Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

We discuss the differing experiences of men and women as they age, using the analogy of youth being a fresh caught tuna that must get "sold" before it rots. Women are anxious to preserve their youth yet often end up just showing it off. Men don't face the same ticking clock. We must fight this by venerating motherhood, not telling women to "feel good" about decay.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] if you didn't achieve, like I did achieve many of the things I was sort of. program to achieve at different parts of my life, right? But like, suppose you didn't get to sleep around a lot when you were younger. Right. If you then try to do that when you are middle aged or an old person. Which aSimone Collins: lot of people try to do.Malcolm Collins: You will not get the validation or the happiness or the satisfaction you would have gotten. It is really important to understand declaring bankruptcy on stages of your life and moving to the next stage of your life. It is like thatSimone Collins: declaring bankruptcy on certain life stages. It just wasn't going to happen.Malcolm Collins: And then you can find new ways to optimize. There are new ways to optimize and still live a life of value. If you realize that you're middle aged or you're old and you never had kids and you never had a family, there are new ways you can Fill the role of an older mentor in your community and stuff like that.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: Oh God. Yeah. When like, everyone was like, you can see every single pore that I have. Everything's horrible. When I [00:01:00] realized what we can do to fix my eyes is I just need to buy those like Naruto contact lenses or just like cinematic contact lenses, like just the just total black, you know, they're just completely black So for anybody wondering what she was talking about there my wife is wearing sunglasses right now because what's that thing that happened? You had like a bud Bessel burst in your eye. Not becauseSimone Collins: I look gnarly and disgusting. I mean more gnarly andMalcolm Collins: disgusting than normal. I think you look beautiful, but this brings us to our topic today.My wife has been Recently, you know, I was talking to her and she's like, I really do not like that. I feel like I'm beginning to look middle aged, you know, I am just my body. Yeah. And I was, it really sort of shocked me that this is still something that would be so concerning to her. The analogy I posted to Facebook, cause it got.a bunch of angry comments, as people can guess. And I think that they're really indicative of where we are as a [00:02:00] society. So what I said is, My wife has been getting worried about beginning to look middle aged.A woman pregnant with her fourth kid complaining about how her body looks to a devoted husband is like a fisherman with a pile of fish on the dock complaining about not having any worms. And of course people were like, and you know, some of my trans friends were like, Oh my gosh, you know, it really does matter that you're okay with your body.And here I am like, no. No, it doesn't matter that you're okay with your body. F**k your body. Your body is a tool that is meant to be used. And, and if you use it well, this is a really interesting thing. And I think it's an analogy I will use for my daughters for their bodies, right? The terrible,Young women in our society, it's like we as parents are giving them this really nice fish we caught like a tuna or something like that, we're like, go to the [00:03:00] market and get the best price you can for this fish.And you know, some women just come back with cum all over their tuna and then nobody wants to buy it. You know, nobody, nobody wants a tuna that, that people have had an orgy on, but that's not the only way you can I feel like the metaphorSimone Collins: is falling apart if that's what people areMalcolm Collins: That's not the core way or the only way you can f**k up this little routine.Okay? Okay. You go to the market and a lot of girls are coming back to their parents with a rotting tuna and saying, nobody wanted to give me a price that I thought it was worth, but look, I still got my tuna. The problem is, is that the tuna rots if you don't sell it. It is increasing in value with every second you haven't sold it.And this is the tragedy. Like, men go out there and they're all like, men have it so hard in our society. And I'm not gonna lie about all the unfairnesses of being a man. But [00:04:00] you're not dealing with this same ticking clock that women are dealing with.Simone Collins: Yeah, and it's not, it's not just appearance. It's, it's biology too.Like if one does want to have children. So even if one is totally like, yeah, appearance should be nothing. There's still this other functional limiting factor, which sucks.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And it creates this, this environment where we tell girls protect the tuna, protect the tuna, protect the tuna to the point where they forget the point.Was that the tuna was supposed to set them up for the next stage of life. They sell the tuna, then they open the fish store or whatever it is they're doing next. Right? The tuna wasn't the point. They're just supposed to protect the tuna on the way to the market. Sorry, you hate this analogy. Become a,Simone Collins: yeah, because everyone's goal is to become a fishmonger.Yeah, I mean, yeah, I, I, I hear you though. Yeah. And I, rotting fish is definitely a. A strong analogy when it comesMalcolm Collins: to yeah, I thought it had a certain. Well, and I also like the worm analogy, like being bemoaning that you don't have the [00:05:00] worm when you have the greater prize that the worm was meant to catch.And so a lot of people are like, well, my wife life, like my life as a woman is not about. Having kids, right? I'll come to you with this, I'll say. So therefore, well therefore what? You're going to get old no matter what you do. Right? And you do have certain advantages within many environments. Whether it's your workplace, or whether it's your you know, anything.Even just like generically, socially often, if you're an attractive woman. Now there are downsides to it. It actually can hurt you in female environments. And women will do things to hurt attractive women more. This is like... You've been shown in a bunch of studies, but generally you have an arbitrage opportunity.So then, as you age, regardless of whether or not you've sort of dedicated your life to the intergenerational game of building a family or anything else you can ask yourself, did I make use of this asset while it was available [00:06:00] to me? And if you did, then great! Okay, you, you did something that I think was pointless, but at least you did it well, you know, at least you actually utilized the asset while you had access to it.But what is completely feckless is not utilizing the asset at all in spending your entire life in veneration of a decaying asset. And how does this happen in a secular society? Why in our secular world do we end up venerating these decaying assets? Okay, okay, okay.Simone Collins: So let's, let's move to this fishmonger world, right?Okay. This is, this is a world then where on every social media platform, it is just people holding their freshly caught, shining, glittering, untouched tuna fish. And That's what people are rewarded for. And there are no, there's no glorification of being a fishmonger. There's no glorification of, of all of that [00:07:00] part of life.And so people will do everything they can to try to look like they've just caught a fresh tuna and some people will take their tuna and rather than sell it. They will have it turned into taxidermy and they'll walk around with their taxidermy tuna and hope that people don't realize that it's not there.And I can't blame them, right? Because you know, that that's, that's what society rewards. And some people will look at the taxidermy tuna and be like, wow, look at them. You know, like we'll have their, you know, they'll post their taxidermy tuna on social media and people will be like, I don't know. They seem.It's, I don't know. It doesn't look quite right, you know, but, you know, but they still try, you know,Malcolm Collins: and they still get attention. I love this taxidermy tuna because now I'm imagining these horrified taxidermy tumors with like the fake eyes and everything. Well, it's, it'sSimone Collins: not. And that's, that's what it looks like when you try to look like a 22 year old woman and you're 55 or you're 38 or whatever, if you're, you're 32 really.But, but then, you know, you're on the other side of this, which is where I'm sitting. I'm sitting at the fish monger desk. All right. [00:08:00] I don't have any tuna. And I'm looking out and I'm watching, you know, all these people walk by with their giant tuna glittering in the sun and I'm like, well, yeah, don't have, don't have any tuna.I don't.Malcolm Collins: Well, so this is the world and I, I like how you've gone deeper with this crazy analogy because I want to go deeper.Simone Collins: You're freaking it out. So I'm going to just.Malcolm Collins: Okay, so we live in fishmonger world, right? When you go on an online environment, when you go in, in, in secular media, you are in the fishmonger world.It's not just the people who are trying to sell tuna that are showing it off. It's the people who just bought tuna that are showing it off. It's, Oh, look at this fresh tuna I just bought with my life savings. Flapping around the tuna taking pictures of the tuna and then they begin to forget the purpose of the tuna marketplaceSimone Collins: Yeah, we just didn'tMalcolm Collins: friggin have a meal was to buy and sell the tuna, right?Yeah,Simone Collins: well and to eat tuna presumably, you know, it's a goodMalcolm Collins: thing about buying and selling women's body Yeah, it's to eventually [00:09:00] eat the tuna, right? Yeah, um Uh, what we, what we, what we are saying is in the same way that you can have a marketplace, like a marketplace for employees. Like there are human marketplaces all the time in our society.There is nothing vulgar about a, a human marketplace. What's interesting about the marriage marketplace is that you are trying to sell yourself a tunam for an equivalent, let's say something else, puppy. Or something, right? You are, you are trying to trade it for a specific other thing, which is a male of equivalent value to you.Well,Simone Collins: and, and more importantly, what you're trying to explain too, is that, Like, the human body is meant to be used, you know, the human body is meant for you know, doing different things at different phases of life. And we are sometimes more strong and sometimes more wise and sometimes, you know, various things in, in, in trying to do the same thing with that body all the time, but basically using your body is a good thing.You know, if you are aging. Because you are [00:10:00] having kids and raising them and whatnot, that's not something to be ashamed of, that means you're actually using your body for what it's meant for, right?Malcolm Collins: Yes and I would say that we live in this, like, the world around us, once you are successful in the...Fishmonger game. Once you have sold your fish and then gone home with the person you sold it to to eat it together, right? Like, ThisisSimone Collins: a weird world where someone buys your tuna and then you're It's a weird world, but I like the analogy, okay? With them for the rest of your life, then you start a fish shop together.You're thenMalcolm Collins: no longer Flogging fish, you no longer have the motivation to be showing how great your fish is. You no longer have the motivation to be showing how great a fish you just bought is. So you are no longer signaling into the world. So then if you look out your window, everyone is still shouting about fish, right?Because they're all desperately trying to sell theirs and it can create a world. And this is the core problem that we're dealing with where. How shiny a fish you just bought or how shiny a fish you just have you have is a [00:11:00] status symbol, right? And you begin to think, Oh, this is how status is judged in society.Because when I go and I buy a movie, right? Or when I look at ads, I'm going to see big shiny fish. And the reason why these fish are big and shiny on ads and in movies and everything like that is me as a guy, you know, this is seen. Throughout surveys on guys, most guys prefer a woman who's 23. Like, if you look, it's really funny women generally prefer a guy who's like a couple years older than them and then about their age and a little bit younger than them if they get older.Men, if you look, it's like always 23. No matter how old they are,23 is the age that they want. It's so simple, right?Simone Collins: It's so comforting.Malcolm Collins: Well, it's simple, but what it means is, that's because that's where, for a guy, you're gonna have the largest biological window to have as many kids as possible. Like, if you died, in my biology, and I was like, master of a tribe, or something like that, and I could choose any woman I wanted to, to be my next wife I would be evolutionarily rewarded for choosing a woman, near the beginning of her [00:12:00] reproductive window instead of a woman around my age, right?So my body is programmed to spend a little extra time staring at those and stuff like that. And so when people in the secular world, whether it's in movies or in ads or anything like that, utilize these they can very easily draw people's eyes much more than they can with women that have moved on to this next stage of their life, that have kids, that are being a good wife, etc.And, the reason I keep saying secular world, people might be like, what do you mean secular world versus religious world? Because some religions succumb to this after a while, but... Only the new, like, really soft iterations. The historic religions, which are usually, like, a religious and cultural tradition, typically have prohibitions against this, and typically venerate women for entering the motherhood phases of their life.Why do they do this and the secular world doesn't? It's because the secular world doesn't have any intergenerational reward mechanism, rewarding and punishing iterations of it. [00:13:00] I mean, it does now, they have very low fertility rates and it's going to disappear soon, but I mean, like, in a historic context, whereas most religious cultural traditions, the ones overly venerated youth that didn't venerate mothers, women wouldn't want to become mothers at the same rates as other cultural traditions around them, and therefore they were out competed and eventually stamped out so it's not like a moral reason why the religious cultural traditions venerate mothers and venerate this, this transition, but they do do it and it is useful.And it's something that I really worry about where you even, I mean, you are a sane woman and I, I think a totally logical woman. Well, and I'm also,Simone Collins: I, one thing that's important to note too, is I was never Someone whose attribute was beauty, right? So like I never I think this is uniquely hard for people who grew up being the beautiful one And who grew up having that as a currency and then they lose it So like this is not even something that i'm experiencing [00:14:00] Is severely because I never felt like I was the pretty one and I never was the pretty one Oh, you you always wanted to be old too.I always wanted to be old I always like my real age is 63 and that's when I will ultimately feel comfortable with myself maybe 62 but Yeah. So like, I think it's even harder, but even me, so even though I don't care about this s**t, even though I really look forward to being older and looking older.And even though I never was celebrated for looks or youth or beauty in the first place, I still regret all the little signs of aging that I see. And that's really crazy to me.Malcolm Collins: So, I wonder, how much of this do you think is a biological thing, like you just want to hide this so you can, I don't know, not visit yourSimone Collins: partner?Oh yeah, so some kind of instinct is kicking in because my body is saying, Whoa, lady, if you don't look youthful, your tribe is way more likely to kick you out if times get lean, right? Yeah, soMalcolm Collins: how much do you think is that versus how much do you think is sort of social conditioning and brainwashing?That's a good,Simone Collins: I mean, I, I, gosh, [00:15:00] it just never occurred to me before you brought it up that this might be a separate evolutionary thing,Malcolm Collins: but Oh, oh, final, final option. First, how much do you think is some genuine doubt that I will continue to find you attractive and desirable? Like, like, real logical doubt.Oh,Simone Collins: I, I think it's, I, I never thought about the evolutionary aspect of it, but I'm assuming that that has to be something at play here. Because if I Genuinely look forward to looking older, right? Like that's the look that I like. And I never felt beautiful, like beautiful and youthful in the first place.Then it has to be something more than that. So like, it's so tempting to just blame society to be like, well, despite all this, everything I see on Instagram is beautiful people and blah, blah, blah. But. In the end, maybe you're right. And so maybe it is like 80%, I would say 80%, um, evolutionary and then 20% [00:16:00] social, and then 0% concern about you.Because if we have, you know, three, almost four kids together, like we're pretty committed, we're pretty happy with each other. And also we have a relationship in which, frankly, if you found me unattractive and gross, like you would. Be super welcome to look for fun elsewhere, right? Like, so in the end, like, we have solutions for this that don't even threaten the relationship.So that's not a threat to me, though. It is, you know, disappointing. But it's not something that drives my action.Malcolm Collins: So this is interesting. With it being partially a biological instinct, that means we'll have to work extra hard to create an environment that helps our daughters fight this in themselves.This shame of aging. Doesn't itSimone Collins: only become an issue when people are older?Malcolm Collins: But they'll need to, I mean, I don't want my daughters to be racked with mental guilt. Like I think that some religious cultures do a good job of venerating mothers. Yeah. So much that it. [00:17:00] Overrides the biological sort of shame ofSimone Collins: aging.Right. Because if, if one is constantly reassured that like, this is a good thing, this is a good thing, this is a good thing, then you think that there's less risk.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I really have to treat my wife well, I suppose, which is one of these reasons why these fertility strategies that some you know, pronatalists pursue, which I think do not venerate the women who are having their children are going to be unsuccessful.There, there is one iteration of them which can be successful, which is the men who just use a surrogate and then raise the kid entirely, and I know some men who do this and whatever, right? Like, that can work. But then there's others Where they'll have a number of, of serial partners and that, that can, I think, cause daughters to be less interested and then sons to do something that, that pushes their daughters out of the cultural group, which isn't a great thing.Yeah, ISimone Collins: mean, that kind of culture basically [00:18:00] says, like, I am not going to, to women, it says, I'm not going to be. Invested in as a long term asset. I'm going to be dropped as soon as I age. So either I'm not allowed to look like I'm aging or I shouldn't bother investing in men at all. And what we were just looking at some other unrelated to this data that really demonstrated even more.So the extent to which women are really the bottlenecks on how many kids a family has that it's, it's more like the upbringing and exposure that young women get throughout their lives that influences how many kids they have, whereas like men. Their experiences. It doesn't really matter. I think it really comes down to who they marry.It's so weird.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I've even seen this one. And I think the vanity of women is especially important. I know a number of families where the man went into the relationship planning to have like five kids, the woman got to like kid number three and said, I'm stopping now. And that's the most horrifying thing.I canSimone Collins: imagine. Yeah. Also like these are marriages where the women came [00:19:00] in saying, yeah, I also want five kids. Yeah. And they're like, it's hard. Yeah, so this is not one in which the women hadn't signed up for that to begin with, which also happens, right? There are many marriages where like there's, there are mismatched expectations and because couples didn't communicate, that's a problem.But these are ones in which literally people entered the marriage of like, I'm going to have seven, I'm going to have five.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. .No, but like you shouldn't be shaming somebody for focusing on their body and feeling comfortable with their body, right? And feeling happy with their body. anD this just really got to me because we absolutely should be shaming that. I mean, secular society doesn't shame that because the, the urban monoculture, right?It tells people do whatever you want, whenever you want and be affirmed for whoever you want to be. And that's how it attracts people. So of course, within its set of cultural values, it's not going to tell people that they should ever really feel bad about any decision they make about themselves or about any.You know, a way they want to perceive themselves. However it's doing really bad fertility rate [00:20:00] rise, and it's doing really bad if you look at rates of mental health issues, like horrible mental health issues that do not exist in the more conservative culture. You know, there's the famous statistic of what is it, progressive white women under the age of 30, like over half of them have a serious mental health issue.This is not great. Like this is not a culture that is functioning. And what I would ask is, is I do not think there is a logical basis for your body not being something that you were meant to spend. By that, what I mean is God gifted you your body to play a part in this intergenerational cycle, right?Like, be fruitful and multiply, right? Like, that was a commandment if you're taking this from a religious perspective. And very few religions, due to cultural evolution, are going to say that that is not the purpose of, of One's body, but then evolution, suppose you're being totally secular about this, well, evolution also wants you to have the maximum number of surviving offspring, and it gave you all of the signals to show your youth.To signal to [00:21:00] potential partners with the goal of having kids eating the fish, right? It's not about just showing people the fish, but this is so interesting when I think about the fish analogy in this context, because It reminds me of the way we now relate to food as a society, where there's so many stores, you know, and especially in cultures that are deeper in the social media abyss than our own, like Japan or Korea or stuff like that, where you can go and like the restaurants are really optimized around being able to take pictures and post them to social media.Ah,Simone Collins: right. Well, even in the United States, totallyMalcolm Collins: in the United States. There's some restaurants that do this more than the food itself, right? More than the experience of eating. And this is because Our society has become warped like this. You know, a lot of young people, they will spend more time bragging or trying to put into the world, you know, how great they are at sex or whatever, than actually being good and getting partners and everything [00:22:00] like that.Right? We see this perversion throughout a society in which our value is, To some extent signal to others and thus in part to ourselves through what we can communicate within environments in which there is no validation happening. By that what I mean is historically, it was harder to do this. You know, you could like, uh, say, Oh, look at this lovely snack I'm having, but other people could go to the same restaurant and be like, that place is gross, right?But in an online environment. It's much harder to do that. And so people begin to genuinely believe the signal itself is what is worth living their life for. So that's, that's one area of corruption. But then the other area of corruption comes from being too deep within the urban monoculture and actually believing what it tells you, that if you live a life doing whatever makes you happy and, and being validated for whoever you desire to be and however you desire to perceive [00:23:00] yourself, that if you do that, you will achieve mental health and happiness.Even, I think, if you take like an objective secular perspective, and you're just looking at the psychological research, you would immediately be like, Oh, this is like a perfect way to, like, psychologically f**k someone up. Telling them, just chase whatever makes you happy in the moment, all the time, and be affirmed for however you want to see yourself.Simone Collins: Well, but aren't you also saying that you would encourage cultures that make people feel affirmed for not looking like they're 23 years old when they're no longer 23 years old? Yeah! It's okay to feel good about how you look. And I mean, part of me, when I look at comments like that, I think, well, yeah, but it's going to be a lot easier to feel good about how you look when you're not trying to pull something off that you can't pull off.One thing I wanted to ask you though, is do you feel any. Like, qualms or concerns [00:24:00] about aging? I mean, you look better every day. I will be clear about that. It's deeply unfair. However, you are getting more gray hairs. You know, there, there, there are signsMalcolm Collins: of aging. This is a really interesting thing because it's how I relate to nostalgia.I'll often think about things I used to do, you know, back in the day when I used to sleep around a lot or you know, the little games I played back then. Think about sleeping with women. Like when I look back and I am nostalgic about things I did in the past, it is not the sex I'm nostalgic about. It's the courting process,Simone Collins: but that was also really hard and stressful.So what'sMalcolm Collins: hard and stressful in a fun way, you would go on a date and you wouldn't know how things were going. And there was, and I reflect on this, like when I'm watching anime, we're like young love is courting and everything like that, but I look at this through the lens and was a. Pleat comfort was the fact that that was part of a previous stage of my life.Oh, so justSimone Collins: that it's over. Like the fact that it's over is what makes you feel nostalgic.