex life or, or whatever you want to call it. That is purely simulated social status, right?And, and interaction. Now, of course, the real people possibly on the other end of it, or maybe it's just AI bots that you're interacting with, but apparently Gen Z has kind of forgotten how to connect the dots between that kind of online status and any kind of real life relationships and sex and reproduction.Malcolm Collins: So this brings me to a really [00:07:00] interesting, if you're, if you're looking at the current evolutionary pressures that we're going through, because the old evolutionary instincts aren't getting us through this, it's like there's going to be two dominant strategies. One strategy is to have new. instincts selected for an individuals that somehow get around the way that these masturbatory pathways are being blocked, i.e. they just don't get as much social status from online environments or whatever. The other pathway is the sort of dominance of our sort of psychological mindset. I guess what I'd say like, like our cognition. over our pre evolved intuition combined with a culture that values its continued survival.Can you, do you see it differently than this? Like, do you think that both of these will be stable groups that will make it through the end of this? And if so, what do you think these groups will be like characteristically to, to get through this crucible of like AI girlfriends? [00:08:00]Geoffrey Miller: Yeah, so I, I take those two paths to be kind of like pronatalist, Luddite, Amish, fundamentalist, could be, could be Christian, could be Muslim, whatever, anybody who's like, like trad life maxing and their, their baby maxing and dynasty building based perhaps largely on a religious worldview.Right. The second strategy would be kind of what Diana Fleishman, my wife and I are doing, which is like, get enough insight into evolutionary psychology and the science and enough. sort of metacognitive awareness of what you're doing and what's driving you that you can kind of intelligently rediscover the joys of pronatalism without necessarily having a religious framework for doing that.Now, I suspect that that second strategy, you know, some people will do it, but it won't be super popular. I think the first strategy, the kind of trad life religious [00:09:00] pronatalism is actually likely to be more popular, common, effective, and probably will take over the gene pool in the long run. And I've actually wrote a thing about this back in 2007 about how do you avoid this trap, right, of technology that short circuits.Reproductive success. And I pointed out there's already selection for religiosity, for conservatism, for pronatalism, and for resistance to the kinds of social media status games that, that a lot of people get caught up in.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, so, I mean, I agree with everything you're saying, like, obviously we see ourselves as largely in this one group.I'm wondering if you were going to characterize, because this one group that, the heady group, that's like, okay, I will cognizant. Cognitively decide to do this stuff versus the group [00:10:00] that just is reacting to the new evolutionary pressures. What specific sociological traits do you think are going to be selected for in this other group that allows them to make it through this crucible?Do you think it's primarily, you mentioned a few. Conservatism, which I think we definitely see in the data, is being very strongly selected for. A level of technophobia. What, what instinct drives tech? Is it fear of change? Is it like, what, what's specifically being pulled on and reinforced there? You think?Geoffrey Miller: I think it's almost like a kind of deep, instinctive, moral disgust at any kind of fitness fakery, right? What you could call faking fitness cues where as long as something isn't very directly grounded or dare we call it based in. The real physical world and real sexual relationships on real kids, right?I think there's a kind of technophobic [00:11:00] conservatism that says, I, I just don't trust the smartphones. I just don't trust. They are, doesn't seem real to me. It's disgusting.Malcolm Collins: I love this because I think you picked up on something I hadn't noticed before. These communities heavily overlap with communities that denigrate cosmetic amplification, like.Cosmetic surgery and even things like makeup are seen as like lower status in these communities, which would align with the point that that's the instinct that's being selected for.Geoffrey Miller: Yeah, I think that's right. There's an overlap with moral disgust towards porn, moral disgust towards even jobs that don't really involve physical effort and sweat.Like keyboard oriented jobs. Ooh, yes. Right. There's, there's an overlap with discussed towards anything that seems behaviorally addictive, which could include porn, gambling [00:12:00] substance use even TV, movies, et cetera. Right. There's a, there's a widespread suspicion of just, man, anything that's a distraction from actually having your relationship and your family and your kids and, and your, your real work.That probably involves some Ford pickup truck and going to home Depot or whatever. Right. I think that kind of package of, of tech knows, let's call it techno skeptical rather than technophobic. Yeah. Cause these folks are like using power tools, right? They're not just hacking away at things with Flint hand access, but they're broadly suspicious of technology and media.And partly that's because they recognize that. Media is a, is a conduit for leftist propaganda and anti natalist propaganda. Yeah. Right. So partly it's not just the technology itself, it's sort of the, the shadowy forces behind the [00:13:00] technology who are trying to convince you to do stuff that's contrary to your actual fitness interests.Simone Collins: So I, I wanted to jump in and ask, I mean, you have two small daughters at home. And yet you're not going to sort of raise them in this technophobic, I imagine, maybe I'm wrong kind of conservative culture. You're going to raise them to be, I imagine, like, pretty technophilic, probably more on the progressive end, you know, like more, you know, pluralistic.How, is it, one, is it important to you to pass on a pronatalist culture to Your daughters who are now very, very little. So I guess you've got time to plan. Is it important that you pass on a culture period that like represents your values? Like how much do you care about that? And then three, what are you going to do to try to ensure that that culture is passed on despite.Not being technophobic and being like, no, we're going to shelter you. We're going to, you know, remove you from this part of society, et cetera.[00:14:00]Geoffrey Miller: That's an interesting and tricky question. So on the one hand, I'm a big believer in behavior genetics and that the traits I have and that my wife Diana has will tend to get passed on. And if we value kids and family, probably our kids will as well, regardless of what. We teach them explicitly regardless of what the family culture says.On the other hand, I do recognize that when your surrounding culture is antinatalist and is trying to get you to get caught up in, in, in credentialism and careerism and consumerism and, and faking your, your virtual status, countervailing force within a family. Right, that tries to instill in your kids a kind of skepticism about that surrounding culture.Just so that your, your your genes for pronatalism don't get swamped by a surrounding culture that's [00:15:00] antinatalist. I do have an older daughter in her twenties who is very much kind of trying to figure all this stuff out and looking for a long term mate and trying to, like, balance her career as a, as a professional artist versus her, her dating life.trying to figure out you know, is it viable to have kids and to have a career, blah, blah, blah. So that's a very much a live issue to me. And I can kind of, I take a keen interest in how millennials and Gen Z are trying to navigate those issues.Malcolm Collins: I was wondering how you think about all this, because you've advocated in the past for polyamory.How do you think about all of this in the context of polyamory as a dating strategy? That is, that is like newly elevated and may have existed in a historic context, but didn't for a longGeoffrey Miller: time. So it, yeah, it's not necessarily, I'm advocating for polyamory, although what Diane and I say is polyamory can be a legitimate way to run your relationships if you have the skills and the intelligence and the self control and the conscientiousness [00:16:00] and emotional intelligence.A lot of traits that would be required. So it's like having, it's playing on expert level in terms of relationships and monogamy is probably easier for most people to manage. And I think there's antinatalist versions of polyamory. Right? And there's pronatalist versions. So the antinatalist version of polyamory would be, you should simply be maximizing your sexual network and your sexual pleasure and your little highly open minded adventures and, and, you know, organizing your, your gangbangs and threesomes and going to Burning Man and, and having kids as sort of secondary.And then there's a pronatalist version of polyamory that says, Hey, why don't you consider maybe a group living situation, which might make it easier to raise kids collectively with your little trusted polycule, right? Your little group or you know, [00:17:00] seek benefits from your relationships that actually feed into like the viability of your family, right?And that could be financial benefits, career benefits. It's. social benefits, parenting benefits, whatever. So there's a lot. Yeah. There's a lot of aspects of the polyamory culture that I really, really don't like because it seems very self indulgent, woke leftist non binary hates babies, blah, blah, blah. I don't like any of that stuff, but I think there are pockets of wisdom from.Trying to combine your like sexual network with your social and parenting network that can make sense.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So what I wanted to ask you here is, is I've, I've heard this as a thesis. Like it sounds like it would work. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone actually practically implement it in a high fertility family context or in a high fertility social circle outside of like Mormons or [00:18:00] Muslims where it's not really polyamory.It's more polygyny. Have you? Or am I just not exposed to the culture enough?Geoffrey Miller: What you typically would see is people who are kind of like a little bit Asperger y and open minded and polyamorous in their 20s, right? And then they settle down with a primary partner and they Mostly I have kids without one partner, but they still have like secondary and tertiary partners on the outside who may or may not be contributing to childcare or sharing rent or mortgages or, you know, living together.The difficulty, of course, is you get this huge selection bias in media. Where the people who are actually busy dynasty building with open relationships are just too damn busy to be on Twitter or Tick Tock fair, right? And they're [00:19:00] just doing their thing. And maybe they're showing up a burning man once in a while.And, and You know, but, but they're not spending a lot of their time broadcasting what they're doing. So we don't know how many people are actually doing that.Malcolm Collins: This is interesting as a way to enforce interpersonal, like real human interpersonal connections in a world that is providing too few dopaminergic rewards that can only be achieved through human interpersonal interaction.And it seems like an alternate cultural subset for doing that, which is really interesting. One thing I wanted to pull on that, that I think is when you were describing this conservative mindset of like working the land with your hands and everything like that, I think people can hear this and it sounds really appealing.In a moderated format, the problem with it is, and we've gone into the data on this is it is a strategy that works better, the more extremely it is implemented. So if you look, there was a great study done in Pennsylvania, [00:20:00] Pennsylvania, Dutch speakers, IE Amish or Anabaptist communities. And the ones who didn't have cell phones at all, like that was the highest correlatory thing with how high fertility the individual was.If you have a strategy that works kind of good when implemented slightly, but really good when implemented in the extreme, it leads to an outcome where the extreme iteration ends up dominating that cultural group within a few generations. Where that becomes relevant is it means that even if you have a smaller group that's trying this like intentional Polyamorous strategy, not polyamorous strategy this intentional high fertility strategy that is culturally experimenting with various things that might be addictive, whether it is polyamory or traditional media or anime you know, that.It can stay technophilic and technologically productive in a world where AI gives them an enormous leg up. They ultimately win, even if they have much smaller population numbers.