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, to put it another way, it would be silly to be [00:25:00] nostalgic about, you know, trying to pierce the egg when I was a sperm. Right. Or the egg being pierced when I was an egg, right? Like I was basically a completely different type of biological entity back then.My entire optimization function, the way my, the things that made me happy were different. The stage of my life was different. Everything was different and I can. Take solace in the things I did get to experience during those stages of life, and the things I didn't get to experience. There were types of rebellion that I decided not to indulge in, because I thought they were too risky to my long term goals.And I can see people in movie engage in those types of rebellion, whether it's tattoos, or drugs, or whatever. And I mean, I did do, I guess, a lot of drugs, but not Specific drugs that were addictive. So, I never really indulged in that sort of stuff, and in that culture in a way where I can go back to that.Like, as an adult, if I went and tried that stuff, it just wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be that experience of, of genuinely doing this in an [00:26:00] experimental time of my life. And I think that nostalgia for previous life states can be a positive emotion when you understand that those are things that you'll never get to experience again.And it can be a negative emotion when you try to recreate them. Well,Simone Collins: I think it's also a problem when, when you actually really didn't enjoy that thing and you couldn't do it anymore. Like let's say that you really enjoyed something really, really super athletic and then you aged and you couldn't. Do it anymore because literally your body couldn't take that kind of wear and tear.Although here's the thing is I don't feel that, that, that that kind of nostalgia, regret, whatever is not what I feel as I age, because first off, like if I actually were super crazy attractive and if people gave me a lot of attention for that, I would feel one deeply uncomfortable because I don't want the attention and two, like.I would also very much not respect the people who were attracted to me, because if someone just likes [00:27:00] me because I'm pretty, that's gross. Like, I just, I would find that pretty aversive, and it would make me very deeply uncomfortable. Like, I was just listening to someone talking about host clubs in Japan where you have, Either a male or female like professional essentially fawning over you and being like, Oh, you're so pretty.Oh, you're so smart. And I was thinking, Oh my God, I would like pay money to not do that. So it's also not that I regret not being able to have that experience. So there is really something different going on with women.Malcolm Collins: And what do you want to be affirmed for?Simone Collins: For achieving things for, for getting stuff done.Like remember when, when, when I first sort of taught you how to compliment me in a way that would make me really happy, it was never to say something like, Oh, you're pretty, or you're so smart. So never to be like, Oh, you are so attribute, but rather, Oh, X thing that you did was so clever, or I see you worked really hard on that.And it's amazing how this is paying off that kind of thing. So like compliment actions and moments rather than. apparent fundamental attributes. But I do think that if we were to get to the bottom of [00:28:00] like, let's just solving societal problems with women not being comfortable with aging. I don't even think it's about like reigning praise on them being beautiful and wonderful in whatever life stage they are like affirming them in their current body position because I don't even think that's it.And I don't really know.Malcolm Collins: Well, okay. So here's what I think it is. Okay. You were talking about how, well, you've got to affirm women for different life stages and optimizing them. Yeah.When I was younger, there were multiple optimizations I, I looked for in a woman, whether it's like the perfect goth woman or nerd woman or like artsy chic, like there are different ways a woman can optimize even within that youthful state to look. Yeah. Breedable, I guess you could say. What's the word these days?That must have been breedable, right? Like, what I was interested in. And I think that there are optimization functions that are valid within our society as a person ages. I think that's what we're seeing with cottagecore, right? Like, cottagecore is thirst trap, but not thirsting over a [00:29:00] woman's body, but over the environment she has created around her.Oh. So, cottagecore is thirst trap Martha Stewart. Yeah. It is. An environment where a woman is cultivated you know, of a house and everything like that, or a family. And then I'd also say there's like, PrepCore, right? Which might be closer to, but we're like a cross between Cottagecore and PrepCore, right?Where you have these like, Christmas photos and stuff like that. Where, when you share these, I mean, if People go to your Instagram account, what's it handles? Simone H. Collins? Yeah.Simone Collins: I haven't posted there recently. I need to.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, it's basically a thirst trap account, but it's a thirst trap account for like loving your husband and having kids.What were you saying, Simone? For wholesomeness. Right? anD, and it's not going to get as many likes because, you know, you're not appealing to the same audience, but I do think that you are signaling an ideal that you have achieved at this stage of your life that one [00:30:00] day you are going to have to let go as well.You know, one day it will be grandmother core and I'm sure people will come up with like granny core and stuff like that in the future. One really funny thing is I was, I've been watching adventure time with my kids. And there's this one character on it. I mean, I've seen it before, but I never contextualized astree trucks, who's like this old sweet lady, but who's also like always talking about her former, like basically sexual escapades and stuff like that. My adventurous side Instincts tell me to seduce that tentacle critter with my womanly charms and elephant prowess. What are you doing here, Tree Trunks? I'm helping you by tempting this guy with my body. It's not a guy, Tree Trunks! It's a snake armed ruby brain beast! Even Brain Beasts get lonely, Finn. Jake! You were supposed to watch her! She got past me, man. I tried to stop her, but she overpowered me. I did it! I helped! I'm the sexiest adventurer [00:31:00] in the world.Mr. Fire Duty? Yes, Captain Tree Trunks. Mr. Fire Duty, pick up that mop, you bug.Captain Tree Trunks! We're approaching a ship off the port bow! Good! Drown all but the tightest man.Uh, I'm Wyatt, your new secretary. These flowers are from Robot Body Mo. Uh, again? Throw those in the trash.I'm sorry I didn't trust you. I just know you've had a lot of adventures in the past, and things are kind of boring now. It's true, I sometimes miss those wild times, but back then I couldn't even tell the difference between a good adventure and a bad one. I was just a leaf in the wind, blown about by my whims, but now I'm on solid [00:32:00] ground.Malcolm Collins: And that's, associated with old age and I suspect our kids will grow up associating that with old age because so much of the future generations I think are going to move away from that lifestyle and only will this like broken older generation be these 80 year olds talking about all the sex they used to have whereas Gen Z today I think is just looking for a wholesome relationship.A lot of them at least the ones that I see that look like they're going to have kids. A final thing I know when I'm talking about life stages and like just being able to recognize and appreciate that I cannot relive those things and I just need to be happy for the game I was playing when I was playing it, I'd almost argue it's like a post game where like the game is switching the score that it's judging you on.Yeah. Is that if you didn't achieve, like I did achieve many of the things I was sort of. program to achieve at different parts of my life, right? But like, suppose you didn't get to sleep around a lot when you were younger. Right. If you then try to do that when you are middle aged or an old person. Which aSimone Collins: lot of people try to do.Malcolm Collins: You [00:33:00] will not get the validation or the happiness or the satisfaction you would have gotten. It is really important to understand declaring bankruptcy on stages of your life and moving to the next stage of your life. It is like thatSimone Collins: declaring bankruptcy on certain life stages. It just wasn't going to happen.Malcolm Collins: And then you can find new ways to optimize. There are new ways to optimize and still live a life of value. If you realize that you're middle aged or you're old and you never had kids and you never had a family, there are new ways you can. Fill the role of an older mentor in your community and stuff like that.No, it's important that you understand, and this is especially important with the older mentor role is that. Your goal is to actually be useful within your community and not masturbate the feeling of being an older mentor, which some people I remember when I was young, I'd get these people who would like, try to like, forcefully mentor me by that.I mean, it's like, give me advice that like, clearly had they hadn't. thought about whether that advice was still useful in the world, or how to deliver it to a young person, or [00:34:00] how to help the young person in their goals just sort of masturbating this self image as an older mentor. So it's important within any of these life stages, it's the same with being a parent.Like, you could do the wholesome preppy prepcore, right, where you are using your children to feel like you are... The perfect parent. And so you are focused on how they appear in pictures, how they appear in et cetera, right? Like how you're thought of by your community, rather than remembering that this is just as hollow as walking around with that rotting fish or taxidermying that fish.The point of the fish is to be eaten. The point of being a parent is to give your kids a good childhood and raise them to be emotionally healthy and efficacious adults. It is not. To look like a good parent, the purpose of being a mentor is not to think of yourself as a mentor or by seen by your community as a mentor, it's to help young people, right?Always remember that there is the taxidermy iteration of life, and there is the actual iteration of life, [00:35:00] the actual being an efficacious member of your community, and your biology will reward you for the true version, and it will punish you for the incorrect version. What I mean is you may be venerated by your community.You may be. liked by a lot of people on Tik Tok or whatever, but the happiness you gain from that will always be hollow and evanescent and eat at your soul. You know, a soul burns on a bonfire of vanity. And that is true.Simone Collins: I think another thing too, in terms of like giving Encouraging our family, kids, daughters, especially to have healthy views about this is I think the way that we'll say like tropes of warriors in the past talked about battle scars is probably a really good way to look at things like you don't see warriors in a lot of like, and again, these are all just character tropes.This isn't like a sample of real people that I know about. But you don't see them complaining about like, oh, you [00:36:00] know, like. My face is all scarred or like my like pinky fingers gone, you know, it's like, Oh, I lost this on this thing, you know, like it shows signs of achievement and maybe if we instead encourage or contextualize, I shouldn't say encourage if we actually contextualize.Signs of aging as signs of a life lived properly and well, and also values well aligned, like not investing money in plastic surgery when you could invest in your children's education or something like that that, that, that being seen as something to be proud of the same way that a warrior shows off his battleMalcolm Collins: scars.Well, and I can't imagine, I mean, imagine being the type of person who invests in plastic surgery rather than your children's education.Simone Collins: A lot of people do when you consider how much these procedures cost. There are many, many, many, many parents who are, you know, implicitly, because they're not putting that money towards something else.[00:37:00] investing in their looks over that. And often it doesn't look good in the end. Often it gets botched in the end and they have to take fillers and get dissolved, get them dissolvedMalcolm Collins: to get rid of them. Taxidermy looks like taxidermy, right? You, you don't have your actual dog, you know, yeah. Reminds me of that Dumb and Dumber scene.Sold my dead bird to a blind kid? Lloyd! Lloyd! What are you? Petey didn't even have a head!Harry, I took care of it.Pretty bird. Yeah, can you say pretty bird? Pretty bird. Yes, pretty bird. Pretty bird.Tomorrow on A Current Affair, inside the home of the Menendez Brothers attorney. And next, we'll be back in a minute with the heartbreaking story of the blind Rhode Island boy who was duped into buying [00:38:00] a dead parakeet. I just thought he was real quiet.Malcolm Collins: That's not a bird, right? That is the weird thingSimone Collins: about plastic surgery is like, there are some plastic surgery looks that I now associate with age because I only like old people use it. And only old people have that kind of facial structure, like the puffy cheeks, the puffy lips.Like I associate it with. A sign of, of, of middle age or being elderly, which is super interesting. YouMalcolm Collins: know what I love is when we get plastic surgery that makes you look better at being your age. Like when you're 60, if you don't look like the perfect granny, you're like, no, no, no, no. I want, I don't want to look younger.I want to look like aSimone Collins: cooler granny. Yeah, like I will, I will probably bleach my hair to make it all white. Instead of just having gray hair,Malcolm Collins: perfect example of the correct way to alter your appearance toSimone Collins: lean into it. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I I can't wait for my white hair. My family has a great genetic trait where we get pure white hair at [00:39:00] a pretty young age.So jealous. You've seen it, and our hair doesn't, like, we don't decrease the amount of hair we have. Yeah, it staysSimone Collins: thick and full, and it just gets gorgeous and white, and I hate you. I hate you so much. It's not fair.Malcolm Collins: Hey, I'm looking forward to you being a granny, because I know you're going to be the sassiest mo f*****g granny ever,Simone Collins: and I love it.I am going to love it. Maybe it's this awkward transition. I loveMalcolm Collins: who you were when I met you, and I love who you're going to be when you're an 80 year old woman, and don't you forget that. I'm never going to say, like, Oh, Simone, I'm so worried about these changes that are happening to your body because of fourth kid that you know, you're producing extra blood and you got this blood vessel pop.And you're like,Simone Collins: no, I was just listening about some Korean divorce in which the husband would get sex workers who looked like the younger version of the wife. And oh man, like that hurts, you know, like, I don't even know if that hurts. That's kind of sweet. I don't know. I don't know. It'sMalcolm Collins: I, he didn't leave the wife and he still liked the idea of [00:40:00] banging a younger version of her.He probably, this is the thing that you're forgetting. He probably was imagining the people he was banging other than his wife were hisSimone Collins: wife. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess that's sweeter than going for a completely different look. But still I,Malcolm Collins: I understand. Also, you got to keep in mind that aging happens differently for different ethnicities.With white people, it's more of a, gradual change as they get older, whereas with Asian people, they often undergo especially Asian women's sort of sudden transformations between life stages, which I think is a blessing because you know what life stage you're at.Are you at Asian granny stage or are you at Asian vixen stage?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, andSimone Collins: like vixen stage somehow lasts forever and thenMalcolm Collins: Oh, it lasts forever and then immediately you transform into like a short granny. Yeah, I don't, ISimone Collins: really wonder what's going on with that phenomenon. Of like, you [00:41:00] really don't see this other transition. You don't see middle age. It's, I, I don't understand it.I don't understand it.Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I'm fine with it. But, but, but it, I, I mean, except, and it might make it easier for them to accept when they're granny.Simone Collins: Yeah. To just be like, oh yeah. Cause yeah, I think it's that, it's that, that weird interstitial period where you don't really. You, you can't pull off any look.You can't pull off old and you can't pull off young. So what are you anymore? Well,Malcolm Collins: I think a core thing that you can do is look forward to who you're going to be next. Look forward to being the old lady, which you do. Yeah, I do. But you just never look forward to being the mom. And because of that, you're sort of struggling with this stage transition because you didn't know it was one of the stages to look forward to.Simone Collins: Well, I only ever knew my mom in her middle age, like she died before she could get old and I never knew her when she was super young, so I only ever knew her hating her body because she hated her middle aged [00:42:00] body just like I do. And. Yeah. So maybe I just like, see, this is like some permanent purgatory, but it will end, it will end and then I'll, and then I'll get old and wrinkly and then I'll be so happy.It'll be great.Malcolm Collins: ISimone Collins: love you so much. I love you too, Malcolm. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

The podcast discusses the economic dynamism of immigrant founders in Silicon Valley. It explores the issues of racism and ethnocentrism within political parties. The complexities of immigration are highlighted, emphasizing the hardships and sacrifices made by different immigrant groups. The impact of the Hispanic vote and immigration concerns on conservatives is explored. The importance of perceiving and differentiating immigrant groups based on economic productivity is emphasized.

We discuss the disturbing trend of people being taught to resent and blame their parents. This toxic attitude promoted in media and psychology isolates kids from families that sacrifice everything for them. Malcolm reads excerpts praising parents from his ancestor's book showing the stark contrast - people back then were grateful despite immense hardship. We must fight cultural forces manipulating younger generations and regain the wisdom to properly judge good parenting.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So I'll, I'll read a little excerpt he wrote here at the end of this book he wrote about his parents life and his life. The little story I have told about my parents and their way of life and their children seems to me as rather poorly told.For as good a basis as I had for writing the story, I do not suppose that any man is prouder of his ancestors and all of their descendants than I. If I had been giving an order to someone to supply me with parentage and with brothers and sisters, I would have ordered the very same parents I had, and all the brothers and sisters I had. in order to get this education, he would take these odd jobs, like digging irrigation ditches for people.Or doing fences for people and then he take this money and he would use it to pay for like first grade, right? And he would do every he would pay for it like 23 months at a time. Maybe even a few weeks at a time. Wherever he would get any sort of a cash windfall.Which is very different, you know, when you think about how hard these people's lives were and how much they sacrificed, you know, how much gratitude they had for their [00:01:00] lives. Why is it these people today who live these indolent lives where the state gives them education, where the state gives them everything, you know, where they're not, yeah, what, why, why do they feel this way?You know, why do they feel this level of hatred and entitlement? And I think A key answer here is they're taught toWould you like to know more?Simone Collins: First, I want to tell a little story about you as a parent. So, , one, you've been like totally stepping up over the past eight days cause I have really bad pneumonia, fever, chills, pain. Like this is the worst. I'm finally on medication for it. But you've been really stepping it up with the kids, but then I just discovered like also what you deal with, with like routine kids stuff that we have this, this like routine at night where I, I take our infant Titan or I guess she's like a.Twaddle her now. And I take care of her. I give her a bath. I like handle her. But you take the boys after we give them their bath and after dinner [00:02:00] and they go up to your bedroom and hang out with you and like they watch the little iPads and the educational videos you've queued up for them and you watch.something or play a game. What are you playing now? You really like thatMalcolm Collins: Warhammer game? Oh, Rogue Trader. It's fantastic. I like it more than Baldur's Gate, to be honest. It is, it is fantastic. It's a Warhammer fantasy game and I'm obviously love the universe.Simone Collins: Yeah. So, so you, you do that. And I just assumed like most of the times when I peek in the boys are sitting there, you know, well, always Octavian is under the covers hidden somewhere.The little kid reading a book with a flashlight at night, Torsten is sitting there, like, on top of the bed. Totally normal. Everyone's kind of doing their thing. But I can kind of now, like, I take a shower after I Get Titan in order and I can see you from the shower if I leave the bathroom door open and I was watching as our son, Torsten, repeatedly crawl up Malcolm's back and then just began pulling on his hair just until he was [00:03:00] like, Maybe like move his shoulders a little bit.Malcolm would, and then, you know, our kid tour scene would go tumbling off and immediately start climbingMalcolm Collins: with hisSimone Collins: tablet. Yeah. Like whacking you, pulling your hair. And I'm just like, and there you are just patiently. Playing your game. LikeMalcolm Collins: this goes to our parenting philosophy or a lot of people would be like, why aren't you, you know, why isn't your son better behaved?And I was like, because we believe not in breaking a child's will, but in stoking their will, the most valuable thing a child has their will. And insofar as they're just goofing around and being boys, like we don't care. And, and, and with tablets actually, and we'll do a longer episode on this. Cause I think this is a really interesting point is people know that generally.Studies show that screen time is not good for kids and they're like, why would you give your kids any screen time? Right? What they also haven't done is look at the effect size of these studies. Yes, while it is generally agreed across studies that screen time is not good for kids, the effect size, like when people talk about like what's going on with general, it's typically below 5%.It's like 3 to 5 percent on most measures, [00:04:00] whether it's behavioral measures or academic accomplishment measures. And not all the studies are even aligned. You know, you'll see I think the broad probably two thirds are on the it's not good depending on how it's deployed and how kids engage with it. But if you are a parent and, you know, how much easier it is to sometimes employ screens with preloaded, like, educational shows as part of your parenting technique and then you look at the studies that look specifically at educational programs for kids and see the effect size there.And he started negative effect sizes. So, Very small. You'd be like, oh, yeah, obviously this is the right thing to do. And so much of parenting today has come to this sort of like, extra curated. Every child needs an adult. They're giving them this perfect environment all the time. And it's like, well, of course, you're going to be low fertility if you're doing that.Instead of being like, you know, the tiger cub style parenting, which we've talked about in another video which is, I think it was when like, well, if you raise your kids, like Jordan Peterson suggests, there'll be simps which is to say, you know, we picked this up from a safari, you know, and, and Simone was talking about [00:05:00] how the little kids like pulling on me really reminds me of, of seeing the little tiger cubs in the safari, like playing onSimone Collins: their parents, not, not tigers, just.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the lion, lion you know, like biting at the, the adult lion and stuff like that. And then just knowing that they get bopped if they cross the line, but the adult, we'll let them know and growl at them first to let them know. But anyway this all comes to this wider phenomenon that happened to me recently.So I discovered yet another book about one of my family members which happens sometimes. That's when I found it was like publicly available online about a. One of my ancestors named V. A. Collins so this would be my great, great grandfather. And he was in between the ancestor who had all the relatives in the Free State of Jones, and who was the leader of the Jayhawkers.So this was the anti Confederacy. rebellion group that was like anti slavery, anti confederacy rebellion group that was in Texas during the Civil War. So that was his dad.And then he, this guy won state office, so he was a state representative in Texas that got a bunch of laws [00:06:00] changed around actually, I have the notes right here.What did he get changed while he was in office? In 1913, he wrote and introduced the worksmen compensation law because the measure was regarded as somewhat radical. He couldn't get a co sponsor. So he handled it alone. He also introduced the law, providing an 8 hour day for work on public projects. Oh, he also got the law that prohibited child labor in Texas passed, where he, he, he led that one and the law that limited work hours and I think it was some other one tied to like work hour links and stuff like that, all stuff that broadly now we're like, oh, this was all really obvious, like good stuff.So those are things he fought for. His son was actually the one, we have another video. called, like, The True Story of O Brother Where Art Thou that in large part inspired the events of O Brother Where Art Thou, but they mix up some characters and stuff like that. But he would be like a, a version of Pappy O'Daniel from the, the show The Politician, but also, butGreat state [00:07:00] of Mississippi the only man in this great state who ain't a music lover is my esteemed opponent in the upcoming Homer Stokes. Yeah, well, there he tastes. It sounded to me like he was harboring some kind of hateful grudge against the Soggy Bottom Boys on account of their rough and rowdy past.Looks like, looks like, Homer Stokes is the kind of fellow who wants to cast the first stone. You folks ought to forgive and forget Christian.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, watch the episode if you want to see a full explanation of that.But what really struck me about this guy's writing was the way he wrote about his family, which was so similar. So I'm sort of dealing with this conundrum. I don't know if it's [00:08:00] genetic the way I feel about my family or the way I relate to things like gratitude or if it's that society has changed.And I just have some sort of like old iteration of, of relating to this because when I read it, it felt so different from anything I see in media at all today. So I'll, I'll read a little excerpt he wrote here at the end of this book he wrote about his parents life and his life. The little story I have told about my parents and their way of life and their children seems to me as rather poorly told.For as good a basis as I had for writing the story, I do not suppose that any man is prouder of his ancestors and all of their descendants than I. If I had been giving an order to someone to supply me with parentage and with brothers and sisters, I would have ordered the very same parents I had, and all the brothers and sisters I had.There would not have been a change made if I had been making the order before I had known them as I have. I think our family is one of the most remarkable families I have ever known. In the first place, I [00:09:00] had a very remarkable father and a very remarkable mother. They might have been distinguishable in some respects, but they were both endowed with the character and intelligence that made them superior in my estimation.My father was a man of remarkable intellect. Of course, taking my estimate for his intellect, he was first among all people I knew. My mother was also well endowed intellectually, but the greatness of her character even exceeded her intelligence. I do not say that my father was faulty in any regard in the rearing of the family, but he seemed to be less adapted to the high responsibility of raising a family than was my mother.In providing for a family, one thing very essential to consider is making proper provision in the mental direction and physical care. My father was entirely adequating a family mentality, but he was rather inefficient in managing his affairs to promote their great physical care. I have often thought that their contrast in character and intelligence was just a contrast that a couple should have to [00:10:00] raise a great family.And if I needed to Proof of that fact, the family they raised would be sufficient evidence to prove to me that nature made just the right contrast in giving us our parentage. Ours is a great family, not in the large number of members of the family, but also in their characteristics. Of course we would admit that we are just common people, but that does not remove the elements of greatness in family character.I do not know how many descendants my father and mother have living, how many have passed on. But I have lived long enough to know every descendant of theirs from the time of their firstborn onto the present, and I saw was a great deal of pride that I have never known a criminal in the family.I do not mean to say that we are faultless people and that possibly some of our family have not been guilty of violating small, immaterial rules of government, but I've never known or heard of one of them being called before the courts to answer for a crime by society, which he lives.I thank God for our heritage. Yours and mine[00:11:00] and for our parentage, he gave us and then after that in the book, there's this huge section that is just page after page. I don't do like it in the YouTube video here of just all of the living offspring that he knew about because he's 11 kids are 14 kids.All of them had 14 kids. Always the same woman, of course who, who, you know, So, enormous amount of work there and just seeing this level of reverence for family, you know, which is something we don't have, and if you read the story, you also see this level of reverence was not necessarily because his family was incredibly rich or anything, in fact, they were, they were very poor, he did an inventory at one part of the story of all of the things they owned and it was the hut that his dad had built, And a, a spinning thing for weaving.I forget what those are called. A spinning wheel? A spinning wheel. And that was it. And, and he actually bemoans a bit of all of the investments his father could have made if he was a bit [00:12:00] more ambitious a person in that regards. But he, he clearly, you know, does not hold that against him. He believes that all of the events of his life were necessary to make him into the person he was and his siblings into the people they became.And I read that and something that really struck me is that's exactly the way I feel. You know, while I may have had some trials in my childhood, if I had had anything else, I wouldn't be who I am today, and I absolutely love who I am today. And if I could choose from all of the humans I had ever met, and I mean this very seriously, like, individually, when I look at my parents, I'm like, there's this thing they could fix, or this thing that could have been better, or my brother, you know, there's this thing.If I could choose anyone in the world as alternatives for them, no, not a single human being, I would choose instead of them. And, and when did we start thinking like, I hate my parents. Like this has become like a big thing in society today. OrSimone Collins: my parents traumatized me, or my parents were narcissistic, et cetera, etMalcolm Collins: cetera.Yeah, yeah. I mean, and [00:13:00] his father, one of the stories there was that he had gotten a bunch of pigs, right? And he had raised these pigs. And then his father decided that he needed to go and slaughter all of his pigs so that they could sell them to pay for the family's yearly expenses. And this He doesn't, like, say anything negative about his father, but this was right before he stopped living with the family.So this was clearly a very traumatizing event for him. But it's also interesting the way that he approached it. It was traumatizing to him because They would have been worth so much more the next year. He just, Oh, so itSimone Collins: wasn't the act of slaughtering a very intelligent animal. It was, it was the active, it was the economicMalcolm Collins: inefficiency of it all.They're sellingSimone Collins: your Bitcoin when it's low. Oh my God.