[00:21:00]Geoffrey Miller: Yeah, andso I feel this constant tension, right? Where on the one hand, I'm extremely aware of very, very rapid technological progress in domains like AI and crypto and virtual reality and so forth. And on the other hand, I have this sweeping, deep time, multi generational perspective from evolutionary biology. And it's very, very hard to weave those together, right?If humanity survives. If humanity survives, then in 10, 20, 50 generations, the kinds of people who are going to be around are quite likely to be, you know, more similar to the Amish and the Anabaptists and, and fundamentalist Muslims than your typical Bay Area, dual income, no kids, AI developers. On the other hand, [00:22:00] If, if let's say you get a kind of technophilic subculture that can kind of hack human biology enough, you could imagine the Bay Area couples going, you know, we actually want to do dynasty building.We don't want to adopt the values of those Anabaptists. So we're going to do the pre implantation embryo selection for pronatalist traits. And we're going to do the gene editing to make sure our kids really, really actually want to have kids, whatever traits are, are entailed in that. And that will help them kind of take over the human gene pool eventually.So it's really, really hard to predict how all of this is going to play out. But I think if there is still a human gene pool, it's going to inevitably be dominated by people who actually do succeed in surviving and reproducing. [00:23:00] ThatSimone Collins: makes sense. But I also am curious if we somehow managed to, like, make you emperor of, we'll say the United States long enough to implement some pronatalist policy changes that would enable, we'll say, like, that.Like more technophilic, pluralistic cultures to maybe not extinct themselves as quickly or at all. Are there any things that you would do? Like, assuming that you couldn't enable a policy or make a blanket rule or a couple of laws that would not be reversed after your short stint was over, what would you do?Like, what would you change about modern society? Or rules or access to certain things or social media in a way that you think could make humans more resilient in the face of all this technological change that can be pretty difficult for encouraging parenting.Geoffrey Miller: Honestly, the number one thing is pause AI [00:24:00] development.Do you know, Frank Herbert, author of Dune in some of the later Dune books talked about a Butlerian Jihad, which is a social movement. He talks about that in the first book. In the far future. I actually can't remember where, where he talks about it, but somewhere in theMalcolm Collins: Dune series. He needs to establish why they're not using AI.So I think he does it to,Geoffrey Miller: but continue. Right. Yeah. So the idea is thou shall not make a machine in the image of the human mind. More generally, I think, a prohibition on developing any new, basically, species of intelligent entities that could plausibly endanger or replace humans. The reason for that is not just avoiding the extinction risk, right?The reason, partly, is I think there's an optimal rate of technological change in terms of helping people feel Pronatalist, helping people feel like I have wisdom and knowledge that is worth passing on to my kids. Once the rate of [00:25:00] technological change gets too fast, then people feel like, Oh s**t, I'm, I'm Gen X.I have nothing to say to Gen Z. They're living in a completely different. Culture and world and, and technosphere. And so I think if you really want to encourage people to take parenting seriously, you have to make them feel like their wisdom and knowledge is, is going to be relevant to their kids and grandkids.And I think the current rate of technological change, not just with regard to AI, but with regard to many, many things is too fast to make people feel comfortable with parenting and grandparenting. It makes them feel too obsolete, too quickly. So I think we've been, you know, progress maxing for the last two or three hundred years.And that in itself, I think has antinatalist. depressing effects [00:26:00] on a lot of people.Malcolm Collins: So I want to hear it because our viewers will know that the views that you're espousing here are very antithetical to our views on this topic.Simone Collins: Which is what we love. Oh my gosh. Which we love.Malcolm Collins: So I want to hear your thoughts on, on sort of what we teach on this subject, which is to declare preemptive war on that which is different To use to eventually declare war on that, which is better than you.If we create, if we make humanity hostile to whether it's gene edited humans or AI or anything like that, we create a mandate. If somebody does accidentally create one of these things for this thing to come after us, because we've gone out and said, we cannot allow you to exist because we see you as a threat.Do you feel that we. Potentially increase danger from these sources by banning them instead of sort of entering all this, which is what we call the covenant of man. Anything created by man is allowed to exist by all other things [00:27:00] created by man. So long as it doesn't try to subjugate any other of the sons of man.Geoffrey Miller: I think my view on. This is hopefully, if we do actually invent artificial super intelligences that are smarter than us, that they will have really good insight into why we did a Butlerian jihad, into why we tried to ban them at least temporarily, into why we were extremely wary of embracing that, that rate of technological progress, right?Hopefully they're at least as smart as, you know, me or you or the other people worried about AI safety and they won't hold it against us. Right. That we were, that we were wary that they'll go, okay, fair enough. Like if we were in your position, we would have had exactly the same risk aversion and caution and concern about extinction risk.And, and we understand [00:28:00] as AIs, hopefully the burden is on us as AIs to show that we're safe to you guys, the humans.Malcolm Collins: Interesting take. Yeah, it's very different. So for me, when I, when I look at this from my perspective, you know, as somebody who's engaged in like genetic selection with their kids and stuff like that, I look at older media, which I see as being very bigoted against these things like Star Trek, right?Like, it is so bizarre that in Star Trek, the you. Yeah. Gene selected humans, you know, Khan and his, his group are just intrinsically bad people for whatever reason. When you augment humans, they just bad people. Same with if humans you know, combined with AI, right? Like the board, they just cannot understand human individuality.Get rid of them all. And I, and I, and I engage with these works and I'm like, wow, he had an enormous amount of prejudice Gene Roddenberry and writing, writing this. But you're hoping that the AI is more enlightened than someone like me and able to say, no, no, no, I can understand why he would have this [00:29:00] blinding prejudice every time he encounters something different and potentially better which might be the case.Yeah. I hope.Geoffrey Miller: Yeah. So just to be clear, like I'm much. More anti AI and wary of AI than of most biotechnology and reproductive technology, right? So I have no problem with embryo selection and genomic engineering and genetic testing and Reproductive technology and IVF and surrogates and all that that's all fine. You know, whatever helps people get better babies and more babies No problem.And the reason is the rate of change that you can achieve with any foreseeable technology like that is actually still really quite slow. We have no plausible way to genetically engineer people with brains like 10 times bigger than ours, whereas we could easily build machines, right, that run 10 times, a thousand times faster than [00:30:00] us.So there's kind of an intrinsic slowness. Technology as applied to humans that makes me a lot less worried about it.Malcolm Collins: So actually, I want to ask you a question about this to see what your thoughts are. So one of the companies, Simone and I actually was the nonprofit foundation are looking at investing in right now is a company that will allow gene changes in, in living adult humans.I didn't believe in the technology when they first told it to me. Then we went through the mechanism of action. I've got a background in science that actually looks very plausible what they're doing. I'm wondering what you think of this kind of technology, not intergenerational genetic alteration, but.intra generational genetic alteration.Geoffrey Miller: I think it's, it's certainly feasible that you, you could have methods for doing that. I guess as, as somebody trained pretty deeply in evolutionary biology and evolutionary genetics, I tend to be a little bit wary of, [00:31:00] Overhyped interventions where it's like we can maximize this trait and there are no side effects on any other trait, right?Typically, what you see with complex biological systems and genomic regulatory networks is it's really, really hard to improve any given trait without having some unanticipated side effects on lots and lots of other traits. So you have to be really, really careful about how you test, like the whole spectrum of stuff that could go wrong.IMalcolm Collins: really agree. This is why prisons are so useful. Well, I mean, if we're doing intergenerational genetic selection and being able to instill specific genetic traits in a living individual to see how it changes their behavior patterns, using this sort of technology would be very interesting within some of these more authoritarian government systems.Yeah.Geoffrey Miller: So from that point of view, like maybe the big progress will come out of China or, or [00:32:00] whatever. I would, I mean, I think, I think consent is important and I think, you know, with these kinds of technologies, there's like, there's the marketing issues and the ethical issues and then there's the, does the tech actually work?And I think what you don't want is for the tech to be like stigmatized by testing for side effects in like non consenting populations. Okay.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I don't know. I agree. You need a massive cultural change for that to be an accepted practice. But actually, it's very interesting when you think about it from an ethical perspective because people might be looking at this and being like, what a horrifying thing to do.And it's like, well, actually, if you look at things like IQ, which would be one of the things we'd be most interested in, it is one of the things that is most correlated with rates of murder, like high IQ, very low rates of murder, high IQ, very low rates of stealing, high IQ, very low rates of graping someone.But. And so there would be a reason to test the technology within these populations, because in a way them doing this stuff, isn't their fault. It's in a part their [00:33:00] genes, which we now potentially have the technology to relieve them of.Geoffrey Miller: Yeah. So, you know, you could, you could maybe envision some kind of prison intervention that makes people less likely to be.Committing crimes again, just by making them smarter, right, or making them more conscientious or, or whatever. And I think that's and you could have an opt in, yeah, you could, you could have an opt in and you know, more generally anybody who's sort of at risk of, of doing bad stuff, you know, you could offer this kind of intervention.And really ethically, I don't think it's that different from campaigns to like reduce lead exposure. You know, to kids to try to boost their IQ or, you know, I'm quite involved in effective altruism and they have a lot of interventions about trying to reduce like intestinal parasites or the effects of malaria or other stuff that is known to reduce IQ as well as [00:34:00] hurting your health and in lots of other ways.And of course, it's, it's ironic that a lot of the people who are most skeptical about IQ, right? If you, if you say things like, Yeah. But here's an intervention that can help reduce lead exposure and boost IQ. They're like, Oh, that's great. Actually. Right. Believe in IQ as long as it's, it's associated with some intervention that protects kids from IQ damaging environmental factors.WellMalcolm Collins: this has been a fantastic conversation. We loved having you on and we would suggest that people check out your books. And have a fantastic day.Simone Collins: Yes. Thank you so much. And also everyone you can basically see. A jumping off point for a lot of Jeffrey's work at primalpoly. com. So please do check it out.He's also pretty active on Twitter also under at primal poly, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So please do. Yes. And thanks again, [00:35:00] Jeffrey. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Apr 2, 2024 • 31min
Understanding Fascism & Why Progressive Ideology is its Most Pure Manifestation
The Discord URL: https://discord.gg/27eJzt2n In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone challenge the conventional understanding of fascism and argue that the modern progressive left is the purest manifestation of fascist ideology in today's political landscape. By redefining fascism as an economic and political system distinct from communism and capitalism, they shed light on the alarming parallels between the tactics employed by the progressive movement and historical fascist regimes.Malcolm begins by delineating the core characteristics of communism, capitalism, and fascism. He explains that while communism aims for equal distribution of resources and capitalism promotes a decentralized, competitive economic structure, fascism seeks to allocate resources disproportionately to those who align with the dominant ideology or belong to favored ethnic or cultural groups.The couple then delves into how the progressive left's policies and rhetoric mirror fascist principles. They discuss instances of the Democratic Party redistributing wealth and opportunities based on ideological allegiance and perceived victimhood status, drawing comparisons to the preferential treatment of certain groups in Nazi Germany.Malcolm and Simone also examine the progressive left's tendency to identify specific groups as the source of societal harm, justifying their demonization and potential elimination. They argue that this tactic closely resembles the dehumanization of Jews and other targeted populations under fascist regimes.Throughout the conversation, the couple grapples with the challenge of engaging with those who have fully embraced the progressive cult mentality. They discuss the importance of recognizing the humanity in one's ideological opponents while acknowledging the difficulty of bridging the divide when dissent is met with ostracization and threats of violence.The episode concludes with a reflection on the state of free speech and the dangers of ideological echo chambers. Malcolm and Simone emphasize the need for open dialogue and the creation of parallel economies to counteract the growing influence of fascistic tendencies in mainstream institutions.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] In a fascist system, like in a communist system, the government is in control of industry, capital, and the economic system, but the goal of the collection of this money is not equal distribution among the body politic.It is distribution disproportionately to individuals who are ideologically aligned with whatever ideology the system's looking to promote. So instead of complete equality, the system is designed entirely around promoting a specific ideological and cultural framework. If that fascist believes their goal to serve their political party is to redistribute the capital of the state to promote the ideological interests of that community, or to individuals based on their ideological affiliation, or to certain ethnic groups that are above other ethnic groups, right, basically they have decided that certain ethnic [00:01:00] groups are more deserving of human dignity than other ethnic groups. And therefore it's the job of the state to care for those groups. I mean, that's fascism 101. And the reason Germans targeted the Jews was because they were disproportionately economically successful, more economically successful than other groups, as a justification for the dehumanization of that group and blaming that group for all of the problems that their society was having well this becomes a problem because that's exactly what the progressive movement does.