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes. He should have been able to make that economic choice. And then act on that choice. And also speaking about the economics, another thing that really. Surprised me about this story was I had a very different picture of what it was like living in the old west [00:14:00] back then.So he was obsessed with educating himself. This was his, you know, every he. No, this guy was, if that's what's educating you. Oh, the author, okay. Not, not his dad. His dad was not, his dad was all involved in the revolution stuff and was known as being a really famous anti like big government guy, anti big corporation guy you know, as one of the leading, the guy who wrote the leading Texas socialist newspaper at the time wrote of him, May the Collins bloodline pour over this great country like clear water bringing socialism, was it?How far have we moved from that? But I think if you look at what he meant by socialism, it was the type of things that you know, V. A. Was pushing it, you know, like no child, like child labor laws and like restrictions on work hours, which are all things that we broadly support. So I think that it's, you know, very in line with our existing political philosophy.It's just that the powers that be have changed. But anyway and this is during the time of, you know, robber barons and all that. Right. So. So, his father was completely consumed with that and, and [00:15:00] helping you want to get a broad idea of what his life was like the movie The Free State of Jones, did a fairly good job because he ran the equivalent project in Texas and his brother was one of the founding members of that and 15 of his relatives were of the 50 founding members of that.So that was basically his family back in Georgia before he migrated.I'm tired of it. You, me, all of us. We're all out there dying so they can stay rich. Tax collectors coming around here, taking everything. We have nothing for the winner. Girls, you know how to shoot one of these? It's quite normal you got there. Last time I checked the gun, don't care who's pulling the trigger.You know they shoot deserters, don't you? Hello. They runaways? They shoot. They're gonna die so they can get rich selling their cotton. That's why we lift them. No man ought to tell another man what he's gotta live [00:16:00] for, or what he's got to die for. I don't have the patience of five or six deserters hiding out in a swamp.Justhang him.See anything? He's out there. He won't miss this.This fight's for our children, and their children's children. From this day forward, we declare the land north of Pascagoula Swamp to be a free state of Jones. They're poor farmers. Deserters. Who, frankly, sir, don't have much to lose. The winds [00:17:00] is shifting. And you can't fight it this time. There's plenty left to fight for.Malcolm Collins: But, but so he wasn't that interested in education. Now his son was so interested in education, which was really interesting to learn about because he would go out. And, and in order to get this education, he would take these odd jobs, like digging irrigation ditches for people.Or doing fences for people and then he take this money and apparently there wasn't like public school or anything and he would use it to pay for like first grade, right? And he would do every he would pay for it like 23 months at a time. Maybe even a few weeks at a time. Wherever he would get any sort of a cash windfall.And then he would use that in order to, by the time he completed first grade, he then went to the, you know, far away to the local state house to get certification so that he could teach first grade so he can be around school materials all the [00:18:00] time and just spend all the time educating himself.Which is very different, you know, when you think about how hard these people's lives were and how much they sacrificed, you know, how much gratitude they had for their lives. Why is it these people today who live these indolent lives where the state gives them education, where the state gives them everything, you know, where they're not, yeah, what, why, why do they feel this way?You know, why do they feel this level of hatred and entitlement? And I think A key answer here is they're taught to so I mentioned this theory a number of times. I think a big part of it actually came out of Freudian psychology to begin with. I think this is where we begin to see this shift, because Freudian psychology, what's the joke?You're laying on the couch. They're like, what did your parents do wrong? Right? But this has come back into psychology. It was pushed out of psychology for a while because everybody Realize how evil it was, which you're essentially doing is like all cults. You are separating a person from their support network and then replacing that support network and saying, okay, now you have this problem, this trauma, and that to relieve it, you need to come see me.A person's [00:19:00] closest support network is always going to be their birth culture and their family. And so they, in, in. Insinuate this trauma into a person's life and create dependency on them. And, and it's a very effective strategy. And so it's been able to economically outcompete other forms of psychology.The, the efficacious forms of psychology, which used to be much more prevalent. And obviously not all psychologists practice this. Some are still actually good guys, but a lot of them do. And, and I think that the ones who are out there teaching people in Hollywood, teaching the people who are writing our cultural narrative, a lot of them have this framing of It's sort of parental hatred as being an important part in anyone's life story.But then in addition to that, I also think that this twisted cat American narrative, which I do not think was early American narrative, early American narrative was, I'm from an honorable family. Even if they are from a hard background and I am going to do what I can to incrementally improve the situation of my family.It then became this narrative of intra generational. So within a [00:20:00] generation Nothing to wealth rags to riches, but part of the rags to riches narrative is the denigration of the circumstances of your birth, which can combine like, if you believe one, you need to be to be liked by society. You need to tell this rags to riches narrative, right?Well, this comes with a few implications, right? Like one, you need to find a way to convince everyone that you grew up in a very. trying environment and condemns yourself of this to have this level of self worth, but also believe that it is because of your own effort that you escaped this environment, which meant that your parents to have let you grow up in that environment must not have been great, must not have done a good job with their own decisions in their own lives, and therefore have been worthy of contempt.And so I think the within both the conservative mindset where you have this rags to riches narratives and within the progressive mindset, you have these two forces which create this wedge between, and it's [00:21:00] a narrative wedge between individuals and their, their parents and families. Do you have thoughts on this Simone?Simone Collins: I do see it happening. I mean, I think despite this, one thing that is encouraging is there are a lot of people. Who do really have good relationships with their parents. And I'm curious to hear your commentary too. I can try to dig it up after this, but when it comes to satisfaction with their parents at least like vis a vis the sixties or seventies, satisfaction with parents is actually much higher.And you're seeing this with like higher rates of kids, not moving out, you know, staying at their parents house and sort of feeling to become real adults. They actually have really close friend, like relationships with their parents. So I wonder how you would contend with this dichotomy of, on the one hand, kids seeing their parents as narcissistic, abusive, you know, evil, terrible parents who've left them traumatized, et cetera, et cetera.And on the other hand, their parents are [00:22:00] their best friends. They're never going to move out or grow up or. You know, whatever, because it's just frankly quite easier when you are really close with your parents, you like them, they make you food, they do your laundry, they don't make you pay rent, and the real world isMalcolm Collins: hard.So I think there's a confluence of two things going on here, which are worth talking about. One is I think if you look at the boomer generation, they really were pretty awful as parents. They did not take the responsibility seriously. They viewed kids as a status item. A lot of them did. And that was because society was framing kids that way to them.So, so they didn't engage like, like when I say a status item, it was part of living like the standard American identity, but there wasn't this. Drive and desire for intergenerational improvement, which existed in earlier, especially immigrant groups within the US, which really, I think, defines our nation's character.It's this immigrant idea of intergenerational improvement and coming and either to the country or moving to. You know, the, the West, you're [00:23:00] moving to new settlement areas where life is hard for this opportunity for intergenerational improvement. And they sort of had a, I've got mine. Now let's just put all this debt on the next generation and not really care about what happens.So there was some motivation for that contempt, but also there was no mechanism for them to earn a steam in their kids eyes because society had begun to tell kids, you know, you don't respect your parents. For doing like good parenting, right? Like, like from, for setting an example. Yeah. WhichSimone Collins: is sometimes tough love,Malcolm Collins: right?Yeah. Get passionately helping you reach that example. In fact, a lot of media, when he was portraying, what does a good parent look like, you know, a lot of even children's media, you see this these days because it's coming from this ultra progressive mindset where these people never really grew up and, and, and they.When they are writing about the relationship between a child and a parent, instead of historically when people were doing that, they were often thinking from the position of a parent, like, what does a good relationship like this look like? They were thinking from the position of a child and they were writing these, like, what do I [00:24:00] wish my parents allowed me to do without telling me you can be better?You can do better, you know,Simone Collins: what good has been replaced by indulgent. What does an indulgent parent do? And that seems toMalcolm Collins: be parents begin to adapt to this, right? And this is when you get this. Gen X parent mindset, but also, you know, when I talk about this, let's, let's, I want to read another passage that it wrote in his book, which shows like the type of thing that he saw as giving his parents high regard in his estimation and what made them good parents.So, um, in another chapter, he's talking about all of the hardship that his mother went through to raise the family. And he goes on to say. This daily and hourly routine of my mother working to keep her family closed and fed kept her very busy. Did she ever complain or think her task hard? No, she did not think so.She was providing for her family. Her husband was her hero, and she would do anything to make him happy. Her children were [00:25:00] her angels, and she did not want to see them need anything instead of being unhappy, She was happy doing something to relieve the needs of her loved ones.She was a happy woman. No greater blessing ever befell any man or his descendants than when my mother stood at the marriage altar with my father and plighted face with him that she would become the mother of his family and the business manager of his household. I will not compare her to your mother or the mother of some friend or stranger.I will not say that I had the best mother in the world, but the way I think of her now, I think she was the best mother in the world. I think Instead of being burdened with her various duties, she got real pleasure out of them and doing something for her loved ones at home. But, hold on, one more quick thing I want to read here about her because this, describes part of her sort of daily routine, right, and the way that he thought of her and what he I thought it meant to be a good mother. This was actually the passage I thought I was reading, but the other one's a great passage, too. She had not lived there [00:26:00] long until she had some chickens, and we each had an egg for breakfast.Every two or three mornings, we always had some first class cornbread cooked just right and some good steam fried bacon, which she had previously prepared in the smokehouse. She saw to it that every meal that went to our table was a well planned meal. A superior chemist could not have analyzed a breakfast that was on our table and found anything lacking in our meal to make healthy, rosy cheeked children.She did not raise a weakly family of children, pale faces, or hookworm victims. She raised a husky bunch. Her girls were strong and healthy, and her boys were the strongest boys in the whole community. And then he goes on to talk about various, I don't know, like, wrestling and sports competitions that the boys had won and how strong and hearty the girls were.And this estimation of what was expected of her. It wasn't, oh, she was N nice to us. It was, she cared about our emotional states. It was very obvious that our happiness was [00:27:00] important to her and our health was important to her, and she did. Everything was in her means to provide for those things while also obviously throughout the entire journey as the sacrifices the family made for his education.And a really interesting part, and I'm not gonna. Read the whole thing here again. That's another quote, but this is a quote about his siblings. So he had a lot of siblings and he talked about how the thing that made a lot of money in the community was going to work at the sawmill. And that, and then he called these, you know, mill boys and they had more money than the other other people.And two of his older siblings who were now too old to get educated, they dedicated all of their time to this higher earning profession so that they could And Put some money towards helping educate where they could the younger kids and that, you know, this family value that his mother had instilled in them made him so proud of his family and and they ended up being successful.He ended up caring for these, these older brothers of his and. That in [00:28:00] today's society, when you hear kids like this forced parentage, like even you have complained about this, like having to take on the role of the family or having to support other members of your family with your own income, parentification.Yeah, it would be a form of abuse, right? To these two older brothers. And, and yet. No, that is what it is to raise good children. That is what it is to be a good parent, is to instill caring about your family members. You know what, actually, I'll just read the paragraph here, because it is interesting and it is sweet, you know.My oldest brother, E. W. Collins, had married several years before that and had his own family responsibility. Morg and Phil were still unmarried, and they had both become high priced sawmill men. Morg was a tram engineer. And then he goes on to talk about their jobs that paid almost as much as Long's job.All of them for the time I had been going to school and even after I began teaching, my mother and the youngest sisters needed help, which one could not give them without giving up my studies. So he's saying that, He would have to [00:29:00] leave his studies to support his family. Have it said to the credit of my brothers and be it known that my gratitude to them will last forever.Morgue and Phil helped my family very liberally and kept my youngest sisters and mother from being in want for anything and always encouraged me to go to school and get an education. They knew they could not go back and get an education and they would not hear of me stopping and going to work in order to help my family.Um, You see these set of values that's instilled in them, and he was not when he talks about how great his parents are when he talks about how great his family is. This is not because they didn't demand sacrifices from some of the kids. It's because when the kids were forced to make sacrifices, they understood that they were all in this together, that they are all working together for this cycle of intergenerational improvement, this cycle of community improvement and for the best interest.of the wider family and cultural group of which they found themselves members. And this is something that [00:30:00] today, the, the centers of power in our society, our kids are constantly being brainwashed and even ourselves to judge our parents by metrics, which are bad metrics to judge parents. And I would encourage our listeners, especially if you're younger, and this has always been a big.If you haven't told your parents how much they mean to you in a while, if you haven't taken the opportunity to reframe the way you see your parents recently, really give it an effort. You know, your parents having a different value system than you is not a reason To to have any animosity towards your parents.If your parents did the best by their own value system, then you should do what you can to to show your parents appreciation. Now, I would also say this was in the context of the wind would read quote, you know, the person who we sort of look to for philosophical advice, which is You know an un a person may live according to their conscience, but an untrained, but a person living according to an untrained conscience is the same as living according to no [00:31:00] conscience at all, because it can still lead you to sin.But the reality is, you know, you look at these people's lives. His father lived basically as an outcast in society, having to give up everything he had. You know, when you turn against the confederacy in the south rough time. Having to constantly having assassination attempts against him, having to constantly run away.You know, he had no land. He had no anything. He had to give all that away just to fight for what he believed was right. And he died being hated by many people in his community for what he did. And I think that's something that I'm glad that the Free State of Jones, it wasn't like, you know, was, was a lot of people think, oh, the people who's doing that to the Nazis, the people who stand up to confederacy, they were loved by their communities.No, they were hated by their communities until the day they die. Because, but they were loved by their family because they did the right thing and they were people of character. And I think that this is a thing that, that is important to do, and this is what it means to be a family of character, to know that so long as you follow the family traditions and, and, and you raise them within this, you know, [00:32:00] humble yet elitist environment that you will be rewarded as well.So I, I do encourage you to go show respect to your parents for the things that they sacrificed so that you could have. The life that you have. And I hope that you can instill this with your kids and that we can work to build a culture in terms of like the summer camp and the school and stuff that we're building for our kids.It helps isolate them enough from these toxic, memetic viruses in our environment that thrive in the same way cults have always thrived by it. Peeling people away from their, their birth cultures and, and, and their families and their parents who sacrifice everything for them. And this to me, it's particularly heart wrenching when I see it happen to immigrant groups, where I know these people sacrifice everything.It just doesn't care, you know, it brings them over with the goal of erasing their family's culture. Because it's the only way it can survive and it teaches them to have this hatred for their parents who gave up everything to come here and give up everything just to give them a better life. And then not just him, but their descendants, their family [00:33:00] line.That's the point. That's the reason you did all this. It wasn't just so your kid could go party in clubs all day, every day. But anyway. I love you to decimum.Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm. And I like that it's clear that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, even when they were like. Multiple trees in between, it's hilarious.So,Malcolm Collins: yeah, it's a cultural group, you know, and I hope that we can spread in any way that we can, that this is a stable cultural strategy intergenerationally. And it's clearly been stable for many generations. I mean, the stuff that he said about his family, I think sounds very similar to stuff you guys have likely heard me or my wife say on this show.And it is. possible to actually be appreciative for the things in your life and to live in a community that, that affirms you and gives you says that you, you deserve affirmation and status for saying those things instead of only affirming people who have this really toxic and negative mindset.And yeah, anyway, love you to Desimone. LoveSimone Collins: you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

We discuss a shocking New York Times article advocating for breeding only short people to help the environment. This blatant eugenics promotion reveals the authoritarian thinking and moral blindspots on the left. We contrast it to polygenic selection which supports family choice, not society-wide suppression of "undesirable" genes. We also cover recent studies confirming left wing authoritarianism and the left's cultural genocide of minorities through forced assimilation.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Like, if you take two steps back from all this, it's like, I feel like that meme where they're like, you know,how's it going now?You know, and they're like, it's like New York times promoting eugenics to help the environment. Ooh, that bad, huh?Yikes guys. Yeah, you, you are. Deep in the spiral nowWould you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, what did I do? Well, I thought that recorded. I clicked the camera because I could camera for recording. You know, we've only done this a hundreds of times now. And of course I turn off my camera anyway, whatever I did to be here with you because I have seen this trend in media recently that just flabbergasted.So. For context here, Simone and I have gone through, you know, the, the rounds in progressive media over and over and over again, they hate that we do polygenic selection on our kids because, oh, my God, we believe that humans have genes and certain traits are [00:01:00] heritable and that families should have access to the reproductive choices to have kids the way that their culture says it's the.the ethical way to have kids and in a way that nudges those genes in directions that their family values on an individual basis. Right. And as well,Simone Collins: they unceasingly accuse us of eugenics, even though by the definition of eugenics that anyone could agree upon, like if you look at Wikipedia's definition of eugenics, we are very much against eugenics because one, we don't believe that there are universally good or bad traits.And two, we are very much against trying to fight for. Promulgation or suppression of those universally good or bad traits in on a society level. Right? SoMalcolm Collins: like to point it out, like what we think is every culture and every family should have the right to choose what traits they think are best for their family to optimize around.Right? And then as a society. Like, like, the world tests us and determines which families and which groups chose correctly. [00:02:00] Yeah, butSimone Collins: there are different societal, environmental, economic, etc. contextsMalcolm Collins: that make different traits useful. Yeah, and one of the interesting things that has been a theme to me recently is as soon as the left, like, accepts something that we've been trying to get them to accept forever, as like, don't immediately, like, run away screaming like you touched a hot stove when you mention something like humans have genes, their first intuition is always to take it to the most insane and evil place humanly imaginable.And so the left has finally admitted That some traits in humans may have a genetic component and the very first thing they want to do is eugenics, like, like, bad eugenics, like evil state sanctioned, like, yeah,Simone Collins: like you should only reproduce with these people.Malcolm Collins: Eugenics. Yeah. Yeah. You should only reproduce with these.people because these are the good people and other people are the bad people. Like, why can't the left just not be evil for five seconds? But anyway, and I'm not talking about fringe left here. Okay. So there was an article talking [00:03:00] about New York times and the New York times now that they have realized the humans have genes.They're like, well, short people are better for the environment. Therefore you should only breed with short people. And. Hold on, so this isn't just like the New York Times. So the article in New York Times that goes over this is there has never been a better time to be short, but there have been other articles like this.There was 1 in popular mechanics. You should make with short people to fight.Climate change expert says there was you know. Yeah, there's been a few articles that have sort of gone over this. AndSimone Collins: by the way, nothing against short people, first off, I want to say that. Like, there are definitely, there are longevity benefits to being short.There are health benefits to being short. And there are environmental benefits to being short. We're not saying, it's the fact that they're taking a eugenic stance on this that we have a problem with. In fact, we shared this article on Twitter and one of our followers pointed out quite cleverly and this is a very dangerous question to ask.Which is wait, but like, [00:04:00] what's the difference between like a short person and like a thin person in terms of their environmental impact? Oh, I know. It's like,Malcolm Collins: don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't watch out. Watch out. No, no, no, no, no, no,Simone Collins: no, no, no, no. We can't talk about. But beingMalcolm Collins: fat isn't their fault, it's genetic.I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that because if it's genetic, then they shouldn't be breeding because they're taking up more, they're making more carbon emissions here.Simone Collins: Well, and not, not to mention government healthcare expenditures. I mean, the burden on governments and the private healthcare system and private citizens themselves.Malcolm Collins: on. Hold on. There's no, a human can't burden the government with expenses. What are you talking about? We're talking about their burden on the environment. The thing that matters. Okay. Not their, not their fellow citizens. Right. But the environment. Environment. And, okay. How do we get out of this New York times?How do we get out of this? Come on. Let's quick, quick, find a way. Fat people are a discriminated class therefore, [00:05:00] but aren't short people discriminated becauseshort people earn less money on average and short people getSimone Collins: passed over on dating markets and yeah,Malcolm Collins: dating markets. Ooh, they're just as arguably a discriminated class, but, but okay.So here's how short people are different. Okay. I figured it out. So the left is a predominantly female, okay. These days as you see voting patterns, it's predominantly female and being short as a woman, is it discriminatory? And as a woman, I don't value short men. I mean, they're not really human because I don't want to breed with them.This is the way that I think a lot of women intuitively actually see men where they're like, I don't mind when guys hit on me. And then it's like, they get the ugly guy, you know, there's that famous meme and they're like, ah,HR because. Those guys aren't guys. They're like these monsters that mope around in society.AndSimone Collins: they're like 5'2 and they have on their Tinder profile. Don't DM meMalcolm Collins: unless you're over 6'4 or something like that, like ridiculous. So I think it's very normal for women to just blatantly dehumanize. And, and, and because the left is, is they [00:06:00] don't see short people as like really people, but when you talk about fat people, well, they could be fat.I mean. Their friends could be fat, you know, and they, you know, when you talk about like progressive women, yes, they overwhelmingly are often obese. Well, we keep seeing this in our detractors, you know, it's, it's actually, that's a, thisSimone Collins: is an interesting question. I don't, I wonder if there is a political divide on being overweight in the United States.I don't think there is because I do think there's a genetic genetic component that inhibitory control around highly processed foods. And it's not. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like, I, I would guess that there isn't a political difference in obesity, but maybe this is because I grew up in a really progressive society, assuming that like, you know, I was kindMalcolm Collins: of Well, the first vertical I find is Democrats are more likely than Republicans or independents to blame their genetics for obesity.Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, yes, because external obesity control is rampant in progressive culture. But I was raised with this like caricature of the Southern fat. [00:07:00] Republican, you know, so like, I don't know, you know, I mean like now I'm like, I know we're conservatives have the, the stereotype of the, you know, fat, obese, blue haired progressive.So I don't know. It's really,Malcolm Collins: I just think that I think Republicans are more frequently overweight than Democrats. ThereSimone Collins: you go. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Ah. Yeah. Interesting. So, so.Simone Collins: But I see, I think that what that has to do is it has to do more with urban versus rural culture. And then the effect that that can have.I think it has to do with poverty. yeAh. Poverty too, probably. But I just feel like, especially when you live in a city and you are walking more places, it just makes a huge impact on.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think that you know, the Democrats have become the party of the wealthy elite, you know, downtrodden on the, on the common working man in this country.Like it's very clear, like they are the party of the, of the elite and the oppressors. AndSimone Collins: they get in their steps by stomping on the dreams of the rural disempowered.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, they're just so [00:08:00] like, to me. What I like about this, this New York times article, right? Where they're like, okay, get short people here.As we were talking about how they don't really see short people, short men as human. And this is trying to like nudge them in that direction. Probably a short, like male Democrat. Who's like, yeah, guys,please see me as human. Please breed with me for the environment. Yeah. Sex with people like me helps the environment.He knows, he knows his audience. It wouldSimone Collins: be, it honestly would be better though, if it were that, because then it would be less eugenics and more just like, please, someone just trying to get laid. Yeah. Like just, just be nice to me, please. Which I, I find a lot more charitable than, Oh, here is this superior treat.Let us all. You know, make sure that humanity breeds in that direction which just really rubs us the wrong way. So, you know,Malcolm Collins: well, I I, I love this. Well, so, so, and I think we need a [00:09:00] different word for when people. Are looking at this stuff from our perspective, right? Like, we individually believe families should have a choice.And so the word I would promote here is polygenic. So some people promote eugenics and we promote polygenics. Polygenics, meaning, you know, you have a choice in this and you have a choice in using polygenic screening. Whereas eugenics is the promotion of the belief culture wide of trying to eugenics.Aim towards some largeSimone Collins: of good genes of just good genes.Malcolm Collins: Like there is a bad genes is where it's polygenics and promoting polygenics is an issue of reproductive rights which is just a completely different thing than eugenics. And so, that's, that's what we're pushing here. I also think that, like, we move forward as a society, you know, you have these two groups, like, suppose they do get their way and they start breeding these short people.Are we going to go in the opposite direction? Are we going to create, like, space marines, like, giant, giant custodies?Like, large Super intelligent chadman or something that'll be like 10 feet tall, like genetically [00:10:00] pre programmed, like double muscled,like you have in some of those cows that look likeSimone Collins: the roid cows.Malcolm Collins: These hulking brutes of people that the problem is, is that right now, you know, if you're not employing polygenic data to, to height, height does shorten your lifespan, which is something Simone is pointing out. So, they would have an advantage on lifespan unless, you know, they're just doing old fashioned, like, super evil eugenics where it's just like, well, we'll keep these people from breeding instead of using polygenic selection, which allows you to increase health at the same time as increasing things like height was in some groups.But yeah, that, that's, that would be an interesting direction for society to go in terms of human speciation. The problem is, is that what's really happening with human speciation, and you can see this in the data, because it's already happening in terms of the bell curve of the different clusters of genetic traits is that obesity, you know, we were talking about obesity, is actually being heavily selected for.It's other than IQ. I think the number one [00:11:00] polygenic score that's most associated with high fertility. So, what you're likely seeing is and, and maybe shorter. I wouldn't be surprised if shorter. So, so fatter, shorter, lower IQ group. And then this other group which is the wealthy, the wealthy population where you see within the ultra wealthy population, you also get higher fertility rates but you see less crossbreeding material populations than you're used to, which within any biological textbook, you would call that like, if you see a trait and you see like a U curve in, in fertility rates tied to that trait.You call that behavioral isolation which is different. So you have a few types of isolation that can lead to speciation. You have things like what's the word I'm talking? I want to say like geographic isolation. Yeah, I think geographic isolation, which means like a stream occurs between two populations.Behavioral isolation is like. Some people begin to develop a trait where they really like having sex only at night. And then another group develops a trait where they really like only having sex during the day. And then these two groups live alongside each other, but they [00:12:00] just stop interbreeding with each other.Oh, interesting. aNd so that's, that's really what we're seeing happening here right now in humans, which is pretty interesting. But I, I'm, I, I just think it's wild that the New York Times has gone in this direction. And you know, you're not seeing a backlash. You're seeing like Republicans laugh at them like, ha ha ha.But what's interesting to me is us who clearly don't have a eugenic position. We have a polygenic position, but it could be seen as eugenic by people who are broadly uneducated and they're just looking for any reason to paint us as bad guys that even that slightest hint is used to attempt to smear us in article after article, and yet mainstream left wingers can go full on like evil eugenics promotion, like the most evil type of eugenics promotion.And I guess he's not. Promoting government mandates yet. But they, they, they can go full out and do this and there is no real repercussion for doing it. So long as they are quote unquote identified, like they're wearing their leftist armor and they're, and they're doing these evil things [00:13:00] to promote the environment.Well, andSimone Collins: that's what's so interesting when I, I searched the URL on Twitter to see like what the general commentary was, if there was any and, and most of the, it's, it's disappointing that most of the commentary was essentially just like. Derision of short people, you know, like, oh, how disgusting that like someone would want their kids to be short and do things to try to make their kids shorter and like try to choose, you know, like, oh, short people gross.Whereas like, imagine how mad your kids would be. If they were made shortMalcolm Collins: by you. Oh yes, because suppose they do this with polygenic screening. They end up just selecting for shorter kids. And you have to explain, especially to your young male kid, I made you short for the environment, little Timmy.Simone Collins: No, no, no.I actually think in the article I have to pull it up. Hold on, give me a second. Where he actually is like limiting his kids dietary options to keep them short.Malcolm Collins: [00:14:00] Oh, whoa! These people are evil! Well, he's an environmental scientist, what do you expect, right?Simone Collins: Sorry, I'm trying to find this, because I don't want to speak out of turn here.Malcolm Collins: I love when progressives decide that they're going to implement eugenics programs, instead of going in the direction of trying to create like uber minches, they're like, let's intentionally create spiteful mutants. Let's intentionally, like, just fight. F**k people. F**k up their s**t. Like, restrict my children's diet.Like, that is so sad. But there's another thing that I wanted to go on, because there was another article it was actually a piece of research that was done recently. And I was going to do a full episode on it, but I think this could be a great time to discuss it. Which is, progressives just found out in this, in this study and, and apparently this had not been found before in other studies that it turns out that authoritarianismexists on both the [00:15:00] right and the left.Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left wing and right wing authoritarians, including a preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards difference in others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggressiveness, Punitiveness Towards Perceived Enemies, Ostracized Concern for Hierarchy and Moral Absolutism. Eh, wha eh, wha How did you not see this? For seventy years, this is the quote here, For seventy years, lore in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism was found exclusively on the political right.The Rutgers University social psychologist, Lee Josten Who wasn't involved in the new SOTY told me over email, so this isn't just the people in the study are like, yeah, only nobody believed like it was believed hypothetically. There might be a form of left wing authoritarianism, but [00:16:00] science just hadn't found it yet.And it shows how strongly you have to not be looking. Like if you're just like a common sane person and you're looking at the left, you're like, wow, this movement is blindingly authoritarian, but not just that when leftist governments gain control and they have disproportionate control, they go authoritarian always and much faster than rightist governments, you know, with communist governments and stuff like that.And all of those traits are very obviously like an Antifa member to the T like Antifa, which is so interesting to me as they claim to be. An anti-authoritarian group, and yet every one of those groups that they associate with authoritarianism are literally what defines Antifa when contrasted with more moderate Democrats.It is an authoritarian group, and you look at the tactics they use and they look like the tactics that like the Nazi brown shirts were using before Hitler won the election and stuff like that. Like this gang violence and stuff like that. It is. [00:17:00] Did you find the quote you were looking for?Simone Collins: yeAh, I did.He's even restricted dairy from his son's diets and only allows them minimal sugar in an attempt to limit their growth, saving them from the ills of height.Malcolm Collins: Damn.Simone Collins: Wait, but that's something. This is something someone tweeted. So,Malcolm Collins: you don't know if it's true.Simone Collins: It's, it's, it's hard for me to say cause like, so she shared the article on Twitter.This person named Caitlin Flanagan shared on Twitter quote, he's even restricted dairy from his son's diets and only allows the minimal sugar in an attempt to limit their growth, saving them from the ills of height end quote. And then she says, anyone else think things are pretty weird around here? And then she just shared a link to the article.So I don't know if the article actually.Malcolm Collins: No, well, maybe she got this information somewhere else. I wouldn't be surprised. But anyway, to continue with what I'm saying here. So the authoritarian stuff is, is really interesting to me, and that it could be so blind to that. And I think it really falls in line with what we're talking about on this article, how the New York [00:18:00] Times can have this article that in this position in it, that Clearly promoting evil eugenics.And yet they can be completely blind to what they're doing because it is a leftist doing it for leftist reasons. Well, but I think the,Simone Collins: the bigger issue is that progressivism is, is sort of, A moral monolith, like there are shared morals and values. And so they, they quote unquote, know what's good, right?They understand what's good. And therefore they're not going to question any policy that supports what they believe to be good. They're not questioning that. Whereas what has become the conservative movement now is really more about cultural sovereignty and, and protecting one's right. To hold one's own.And protectingMalcolm Collins: diversity in the population.Simone Collins: And so then there, there isn't this same like, Oh, well, this is obviously the morally right thing to do. No, I would say that the conservative movement is sometimes overtaken by subsets that are like, this [00:19:00] is the morally right or good thing to do, like with the, with the abortion.Like, like legislation shifts the really, it could be argued that what took place in the Supreme court with abortion in the United States was appropriate because it allowed for states to exercise cultural sovereignty on a state level by making those decisions at the state level, which, you know, perhaps is the right way to go.I don't know. But yeah, I just, I think that's, that's the difference is one when, when you believe that you are good. And it is your culture to believe that you are righteous, then you are not going to question the morality of your chosen methods and actions. Whereas if you're just fighting for things like cultural sovereignty, or if you have doubts about your righteousness or the right way to go, you're not going to do it the same way.Malcolm Collins: Well, I think what we're seeing here, because I don't think the left would have done stuff like this in the past, although the fact that they never did somehow didn't discover after, like, communist, you know, communist Russia, that leftism [00:20:00] has an authoritarian streak they couldn't find any authoritarian leftists, they were unicorns.So, I mean, it shows how blind they've been to this for a while, but I think increasingly, recently, they've become so isolated within their intellectual bubbles that they have blinded themselves to the idea that any, any idea within the left could have an evil streak to it, whereas we, on the right, I'd say, yeah, if you're going out there and you're pushing some, like, ethnocentric policy That's evil, right?Like you should not allow that to happen. Now, unfortunately, from our perspective, the left is much more likely these days to push ethnocentric policies. If they're for an approved ethnicity, like the right hasn't, hasn't really had a large and meaningful group pushing ethnocentric policies in like half a century at this point.But there are groups like, I'm not gonna lie. There are groups on the right that sometimes attempt things like that. They, they are and I should point out, and this is something we constantly point out for the 539 poll and the article on this, they are not [00:21:00] disproportionately, 538, 538 poll they are not disproportionately larger than the ethnocentric groups on the left, even the white nationalists.So, as we point out from the 538 poll, and I will never stop mentioning this stat is that until Obama was elected more white Democrats and white Republicans said they would not vote for a black president. So, so the right does have a problem with this sometimes, but the left also has this white, ethnic centrism really deep within it.They just pretend they don't. They're like, oh, yeah, the unions, they don't have that problem. They've never been centers of racism and I feel like that's worseSimone Collins: to never admit to never admit it. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: I mean, it really twisted the narrative in society, which is confused people about what's actually going on so much that I think a lot of the, the masses are just living in this wild distortion field where the left isn't carrying out, like, An intentional and, and wide [00:22:00] scale cultural genocide of groups that it sees as lesser than itself, lesser than the urban monoculture they do not see that the left is openly excited about the erasure of not just, you know, domestic cultural groups that are different from it, which are usually religious cultural groups, but the erasure of immigrant culture you know, in the article It's another article that we've done a piece on.I don't know which one's going to come out first where the guy was, was talking about from a leftist perspective, following fertility rates and he was like, well, and I really promote immigration and assimilation. Assimilation is cultural genocide. If you're doing it at a large level, you are saying I want to erase their culture.Whereas I think that. What what the right supports and what I think is the actual correct way to approach immigration is that immigrant groups should immigrate insofar as. Their culture can mesh well within [00:23:00] American culture and can add to American culture which I think, you know, Hispanic immigrant populations do spectacularly well, you know, there are these traditional tradcast communities with value systems that are very similar to previous Irish immigrant groups.Sorry, the two previous Catholic immigrant groups. Like, I love it so much. I'll talk to, to some people when they're anti immigration sometimes, and they'll be like, Ah, the Hispanic immigrants are coming over with their gangs! And I'm like, okay, every large Catholic immigrant group has done this, whether it was the Irish mob or the Italian mafia, it's just something Catholics do.I don't know why, but those two groups have made America stronger, not because we erased their cultures, but because their cultures added to our own, you know, whether it's our pizza or pasta or, you know, these you know, when I think of a pizza these days, like an American style feature Detroit style pizza, you know, this is [00:24:00] the, The fusion of these cultures to create something better because we didn't go out there with the goal of erasing their culture when they came to this country.And yet now that is the left reason dtra because they can't replenish this urban monoculture that they've created. It has almost zero fertility rate. Mm-Hmm. , they've, they've, they're getting worse at deconvert people, children from the Right, you know, they're, they've gone way too far with this education system that they're using to attempt to, um.You know, we'll basically take the children of nearby demographically healthy cultural groups. And so they are now shipping in immigrants to erase their culture. And it is something that is just so sad to see when I talk to the parents, like immigrant parents, and they talk about what has happened to their children.You know, and it is, it is really sad to see this loss of cultural identity. It reminds me so much of these days of the early immigrants, you know, where they were promised, oh, you go to America and there's gold on the street and everything like that. And, and these were clear lies that people were using to take advantage of them.[00:25:00] And now these people are told, come to America so that your family going forwards can be wealthy and be successful. And then their kids are medically sterilized, if not outright castrated and taught to hate their parents, hate their parents culture to see it as backwards. AndSimone Collins: what makes it extra painful is parents are often.Living much harder lives to enable this, you know, it's not like their, their lives are going to be easier immigrating to the United States, starting fresh. You know, in many cases, you know, to get into the United States, you have to be a highly qualified person. Often doctors come in and have to completely redo their education.Like it's, it's a nightmare. And then all of this is to give their kids a better future. And then their kids are like, no, I don't want a future. I'm not going to have a future. I'm not going to have kids. I'm not going to. You know, I'm going to sort of lean back from life. I'm not going to marry. I'm not going to really invest inMalcolm Collins: a lot.That was always the plan. When they say we're taking in immigrants and we need to assimilate them, [00:26:00] assimilate them to what? Not conservative Christian culture, not trad cast culture. No. What they mean is we need to assimilate them to the urban monoculture. They can still call themselves. You know, whatever they want, they can still call themselves Muslim.If they want, they can still call themselves Catholic. If they want, they just can't deviate from our cultural views on any major issue that humanity deals with, whether that's morality or gender or sexuality or the way we. Relate to you know, our partners or the, what we think of the future of species is the way we relate to our environment.You, you literally can't differentiate from anything, but if you token holidays, it reminds me of this, this, this old song that I used to lovethe gap year song I'm going on a gap. Yeah. And he's going around the world and he's so he's, he's bragging about all of these different cultures that he's experiencing, but he's so obviously.has this deep dis disrespect from them, like he barely sees their cultures as humans and they're just tools for him, like, I was in [00:27:00] Africa in Tazna I saw this woman with malaria And she looked at me with this vacant stare As if to say, despite our differences,Malcolm Collins: parah. Parah, darling. Do you mean parah? Beautiful people. Beautiful people. Patting one of them on thegod, I can't believe you said that because that really reminds me of this time. Oh my god. Yeah Yeah, I was in South America in Prague , yeah. Wonderful country, beautiful people, yeah.Um, yeah, I knew. We were drinking in the Andes, and the sun was just rising and glinting off the snow, creating a sort of ethereal haze. And I really got a sense of the awesome power of nature and the insignificance of man. And then I just shuddered. Everywhere.Malcolm Collins: head. That's what they mean when they're like, everyone's a hot one.Wonderful [00:28:00] people. Wonderful country people. Of course now if your parents do deviate from us on any of the approved beliefs, we are unfortunately going to need to teach you that the fact that they disagreed with us was traumatizing to you as a child. They are the source of all of your problems.You will need to constantly give us money at this date, appointed psychologists. Who you will become dependent on because they will tell you that the only way to relieve your trauma is continuing to come see them, continuing to come have your brain, they will clean your brain, don't worry, they'll wash your brain for you and you'll feel amazing, you'll feel amazing, you'll wake up every day I mean, obviously, statistically, you won't feel amazing, obviously Statistically, when we look at progressive populations, you know, over 50 percent of progressive white women under the age of 30 have a serious mental health issue.Well, but that's becauseSimone Collins: they've experienced so much trauma. That's not their fault at all.Malcolm Collins: Well, the trauma is, unfortunately, being exposed to people who had different views than them, often in their childhood, and that is, of course, deeply [00:29:00] traumatic.Simone Collins: Progressive culture is just trying to cure it,Malcolm Collins: don't you see?Yeah, they're just trying to cure the cultures that they're shipping, and so why are they shipping in these cultures? It's because they want their children, because they can't, they can't as easily take children from the surrounding groups anymore. And it's really, really messed up. Like, if you take two steps back from all this, it's like, I feel like that meme where they're like, you know,how's it going now?You know, and they're like, it's like New York times promoting eugenics to help the environment. Ooh, that bad, huh?Yikes guys. Yeah, you, you are. Deep in the spiral now I, I, and, and you won't get out of it. It's going extinct. There's nothing I can do. You know, when we come to them, say it's like a, you know, Noah in the Ark, you know, with this fertility rate thing, you know, sometimes you go to the unicorns, and you're like, hey, Get on the ark.And they're like, f**k you, bigot. And you're like, okay. I don't have, I don't [00:30:00] have the patience of Noah. Go off into the woods and die in the flood, okay? We're trying to tell you your fertility rate. How could you say my fertility rate is too low? Is that because I'm, you know White? And it's like, no, it's because of the cultural group you're in just has a desperately low fertility rate, and that is the urban monoculture, which is a multi ethnic group, and it is very, very, very, very, very low fertility rate.Well, I don't know about that. It sounds like you're telling women that they have some sort of duty to society, and that I might have to work for this duty. Well, I mean, I think men have an equal duty. Ha! You said it! You said it! And then you point out, wait, when you say women have a duty to society, are you saying that men don't have wombs?That there aren't a group of men out there with wombs? They're like, well of course I also need to, but of course they wouldn't forget that. Women and men with wombs, they would say. Duty to society. This whole thing is just getting absolutely comical at this point. [00:31:00] But oh, well,Simone Collins: I'm sure it'll get crazier.That's okay. I love you too.Malcolm Collins: Have a great day. YouSimone Collins: too, gorgeous. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Leaders of the Mormon Transhumanist movement explain core Mormon beliefs like humans becoming gods and the purpose of existence. They discuss the growth of the movement in Africa and the desire to create a more formal religious order. The speakers explore the concept of compassion, differing beliefs on exalted beings and godliness, and the complexities of Mormon theology. They also touch on the combination of self-reliance and communalism in Mormonism, and the intersection of religion and technology in storing personal information.

Malcolm Collins, an expert on the incremental cost of each additional kid, discusses the dramatic drop in costs after the first few children. The podcast explores the unnecessary expenses of private school, travel, and restaurants for kids. They also highlight the wastefulness of buying toys for only a few kids and emphasize the importance of financial stability before having more children.

Exploring the dangers posed by a growing movement aiming to end all human life, online communities within the anti-natalist movement and their influence on mental health, the debunking of adoption myths, the battle between anti-natalists and pro-natalists, and the need to protect against extreme anti-natalist ideologies.