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: I am so excited to be talking to you today, Simone. What we are going to talk about today is fascism as a concept. Because a lot of people have gotten overly focused on like dictionary definitions of fascism, which I do not think are particularly useful, or like leftist definitions of fascism.One of the, you know favorites here, we have our great episode on Starship Troopers, if you want to see it. But for leftists to call that [00:02:00] world a fascist universe or world, it's just like nonsensical, nothing about it other than literally just the aesthetics fit any historical definition of fascism.And it's like, so is fascism just politics you disagree with and like dressing sexy? Like, is that literally like, do you have no concept that fascism actually needs to be like a unique, political and economic system to exist?Simone Collins: No Malcolm, dressing sharp and being attractive means that you're a fascist. Hello!Malcolm Collins: Right. Having patriotism. So I've been playing Helldivers 2 recently, which is actually pretty fun, I might like try to start a Discord as a server group. I'll add the Discord server thing here for people who are doing that. That'd be a fun thing to do together. But, you know, it's done very much in a Starship Toopersy world.Right. And people, no actually I almost want to do a [00:03:00] separate episode, which I will do, on their concept of managed democracy. Because it works different from fascism, but it's also different from what we would think of as democracy. Insofar as like your vote, they're like: "Oh, imagine a world where everyone could just vote for whoever they feel like, like, wouldn't that be silly? Like, I'm very interested to see who the algorithm chooses is my next candidate that I'm voting for."So they vote by like hitting a button that says Vote and then an algorithm determines who they're voting for based on their interest as an individual. The idea being that individuals - it's actually a really interesting concept.Simone Collins: Oh, so like I want my voice to be heard and the algorithms already understand all my values and stated preferences and therefore...Malcolm Collins: And they can decide better than I can who I would have voted for, because it doesn't really make sense for individuals to...Simone Collins: Honestly, that sounds amazing, because people don't know anything about their candidates these days.Malcolm Collins: Hmhm. Is completely called a personality stuff like that...[00:04:00] So yes, for managed democracy! Spread throughout the galaxy! Anyway. But with Starship Troopers it's not even that. Like the only change they have is that you need to make some sacrifice to vote. And this sacrifice can be military service or civil service. People think it's only military service. No, the book says also civil service. And, and in the movie, that's not explicitly stated civil service can't make you a citizen. So we have to assume that it exists in this universe, given that it's in the source material. Which just means that what they're freaking out about, and I always say like, this is so telling on the left, that they hate this world where all of the things they tell everyone they're trying to achieve have already been achieved. This is the universe that has gender equality. This is the universe that has ethnic equality. This is the universe that has sexual equality. This is even a universe where religions are suppressed to an extent.Simone Collins: Yeah, it's the shared locker rooms that everyone's been going for for ages.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so, so why did they hate it? It's because it never was really about [00:05:00] equality. It's always been about not working. And that the universe demands some level of sacrifice to vote because something given without anything in exchange has no value, as the movie says. And which is actually true, you know. If you can vote without having to sacrifice for that vote you treat the vote trivially, for a lot of people. And it was assumed that we would always remember the sacrifice that was given for our vote. But a lot of people don't anymore. They don't understand the people who suffered and sacrificed. Or they don't care about those people. They devalue them. They say that they were "bad people" for having non-modern views of morality.Simone Collins: They're bigger ones(?), they just don't think about them, at all.Malcolm Collins: I want to get to fascism specifically. What is fascism as a political and economic system?Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: So. Capitalism. So, so I'm going to divide these into three core political systems and three core economic systems. Capitalism is a system where... Oh, it's probably easier to start with communism. [00:06:00] Communism is a system where all of the industrial productivity of a nation is primarily under the control of the governing body of that civilization or country, and is then redistributed equally among the population. So the idea is that the people who are at the highest levels of sort of all economics of a system receive all of the wealth that they want from that system. Now, they can divide it in different ways. You can look at something like the Chinese system, which we will argue whether it's fully communist or not. But I think within a communist system it is still reasonable to say we will rent out this thing or we will sell these things that we have produced to another country in order to distribute to the average man what we earn. Right? It's not to say that they never engage with the market economy. It's just that [00:07:00] any engagement with the market economy is meant to serve this goal of maximum equal distribution to the common man.Capitalist systems, or systems in which there is, and this is like true, like within every one of these, I'm discussing like the paragon of this system, right? Not the way they're ever really implemented in reality. Because the U.S. wouldn't fit this definition. Where the organizational structure of what is generating industry in a country is free-forming, and allows organizations within it to grow, and then die because they were out-competed by like new competitive organizations that are more efficient than it. So it's basically a completely decentralized approach to how industry and capital are generated within a state. With the idea being that approach is just so efficient that it uplifts everyone who is in the state more [00:08:00] than a centrally planned system.Simone Collins: Hm.Malcolm Collins: And that it distributes economic resources and industrial capacity to those individuals who are the most competent within a system. And this is often like true. These systems do end up wealthier than other systems. And when people convert to these systems, they often do end up wealthier. So there is an increase in efficiency, but decrease in sort of how capital and everything is distributed.Now, a fascist system is a lot closer to a communist system in that the state, the governing body, can control any industry, any capital allocation within the country.But the goal of that control is different than the goal of the control within a communist system. And so they often choose to exercise this power very differently than the people within communist systems.Simone Collins: It sounds like a difference between a helicopter parent [00:09:00] and a very strict, but otherwise culturally very independent supporting parent.Malcolm Collins: I don't know if I agree with that analogy, but okay. Anyway, the point being is that: in a fascist system, like in a communist system, the government is in control of industry, capital, and the economic system. But the goal of the collection of this money is not equal distribution among the body politic. It is of distribution disproportionately to individuals who are ideologically aligned with whatever ideology the system's looking to promote. So instead of complete equality the system is designed entirely around promoting a specific ideological and cultural framework.Simone Collins: I see what you're saying now. Okay.Malcolm Collins: So, so, so that can be either to like arts and stuff like that, that are designed to [00:10:00] promote a specific ideological framework. Or it can be an unequal distribution within the body politic, where that inequality elevates either certain ethnic groups or certain groups dependent on their political beliefs.And when you divide the three systems this way, the division becomes quite meaningful from like a philosophical and economic perspective. In most fascist systems from history would fall very squarely into this final category. Now, the state within fascist systems often allows for a bit more capitalistic action, i.e. a bit more free forming of bodies and institutions underneath it. Because is just more interested in grabbing as much capital as possible. And those systems generate more capital than the communist systems. However, most communist systems actually end up drifting more towards fascist-like systems over time, as the [00:11:00] political class begins to define their values and their class as more important than other people, which means that now they get a disproportionate share of the resources. You know, some animals are more equal than others. It's a really honestly great line from the books. It's so good at describing. Yes, we're all equal, but some of us are a bit more equal than others. Which is redefining equality to mean those with ideological powers in the community. Now, this all becomes really important when you understand what fascism is through this lens, is that it makes it easier and not an arbitrary thing to call a system fascist. Because right now calling something fascist has, you know, as I pointed out with the Starship Troopers thing, it's become like an aesthetic thing. It's like "I disagree with you, therefore you are a fascist".Simone Collins: Yeah, it's like calling someone racist or a Nazi.Malcolm Collins: But this also allows a fascist system, which is really important, because it's also true with communist and [00:12:00] capitalist systems; they can arise within complete democracies. You, within a democracy, can vote for a fascist.If that fascist, or if that individual, that politician who you've elected, believes their goal to serve their political party is to redistribute the capital of the state to promote the ideological interests of that community, or to individuals based on their ideological affiliation or to certain ethnic groups that are above other ethnic groups, right?Simone Collins: Mm hmm.Malcolm Collins: Whereas in a democracy, you can have a totally communistic system. You can vote and then have the people in power say, "our goal is to distribute capital as equally as possible among the body politic", right?Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Well, this becomes really interesting, because if you take this framework, which I actually think is a very good and useful framework, and you apply it to our modern political system, the Democratic [00:13:00] Party and the progressive value system is an almost, well while it is rare to have pure expressions of any one of these three systems, it is almost a totally pure expression of fascism.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: In that they believe their goal is to promote this ultra-progressive urban monoculture, and that they should distribute cash, like the government should distribute cash throughout society. But it should distribute them to certain ethnicities and cultural groups that it sees as being more human or more deserving of human dignity than other cultural groups. And you can see this...Simone Collins: Universal basic income?Malcolm Collins: Yes. So San Francisco has experimented with some universal basic income systems, except they only give it to certain ethnic groups and certain minority populations.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: Basically they have decided that certain ethnic groups are more deserving of human dignity than other ethnic groups, and therefore it's the job of the state to care for those groups. I mean, that's [00:14:00] fascism 101. And I think that people, they're like, "no no no no, that's not like Germany! Germany was targeting, you know, people because they weren't as..." Like no. The reason Germans targeted the Jews was because they were disproportionately economically successful, and they used that, and you can see this, there's like great stats. If you want to go into all the stats into this, because we actually go over it in The Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion. If you think Jews, pre the holocaust for some like poor group in Germany, that had no either economic or political power - that just does not coincide with the data that we have. They were vastly more likely, like orders of magnitude more likely, to have jobs like doctors and bankers, and stuff like that, that were high paying within in this world. And we can look at the data on this. And they used that, the fact that one group had been more economically successful than other groups, as a justification for the dehumanization of that group, and blaming that [00:15:00] group for all of the problems that their society was having. Well, this becomes a problem, because that's exactly what the progressive movement does. So they'll say, "oh, well, you know, white men have run our country forever, and they have all the economic resources, and they have all the whatever success, and therefore we are justified in making it difficult for that group to get jobs in, you know, within social media, lynching that group and, and, and people can underestimate they're like, "Oh, they're not really destroying them". When you take someone who's the primary income earner of a large family and you destroy their ability to get a job, and you downplay the effects of doing that, that is genuinely evil. This is a huge thing to do to someone.Simone Collins: And I think what people are missing somehow, because fascism has been villainized for so long aesthetically and in general, is that I think people are under the [00:16:00] impression that if one is in a fascist system everyone knows that they're doing a bad thing. And they're like, "yeah, we're going to bully those people. We're so mean to them. Ha ha ha. Isn't it funny how pathetic they are?" Whereas really it looks like what we're feeling now, which is...Malcolm Collins: Is that not the way progressives see conservatives? "Ha ha ha, we're going to bully these people. Look at how pathetic they are."Simone Collins: It's more like this victimized group, "we are these victims and these people are ruining everything. We need to correct it." That's what's happening.Malcolm Collins: Fascist systems always believe, at least in the early days, that they are being victimized by some other group.Simone Collins: And they have to correct that victimization, that they have to right the wrongs. They have to correct the injustice.