We explain our strategy of aggressively educating kids about sexuality to normalize it and reduce interest. We believe society frames sex as no different from porn and this obsessiveness ruins enjoyment. True happiness comes from improving future generations, not temporary pleasure. Early exposure and openness make desire and experiences less appealing long-term.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I was like, okay, let's look into the data on this. Yeah. Generally it seems that the more you teach young kids about sex, the less they have sex and the later they have sex the first time. Do you think that's because adultsSimone Collins: are tainting it with uncoolness?Malcolm Collins: I would that could be part of it. Yeah,Simone Collins: but does this teaching kids about sex include teaching kids about. Abstinence, or like teachingMalcolm Collins: kids to not have sex.Okay, so you can do abstinence only education, which actually has a similar effect to general sex education.Simone Collins: Interesting. See, I had thought as a kid growing up, and like younger, that like abstinence only education didn't work. That's what I always heard. AbstinenceMalcolm Collins: only education doesn't work. Of course, because that's what they wanted to tell you.Yeah. Like that fit the narrative. Perhaps in this only education actually does work, but it doesn't seem to work as long as general sex education. The more a community is told to restrict access to these sorts of things, the more they're going to engage with these sorts of things under the radar.It really seems like. The best panacea [00:01:00] against over sexual abundance. So we will teach our kids, basically the answer here is we will teach our kids pretty aggressively and early about human sexuality. But because we want them to engage in the topic with moderation, and we think that that is the best way to achieve that outcome. ​We are getting to do a special recording today because we had the disappointment of setting up all our recording equipment For a Great Britain, what about a GB news interview?And this is the second time they've done this to us But you know, we always got to be ready for those news conversations and said we're like what we blocked out time Anyway, we might as well take the time to chat with each other which is more fun Let's be honest. We had one of those, those recording sessions ruthlessly stolen from us by a a friend where we had to talk with a friend.Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. The burden of [00:02:00] friendship. Will it ever leave us, Simone? God, I don't know. One day I hope to be famous enough that I do not care about alienating myself from friends. The whole world can be just you, me and the kids. Won't that be wonderful?Simone Collins: Yeah, except then like the friends that you do hang out with probably just hang out with you because you're famous, which sounds annoying.No,Malcolm Collins: no, I don't want any friends. Once I'm, once I'm at that level. Just, justSimone Collins: would be completely isolated. Okay, that's dreamy. I'mreadyMalcolm Collins: for that. You, me, the kids, living in our, our antique farmhouse in the woods. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. Or potentially we're going to have to go set up our charter city by then, some remote place in the far north, a little settlement, right?Simone Collins: God, I don't want to leave this place. I really likeMalcolm Collins: it. I know. I know. So today's topic is an interesting one. And it has to do with when we think it is appropriate and how we will engage with our kids and the subject of sexuality. Indeed. And [00:03:00] what's really funny is I think a lot of people might see us or they see, you know,they know that broadly, you know, we consider ourselves as very like culturally similar to Ayla. And, and we're friends with her, you know, we have her on the show sometimes. And then we'd be like, what, so you want to raise your kids to grow up like Ayla, right? Like, is that your goal? I'm notSimone Collins: grow up like Ayla, because she grew up in an extremely hardline conservative religiousMalcolm Collins: household.Yeah, well, I mean, we are an extremely hardline conservative religious household, we just have a different view of sexuality. We'reSimone Collins: not a sex negative extremely hardline conservative religiousMalcolm Collins: household. Yeah, that's what you meant. So, so, our response would be, you know, which of us Ayla or us, do you think, grew up not learning about sexuality?I was exposed to sexual, like, like, information at an extremely young age. And, and I would say it was extremely negative. I, I remember, because I remember, okay, so the house I was living at the time, I couldn't have been older than seven. When my mom, I [00:04:00] remember this conversation with my mom. Oh dear.Simone Collins: And she takes me by Okay, soMalcolm Collins: you're totally pre pubescent at this point. And she goes, well, Malcolm, you're going to need to be very, very careful because many young girls are going to try to get you to get them pregnant so that they can force you to marry them and take your money.Simone Collins: I mean, actually, that's, if you have a family that is likely to be targeted for that.Malcolm Collins: I understand. She had a perception that we were that kind of, and I guess my family more largely was that way at that age. That was sort of at times yourSimone Collins: family did have a lot of wealth. And I think was known for that. Also, like it could be a similar liability if like, you know, that your kid is like going to be the high school star.And then like women would. You know, you need to warn your sons that like, women will pursue them just for social status. It's not as like, the pregnancyMalcolm Collins: risk is not as dangerous. I remember she also told me like, at a pretty young age, [00:05:00] that I needed to know how to be good at sex. I needed to know how to, like, that this was something that I should take the time to research and familiarize myself with.Like, she wasn't like, creepy, like, I'm gonna. you know, teach you about all this stuff, which I appreciate, but she was just like, this is something you can study and you should take the time to study because it will matter both in terms of your social, you know, popularity and your ability to secure a high quality wife.And, and, and as. Other people who have read other of our works know one of the things that my mom always, always enforced me as a young kid is that the single most important decision or accomplishment I would ever make is who I married. So for her to be like, this is really important in terms of who marries you, for her to be like, this is important in terms of who you marry, like, she's being like, this is a really critical life tool. And you also grew up with a lot of exposure to sexuality stuff at a young age, right? Yeah, I mean, allSimone Collins: my parents just left, like Porn illustrations [00:06:00] and likeMalcolm Collins: this is one of the most embarrassing moments of my life at your house.So do you remember this? So I'm talking with her dad in the living room.Simone Collins: This is likeMalcolm Collins: in like a main, like in the living room. And I see on the bookshelf. Like, cool looking, like, anime thing.Simone Collins: Yeah, so you're like, oh, it's manga.Malcolm Collins: Cool. And I pull it out, and it is a hentai book. In her family's living room.Pretty explicit. While I'm talking to her dad. Yeah. I pull this out, and I just like, put it back. Pretend nothing happened. Cause I am mortified. I think. Your family is, is the one extreme I wouldn't go to. I mean, they pushed you into the type of woman who, who, you know, by the time we were married, I was only the second guy she had ever kissed, you know, much less you definitely had never had sex with anyone before me or anything likeSimone Collins: that.Yeah. Which is weird because like, I mean, as you can imagine, like if a child is knocking about a house where a lot of the illustrated books are. [00:07:00] Literally extremely explicit material. Like you are exposed to that sometimes without, and no, always with that annotation, like, you know, early, cause you're going to pull the thing with the pictures off the bookshelf, not the stuff with the words.So that was great. Interesting. And move on there. DidMalcolm Collins: your parents tell you about sexuality at aSimone Collins: young age? Like, so what's really interesting is. The only sex talk I remember with my, with any parent was with my mom. I remember where I was in the house and she was basically like, Simone. So when it comes to sex, like you have a, it's like a precious jewel and you have a certain number of jewels and they're very precious.And you just need to be really thoughtful about who you give them away to. And, you know, I was really generous with my jewels.Malcolm Collins: She said that, yeah. She saidSimone Collins: she wouldn't, [00:08:00] she, she essentially told me she wouldn't have. been so generous. Like she she basically said, I, I wish I hadn't slept around as much when I was younger.Which was interesting. ButMalcolm Collins: you know, to be in this hippie culture growing up, you know, your mom, like her whole shaman thing, you know, she's really into all that for her to tell you that you must've been like, wow, she's really serious about this advice.Simone Collins: I was indifferent to it because like with you is this really bizarre exception.I'm asexual, like I'm not attracted to anyone except for you, like, and I've been having these sex dreams about you. It's so freaking weird, man. It's like, anyway, so like, I have problemsMalcolm Collins: with you. But this is only because of the pregnancy, right? Like theSimone Collins: Who knows? I mean, I've always been hot for you, but like now it's just worse.So yeah, probably pregnancy hormones, which who knows? You've also just been extra hot recently and amazing and perfect and the best husband ever.Malcolm Collins: This is sweet. I have a yandere wife here.Simone Collins: No, [00:09:00] like genuinely. Like, yeah, I hate everyone else, only have eyes for you, but like, so that means though, like my mom having that talk with me meant nothing because like, I wouldn't have beenMalcolm Collins: interested.achieved status. I mean, I believe that the reason why I was so sexually active at a young age, which is less important for a guy, is because In terms of like my, my status on the marketplaces because I believed that it was important to my social standing and my, youSimone Collins: were trying about Yeah, but for women, that's not the case.I mean, and I do remember, like, there were some actually women in my high school who I reallyMalcolm Collins: respect. Not all women. Some women believed that they can gain social credit for this. Some, some do.Simone Collins: And there were some women in my high school who I thought were really beautiful and way smarter and cooler than me.Who. Did become sexually active in high school. And then I would hear people say things like describe them as cum dumpsters. And, you know, think that that was kind of weird, but like, I, I, I had zero one. I didn't [00:10:00] think anyone would ever be attracted to me. So obviously like, I wouldn't think about sex is something that I wouldMalcolm Collins: like.You're so inherently humble, Simone. It radiates from you.Simone Collins: I, yeah, you've also seen me in high school. Well, like I wasn't, I, I was not. Even close to the top 50 percent Okay,Malcolm Collins: you were less attractive than you are today when you were younger I'll agree with that, but I think that you were still very attractive.I ISimone Collins: was like in high school. I was like a Three and a half and maybe youMalcolm Collins: were nerd bait in high school. I've six you were nerd bait, but continueSimone Collins: That's sweet. In, in college, sorry, post college in college and post college, I was nerd bait in high school. It was a real story. So, one, like I never would have thought to use that as a social currency.Cause I didn't think it was a social currency. I had second until I met you, I thought it was completely asexual. So like. I had no interest. So like my mom saying that to me meant nothing, basically like no amount of sex [00:11:00] education or lack thereof or abstinence education would have changed my stance and policy around sexuality.And I think this is a really important point. I think that with many kids, they're going to do what they're going to do. If they're the kind of person who's going to just hormonally, biologically have a high sex drive or grow up in a culture that makes them feel like they are. Sexually attractive and for validation.They need to have sex. They're going to have sex. It doesn't matter. So like the only thing you can do at that point is try to encourage safe sex and strategically productive sex.Malcolm Collins: So I don't think that the evidence agrees with you on this. Really? Okay, go on. So this is something that I had recently looked into before this, because I wanted to double check.I was like, okay, let's look into the data on this. Yeah. Generally it seems that the more you teach young kids about sex, the less they have sex and the later they have sex the first time. Do you think that's because adultsSimone Collins: are tainting it with uncoolness?Malcolm Collins: I would that could be part of it. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.And there's a whole psychological issue here that we'll [00:12:00] get to. But I think that you see your own experience as being more anecdotal than it really is. And the reality is that the data is pretty robust on this. Like I went through a number of studies on this. It seems it's not like a Yeah. Sometimes the data goes one way.Sometimes the data goes the other way, which you sometimes see the data is profoundly. The more you teach kids about sex, the later they have sex and the less sex they have early in their lives. Okay.Simone Collins: But does this teaching kids about sex include teaching kids about. Abstinence, or like teachingMalcolm Collins: kids to not have sex.Okay, so you can do abstinence only education, which actually has a similar effect to general sex education.Simone Collins: Interesting. See, I had thought as a kid growing up, and like younger, that like abstinence only education didn't work. That's what I always heard. AbstinenceMalcolm Collins: only education doesn't work. Of course, because that's what they wanted to tell you.Yeah. Like that fit the narrative. Perhaps in this only education actually does work, but it doesn't seem to work as long as general sex education. Yeah, well,Simone Collins: because I [00:13:00] mean, eventually for the average person, something's gotta give, right? I mean.Yeah,Malcolm Collins: yeah. So it is protective. It is not as protective.Simone Collins: Even though they really care about abstinence.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, it was, it was more, the studies that have looked at this long term, like six months to a year out show that you get a persistent effect from regular sex education and a, and a non persistent effects from abstinence only education. And I think that a lot of this comes from the way that you acculturize kids to think about sexuality.As a kid, for example, you get somebody like me, I smoked, right? Like, like cigarettes, right? Clove cigarettes, of course, because I needed to sleep with all the hot girls. And the hot girls were into clove cigarettes. They really were though, yeah. So, you go and you sneak out behind the rock in town and hope nobody saw you.As soon as that was the Rockwood town, as soon as I went to college, there was a [00:14:00] rock by the lake until we go into the woods and then in New Hampshire and hook up and you, you know, but as soon as it was legal for me to do that, I immediately stopped doing it. I never did it again in my life. Oh, funny.No, and I'm lucky I didn't become addicted to it because I could have, right. I, I, I'm lucky that mySimone Collins: cigarettes don't have nicotine in them. Could that be.Malcolm Collins: No, they have nicotine in them. My family just historically is not particularly susceptible to nicotine addictions or really any addiction other than alcohol.So, and your family is pretty much like the complete bears when it comes to all of it's done everything. So, so I, I, I think there was a genetic thing protecting me and I didn't do it that often. I literally only did it when I wanted to go hook up with someone. So it was, it was rare but it was something I engaged in because it was disallowed.And this is another thing you see in the data.Simone Collins: But, so that's why I would expect abstinence only education to [00:15:00] backfire, because you're making somethingMalcolm Collins: forbidden. Well, it does seem to backfire in the long run, right? But I think the more you engage with sexuality, like the grosser it seems, okay? Yes. So, that is one aspect of it. But I think there's more to it than that.Okay. I think that if you look at the data, another thing you'll see is, so even in adults, if you look at regions by there was this great study, I think it looked at like how conservatively Mormon regions were. Okay. This is a culture that doesn't particularly like masturbation and it was looking at by zip code and it showed that the amount of online porn consumption was Correlated with how conservative the area was.Isn't that marvelous? And I seem to remember a historic thing about like PayPal addresses and then sales of girls gone wild that, that was selling in those ads or something. But generally this is something you see over and over again. The more a community is told to restrict access to these [00:16:00] sorts of things, the more they're going to engage with these sorts of things under the radar.It really seems like. The best panacea against over sexual abundance. So we will teach our kids, basically the answer here is we will teach our kids pretty aggressively and early about human sexuality. But because we want them to engage in the topic with moderation, and we think that that is the best way to achieve that outcome.Yeah, andSimone Collins: also that when they do it, they do it safely. But so then, okay, so like, let's go a little further with this. Like, I think the thing,Malcolm Collins: I don't think that they should go out there and have a ton of sex. I do. But ISimone Collins: do think that when they do, they should do it safely. So that's part of what sex ed is all about.yoU know, a lot of what these studies are looking at is when people do eventually,Malcolm Collins: I'm making is that sex ed has a secondary effect depending on how it's done. So what I'mSimone Collins: saying is if weMalcolm Collins: like, I don't care about it. Don't [00:17:00] care about it. I'm talking safe sex outside, obviously you're going to have moreSimone Collins: safe sex.I know, I know. What I'm talking about also is the chilling effect of adults teaching you this thing. So for example, if you and I teach our children like, oh, by the way, like if and when you want to try anal, these are like the processes you should go through. Like here's how to like clean Make sure you use lube!Yeah, like you gotta use lube, like start small, you might want to start pegging a little bit before you go full out, like, you know, before you, this is how you douche properly, here are the various, and like, they're just getting increasingly like, just disgust, like disgusted, ashen face. If yourMalcolm Collins: parents tell you this stuff.OhSimone Collins: yeah, no, if we teach our children. Like how to do any, you know, like, you know, here, like here are the various techniques, like, you know, when you go down on someone, you know, make sure you don't, you know, don't use your teeth, you know, make sure blah, blah, blah. And like, you know, and you for deep throating, this is some methodology and positioning that may indeed they're going to die.And IMalcolm Collins: mean, but here's the thing about this. My mom [00:18:00] telling me about this, whatever they're. One, whenever they hear one of their friends brag about it. Right. Yeah. So they're not gonna see it as high status. They're thinking about their parents. And two, you know, the first time they engage with it, the way you sabotage your kids having sex is bury those memories in their heads.Yes. Not just don't engage with it. And I also think even in mind, so if a kid's going out there and they're educating themselves about their sexuality, right? Yeah. Yeah. They're going on online websites, they're like, okay, what is sex about? What is Mm-Hmm. . Those are going to be really sex positive, I think in a particularly toxic way in an uncritical way.Like,If you go online and you look at the places where this is talked about within online communities, they're often very uncritically sex positive.Or I think if you look at something like our book on the subject, the pragmatist guide to sexuality, like if I was in us and I was like, how do I teach my kids realistically about sex? Honestly, the audiobook for The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality is probably a pretty good place to start. [00:19:00] Because it really makes it not sound cool, it makes it overly analytical, it goes really deep, it unmystifies a lot of it.With a lot of this stuff, Unmystifying it is how you build protection against it. Yeah,Simone Collins: one of our best reviews for The Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality was something along the lines of, I came to this book to better understand how man loves one another, you know, how we intimately you know, come together.And instead I came away disgusted by humanity. And we're like, exactly, exactly. That was our goal. Yeah. Mission accomplished. You may have given us a two star review, but we're keeping it. Cause you know,Malcolm Collins: fire hydrant of sexual, like what humans are actually doing online. It is the collective delete my search history of humanity being, being poured down our kid's throat, like some sort of torture device.Simone Collins: But you know, we're not going to, we're not going to say any of this in a sex negative [00:20:00] context, although we're also not like. We're not ourselves, obviously, is super infatuated by sex. You know, we'reMalcolm Collins: not Oh, the thing I don't understand at all.Simone Collins: The idea of calling it making love makes me,Malcolm Collins: you know.Also, I had a high sex drive at a younger age because I grew up again. This is something we talk about. You can tell from people's facials features. My facial features are of somebody who was overexposed to testosterone growing up. The reason I had so much sex growing up, like I mentioned, that's on other things I'd slept with a hundred different people before I started college.The reason I had done that is because I had this Over driven sex drive. And a lot of people are like, Oh, you should, as an adult now, now that you're free, because testosterone goes down when you have kids, it goes down when you're in a long term monogamous relationship, they're like, you should want that back.I'm like, why would I want that back? That was not just. Hell in that it was something that I constantly [00:21:00] thought about all the time. It was Simone, right? Like, we get receipts and she's like, Oh no, that could block your test. I'm like, grab the receipt. I'm like, Simone, I don't want you touching it because you're pregnant with our kids.I don't care anymore. I won the game, right? Why? They're like, well, don't you, don't you want to be virile? I, I suspect that these people who like go out there hunting for virility have never really experienced like full on male sexuality. So just likeSimone Collins: how not only logistically cumbersome it is to have a lot of sex, but also like how legally emotionally and socially liable it makes you, right?Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and morally. So, you know, I look at the first person I had sex with, you know, the first time I had sex with someone. I had gone to this camp that was for nerds. It was, it was, you would only get invitations if you had gotten over a certain score on the SATs. And before this or I was thinking it was like an IQ test or something.Anyway, before this, I had never really and it [00:22:00] was hosted at Cambridge or Oxford or something like that. Cambridge, Cambridge. I had never really done well with women before this moment, but I had just gotten into the period of starting to like, try to logistically using online environments, try to understand with you know, if then statement, like I would use that if the statements, but I would use chains of texts when talking to girls online and learn which chains worked and which chains didn't.So I just begun to like really formalize this process. I get into this environment where I am valued for being nerdy. You know, the first party there, I'm hooking up with two girls at the same time behind the party. I end up choosing one of them, and it was literally, like, basically NTR porn Netanari or whatever.This girl had been in a long term relationship. She was a very conservative Christian girl. She was saving herself for marriage and she was just like, . I will do any, like, I'm really, really into you.Like, I know I've been with this guy forever, but let's just do you. [00:23:00] This is, this is what I want to do. Like, this is the path I want to take. And at the time, like, that was really hot to me. It's so funny, we had this one person on the, the, in the comments once being like, Oh, Malcolm, you seem like you're, you're into cuckoldry or whatever.Like, do you want other people to sleep with your wife? And I was like, you've really read me wrong. Like I used to and that was something I did a lot. We were, I slept with somebody else's prom date on prom. You know, one of my friends I did the things where as an older person now looking back on it, it was really immoral.And I feel very, very bad about it. That'sSimone Collins: good. Yeah. It's a dick move.Malcolm Collins: No, I was a dick. I was a dick. I was driven by my hormones at that age. Yeah. And I didn't have any sort of a moderating Moral instruction telling me to do otherwise. I mean, if you look at, you know, who was my moral instructor up to that point, which was my mom, right?Her position [00:24:00] was if you can f**k people over and flex on them and show that you're better than them, then do it. Yeah, that's very much a Trumpian sortSimone Collins: of mindset. Totally. Well, are we going to teach our kids, our sons, especially some form of bro code? IMalcolm Collins: mean, Yes. Yeah. No. Well, I mean, I'd say that I, I, I will tell them about my background and that I made mistakes.That was bad at the time I thought, and you can even see Trump do this when I say Trumpian, you know, he brags about sleeping with his friends, wives, like as an adult. Right? Like long after he should have known that that was the immoral thing to do and like trying to pressure his friend's wife into sleeping with him.The lack of progressionSimone Collins: there.Malcolm Collins: And for me, I view this period of when I was super sexually active as a period in which I broke a number of moral codes, which I should have known not to break. You know, sleeping with people that were hot, but I didn't respect. Sleeping with people that were, no, I never Bye.Like, like my, the one thing I always stuck with is I would never hurt their feelings. Right. Right. Which is meaningful. If [00:25:00] somebody gave their virginity to me, which happened a lot, like about a third of the people I slept with were virgins. That was like the group that I did best with. I would always try to date them from a specific period of time afterwards if they wanted that.I would try to. I mean, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they were just like, I want practice before I sleep with my boyfriend, which again, like just me being the f*****g antagonist in NTR porn. But that's also kindSimone Collins: of sweet if they, you know, just didn't want to disappoint someone that they IMalcolm Collins: understand, but I shouldn't have done it.Yeah. And so I think people who have never been cursed with this ultra high male sexuality, they do not understand. It's like somebody one day injected me with like meth. Got me addicted to it. And I didn't ask for this at all. And now all of a sudden I'm breaking into people's houses and f*****g stealing s**t so I can get math.Right. Like it was wrong and it was evil. And I am trying to, as an adult learn to like, like, like not a tone for it, but I [00:26:00] don't want to go back there. Like, I don't want to be like, Oh yes. introduce that challenge to me again. Yeah. Although oneSimone Collins: way to atone for it, of course, is to raise kids to do better.So that, that is a hope that we have for our kids then. I think another thing that I, I, I think about a lot is when it comes to I do think that it creates a certain lack of understanding of like how these dynamics work and I'm, I'm not even talking about like what people are willing to do. I'm talking about what people.Expect from partners as a default. And I think one of the biggest things that I see in terms of people, like problems that people have with sex throughout their lifetimes that we see people post about online a lot is that partners don't feel sufficiently desired. And it really, it has nothing to do with like, I don't care if like they're doing wacky stuff in bed or if they have like zero sex [00:27:00] lives, a lot of it comes down to like how desired a partner feels.And if there's one through line through every single like fetish you'll see in erotic material. Like the thing that people almost universally, and of course there are some fetish based like differences here, but like, it's almost always based around the person being very into banging you like the concept there, like enthusiastic interest.And I think a big problem that That both men and women have, especially after being exposed to any form of erotic material. And this is, you know, romance novels for young women, or like, you know, manga. Or like, you know, typical, standard, very visual erotic material for men. Is they just kind of assume that without putting any effort.You're going to end up with a partner who's showing like insane levels of enthusiasm for you. And like that, unfortunately, that's actually either something that like, unless you're like some kind of Adonis or you're like really rich or [00:28:00] famous, which is kind of hard to do, especially when you're just a kid.You have to put a lot of work into getting that kind of interest. And I, I don't know how I'm going to approach this with our kids yet, but it is something I want to talk about with you because I, I want kids to understand that like, no, a woman or man is not going to be like insane. Like, you know, like cannot control themselves around you.Malcolm Collins: I know I've had that with some girls. Well, you're you, I mean, no, I understand, but, but some people I assume, I mean, I don't want to say it's an act, but like they know to lean into it. Like, I, I think that the better thing to focus on with kids is I think a big problem in our society. Basically sex, non reproductive sex from the perspective of our culture and the way we're teaching our kids is no different from pornography.Yeah, agreed. No different from pornography. It is no additional social standing. Well, I would saySimone Collins: it's, it's probably a little worse because you're more likely to put yourself at physical, logistical, legal, moral risk. No,Malcolm Collins: it's just pornography with extra [00:29:00] steps. Yeah. It's pornography with extra steps and risks.So insofar as it feels better to you than pornography, then engage in it. But if it doesn't feel better to you than that, then. don't engage in it. And, or don't waste a ton of time seeking it out. And I think the, one of the core problems in the way our society frames this is it puts, you know, corn in one category, actual sex in one category, and then like reproductive sex in another category.And then there's conservative religious groups, which sometimes are like corn and actual sex should go in the same group. But that whole group is off limits. Whereas we say, No, because they're in the same category, just engage with porn. Don't engage with actual sex unless it is moving you towards reproductive sex.And and even in that case, reproductive sex is largely immoral from our perspective if you can engage in polygenic screening. And so you know, don't, don't over indulge in that either, [00:30:00] you know, so, uh, what this means is I think when you frame things that way, when you're like, look, what you are doing when you are having sex with someone else for pleasure is you're basically using another human being like a fleshlight, like.Why? Like, you, you, you functionally are getting nothing additional out of it other than any hormones that force some sort of a bonding to you. And insofar as it's creating hormones that force a bonding to you, then you're using it as a tool to brainwash the other individual, which, okay, yes, learn to use that tool well, but recognize what you're doing and that that is the purpose of sex in those circumstances.There's an argument that It's not your personal gratification.Simone Collins: A lady or gentleman with a weaker imagination may just have difficulty getting the same enjoyment from not exactly the real thing.