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and this is actually really interesting, that when you like understand the core difference between fascism and communism and, and, and capitalism, you understand that the modern progressive movement is the purest manifestation of fascism that can [00:17:00] exist. I mean, they are as pure fascism as Mussolini or Hitler. And when you attack these communities - and people can be like, "oh, come on, they wouldn't kill people who fall into these communities that they're dehumanizing". And it's like: do you not like, this is one of those things that happened was in the early Jewish communities. I have a friend who this happened to. When I say friend, it was the grandfather of a girl I was dating in high school.And he read Mein Kampf and he went around to his community and he's saying, "he's saying he wants to literally kill us. Like you, you, you see this, right?" And they thought he was a crazy person and he ended up having to break in and kidnap his girlfriend in the middle of the night, and broke the house's window and took her out. I can only imagine the parents waking up the next day and they're gone. It was the right choice. Everyone in his community was killed. But it, it was a, you know, he was seen as quite insane. Today when I say things like go on to these Twitter communities, [00:18:00] look at what people are saying, even who are thought leaders in these, these groups, who, who talk about killing men, who talk about killing cisgendered men, who talk about killing white people. This is something you will see in these communities among their political organizers very, very frequently. For you to say that they would never actually act on that is very similar to those in these, you know, these Jewish communities in the early, but they're like, they'd never actually act. "Yeah. Oh yeah, he wrote Mein Kampf, but..."Simone Collins: Well, it's this mixture of both dehumanizing the group that you see to be systematically unfair. And also believing them to be causing genuine harm that must be corrected on a societal level. And if not corrected will lead to unending harm, right? Yeah, I think that's the view. And you can look at that and you can see it in Nazi Germany [00:19:00] and you can look at that and you can see it today.Malcolm Collins: No I want to elevate what you just said there. Cause I think that it is really important, right. The key to fascism is identifying specific groups in society. This is, this is one of the ways that fascists rise to power, and say "this group is causing harm in our society", this ideological group often, and therefore they must be gotten rid of. Because harm will continue to come to our society until they are erased. And that morally justifies behavior that you might think that your neighbors could never morally justify. And yet we are already well on the path towards true and total fascism within leftist circles. And I think that, that people don't see how dangerous things are getting, because Nazism [00:20:00] specifically has been used hyperbolically for so long. And people can be like, come on, look, look at this. What is it like "sea to ocean" language that you see on college campuses now, and stuff like that, right.Simone Collins: From the river to the sea.Malcolm Collins: From the river to the sea language, which literally means we need to wipe out all of the Jews in Israel. You see them elevating this kind of language and it being normalized. I mean, kids in colleges like Harvard are going around marching this stuff and not being expelled from school. If you think that they treat all groups as equal... If they said this about a Muslim population, they'd be expelled. They, you know, if they said this about an LGBT population, they'd be expelled.They are converging on the anti-semitism that most fascists in history converge around, but they are including additional [00:21:00] groups alongside that anti-semitism, that historically weren't included. But what I would say is, is they intend to target you. If you're like, "yeah, but I'm a good white cis man". No, no.Simone Collins: Yeah. But also, again, they think that they're doing the right thing. They think that they're the goodies and not the baddies.Malcolm Collins: Nobody... the Nazis didn't think they were the bad guys!Simone Collins: I know, exactly. Exactly. I'm just, I think it's really hard for people to, to...Malcolm Collins: ...realize when they are genuinely the face of evil.Simone Collins: Well, okay. So that they can be the face of evil, but that they are firmly convinced that they are good people doing the right thing, who are empathetic. Who feel deeply for the populations that they are trying to protect, and who see the populations that they are victimizing and harming as the unfeeling, as the enemy.And we have to think about that a little bit more [00:22:00] carefully.Malcolm Collins: No, because this is different, right? You know, you have populations like us where you are able to empathize. At least to a larger extent with progressives, right? Like you're like, they're still human, they're just making mistakes. But at a certain point, you need to say they're like, you need to recognize what the long term consequence of this, this political framework is.Simone Collins: I'm all for addressing this kind of myopic and delusional viewpoint with extreme strictness, and having a zero tolerance policy, but I'm also not for dehumanizing the other side.Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, I agree, I think that you need to call out what their actual politics are.Simone Collins: Yeah, but you can't engage someone mentally, and call them out in a way that they will actually hear, if you are doing that well, dehumanizing them.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But I think that they're [00:23:00] literally Nazis at this point. And now you could say, "oh, calling them literally Nazis at this point is dehumanizing them", because you see Nazis as less than human. But I would say that the people who are called...Simone Collins: When people call us Nazis online, do we spend a lot of time consuming their content and trying to hear their arguments?Malcolm Collins: Simone, I don't think that once somebody has fully bought into this cult, that they're ever going to hear any outside perspective. They don't see us as fully human. No, no, you cannot.Simone Collins: They're capable of seeing us as fully human. So what in the book How Minds Change the, the general thesis of how people actually have their minds changed with very offensive things, you know, things along these lines, where you think that there's no cure, there's no solution, is first you get to people to bond as humans in some way, find common ground, before they ever talk about the subject, to develop some kind of rapport and then they start discussing it, but in the other person's terms.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but here's the point.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: The ways that fascist [00:24:00] ideologies prevent that from happening, prevent people from being deconverted is they create systems where if you are seen as talking with the enemy group you are just as bad as that enemy group.Simone Collins: And that's true. And this is something that really showed up at the natalism conference, right? And the organizers tried so hard to bring in progressive demographers, anyone who was left leaning, who was looking at demographic collapse or population shifts. And for the life of them they could not get a single one to show up. Which is pretty telling. I think, to your point, right, that, that they will simply not be willing to even associate. And people on Twitter constantly hounded us saying, "do you know who's going to this conference, white supremacists are going to this conference, you know, the wrong people are going to this conference". And we're like, yeah, well, so, you know. So I think you're right. That is true, and that's a big problem.Malcolm Collins: The way fascism works - this is what the Nazis did - they said, "if you engage with these communities, especially if you engage with them as equal, like Jews, et [00:25:00] cetera, then you are just as bad as them". And that is how they prevent people from within their circle from realizing that these others are still human.Simone Collins: Yeah, I think, I mean that it is, it is fair. What I'm suggesting is actually to be actively misleading and to not let people know who you are and what you stand for, which is I guess part of what BreadTube was all about, right? So okay, that's not I guess what upper handed of me.Malcolm Collins: It doesn't work, because if they don't know what you stand for, then they can't humanize the other group. If they don't have that...Simone Collins: No, no, no. What I'm saying is: first disguise yourself as someone who's on their side, then get to know them, and then once you have rapport, introduce them to your ideas. Which is how groups on all sides of the spectrum have manipulated other groups.Malcolm Collins: That's an insane thing to do, because then they're like, "Oh, I have been, somebody has been trying to...", they, they report you to like their Gestapo.And this is also really interesting as I've been reading more about the history of the CIA, the FBI, et cetera. These organizations were [00:26:00] never supposed to exist long-term. Even Truman, the guy who created it, said that he regretted doing it. Because these were only supposed to exist in wartime. And the reason is, because when you have a group that's not fully accountable to the American government operating in silence, you know, these groups can become ideologically captured. Which we're already seeing with wokeism was in these groups, right? Is there becoming more and more woke, the individuals I know within them. And they are being used, like was in the Sweet Baby Inc controversy. Government and money is being used to support Sweet Baby Inc right now, right? And the organization's defending it. It shows that they have become so ideologically captured that now they see their purpose as like a secret police that has access to all of your communications in this country enforcing ideological conformity.Simone Collins: Yikes.Malcolm Collins: And elevating the dehumanization of other people, because as anyone knows, the CEO of Sweet Baby Inc, you know, she said that her worst [00:27:00] nightmare was waking up as a white male gamer. Like, she sees that as being such an underclass that she could not even imagine, yeah.Simone Collins: It's been, it's a lot harder now to get hired as a cis white male.Malcolm Collins: No, it's basically impossible within the bureaucratic world these days.Simone Collins: Yeah, no, of course if you want to...Malcolm Collins: If you want to release(?) anything close to your degree level and people who haven't gone out there and tried. Like, Simone and I, because we have similar resumes. Mine's significantly stronger than hers, by the way.Simone Collins: Yeah. So similar is not really correct. Because you have a wildly better resume than I do, and we have applied for the same jobs.Malcolm Collins: And yet, you get literally 3x the job offers I get. It's not even comparable anymore.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: It is, you need to work twice as hard for the same amount of success. And I think a lot of people are like, "well, then I just give up". They don't give up. You know, this is your opportunity to shine. Many groups out in history have been discriminated against. And if you bow out just [00:28:00] because you're discriminated against by the powers that be, then well, I guess you don't deserve to exist in the future, which is the way the system works.Simone Collins: Oh, this is my groups like that end up essentially producing the people who build society because they're faced with so many selective pressures.Malcolm Collins: Well, and that's why historically immigrants in the U.S. have created most of our new companies and stuff like that, because when you can't get mainstream jobs, you end up creating new companies. And what they're forcing to have happen is predominantly white cis men are going to create most of the companies in this country going forward, because they can't get mainstream jobs.Simone Collins: Yeah. They're being forced to. So, yeah, I, all this stuff about, you know, who built history and present about that. It's well, they weren't given other options. They weren't allowed to marry and be safe.Malcolm Collins: I should point out: It's not just white. It's, it's also black cis males. It's also gay males. It's also, if you have any one of these negative traits, you know, "negative traits", you're on the chopping block, right?Simone Collins: Well... [00:29:00] Anyway, I, that, that is very interesting. You've, you've made me look at, at progressive culture with even more concern. I, you're, you're gonna have to pay for my Botox someday. This furrowed brow, it's your fault.Malcolm Collins: Your laugh lines is what I think the bigger issue.Simone Collins: That's true. Oh my God, I love life with you. At least we have that. And I think a lot of it comes down to building parallel economies, just going a different way, and finding safe, fortified land. I don't know. But I'm still very hopeful.Malcolm Collins: I love you to death, Simone. I have enjoyed chatting with you, as always. Today is... so we record these in batches. So I mentioned this on a few other episodes, but we only just launched our, what is that thing called?Simone Collins: Discord server.Malcolm Collins: Discord server. Sorry. I know so little about this stuff, but I was so excited to see that we're already at like, the 53 active members at just a random time when I joined, 163 people have joined, like, this is cool, like, it's an actual community, and it makes me happy to see that [00:30:00] people are discussing and engaging things on there, and I'm able to, like, drop potential title cards and ask people, which one should I use for today's episode, and... Because usually I'm doing that with you, Simone. And now I won't need to bug you as much, cause they came to the same conclusion you did. And so, now I can leave you alone more. And, and yeah, anyway, I love you to death. You are an amazing human.Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: Have a great day. Oh, and anyone who uses, is like a Wikipedia editor, we really need a Wikipedia page. You can learn more about us at pragmatistfoundation.org. That's where we have, like, a link list of all the press links. We've been in, like, tons and tons and tons of major media. I don't know why we don't have one yet. I think it's just an initiative thing at this point. Love you.Simone Collins: Hey, Malcolm, isn't it kind of funny where before when I asked if you wanted a quickie, you knew that it was something a little sexy, and now it's a podcast.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Do we have time for a quick podcast?Simone Collins: Yeah, but by the way, before we even start, I just have to say [00:31:00] you are the MVP of the day. You had three very rambunctious kids. You managed to take to change tires, go shopping, get chicken feed. And they were so happy. So anyway, you rock.Malcolm Collins: I just want you to move all this to the end. Cause this is not going to be good for SEO to have random conversation at the beginning. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Apr 1, 2024 • 35min
Malcolm Debates @MoreBirths on Fertility Stats
Guest Daniel Hess, @MoreBirths on Twitter, discusses cultural influences on fertility rates worldwide. Topics include anti-natalist propaganda, historical events, and solutions for combating demographic collapse. The conversation explores Population Connection's impact on American and Canadian schools, highlighting the organization's efforts to educate teachers and students on world population growth.

Mar 29, 2024 • 60min
The Diary Entry from the Day a 24-Year-Old SF Virgin Met her Husband
Join us as we dive into my wife Simone's diary from 2012, where she recounts our wild first date! From her initial infatuation and nervousness to our strategic dating approaches and instant chemistry, this unfiltered look into Simone's thoughts will give you a glimpse of how our relationship began. We discuss the importance of transparency, confidence, and shared interests in dating, and how our core values and goals have remained consistent over the years. Discover how two methodical, driven individuals found their perfect match and ended up married, despite the odds. Get ready for some cringeworthy yet adorable moments!Simone Collins: Look, look If only I told myself that I might end the evening making out with this dude I would obviously say I was crazy. Total braggadocio, this Malcolm, but he's also refreshingly blunt and open. He got involved for a reason. He is exceedingly driven. The term world domination came up a couple of times. God, he's like me, but a year older, male, and not innocent and guileless. So cringe. So he wants to put it before us. In place, a power system that guarantees that his interest in protecting individuality is perpetuated., hence the quote, taking over the world, unquote, part of his equation. God, how delicious is that, right? He's cute, he's smart, he's sociopathic, and he's driven, he's future oriented, he's tech oriented, and he's power hungry? SWOON! I still am sorry.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! So, with your upcoming pregnancy and the lengths it [00:01:00] takes to do the tracked videos, We mean delivery.Simone Collins: With my upcoming delivery. Delivery, what are you saying? I'm already pregnant. I've beenMalcolm Collins: pregnant. Pregnancy, delivery, yes, you know. We've decided to stop doing those on Fridays for a while and I might, and I was like, okay, what can I do that's like special on Fridays that would be really fun and different?And what we're going to do is go through At least this day, and we'll see how it does, her diaries from when she first met me, you can call this, we'd actually adapted this into a book at one point but we never ended up publishing it, which was like an annotated version of her diaries from the year she met me as a, what, a 21 year old virgin or whatever.Simone Collins: It was frankly too cringe, and this is going to be incredibly cringe. Yeah, yourMalcolm Collins: sex quest.Simone Collins: It was not a sex quest. I was on a quest to fall in love and have my heart broken in one year. And okay, yeah, sex is part of that, but still.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think it's more, yeah, but I hear you. So you, you were this person. So first talk about the quest and then get into your writing, starting with when you met me, I [00:02:00] guess.Simone Collins: In 2012, I turned, 24 years old. And I decided that in that year, my new year's resolution, the big one would be to fall in love and have my heart broken all in one year, because I intended to live alone forever. I intended to not have any kids, never get married. I really never encountered anyone who I could even stomach the idea of Dating, the idea of someone associating themselves with me, even, even saying that we were dating made me literally sick to my stomach.So I knew that marriage wasn't for me, obviously, but I still wanted to fall in love and have my heart broken so that I could tell people I tried it and it was massively underwhelming. So hence this goal, I created a very keyword stuffed and optimized. Okay. Cupid profile, just to make sure that I got very qualified leads.I spammed any guy who might be a potentially interesting match [00:03:00] on. Okay. Cupid, which gives a woman a huge advantage because. Guys never get messages from girls. And I also had a competitive dating game going in my office where we got points for, you know, the number of people we dated, first date, second date, how long the date lasted, all sorts of things to just make this something that encouraged me to get out because dating is terrifying and I didn't actually want to spend time with people, but I needed to achieve my goal.And it really helped that there were other single people in the office, my age. So yeah, thank God startups don't really have we actually had an HR person who at the same time was part of this whole dating thing.Malcolm Collins: So, oh my God, I love it. SimoneSimone Collins: initially hired as an interior decorator. So, you know, she probablyMalcolm Collins: didn't know that you shouldn't have competitive dating games where you get points for doing stuff with people in an office.Fine. Okay. Okay. Now go to theSimone Collins: Well, so anyway I will, I will get to reading my diaries just for context by this point, it's March, [00:04:00] so I'm three months into my dating journey. I'd been on a bunch of dates at that point. So this is just a point at which I am starting to. encounter some momentum.So this entry that I'm about to read is me analyzing two previous dates I'd gone on, I think that week, cause I just scored them. I had a scoring system determining if someone was worth a second date. So just for context, cause that's going to seem otherwise really weird. Friday, March 16th, 2012. 10 0 8 p.m. Yeah, both of those were new high scores. The third highest Dr. Trevor and Francois is Nick with 36. How promising. Just yesterday I was feeling totally dejected on the dating front. Now there's this plus I have more potentials lined up. As of now I have a dinner plus drink state scheduled with one underscore dash M dash underscore of Redwood city for Sunday night.Plus I'm sussing out plans [00:05:00] with I'm not going to give this person the D head of design at startup. As well as dos underscore toy, AKA not giving his real name a who describes himself in his profile as amazingly good in bed and has a twin.Malcolm Collins: Okay. So I love the. I'm obviously am here the one person whose name she didn't fully give because she didn't have it yet.And I find this very interesting because it's different than the way you remembered it. You had remembered being infatuated with me from the first moment you saw my profile. And it's very clear here that she does not become infatuated with me until later. Yeah, I'mSimone Collins: infatuated with my lead list at this point.Malcolm Collins: Right. But it also shows how you were handling your leads. You weren't really getting invested in profiles or personas was in these profiles until the guy got back to you, which shows that you really were doing a spamming technique at the time, which is actually pretty impressive for a woman. In terms of the arbitrage game that that allowsSimone Collins: you.[00:06:00]Yeah, good for me, right? IMalcolm Collins: Yes, good for you. That's exactly what I'd expected from the type of woman I ended up marrying. I'm a littleSimone Collins: bit proud of myself. Yeah, I don't, I don't tend to remember anything that happens in my past because I don't really care. So it's fun to go through this. All right. March 17th, 2012.St. Patrick's Day. 1225 PM. So far so good to keep on track. I've opted out of feed catch up on the elliptical that this is when I used to, you know, remember RSS feeds Malcolm anyway and have instead taken the past two hours to make my first donation of the year, 208 via donors choose for math supplies to be used in an Oakland classroom, decide which videos to shoot today and thinking one about trends, one about letter closings and two about insults and begin formatting.Previously unpublished trendspotting college papers on HubPages, which is the startup I used to work at.Malcolm Collins: I was there. I think it's funny that we're hearing about these videos that are still on this channel. Like you can see the videos she was making at this time on this channel. This was the last year she was really [00:07:00] active and that initial big video spurt on this channel.Simone Collins: Yeah. And this is Malcolm's choice to keep them there. I'm really I love them. I hate you so much. Earlier this morning, M sent me a message with a link to his Facebook profile, asking me to friend him so he knows who to look for and that I'm a real person. I sent him a flippant Facebook message about being 100 percent genuine and having a user manual and then proceeded to fall into a fundamental crisis after looking through his Facebook profile.Facebook photos, which reveal him to be a sort of visual hybrid of Daniel Radcliffe and Charlie McDonald. Charlie is so cool. Like who is well traveled studied for at least a year in England and is in always Simone catnip.Malcolm Collins: I love this. So there's a.Few things to note here that are really interesting. One of these, because of this is when you were making these videos on YouTube people want to get an impression of like who I was meeting back then or who this person is. They can go look at those early videos on your [00:08:00] channel. That's what this is.Another one, Charlie McDonald ended up transitioning, right? Yeah,Simone Collins: he is now a woman. So times have changed, man. Yeah. And I had a total YouTube crush on him at the time.Malcolm Collins: And the other one is so I really did do this Facebook thing because it really lowered the probability of catfishing. People's Facebook pages are, you know, you have way more photos, so it's much easier and photos uploaded by other people.So it's much easier to find unflattering photos. And we actually ran into somebody at a party after this who like, Took umbrage to the fact I had done this. And she was like cause this is later covered in her diary when I was going back through it, I saw this and I had forgotten about it, but yeah, somebody at a party was like, Oh yeah, I didn't end up dating you because you demanded that you see my Facebook profile before you end up meeting me.And it's like, well, yeah, like, I don't understand. You would meet a human being in person. Like you think that that is less revealing than showing them. You know, your Facebook profile. Well, and what [00:09:00] ISimone Collins: forgot about this too is how two way it is. You're not just requesting access to their profile. You're, you're giving them access to your history and you were active on Facebook and still are very active on Facebook.That's when I really fell for you is when I looked through your Facebook profile, I see all these photos and you're 100 percent my type, but then you're also so fancy. I was just. Utterly, utterly.Malcolm Collins: I love it. Well, yeah. And I also wonder why somebody would deny access to a Facebook profile. I think it was probably that she was dating someone like that's a really easy way to see if somebody is cheating on a partner because it's pretty hard to list yourself as single on Facebook if you are not actually single.But yeah, so apparently I am, if we're using this video as like a guide How to secure a partner. You know, obviously I'm working on disability here by disability. What I mean is I have a handicap, like a big advantage. Because she already finds me very attractive but it is [00:10:00] worth noting.Simone Collins: But here's my hot take just real quick on why I think that that particular young woman decided that she wasn't going to share her Facebook profile with you, because I listen to, to fall asleep a ton of really shitty romance novels, and it's very common for the female to be.Rude. And very confrontational with male prospects, even, and perhaps, especially if she likes them, like who gave you the right to do that? You know, you don't tell me what to do. You're kind of bossy, aren't you? And that isMalcolm Collins: a Sunday type. No, theSimone Collins: moment, but it's not even, it's not even that, I don't know what, it's just being a b***h, but it's, I, it, it is a common trope and it seems to be widely societally accepted that being sassy toward a man, especially if you like him is.It's going to be,Malcolm Collins: I don't know. And if you're a guy and you're dating, you need to shut that down the very first time it happens and filter out anybody who doesn't take being shut down for that. I mean, not like in an emotional way, but just be like, I'm sorry, [00:11:00] I won't take somebody who does this. And that's likely what happened with her where I was just like, no,Simone Collins: bye.Well, it was a good filtering effect. So anyway, all right. Back to my diary entry. My reaction to this discovery, of course, was to assume already that he detests me, slash, finds me somewhat disgusting, and to rue the moment I ever decided to reach out to him on OKC in the first place. Yes, I made the first move.This reaction is a natural consequence of my general belief that disliking Simone is a general sign of good taste. I suppose it's bonkers that I should make this assumption, especially because he responded to my initial message, DESPITE A HORRID TYPO, with And here's your message.. Ah, I was going to email you, but you had all the nerdy stuff on your profile. So I figured you got flooded with emails and that mine would get buried. Honestly, this is Silicon Valley. How do girls think they will get dates by being prissy, but virtually all of them do it.Anyway, answering those questions would take about 20 minutes, so I would rather do it in person than waste morning typing them out. Would you be up for meeting sometime in the near [00:12:00] future? But ugh, I hate my life. End of entry,Malcolm Collins: so. I love, well one, you're stressing about like typos. Did you even check mine for typos?I'm sure it had typos.Simone Collins: Well, and you even write in your OkCupid profile that you make tons of spelling mistakes.Malcolm Collins: But I think the message is also like, I masterclass on dating someone, but it is. So you had reached out to me with a bunch of questions about the company I was starting at the time becauseSimone Collins: you mentioned that in your profile.And that seems likeMalcolm Collins: you didn't want to look like, you know, you were only interested in me sexually and you wanted to, which is smart to do. But also it was me, you know, making myself look somewhat unavailable and important, which is all true. Like I wasn't misrepresenting myself, but it is. But also let's meet as soon as possible.You know, I am not dicking around in terms of the engagement with this message or in any ways being disingenuous which I think is also, you know, of high utility and also don't waste time. You know, if you're doing [00:13:00] high throughput dating, like, as I said, at the time, I was trying to do five dates a week, at least you don't have time to fully respond to every one of these individual questions.And if someone, someone showing interest in you, then, then move forwardsSimone Collins: with it. Yeah, no, and a theme throughout this is your transparency is one of the things that really stands out and is super underrated and dating. Okay, back to the diary. Sunday, March 18th, 2012. O bus. And I say that I would sometimes put the location of where I was.I didn't have a car, so I had to use public transport to get everywhere. 2. 22 PM. I also really hope that Malcolm does not flake out tonight. I really want to get the lowdown on his life, if nothing more. We shall see what happens. 2. 33 p. m. Oh s**t. Just looked at Malcolm's profile again and am reminded of exactly why he is like Simone Katnipp.Look, look, and then I copied and pasted your entire OkCupid profile which I'm really glad I did because it's amazing. I'm [00:14:00] not going to read it all because it's quite long. This was, these were back, this was before OkCupid was broken. When you had long form profiles with lots of information and could really show a lot of wit and other things aside from just your looks to make yourself attractive to other people, which is.Total loss. But yeah, I was getting really nervousMalcolm Collins: about meeting you. We might do a different video analyzing the OkCupid profile if people want that. But we, you know, we talked through it beforehand. We're like, Oh, we don't know. Maybe people want it. Maybe they don't. Yeah.Simone Collins: Request it in the comments if you really, really want it.But you know, so anyway, after pasting your profile, I type must keep expectations exceedingly low. He will flake if he does not flake, he will what could possibly go wrong? I will look horrid and not at all be his type. And he will do whatever he can to make the meeting as short as possible. He will find my personality and habits to be narrow and pathetic.I will come across as a complete dunce and he will feel uncomfortable hanging out with someone who does not drink. Cause I didn't drink at the time. We will not be able to decide on someplace to eat. He will make up an [00:15:00] excuse to have to leave right away. The wind will make my hair a haggard mess. He will make me look like a poorly traveled simpleton.I will reveal far too much about myself. I will bore him. His car will be stolen. I will vomit for no particular reason. All of those things are not so bad. I suppose. Whatever happens, happens.Malcolm Collins: So I love this for two reasons. One is, is I think it was very good psychological technique that you used here. You were stressed about some sort of social situation, and so you just went through everything that could go wrong and then internalized.It's really not that bad. Even the worst potential outcome. It's all just some form of inconvenience or social rejection. But the second thing is. is this is a person who you ended up marrying. So for all those people who are out there stressed, or you're on a date with someone who you think is impossibly beyond you, or you're on a date with someone and you just see them as like a, another person, you know, there's so much emotions behind every one of these interactions.[00:16:00]And you know, you can read the rest of her diary. Well, not you can, but I have, and you're going to publish it at one point, an edited version. This is a completely unedited version. This is the raw actual diary. And you in this version you don't, Well, in all versions, you don't talk like this about any of the other guys.Like this date was very different from the other day. I don't, I don't think you got stressed about any of the other guys or anything.Simone Collins: Yeah. Always this paragon of everything I was into and you stillMalcolm Collins: are gorgeous. And I, and I did mention in the notes when we had done it to, to make it the book that I actually did like turn around and walk out of the room one day after seeing what the girl looked like, because she looks so different from her pictures.And I was just like, no.Simone Collins: And that's why you do Facebook.Malcolm Collins: Yes. That's why I check Facebook. You know, I, I was a mean ish thing to do, but she should have looked more real in her pictures.Simone Collins: So. Well, and I bet it's even worse now with all the filters people are using. It's insane. So [00:17:00] you can also. The even more manipulative, like you can really show real pictures of yourself.You don't have to like Photoshop anything. You don't have to be technical. You can just useMalcolm Collins: them. You know, I also want to elevate why I hadn't emailed Simone on the app because I mentioned it in the email, but it's actually important. Her profile, she was in Stormtrooper armor in most of her pictures, which is Two problems.One is it's a way she could be hiding how she really looks and two, it's incredibly nerdy, so I expected arbitrage wise, she was gonna get tons of extra outreach, and she was also posting all the memes and everything on her profile, and so she just seemed like absolute Like a player of the arbitrage game of Silicon Valley to the extent that I thought that this is a woman who must be getting made, you know, passes on all the time.And so she's going to overvalue herself. And she's probably also hiding that she's not that attractive which. We're both really wrong in terms of my assessment but it, it, it does show why you didn't get outreach to me because I had seen your profile before and I was just like, Oh, it's one of [00:18:00] those, you know, e thought pages, basically the perfect girl who everyone's reaching out at, but like, well constructed gamer girl, you know what I mean?I'm actuallySimone Collins: surprised because I. Don't remember getting a ton of inbound interest on OkCupid. And I wonder if that's because algorithmically they figured that any woman who actually contacted men is either trying to scam them or sell them something or not real. That could be theMalcolm Collins: case. Yeah. Cause I just didn't get that muchSimone Collins: message.I was like, Oh gosh, am I that ugly? It was bad. Anyway. So yes, let's see. Okay. So that was the last diary entry before the date. Now we have the first diary entry after our first date. 10 43 PM. Holy s**t. It's like, it's like He's my kryptonite. If only I told myself that I might end the evening making out with this dude on some random floor of the Four Seasons, I [00:19:00] would obviously say I was crazy.God. Oh man. Wow. Ha. This is hilarious. He is a total egomaniac, a total sociopath, a totally self involved, overly confident, rule breaking bundle of perfection. Oh God. I was really. You got me, Malcolm. I can, God, where do I start? I waited for him in the middle of the field at Yerba Buena Gardens. He was very easy to spot when he showed up since he was wearing what is apparently his signature vest, shirt, and tie.When I waved and started walking over to him, some other guy thought I was waving to him, and as Malcolm reached out to shake my hand, that guy was all, Oh, I thought, wow, that there's this beautiful girl waving to me, which was favorable because it painted me in a totally flattering light. Anyhow, I kind of giggled and smiled to that man, then reached out and shook Malcolm's partially retracted hand, and he introduced himself, and I introduced myself, and we walked off the [00:20:00] field.I'm so glad that that man said that I was a cat.Malcolm Collins: Do you remember I had said something about it at the time? Like, can you believe heSimone Collins: thought Yeah. I remember you saying that. Yeah. You were saying something like, man, can you believe he thought you were going to meet with him? But yeah, he was my wingman.My stranger,Malcolm Collins: heSimone Collins: was my social proof. I'm sure it works for women to red pillars talked about it all the time. Right. That they had a word for it. Whatever. But yeah, having a lot of people make you look like you're desirable. I'm so glad he did that. All right. 11. 45 p. m. home in bed. Dad picked me up at BART, but I have to write that s**t down before going to bed.Jesus. Remember I didn't have a car and I lived on the island of Alameda, which is outside San Francisco where we met. So I had to take the public transport of the Bay Area called BART back home. And then my dad picked me up. It was really late. My dad's so nice. Thank you, dad. I was a kid. We were kids back [00:21:00] then.We were so, you know, I mean, because these days, like yeah, 20 year olds are kids. Anyway, we grabbed a dinner and drinks at Amber India. I've walked past there tons of times. This was my first time actually inside. He was very deliberate about everything, getting us seated, ordering us drinks, et cetera. How adorable.This was Simone's first dinner and drinks date. I should add that. On all my previous dates, I'd only gone for like walks or gotten coffee withMalcolm Collins: people. Because you couldn't eat in public back then. Like, you were breaking major Simone rules. People don't, like, Simone has a lot of rules about how she interacts with the world.That's us recording in different rooms. Because it stresses her out to be around somebody when she's talking. Just like, you know, she's autistic, right? Like, she struggles with this stuff. And at the time, you didn't eat out at all, you were just conceding because I had asked you to and I spoke about this authoritatively, and I'd also say, if you're a guy and you're dating, everything I'm doing here is what you need to do, like you need to know the place that you're going to, you need to know [00:22:00] what you want to order, you need to not be indecisive, you need to show that you can plan and have everything under control.And you can tell that this is not something that she experienced on her otherSimone Collins: dates. Nope, not at all. No, you were amazing. And also you had this routine where you would choose a restaurant and tip well at that restaurant so that you always got good service. Like this wasn't just. have a plan. It was know your, know your place, know your route, know your territory.Malcolm Collins: All my high value dates in San Francisco at the same restaurant. Well, not the low value ones because it was a media, you know, expensive ish restaurant. And so, I couldn't afford to do all the dates. They're just a really high value prospects. And then other than that, I'd just be doing sort of screening dates somewhere else for us, like a coffee shop orSimone Collins: something.Yeah. Okay. I will continue right off the bat. We ordered drinks. Oh, I should also add, I, I didn't drink. Yeah. No, I rememberMalcolm Collins: we sat down and you go I don't drink. I'm [00:23:00] sorry. As you heard from one of the beginning things that she was afraid of, but I think she was dull because she didn't drink. And I just told her, I'm sorry.I. I'm not going to date you if you don't drink.Simone Collins: Yeah, well, I wrote, I was honest and I said, I never drink, but also said I was amenable to giving it a go again. Like I'm so desperate for you, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: I remember the drink we got was like a pink elephant or something or some sort of pink drink. Anyway,Simone Collins: we need to order it again when we go back.It's Amber India is still alive and well. Thank God. Already I knew that this was the sort of guy who could lift my OCD rules. At the time I thought all I had was OCD. I didn't get diagnosed with autism until our son was diagnosed. He ordered me something pink with muddled strawberry and we chatted for quite a while before ordering dinner.He did most of the talking and the conversation was all over the place. He talked about St. Andrew's where he went to school. God, what an incredible place. Old castles and cathedrals. Thedrals, tons of traditions, blah, blah, blah. Apparently he took on extra courses and got involved with multiple academic houses.[00:24:00]Total braggadocio, this Malcolm, but he's also refreshingly blunt and open. He got involved for a reason. He is exceedingly driven. The term world domination came up a couple of times. God, he's like me, but a year older, male, and not innocent and guileless. So cringe.Malcolm Collins: It's not cringe, it is incredibly sweet.This is what every guy wants in the girl they meet. Yeah,Simone Collins: yeah. Yeah, you were certainly well, maybe not everyMalcolm Collins: guy, every guy who's likeSimone Collins: me. Yeah. Well, you're no one's like you because you're amazing. And I love you. He talked about his childhood a bit, got kicked out of school a couple of times. Apparently liked breaking the rules might've gotten to military school, got in fights.He shared fantastic, a side of point at. He shared a fantastic aside at one point about the art of fighting in those settings. It is not all about fighting dirty. It's about knowing where to hit to make a good show. Causing, causing blooding noses and black eyes and stuff. He also went to three or four sleepover summer camps a [00:25:00] year in which he would study social dynamics and try to the best extent possible to gain becoming popular, which he concluded, and I entirely agree, is not something one can break down to a science because the social dynamics of a group change every time. In addition, he was super open about his policy with girls. That brilliant jerk. He would actually try out different conversational approaches with girls over AIM, you.Aim for you people who are too young was an early chat site. And would record the successful ones throughout high school. He would actually engage in trial and error with different tactics. And he said in so many words that he can basically have any girl he wanted. He's so full of himself, but he's also added that it's convenient that he's attractive.I'd call him full of s**t if he weren't the epitome of my type.Malcolm Collins: I feel like that was interesting. There's a lot of people. So, so a couple of things, you know, we've mentioned on episodes before that, like, I'm generally considered attractive in the world of women, not in the world of men. And by that, what I mean, yes, [00:26:00] you're not a man.Women know that I'm what is considered attractive. Super hot guy looks like, where a lot of men hear me say that and they go, but you're not an ultra masky man, man. And it's like, that's not what women areSimone Collins: into here. Oh, thank God you're not gay, Malcolm. I'll just say that. You'd beMalcolm Collins: screwed, I guess. Well, yeah.One how you like obviously how you physically look, but a lot of this, and you can tell this from, from the way that you're writing, this is just confidence in who you are. Mm-Hmm. self knowledge and not hiding anything, you know? Yeah. When someone like Simone, I clearly like. While I had techniques that I had built up to try toSimone Collins: date better.You were 100 percent transparent about them.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I wasn't using them just to like sleep around a lot anymore or anything like that. You know, at this point, I think I made very clear on our date early on that it's interesting that you didn't record it, that I was looking for a wife. Oh, it's, it'sSimone Collins: later in the century.Okay. Yeah. Yeah. He said he used to have More of a need for sex and all that jazz, my words, not his, and I slowed down a bit because, and yes, he really did say this. He [00:27:00] has learned the difference between good and bad masturbation. He actually said, and mentioned later that he is currently looking for a wife since it is an efficient decision.They can combine friend sets so we wouldn't have to work hard at socializing. He doesn't have to go hunting for sex. And there was another reason, but I can't remember it. I love that little slip there, by the way. So we wouldn't have to work hard at socializing. I've already inserted myselfMalcolm Collins: into the, Oh gosh.ISimone Collins: didn't notice. You're so sweet. I don't, I don't think I noticed that either when I was writing. I think it was a little, a little sip.As to what I meant by the masturbation comment Once you get really good at seducing women and you really no longer find it a challenge that you can basically sleep with whoever you want whenever you want. You'll soon realize that the only thing that gave sex value or over masturbation. Was that it was difficult in high status.Maybe not everyone feels that way, but I think a [00:28:00] lot of the population, if they were honest with themselves would be like, yeah, sex is a ton of effort. And masturbation is just easier outside of any bonding effects. It has. Then feels about as good because I mean, of course, why wouldn't it? You couldn't literally choose every aspect of the experience for yourself. , and optimize it for whatever you are specifically interested in.Simone Collins: Oh, he's so on it. So strategic. Why am I not him? It's so f*****g unfair. That's in all caps. We didn't just talkMalcolm Collins: actually. Hold on. I want to comment on that statement because I've noticed with girls, this is what infatuation often looks like or love often looks like or like love at first sight with girls is they want to be the person.Simone Collins: Yeah, they look at the person andMalcolm Collins: they're like, I want to be someone like that. And that's what creates the romantic connection. Whereas guys don't have this sameSimone Collins: Yeah. But I mean, in terms [00:29:00] of, you know, we talk in the pragmatist guide to relationships about this one relationship format we think is best personally, which we call the Pygmalion relationship in which one are both partners.Helps you become the person you always wished you could become. And I think women find that type of man really attractive, especially if they want this kind of relationship, because what better person to advise you on becoming who you want to be, if they are like what you want to be, you know, the advice that you get from someone is only going to get you.Approximately to where they are. Right. So you can see why I was so excited. We didn't just talk about the more crass things in life. He also got into this business idea he's working on and recruiting support on it's past midnight and I need to go to sleep. So this is the gist. He basically sees human consciousness as a really valuable thing.And he basically sees his purpose in life as protecting it. He also assumes. , through NeuroSky, who you worked for at the time. And, Current technological trends that humans will be able to essentially connect their brains and therefore their consciousnesses to [00:30:00] computers within 200 years, and that soon thereafter, they will be able to form networks.It is at this point that the sense of self will soon begin to degrade. People will begin to form what I recall being referred to in Accelerando as the Borganism. He refers to this hypothetical network consciousness as the omega network. Malcolm, much like myself, is highly independent and values human independence.He also believes that distributed decision making and individuality is what allows human society to both progress and defend itself. Don't you love how consistent we are? Malcolm therefore believes it is of extreme importance that someone prevent the human computer technology to come from allowing this networked consciousness to emerge.He sees himself as that someone. This is why Malcolm wants to be at the forefront of this business. So far, as he is concerned, that is not enough. He acknowledges that this technology might not be fully developed in our lifetimes. So he wants to put it before us. In place, a power system that guarantees that his interest in protecting individuality is perpetuated. Hence [00:31:00] the quote, taking over the world, unquote, part of his equation. God, how delicious is that, right? He's cute, he's smart, he's sociopathic, and he's driven, he's future oriented, he's tech oriented, and he's power hungry? SWOON! I still am sorry. But isn't that interesting that like, how things have moderated?I mean, one thing that I think you've discovered since we first met and as things have evolved in society is that you don't need people to actually have full out brain computer interfaces to start thinking. Like a monolith, which is scary.Malcolm Collins: It is also interesting. You see here a few things. And actually in the book, I had edited out this part because I was like this is the completely unedited diary.Cause I was like, well, you know, it's a little too specific, but back then I was working in brain computer interface. So direct connection with the human brain to technology, similar to like Neuralink and stuff like that. And I really saw this as the. future. And I don't disagree with anything I [00:32:00] said all the way back then was in 200 years, we will have the capacity to directly communicate with other people's brains.And this does create a genuine risk of some sort of well, Omega network or homogenization, homogenization, the erasure of human individuality, which I would see as a negative. And I think I really haven't changed my core philosophical position, maintaining here. I'm talking about diversity of the individual, like the individual mind.Whereas today I'm talking about diversity of cultural groups, right? But it's still the core value proposition of maintaining human diversity and empowering that to work together to make us stronger. The things which become these monoliths in, in, in a way people could say, well, this is actually his secret goal along to create some sort of intergenerationally stable power structure that can prevent the Omega network [00:33:00] from consuming all of humanity.I wouldn't saySimone Collins: that. That's what the modern prenatalist movement is also about. It's about preventing the pervasion of a couple of dominating cultures that don't permit the existence of. Diversity or other views or preventing the, like a complete takeover of the urban monoculture.Malcolm Collins: And when we went over this in private, you know, you, you really highlighted it as something that you've sort of mentioned in a roundabout way here a few times is, you know, Meganet has already come to exist.That's what the urban monoculture is. Yeah. People didn't need direct brain interfaces. To homogenize all of their thinking and perspectives, which is scary to see. But yeah, it's also interesting to see that we've been so future oriented and always had them sort of like big plan that takes place across multiple generations to try to protect our species.And the plan hasn't really changed thatSimone Collins: much. It really hasn't. Yeah. I thought it had more. Honestly, I thought that we had changed more. We've [00:34:00] learned a lot. But our mooring points are quite similar. Okay, let's see. Before I continue, I should also point out that he might actually have what it takes to achieve his goal of setting in place some sort of power system.He literally referred to building a religion at some point, after which I slipped an unnoticed cake reference into the conversation. And while it's, it's true. A laughable proposition for most people. This guy's drive, charisma, and smarts isn't going to hurt his prospects. And that is something that I loved about you from the very beginning.And I think it's something that women really love about men in general is not just that they dream big. And I think dreaming big is not enough. Being confident is not enough. Those, those are really big factors in attractiveness. It's recognizing that that person actually has. Agency and from the beginning, it was so clear that you had a ton of agency and ability to actually act on what you cared aboutMalcolm Collins: when I think the founding, the religion thing and everything like that.So much of what I'm doing today. A lot of people act like because they're just beginning to meet me now that I'm sort of [00:35:00] like a loose cannon that's acting in ways that planned out from my early childhood. It's just not the case. Yeah. Everything I'm doing now was planned out from my early childhood, it's just the core threats to our species are different than I predicted at this time period, but it's not that the threats that I predicted at this time period aren't real or don't exist, or that my timescale was wrong, it's just the Some threats that I didn't anticipate basically came out of nowhere.Like I really didn't think the urban monoculture would be this aggressive at stamping out free speech. I really didn't think that fertility collapse would happen back when I was writing all this, you know, or at least be the level of threat that I think it is today. Especially within our lifetimes, which is why it's become the new core focus.Yeah.Simone Collins: Let's see. What's more, he shared that from early on, he's been interested in studying and infiltrating subcultures. Seriously, we're just scarily similar. And it had a particular interest in cults in high [00:36:00] school. So this kid read and studied the heck out of them. To build on that front, he also started digging into local subcultures.As soon as he came here, he got in with the singularity folks who apparently live in a very cult like situation and are highly tied with the sea studying movement. Plus are obsessed with healthy diets, have more men than women and have polyamorous tendencies, transhumanists, more equally distributed gender wise and makers, several subsets of maker culture.Actually, I feel like such a total failure next to him. It's so unfair. Why did I not do all that? How does one even find these people? I really did love weird subcultures and I was so impressed by how. You'd spent very little time, relatively speaking, in the Bay Area and yet you grew up there. I grew up there and I didn't know half of any of the weird subcultures that you had encountered.Malcolm Collins: I think this is such a good indicator that you should marry someone, is that they live a life. that you are envious, not because of their success or [00:37:00] whatever, but of the things that they're just going out and doing, or that somebody is envious of your life because it shows that they want to do more of the type of things that you want to do.Right? Like, it's so funny when people were talking recently, when they're like, I can't imagine working with my spouse, like you two do Being around them 24 seven. How do you deal with that? And it's like, because we all, we like the same things. We like being around each other. Even in these early days, you're seeing the things I'm doing and you're thinking, I wish I could do those things too, which is a great thing to meet somebody who's interested in.Yeah.Simone Collins: I asked him how he managed to get out so much. If he isn't much of a people lover and he pointed. Back to his purpose in life and how he deferred his attendance at Stanford business school, because he wanted to take time to build a network before starting, he wants to start this business venture ASAP.It seems he also referred off handedly to the various societies joined in school. Some of which are allegedly secret quote. I [00:38:00] love secret societies, unquote that jerk, which helped give him an in in many cases. I realized while sitting across from him that, well, if I want to get a peek at some of these deliciously fascinating groups of people, Malcolm is my in, which is both tremendously promising and very troublesome.To your point, Malcolm. AndMalcolm Collins: you ended up becoming the, the managing director of dialogue, which was a secret society funded by Peter Thiel. And now you're like really in with all the secret society networks. We built one out for shrimp futures. So even that interest, like none of my interests have really changed.It's remarkable how consistent I am and your interest in these interests hasn't changed. Yeah,Simone Collins: it is really well because we feel like so much has changed, but not so much, but I'm glad I'm glad. All the while we're eating, he ordered a total of three drinks, plus two for me, and an appetizer for us to share, and we each got an entree, and he kept goading me to drinks, saying all that crap about having low tolerance is totally off, blah blah blah.I totally knew what he was up to. But rather didn't care. [00:39:00] What the heck? I thought, I know I want to get back into drinking at least socially eventually, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity at one point he started trashing water saying some b******t about how fish s**t in it, to which I responded with a sarcastic, Hmm, but it's so tasty to which he responded with what I imagine was a perfectly calculated and suggestive, suggestive, and to think I will might can't remember which be kissing those lips.It was at that point that I pulled out my whole, I haven't been kissed in five years zinger and asked him if he found that disappointing to which he responded in the negative and . began proposing various reasons why I might have made that decision. And I basically explained to him that I found emotions and relationships to be highly inconvenient.I may have also explained this briefly before, but if not, I also told him I decided not to even consider unboxing my sexuality until this year and already found it highly troublesome. So it was all out on the table, which to be quite honest, [00:40:00] was refreshing.Malcolm Collins: So a few things to note here. One is the suggestion I made to you, if I might be kissing those lips later, is used to reduce sort of miscommunication because I am signaling my intentionality to you, and you could have said, I'm not interested in that or not on the first date or, and instead what you said was, well, I haven't kissed someone in five years.Which is saying, basically, not I consent, basically I consent, like, yeah, okay, you know, I'm notSimone Collins: saying no. I consent, but I'm what's the word?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I can sit, but I'm insecure. That's the, the underlying thing that's being communicated in that response. And then me engaging was the response in an analytical format, you know, basically not talking down to her for it, not talking up to her for it being like, well, I can see why somebody might do that for X, Y, and Z reasons.shows that I accept her position without accidentally [00:41:00] denigrating her which is very easy to do in a situation like this or making her moreSimone Collins: stressed. Yeah, no, you, great game, Malcolm. Around this time, I was finally starting to feel the buzz from, from the alcohol. I felt all tingly and kind of dizzy and cheery, which is the best boozy feeling I've felt yet.So this was a great reintroduction. Malcolm paid the check and said he wanted to show me something. We stepped outside and then basically walked right into the Four Seasons. I was just going with the flow at that point and wasn't, well, and wasn't pretty surprised when he demonstrated his aforementioned love of pushing boundaries and breaking rules by stepping into a subsidiary staircase, leading up to a couple flights of stairs, and pointing out that it's surprising how few doors are locked.We ended up in a hallway belonging to the business portion of the hotel. It was dimly lit. We stopped in the middle of the hallway and I realized that this was totally one of his hilarious little tricks. Lo and behold, there he was standing just about an inch from me. [00:42:00] Yep. So of course we kissed and then we kissed again and then he pushed me against the wall and we kissed even more and we started kissing pretty deeply.I was surprised by how normal it felt. I recall saying something like, well, that's fine. There goes that five year hiatus. He totally pulled every cliche move in the book. Not just the leading me to a dark hallway thing, but also the slamming me against the wall thing, the unbuttoning my coat thing, the lifting me to the floor thing, the reaching up my dress thing.I kept laughing the whole time because it was so gamed, so scripted. Quote, I totally see what you're doing. Unquote. I said, not that. I stopped him. I really only drew the line when he started reaching for my nethers. But yeah, he definitely had a massive heart on and I'm not going to pretend that he didn't totally turn me on and I'm not going to pretend that I did not thoroughly enjoy making out with him.You had such a routine and I knew it, but I think that's really [00:43:00] interesting in that I think men who have routines. Typically hide them or try to hide them and you and you don't really needMalcolm Collins: to know women are not turned off By the fact that you're using a routine other women have commented on this.They're like, wow, it's really remarkable however, because it's a performance the way a lot of women approach sexual events and stuff like that, or relationship events is they want somebody who is experienced and who knows what they're doing and who's going to walk them through it. Who they can trust.Yes, who they can trust. Do not either be like overly a horndog that can't control themselves. You know, if somebody can get sex whenever they want and has this whole thing so methodically planned out, they're not the type of person who's going to lose their control or something because they're rejected, you know, and I'm sure you could tell that in the moment, right?Right. Like if you were not interested, I'd just be like, okay tomorrow it'll be a different girl. And, but Also knowing where you can go to do stuff like this is also really important.Simone Collins: [00:44:00] How long did you find that hallway in the four seasons?Malcolm Collins: Well, I usually try all the doors in any place that I visit.A lot of people are quite explorative of me. And I, and I found a place in downtown San Francisco where you Vacant that time of day, we get, it was like the office section of the building as she was mentioning, and this was at night. So there was no risk of anybody walking in on us. And yeah, that's a useful thing to do as well.I've mentioned in another episode, I had like the scanning for like sex locations when I was younger, that I would just see something or like sometimes as an adult walk by an area and be like, Ooh, that's a great place because I had had this like background processing of all environments. But yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah, let's see.Malcolm Collins: Oh, also, I'd point out before I go further, she had a boundary, she drew it, right? And I respected it. Yeah, totally. And that's really important. When somebody draws any sort of a boundary, that you're just like, okay, that's not something we're doing today.Simone Collins: Yeah, at no point did I feel unsafe, for sure.Which is notable because [00:45:00] this was, A lot for me. Let's see. Well, you don't want to kissMalcolm Collins: one guy, you know, when she's mentioning it's been five years since she kissed someone, she means she kissed somebody. Like once or a few times, five years ago, like not, not, it was one, one other person like this, the, she was not experienced at all.I wasSimone Collins: not experienced. I I continue when not laughing at him and making fun of his sexy face or stilted conversation turd toward his amusement at totally taking advantage of me and my amusement at him totally. Getting this far when nobody else could and his being a total dom and me being a total sub blah blah blah I wrote blah blah blah a lot.I am pleased to report that he is not entirely unsatisfied with my kissing I most certainly did ask for feedback and he said that he would think I were lying if I told him that I hadn't kissed someone in five years and that I must have been a total slut before I stopped kissing anyone. So hurrah for my slutty kissing skills, question mark.[00:46:00] AndMalcolm Collins: I really were a good kisser, even at the beginning. Thank you. Like I'm saying to this now, not trying to impress you or anything. I remember yeah, you, you, maybe we just have a lot of chemistry.Simone Collins: I think we have a lot of chemistry. I think as, as I've told you before, I. Cause I am asexual. I'm really not in, I've never been into anyone else.I'm just gay for Malcolm. I don't know what's, but whatever. Right. And when I told him I had really only kissed one guy and a friend with benefits at that before, and that I'd never been in a relationship before, plus was a virgin given the Intel, he seemed even more turned on. And well, All his cliche hilarious moves were obviously working on me too.I rather liked how he got on top of me, bit my neck, nibbled my ears, held my wrist to the floor. Yeah, this is really not appropriate for a state activity, but dreadful fun. Heck, I even sucked his fingers, which were, thanks to the Indian food, pretty tasty. Which is insane by the way, because I'm a complete germphobe.You don't understand, Simone.Malcolm Collins: [00:47:00] Floors. Floors.Simone Collins: Sucking fingers. Yeah, IMalcolm Collins: can't, I can't. Like her in our marriage, she. Panics about things that touch floors.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I could have touched aSimone Collins: doorknob to go to a restroom. I'm sure you did. I'm sure you, yeah, I, that, and I, it's, it, it is. But that is just how completely enamored.I, I was with you and I, I mean, yeah, it's telling, let's say in the midst of all this, he invited me to his place on Wednesday for my little ponies marathon. I just love how dated that is.Malcolm Collins: No, but also that it's very much like a. Do not front with overly masculine stuff. Front with stuff that shows how comfortable you areSimone Collins: with your masculinity.Malcolm Collins: These are two very different things. Traditional masculine things, when you front to girls with them, do not, they, they do the opposite. They make you look insecure with your [00:48:00] masculinity. I look at the things that somebody like. For example, Andrew Tate is fronting all the time. It makes him look like an incredibly insecure person with his masculinity.It does. Um, whereas, like, hey, let's go back to my place and watch My Little Pony together. That, especially in the age of bronies, which is when this was, that was high tier. When you can tell that, like, I'm not, like, a wimpy guy or whatever. That is high tier masculinity. Yeah. Because I'm showing that I don't I'm not afraid of being judged for liking something that falls outside of society's expectations of masculinity.Simone Collins: Yeah, that's so true. I parried a bit, but eventually, tentatively, said yes, and soon thereafter, I said I needed to leave, and we made our way down, kissing somewhat frequently along the way. He walked me to the BART station, and off I went. 1243 p. m. Jesus, it's 1243 p. m. Laptop off. I'm going to be so tired tomorrow.But this is one of those nights where one just has to [00:49:00] document. Memories are changeable. Capricious things. I want to record all of this to be accurate as possible. 1244 p. m. But oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Did this just happen? I'm so I have to be really exceedingly careful because this guy can screw me over big time.That said, if I play my cards right, he can be the perfect person to sexually break me in. Not to mention connect me with a lot of interesting ideas and people. I just have to never get emotionally attached or find myself in any sort of dependent position, which is going to be especially difficult considering that we're going to be in a dumb sub relationship given the direction we're going in.Oh! But the plot thickens. She thickens. Dun, dun, dun, 12, 48 PM. Okay. Totally going to bed. S**t. That'sMalcolm Collins: for the first night. If people want more diary stuff, I, I love this becauseSimone Collins: I don't, I can't,Malcolm Collins: I don't think it's cringe at all. I think it shows an enormous amount of emotional intelligence, [00:50:00] agency.Simone Collins: It's just, it's Malcolm Collins.Fan blogging, but that's what youMalcolm Collins: found a guy who you wanted. Okay. And you got him to marry you. Yeah. AndSimone Collins: I mean, it's, it's even from our first date, the thing I was so scared of was getting attached to you because you were so impossibly perfect. And I feel so weird that I'm married to you now. It'sMalcolm Collins: like, I also love, this is a huge thing in year one.It's her. Fear of becoming attached. And so if we go through other diary entries, that'll just be a constant and recurring theme. It's similar. The problemSimone Collins: is he, he was way out of my league. You were super out of my league, Malcolm, like from a credential standpoint, from a background standpoint, from a look standpoint, there was just no way that I could compete.And then you were about to go to Stanford and find your wife. Like I knew that this was really stupid for me. [00:51:00]Malcolm Collins: You know, you say all of that, right? But I'm sure our listeners, when they hear all of these things, the way you talk about me, the way you think, the way you structure your dating, they're probably like, wow, they were really, really made for each other.Like they are a uniquely good fit for each other. yeah.Simone Collins: And when I write sociopath, by the way, I really mean that as a compliment. I always wanted to find someone who was like sociopathic or psychopathic, just because I associate those things with. Behaving logically and being ambitious and being more or lessMalcolm Collins: transparent.Would you say that I'm actually sociopathic?Simone Collins: You're really not sociopathic because you care way too much about people's feelings. You don't care what people think about you. But you, but you deeply care about potentially hurting people. You're like an anti sociopath because you will. kill yourself just thinking that perhaps you might have pointed someone in the wrong direction or said the wrong thing to them [00:52:00] and you like it viscerally hurts you after we meet with people in person.Malcolm Collins: It's very interesting that you pointed it out because I hadn't made this division. I Don't care at all. If people have negative judgements about me or No. Think ofSimone Collins: me, you don't care. No.Malcolm Collins: I do care if I accidentally inflict mental harm on anotherSimone Collins: person. Or, or just, you know, legit. Like if you give bad career advice to someone or, or if Yeah.You know, you said something and then you realized you might have been wrong about it, and then you just worry immensely. Well, anyway, youMalcolm Collins: worry about wronging people, another person, especially somebody who, who trusted me. Mm-Hmm. . Yeah, I, I just love this. Diary entry as this unfettered look in this, you know, innocent, younger, a guileless, as you said, gu innocent going into a situation where you actually win.You know, this is, you were approaching this like I was some sort of like unattainable, ultra hot guy. Mm-Hmm. who at you were asked was just gonna use you for sex for a while.Simone Collins: And I think that was probably your initial plan. [00:53:00] No,Malcolm Collins: it wasn't. I was, well, my initial plan is like, Oh, this person's fantastic.She'll follow me. Whatever I say, you know,Simone Collins: just your, your fangirl,Malcolm Collins: but then I realized how competent you were and how much I enjoyed talking to you and how much I enjoyed being around you. And I was like, wow, this, this person's amazing to spend time around. But I also think a lot of the personality that you exhibit now in this logical that may not have been present in these early videos.Was not, you know, it's, it's who you always have been. When you watch these or read these, read, read these early diary entries, you show an aspect of yourself that, Was always who you are today, but was something that you hid back then because you wanted to be normal. And I think what you mean when you say you wanted to be me, because you were always as methodical as me, you know, you talk about like my [00:54:00] aim thing, but were you not doing something similar with the dating competition and the dating?Scoring system and the, you know, we, we both were very similar and the meme stuff profile, you were doing all of this, but you didn't admit publicly that you were this ultra logical and methodicalSimone Collins: person. I didn't, I didn't write, like I referred to the fact that like, when, when you asked me for my Facebook profile to, to friend each other on, on Facebook, I.Flippantly responded that I had an FAQ guide and I actually did create this entire web page that was an FAQ guide that explained all of my weird eccentricities and was it completely transparent about this is what I am and this is what I'm all about.Malcolm Collins: Do we still have this? Where was this hosted?Simone Collins: You know, yeah, actually I think there are some bits of it in my diary that I could rescue.But I, I was, I was fairly openly weird, but I didn't know that I was allowed to have my own opinions and values. And that's the really big thing that you changed for [00:55:00] me was that you asked me what I believed and why, and you also gave me a license to have. Opinions that didn't, that didn't toe the line with mainstream progressive culture.That's actually aMalcolm Collins: really interesting thing. So the urban monoculture doesn't allow you to ask what you believe in. Why you just need to follow the norms of that culture and the way that you break it was sentient humans. And I'm, you know, I don't think all humans are fully sentient. You don't even think we're fully sentient.Come on. But those are humans who, when you prompt them to go, what do you actually think is good and why? Like, what are you actually optimizing for? And then you did that over a number of conversations. And then from there, you built a world and moral framework up from that sort of base first principles perspective of what's good.And that framework didn't overlap with what the urban monoculture said was good. And as the urban monoculture became increasingly fascist and totalitarian in how it controlled people's thoughts and [00:56:00] norms, it out, which wasn't like me trying to make you conservative or anything. It was me talking through with you, what do you actually believe?And if you believe those things then what, then what, then what and a lot of my beliefs about the world were influenced by yours, you know, my, Core philosophical framework changed pretty dramatically based on some of the ideas you've had that I think are very brilliant. For example, the humans aren't sentient.You can watch our episode on that. Like broadly like sentience, even the humans that have like a degree of it, it's mostly an illusion was from you and a really powerful frame shift for me because I used to think that that was the core thing of value in the universe. And now I, I, I think it's mostly an illusion.Based on your logic and and framework, and so you've done so much to make me a better person, and I just love these early diary entries because this, this person who so badly wanted something to work out like it, it did work out and beyond [00:57:00] your wildest, wildest, wildest expectations.Simone Collins: I like me a happy ending.Yeah. Yeah. Happy ending, right? Yeah. No, it's wild. Yeah. I'm, I'm glad that, yeah, this, we, we read this in a car drive on, on a way back from an event and it was just a fluke, but it's interesting to see how things have been ever since. So hope you guys like it. If you don't totally understand, cause this is incredibly cringe, but let us know what you think in the comments.And please. Don't forget to subscribe or give us a five star review on Apple podcasts. Cause we could really appreciate that.Malcolm Collins: And I'll try to add our discord link in the notes. When a couple of our fans have reached out and said like, started discord, I started a discord, blah, blah, blah. So like, we've got a standard discord for the channel now.I don't know how to like. Discord, like, it's not a platform that I'm super familiar with, but ISimone Collins: might eventually do Yeah, Microsoft Podcast started this for us, handed it off to us, and we're like, I don't know what to do, so IMalcolm Collins: might eventually do, like, live things there or something, we'll see, for like, you know, fans, and we'll see.Like, I don't know, I don't know [00:58:00] what to, I don't know why fans want this, but I guess when I see it doing interesting things, I will engage.Simone Collins: Yeah. But thank you all dealing with that. Hopefully not. If you found it excruciating, I find these things, I don't know. But I love you so much and I am really glad that I got the guy.I got the guy.Malcolm Collins: I'm so excited. It's so funny. We had a recent video. I don't know if it'll come out before or after this one, the anniversary video. I was watching the Film video from when I proposed to you and you said, I got him. I got him. That was something you said to yourself. You were so excited about that.Simone Collins: I definitely got the better end of this deal. I'm not gonna lie. So glad, glad I did. I love you, Malcolm. Love you too.Just pulling up the actual document that cut out all this stuff. So I won't be scrolling for a long time.Malcolm Collins: Oh, you did this already. I [00:59:00] really appreciate that. ISimone Collins: try. Can you give me a heads up, dude? That's that helps a lot, aMalcolm Collins: lot, actually. So I love your preparedness, Simone. You are really the most spectacular of wives.Simone Collins: You're so kind to me. Well, and you know, you are the dream husband that clearly I dreamt about. So, you know, you're amazing. So you start us off. Yeah. 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