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I, I, I think that that framing for our kids will work in terms of leading them to understand that [00:31:00] sex is a tool that can move them towards their goals.It is a tool that it goals. The big one that sex helps with is getting someone to marry you. But the and then have kids.Simone Collins: Wait, so you think you're more likely to marry someone if you've already had sex? As a guy, yeah. As a guy, yeah. I guess because you can be sure that you're not sexually incompatible because that's kind ofMalcolm Collins: scary.No, like I had a, I mean, the way that I, you know, you can get women basically indebted to you, like get them to have a, a supernatural is the wrong word, but I mean, it's, it's.Simone Collins: Oh, so you're, you're talking about like oxytocin and like. Yeah. TerminalMalcolm Collins: bonding. Okay. Utilize that to achieve bonds with people that then you can then utilize to or exploit whatever you want to say to better achieve your long term goals.Okay. Insofar as you don't hurt them. And, and keep in mind, you know, if there's somebody who's out there going to be having sex anyway, like, how did you ruin all these women? You know, after, after [00:32:00] the first few, I was like, okay, no, I'm only going to go for the type of girl who I know would otherwise go out there and have sex with people.So yeah, that's how we're going to engage with sexuality with our kids. So I think the question is, what outcome are you aiming for? Are you aiming for Ayla? Which, who I think, you know, we love Ayla, really smart person. I, I, I think that the strategy that she has chosen, she's really pioneered it. And I think it's shown that even if you are the best at the world at what she does.It's still hard to find a husband if you take that path. And so I wouldn't recommend it for our kids. So do you want to take that path or do you want to take our path?Our path is extreme and total sexual education, allowing your kids to be exposed to sexual information at a young age, normalize it and treat it as something that you as a parent are engaging them on.Or do you extremely restrict sexual content, tell them to restrict masturbation and don't engage them with pornography. It's at the path you want to take. Right.Simone Collins: So that we're, we're essentially saying traumatic explo [00:33:00] exposure. Versus sheltering.Malcolm Collins: Well, not traumatic exposure, normalization.Simone Collins: I think if my parents, Now, I guess if my parents told me, like, the logistics of anal, for example, I wouldn't be traumatized, but,Malcolm Collins: You'd never have anal.Simone Collins: I, I never would, anyway. I'm not into anyway. Like I guess I should like give a better description of like, something I'd be into like ChAARI. No. Yeah. Then I would be much less likely to do it. Yeah, it's true. Did Even if it's something I'm kind of inclined to . Sorry, that's,Malcolm Collins: that's the not tying thing.Simone Collins: UhhuhYeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm in, I'm a, I'm a Swaddler, so. Um,Malcolm Collins: yeah, she, she, she likes being restrained is what she'sSimone Collins: saying. It's very, well, I mean, it makes sense. I think like, I would imagine that the proportion of autistic people who like, if they were asked to choose sexual fetishes that like were the sexual equivalent of a weighted blanket, YouMalcolm Collins: are such a goof Simone and [00:34:00] I absolutelySimone Collins: love you.But no, yeah, you're right. If my parents had been like. Learn about this. I would be like, maybe I will never do that. Okay. Let's do this to our children. We're so terrible. Hah hah hah! Heheheheheheheheh. Foo foo fooMalcolm Collins: foo. It's gonna be bad. This is what the private disguise of sexuality says. That we have ruined sex for our children for life.WellSimone Collins: that's why we dedicate the book to them. Because at least they have that.Malcolm Collins: Alright, love you soSimone Collins: much. Love you too! Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

We explain why the childfree/DINK (dual income, no kids) lifestyle is not something the pronatalist community should oppose. If people do not wish to have children, they likely would make poor parents and passing on those genes is not productive. We also highlight how the animosity towards DINKs often stems from jealousy, not concern for civilization. Ultimately, voluntary sterilization of those not fit to parent strengthens society long-term.[00:00:00] We're Dinks. We can go to Florida on a whim. We're Dinks. We're already planning our European vacation next year. Dinks. We get a full eight hours of sleep and sometimes more.We're Dinks. We get desserts and appetizers at restaurants. We're DinksSimone Collins: the response that pronatalist communities or even just like broadly conservative people have to them is just totally wrong.These are people who really, really, really, really should not be having kids.Malcolm Collins: We mean this both from a genetic reason.Like, as we've talked about, like a dink is obviously more likely to be narcissistic, less likely to want to get back to society, et cetera. But in addition to that, they're not going to be good parents.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: I just hit record. So we're set. Let's make sure you're looking gorgeous. I love it when you have a little flippy do on your forehead of hair. It'sMalcolm Collins: just really I wanted to see. So we will, I love my wife and I am excited to be here with you today. Because we are going to talk about a subject. that I didn't really know about. Apparently there was some meme around this because a bunch of [00:01:00] people got mad at people on the internet about this, because people on the internet love to get mad and judge other people.But it is the phenomenon of dinks. And it's a dual income, no kids. No kids. So these are couples, no kids. And I think a lot of people they look at us, you know, the ISTs and they're like, oh, you're fighting the dinks. Right? And it's like, not really . And we'll, we'll get to this actually. You said at the prenatal list conference, somebody came up, right?Mm-Hmm. . And they were like, well you guys as ISTs, you know, what are your views on and how are you going to fight the use of condoms? You know, like in other contraceptive drivers,Simone Collins: right. . And they also ask you this, like on the spot in front of a large audience of people.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, I said something along the lines of, look, I do not want kids being born because they were born accidentally.That is notSimone Collins: a victory. Seriously, or to people who don't want them. Come on guys.Malcolm Collins: How is that a good thing that we are basically [00:02:00] forcing you know, people who don't want kids to have children with people who they did not intend to have children with? Talk about cruelty.Simone Collins: What to theMalcolm Collins: kids, you know, she's just like, come on.Yeah. And this is, this is very much around dinks, you know, if somebody doesn't want kids, like that is not our job. WeSimone Collins: also like, we don't want them to have kids. Our job is to protect. They're right to not have kids. Cause if we care aboutMalcolm Collins: kids from them, exactly, exactly, let's, let's talk about dinks more broadly.So, we'll do the little video of the dinks here. So you can seeWe're Dinks. We go to Trader Joe's and workout classes on the weekends. We're Dinks. We get into snobby hobbies like skiing and golfing. We're Dinks. We can go to Florida on a whim. We're Dinks. We're already planning our European vacation next year. Dinks. We get a full eight hours of sleep and sometimes more.We're Dinks. We get desserts and appetizers at restaurants. We're Dinks. We can play with other kids and give them back. We're Dinks. We still do it three times a week. We're Dinks. We spend our discretionary [00:03:00] income. We're dinks. We max out our 401ks, Roth IRAs, and HSAs. We're dinks. We don't use our kids or dog as an excuse to leave a party.We just leave.Malcolm Collins: they do come off as a little, well, I mean, well, forSimone Collins: context, like dinks did start trending a lot recently because a lot of dinks are making Tik TOK videos specifically about it. And this one couple doing this sort of back and forth of dink lifestyle amenities went viral.Which led to aMalcolm Collins: lot of discussion. Our friend of the show, Edward Dutton, did a counter dink video that I'll Which is hilarious. Found randomly. It just came up and he's like, oh, his voice sounds familiar.We're dinks. We've been sucked into a death cult. We're dinks. We're putting our immediate hedonistic desires above our long term genetic interests. We're dinks. We're part of a selection event, and we've been selected out. We're dinks. We're coping with the fact that we're going to be failures as organisms.We're dinks. When we're older, we're going to look back on our lives with a profound sense of regret. We're dinks. We're going to die cold, alone, and with no one in the world who loves [00:04:00] us.Malcolm Collins: But no, no, no, it makes perfect sense, right? So, the, these individuals, like when you see what they're talking about, when you see why they're excited to not have kids you're going to repeatedly see a few through lines.It's, it's primarily because it allows them to engage with more consumerism. That's a really big thing. Like they're like, orSimone Collins: savings. Like in, in, in the Dink video, they're like, we max out our Roth IRA, 401k and HSA. Well, we do too, by the way. Parents are more likely to need to do that because then you just save the money.But yeah, whatever.Malcolm Collins: No, not just, they're, they're, they're much more excited in their consumerist behavior. They are. We can buy an 8 latte that we can go on random trips so that we canSimone Collins: appetizers and desserts. That we do too.Malcolm Collins: Who does that? Who goes to a restaurant and orders three courses? That's insane.Simone Collins: Well, we order appetizers 'cause we just eat appetizers. , likeMalcolm Collins: shared appetizers. Yeah. We order [00:05:00] appetizers to save money and you know, save, save on calories, . Well, so, so there's that. And then there's a lot of like, well we get to have sex more often or Yeah, we still haveSimone Collins: sex three times a week.So many married couples we know have not sex three times a week. Every single night. If you care about that, kids aren't going to stop you from doing it.Malcolm Collins: . Hold on, Simone. I'm not saying, and I do not think it is helpful for us to say, that married couples can have everything a dink can have. True. While, you know, you can look at individual things you're seeing and saying, that's not true of all married couples.I think that that is, it is, it's disingenuous to make the claim that married couples and dinks have access to the same amount of resources. And that is really, really important is that they actually do have access to more resources. What is more interesting to me and I think what causes the backlash to them is why do they want these additional resources?What [00:06:00] are they trading? The continuation of our species and their culture and the improvement, like the intergenerational improvement of humanity. This great game that every single one of their ancestors participated in and sacrificed for what they're pointing out when they talk about all the things that they can have because they're not parents is they're pointing out what a sacrifice apparent is and what is sacrifice every individual.Who came before them so that they had the privilege to opt out of this system. The sacrifices is that huge, great chain of individuals had to undergo for them to have the privilege to basically cash out. Now it is as selfish as the boomers who go out there and just take out tons of debt in the name of future generation.They are cheating the system because they don't have to deal with the consequences personally. Now, what is. Also true is the genetic precursors to their [00:07:00] psychological proclivities that lead to this sort of narcissistic and selfish behavior are going to be bred out of the population. So that's a, that's one, a good thing, right?You know, so that's removing and the cultural groups that did a bad job of motivating them to. Yeah. You know, intergenerationally stay in this system are also going to be bred out of the population. And, and even if those groups are aggressively attempting to convert people intergenerationally, the groups are converting from are going to get better at resisting them.We're just not going to see that anymore. You know, there's one study I saw recently that said something like 55 percent of Gen Z plans to not have kids, 55%. And for a huge portion of them it's environmental concerns. So, they have been so brainwashed by this environmental apocalypticism, because every generation, every 20 years, there's an apocalyptic cult.You know, their kids are gonna not have kids, you know, if they had kids, because of AI, right? You know, you see this in the EA movement, which has just become this crazy, aggressive, luddite community. The moment Moment. You know, I always go back to the Douglas Adams quote, [00:08:00] Douglas Adams quote of everything invented after you were 30 is like an abomination.It must be destroyed. The moment the leaders of the movement turned 30, all of a sudden all new technological innovations are heresy and must be destroyed in a threat in the future of our species. And, and these young people really believe this, this sort of nonsensical panic who sometimes, you know, come into the movement now because they don't know that, you know, just.Old people who time has left behind yelling at the sky.. You wouldn't understand, Dad. You're not with it. I used to be with it. But then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it. And what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you.Malcolm Collins: But where are they going with this? Yeah. So, so these concerns, this sort of susceptibility to this form of apocalypticism, like environmentalist apocalypticism is hopefully going to be brought out of our species. Now this will lead to more environmental catastrophes in the future, but I mean, humans have had a great, great job and done a great job at [00:09:00] creating environmental catastrophes over and over and over again.You know, you look at like when the environmental protection. To went into place. It went into place because lakes usedto regularly catch fire in some areas. ,Simone Collins: oh boy,Malcolm Collins: I forgot about that. Or the London smog. Like people,apparently it's worse than like Bangkok today. You could barely, like if you walked into London, people would just die hall all around you.Yeah, yeah, yeah. You met you. If you go historically right, people are like, yeah, but. That's just like industrialization problems. If we go back to like Native Americans, like working off the land, I'm like, oh, where did all the mega fauna in America go? Where did the giant sloths go? No! When they came to this country, they systemically exterminated hundreds of species just completely changed the ecological landscape caused huge ecological disasters.Because humans always do this. It's what we do. Okay? Yeah. AndSimone Collins: Well, it's very natural. That's the problem,Malcolm Collins: I guess. We had reached this one iteration of our species that thought it might go in the opposite direction. But the [00:10:00] moment you know, that then also became a sterilizing memetic context, like it, you know They then disappear.So you have these dinks and people are like, well, do you hold animosity to them? And it's like, no, I mean, really I think I hold a level of pity for them. Because a lot of these people, you know, when I look at these women who are spending, you know, 300 K or whatever on trying to get pregnant and they're like 45 they had this mindset when they were younger because they didn't realize or they didn't fully accept yet that they're.What, what gives them the happiness that they were getting from things like this commercial extravagance, these trips was going to change as they got older. And they just, it had probably already changed by the time they filmed these videos. They just built their self identity because, you know, there's a lot of research on identity creation, which typically happens between like 18 and 24.And during that period of your life, you're in this mindset of like kids. Ick because, you know, you are supposed to be going out there and finding a mate should be that way. Yeah,Simone Collins: it's fine.Malcolm Collins: So it makes, it makes perfect sense that you would [00:11:00] have that mindset at that age, but that's not like who you are.But they mistakenly believe this because it's reinforced by society around them. So then they end up in these desperate states, you know, reaching out. You know, our foundation being like, Hey, can you fund me to get IVF? And we're like, no, that's not whatSimone Collins: the foundation. That is. Yeah. That is, I, we should point out that that is something that has happened to us.That like many people who probably formerly identified as child free or dink have contacted us and basically said, like, I can no longer afford IVF. Can you, you know, can you give me a grant? And we can't and no one else will. So this is something people should keep in mind. Like even if you.Malcolm Collins: But you made your own bet is, is really at the end of the day.And people don't realize that they have thrown away their happiness.Simone Collins: No organization is going to, is going to invest in, in a person's fertility. If they're in their forties and having trouble having a kid because they, they're the same dollars that they could spend on that. Older person could help like, you know, [00:12:00] 10, 20, 20 year olds have kids.Yeah. So like, they're just not going to do it. You're not going to get help. So I guess like if, if I'm going to give one piece of advice to dinks of like, here's how to really have absolutely zero regrets, like freeze eggs, sperm and or embryosMalcolm Collins: embryos, everything is a bit of a scam. It doesn't like, they do not work as well as people think theySimone Collins: do.But I mean, some, some dinks are some single. So like for the dink couple that went viral. I would encourage them to freeze embryos, obviously because they were a couple and they, they had other people, but like, I think many women and men don't have a partner and therefore like, you have to do what you can with what you have.So yeah, I get what you're saying, Malcolm, but like at the same time, like it's better than nothing. And that way, like. And who knows, maybe you'll have like a sister or a brother or a cousin who really like, can't, you know, can't use their own material and they'd really appreciate you as a donor. So like, this isn'tMalcolm Collins: for nothing.And people who are horrified by this, you see our video on who kills more kids, Catholics or us, you like it, you're like, no, creating an embryo via IVF, it's [00:13:00] creating a kid and so you're murdering them if they don't end up being used. This is not what early Catholic theologians thought, this is not what most early Christian theologians thought, you know, you'd look like Augustus of Himbo.Or Thomas Aquinas, you know, they thought that the soul entered the developing embryo 30 days after it began developing. This is a fairly modern belief that is not really biblically backed. Then we go into this with lots of quotes and stuff like that. So just, just be aware that we're not out there advocating the rampant killing of kids.We're just trying to ensure that the kids who are meant to come into the world can, and we don't end up with these heartbreaking situations.Simone Collins: Yeah. And we see, we do see dinks change their mind, but I think my larger sense of dinks is like, The, the response that pronatalist communities or even just like broadly conservative people have to them is just totally wrong.These are people who really, really, really, really should not be having kids. They don't want them. And also like I've seen, I I've watched a lot of child free content. I've gone through a lot of child free. Reddit threads. And I've gone through like posts of parents who regret becoming [00:14:00] parents and that's talk about heartbreaking.Like I see a dink couple or see a child free person. I don't feel sad for them at all. Like they seem pretty happy with their lifestyle. It could, you know, not, not for us. Right. But like, fine. But what makes me really sad is like videos, Tik TOKs posts by parents who are like. Don't do it. You know, I, if I could go back in time, I'm like, Oh man, like how horrible is that?Especially for the kids.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of these people are in sort of dink cultural groups and stuff like that. And they have this enforced on them. And this is why we really do not advocate to these communities. And I should point when we say like, dinks shouldn't have kids, you know, we don't, we, we, we mean this both from a genetic reason.Like, as we've talked about, like a dink is obviously more likely to be narcissistic, less likely to want to get back to society, et cetera. But in addition to that, I think that, that they're not going to be good parents. And, and even when it's heartbreaking, when somebody reaches out to us and they're like, I didn't start trying to have kids until X age [00:15:00] because of whatever it's like, well.So nobody chose to be with you who you were willing to accept. You know, like, that's a sign, okay, that you waited this long. That you didn't question what you were being told by society. All of these things are unfortunately, like, we live in a world where unfortunately not everyone is really happy.Equally fit to be a parent. And the, the selfishness that is shown by these individuals means that they're much more likely to fall into this narcissistic parent category. Which is really, really something that I would promote avoiding. One of the tweets that was done and like counter to the dinkness, I think it was actually Elon's tweet to this is he goes, it's really selfish to not have kids because what you're saying is somebody else's kids have to care for you in your old age.And I thought that that was a I mean, I don't think that's going to compel dinks, but it is also a true statement. You know, when these people are. You know, promoting immigration and stuff like that. What they're essentially saying is [00:16:00] we didn't take the time or make the effort to raise the next generation ourself.And therefore you know, when I'm old and I'm living off of the, the dole off of society, off of social security or whatever I need to import people from other countries to support me.Simone Collins: But I also, like, I don't know, I don't know. I, I don't agree with that particular stance of Elon Musk. I don't like, I think a lot of these people are going to die deaths of despair, or they're just not going to get very good services, or they're not going to get human help because the human help isn't available.And they're going to have to deal with that. And that's, that's just kind of on them or they'll be fine. And, you know, it's a market based thing and they will have saved the money necessary to pay a very pretty penny. For whoever is very happy to receive that money to give them services. I don't like that argument to me doesn't do anything like either.They're going to, you know, die alone on a floor, not being taken care of because they haven't [00:17:00] planned accordingly. Or they're going to kill themselves, which I think a lot of, I think euthanasia is going to see, especially in a post demographic collapse world, people are going to opt into humanely killing themselves when they become too old to either pay for their lifestyles or they're unhealthy.You know, or they're just going to be able to pay for someone, like whatever. And that's fine. Like I'm okay with employment.Malcolm Collins: So if they, if they are paying for people, but a lot of these people don't really, are not really planning to pay for it, they're going to die aloneSimone Collins: on the floorMalcolm Collins: or they're going to be a major voting block because people aren't having as many kids and elderly people vote more than young people and they end up taking the money from the younger generations to support their indulgent lifestyles, which is something that we're already seeing the older generation too.That's where this unsustainable debt load and everything like that is coming from, and they will do that, and they will keep doing that, and they will do it more in the future, until the system breaks. That sounds pretty evil. Because they don't care. They don't care about future [00:18:00] generations, and they don't care about people younger than them.They only care, when you see the videos, they're not like, I'm a dink so I can give back to society. It's, I'm a dink so I can indulge in personal hedonism as much as possible. And we will have one, you know, the next generation is likely going to suffer to some extent because of these individuals. However that suffering will to some extent be ameliorated with the knowledge that at least these individuals have removed themselves from our cultural landscape and our genetic landscape.And this is something that I think people really don't. Expect much, you know, running the prenatalist movement, people will come to us and they'll say, how do you convince this environmentalist who doesn't want to have kids? How do you convince this person who has no kids that they think they can't afford them or something?And it's like, well, except, you know, the less money you have, the more kids you have. So clearly people with less money than them are able to afford kids. Within all of these instances, we're just like, don't have kids. No argument for them. And they don't get it, because they're not used to that. Every movement they've dealt with before says, [00:19:00] everyone, you must do what we're telling you to do.When we come to them, and they come to us, and they're like, well, what do you think of me doing this? And we're just like, well, we don't care about you. You don't matter to us. You're not part of the solution. You're, you're not, and you have no capacity to be part of the solution. The mere fact that you would ask me to convince you shows you have no capacity to be part of the solution.Yeah. And, and, and then there's the alternate group, which does matter for us to reach out to these are young people who are being influenced or brainwashed and just need to know that this is an option for them, that this is a problem and that these, you know, environmental nutjobs, we've done a video on this are mostly lying to them.These AI nutjobs have done a video on this are mostly lying to them. These things are not the threats that they're being told if they had studied American history. It's something outside of our horrified failing public school system. . They likely don't know. What would be blindingly obvious to anyone who has actually studied American history is that America has a large apocalyptic movement that spreads. particularly [00:20:00] was in you know, upper class communities, urban communities, stuff like that, about every 20 years 25 years about and, and this is just something that America has had forever.And no, they are not the first generation to think the world's about to end. And it doesn't happen, it, it doesn't happen, I'm sorry, like, and, and if youSimone Collins: It's the first time for everything, I'm sure, you know,Malcolm Collins: dream big. But I would look as a barometer for is the world actually about to end, not what people from a culture that does this every 25 years, what Yeah, they're probably not the most But instead look at countries and cultures that are intelligent and developed, but that Don't have this panic scenario every 25 years, they are panicking about these things, especiallySimone Collins: if they have a record for calling other shots.So,Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah. And if they don't have these same problems, then it's probably not the same issue that these people think it is. And that they're really just looking for justification for decisions. They were already inclined to make or wanted to make while also making them themselves feel, you know, morally [00:21:00] important.Like they're at an important point in history because everybody wants to feel that way. I, I really get that. Right. And I do think that we are at an important point in history, but not in a nothing we do matters way, but the, you know, see our dark ages of video, everything we do in history right now has an extra layer of importance to it because we are in one of the last ages of prosperity.One of the last ages where you could really indulge in dinkism. It's, it's very much, you know, you look at right before the collapse of the Islamic Empire, right before the collapse of the Roman Empire and if you saw people like marching or look like we don't have kids, look at how wealthy, look at all the, you know, slaves we've been able to buy to carry us on Pelican, you know, it is.And then you have the other guy who's like, Oh gosh, okay, the system's about to collapse. Okay. I need to have a lot of kids. I know that everyone's really concerned that like the upper classes have stopped having kids and I need to cause Caesar was concerned about this. You know, he, there's famous laws that he was passing because he noticed that nobody was having kids anymore.And I need to plan out like geographically where they're going to live because Rome is going to become more destabilized in these areas, et cetera, like this [00:22:00] requires a lot of work and it puts a lot of responsibility on an individual and it is both a gift and a curse that we are the generation that gets to engage as that responsibility.But because of that, this is no longer a situation of just convince everyone. To have more kids. It's now a situation of empower the people who are going to build the next civilization to do a better job doing that instead of you know, convert these, you know, pretty pathetic individuals.Simone Collins: But here's something that I think is more interesting and under discussed on this issue, which is the amount of butthurt you do get from pronatalist people about dinks and child free couples.And I think what's really telling about the butthurt that you get from them and the fact that they react so viscerally and are so judgmental really implies, it could imply, a tremendous lack of security in their decision and a certain amount of resentment that they do not share that same amount [00:23:00] of affluence and freedom.And, and I think a lot of that may be becauseMalcolm Collins: we do. This is what's really interesting, Sinan. When I look at the pushback against the dink movement, it does not come from like pronatalist parents. I, I see it occasionally there, but it's not predominantly from that group. The predominant group, because I was going through videos today on YouTube complaining about dinks.It's actually mostly from younger moderates who one day plan to have kids. Oh,Simone Collins: interesting. So then I guess that would explain it more because then they're on the fence and they still feel more heavily the pressures of wanting all the nice stuff,Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah. Yeah. And they might be closer to these communities or they haven't fully achieved, you know, the having kids yet and everything like that.I think that when people are on like the civilizational train, I'd say they don't really care about the people who are off the civilizational train. It's more like, let's focus on everyone else who's on the civilizational train. And, and, and the dinks are just not participating in the civilizational [00:24:00] chain and the fight that they're having is with other people who aren't on it yet.Simone Collins: I still, I still think that there are, I mean, in the commentary I've seen, there are some families that have a lot of kids that do, that do complain occasionally and bemoan like the. The hedonic sacrifices they have to make with kids. And I think that's just a product of living in a society that celebrates the lifestyle of a like late teen, early twenties, maleMalcolm Collins: or female.And I don't feel that way even a little.Simone Collins: No, no, I don't either. I just think, I think this is why you're going to see why we see some of that butthurt. Even sometimes from prenatalist people, although like I would say like the Jolly Heretic's reaction to, to this was not even that it was just like really funny because he's hilarious.ButMalcolm Collins: I hear what you're saying. Yeah. But I think this is important for the prenatalist movement to remember, like if you're, if you consider yourself part of the movement. And you're out there advocating for it. You, when somebody comes to you and they go, Well, how are you going to convince me to have kids?How do you convince, you know, the [00:25:00] 20 something environmentalist who doesn't want to have kids? We don't. That's the point. We do not. These people are not a part of the problem. In that they're, they're a part of the solution, to be honest. We, if there is a group out there that opposes you and is sterilizing themselves, do not, you know, f**k up your opponent when they are in the process of a great mistake.You know, this is something that around the world, the What great blessing it is to have your opponents primarily be a group that is sterilizing themselves. That is, that is not a mistake that you want to get in the middle of. Nor do you want to take too much relish in the fact that they are going to lead to more suffering within their own population in the long run.So like we can point out within our communities wow, these people are really probably going to end up trying to get pregnant later. They're going to be really sad about this decision. They are going to suffer emotional and psychological consequences for this decision. [00:26:00] But we do not publish that, you know, when we're doing like.stuff like that. We don't push those positions. We do not say, Oh, they're going to regret this because that's not the message we want. Like we are okay with the fact that they end up regretting this. We just say, do what you want. We don't care. Because the kids that are not burdened with having to live with these parents are, are, are fortunately, hopefully going to be born into families like ours or, or like other high fertility families that really are having kids.Because they want to make the world a better place intergenerationally and because they want to participate in this intergenerational cycle and not as an alternative to going on a trip to Florida every year in terms of the amount of happiness or status it gets.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Do you have any other thoughts on your dinky dinks?Simone Collins: I, one thing I'm just thinking about is before we had kids and we lived [00:27:00] as a dink couple, having these thoughts of like, well, I better enjoy. I'm going to be sleeping through the night because I'm never going to do it again and I do somewhat, as much as I know, it's not really productive to have a conversation about like, Oh, actually being a parent isn't so bad, but it actually really isn't though.Like, I just,Malcolm Collins: I just want to say that. I'll be honest, who I feel more bad for than dinks is, I don't know what to call it, two and below parents.Simone Collins: Oh, that is, that is, oh, that's really interesting. The hardest form of parent is having one kid. So hard.Malcolm Collins: I think two kids might be almost as hard. But they're, they're both really hard.At leastSimone Collins: with two kids, they like, you know, keep each other occupied. A littleMalcolm Collins: bit. Yeah. Yeah. Like a one parent family is far, one, they're not really on the civilizational train. So they're not getting the benefits of having kids. And two, the effort required to raise one kid, the sacrifices [00:28:00] you make to raise one kid.For sure. Yeah. Or so much higher than the sacrifices you make when you're having seven or eight kids or something like that, you know? Oh, it's the worst.Simone Collins: And everything's a big deal. Also, like you, you kind of feel morally obligated to like, make everything a big deal because you can'tMalcolm Collins: sleeping through the night thing that you were talking about.And I remember when we had our first kid, like that was genuinely at the beginning, like an issue. Like I was like, Oh, you know, so much work. It was only so much work because we had decided to make it a lot of work. Because that'sSimone Collins: the thing. Yeah. Like when you're like, Oh, I'm just going to sit, you know, sit up and stare at my kid.You know, all night. And that's, so that's, and that's not to say like literally every night. And I've been sleeping incredibly well, like solid eight hours, really good sleep. I have never slept so well, I think in my life up until like this past month. I don't know what's going on. It's just been amazing. Yeah, he used to always complainMalcolm Collins: about sleeping.I'm glad you're happy. ButSimone Collins: it's maybe it's all the sex dreams about you. I don't know what it is. It's that I'm extra hot for you. May it's that you've been extra hot. So like, maybe I sleep well because my female mind [00:29:00] is like husband's in the house. Everything's perfect. He's better than ever. So now youMalcolm Collins: can kind of stay, stay good enough for you.ButSimone Collins: like, I, I sleep with our, like I'm in the master bedroom. Now the crib is right here. The, the, the, the bed that I sleep in is right there. And I am always listening, like I will always have an infant in this room and I'm always listening for them breathing. I'm always paranoid and like terrified that they're going to stop breathing.I'm always like, you know, I'll wake up and then I'll listen for them. So like I am constantly like monitoring, I am, I am worrying, but also like I'm sleeping really well and, and I'm fine and they're fine and nobody's fussing and like, it's, it's okay. I can also hear both of our kids. Immediately below me.Cause their bunk bed is like immediately below the master bed. And I can hear Octavian talking to himself and like thumping the wall with his toys and stuff. And that's good and it's, it's fine. But like, it also just sort of becomes like part of your background mental processing. And I, I dunno, I just, I think it's [00:30:00] unfair because like people framed being a parent.Is, is way worse than it actually was. You'll never get in a full night of sleep again. ButMalcolm Collins: it was accurate for being a parent of one child. Yeah. Yeah. All of the negative stuff you hear about being a parent is totally true. If you are a parent of one to two children, it is totally not true. Once you get well above two children.Simone Collins: Yeah. So being a deoc is the worst, a dual income one, one kid. Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Complete. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and it's interesting if you, like after your first kid, if you're framing having more kids, like you just assume you're going to have a bunch of kids, the way you build the routines around your kids, the way you build your routines around pregnancy are really different and just make the whole process a lot easier.Yeah. Also, and this is a problem that Simone and I constantly have. Is you have this constant fear that you're not going to be able to have all the kids that you want and your house always feels empty, you know, right now we've got three kids. You're pregnant [00:31:00] with number four. And every time I look at a room, I'm like, why is no one here?Like, where is everyone? You know, I, I, I need the stampede. I need you know, it feels, it feels very much like a ghost house, which I think is really surprising to people when they normalize to two kids. When you normalize your brain to the idea, I'll have like seven to 13 kids which, you know, realistically, we'll probably only get to seven, even, even if we do everything right.You know, we can try, we can try. And you look at things, you're like, well. You know, I, I, I, I just it, it feels so empty. It feels so, so, so empty and it feels so like we're doing so little, but we also end up making decisions like finding ways to take them out of daycare and stuff like that, that actually are financially beneficial to us even now, but they're decisions we probably wouldn't have been forced to find solutions to had we not planned on having so many more kids.We would have been like, Oh, we can deal with the financial cost of, or the [00:32:00] temporal cost of doing this or that.Simone Collins: That's true. Yeah. You're, you're allowed, you're, you're allowed and able to and encouraged to make very unsustainable financial choices. So like, yeah, I guess it is true. Being a parent is way, way, way, way worse than being a dual income, no kids, couple or person when you.Have just one, maybe two kids, extra stressful. And then after that it can get, especially after four, that's when economies of scale like kick in. You know, when you actually look at literally unit economics,Malcolm Collins: that's when it really, she's actually right. It really doesn't begin to help until after four.That's when you get to like very marginal. It's like a thousand dollars extra to raise a kid once you have above four kids. Exactly. Yeah. It's justSimone Collins: not much. But anyway to all the dinks out there, we respect your choice. Have fun. We, Yeah, you have our blessing and you don't need it, butMalcolm Collins: yeah, we don't need to have a great life.And I really hope that it does work out for you because I appreciate the service that you are playing to our species [00:33:00] by removing yourself from the cultural and genetic pool. God. Speaking of genetic pools I want to start doing these ads at the end of videos because I want to support my brother and he has created a very cool product.We really like our brother, smart guy, you know, talked about him in other episodes. It's called bun box, like a bunny box.One word box. You can find it on Chrome store. It's a Chrome right now. And what it does is. If you click a little button within your gmail account sort of next to like, you know, the delete message button and stuff like that.It actually will just summarize the message up top and you can click a button to automatically create an AI response to that message. And you can do this within messages too. You read a message, you get one of the six, you know, suggested AI responses, or you can create a prompt and it will create a response for you.And it works spectacularly well from what I've seen so far. And if you're worried about security or anything like that, I mean, he's my brother. Like I, I don't know, like if you trust, I trust him fully. Like I, this is the thing, like if it [00:34:00] was anyone else out there creating like an AI product like this I'd be worried about giving them access to my inbox as an AI.But this is like alternate timeline, Malcolm. I'm I, yeah, just think what you will of that, you know,Simone Collins: Alternate timeline, Malcolm, who worries about everything. Like we were once in a building with him and he was like. How sure are you of the structural integrity of this building?Like he was literally worried that the building was going to collapse on top of us. He thinks about everything. So yeah, no, he's being extremely thoughtful about security and everything else. I will add just in terms of like cool features of this. I personally don't use it to compose emails because I don't like AI style of writing.Even like good AI style. This is good AI style. He is. very good prompt injections, whatever it is he's using to make sure that the emails that he generates are good. But I, I use it for emails that stress me out where I'm like, I just don't want to deal with this. And it's great. Cause it summarizes things.What's even better is, is we run a business [00:35:00] that works with a lot of vendors and clients throughout Latin America and in Spain. I'm fluent in Spanish. I can deal with it. But when something is both stressful and in another language, sometimes I'm just like, I don't want to, I'm not ready for this.And this will give me nice bulleted summaries in English of everything that happens in the entire email thread. It will even remind you if it, if there's like a chain that you summarize, it will say like, so and so said this, and then you responded saying that. And then, you know, and it's. It's genuinely wonderful, really has reduced my stress palpably.Malcolm Collins: Well, that's why he made it, you know, when we were talking, cause I actually was there when he had the idea for the product. We're talking on a plane. . He had just entered a major life transition after a success. And he's like, what do I do next with my career? And I had sent him an email recently and I was like, you know, did you, did you get this email?I sent you and he goes, no, honestly, I find answering email really stressful. So I don't go through all my emails. I was like, well, what do you mean? He's like, I just, and I got it sort of, because I feel [00:36:00] the same way about some things like answering a phone message. I find those really stressful. Like if somebody could just.Summarize and tell me, I feel the same thing with articles on us. Whenever we go viral or something like that, I always tell Simone, I was like, can you read the article and tell me if I should feel pain or somebody does a video on us? I'm like, can you watch the video and just summarize it for me? So I don't need to go through that myself.And so this is how he feels with email. And he's like, yeah, it'd be really cool if somebody could just summarize and handle these emails for me. And I was like, well, there's your business idea right there. And he's like, Could I really do that? And so then he, he built it and I'm proud of him because it works well.It's reallySimone Collins: good. And, and I, you know, I've looked at so many AI based solutions that really, really disappoint. Because I want, I want them to work. I need them to work. So anyway, very impressed. He's great, but he's your brother, of course.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he's my brother.As a side note, for anyone who does end up downloading the app, BunBox, on the Chrome store, after you install it from the Chrome store, you then have to click on, you know, your little, uh, [00:37:00] icon that shows all the, uh, widgets or apps you've downloaded, and then click on BunBox, then click Activate. Uh, if you don't click activate, it won't start working on your Gmail account.And, and you need to reload the page after that on Gmail, but I figure that's self evident. Please, you know, he's putting this out there for free right now. If you do like it, and you do use it, leave a review. That's all we're really in this for right now. And, uh, tell your friends about it.Malcolm Collins: And you know, he's working with us hopefully on the school now as well to integrate AI with the school, which I'm really excited about as it gets closer to launch.And for our fans, for any of you who are interested in helping us with the school, we could really use help with that. That's another area we could use help. So, specifically going over the skill tree, like if you have a lot of understanding of one particular subject area and you're like, I would like to review the tree for that.Let, let us know about that. And the final area where we can call out for fan help, just as long as we're doing this is I've been meaning to replace the little, like the logo that was created with an AI for this channel for a while. I paid to have like a portrait of us [00:38:00] drawn and it didn't look very good.If anyone has anything that they think would be good logo for the channel, let us know because that's a, another thing we're looking to replace, but I love you, Simone, and I hope you have a spectacular day.Simone Collins: I love you too, gorgeous. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

My wife Simone and I have a discussion about conceptualizing God as a four-dimensional "tesseract" that humans can only perceive shadows and projections of in our three-dimensional world.We talk about how conservative interpretations of religions may come closer to truth than progressive re-interpretations, the issues with using psychedelics for revelation, the problems with "super soft" cultures, and more. We also touch on why we encourage people to follow their own religious traditions.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] generally, we think that people are following both a more accurate iteration of God, by following the conservative traditions of their faith, and, and that they are following a totally true iteration of God. So, what I mean by that is the human mind is unable to really conceive of a four dimensional space. And we think of God as like a four dimensional entity in this, this metaphor. When a person is looking at the shadow of a three dimensional cube. And they just go as the shadow that was projected.Mm-Hmm. And they say this is what a cube is. They are actually saying something that is 100% true. They are seeing a full and complete revelation of that cube as that cube can be revealed to someone of their intellect in that time in history. if we were evangelizing to an average person, that evangelization doesn't look like follow us. It looks like a go back to your traditions because that's the closest to truth you're going to get.Would you like to know [00:01:00] more?Simone Collins: Hello, you beautiful creature. Hello,Malcolm Collins: you beautiful creature. You are the best, Simone. And we are going to have a conversation today about a topic that I briefly touched on in the Our Religion video topic. But I want to get a lot deeper on because one of the real risks around any religious belief system that believes that there can be multiple revelations from God or multiple prophets.And this is why, Most of the more simple religious systems will say no, no more prophets after this one. Nothing else comes after this one. Because it's easy to pass that culture with intergenerational fidelity because if you don't then any random person who's like a f*****g magician can come along and claim Yeah, I'm the next prophet, you know, or no take backsies You can get the softening of the religion.So, a lot of people will say something like, Every religion has an element of truth. They say this in an attempt to [00:02:00] soften their religious framework. Right?going with the logic that if all religions have an element of truth to it, if any religion allows some behavior they want to undertake, then all religions should allow it. Or that if any religion doesn't demand some action or penance from them, then no religion should demand that action or penance from them.Malcolm Collins: You know, they, they, they, And you, you've seen people who do this. They have some like weird, hippie nonsense as their belief system. And it's just pointless.But they, they form, They end up forming what we call in the book The Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, a super soft Culture or a framework. So when a person is building a world framework outside of any traditions or outside of science, like when you have dug down to the bottom, completely drain the ocean of their mind.A lot of people think what is under there is secularism, and it is not. Secularism, you know, when practiced rigidly, is, is actually very, it can have a lot of religious aspects to it that cause people to go against their [00:03:00] basal instincts. Instead, what you find is this sort of, like, pre programmed human religion, I guess I'd call it.It's, it's the scars of our evolutionary history. You know, it's, it's, it's a belief that we're all connected. We're all sort of one they'll have fetishes. When I say a fetish, I don't mean like a sexual fetish. I mean like an item that they believe has some sort of power to it. Like a crystal or something like that.They often believe that humans are divided into distinct categories. You know, this would be like astronomy. Or is it astrology? Astrology. Astrology. Astrology, or like, you know, and, and, and I'm not saying that, you know, the, the secularists can't fall into this with stuff like Myers Briggs nonsense, or like in, in, in Japan, you know, you got your blood types.Blood type, yeah. buT if you want to go into that, go into the Fragment of Sky, the Crafting Religion, we go really deep into super soft cultures.To go over some of the aspects of Supercut's soft cultures, I forgot to [00:04:00] discuss here. They often have ceremonies tied to forgetting an adherent's identity while dancing. They often attribute agency to inanimate objects or animals. And they often attribute power to intention. We call this the power of wishy thinkingSpace. What is it? The simple answer is, we don't know. Or at least we didn't know until now. Hello, I'm Douglas Renham, and I'm not a scientist. But I do have a better understanding of what space is than any scientist living today. Where did I gain these insights? From this man. The founder of spaceology, Beth Gaga Shaggy. Is the founder of spaceology. A religion, not a cult. In other words, when it comes to space, he's the man with his head screwed on tight. This is what he told me when I met him on holiday . Space is invisible mining dust, and stars are but wishes. I mean, think about that.That means every star [00:05:00] you can see in the night sky is a wish that has come true. And they've come true because of something he calls Space Star Ordering. Space Star Ordering is based on the twin scientific principles of star maths and wishy thinking.If that doesn't convince you, well then, maybe you just don't deserve to get what you want.Malcolm Collins: and they are really dangerous. Like, people are like, well, how is that not obvious that that's the true culture? Like, if it seems to be pre programmed into us, in, in the answer Is well, because cultures that fall into those practices almost immediately die out.It, it, it is not an effective culture. It does not seem to help people do well in our current world or environment. Examples of God is love, like that would be like a super culture thing to say, where they often see this sort of interconnectedness of all of humanity, God being this vague, like emotional state, et cetera, et cetera.We definitely do not take [00:06:00] that perspective at all. And I think that that perspective is really dangerous and it's always a danger if you are in a, in a culture that is looking for truth and believes that truth has come through multiple iterations. So you have one, the new prophet. problem where a new prophet comes up and now says, I'm the last prophet, and here's the new thing I'm adding, or you have the problem of just like the general beginningAnd then somebody may say, well, but then why would you run the risk of teaching your kids that there will be other prophets in the future, or that there have been multiple prophets after any of the core prophets? Well, for two reasons. One is just the logical reason that we went over last time. It would seem very capricious for God to give a message that you needed to know to be saved to people in Ancient Israel and then not have that message spread to people in the Americas for, like, a thousand years.Or, you know, all of the people who would have lived and died before that message was released. That seems overly capricious to me. Instead, we think God has always done his best at giving people the fullest [00:07:00] prophecy they could comprehend in their time period, and that could realistically become widely believed within their time period.For, for each cultural group. But two, and more importantly, if you are part of any of the major Judeo Christian traditions, they all say this, very explicitly, that there will be future prophets. So if you, and a lot of people don't know this, because the iterations of those traditions that pretend like the Bible or the Koran or Mormons are much more aware that their book saves us than other traditions, but the iterations that pretend like they say there's not going to be any more prophets, they have an easier time spreading for the reason that we've talked about before, and they stay healthier in terms of intergenerational cultural transfer than the ones who accept what's actually written in the books.So for Christians, if you look at something like Matthew 23 34, Jesus says, quote, Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify. Others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. End quote. This indicates pretty clearly that more prophets are going to come after him.In Acts [00:08:00] 2 17, Peter quotes the prophet Joel saying, quote, In the last days I will pour out from my spirit upon everyone. Your sons and daughters will prophesize. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. In Ephesians 3 5, Paul refers to the prophets and apostles in the early church, saying that there were like active prophets in the early church.In Revelation 11 10 there is a reference to two prophets that will come in the end times. So, all pretty clear indications there's going to be more prophets. If you look at Mormons when a journalist asked Joseph Smith if he was the prophet of God, he said yes, and so is everyone else with the testimony of Jesus.So, for Mormons, Everyone is literally a prophet to some extent. We don't believe that well kind of, but we believe that some people have much more clear prophecy than others. If you look at the Book of Mormon Nephi says, quote, there came many prophets prophesying unto the people that they must repent.Or the great city , Jerusalem would be destroyed. That's one in Nephi one four or in Enos. 1, 2, 2. Eno said that there were, quote, [00:09:00] exceedingly many prophets among them, end quote.Now, you might be thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I have heard from Muslim preachers that their book definitely says that Muhammad was the last prophet. Well. What their book actually says is, quote, Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but he is the messenger of God and the seal of the prophets, and God has full knowledge of all things.That's Quran 3340. That's what they use. It's a line that's most commonly used to argue that the Quran says Muhammad is the last prophet. It doesn't really say that, though. It says that God knows all things, not that Muhammad knows all things. It also says that Muhammad is the seal of the prophets, but that can mean one of any number of things., and when you take it in the context of other quotes from the Quran, it seems pretty clearly not to mean that he is the last prophet of all times. So, if you look at, for example, Quran 1636. For we sent amongst every people a messenger, with the command, [00:10:00] Serve God and eschew evil. So there's a messenger for every people. And then Qur'an 35, 24. Verily, we have sent you with the truth as a bearer of glad tidings and a warner. And there never was a nation, but a warner passed through them.So there's never been a country without a prophet. , and then Quote, indeed, we have sent it down to you as an Arabic Qur'an that you might understand it. This is Qur'an 12 2. So this is, if it's sent down in Arabic, so you may understand it. This is clearly speaking to Arabic speakers in the Arabic community.Muhammad was meant to be the prophet, to the Muslim community, and that is what it says in the Qur'an. So much so that it says, you know, similar to we believe, which is very interesting that Islam has a lot in common with our beliefs, or at least what's written in the Qur'an has a lot in common with our beliefs, is that the different revelations were meant for different people.So 548, and we sent down to you the book in truce confirming what was [00:11:00] before it. of the scripture and as a criterion over it. So, judge between them by what God has revealed, and do not follow their inclinations away from what come to you of the truth. This is 548. So that's saying that The Quran was meant to confirm both the Christian Bible and the Jewish Bible as true, but conform it as true for their people, as can be seen in some of these other lines. So, you've got 547. So let the people of the Christian gospel judge by what God has revealed in it, and those who do not judge by what God has revealed in it are truly rebellious.That seems exceedingly clear to me that the Quran is saying that Christians who don't follow what are in the Bible are living in open rebellion to God. , now look at Quran 262. Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Christians and the Sabians, whoever believes in God and the last day and does good, they shall have their reward [00:12:00] from the Lord and there will be no fear for them, nor shall they grieve.So, again, this is saying that you get rewarded if you are a Christian for following the Christian scriptures, if you are a Jew for following the Jewish scriptures, and if you are a Muslim for following the Muslim scriptures, and that every country has a warner. So, presumably, there's many more warners than just these warners.Now, you might say, Why don't I hear this from my Muslim friends? And the answer is, is because a religion that's structured this way is just going to do a very bad job at spreading. , as you can see with us. Like, there is no reason to proselytize an iteration of a faith that thinks that most people already have a correct faith.So, those iterations of Islam that followed what the Quran actually said didn't spread as far as the iterations that didn't.Malcolm Collins: And the way or the story we will use with our kids to help them get around this and also understand the value of hard cultural traditions is the Tesseract The tesseract model of God, we'll call it or the four [00:13:00] dimensional model of God.So I, I talked about this briefly, but I'd like to go a bit deeper into it. So for people who are not familiar how four dimensional shapes work vis a vis three dimensional, two dimensional shapes. So , a one dimensional shape is a line, a two dimensional shape is like a flat drawing, like a square would be a two dimensional shape, a three dimensional shape is something like a cube and a four dimensional shape, a four dimensional cube is a tesseract Now, we as humans cannot perceive four dimensional shapes.We can't even think about them. It is, it is, no human can think about a four dimensional shape. Very interesting story here the guy who invented the concept of the tesseract and, and was a real prodigy of four dimensional space, what he thought is he's like, okay, I, as a person, don't often engage with three dimensional spaces and maybe if I engaged with three dimensional spaces more, I would have a better time being able to imagine what a four dimensional shape would look like.Like in my [00:14:00] developmental stages. So he invented the, do you know what he invented? The jungle gym. The jungle gym, yes! He created a jungle gym, but these early jungle gyms were just three dimensional grids that kids would climb within. ISimone Collins: remember, there was one in, like, one of my top childhood playgrounds it was sufficiently dangerousMalcolm Collins: and perfect.The, the, one of these total four dimensional grids, I mean three dimensional grids, yeah, and he would label the points on it with different things and be like, go to point A3B or something, you know, and the kids would have to run, like that was the game he played to the point, so he'd try to Turns out it did not help his kids be able to imagine four dimensional shapes.It just turns out that humans are not biologically equipped to imagine a four dimensional shape because there was no evolutionary pressure for our brains to be able to do that. So why would they? I mean, our brains need to be able to really, really well understand three dimensional space because humans just, just so people don't know, like, evolutionarily, one of humans big advantages, like, other than intelligence and persistence, Is our [00:15:00] ability to throw things with high accuracy.Other animals don't have anything like this. Most other animals don't, at least. You know, humans can throw things like really well. WhichSimone Collins: it turns out was probably Probably bad parents for not playing catch in the backyard with ourMalcolm Collins: kids. Well, I guess we can do that more. I do it sometimes. But yeah we, we, we you know, evolved to throw stones, spears, stuff like that.It was a very useful technology for us being bipedal and everything. But anyway, back to this concept of, of the Tesseract God. So if you lived in a, a, a two dimensional plane and, and you were trying to understand three dimensional shapes, what they would look like is the shadow of the three dimensional shape.Okay. So if you are looking at a. Cube from the perspective of a two dimensional plane, you can look at a cube under a light, like have it cast down a light, and the shadow that it's casting on the paper is the two dimensional representation of that three dimensional shape, and you can [00:16:00] spin it around, and that two dimensional representation will change.Right? Um, well, four dimensional shapes leave three dimensional representations. And I'll put like a little video of a tesseract here spinning so you can get sort of an idea of what this looks like. But there canSimone Collins: be no such thing of a video of a tesseract.Malcolm Collins: No, but there can be a thing of a three dimensional shadow of a tesseract, as a tesseract is rotating.So, when we talk about this from the perspective of religion, and we say God is like a tesseract being viewed from different angles, suppose you were trying to understand a, three dimensional cube from the shadow it's leaving on a sheet of paper. Okay. There's various approaches you could take to this, but the way most people do who are like, well, let's stitch together different understandings of the cube is they'll say, okay, on average, what spots are dark, you know, on average, what spots are [00:17:00] shadow, or they'll say, what are the spots that Always covered by the shadow or, and nobody does this that I'm aware of, but it's kind of what we do with those say, like, maximally, what are the spots that are covered by the shadow?Now, if you take the average or the minimum shadow perspective, the shape that you are going to think of is an accurate two dimensional representation of a cube is going to be a sphere, which is it. The furthest it is a much further or much more distant representation of what the cube actually looks like than any individual representation of the cube through its shadow.So what we're saying here when we talk about this, this Tesseract God or whatever, right, is while we believe that different revelations of God have been given to different people for their people for their time period, people of that time period and of that cultural tradition. Most accurately follow what God actually wanted [00:18:00] from them and, and a true vision of God by following.Strictly and as a conservative interpretation, their religious system and trying to stitch it together with other systems.Simone Collins: So, in other words, literal translations have higher religious fidelity when we're talking about because what you're trying to say is a Tesseract is a proxy in this metaphor for God.So literal translations of God or the Tesseract are higher fidelity than. overanalyzed amalgams, averages, minimums, maximums, medians, modes, etc. Right?Malcolm Collins: Yes. So generally a person who, and, and this is where we, obviously people are like, yeah, but you guys don't do that with your faith. And it's like, yes, but every faith thinks they're a little different and a little better.And that they have access to information, which allows them to do things that other cultural traditions can't easily do. Of course, everybody thinks their own religion is like, a little better than everyone else's, and it gives them [00:19:00] a little credibility. But generally, we think that people are following both a more accurate iteration of God, by following the conservative traditions of their faith, and, and that they are following a totally true iteration of God.So, what I mean by that is the human mind is unable to really conceive of a four dimensional space. And we think of God as like a four dimensional entity in this, this metaphor.as Wynwood Reid writes, the supreme power is not a mind, not a force, not a being, but something higher than a being, something for which we have no words, something for which we have no ideas.Malcolm Collins: When a person is looking at the shadow of a three dimensional cube. , right? Mm-Hmm. . And they just go as the shadow that was projected.Mm-Hmm. And they say this is what a cube is. They are actually saying something that is 100% true. They are seeing a full and complete revelation of that cube as that cube can be revealed to someone of their [00:20:00] intellect in that time in history. Okay? But this is also what we believe about religions people who are following conservative iterations of their religion.are actually seeing a full and complete revelation insofar as their mind can understand it. Right. It only gets dangerous when they start to water it down.Simone Collins: Or, mmm, interpret it in some way.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, try to combine it with different things, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And this is a perspective that I haven't really heard anyone sort of talk about or preach before.But it is one that feels intuitively true to me when I look at the data and the gifts that are being given to people who stick with stricter iterations of their religious frameworks.Simone Collins: Yeah, what I like about it and you and I discussed this offline was that it reminds me of the, like, [00:21:00] four men and an elephant, like blind men and an elephant metaphor where people are like, well, you know, if a bunch of people are all blind and they're all trying to feel an elephant, but they're standing at different angles of it, they're going to have very different descriptions of what they're encountering.But,Malcolm Collins: you know, your point is that,Simone Collins: you know, the elephant is knowable by us. Like if, if they weren't blind or if someone turned the lights on. There is an easily seeable elephant, whereas a tesseract is literally something that we are incapable of, of picturing accurately, comprehending,Malcolm Collins: et cetera, right?Yeah, well, but not just to that, but it also allows you to point out, you know, is the shadow of the three dimensional cube and somebody saying, this is a cube. You can say, yes, they are literally correct. That is a cube. Right. And then people will be like. But this seems incompatible with this other revelation by this different prophet.And it's like, yes, that's because you live in a two dimensional space. Like it's one person holding up one shadow of a cube, and another person holding up another shadow of a cube. And they're [00:22:00] both saying these are obviously two different objects. Look at how they're incompatible. Look at this one's point here.Look at this one's point here. And yet they both actually have complete revelations in so far as they are capable of understanding a complete revelation.And keep in mind here that we believe thatas humanity develops, their capacity to understand a more complete revelation increases, and it increases at different rates between cultural groups to understand specific aspects of a more complete revelation, and therefore, A more complete revelation is always being drip fed to any group that is improving, thus the need for continued prophets. And thus why we see this need for intergenerational improvement and intergenerational sharpening of one's mind and understanding of the world to be a religious imperative. As Wynwood read, writes, persons with feeble and untrained, intellects may live according to their conscience, but the conscience itself will be defective to cultivate. The intellect is therefore a [00:23:00] religious duty.Any group that has lost the continued prophecy that was promised to them in their original religious text has lost to that because they are not improving enough to understand a more complete revelation at this point.Malcolm Collins: Which the elephant story doesn't really do. What I find with the elephant story is that it's often used to justify sort of the watered down approach.And a really dangerous source of revelation that a lot of people who use these super soft cultural traditions do is psychedelics. We talk a lot about this in our book and there's a lot of research on this psychedelics are not a useful source of revelation, nor are altered states of mind that are equivalent to psychedelics.So you can create similar effects to psychedelics by doing things like chanting, not sleeping a lot, dancing in a large group, stuff like that. And a lot of, of religious traditions have evolved to. To do these, these sorts of rituals where they'll like chant and march around. Because it, it, [00:24:00] it, it, or, you know, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, you know, music, simple rhythms combined with this can create these effects where you will feel a sense of profundity and go on what we call a.A ghost ride. But we'll talk about what a ghost ride is in a second. First, let's talk about the feelings of profundity. So humanity, one of the big problems with, with religion as it's revealed to humans, is we as people who believe in human evolution and everything like that, we did not evolve in an environment Where we were rewarded for correctly recognizing profundity humans are unable to recognize profundity.Basically we can create profundity in the human mind with things like psychedelic, with things like group chanting, we can. Uh, or, or like sort of tricking our brains. So like, quote unquote, thinking about the vastness of the universe and stuff like that can create the senses of profundity or thinking about concepts that are vague, but not in and of themselves, [00:25:00] not fully understandable.I E the Trinity would be something like this to say that God is both fully three separate things and fully one thing. Because this statement is that we need to talk about, buddhist traditions doing this a lot with cones where they'll create the sense of profundity by giving a person a concept which is supposed to not be fully understandable and through it not being fully understandable.So a cone would be something like a tree falls in the forest. Does it make a noise or what isSimone Collins: the sound of one hand clapping?Malcolm Collins: What they're actually doing there is gaslighting people. Cause there'sSimone Collins: actually a sound. There was this one of my former classmates could actually make. Like, cause I guess his fingers were kind of disjointed, his handMalcolm Collins: clapped.So let's talk about what I mean when I say they're gaslighting people with these concepts. So if I then went to them and I was like, okay, this is what a sound like, like it's a definition. I recorded the sound of oneSimone Collins: handMalcolm Collins: clapping. Or I'm like, yeah. Or it's a definitional problem. Right? Like, are we defining sound as like vibrations or something?They'd be like, oh no, you don't [00:26:00] understand it. Right. They are showing that you cannot rely on your own internal. Logic to come to an understanding of reality, you have to be submissive to their understanding of reality. A lot of it's gatekeeping, and I,Simone Collins: ugh, it makes me so mad.Malcolm Collins: Well, it's gatekeeping combined with gaslighting.They are telling a person that their understanding of the world that they think they know is just wrong, and that the only way to get a correct understanding of the world is to take it from them. And so they use this to pass cultures intergenerationally with fidelity a bit higher, but I do not think it's a, a good mechanism because it teaches Uncompromising sort of, following of your elders in a way that I think is really psychologically unhealthy.No, like a lotSimone Collins: of it's kind of like blind following, right? Like, you, you know, you have to know it's not right, or you have to know they're kind of lying to you, but then you have to develop a blind faith regardless, and that'sMalcolm Collins: sick. Yeah, I, [00:27:00] I, I do not have a high opinion of cultural groups that really engage in that.Over heavily, but it can also create a feeling of love. Like if you think about a concept like that, but then you're not constantly being gaslit. This is what Catholics do as a Trinity. It, because it's, it's a not fully understandable concept, inherently unknowable by humans. Yeah. It begins to fill up a lot of your, your brain.And if you also feel like a safety from that thing or an attachment to that thing, you will develop a feeling of love towards it or a feeling of profundity from it, which is similar to like thinking about the vastness of the universe or something like that. So there's ways you can trick these mental systems.And I actually think that that's a healthy thing for a culture to do. That's very different than like a master being like. You don't understand, you know, then you, you go to the scary ghost train that I'm talking about. So when I talk about a ghost train ride, right? If people are familiar from like a, a, a theme park or something like that, you can go on these things called ghost trains.Where you sit in a train, and then these pre set experiences, like a ghost falls from the ceiling and goes, [00:28:00] Boooooo. And it's like a, a, a set track and a set series of things that you are seeing as you are riding around the tracks. Um, well, that is kind of what psychedelics are. People think they're getting these really unique and personalized experiences for them.But really what they're doing often is just sort of depending on the psychedelic they're taking. And we go into this a lot and the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. They're going on sort of preset experiences that are just going to have a lot of Similarities toSimone Collins: everyone else. There are articles in it, and even like there's scientific research on this, like that people describe these very, very, very similar and consistent thingsMalcolm Collins: happening to them.Yeah. And they're, and I should be clear, they're not similar because they're seeing something that's real. Like one of the things that they'll see is like elves that exist behind reality and are like constructing reality or something. It's the elf hallucination, which is like, obviously, I don't know, to me that seems obviously stupid.Our reality is not constructed by elves. That's what they [00:29:00] want you to think. But what it is, is they are sort of activating parts of the human brain where I, I talk about sort of tracks wearing in a road for a really long period of time. If you've ever driven on a ruddy road that a lot of people have driven on, you will get sucked into the tracks.That other people have driven on and then you're sort of stuck in the tracks that everyone and you're making them incrementally deeper. Well, this happened to humans throughout evolutionary history and we have some of these tracks in our brain, but largely we have gotten good at covering them up.What the drugs drew is they basically uncover these hidden tracks and then snap you onto them and you go through these preset experiences. That the higher order human mind has been able to suppress. They are not leading you to truth. They are degrading your understanding of reality through delivering false prophecy through delivering false information that then people use to try to construct a world perspective.And this is something that we often see in the boomer generation [00:30:00] where a lot of them tried to understand the world through. And the hippie generation did this a lot, through these sorts of psychological hacks, like through these ghost train rides. And they end up with really, I think, very philosophically unsophisticated understandings of reality, that lead to them being generally unhappy and unproductive people.That is generally like, all man is love, all religion is love, God is love, we're all one thing. No, I don't. I think that's patently untrue if we look at the world today, if we look at I mean, look, not even talking about humans, like, we live in a world where, like, for a lion to eat, it needs to regularly, like, kill other animals.Grizzly bears, like, eat animals alive. Like, that's the normal way they kill things. Why? This is not set up by, like, Less chance of getting disease. So what they'll do is they'll maim an animal and then they'll put it in a pile with other maimed but dying animals. So [00:31:00] maimed enough they can't get away, but they'll keep them alive, sometimes for days, and then eat them later.bleed out?Simone Collins: Or they're just collecting for later?Malcolm Collins: They're just, like, collecting. Well, so, yeah, they'll eventually bleed out, but that will be a period from when they're first maimed to when they bleed out that they are not developing disease within them. Which is obviously a risk to the grizzly bear.That's why it does this. It's like, instead of refrigeration, you just keep the animal partially alive. And then they eat them while they're still alive, of course. Horrible, horrible way to die, by the way. And this is why I f*****g hate grizzly bears. Teddy bears? You know what we're doing with teddy bears?We are teaching kids to not fear bears as much as they should. Bears are monsters and we need to get rid of them. Well, butSimone Collins: that's what Theodore Roosevelt was, you know, supporting conservation through hunting.Malcolm Collins: He was all about killing the bears. Conservation through hunting. He just didn't kill that one bear that was tied up to a tree.He had to do it sportingly.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, because it's all about good form, which is something that I'm [00:32:00] obsessed with. But here's the thing I wanted to discuss on this subject is I think that, you know, a lot of what draws people to religion and what like we would say like your slightly above average to average and below average constituent or parishioner would need to believe is just like, yes, like what, what is being told to me is true.I am going to heaven, blah, blah, blah. Like this is exactly the way everything works. Everything is true and accurate. And I'm not going to live my life a certain way. If like, the literal interpretation that my religion has is just like the best we can do with an unknowable concept, right? Like, I, I feel like maybe this concept hasn't been discussed at length or peopleMalcolm Collins: don't want to be clear.I do not think the concept is unknowable. I think the concept is unknowable for. Yeah, but I think our distant descendants will be able to easily grasp theSimone Collins: concepts involved. Totally agreed, and that's why we practice descendant worship. But I'm still saying, like, I feel like most people wouldn't want to get on board with anything [00:33:00] when they know it's being fudged.Hence that this is not a concept that's palatable to anyone who has religious tendencies, because it's too deeply uncomfortable to know that, that, that one is doing the best one can at the moment, but one is technically wrong. Wrong in the right direction, if they have a hard religion. We would argue.Yeah. But still wrong, right?Malcolm Collins: Well, no, and that's why we don't just then follow a traditional hard religion because if we didn't believe that, you know, we would just go back to following a traditional hard religion. What we think is with this knowledge, an individual through intellectually studying messages, like intellectually studying prophets, which we talk about in our video of like identifying prophets and stuff like that can not, not Not with like drugs or something, not with like meditation, none of this new agey nonsense, with like a book and studies and, and time and history and detailed Intellectual investigation can come to [00:34:00] truth, but they need to be thinking about it, not as this truth is going to be a three dimensional truth.Mm hmm. Um, they need to be, they need to be, if there are these two people arguing about what shape is accurate, they need to say, look. This is a three dimensional shape we're trying to construct here. We live in the two dimensional world. This is why these two things look at odds with each other. Thus, while the whole truth can be mapped out by somebody exploring the spacesin between the individual prophets,it is not going to feel like something that an individual human mind can easily wrap itself around. It is going to be something that you can sort of mathematically chart out and get some ideas about. But not something that you can holistically hold in your mind at any time. One thing to note is that it definitely does not sound or look like something that you want to hear.It doesn't sound like some sort of distributed hedonism, [00:35:00] whether that's compassion or love or other euphemisms for hedonism. that it is not true that all religions, whatever they may be, were founded by a real prophet. So, for example, christ was almost certainly a real prophet. The Jews follow real prophets. Probably Mohammed was a real prophet. Maybe, , the Mormons follow real prophets.Other than that, there's no groups that I can see are very obviously following real prophets, and obviously we think that Wyn would read with a real prophet or the most recent real prophet.Malcolm Collins: And I do not think that this is a useful thing for most people to do.I think it is a thing that some people can do, and some people should dedicate their lives to. But I doSimone Collins: not think Do they just have to lie to everyone else? Like, what do you do about the people who cannot beMalcolm Collins: comfortable with an imperfect No, I mean, I don't think it's our I think that for most people, they're better off just following a hard tradition from an existing religious framework.I think for the vast majority of people, that is the right [00:36:00] answer. That's why I would never try to pull someone away from that path and why in a lot of our advocacy and when we talk to people, we encourage them to go back to their religious traditions, whatever those traditions are. A lot of people think that's very weird for people who are like technically secular to do.Why are you pushing people back towards their religious traditions? And we think It is because for the average person, that is as close to truth as they are going to get. Even from a very intellectual person, that's as close to truth as they're going to get, and this is why we, historically in our videos, we took a long time, like, hundreds of episodes in before we really started laying out our religious framework, because it's sort of a sad religious framework, and it's like, it's not meant for everyone, people can know that we think it and be like, I want to join you guys, and we can be like, well then, study, right, like, it's, it's not something that is necessarily going to be study, right, right.communicate, you know, but it almost sort of gatekeeps itself to an extent [00:37:00] in that we just don't believe it's meant for everyone. And if we were evangelizing to an average person, that evangelization doesn't look like follow us. It looks like a go back to your traditions because that's the closest to truth you're going to get.Yeah. Which is a very odd religious framework. And a lot of people will be like, well, that's not going to spread intergenerationally and we'll see with our kids. We'll see with our kids.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. We're not saying we're right. We're just saying we're trying our best and we'llMalcolm Collins: see. yeAh. And I really love you, Simone.And I love these religious topics. You know, I love talking to you about this and stuff, but I don't know if our audience likes it. So, we can keep them shorter. One I'd love to do is on teddy bears because I really want to do a video on why kids have teddy bears.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no. Yeah, we've had some fun covering.Yeah, we have, we have theories about this.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Anyway, I love you to death and you are a great wife. You are aSimone Collins: perfect husband and I love how clever you are, Mr. Tesseract Man. [00:38:00] All Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe