Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

My wife Simone discovered that there is a thriving marketplace on Etsy for buying customized spells. We explore love spells, money spells, curses, and even death spells being sold - often with rave reviews. While I am critical of the practice, Simone argues there may be some placebo value for people as well as lessons for building more intuitive cultures. We also touch on themes around magic & belief, the decline of religion, sympathetic magic, and compare to our experience seeing witch doctors in South Africa.Simone Collins: [00:00:00] one final thing to check. Do they allow for hits? So spell Spell forMalcolm Collins: murder. Oh, that's a good one. Oh my God.Simone Collins: Donkey spell. No, no, no. They had, they sell death. Death curses. I feel like Etsy should, I mean, it's one thing to like non consensually for someone to love you. This is, it's $16, right? Like at least price it higher. It's a death spell. Can I do this? I should do this. These are like, these are like Mexico level hit prices.Cause also you can, you can buy a hit in Mexico forthat.Malcolm Collins: I mean, that's cheap. I need to go like Death Note on these people. If it's 16 a hit I'm just gonna start and start writing names.Simone Collins: I give five stars for good communication.So That's, that is very interesting. This reminds me, actually, surprisingly, of OnlyFans.In some cases, where like, you're paying for, like, you want to make sure that, like, the woman did it only for you. So you're like, I need you to, like, hold up this level of proof that, like, this thing was performed for me only. [00:01:00] So this is like the psychic magician version of OnlyFans, where it's like, okay, I'm going to give you three photos and you need to include themMalcolm Collins: in the ritual.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: So Malcolm, as you know, I was shopping for our holiday future day on Etsy because I want some really cool like handmade stuff that's unique or vintage. And I discovered when searching for like time travel related things, Sellers sell spells on Etsy. I don't know how this works. I guess it's because they're technically handmade, but they're, they're, they're framed as digital downloads.Malcolm Collins: Well, it looks like a lot of people buy these. Yeah,Simone Collins: there's a, there's a lot of them. And that's the thing is like, how can there be. So many spells. So if you just search the word, I'm doing this right now. SpellsMalcolm Collins: branded spell sellers. So a lot of these will be from this group called the three witches, which appear to be three old, old women.And I, I don't doubt that this is probably their real pictures. Like it probably is. ISimone Collins: don't know. [00:02:00] Part of me thinks it's like, it looks to me like an AI generated. Image if we're being honest here and let's, so what are the spells called? And when one is called powerful protection, hex curse, removal, spell, premium divine favor, spell, eternal dark obsession, spell, powerful banishing spell, banish someone that you canMalcolm Collins: look at the reviews.So this one has 484 reviews.Simone Collins: Okay. Which one are you? Okay. What are you lookingMalcolm Collins: at? I'm looking at unlock abundance money spell, three witches, 70 percent off today. I mean, it's probably not 70 percent off. Well,Simone Collins: it's a deal. I mean, maybe that's how you get abundance is by getting things on sale.Malcolm Collins: Right? So yes they make it look like it's really cheap, but this is clearly like their standard price and keep in mind like 106 and 67 cents, but it's an even 62.Went on sale, which is clearly how they create abundance by and, and so, oh, you've got to get personalization. You've got to do your full name and birth date to get this. This actually seems like a good way to get people's like [00:03:00] billing information. Oh mySimone Collins: gosh. That's the real moneymaker is like you then commit identity theft, right?YouMalcolm Collins: commit identity. Right. It'd be very easy. I think. Birthday.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: By the way, you talked about hacking. This is what most of hacking really is, is it is manipulating people. So you would say, well, I need your mother's maiden name for the spell. I need to know your favorite color for the spell. Like that stuff I think would be pretty easy to get from this population.Now let's talk about some of these reviews here. Okay. Okay. Mother Elizabeth, Mother Isabella responded to my spell request promptly, and I feel blessed to have received her attention. I am grateful for their support, waiting for manifestation. And then, in response Mother Isabella wrote, It warms my heart to know you felt the promptness and care in my response.You are truly blessed, and I am honored to have been able to assist you. The universe listens, and your intentions are being woven into reality. [00:04:00] Patience and faith are your companions on this journey. I am here for you, supporting you and guidance as your spell manifests. Okay, here's another one. Um Uh, thank you, Mother Isabella.I feel like your spell is working already. I won seven dollars. It's not much, but I'm grateful and I'm happySimone Collins: for this purchase. Wait, but this is like approximately two hundred dollars, so she's very much still in the red here.Malcolm Collins: This is my third purchase from the Wonderful Trinity of Witches, and everyone, they are legit.Each experience with them has been wonderful. Not only that. But this money spell is working. I refinanced on my debt unexpectedly. Wait, refinanced? They took out more debt. Yeah,Simone Collins: but I mean, maybe the lower interest rate. So that's, that's, that could be, that could beMalcolm Collins: meaningful. I refinanced on my debt unexpectedly, received money due to an error at the end of my job.They still have to pay me because they messed up. So I'm able to keep it. So they got money that was due to [00:05:00] them, but they didn't know what they didn't get. I will be starting a new job that pays more. I don't know if I still will be receiving more money blessings, but these ladies helped me out during a tough financial situation I was in.Thank you so much. I am so happy I found you guys based off a hunch. So this person was in a tough financial situation. AndSimone Collins: they paid for a spell and thingsMalcolm Collins: got better. Etsy wishes which is, which is, and wishes, whatever. Right. And talk about selling your soul for a small price. A pittance, a pittance, but what I also love is their responses remind me of the IT crowd thing where he's talking about manifesting, and he goes, you guys should try it sometime.Just yesterday, I was imagining having a helicopter, and today, I went out and bought a helicopter. Now I have a helicopter.You're a sceptic, Jen. You should be more like these. They can't get enough of my space star ordering story. Yes, yes, I noticed you've been coming down here a lot more [00:06:00] often because of all the questions. So, Mr. Rennam, how did the cosmos grant you a helicopter? Well, I visualized the thing I wanted. In my case, it was a helicopter.I drew a picture of the helicopter on a piece of paper. Then I stood with my back to space, threw the paper over my shoulder, and wished really hard. How exactly did you achieve that? I waited till night time. Of course. Couple of days later, bought myself a helicopter.Explain that one if you can.Malcolm Collins: And that's very much like, You know, for a lot of people, you know, they need this sort of thing to be motivated to go out there and do their job. And I also, actually, I think that this stuff can be very useful for people of more traditional faiths toSimone Collins: investigate.Yeah, or people who just have like more intuitive, like, spiritual leanings.Malcolm Collins: Well, because I think it shows that when you see how comical and evil this looks when it is done by [00:07:00] somebody of a different faith background, When you see members of your own faith peddling similar things, they are of this ilk.They are not different. When they are saying, I can take money in exchange for giving you financial blessings through no additional work of your own, that is always, whatever, however your particular faith thinks that sin or demons or whatever work I think that that is the very nature of sin. So when I look at something like the prosperity gospel, right?So for people who aren't aware of prosperity gospel preaching, it is a form of protestant preaching in the United States. And it's something that we can be slightly susceptible to given our religious leanings that believes that God rewards people financially. For their piousness and ability to be good Christians.And this is something that reminds me a lot of what we're seeing here [00:08:00] and it can manifest in different ways. You know, they pray on the elderly where they'll send them things and confuse them into sending money. And this is. And all churches have gone through phases like this. You know, right now we have the prosperity gospel in Protestants, but you know, you had your indulgences was Catholics.Exactly. Right. Yeah. And where people would pay to have their sins removed basically and to lower their time in purgatory. So this stuff is always really evil. Like if you want to know how to spot an evil person, they're saying, give me money and I will offer you. Divine providence, basically.I will manipulate fate towards your direction. Yes. Which is,Simone Collins: yeah. But this is evil. On the flip side I, I've, I've seen it argued online that, you know, the placebo effect is It seems to be pretty well attested and for a lot of people, this is a meaningful way to [00:09:00] trigger a placebo effect.Like, even people who know that they're receiving a placebo and they're just told, Oh, you know. Some people have found the placebo effect to be effective and we're going to give you a placebo now. And they're like, Oh, okay. And then they're like, wow, I feel better. And so maybe it's enough to have a figure of authority in this case, a carefully marketed Etsy seller cast a spell for you and give you a commemorative PDF download that is customized to you to, to feel.Better. And I mean, I think this works better with some things and others, right? I think some of these spells that I could imagine the placebo effect working really well with and actually helping people with is like, there are some deep focus ones. There are some anxiety ones. There are some like reading well ones.Okay. So that's like, I could see like really helping people because they're like, Oh, I cast a spell and therefore I feel well. And you see this with ego depletion, that this concept that Do you want to readMalcolm Collins: the rules on the anxiety ones, theSimone Collins: reviews? I can pull some up. I scrolled past it, but I can go back to it.The, [00:10:00] the like ego, the concept of ego depletion is that like, oh, well, if I've done a lot of hard things throughout the day, now at the end of the day, I won't be able to like. Stop myself. Like I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll impulse buy something or I'll splurge on a bunch of ice cream. Whereas actually it seems that some studies have found that if you live in a culture that doesn't believe in ego depletion, but rather ego reinforcement, which is to say like, Oh, if you do a couple of hard things, then you're warmed up and you can do even more hard things that won't happen to you.So again, it's about like how you frame and perceive things. So at the end of that person's day, they're like, okay, wow, no, I definitely won't be tempted to eat a pint of ice cream or to impulse buy something because I've been, I'm warmed up in my discipline. And so arguably these spells where they do involve personal internal processes may be very effective.But then I also am looking at a spell here that's about getting ridMalcolm Collins: of noisy neighbors. I'm going to, I'm going to disagree on this and say that I think that this builds really unhealthy mindsets, even if it makes people feel better in the [00:11:00] moment. Okay. It builds a precedent in the way that they process things like anxiety, that they need an external force to relieve it from themselves, instead of that they can do it themselves, instead of that they're responsible to do it for themselves, and anything else leads long term to more anxiety and is thus sinful and demonic.But, I want you to, to go into these reviews.Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay. So let's do one for a well, okay. This one has 1. 6 K reviews at 4. 9 stars. And it's only starting at 24 and 66 cents. So extremely effective. So it's online spellcasting service only. And I think it involves maybe a reading the hours are 11 a.m. to midnight after the spell, you have to You'll be sent three random photos of your [00:12:00] ritual with the photos you provided displayed somewhere, so you know for certain that it's your spell ritual I'm taking care of. Oh, interesting! So That's, that is very interesting. This reminds me, actually, surprisingly, of OnlyFans.In some cases, where like, you're paying for, like, you want to make sure that, like, the woman did it only for you. So you're like, I need you to, like, hold up this level of proof that, like, this thing was performed for me only. So this is like the psychic magician version of OnlyFans, where it's like, okay, I'm going to give you three photos and you need to include themMalcolm Collins: in the ritual.Like the parallels here and where a woman is doing something for quote unquote you yeah, like really they're obviously not likeSimone Collins: there they are. I mean, in this case, the ritual is performed. There is a video for it. Like you get a person, a, the, the seller, the Etsy seller is performing a ritual for you recording it for you so that you can see that it was done.And thereby helping you and then let's see what the reviews say. There are even photos from [00:13:00] reviews of happy, happy people. You're going to have to experience her magic for yourself. Avangia was amazing. I was having some really difficult times with getting along with a family member that I love because of the anxiety she would generate with me.I had a couple of anxiety spells done in a toxic relative one and boom, it completely changed my relationship with her. I know I will most likely need maintenance for this issue. Oh no. So we're creating that sort of psychologist dependence issue.Malcolm Collins: Dependence, the thing with psychologists.Simone Collins: Yeah, but yeah, let's see.Wow. Still though, I mean it, so I, I, I, I, I don't know, like, I mean, I, I think that placebo effect things can be worth investing in because think about, you know, what you might otherwise spend, for example, on therapy, which is just as much of a scam in many cases, right? IMalcolm Collins: mean, and more dangerous because it, it more acutely creates dependency therapy.Simone Collins: Yeah. Therapy. So you're, you're saying then that the Etsy magician is the [00:14:00] lesser evil here now. Okay.Malcolm Collins: So the lesser evil than therapists, but therapists are like literally like one of the most dangerous cults in society today. You should see our video on has therapy become a cult. If you want to know more on our opinion on this.I, I think that they do astronomical damage to society today and it can be really damaging. We'll do an episode as well. We're like, even to have a stable relationship, if your partner is regularly seeing a therapist and be regularly seeing a therapist, this is a, a third party who has motivations often a lot of motivation to disrupt this person's happy relationships.Cause that creates more dependency on them and you know.Simone Collins: I, I also want to push back. I, I, I'm not the type of, I'm not going to buy these things. Like, I'm not into this. I would think this is a total waste of money. This wouldn't work for me because this is not what I believe in. However here's another spell I found.No, hold on. IMalcolm Collins: gotta, I gotta give a spell here, right? Oh, no. You want to give it to me? One spell type that seems to be common [00:15:00] are Love Spells or like,Simone Collins: Attachment Spells. That's harder, right? Because you can't make someone else love you. So I don't, you know, I feel like that'sMalcolm Collins: more of a scenario. I mean, they think you can.They think that this is not an issue of personalSimone Collins: choice. Right. But I, I question the ethics here more because this isn't helping people with a placebo effect. This is like promising something that cannot be promised.Malcolm Collins: So these are like extra strong love spell with extra X strong, like XXX spells. Wow.These can be too dangerous. Like you might not, oh, yeah. You might not want to touch it, right? Oh, ISimone Collins: love it. I love it when people do that. Like, be careful with this magical book. Be careful with thisMalcolm Collins: word. Do you know how often people are buying this? Right now on Etsy, it's warning me. It's saying this is an in demand item.Seven people have bought this in the last 24 hours. Oh my god.Simone Collins: From a pronatalist standpoint, doesn't that kind of encourage you? That there are people out there who reallyMalcolm Collins: There's so many dumb people. I hope these people don't find love. I hope they don't be. Look, I'm not for everyone breeding. The people who buy these, f**k them.Tentastronics in action. These are the people [00:16:00] who the abortion advocates are targeting, right? Like, I a lot of people are like, Oh, don't you think that the government should have regulations on this stuff? And I'm like, they're killing their own kids. Like, I don't know if I care. Like, I don't, I don't like that people are killing babies, like, bad.But also, are they going to cause more pain in society in the long run? So so we know that people are buying this, they're buying it for 26. 60. And the second review on this toSimone Collins: that 200, I mean, this is very affordable.Malcolm Collins: Well, that was, that was 200, but then on sale for like, cheap. But okay, so the second review on this, to be clear, it's a one star review, so people can get an idea of what's actually going on here.So this is really interesting. So they and a friend of Bo's bought it. And they go, is this a scam? My friend and I received the exact same email from you. Mind you, you is spelled, that's the letter U. No. Was it just our names changed and the spell doesn't work? Was the spell even casted? Updating my rev my updating my review is still no results from the love spell.Simone Collins: No, I no, I'm seeingMalcolm Collins: there's variation. In fact, my situation is going exactly in the [00:17:00] direction I didn't want. But but there's some most of the reviews are positive. This is just a highly upvoted negative review. But this no, no, no, I think thisSimone Collins: shows that there's variation in the ethics of practitioners here.And this, I think, even among People in a very corrupt industry, you're going to see variation. You're going to see people who are genuinely acting in good faith and genuinely showing that they are doing the thing, right? Like they are, they are doing it with fidelity. They're actually performing the ritual for you.They're actually recording it. It's only for you. They're not using templates, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there's like video and photoMalcolm Collins: proof. You don't have to do anything. Look, this one's great. I, by the way, I is spelled with a lowercase i. I woke up from a deep sleep and had a dream about the person I'm manifesting.It felt super realistic, like a lucid dream too. And I, lowercase i again was really happy. I'm, how did they do this over and over again? I'm looking forward to the results. Other ones woke up to an email saying the spell was cast, then received a long text message from my ex [00:18:00] saying he loves me and misses me and doesn't want to see anyone else.10, 10 would definitely continue buying. What was, what was the spell that you wanted to read about? AndSimone Collins: again, I think that this is an example, I guess, you know, you're the. The Contra and I'm the pro. Here's a double or sorry, ultimate double attract new friends spells. You know, you won't be alone anymore.Two witches for you casting in less than 12 hours. What a turnaround. I mean, twoMalcolm Collins: witches, how many spells are they casting a day?Simone Collins: It would be, you know, the more witches, the merrier, especially if you're trying to get,Malcolm Collins: I admire these women's entrepreneurial spirit.Simone Collins: I mean, and witches have been around for a long time, haven'tthey?Malcolm Collins: I mean, they're not working much. They're sitting at home dancing around a fire. I think that thereSimone Collins: are some people who actually take this seriously and have their weird candles and do the thing, and then there are other total, like Messed up people who aren't. But again, with friendship, I think that, you know, if, if I believe this, if I pay for this spell, if I do the thing, I [00:19:00] get, you know, I really, really believe that these, these witches are out there casting for me.And that like, one of the biggest things in dating and friendship is confidence in someone is that self confidence and self assuredness. And if someone believes that, that witchcraft has literally made them a more attractive friend. They are going to be more attractive friend prospects. And also they're going to just, you know, how like people who think that they're lucky are, are luckier, not because they're luckier, but because they actually see an opportunity when it passes them, whereas people who are more pessimistic don't recognize a good opportunity if it even slapped them across the face.Right. So like. These people are now recognizing interest in them. They're returning eye contact. They're sparking conversations. They're recognizing when they should ask people to hang out later or do something with them. Like, well, I mean, you know, you can't,Malcolm Collins: can't knock it. Okay. Okay. Sorry. I gotta, this is from the three witches group again.This spell right here [00:20:00] is. Make them pay. Revenge spell. Revenge spell curse. Spell black magic. Bad luck. Curse your enemy. Destruction. Spell return to sender.Simone Collins: Wait, wait. Return toMalcolm Collins: sender? I don't know. That's the name of the spell. I think it's return to sender. It's like return their bad deeds to them. And I'm trying to find out I, so, so, okay, here's one.I'm not gonna lie, when I got the reading, I didn't have much confidence in it. As much as I love getting readings done, I take them with a grain of salt. But I was playing around with a dating app, which I don't like to do, and have no hopes in anything happening. Just scrolling through people. No one really catching my eye, but there was only two people that made me laugh.And one was because of the pictures he took of himself. And even this minimalistic bio made me laugh. His name was Riley and he put down as his gender identity, male, age, gender, no gender, the name sounded familiar. [00:21:00] So I popped back on here and reread. The reading these girls did for me, realizing that this person you were describing with the exact same name, I'm honestly stunned, what, did they cast a spell on a random person?Was it, what?Simone Collins: I, I'm assuming they were like, oh, O'Reilly is in your future, and Then O'Reilly came up, but I mean, like, you know, whatever.Malcolm Collins: I want to hear about why these women are having other people punished. You know, this is really old human history. They would do stuff like this though. So, so it is worth noting that this isSimone Collins: Remember when we were, when we toured the townships in South Africa,Malcolm Collins: No, no, no.Think about Bath. Bath in the UK. What did they do there? Remember in Bath, they found all of these Oh,Simone Collins: the curse, the folded up curse is written on metal. And they were like, I curse this. Whoever stole myMalcolm Collins: sandal. Yes. I hope that you're cursed for forever. Yeah. Talk about what we [00:22:00] sell in South Africa.Simone Collins: Yeah.That like, even now there are these. traditional markets where people are selling sympathetic medicine. Like, you know, if you, and the general idea of sympathetic medicine is something that I first discovered in preschool, where in my preschool class, you could have a cake made of any, anything you wanted because we had an amazing preschool.And so I always asked for a swan because I believed that if I ate a swan shaped cake, I would turn into a swan and I wanted to be elegant and graceful. And I sadly never turned into a swan and I'm still incredibly clumsy. But that, that kind of sympathetic magic, like, Oh, this thing is like this. So taking it will cure the thing, you know?But I think that that's the thing is, is that most, most people have this tendency. To kind of go for like, Oh, well, there's this magic. Or if this person waves their hands and does the thing, then like we're there. And I, I mean, I don't even, like, I don't think this is like, I, at first when I, when I found these spells on Etsy, I was like, Oh, this is the [00:23:00] fall of civilization.We've lost our culture. We've lost our tradition. What I'm realizing now is in, in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, you describe what happens when you go from a hard culture, you know, like really strong adherence to. to Orthodox Judaism or to Catholicism or whatever it is, like really sticking to the rules.And then you become a softer culture. And then, oh, everyone goes to heaven, but I still go to church. And then even softer and softer, and then you lose everything.Malcolm Collins: Secularism is not the pond completely drained. This is the pond completely drained.Simone Collins: This is the, yes. And, and this is like, We're, we're turning to a, a highly intuitive, like literally instinctual, like zeroMalcolm Collins: cultural sound understanding of the world.You know, speaking of here's another one that came up in a bestseller and I love how like racist this is. Oh no. So it's Chinese magic spelled wrong. OhSimone Collins: wait, how is itMalcolm Collins: spelled then? M A G I C K?Simone Collins: Oh, no, that's just, I think that's the English, the UK spelling for magic. Okay,Malcolm Collins: okay. But it's called the Dumb Donkey Curse.[00:24:00]Okay. But I love how, like, and it looks all, like, Chinese y and, like, a really, like, Racist looking way. ISimone Collins: actually remember a, a woman in Chinatown who was like clearly a Chinese immigrant calling. Oh no, no, no. She called one of my classmates, a stupid monkey. Nevermind. Not a stupid donkey. Maybe it was like 20Malcolm Collins: people's carts, 20 plus people's carts inSimone Collins: 20 carts.Okay. What does it do? Does it curse donkeyMalcolm Collins: to ruin his life? His life. Make them pay curse, ritual to get revenge spell to return to cinder fast, ruin career and make him stupid spell. And the capitalization is all over the place with this.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, I'm sure that like, maybe the spell rubs off, you know, this is a costly spell for her to perform because every time that she makes someone a little bit dumber, some of the, you know, it's kind of like a hat and a millionaire.The dumbMalcolm Collins: juice hits you? You'reSimone Collins: like exposed to the lead and it also poisons you, right?Malcolm Collins: I was drawn to the Chinese magic shop and picked up a couple spells for my situation. I spoke [00:25:00] to Ling Zicane about my, I don't know how to pronounce this, about my situation and he was very supportive and understanding.I have full trust in his work and have great expect explanations, certificates of the work he completed. Now to continue to work on myself and stay positive. Thank you. And he says, thank you for the very kind words, my dear. Chinese magic is truly something and I am sure we will see great results with it.Simone Collins: well maybe no. So maybe also from a branding standpoint, if you're trying to be like a, a non English speaking magician, you have to like, Play up the stereotype. Just how like we, we discovered by interviewing many fine artists that they had to act crazier than they actually were because otherwise people wouldn't buy money from them.So like,Malcolm Collins: I just felt a ting of real sadness. I saw a two star review and the person said that they had great customer service and loved the person, but the spell had a manifest. And I'm like, that's no reason you're buying a fake thing. You can't give a bad review for the spell, not manifesting you jerk.Simone Collins: [00:26:00] Oh, I know. That's. It's too bad this, cause this, this seems like one of the legit guys who like actually, at least my whole thing is they perform the ritual,Malcolm Collins: they do the work. I think we should start a company doing this. Just have an AI respond to people.Simone Collins: Well, I'm, will we have AI magicians though in the future that like, cause I mean already a lot of, a lot of the images here look AI generated like clearly.So, I mean, in the end, it's like we're, we're progressing toward our AI gods, but I, let's go back, just like, I just want to emphasize this sort of like to put a bow on all this, but this is not, this is, this is the really, really good example, which you hadn't illustrated a ton in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion of that instinctual Complete baseline of, of humans devoid of culture.And that's what it looks like. And that's what it looks like in our society. It's, it's Etsy magicians, which isMalcolm Collins: super cool. I really love your positive [00:27:00] spin on all of this and your positive view of our fall. I am. It brings stuff like this to my attention, it's just wild that this is something that people are doing.It's,Simone Collins: it's really, it's cool. I hope we find more of it. I hope, you know, like this is, this is insane. Just like our minds were blown when we, you know, went to that, like, you know, witch doctor sympathetic magic market in, in the townships of Cape of South Africa, Cape Town. Like we were like, this is. No, sorry.It wasn't Cape Town. It was Johannesburg. Yeah, that'sMalcolm Collins: right. It was, it was in the the really dangerous districts outside of Johannesburg. We did a tour of one of the I don't know what you call them, like The townships. And we met with their local witch doctor and we were learning about the way that she interacted with the community.I think she also took in orphans?Simone Collins: You know, then, then we also visited a different settlement in the township and we visited an orphanage. Before that, we visited the, the like witch doctor market where they had all the, all the things. You could buyMalcolm Collins: baubles made from, [00:28:00] youSimone Collins: know. All sorts of things, all sorts of things that I wouldn't want to touch, but that's my culture and my problem.And again, we were, the whole reason we learned about this was because we're about to celebrate future day, our weird cultural holiday. So. This is all just cultural differences, but anyway, I'm delighted that we live in such a weird world with lots of different solutions for things. And I wonder how many women have paid people for spells, love spells for you, Malcolm.I actually, it's not a non zero number. It's not a non zero number.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's definitely not a non zero number, I can say that, and that is a weird thing to think about, and I am sorry that those spells weren't effective. I know you must have paid for an awfully strong one, Sinon, because I am supernaturally indebted to you.Simone Collins: Oh no, have I, has my secret come out? That like, actually, you don't reallyMalcolm Collins: love me? You Etsy.Simone Collins: It's that I, I have aMalcolm Collins: But that's literally what these people are doing, they're buying Etsy. [00:29:00] S**t. Yeah, that's it. I want to go to one of these sellers and just be like as amoral as possible, be like, I don't love this woman.I don't want to love this woman. I just want her to f**k me. Well, I wonderSimone Collins: like, but I mean, and are there, hold on, one final thing to check. Do they allow for hits? So spell Spell forMalcolm Collins: murder. Oh, that's a good one. No, I wanna, I wanna go and just be mean. I, I wanna combine two of your spells. I want one that's a lust spell and then one that's like a, oh my God.Simone Collins: Donkey spell. No, no, no. They had, they sell death. Death curses. I feel like Etsy should, I mean, it's one thing to like non consensually for someone to love you. This is, it's $16, right? Like at least price it higher. It's a death spell. Can I do this? I should do this. These are like, these are like Mexico level hit prices.Cause also you can, you can buy a hit in Mexico forthat.Malcolm Collins: I mean, that's cheap. I need to go like Death Note on these people. If it's 16 a hit I'm just gonna start and start [00:30:00] writing names.Simone Collins: I give five stars for good communication. It is too early to judge the results of spell. If the magic doesn't work, I want a refund.Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. Well, I'd love to ask for a refund for aSimone Collins: murder spell. They're not dead. Give me my money back. Spell was done fast and was certainly powerful. I could feel it bring done. I could feel it bring done. Thank you, Freya, for all your help. And I love everything you do. Ah! I, I don't see any deaths though.This is the, well, my God, there are 23 pages ofMalcolm Collins: reviews on us as, as people leading the proteanalyst. That's something else. AnotherSimone Collins: five star review under death spell, fast delivery and was very nice. Smiley face.Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I love this. That, this is fun that you found the deathSimone Collins: bell. I just, I feel like this is, it's, it's one, I'm like, okay, okay, fine, Etsy. This is [00:31:00] handmade. These are like custom experiences. I remember IMalcolm Collins: showed you this movie, The Craft, by the way, we may have Gen Z followers who Seeing theSimone Collins: movie The Craft.Yeah, go watch it. You wannaMalcolm Collins: seen it? If you wanna see like peak nineties, nineties, if you wanna see like my friend group in high school, go f*****g watch the craft. It is hilarious. Yeah. Because it's so accurate and it so captures the vibe. Of that moment in, in, in our history.Yeah. Yeah. And I shouldn't say my friend group.I always thought this stuff was stupid and I told them that they were stupid. ButSimone Collins: Not unless they These girls were really I'm sure if you were hitting on them and you thought that that would get you what you wanted. OhMalcolm Collins: no, I, I, I mean, I slept with a lot of these people, you know, these people are not difficult.They, they do not have a full mental capacity.Earth, air, fire,Malcolm Collins: But I don't thinkSimone Collins: you poo pooed the idea in front of them when you wanted. Something. Oh, yeah,Malcolm Collins: I did. ISimone Collins: was a strict atheist. Oh, you nagged them. Okay. Well, then yeah, you're probably just nagging them or whatever.Malcolm Collins: Oh,Simone Collins: okay. Okay. Anyway [00:32:00] dear audience death spells are unethical.I do not care if you, you know what, you know what I think actually, but there's a lot of magicians on Etsy who offer death spells, but then like ultimately just try to help their clients mentally. And don't actually cast death spells, even if, like, especially if they believe in the magic. I hope so.This is what I'm hoping. I'm gonnaMalcolm Collins: offer death spells and try to talk people into killing someone. They reach out to me and I'm like, okay, but you have to play a hand yourself. So one, I'll do the spell and then you go out and stuff. I'll do, yeah, I'llSimone Collins: do the spell. So yeah, that's, that's the power of wishy thinking.I wanted a helicopter and I wished for it and then I bought one.Malcolm Collins: So. No, no, no. But have you seen in Africa remember they were talking about this was a major problem they had where people would go to black magicians and they would cast spells that would prevent bullets from hurting them. Oh yeah.And then they'd like go out and try to like attack people or rob stores and stuff. Because they thought they wereSimone Collins: genuinely unstoppable.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Love you to death. We gotta go get theSimone Collins: kids. Love you too. Yes. Bye gorgeous. Please don't kill me. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Professor Edward Dutton joins my wife Simone and I to discuss his theories on where our education system has gone wrong. We talk about the lack of teaching useful logic and reasoning, why science and math are made boring, the feminization of teaching, evolutionary mismatches in education, and more from his book "The Naked Classroom."We also discuss the genetics and psychology of religiosity, why some people have dramatic conversions, the two types of religious people, and implications for fertility and mental health.Edward Dutton: [00:00:00] I suspect that what has happened with those, so there's, there's two kinds of, I mean, it's simplistic to say it, but there's two kinds of religiosity, William James. I think it's the snail on the head with, with, with that. I like that phrase. It's the snail. Yeah. And that is the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.And those two and those two sets of religiously are quite qualitatively different. And the religion of healthy mindedness tends to be, you know, that you, you're normally born into it and you believe all of the, the. the different ideas and whatever and that's associated with being a high in agreeableness with high, high in conscientiousness and and low in mental instability.So highly mentally stable and those associations, at least the association between religiosity sorry. And, and mental health seems to be genetic in nature. There was a study by a guy called Koenig, and they could find no environmental reason why this was the case. Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.That's the religion of the convert. And that is associated with relatively the opposite [00:01:00] personality profile, basically, and in particular with high neuroticism.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to have you here today. And today we have a very special guest, the jolly heretic, or Ed Dutton, or Professor Dutton. I'm sure I would guess 80 percent of our followers probably also follow you or know broadly your work.He's very well known for controversial, much more controversial than us, mind you takes within the field of human genetics. And human evolution, but today we're going to be talking about another shared interest, which is the failure of the education system.I'm going to try to do the, I can only count to four song. Which ourSimone Collins: son is obsessed with.Edward Dutton: Wait, have you seen this? No, sorry, no. It's [00:02:00] aMalcolm Collins: song where they redid bodies hit the floor. Yeah, let the bodies hit the floor, but it's Sesame Street,Malcolm Collins: But I want to hear your thesis on where the educational system has gone wrong and sort of the thesis that you lay out in this recent book that you laid out while also giving the title of the book and where listeners can find it.Edward Dutton: So the book is called The Naked Classroom, The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School.I published it on Amazon KDP. It's quite a short book. Basically, I suppose it's a sort of introduction to based science. And I was, that's what someone suggested I should do. And as you know, I don't have a formal science qualification. I I'm an honorary professor of psychology of various places, but I don't, I was always at school, a [00:03:00] humanities person.I very quickly came to to the conclusion that science is boring. I could see no benefit in science. You know, history. I could look around England. I lived near Hampton Court Palace and I could imagine the kings and queens of England walking there and their ghosts that haunt the place at night. You know, English literature.If you wanted to go back in time and know how they spoke, you could read, I don't know, the works of Thomas Hardy. And there you are immersed in the 19th century, even geography, you know, how a river's formed or whatever, but how flowers have sex. Or even when I was at school, how humans have sex was not really of interest to me.And I, I just thought, I just, I just thought it was, it was terribly, terribly badly taught. And so, and I think that that's the fundamental problem that you quite quickly divide between being a humanities person and a science person at school. And when you do that, then the ignorance of science and scientific concepts and scientific thinking among, and mathematical thinking among humanity's people can be quite staggering.So, for example, I there was a video I [00:04:00] did recently that British Members of Parliament, more than half of British Members of Parliament thought the probability, if you toss a coin, of getting heads, or rather than tails, It's half, but if you toss it twice, they also thought it was half. I thought I'd offer some clarification on what he meant by that statement. Because it's so dumb, you wouldn't expect it to mean what it actually means. Which is, they were asked, if you flip a coin, what's the probability it turns out on head? And then they were asked, if you flip a coin twice, what is the probability it comes up on heads twice?These people thought that there was a 50 percent probability that it came up on heads twice, and a 50 percent probability that it came up on heads individually.Edward Dutton: Now, that's obviously wrong.And and that, it's so obviously wrong. And somebody gave me an example today. They said, well, that's not a sign of stupidity. I've got a friend who's got a PhD in whatever, and she got that wrong. I'm like, [00:05:00] no, right, that's the problem. So science is Science is not, is not integrated into the curriculum.It's not taught in an interesting way. And it struck me, everything was based in science, because it should be. I mean, ultimately there's this idea of of E. O. Wilson, consilience, the idea that every. If you make an assertion in sociology, it has to be reducible to psychology. If you make it in psychology, it has to be reducible to biology.If you make it in biology, it has to be reducible to chemistry. That's, and so if, if it was taught in that way, then first of all a lot of questions that are unanswered in humanity's subjects would be parsimoniously answered. For example, I always thought to myself when I was younger, Well, why was it that people in World War I were prepared to lay down their lives for their country and die, but were not prepared to now?What's, what's changed? Why is, what, what, what, why is it that peopleMalcolm Collins: That's an interesting question!Edward Dutton: Right, why is it that you get these people that would be prepared to burn, be burnt at the stake? For their, what possible have they gone [00:06:00] mad? You know, that wasn't answered, you just learn the information, and then you write your essay and you get your A and whatever.But first of all, I think it should be reduced down, all these questions need to be answered in a scientific way. And secondly, the other thing I thought was, well, think of all the questions that you ask when you're at school. All the things that are going to occur to you when you're at school. Like, why are so many of the teachers women?Why, why, why, why do, why do some boys give women the ick and they find them disgusting? Why, why, why, why is, why, why is why are some people having sex with the teacher? Why are the side of teachers often male? Why are teachers so left wing? Why are so many male teachers gay? Why, you know, frankly when I was at school, when a lot of people went to school, why were there some teachers, male teachers that were a bit, you know, Yeah,Malcolm Collins: even if you had done a degree in science, they wouldn't have touched on these issues.They wouldn't haveEdward Dutton: touched on these issues, no. And these are the things that are going to fascinate you at school. Why is it that girls have these cliques [00:07:00] at school that are complete b*****s to each other, you know? Why is there this anorexia and lesbianism and transsexuality among girls? Why, why do the kids that are, that are retarded, like, literally look physically different? All of these kinds of these, these these, these kinds of questions. And so it struck me that that could, that could get kids into science.If you understand the, the base questions that you're going to ask at school, and if other subjects are reduced down to the science, then you realize the importance of science, that science could really answer. parsimoniously, all of these questions, and therefore you don't make the mistake which so many of us make, which is a young age, really quite a young age, to just stop thinking in a scientific way.I mean, when I did my theology degree, and you try to understand what causes some people to be religious and others not to be, right, I was in my late 20s. Like six years after I got my degree, when I found this information indicating that there was a genetic component to religion, it had never occurred to me, [00:08:00] and it had seemingly never occurred to any of the people that taught me at Durham University or whatever, that you just didn't look at these things.They were separate subjects. So that was the idea with the book, basically, to show that science needs to be based. It needs to be taught in a based way. You can do this by showing its relevance to other subjects and all by just by showing its relevance to your life at school. Answering the question scientifically that you might have thought about at school.ItseemsSimone Collins: like all the things that like a little kid is not allowed, like if, if the little kid says like, why is this, why is that? And the mom's like, shh, that's what, that's whatEdward Dutton: science should be about. Those to go back to school, put your tie, if it's an English school, not an American school, put your jaunty angle, put your satchel on.Go back to school and, and look at these questions that would have occurred to you at school. Well, that was the idea. I,Malcolm Collins: I want to pull on two of these ideas you talked about because there's things that we haven't talked about on this show yet. And I don't think some of this stuff that you talked about, I think generically, if people are familiar with like a manosphere stuff, or they're familiar with like genetic nerd stuff, they're going to have some vague idea of what the answers are going [00:09:00] to be.But other things you mentioned, I don't even see talked about in these communities and they're really interesting. One of them that is, is. Being able to predict people's personality and things like their level of testosterone based on their facial characteristics. Yeah, I think people would be really surprised the extent to which humans can accurately do that.Yeah, you're going to say,Edward Dutton: well, I was going to say, yeah, I mean, what's more interesting now is the extent to which AI can do it. Yeah, which is, which is, which is way, way beyond what humans can do. But yeah, because of course it's, it's adaptive, isn't it? We, we are a social animal. So it's inherently going to be adaptive to be able to make correct judgments from appearances.Now, at the same time, it's also going to be adaptive to be able to evolve in such a way as to mask whatever it is that is suboptimal about you. with an appearance which tells, which doesn't indicate to people that's the case. So there's going to be a kind of arms race all the time, whereas on the one hand, you're going to be, you're going to be evolving to be able to accurately judge my appearances.And on the other hand, you're [00:10:00] going to be evolving to not be accurately judged by appearances. So, you know, you can, you can get around those problems and that kind of thing. So, but what we end up with is that certainly a level of, I look at this in an earlier book I did called how to judge people by what they look like.But I also look at this again with regard to school in the new book. Is that is that with a level that is significantly exceeds chance we can, we can note intelligence from appearance. We can particularly the face, because the face is a huge number of genes involved in the face. So it's a very good indicator of basically, you know, your, your level of genetic health or whatever.And, and, and personality. And a good, I mean, a good example. And it doesn't sound very pleasant to put it like this, but if you think about what is an example of a low intelligence person, well it's a person with Down syndrome. Now that's low, now that's low intelligence beyond the normal range, that's outside the normal range.These people have an IQ of about, it depends on the severity of the condition, but they have an IQ of between 150, something like that, but often about sort of 60, something like that. So it's, it's way [00:11:00] out, it's way out of the normal range, which is 70 to 100, 130. And what you see there is that the, the developmental pathways have been interfered with at a very young age, you know, a very young age of And this has predictable results in what they look like, i.e. they have small, they have small noses, they have sort of short faces, they have narrow eyes and they have various examples of minor physical abnormalities and whatever in the face. Now it follows from that, that if, that you're going to get that in a much diluted form. among, among people that have low intelligence within the normal range.And you're going to get the opposite of that among people that have high intelligence. And that's exactly what we see.Simone Collins: Wait, you're saying that smart people have giant schnozzes?Malcolm Collins: Simone, I think you're getting intoEdward Dutton: That's, that's, no, no, that would that, that would, if it was a giant schnoz, as, as you [00:12:00] put it, that would perhaps be a mutation, a mutational load tends to be associated with no IQ.But, but, but, but in the normal range, the the studies indicate that being intelligent is associated with having a longer face, with having a narrower face, with having, you know, basically a more horsey like face, a more kind of Anne Coulter, you know, sort of face. You know, she's lovely, but you know what I mean.And soMalcolm Collins: things like b****y resting face may just be a sign that someone's a b***h. One of the,Edward Dutton: the not, and also the pupil size at rest is larger. I eyes are larger. Pupil size at rest is larger, which makes sense.Malcolm Collins: Really, people in more int intelligence, they like, have a base level of more, more interest in their environment.Exactly.Edward Dutton: Exactly. So the, I mean, what is intelligence? Intelligence is solving problems. What is the pupil? It's the interface between the world. and the brain. And so it follows that you're going to, you're going to have a base level, a larger pupil. And also, I mean, I know you both wear glasses. Well, I think Simone does so for pretentious reasons, but one of the, one of the one of the indicators [00:13:00] of intelligence is short sightedness.And the, the, the, there's a weak correlation. And the reason for is that the eye is part of the brain. So obviously if you've, if you've got a bigger brain, your eyes are more kind of, convex, basically. And so they're pushed out and so you're short sighted. Obviously these things only work within race.You can't make those kinds of assertions between race, but that, that's the, that's the face. Yeah. And there's other things, personality as well. Fun, fun,Malcolm Collins: science y divergence here. So we were talking about the, the pupils, right? And so, somebody's pupils being a because they might not understand the implications of what I was saying there.Somebody's pupils being constantly dilated. Typically, your pupils dilate when you're showing interest in something. And, and we even have a natural response when somebody's pupils dilate when they're talking to us. to believe that they like us more. And this is why the Deadly Nightshade's scientific name is Tropa Belladonna, the beautiful woman it's because it used to be used, you'd put little droplets of it in your eye before you would go on a date with somebody.Women would do this, and it would [00:14:00] paralyze some of the muscles in the eye and cause the pupils to dilate an extra large amount. So they'd look like little, you know, anime girls. And so what you're literally seeing is more persistent interest in their environments in, in this intelligent group, which is really interesting.Within the face category, one of the jokes we persistently make on the show, because I think just as a scientist, it really jumps out to you. And again, we have nothing against Andrew Tate, but his face is, if you're familiar with face models, almost the cliche of somebody who developed in a very low testosterone environment.It's a very, very low testosterone face. And it's really interesting that that's so antagonistic to his brand. And we point out that likely now he's high testosterone. Because of his lifestyle, because he's sleeping around a lot, which increases testosterone, because he's living with competitive males, which increases testosterone, not that he's a naturally high testosterone person.And in many ways, that's almost better. You know, he, he got to it honestly, rather than by birth. But the other thing you touched on that I really want to [00:15:00] pull on, because I think that it's really interesting too, is I totally forgot what it was.Edward Dutton: Let's,Malcolm Collins: let's talk about the teacher one. That could be an interesting one to dig into. Yeah, but why, why are teachers disproportionately women? That would be an interesting one.Edward Dutton: Well, that's yeah, I mean, that's, that's one of the more obvious ones, isn't it? I mean, it's a, it's a very interesting process. Basically you, if you open up a profession to women and it's the kind of, which it wasn't previously, and that is the kind of profession that is attractive to women, then it becomes Overwhelmingly female very quickly.Because women are within apart from that. There's out women Males have more outliers both in terms of low iq people and high iq people and a slight iq advantage adulthood but basically intelligence is about the same and women are higher in conscientiousness higher in rule following and Harder working basically, and higher in agreeableness and things like this And so, this means that they will be able to get into that profession that they want to get into particularly if it's not particularly intellectually challenging.Obviously, they're hiring a general desire to look [00:16:00] after children and be with children, so they're attracted to that profession, and then they get into that profession, and then you get more and more and more women teachers, and then at some sort of tipping point, it becomes seen as a kind of a girl's game, as Jordan Peterson summarized it.And then when it's seen as a girl's game, then it loses status. It loses status and the salary goes down, commensurate to other professions. And then men stop being interested in this. And then it becomes even more of a female profession. And at the moment it's in England, it's something like 65 percent of secondary school teachers are women and about 85 percent of primary school.So you're really, really young. It's a woman and that's just going to go up. And then when we, when in the. book I did in The Naked Classroom, when you interview men who are teachers, and you're like, well, why, why, why have you gone into teaching? They basically come across as quite unambitious men. It's just, oh, I've, I've, I've gone into teaching, I've got my degree in whatever, history, and I've gone into teaching because you get long holidays, it's good.You know, I've, I've, I've gone into teaching because I can spend my time doing my hobbies and the holidays and it's a sort of stable job [00:17:00] and whatever. So they're not very, they're not very ambitious kind of men. And, and it's just overwhelmingly female and it's an evolutionary mismatch. It is clearly an evolutionary mismatch in all societies for young women in their early twenties to be hanging around.16 year old boys, 17 year old boys, 18 year old boys. That's just not how it's supposed to work. That's not how it's done in any tribal society. Boys at that age are taken away from the society. They go through their rite of passage. They become men, they come back. This is their rite of passage. And the instructors are women, so naturally you're going to end up with relationships between the boys and the teachers.As you do,Malcolm Collins: I've, I've, I've heard an interesting theory around this, that one of the reasons why education rates rose so much for a period is because teachers were one of the only jobs available to women. And respectable jobs, respectable jobs available to women, which meant that for a low price below market, what you could get somebody at that competence level, we were able to get many of the most competent women in our society.Edward Dutton: Really true. [00:18:00] And I look at this in the book, it's in the Naked Classroom. It's very interesting, this. It seems to me the standard of teachers has gone, the standard, the quality of teachers has gone down precipitously for a number of reasons. First of all, it's lost prestige. It's just lost prestige. And so men in the old days, like my RE teacher, Mr.Sutton, who was highly intelligent, you know, that would, would, that would go into teaching profession. They're not going to do that now. They're going to, they're going to go somewhere else. Secondly, we have a more meritocratic society. So you could imagine a situation where a person who was born into the working class or something like that, and he goes to grammar school and he becomes a school teacher.There's no there's, even though he's probably sufficiently intelligent to become, I don't know, an academic in whatever subject he teaches, but it's not a very meritocratic society. So he's not going to do that. He's going to become a school teacher. That person these days is more likely to become an academic, particularly as well, considering the expansion of higher education in tandem with that.So he's eliminated. And then with women, of course, I mean, I had a teacher at school and she was a very intelligent woman. She wanted to be a lawyer. And they said to her, this is in the 50s, in the 40s. Of course, you can't be a lawyer, you're a girl. So, so, so she became an [00:19:00] English teacher. Now that generation of women that became teachers, they're gone.And the women that are capable of becoming lawyers or doctors or whatever are likely to become that. Whereas in the old days, they would have become a school teacher. So you're right. You're quite right. You would, we probably had a substantial period of time where you have women that were quite good. But we're going into teaching and now they're not, you know, it's just going to be overwhelmingly midwhip types that go.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, unfortunately, this is not unlike what a lot of people think, something that you can easily fix just by like raising teacher salaries or something like that, like the boat has already sailed. You would need to have a major cultural shift or just replace the profession, which is what we're trying to do is our.institution.Edward Dutton: Well, it was a good point you make that because studies indicate this whole idea of would raise the salary, raise the salary. There's a lot of evidence indicates that people will trade money for prestige. So the problem is, is not, it's, it's the prestige. It's got low prestige. And once it's got, once it's got low, you could, it's like, oh, people are under being a plumber.You can earn way more being a. Plumber than you can being a school teacher or whatever, but it has [00:20:00] lower prestige. Well, being a school teacher has got to that point because it's so female dominated because it bears up it's, this is exodus of high quality people from it, but it's just got low prestige.And I don't know how the, it's very hard to reverse that. I thinkMalcolm Collins: that's really interesting. I, another thing, when we talk about men and women. Having different biological tendencies in terms of the types of jobs they take that is actually really important from the perspective of pernatalist advocacy.And there was a great piece called the baby boom by Arctotherium that we did an episode on recently. I don't know if you read this. It was in Aporia where he basically argued a strategy that you could use to help fertility rates is to lower the amount of bureaucratic jobs within the government because those are predominantly held by women because they disproportionately take those jobs which would allow and put pressure on people to be more.You know, stay at home moms it's an interesting theory. Well, andSimone Collins: it wasn't just that, it wasn't like let's force stay at home motherhood. It's let's give men the ability to be higher in status than women, because women won't get married if they don't have [00:21:00] access to higher status than the men. So that was like the bigger thing is like, how do we enable men to have relatively higher status than women?And a lot of that involves reducing the extent to which women have an unfair advantage and really, really common and major. Like job segments. One thing I wanted to ask you though, is if you've read you probably have Paul Lockhart's and mathematicians lament because it really changed how I looked at mathematics and I, I like sort of to like recap it for people who haven't read this essay, basically.Paul Lockhart argues that we teach mathematics to kids as though for the entire, like grade school, middle school, high school experience until you hit college, you're basically only studying grammar. You're not allowed to write a sentence. You're not allowed to like read books or discuss literature or build narratives.You're only allowed to just look at grammar and punctuation and the rules and it's terrible and you hate it. And it ruins math for everyone, and that's why people hate math. And what [00:22:00] really math is all about is imagination, and sort of building imaginary worlds and constraints and seeing how things behave with those constraints.What would be the equivalent of applying this kind of reasoning?Edward Dutton: That's what I argue in the book. I said, So the Why don't the schools teach pure, like, logical thinking? So just usable, usable stuff. That's usable maths. I can only think of a few times when I did maths at school where there was, for example, there was one, I don't mention this in the book, but there was one test we did, it was SAT when you're 14, and there was this question where you had to, there was a wardrobe, and you had to work out if you could get it out of the door.You were given the proportions and you were given the, and I realized, ah, Pythagoras theorem, that will solve that. And that's the, that's the, that will give me the answer. And that's the one time in my life. And that was in the math test, not a real life situation where Pythagoras theorem came, you know, became useful.And so I think that what they, you're right, I think they are, what mathematics teaches you at school [00:23:00] is the, is the sort of the grammar, as I said, the grammar, and I think you can go a level further than that and just take that down to the level of logic, of, of formal logic, obviously and then of informal logic.And when I was doing my maths GCSE, that was the height of New Labour, that was the height of all of this emotional nonsense, you know, New Labour, New Britain. All this and I thought wouldn't it be good if they had sat us down said look boys that we've got this political party saying New labor new britain.That's a fallacy Okay, the fact the fact that the party is called new labor It does not follow and it cannot follow that. It's going to renew britain. That's insane and there were and there were many other examples of these kinds of manipulative slogans that I think you could ultimately be reduced out Basically something like maths, basically formal or informal logic.And if, and if you teach kids that, if you teach kids the benefit of of, of informal logic and then a formal logic, then they can start to understand the benefit of maths because it's an extension of that basically. And then they can start to see the math is not just some boring grammar. It's actually extremely [00:24:00] important and vital to everything.That's not, it's not taught in that way. It's not taught in a way that is useful. It's like teaching languages. The new modern way that you teach a language, I think is an improvement. You can teach French by teaching everybody the grammar and stuff like this, or you can just immerse them in it and say, okay, here's some French, get on with it.And that's what they should do with math. So,Malcolm Collins: so, I remembered the thing I wanted to talk about, which was the genetics of religion. Oh, yes. It is a very interesting topic, and it is really undersold how heritable religiosity is, but a really interesting phenomenon, and for us, this was what actually drove us on our path to pronatalism, is we had originally thought that what was being selected for, like the way humanity was changing, was that people were being selected to be higher levels of religiosity.And then when we looked at the data, this doesn't appear to be what's actually happening, and it's really interesting, which is the historic research. And you're one of the few people who's going to immediately be like, Oh, yes, I've seen this phenomenon. When it looked at the religiosity [00:25:00] and hereditability, it would always point out, it does not determine what religion you are, just your fervor in terms of how much you follow that religion.And it looks like this fervor, like this genetic fervor for religion is not protective of the religion that people are born into. And this is why when you look at the new atheist community, which you were. you know, on the edge of, I think, along with us for a while, a lot, like disproportionately, they were incredibly fervent within their religion before deconverting and joining the movement.It was not that they were like loosey goosey religious types. They were like extremely religiousEdward Dutton: types. Well, I don't, I don't know if that's necessarily a good example of people that are pronatal though. No, no, no, it'sMalcolm Collins: not, but it's, but it's interesting because historically, this genetic fervor for religion kept people within their cultural group, but just made them extreme advocates of that cultural group.Yeah. Well,Edward Dutton: yeah, I suspect that what [00:26:00] has happened with those, so there's, there's two kinds of, I mean, it's simplistic to say it, but there's two kinds of religiosity, William James. I think it's the snail on the head with, with, with that. I like that phrase. It's the snail. Yeah. And that is the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.And those two and those two sets of religiously are quite qualitatively different. And the religion of healthy mindedness tends to be, you know, that you, you're normally born into it and you believe all of the, the. the different ideas and whatever and that's associated with being a high in agreeableness with high, high in conscientiousness and and low in mental instability.So highly mentally stable and those associations, at least the association between religiosity sorry. And, and mental health seems to be genetic in nature. There was a study by a guy called Koenig, and they could find no environmental reason why this was the case. Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.That's the religion of the convert. And that is associated with relatively the opposite personality profile, basically, and in [00:27:00] particular with high neuroticism. So be going through a period of religious fervor of really extreme, really extreme religiousness or changing religion, so that is to say extrinsic religiousness, socially conformist religiousness, as opposed to intrinsic religiousness and going through a period of religious fervor, i.e. a conversion, that's associated with mental instability. And so there's no reason what you would actually expect is that you would get people that if they had let's say something like one of the things that's associated with mental instability is a borderline personality where you have a weak sense of self and you're very fickle and changeable and you fundamentally fear abandonment and you feel feelings very strongly and these, these kinds of things.And so you, and you can see that someone like that could have a dramatic conversion experience where they would move from being extreme in terms of, let's say, being a Christ, a fundamentalist Christian, to being extreme in terms of being an atheist or vice versa. And I, I know of many, many cases of this, but I would expect that personality type to a certain [00:28:00] extent to be associated with just general sickness, just sort of problems, mental illness and physical illness.It's the religion of the healthy mindedness. That's more, more interesting because that seems. associated with fertility and that seems to be associated with, with you know, pro social nature and, and so on. But yeah, there's a, there's a definite distinction between those two. And it's very, it was very interesting when I was at university, I did my research and I think about the kind of people that converted one way or the other.And it was always, as you say, to the most extreme manifestation. I can think of one example, a person who's fundamentalist Christian, and now it's like she just hates God, and God doesn't exist, and it's just totally woke. And that seems to me, to the token, you can think of a sort of a religious bundle that we were selected for.A bundle of traits that is religiousness that then come together and become pleiotrifically related and then are associated with other things which are adaptive as well, such as mental health and physical health and pronatalism and [00:29:00] whatever. And they all become bundled together and equally you can You would think that if any deviation from that would be associated with negative things.And I think that you have, if you have the breakup of the religious bundle, i. e. you have one element of it, i. e. extreme fervor and desire for black and white servanthood, for example, whether you get that from trad Catholicism or you get that from Wokeness, but you get it from somewhere. And and and it's and you can move between the two As as you because your sense of self is weak and oh, this isn't working break down or maybe thisMalcolm Collins: And and you think these are two different genetic clusters and one is being sort of bred out of the populationEdward Dutton: I yeah, I would, the, what I, my reading is that the, the personality involved is so different from, it's so fundamentally different that you're, you're, you're dealing with two separate kinds of two separate kinds of people.I mean, there's all kinds of nuance. Of course, you're going to get some people that have converts and are religiously fervent and therefore have loads of kids or whatever.[00:30:00] But My, my understanding is that neuroticism tends to be negatively associated with fertility except in certain subsections of it.And, and so, so, you know, overall, I would think they would be quite separate. I mean, one thing, for example, that could predict conversion and having being a fundamentalist Christian, for example, would be some kinds of narcissism. So borderline personality predicts dramatic changes in the nature of the self.One example of a kind of borderline personality is narcissism, and some kinds of narcissism are positively associated with having children. Quite why I'm not sure. I don't know if the mediating factor is socioeconomic. It could be that to some extent we still look up to those that have children and say, if you're narcissistic, you want to have lots of them.I don't know. I mean, itMalcolm Collins: was in specific sub communities. I mean, I'm thinking now about like the eight passengers lady and stuff like that. When children are a status symbol within their community, which is sort ofSimone Collins: any mommy blogger, like kids are good props in many cases.Edward Dutton: That's right. [00:31:00] We found, I mean, we've got a study at the moment we're doing, we found a number, a number of indicators that among Mormons there is a EU eugenic among white Mormons in America, there is eugenic fertility because more intelligent people tend to be more socially conformist.And in that community it's prenatal. And so the, and therefore you wanna have kids to show that God is heavenly Fathers blessing you or whatever. And so,Malcolm Collins: sorry, I'm gonna unpack what you said there just because I think. What he's saying is that if you look within most communities and most cultural groups in the world right now, you have what is called this genetic fertility, which means that they are selecting for traits that we would think of as non competitive traits IE, low IQ and stuff like that.But that lead to. higher competitive within reproduction markets within our existing socioeconomic condition. He's saying within this one rare community, there is, and I've seen the studies on this, it's a very slight eugenic effect, but a eugenic effect within these Mormon communities. But this has been a great way to end this episode.And I really would encourage people to check out this book. If you'd like [00:32:00] some of the topics that he was talking about or What's the word that I'm looking for here? Dissident science is what I call it. Real science. The last real science that's left. And it has been great to have you on, and we would love to have you on in theEdward Dutton: future.Great. It was a pleasure to talk to you both. Bye bye. Bye. Oh,Malcolm Collins: and do check out his podcast as well, Jolly Heretic, our YouTube channel or whatever..Speaking of people who really sex up science, well, acapella science, I have just had one of their songs stuck in my head recently, so I have to, uh, share a little clip from them, to share the, the infection with you guys and, if you want, after this clip, I'm going to have a sort of an outtake from us just chatting with, uh,We are built of modules combined in a planned out way Each new piece must be told where to go Oh, now, there's a science helping us to [00:33:00] understand How ourselves encode this architectural plan Signaling each other with genetic tools, oh Oh yeah, wow Phenotype the interface for mouse and man Genotype the files and the sub programs What then are the switches, circuit boards, and boot code?E V O D Looking at the logic in the ways that we grow Every gene directed by a signal key code Proteins that can activate, enhance, or be told E While these signals are controlled by other genes, let's signal Calculating in a networked labyrinth, though Where the heart and liver and the hands and feet go Signal, Signal, Signal, Signal, Signal Signal mapping tells each region what it ought to be, yo We're circling so deep they build a port They're older than D'Amelio D'Amelio's a wicked red baby In a crucial pathway, genes just tend to get torpedoed Where they go, calamity goes As the sun goes down So make sure you [00:34:00] turn it up, speak now! Boxing day really, and this is sort of a second boxing day.Malcolm Collins: What are we supposed to be doing on boxing day? I can't remember.Edward Dutton: Well, traditionally, isn't it that you fill boxes with meats for the for the, for the the downtrodden of the community and leave them outside? And then there's the boxes, that's why it's called box, that's my understanding.Oh, that's what WobbliesMalcolm Collins: has thought. I can see why we forgot about this. Hold on, there's a toy in the background that I Definitely need to turn off.Edward Dutton: But my, my wife, my wife got me this cravat, which I was quite pleased with. Oh, so that's a Christmas cravat.That's a Christmas. That's Christmas Cravat. Yeah. Christmas. ThatSimone Collins: is very well, there you go. You're already benefiting from the holiday. That's, that is very nice. Okay. That's,Edward Dutton: I I got her a book about feral cats. 'cause we've, we, we've just, we've just got our, we've just got our cat. A cat, so our cat is incredibly sociable.Very ridiculously sociable, like a dog. Okay. Has to be entertained. So we got him a cat. It's his cat, but we [00:35:00] can't touch it. It's feral. It won't let us touch it. But they're, they're okay with each other. They're okay with each other, yeah. But it's his cat. So my cat has a cat. And and that's all going very well.He doesn't pester us anymore for attention or anything like that. He's got his cat, but he can basically, like, dominate. That'sMalcolm Collins: a very cat thing to do. That is very cat thing to do. The whole situation is a very cat thing to do. I'm gonna keep that cat, that cat anecdote in the, in the start here. I think that's a good one.This is how we go from single cells Every generation and in life primeval Life in variations endless and beautiful From Devo to Evo Ivan and Mosquito Patterns are resolved as the signals proceedo Melvin and Chiggy with the glow tail Kill it with the light morpholino Shoot a legal morpholino From Devo to Evo Voyage of the Beagle Body plans evolve when proteins to the genome In this matter, life's beauty grows Is that a game, Devo?If A C A P E [00:36:00] L L A S C I E N C E Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

My wife Simone and I discuss why the pro-natalist movement seems to be drawing many people on the autism spectrum. We share our thoughts on why autistic people may be attracted to intense affiliation and dedication to causes they believe in.We also talk about the future of the movement, keeping relationships healthy in the public eye, managing our mental health as quasi-public figures, and more with our usual sense of humor.https://manifold.love/Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Next time we're talked to by a reporter or something like this, we need to have you subtly drop that you want to replace the rest of the population with autistic people. Um, We need to have you.Simone Collins: What do we call it? The greater replacement. The greater replacement The complete solution.Malcolm Collins: No, no, you gotta say it's the greater replacement theory.Simone Collins: I really like that, the greater I have a greater replacement theory.Malcolm Collins: I'm a greater replacement theorist, where the autists are trying to replace us, and Simone here, you affirm, you as an autist are trying to replace them now, right?Like, that's what the pronatalist movement's really about. Yeah, we need some progressive to freak out about this.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Great. By the way, one thing you would've loved is when the repair guy came, you know, because I was managing the call, so I wasn't able to stand next to the repair guy, and I couldn't keep Octavian away. He wanted to watch the whole time. Oh boy. So he got his iPad and he sat down right next to the repair guy with his back leaning against the repair guy.You know, like he know and I'm like, on the bat or something. Oh my. So the guy standing there doing stuff and Octa and this kids like coddling with him, like [00:01:00] leaning against him? Yeah. . Oh,Simone Collins: no. Octavian is, has zero fear of any strangers. OneMalcolm Collins: of my favorites as a, yeah, he, there were like guys out working by our place.And Octavian goes, Hey, can I go up and give him a hug? And I was like, Oh no, Octavian, I don't think like the random guy wants a hug. And Octavian goes, Everybody likes hugs.Simone Collins: This guy was like, he clearly wasn't a morning person. He was smoking a cigarette and like, drinking a Dunkin coffee and like, just looking like he wanted to die.Malcolm Collins: Octavian was like, I want to go give him a hug. Even whenSimone Collins: he was really, really little, we'd like go hiking and walk past a group of people. And he would just like veer off from us and follow them because, you know, they looked like moreMalcolm Collins: fun, I guess. The new family's more fun. So Speaking of all of this, one thing that was really interesting at the pronatalist conference, because we got a better understanding of like what the base of the movement is actually like.And at one point I was like, this [00:02:00] really feels a lot like the early effective altruist movement. You know, lots of really competent entrepreneurs disproportionately highly educated, disproportionately entrepreneurs, disproportionately tech people, disproportionately successful. And somebody was like, and we were like, how can we move this in the direction of the EA movement?Not like in the corrupted direction, but in the direction of actually having tons of societal influence instead of just being a subculture that is four people of a subculture are seen as like a weirdo thing, right? Somebody goes, well, the reason why that culture works so well was because, it appealed to disproportionately autistic people.And thenSimone Collins: like out of the woodwork, someone like sprang up and was like, did someone say autism?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then like five people in the room raised their hand. Literally. It must've been. 40 percent of the room was autistic or 30%?Simone Collins: There were a lot of autists there.Malcolm Collins: It was, it was higher than I expected. And as people know, like Simone is autistic, right?So this was like, yes, the EA movement was disproportionately autistic and still is. And the pronatalist [00:03:00] movement is disproportionately autistic. And the question is why? What's going on here? Now, before we get further with that question, I'm going to do like a little free ad for a product I want to support because I always support any interesting autistic focused dating products that are maybe going to get more of you guys wives.So Manifest. It is a predictionSimone Collins: manifolds. Hold on. No. So there was a prediction market called manifold. That is really cool. We went to their inaugural conference this year called manifest in Berkeley. And shortly after that conference, they were, they released a dating app called manifold love. You can access it at manifold dotMalcolm Collins: love.Yeah. And so, I don't know exactly how it works. Maybe you can read on the thing, but I, my understanding is that people will put up like profiles of themselves and then other people will bet on who you would be a good match for and they win [00:04:00] betting pools. If you end up with the person who they're betting, you're going to be a good match forSimone Collins: now.Basically, it's crowdsourced matchmaking via prediction markets. So they're combining matchmaking with prediction markets. And. Basically, you can create a dating profile, a lot of it's like typical dating platform stuff where you upload photos and you answer questions from a long list provided, you know, this includes like, do you want to have kids?What's your personality like? And then basically this creates a collection of highly detailed profiles. And then anyone who joins, of course, can act as a matchmaker between profiles. So this isn't just a platform. Where people actively looking for a partner would want to be. This is also a platform where someone who's like, I feel like I can predict a good pairing between some people.Malcolm Collins: Well, it's good gossip if it's going on in your community. Oh yeah. Right now I hear it's mostly just used in Silicon Valley.Simone Collins: No, they're like, I'm looking at it now. There's there's someone in London, New York [00:05:00] city, Beijing, Washington, San Jose, Fairfield. California city, greater London Berlin game, like all over.I mean, yeah. Okay. It's like San Francisco Bay area. There is a lot. Singapore though, more New York city, Calgary. So Paris, so it is, it is actually, I think it's, it's starting out with a nice spread of people. And what I like is that matchmakers playing with this, this data aspect of manifold can profit with mana, which is there like in, in.world currency. If they correctly bet on whether two individuals will last in a six month relationship or not. And I love that betting. I just, I like, I wish. We've got to do this. Like I want there to be like a running like thing in our family where we're betting on like all sorts of inappropriateMalcolm Collins: things.I would love that. I mean, it'd be so cool. Something like it's got popular on like a college campus or something. Well,Simone Collins: even like, with dating too, like, I think one, one thing that actually came up at the pronatalist conference in, I think that same conversation [00:06:00] where autism came up was The fact that like family and social approval of partners of people, people were dating had sort of fallen by the wayside.Whereas like in the past, your parents and your brother and sister would all have like a whole lot of things to say about the woman or man that you were dating and they, you know, it would be like, well, here's what I think of them. And I love the idea of like bringing it back and being like, Yeah, I'm going to place this bet that you're going to last, like, you're going to last for five weeks.It was very interesting how thatMalcolm Collins: came up. The guy was like, My brother brought home somebody to meet the family and it was like very clear this was a bad match. Yeah. But we couldn't tell him. Try to subtly tell him like this is a bad match, but it didn't mean much to him that the entire family thought that and historically and within most cultures, that would be a very, very loud signal that you probably shouldn't get married to somebody.Simone Collins: But I think it's different. I think it's different when the family's like literally putting money on the line. Like, here's how long I think you're going to [00:07:00] last. And of course that can happen like if that happens to the wrong type of person. They might pursue a relationship or a string in a long longer than they should just to, you know, out of spite.Malcolm Collins: We don't want them colluding on these bets, you know, that'd be so easy to do. But I,Simone Collins: I still, I still love this, this idea. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I'd also love it if we did little ads like this occasionally and things for. products that we stan. I was thinking about that earlier when I was watching YouTube videos and they had like sponsored segments.I was like, Oh, it'd be cool to like sponsor little products or people who are working on things inSimone Collins: the community. Not for pay or the greater good.Malcolm Collins: Not for the greater good. That's what the Tao empire would say. And there are a bunch of commies. Oh, we do it for community cohesion and utility. Okay. Simone efficacy, efficacy.But I,Simone Collins: I actually do think it's a legit good place to look for a partner though, because you have to think about, this is one of those things where, in, in business, you need to look for an [00:08:00] arbitrage opportunity. You need to look where there's a lot of value that is untapped. And what we learned after attending Manifold's inaugural conference was just how smart everyone there was.And like, we're like, Oh my gosh, like I am ready to like move into a neighborhood full of these people. I would happily live in that neighborhood.Malcolm Collins: That's where we finally met Scott Alexander.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and saw a bunch of other really awesome people and made a lot of friends, like ridiculous.Like even, and we've been to a lot of different like societies and groups where we really love the people there. And we're like, Oh, everyone's so intellectual. This wasn't just intellectual people. It was like intellectual doers, intellectual, thoughtful people like who, yeah, I don't know. I just, I think they're great.So this is why I think it's uniquely worthwhile thing to plug is because right now. Before it becomes like overblown or too well known, it is a very curated network of very smart, thoughtful, but also like impactful, employed people. So, [00:09:00]Malcolm Collins: yeah. But now to the topic of the video. Why is this community disproportionately drawing autists?The type of people who would be engaged by something like that. Yeah,Simone Collins: and autists, you'd think, would have a lower birth rate than the average person. So why would autists not only be, like, keen to have a kid, but like, six? And we should callMalcolm Collins: them hottists, because that's the new thing. They're hot autistic people, the hottists.Why is it that hottists are disproportionately drawn to pronatalism? I am asking you, the autistic woman.Simone Collins: I think, well, yeah, I mean the, the classic easiest answer is autistic people don't just do something. They like really go overboard, you know, they're not just like into trains, they like know every f*****g thing about trains.Right. So like, I think once you get an autistic person into kids, they're like, kids, bring all the kids and I'm going to raise them perfect. And they will. They're going to be autistic about it, which is such an [00:10:00] ironic twist from like the classic image of the refrigerator mom. For a little bit of color for a while, people thought that people became autistic because they were raised by overly cold mothers who, you know, didn't show them love and were incapable of expressing love.Whereas like when we see the, the autists who are raising kids you know, they, they may not, it may not be natural to them to like express affection in certain ways, but they have studied it so much and they care about doing it right so much that they are way better at showing affection than theMalcolm Collins: average person.You're very good at simulating it.You can't replace family with a robot, Richard. We need real human affection. That's why Huggy's programmed to simulate its sweetness. ,Malcolm Collins: butSimone Collins: yeah, so. Well, honestly though, here's my, here's my thing though about, about simulating love. I think that someone who's quote unquote faking it when it comes to love and affection is the best.Ultimately going to show much more love and affection to someone than someone who's really acting it out because people who are, who act as they [00:11:00] actually feel are way less, like way, way more likely to get irritable, way more, less likely to act patiently, way less likely to act picturesquely all the time.This is important! What could be more important than your family, Richard? Ssssssssssscience?Simone Collins: And I think both you and I, like a lot of the time when we do super wholesome stuff and it's, you know, being really cute with the kids and being really loving with them. Like it's right after they just vomited slash shat slash spit up all over us. You know, it might be after they just screamed in our faces or had a tantrum or like, we're kind of tired, but we choose because we're being really autistic about it to be more affectionate.So again, ironically, I would also say not only are autists like extra enthusiastic about parenting when they get into it, but also like they're better parents than neurotypicalMalcolm Collins: people. That's an interesting theory. That is not the theory that I was in. Okay. The theory I would have chosen goes like this. Why were autists [00:12:00] disproportionately in the early effect of altruism movement? It was because the movement combined two things, something that was obviously a problem in society that most philanthropic money was mostly about social signaling and not actually helping people.But that also a person with good. emotional, like, intelligence of other humans, and, and, and who could read other humans and social cues really well they would know that you're not supposed to say that, that people are just spending philanthropic money to self aggrandize themselves and make themselves look better, because that's a really hurtful thing to tell somebody, and that's you know, disruptive to society, and so we have, broadly agreed on this mass delusion.And they're like, no, but look, seriously, it's not working. And everyone else is like, well, and I think that with the pronatalist movement, it's the same sort of a thing. It's a movement that is based around an obvious statistical trend. Anybody who's looking at statistics is going to see That fertility rates are fallingat a rate [00:13:00] that makes it inevitable that it is not going to be the biggest issue that humanity faces over the next century, much bigger than things like global warming and stuff like that. When you're looking at just the numbers and the speed of of what's happening. And so. They recognize that this is a problem, but they also lack the social graces to recognize just how much blowback they're going to get from the urban monoculture, which controls most pathways to power in our society, most pathways to income and stability in our society, pathways and access to sexual resources in our society.So they just go out and say it. Hey guys, do you not see the problem? Do you not see the, the train that we're about to hit. And I think that that's what it is. It's a obvious thing with a social filter in front of it that most people know not to cross. And I would say that this is also true when I think about like the people who were autistic at the conference or were heavily on the spectrum there.They, they were just genuinely like, I am concerned about the statistics here, [00:14:00] whereas I think the people who weren't like that at the conference, they more like had some other agenda that they were using this to promote to some extent. Right. They weren'tSimone Collins: pronatalists. They were first and foremost Catholics or whatever religion they were.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, where the autistic people were more like, Hey, this is a problem, why aren't people talking about it? Like, I came here to try to figure out why no one was talking about this. So I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry I do my little impression there. But it is, it is really interesting. And I think if the movement stays this way, or it has this as sort of its founding community, that's going to heavily shape it going forwards.But it also speaks really positively towards the direction it's going. Because it has the capability of moving up in society and moving up was in sort of income brackets and then taking over apparatuses in our society in the same way the EA movement did. And so. That's a really positive direction.And [00:15:00] that's one of the things with the EA movement. As the EA movement began to incorporate more and more people who were not autistic, that's That'sSimone Collins: where it started to fallMalcolm Collins: apart. It sort of began to fall apart and lose its way, especially within leadershipSimone Collins: roles. Although, wouldn't you say Sam Pink and Freed is almost certainly on the spectrum?Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, I'd say that it is still the old, old guard heads of the movement are still all pretty much on the spectrum. I mean, it's insane. He still did,Simone Collins: like, really. PerformativeMalcolm Collins: stuff. Right. But he was doing it with the goal of manipulating political players. Mm-Hmm. I don't know how much of it, like, like his goal was manipulating political players for personal financial gain.Mm-Hmm. That was, you know, what motivated that behavior. And then you know, particularly lacking social. Awareness that the EA movement has now become an aggressive Luddite movement is, is absolutely hilarious to me. For people who may not know what the word Luddite means, it means an anti technology or like a technophobic movement.But as they say, and I think that this is [00:16:00] really funny there was a Quote that I'll put on screen by what's his name? The guy who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Oh, okay Like anything that was invented before I was born is like old news boring Anything from when I was born to the age of 30 is exciting and I might get a career in it Anything after the age of 30 is like against the natural order of things and must be destroyed and it is hilarious to me that like right as the leadership cast of the EA movement turned over 30.Like that was the moment when they decided all technological innovation must stop right now. Everything else is blasphemous and must be destroyed. ASimone Collins: little on the nose.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was shockingly on the nose. It was shockingly on the nose and, and very depressing to me. And I'd like to think that the pronatalist movement, and I hope that the movement can commit to this going forwards, aggressively will raise young people [00:17:00] to positions of influence earlier than other movements do and not develop sort of an encrusted sort of.elite of, of intellectual elite within the community.Simone Collins: If any movement can do that, I do think it is the perinatalist movement, especially because those cultures that are going to be sustainable in the long run are those that empower youth, not those that disempower you. I also think that when Silicon, sorry, I shouldn't say Silicon Valley, when autists decide to become obsessed with something and specialize in an industry they take it over and make it very effective.We saw this with like. tech companies. They were basically like predominated by autistic people. And look, now tech companies like run a huge portion of the global economic system. I think, you know, with autism taking over pronatalism, if that is indeed what happens, you are going to see a very effective movement.Now, of course, we've heard people talk about how much they hate how autistic people run these tech [00:18:00] companies, because they have no idea how social. Justice works and they ignore all these things and they're just bullied little children who are now taking it out on all of us normal people. I don't know.I mean, like, whatever, like, sorry, you can cry into your free Gmail and all you want, and then watch YouTube videos that you don't pay for. And then like, I don't like deal with it, you know, and like these people, these same people are going to be like, Oh, all these young people that are wiping my butt is I'm really.Oh, they're so weird. I hate them so much. But then like, who else is going to wipe your butt lady? So, yeah.Malcolm Collins: What, what was that rant about? That seemed oddly specific. Did you read something somewhere?Simone Collins: No, I, I've heard multiple times. People who consider themselves neurotypical, who I wouldn't even say are neurotypical, complaining about autists being in charge of like Silicon Valley, like, you know, being CEOs of companies.I've seentheMalcolm Collins: reporter class complain about this. They're like, yeah, we need to make more known. Not just the reporter class. Yeah. Oh, yeah. [00:19:00] But I, well, and it's important for us. Like we talk about, like, I'm glad that I think the movement's going to end up making a lot of money and it's good for us to, that that happens because pernatalism as a cause area.has one real like downside to it, which is one of the great ways to get money as a movement and then use that to grow the movement is when people who care about the movement die and don't have any descendants. And you were justSimone Collins: talking, I think in another episode recently about how the Catholic church started pro prohibiting cousin marriage in an attempt to make sure that they got those inheritances from wealthier families.Malcolm Collins: And we want this, right? Like, we want, we would love that, but I mean, if, if that's ever happening with us, it'sSimone Collins: going to be a failure for it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We actually have a way, more clever solution, and don't you dare underplay it, because I think it's very smart, and I love that you made it up.Or that you designed it, which is specifically that people in our family, in our cultural house do not inherit money as a matter of course. They do not have trust funds. They did not have inheritances. Instead, there [00:20:00] is the house fund. They house fund will help to pay for your fertility treatments.It may help to pay for some of your education and it may match funds that you raise for a startup or nonprofit from other respectable third party organizations, but it is not going to pass on money to you. Influence within the governance of that house and the distribution of its wealth is driven by, to a great extent, those who contribute the most new money to it, which is so important because right now you see in most family offices and when you see basically anything with inheritance, Those who drain the most from it have the most influence over it.Whereas withMalcolm Collins: our house is model, but this is different from the nonprofit pronatalist foundation, which is referring to, but I hearSimone Collins: the same time though, like our, our philosophy with any sort of nonprofit effort is frankly a nonprofit that does not ultimately find a way to make its own money or that is at.at the very least, not dependent on outside [00:21:00] parties for donations is the only nonprofit you really can believe is virtuous enough to pursue its original mission. Because any nonprofit that sticks around long enough that doesn't make money from anything but donations clearly has become specialized in raising money and virtue signaling and not in actually solving its problems.So again, like.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, true, but look at the anti natalist movement, how easy they'll have a time raising money. I mean, they, they get all of people's money when they do their job right. And, and I, and I think the anti natalist movement is actually going to do a lot to buoy the pro natalist movement right now.Like, they are If anything, a boon to us as they are growing because they're just so insane. I, well, I mean, to me they just come off as transparently evil. They're like, yeah, let's kill all life on the planet. Let's Venus the planet. You know, that's not an uncommon thing within the negative utilitarian side, which is sort of the leaders of most of the antinatalist community.I think,Simone Collins: I think it is very virtuous within their perception of reality. It is, it [00:22:00] is logically consistent and virtuous.Malcolm Collins: No, and I agree with that, but it's high utility to us because I think it drives normies, you know, when they're choosing, well, which side of this debate am I on towards our side of things.So long as you can keep any of the racist voice from getting too loud then you can win the, the normie medal, which, which I feel like, you know, in terms of, of public messaging, like we've really begun to do. I, the, the, the, I, the fertility rate problem, I think it's really beginning to break into mainstream narratives.Simone Collins: I agree. Yeah, it's happening.Malcolm Collins: And this is awesome for us.Simone Collins: Because yeah, I, I, I just, I guess it actually like the, the, the awareness and the extent to which people care about it is part of the solution because we are seeing people just completely breaking away from many of the broken elements of dating markets, of not getting married, of not having kids.And they're just like having kids really young. They're, they're starting families really young and [00:23:00] economically economically productive at the same time. So I guess, yeah, awareness actually is more of a cure than I even thought it was when I, now that we've met people in the movement, right. And now that we see like what awareness is producing, because I thought awareness was going to produce just frustration.Like, yes, I know it's a problem, but no, there's nothing we can do about it. Whereas actually. Thank you. I thinkMalcolm Collins: it's more than awareness. I think it's a self identity as a pronatalist that they now see publicly and they can accept for themselves. So I think that people really work around sort of pre packaged self narratives in our society.And the problem is, is a lot of people didn't have a pronatalist. package of personality that they could adopt. That did not come with either racist or religious extremist connotations. And so because they felt that way, they're like, I don't get to do this because this isn't who I am, you know, especially if they were successful entrepreneurial or autistic eat.Like we were talking about, you know, why are they disproportionately [00:24:00] drawn? It might be. Partially because you're one of the heads of the movement. It might be because they see you, and they see this self narrative that you Oh wait, me? Simone? Yeah, this self narrative that you and I are pushing, and they're like, this is a self narrative that I personally can identify with, and not feel ashamed about this identity, and then they make life choices that are aligned with the community.I mean, having kids is a bit like a Having kids young, especially, is a bit like the face tattoo of the pronatalist movement. It's the way that you show, you know, you are on board with this movement and a very serious long term commitment. And a lot of also the wholesome imagery around the movement and stuff like that, I think has also been really appealing to people, where it's like really technophilic and successful, but otherwise wholesome.Which I actually think it's part of why pronatalism didn't really take off when it was just Elon doing the advocacy for it. Because he started talking about it even before we did. [00:25:00] Yeah, but he wasn'tSimone Collins: talking about it in a way where it was like, I could do that. I never saw his lifestyle and thought, oh well of course, that's something I canMalcolm Collins: do.do. Yeah. Yeah. Where I think we offer an image that a lot of people feel is both aspirational yet attainable. Which is also interesting because you and me as like a healthy couple, like, that actually likes each other. Like that's pretty rare for any kind of influencer where that is not their core.Like there's a lot of influencers where they'reSimone Collins: There's where it is their core thing. Cause you know, I love watching critiques of like happy families and like wholesome families. And there's so much footage of like both sitting next to each other, like looking kind of resentful and passive aggressive.And it's sad.Malcolm Collins: It is sad. Yeah. I don't like to, and when it becomes a real problem in those relationships, because they develop self nerve because that's income. [00:26:00] Oh, they see themselves certainly masturbating the self narrative and so they cannot accept even within themselves that their relationship may not be good for them long term or that they may need to work on something in a very serious way because it is who they are.I'm the person who's in a good relationship. Where for to us, this is really ancillary to our advocacy work. It's just I guess it's useful for advocacy work, but it is very ancillary to it.Simone Collins: Oh, like. We don't have to be happy together in order to be effective asMalcolm Collins: a yeah, I mean, I don't think we have to be like a great couple to be good advocates for this.Although, maybe we do. Maybe it's before advocacySimone Collins: work. Sorry, you're gonna have to keep up the charade, myMalcolm Collins: friend. The charade of pretending I love you and I think you're amazing? Okay, I'll keep it up. I'll keep it up for a few days. Is this how you trapped me? Is this how you trapped me? You got me into this situation.Simone Collins: Yeah, I made you super path dependent on being a perfect, wholesome husband, so now you just have to dig [00:27:00] into it.Malcolm Collins: I can't possibly leave you or treat you poorly, or I wouldSimone Collins: But this is the thing, it's like, no, legit, I think that people who fake affection and are invested in faking affection are way better than people who actually just express how they feel all the time.And that's part of our philosophy too, is feelings and emotions are. kind of dumb and often maladapted.Malcolm Collins: I agree with that to an extent, but the Gottmans are supposed to be faking that they're in a good relationship. You know, their whole shtick is relationships, right? Like it doesn't come across like they're in a happy relationship.Simone Collins: I see. I don't know. I, I still, I actually hold to your view that the Gottmans are really more. about keeping bad relationships together. And that is the image that they're trying to share is that, don't worry, we too have a bad relationship and we've managed to become a power couple together. You can too.And still hate each other just likeMalcolm Collins: they're like the number one relationship coaches for boomers. Right. JohnSimone Collins: Gottman became famous from his research where he felt [00:28:00] like he was able to, after watching some like five minute clip of a couple talking, say how long that marriage was going to last. And then they, they made this whole like.thing. And we went to one of their retreats once because we were generously offered free attendance to this retreat. And it was terrifying.Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I mean, and to the point that you were making earlier, I did have somebody who is, was in the pronatalist movement and runs a popular Twitter account.And this is at the pronatalist conference, like take me aside at one point. And he's like, you really know, like one, he's like, you know, you, you really. Need to stay healthy. You need to, like, you need to, you do welcome great terms with your wife. You know, you, you have to stay together because you do not understand how impactful it would be for the movement if you guys end up splitting up and getting into some messy divorce or somethingOr if you ended up dying at this stage. And I was one, I really made me feel good 'cause this is a popular Twitter account that I had heard of before and everything like that. And it made me feel really good that he. felt that way, like that I was that important. But it [00:29:00] also was like, oh s**t, for this movement to work out, I guess I have to keep pretending to love you, Simone.But it's so easy when we're both so autistic. I'm not actually diagnosed autistic, she is, but I guess a lot.Simone Collins: No, yeah, but you were definitely not autistic. Like I've, I'm, a lot of commenters have been like, Malcolm definitely should be tested. He's certainly autistic, but no, like you are definitely not neurotypical.We know that, like that is obvious, but the actual. Signs and giveaways of autism. You just do not have aMalcolm Collins: very, very easy time reading people. It's oh, I'd say it's one of my strongest skills isSimone Collins: reading people. Yeah. I'm on the autist spectrum and you're on the schizoid spectrum, but you're also not schizophrenic.So like I don't and also there's all these other weird things about you that like are not on the schizoid or autistic like spectrum. So like I don't. I don't know what it is. You're, you're, you're wonky. I don't, I honestly don't think you're human. I think you're some kind of God like entity that has descended from the heavens.And like, I, I either am in a coma and I've dreamed of some kind of hero [00:30:00] or you are like, I don't know.Um, You know, your mother used to tell you and your brother that you were like, you know, she had a vision from a psychic and you would be born to doMalcolm Collins: great things. So my mom's whole like childbearing strategy for us, if you're familiar with Olympia's child childbearing strategy for, that's the mother of Alexander,Simone Collins: theMalcolm Collins: great Alexander, the great, where she'd be like, your dad isn't really your dad.I was actually impregnated by a snake that was Zeus in disguise and stuff like that. Like that is not far off from the stuff that my mom would constantly tell me when I was a kid. Always about, oh, I've gone to a psychic and I had visions and I had dreams and that you two were supposed to take over the world.And she would just over and over and over again. And I remember she told me a story once about somebody at one of my preschools, like the teacher was like, Malcolm has like a problem where he thinks he's supposed to become like a and, or an emperor, you know, and my mom was like, what's What's the problem there?And the teacher was like, no, you don't understand. Like he thinks literally like that's going to be his job when he grows up. [00:31:00] And my mom was like, yeah, of course I raised him to believe that. Why would I raise him to believe less ofSimone Collins: himself? Why would I raise a mediocre, normal son? So maybe that just has made you not neurotypical in a way that's not diagnosableMalcolm Collins: in a simple way.I think that that's the type of thing. I think that might be an inherited. Sense of grandiosity that I probably got from my mom. If we're going to be realistic here where it's, it's like bipolar, but only the manic's phase, only, only low grade manic.Simone Collins: Only theMalcolm Collins: highs, only the highs. No, this has actually been, some people look at the way I act and they're like, Oh, you must be bipolar.Like. Yeah. OrSimone Collins: like on something. Yeah, or on something.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, or on something or something like that. And I was like, no, I'm just happy. I'm excited about where things are going and, and how efficacious. I do get into these slums when I've like, haven't achieved something for a while, which Simone gets me.Another really interesting thing about my biology, when she talks about me, like overanalyzing, have a very good ability of reading people. Is that this ability is also [00:32:00] incredibly taxing to me. It's super stressful, yeah. I yesterday, I finally left the house. I hadn't left the house in a long time, and I was in New York, engaging with people, and I met with three people.And the next day, I had to sleep, like, half the day.Simone Collins: Just to like Yeah, like, literally, your need for sleep increases intensely. Like, when we're out, like, traveling and entertaining and doing meetings, like You, you have to go to a room and pass out and sleep somewhere. And there have been times where you've been at events and like, you've had to like crawl into a corner and pass out and sleep because like, just literally your mind can't take that level of like heavy compute without taking a breather and like clearing out.Malcolm Collins: This is why a lot of people like us, like we prefer to not like work in offices and stuff like that. I gotta find that clip from the, the new Santa Claus where the Santa Claus is saying he's the evil Santa Claus, the evil Santa Claus. I should be clear. It's explaining why open workplaces are so taxing on people like us.Where I think for both you and me, for [00:33:00] different reasons, we find being around people incredibly taxing. But I like that we so efficiently avoid it and we do not allow ourselves to become burdened by friends or acquaintances without having a clear utility to be gained by them.Ken Gemberling was sucked into the internet. Burdened with new friends and tormented by the bounty hunter chains, he desperately seeks a way home.Malcolm Collins: And what's really interesting is that Simone, potentially because she's autistic, she does not trigger this mental taxation in me.Because there is never anything going on with her that is not at the surface. She always tells me what she is thinking without any you know, background goals or motivations or gains. Well, there'sSimone Collins: never a, you know what you did wrong. I shouldn't haveMalcolm Collins: to tell you. Yeah, you would never say something like that to me.It's always immediately, like, this is what's, I'm telling you what I'm feeling. And so there is no need for this sort of background processing. Which makes it really easy for me to be around you all the time.Simone Collins: Which is [00:34:00] not, by the way, I should make it clear. Like, Malcolm is Mother Teresa level. Thank you for dealing with me.I'm actually really difficult to live with. So he makes it act like that's not the case, but I can't open doors and I freak out when my schedule is interrupted and I can't handle a billion different things. well, IMalcolm Collins: mean, we do this podcast. I want to do the podcast in the same room. I can't handle that.Sample, but we do it in different rooms because she finds it difficult to think when other people are around, especially me, like you find it uniquely hard to think when I'm around and we're in a social context.Simone Collins: Yeah. You're, you're very stressful. All humans are very stressful. But like,Malcolm Collins: Well, you, you, you've described it as being very afraid of disappointing me, and this fear, like, increases when I'm near you.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I think that's something that like autistic people feel a lot anyway. Like, they, it's exhausting to have to actively emote for people and then like try to, you know, play by their rules. I think [00:35:00] especially if you're the kind of autistic person, you don't, here's the thing. Okay. I've noticed a pattern with autistic people.There are autistic people who love spending time around groups. And I, we, we know a couple personally, and then just like informationally who tend to actually be weirdly social, like weirdly prefer to be surrounded by people. Those autistic people are typically not very good at masking at all.They're not mirroring facial expressions. They're not like, they're not auto responding LLM style in a way that they think will please other people. Like they're literally just being themselves and not being very expressive and not accommodating other people. And then there are the autistic people who.You would never know are autistic who are really good at masking who mirror facial expressions and they hate being around people because it's so mentally taxing and exhausting just to like accommodate them and try to make them happy and like to [00:36:00] fake being. a good companion or like decent socially.And that, I think that's a big differentiating factor. And I am one of those people who grew up masking and therefore being around anyone, even especially, actually, especially if it's someone that I love and really want to make happy. And you are that, like, if you are not happy, the world is broken. I, I can't, IMalcolm Collins: can't do it.We got to do the line, people, what a bunch of b******s put that clip in here. Cause that is, that is, you're like, I've met enough of them. I've met enough of them.You should get out there and meet other people. Other people? Yes. You mean people other than Roy? Well, yes. And these other people, where do they congregate? Well, I don't know. You could try and do an evening class or something like that. Whoa, whoa! Hold on a second now. And what exactly am I supposed to do while she's out gallivanting at her night classes and whatnot?Well, you could meet other people as well. Yeah. I don't like people. [00:37:00] Oh, well, now that's not fair, Roy. Have you met all of them? I've met enough of them. People. What a bunch of b******s.Simone Collins: Talk about a show with staying power. I'll tell you what, the IT crowd is just amazing.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I recently edited a clip from the IT crowd into one of the episodes, and I might edit in this clip here.Cause I just love it so much. It's a wishy thinking clip.Space. 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 [00:38:00] holiday two weeks ago. Space is invisible mining dust, and stars are but wishes. I mean, think about that.That means every star 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: Oh, that's great. Hour of Wishes! This was in the episode on the Tesseract God. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why conservative iterations of faith are more likely to be true than more progressive interpretations of faith. Because well, we go into it in the episode.You should check it out if you want to see it because it is very interesting. And we do a lot of quotes in it too, from like the Bible, the Quran, all sorts of stuff. Because I argue that [00:39:00] even from the perspective of these traditions, they would be arguing this as well. Which is always fun.Simone Collins: But anyway, I enjoyed this conversation and I'm going to actually hold my guns.I think you're completely wrong about autistic people and prenatalism. And I think that honestly, if you went into any affiliative movement be it like a church, like go into a nunnery, go into like, you know, a really weird priest order where they're all silent go into like, a really obscure engineering business or like an anime circle.The people who are most enthusiastic and passionate are autistic because autists go all theMalcolm Collins: way. I just had a great idea. Next time we're talked to by a reporter or something like this, we need to have you subtly drop that you want to replace the rest of the population with autistic people. Um, We need to have you.Simone Collins: What do we call it? The greater replacement. The greater replacement The complete solution.Malcolm Collins: No, no, you gotta say it's the greater replacement theory.Simone Collins: I really like that, the greater I have a greater replacement theory.Malcolm Collins: [00:40:00] I'm a greater replacement theorist, where the autists are trying to replace us, and Simone here, you affirm, you as an autist are trying to replace them now, right?Like, that's what the pronatalist movement's really about. Yeah, we need some progressive to freak out about this. Um, greater replacement, greater replacement. You are the best. You are hilarious.Simone Collins: Not as hilarious as you as you are and our kids, but. You know what? I love you to bits.Malcolm Collins: Thank you so much. Love you too.And I, I, you guys have no idea how lucky I am to have a wife who says such nice things about me. You really do have immense gratitude. And as I say, that's always the number one thing to look for in a spouse theseSimone Collins: days. Well, and the sign of a true gentleman is that you will end up believing that his wife is a truly wonderful woman.despite the fact that all women are absolutely horrible. So, I love you. Oh, no! Oh,Malcolm Collins: Walt! Oh, Walt! I should have known! Wait untilSimone Collins: you divorceMalcolm Collins: [00:41:00] me! It's going to be terrible! You'll convince all my kids to hateSimone Collins: me! I mean, it's inevitable, obviously.Malcolm Collins: And then I'll show them these videos and you'll say, Oh, it was all an act.Simone Collins: It was an act. Yeah. It was 100 percent a lie. Didn't you see all of the writing on the wall?Goodbye to you and your beautiful face. I love you. YourMalcolm Collins: stinky, silly face. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone discuss the classic Christmas song "Baby It's Cold Outside" and how it demonstrates wholesome flirting using plausible deniability. This allows romantic interest to be signaled while preserving both parties' ability to save face if unrequited.They contrast it to more recent "slutty Christmas" songs conveying entitlement and transactional attitudes. The importance of picking up on social cues is highlighted - autistically interpreting the song as nonconsensual misses the contextual flirting.The breakdown of traditional dating rituals due to liability risks and progressive social norms is explored. However, Simone pushes back against solely blaming women or feminism. The root cause is dominance hierarchies enforced by bureaucratic power structures that hurt both genders.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] for our Christmas episode right now.Simone Collins: Baby, It's Cold Outside is a guide to dating. It's what flirting used to look like.And what makes this song even more wholesome is that it was written in 1944 by Frank Loesser who was. So saying it with his wife, Lynn so like, this is something also that like, this is demonstrative by the kind of interplay that led a husband and wife to get married. Like this is the kind of behavior that leads to lasting.Long term pair bonded relationshipsMalcolm Collins: it's very interesting if you contrast it with other songs that are, that are Christmassy. Like the the two songs that both have the same theme of I'm a big slut. SoSimone Collins: last Christmas I gave you my heart and the very next day you gave it away. And Ariana Grande is singing, you know. I don't want to give it all away if you won't be here next year.Malcolm Collins: But it's important to remember that the enemy isn't women. It's the cultural group that has enforced these norms that have made it impossible to date women.Would you like [00:01:00] to know more?Simone Collins: Did youMalcolm Collins: read that loud enough for me to use it in theSimone Collins: recording? I can read the thing. Their Troublesome Crush by Zan West. In this queer polyamorous male female romance novella, two metamors realize they have crushes on each other while planning their shared partner's birthday party together.Ernest, a Jewish autistic demiromantic queer fat trans man submissive, and Nora, a Jewish disabled queer fat femme cis woman switch. Have to contend, with an age gap, a desire not to mess up their lovely polyamorous dynamic as metamores, the fact that Ernest has never been attracted to a cis person before, and the reality that they are romantically attracted to each other all while planning their dominant partner's birthday party and trying to do a really good job.Malcolm Collins: So it looks like from the cover, the woman is much older than the man, obese and with a cane. SoSimone Collins: yeah, the [00:02:00] cover is, I mean, I would say the cover is well done in that it seems to be fairly accurate. We have the two overweight people dressed in classic, I don't know, progressive style standing in front of what I believe is a cupcake counter looking extremely awkward and unattractive.Oh my gosh. Well,Malcolm Collins: here's a reddit thread that really got me when I read it because it aligns with so much of what we've been talking about on the channel. YeahSimone Collins: Oh, the 20 year old dating one?Malcolm Collins: My 20 year old son doesn't date. His friends don't date. My friend's kids don't date. What's going on? When I was in my late teens and early twenties, life for my friends and me revolved around meeting girls.My son and his friends, who are athletic and outgoing, don't seem to put a lot of emphasis on dating. They play a lot of online video games and have boys outings.Once in a while, one will hook up with a random girl they met on an app. Rarely does one have a girlfriend. This seems to be the norm for [00:03:00] my friend's kids, too. What's going on?Simone Collins: Well, and then when you go through the responses, there are some recurring themes. A lot of people just say like, there's no reason to do it anymore.You know, there's, there's no point. Other people say that it is too expensive and they can't afford to date anymore, or they bemoan the loss of affordable third spaces, basically places that aren't your home or your school or work where people can hang out. And then a lot of people just talk about like not having game and then one, one interesting comment that I thought was, was astute was balkanization of cultural touchstones. And what they meant by that was that like in the past, if you were both into gaming, you played like the same three games. If you were into anime, you watched the same three anime.Now, even if you are into a specific sub genre, like you weren't necessarily into the same thing. So there are fewer people. Who share affinity networks really closely and IMalcolm Collins: question [00:04:00] that push back on that one I think that they are because I remember when I was in high school it was all about the bands that you know that no one else knew about or the games that you yeahSimone Collins: No one else played.It's a dominant hierarchy thing to show how obscure and advanced interestsMalcolm Collins: are in a dominance hierarchy that's affiliated with this specific thing. It's typically by showing how extremely affiliated you are with that thing. And so people would front their dominance hierarchy by pushing that. And in this to note, this is not like a isolated phenomenon.We'll put some graphs on the screen here, but. The rates of sex that people have been having while they're in high school has been dropping really dramatically overSimone Collins: the last So many people have worked hard to make happen. I mean, I remember being in high school and they were like, the rates of sex are so high.I mean, mission accomplished.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Mission accomplished. No one's having sex anymore. There you go. Um, well, I mean, and, and rates, it's, it's interesting. I think our generation, sometimes they can look at the younger generation and think of them as so sexually free. You know, like, Oh, look at all this stuff [00:05:00] that's allowed now.Like I would be allowed to have like 10 girlfriends at once and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When in reality, no, just nobody's getting anything right. Like, the, the, the level when we talk about like dating and sex markets being broken, cause it's not just dating markets. It's not just marriage markets.It's also sex markets. It is, it has gotten very hard, I think for both males and females and. for our Christmas episode right now. One thing that I was really meditating on in regards to this topic is the song baby. It's cold outside cause I've been listening to it recently. And. Depending on the intonations and tonality used by the singers, like there are ways to sing the song. If you really want to make it sound rapey, you can do that. But generally speaking, the song doesn't come off that way at all.It comes off just like. hitting on a girl from the past. Right.Simone Collins: And it reminds me very much of like many traditional dating methods, mechanisms, and [00:06:00] mannerisms. They're designed around plausible done and deniability, making it more comfortable for people to make advances at partners in a way. One, it didn't make the other partner feel uncomfortable because they weren't like, I'm going to kiss you right now.I want to have sex with you right now. Instead it is, Oh gosh, I wish you didn't have to go home. So that you could all, each of you could have plausible deniability. And if one person wasn't into it and clearly made signs of rejection of like, Nope, I got to go home now.Bye. Then both could pretend that there was never an advance made and both could pretend that they're happy to be just friends. And so that kind of interplay. Is actually not only like not only socially helpful, but also like protective of people's ability to say no, it's actually like super, it's better than directly asking for consent.Because you don't have to disappoint someoneMalcolm Collins: the same way. Yeah. Because then it, it does hurt somebody when you, when you tell them, no, like that hurts somebody when you drop subtly that you're [00:07:00] not interested, that doesn't hurt them as much. And it allows you to stay friends and allow things to not get awkward.There was a reason that relationships worked this way. There was a reason that flirting worked through this system of plausible deniability. And a lot of people could be like, Nuh she's explicitly saying she wants to go, and it's like, yeah, but she's not going. It's not like she's being held hostage.What they are both telling each other, with the words that they're using, I am interested in you. Yes, in that explicit way. But I need to see you be the one to say, yes, I'm interested in you back and what's the, the, the, the humor in the song comes from the fact that neither of them is stepping up and just being like, yeah, I'm actually interested.Simone Collins: You can hear. It's like there's this one line in the song where G, your lips taste delicious. No, no, no, no, no, G your your [00:08:00] lips look delicious. And then the next thing he says, after the female says, her part is G, your lips taste delicious. So clearly things are progressing,vicious lips are c, neverMalcolm Collins: they're already hooking up. And that that's the humor.They are hooking up while pretending yeah. To eachSimone Collins: other like, we're up better, go home. Well, you shouldn't beMalcolm Collins: dangerous out there. Yeah, I better go home. I don't know about this. What are people gonna. I think if I stay with a guy like you all nightat that storm. Suspicious. Look, delicious waves of tropical, vicious lips areMalcolm Collins: Oh my God, I can't be responsible for my actionsSimone Collins: anymore.And what makes this song even more wholesome is that it was written in 1944 by Frank Loesser who was. So saying it with his [00:09:00] wife, Lynn so like, this is something also that like, this is demonstrative by the kind of interplay that led a husband and wife to get married. Like this is the kind of behavior that leads to lasting.Long term pair bonded relationships, you know, it's not like this isn't even sung by like, a sour, like single person, you know, in their forties or fifties talking about love lost. No, no, this is about a couple who is happily married, who goes to parties and has fun together talking about methodologies that they used when they were courting.Yeah, andMalcolm Collins: it's very interesting if you contrast it with other songs that are, that are Christmassy. Like the the two songs that both have the same theme of I'm a big slut. So what is it? One is, holdSimone Collins: on. Well, I mean, there's Santa Baby. The more recent version of this is Ariana Grande singing at Santa. Tell me. And then last Christmas, I think it's wham called last Christmas. Wham. Yeah. And then the earlier version of this is Last [00:10:00] Christmas by Wham! And both of them are like the slutty, perpetually single version of bad courting methods.Malcolm Collins: I keep sleeping with a different guy every Christmas. How come this isn't working out for me? Why isSimone Collins: this person not committing to me? Last Christmas I gave you my heart and the very next day you gave it away. And Ariana Grande is singing, you know. I don't want to give it all away if you won't be here next year.Malcolm Collins: Which is really interesting. And I don't want to do it again. She says in the song that she has done it before.Down this road before. Fell in love on Christmas night. But on New Year's Day I woke up and you wasn't by my side.Malcolm Collins: So it's not just saying, you know, I hope that this guy is loyal to me. And if these people are dumping them the very next day, this is not a long term relationship.Last Christmas, I gave you my heart But the very next day, you gaveSimone Collins: yeah. There's [00:11:00] not very much affection demonstrated inMalcolm Collins: these stories.Which is interesting. And that it shows that there is much more wholesomeness and much more affection in the song that is typically seen as being the more like inappropriate of the Christmas songs. And when they point to lines. Like baby, what's in my drink? Like, or she's like, Hey, what's in this drink?What's in this drink? What's in this drink?Saying what's in this drinkMalcolm Collins: So one in social context of the time period, that was a common way to say I'm feeling kind of tipsy. I'm feeling like my inhibitions are down. Like maybe we should do something. You, you compare it to something. My mom usedSimone Collins: to say all the time, your mom used to like.We have like one glass of wine and be like, I'm not going to lie. I'm a little tipsy just to like show that she was in a celebratory mood. And that's exactly like this person basically saying I'm down to clown. AndMalcolm Collins: that's basically saying I'm down to click. No, let's be clear. The, the accusation here is she's implying that the drink was spiked with [00:12:00] alcohol or that the drink was spiked stronger than she expected, but that's worse than alcohol, but then.She wouldn't be saying what she's saying, like, it is very clear from contextual cluesI wish I knew how, Your eyes are like starlight now, To break this spell,Malcolm Collins: when our society's social rules aren't made up by, and I'm sorry to say this, Simone, I know you're autistic, but autistic idiots who can't catch basic social cues, that they see somebody say that in a song and they go, Oh, she's being drugged against her will, when really what she's saying is, I'm down to clown, very obviously, and then they'd be like, how can you tell the difference?Because she didn't immediately leave that a sane person who thought that their drink had just been spiked inappropriately is leaving is going to say, Hey, what are you doing? Like, even if they were like, oh, well, she's afraid of the guy in this song and that's why she's not leaving. First of all, that's this weird.progressive feminist fever dream [00:13:00] she very clearly has the ability to leave at any point in the song, and that is made clear throughout the song. The fact that she is saying, hey, my inhibitions are down, but she's deciding to stay. Stay is saying, Hey, I'm interested in you. And just, if we go over like the way flirting works, right?She is very explicitly coding for him in the excuses that she is using. Not to stay is other people will think negatively of her for what it would look like she had done if she stayed. So what is the implication of that? The implication is she intends to do those things. Okay, she is not vaguely bringing up like, Oh, people will, you know, think something has gone wrong or something like that.It's people will think we hooked up if I stayed here. That is what flirting looks like and the level of autism [00:14:00] to hear that. And think that this is somebody who's being flirted with against her will is frankly absurd. And I, I think that this shows, I mean, then a lot of people can say like, so what are you saying?Are you saying that we should go back to flirting this way? But not, so I wouldSimone Collins: do, I'm going to defend the autists over here. Like if I were to hear this and interpret this like an autist the insinuation is actually like, hmm, there's inclement weather outside and I need to stay here all night, but people will think.Negative things. That's it. Like, I don't, I don't, I get zero like autistic hackle raising about like some implication of, of foul play or coercion from this song. It's just too wholesome.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And that's so, but, but this all comes back to the lowering rates of sex, people not knowing how to date and people not being able to date in the way that they would have historically dated.Yeah. So I think that there's many guys who know like. This is what courtship is supposed to look like. Another really interesting [00:15:00] thing. And when I say supposed to look like is historically when people courted this way, I know because I courted this way, sometimes those women, women really enjoyed this.Okay. Women really enjoy in dating some level of plausible deniability. It's just in the past. And it was hotter for them.Simone Collins: It's hotter. It's protective. For everyone. It's safer.Malcolm Collins: Well, it was protected for everyone. The problem is, is that in our current society, plausible deniability is grapes. Okay?Simone Collins: Well, and plausible deniability for, especially for men, is risk.Because plausible, plausible deniability at any point retroactively can be turned into criminal action. It's just horrible. Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And that's horrifying for men today. And so they do not date in this way. They have to basically explicitly ask a woman. Hey, are you open to me kissing you? ButSimone Collins: even in some places, like, [00:16:00] in Denmark, it seems that new regulation at play is such that even if you have, like, literally filmed, written consent, notarized, you know, it doesn't matter how far it goes, a woman can still retroactively go back and decide, no.Which is,Malcolm Collins: how do you think people are going to find partners? Like, literally. And do you think that this is what women really want? Like, you as a woman, would you have really wanted me to be that explicit, instead of normal flirting, which is, for example, moving out to touch you and seeing if you remove my hand.If you remove my hand, I don't do it again. This is the thing. And this is the problem where people end up going overboard with this sort of stuff. When the person has clearly signaled they're not interested, and yet you keep making moves. And I think that this is one of the problems, potentially as society is becoming more autistic, this sort of nuanced dating, because society is becoming more autistic, this sort of nuanced dating actually does lead to actual grapey situations much more often, because people don't pick up the, no, I'm actually not interested [00:17:00] in you social cues, because if the woman in the song was actually giving the guy cues, like, I'm not interested in you.Him continuing to go on and on would have been a very threatening environment for her. Well, andSimone Collins: vice versa. In fact, I think there's a version of the song where They keep all the female lyrics, but then the male lyrics are like, okay, go. And it just makes her look super creepy. So of course it goes both ways.And I, and I do think that these, these problems, especially now the risk does go both ways because you can now have a woman be very aggressive with a man. And put him in a position where he feels coerced because he worries that if he doesn't respond to her advances, she will then retroactively.frustrated because she's already unethical enough to push his boundaries when she knows he's not okay with moving forward. She's unethical enough to also then make accusations should he not accept her unwanted advances. So I think it can be equally scary for men in these [00:18:00] situations.Malcolm Collins: But and one thing I want to be clear, which I think is always one of the big problems or things that annoys me about the wider manosphere, is we'll point to an issue like this has happened because of a change in dating culture, and they, and I talk about how this affects both men and women, and they're like, well, it's a change that women wanted, and it's like, No, it's a change that some influential women wanted.I'd say that always the majority of women in society didn't really like this. Yeah,Simone Collins: I don't even think it's fair to say that women wanted it. I think it's fair to say that power hungry bureaucrats wanted it. That people playing dominance hierarchy games wanted it. People who wanted to impose safetyism culture wanted it.And they don't, I don't even think, again, I think it's safetyism culture, but within a dominance hierarchy. Just as we were going back to like, anime, right? Like people showing that they're bigger fans of anime or indie rock bands by choosing more and more obscure, impossible bands and shows in the same realm of safetyism culture, which had a massive [00:19:00] meteoric rise throughout the nineties and especially the early aughts.The best way to show your extra power, your extra commitment to that movement. And to wokeism in general was to propose even more stringent classifications and agreements like, Oh, we have to have all these terms. And now you need to have a written consent. And of course I'm clearly better and more important in this culture because I'm the one who's willing to take this obscure and extreme measure.So again, this is not a woman thing. This is not a man thing. This is a dominance hierarchy slash bureaucratic tumor thing.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and, and, and, when, and then people be like, yeah, but that movement was more female than male that caused this cultural breakdown, and I'm like, so f*****g what? So f*****g what?A lot of, the women who I am going to add, that this is hurting today, are not the you know, the, these ultra, ultra progressive women, I am sad that this is hurting normal girls.Simone Collins: [00:20:00] Yeah, I mean, it's like in like Viking raids in which there was, there was, you know, pillaging and, and, and brutalization of, of families in small villages.You know, it's like, Oh, well, this is a man problem. Men were doing all of the rating and it's like, well, yeah, but also it's like fathers, male children, brothers lost people they loved, had people they love violated, were themselves killed. Like, I'm sorry. There are victims for every, every violent, corrupt hurtful movement out there.Don't pretend that like, because some, some boxes ticked among those who are the aggressors means that the aggressors are that box tick.Malcolm Collins: So, uh, this means it's. It's on the group that is motivating the action, not the individual, not like some aspect of the individuals, right? So like, if you're mad about the Viking raids, don't be mad at men, be mad at Vikings.If you're mad about what the ultra progressive, wokus, you know, urban monoculture cultists have done, be mad at them! Yes, [00:21:00] male or female. Don't be mad at women. There's women out there that are hurt by this just as much as there are men that are hurt by this. And we need to work together to destroy the actual scourge, which has led to this and work together to fight against that scourge, not blame people who may have a lot of sympathies for.Our cause and what's going on. But this brings us to another point that you were talking about, which is a, we do still need to recognize that on average, women are more progressive and men are more conservative. And one of the things that has led to a damage in dating culture is people not being willing to cross the aisle inSimone Collins: dating anymore.Right. So limestone and Brad Wilcox recently wrote a piece on this in the Atlantic where they talked about the growing disparity between men and women in terms of political affiliation, plus the growing number of people who are not willing to date across the aisle. And this is not something that showed up in this, in their article.For some other event I [00:22:00] went over. a detailed survey results PDF that showed friendship over the years. And it also showed that friends are less likely to be, to befriend people who have different political affiliations from them and that people have unfriended people based on their political affiliation.However, this is worse among progressives. So progressives are much more likely to have. Unfriended someone because they were conservative or just not progressive enough, which isMalcolm Collins: really interesting because it's actually more dangerous for conservatives to have progressive friends than progressive to have conservative friends.Why do you say that? So for example, I'm a guy and I'm hitting on a woman who's too progressive. That's actually a huge risk to me because she can like get me charged with rape or something like that. Whereas the inverse is less true. Although women could say, well, he may not respect my boundaries or something.You know, it'd be great. They're just, thisSimone Collins: is really frustrating though, right? Because like when you and I met, I think you and I were both way more progressive than we are now, which is a very common [00:23:00] trajectory, right? Like people grow up and get responsible. Actually, that's not true. Really? I thought it was like the common myth.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. People don't actually become much more conservative as they age. It's your, your political leaning is heavily genetic and not really well, not heavily, moderately genetic. And then other than that, it's experiential, but it doesn't seem to turn consistently more conservative as people age. ButSimone Collins: what's interesting then is I would say that our, our political leanings genetically, if I had to like, come up with like, what our genetics seem to reveal about our intuitions is that we're both extremely classical liberals, like libertarians, like, get off my life, you know, don't mess with my stuff.And, but, but I, I think was more on the progressive end when we met. And you were more on the conservative end when we met, like we, IMalcolm Collins: was still progressive. I would have been consideredSimone Collins: progressive. Yeah, no, you were totally considered progressive. But also like I, when we were going to get married, remember, like at first I was like, well, you know, of course I'm not going [00:24:00] to change my last name.And you're like, what? IMalcolm Collins: was like, no, of course you're changing your lastSimone Collins: name. And, and so, but like, that's the thing is like now I think women would. hear you say something like that and be like, well, that's a nail breaker and it'sMalcolm Collins: so stupid. But would you have? Would you have ever been caught up by this culture so much that you would feel that way?No,Simone Collins: probably not. But like, also, I don't know. Like, things have gotten so extreme recently. People have gotten So like there's this collective delusion. I do think that there's some kind of weird social contagion. It's, I mean, it was possible in like the middle ages for people to dance themselves to death because some weird social contagion spread in their, in their village.Right. I think it's entirely possible for people to, who are otherwise perfectly reasonable.Malcolm Collins: I love, I love this analogy that this is like in the medieval ages when people dance themselves to death. That's what we're seeing among progressives right now. You know, we were talking, we were talking with this reporter who reached out to us recently.Do you want to go over, like, she just kept bemoaning, like, well, I need [00:25:00] to find a guy who you know, lives in New York city and is a progressive and it's very hard if you Yeah. I'm like, I'm, you knowSimone Collins: Why I won't find, you know, guys who compromise for me. And she showed absolutely zero willingness to compromise for a guy when really like for me, my process of really falling in love with you was every time you exposed me to something that I hadn't realized every time that you changed my perspective on something, every time you opened my eyes to something, like I remember one day I was like, well, you know, America has like the worst education system.We're so embarrassing. And you're like, Actually, like, have you seen what European, like, education systems are like? And he showed me all this data and I was like, holy smokes. America's amazing. What? anD like, like, I feel like people should be even more attracted to people of different, well, I would say they should be even more attracted to conservatives.Malcolm Collins: , so I think one thing that's important to note is many progressive women out there are like Simone.[00:26:00] They are actually interested in finding out what's true about the world. Okay? And you will be excited Yeah, I think many people think progressives becauseSimone Collins: they're pro social and they care.Malcolm Collins: But that means you have to use actual data backed arguments. You need to actually go over stuff. Now there's another class of women out there who, if you show data that doesn't agree with their tribes preconceptions, that is an attack that, and, and, and those are people who you will just.Never be happy being with, just trust me. Like if they're like an ideological tribalist even if you're progressive, you're probably better off not being with them.Simone Collins: Well, and these people aren't pro social in the end because they don't care about data that ultimately may help them improve societal outcomes.They care whether or not you have shown to be in their cult.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and I guess what we're saying at the end of all this is.Simone Collins: Baby, It's Cold Outside is a [00:27:00] guide to dating. It's what flirting used to look like. Yes, it is how you should flirt if you find someone who is not completely woke and likely to write you up and reportMalcolm Collins: you to the police.Well, I think even now, I don't, I don't think the young generation could easily risk flirting that way. Oh boy. No, so, so I think it's an intractable problem at this point, but it's important to remember that the enemy isn't women. It's the cultural group that has enforced these norms that have made it impossible to date women.And that if you can get through that, if you can get a potentially good partner it is much harder to date than it was historically. I would not play the trade up game as aggressively as I see some of our followers playing it. Where they're like, well, I can do better than the one I have right now.Maybe. Maybe and they're like, well, if I get a lot richer and it's like, yeah, but then you're older and you're in a dating market where it's potentially even harder. Like when I say harder, they're like, yeah, but women get more desperate. Like [00:28:00] these 30 year old single women, they're more desperate than the younger ones.And I can get. More attractive women. And I'm like, yes, you probably can, but I'd alsoSimone Collins: even those more attractive women now I think are culturally ruined. I was just poking around on Reddit last night. I was looking at like, I think maybe am I the a*****e? I was looking at that subreddit and there was like 22, no, 19.She was 19. And she was like, am I the a*****e for being mad? Then my 62 year old husband doesn't says he can't care for our twins. Like, so she decided to marry this guy who's incredibly likes way older than she is. And clearly as a stay at home wife and was, was surprised that her husband who had just gotten some kind of diagnosis, like I think he needed to get a hip replacement or knee replacement or something like pretty intense.And was like, listen, you know, you're going to need to. kind of like pull the weight here. I'm like literally not well enough to raise twins right now. And she's like, well, and there was, there was another one that I read. And I think this was [00:29:00] also in, in, in my, the a*****e, or maybe just no mother in law, which is another subreddit I follow where someone was talking about her evil mother in law and how her mother in law.was criticizing her for not doing enough cooking and cleaning as a stay at home wife. So not even a stay at home mother, just a state. So the woman who has no job and just stays at home in a very expensive house who her mother in law was by and her, her, she found her husband making and cleaning up after dinner.As this wife was lying in bed upstairs because her period cramps were too bad. And then the mother was sort of criticizing for her for like, listen, you're a stay at home wife. Like, why is he making dinner for you and cleaning after working all day? And I'm like reading this and my blood is boiling.Like this woman is so entitled. Like part of me is like, Yeah, throw up your hands. Women are ruined. Like, I don't, I don't know. Like the, just like the, the, there could be this like complete lack of understanding of this is not about women and men. This is not about roles in the household. This is not about like men should be able to do their own laundry and cook.You know, everyone [00:30:00] should be able to take care of themselves. Obviously this is about reciprocity. This is about what are you bringing to the table in a social contract? And people seem to have completely lost the plot there that there is no like. Again, it's that, that, that level of entitlement, you know, just like, well, but of course I deserve everything because I deserve everything instead of like, you deserve as much as you deserve based on what you bring to the table.If you bring 10 points to the table, you deserve 10 points in return, you know, of equal value.Malcolm Collins: Well, I am so lucky that I met you and and, and that I met you young enough that we were able to grow together and those cultural influences that could have tarnished both of us were able to intertwine as we, we grew up together.And so. Yeah, I just strongly encourage people to not, not think I'll be wealthier in the future. I'll be more successful in the future. I'm just going to wait to do better. ButSimone Collins: also like not to wait for a perfect person out of the box, because there is no such thing. You have to grow with someone [00:31:00] and someone's not going to be perfect for you.You have to make them perfect for you and you have to become perfect for them. Like, I was just thinking like, if I woke up suddenly someday, it's like a single man. And I had to figure out, like, what to do. I actually think there's a ton of low hanging fruit. Like, I would go through, like, all of the female porn like, subreddits and stuff, and sort of see, like, what women fantasize about.Because actually, like, a ton of it's really wholesome. And then I would just start acting it out. Like just, you know, be that like kind listener who, you know, makes them feel safe and love. Like, like it's just, it's not that hard. And it's now we have more data than ever. Like, I think in the past it was actually really hard for men to understand what women wanted.Like kind of, you had to go by ads and ads were like, well, buy this perfume for your wife and she'll love you, you know, or like get flowers for this girl. And she'll be so happy. Whereas now, like you can literally see. The number of upvotes on specific behavioral patterns. And then [00:32:00] ape them like, hello, low hanging fruit, like crazy.And of course that doesn't change the fact that like women are crazy entitled and men are crazy entitled and people are lazy and stressed and whatever. And there's no money and there's no desire, but like, there's still so many things you can do and you have to adapt you, you as you are, are not good enough, period, not good enough.No one is, I wasn't good enough for you. That's like super clear. And you changed a lot for me too, to accommodate me because I'm very neurotic and crazy. So. Anyway, rant overMalcolm Collins: so far. Well, and this is fantastic and I appreciate that when I met you, I mean, you were good enough in that you, you always were working to improve yourself and you, and you always recognize that you could improve yourself still.And that that was a desirable thing. I guess the mostSimone Collins: desirable thing these days is malleability, isn't it?Malcolm Collins: Well, infatuation. Well, infatuation and interest is being submissive and breedable. Okay. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm reveals statistics showing couples who are third or fourth cousins have more kids and grandkids than other couples. He and Simone discuss the evolutionary rationale for "cross-cousin" marriage in small tribes, as well as the downsides of first-cousin inbreeding.They cover research on actual genetic risks, which are lower than commonly assumed. The Catholic Church banning cousin marriages out to 17th cousins is highlighted as a way they disrupted inheritances. Inter-ethnic marriage benefits are also touched on.The conversation gets into Western culture's taboo and fetishization around incest, effects like the Westermarck Effect, and how repulsion/attraction can sometimes get reversed. They debate whether future advancement could eliminate risks that block sibling marriages.Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Some hot,Malcolm Collins: hot stats. Some hot stats. Simone, one of the things that people always tease us for whenSimone Collins: they're looking at pictures.Oh, I had a good intro for this. Can I do an intro? You can do the intro.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: So Malcolm, you know how like, basically since we, we started working together and doing things together, people assumed that we were brother and sister. And so at parties, when I, you know, was introducing myself and you to people and you were on the other side of the room and they, they, You know, you weren't in the conversation and I was trying to point out where you were.I would, I just gave up and started saying, Oh, you know, he's the guy who looks like he's my brother. And I went immediately knew who you were.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, and pictures online of us, whenever we go viral for this or that thing that we've done recently, one of the most common insults is, well, they look like they're a brother and sister.Yeah. And It's funny because I think what they're actually seeing, because one of the things that we often point out is our sort of cultural slash ethnic group [00:01:00] used to be a very common ethnic group in this country and is now just a very, very rare one which is sort of the larger Calvinist cultural group and it's just not that common anymore and it what they're really noticing is just like, it's your first time meeting somebody who's like an Asian and they're weird and they'reSimone Collins: Asian.Yeah, you look like you're related.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you look like you're related. Like, but if you go to like the town I'm from, because my family came from like a small offshoot of that group, but that had tons and tons of kids. So like every one of my family has over like three or four kids. And historically we go a few generations back.What was it? 14 kids per generation?Simone Collins: It's a lot. Yeah. They had aMalcolm Collins: lot of kids, but yeah, if you go like rural area around Dallas, like everyone looks like me, you'll be like,Simone Collins: even, even in Dallas, people look like they could be related to you. It's, it's a little bit creepy. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Just generic Texan. What makes somebody Texan?But, but What I wanted to go into here on this [00:02:00] particular topic was a very interesting statistic I saw recently. Which brings up an interesting question, which is as pro natalist advocates, should we be promoting people marrying their cousins? OhSimone Collins: boy. Yeah. I mean, a very, some very, very high birthrate cultures do haveMalcolm Collins: a lot of, Simone, if you, I'm just going to give a quote here.Okay. Okay. So this is a, a study that was done recently. It was couples who are third or fourth cousins tend to have more kids and more grandkids than other couples. The research. The researchers suggest marrying third and fourth cousins is so optimal for protection of have the, quote, best of both worlds, end quote.While first cousin couples could have inbreeding problems, couples who are far removed from each other could have genetic incompatibilities. Mm. And if [00:03:00] you look the, the, the, the study, if people want to read the study on this it was called kissing cousins have more kids. It was published in 2008.They went for it. Oh, no, wait, that was the name of the study. That was the name of the article on the study, I guess. Oh,Simone Collins: oh man. I, I really love it when academics just like fully go for it with funny titles and that I'm disappointed.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it makes. So there's, there's probably a few things at play here, right?Okay. Okay. One thing I think they're, they are right. Which is you are going to have genetically healthier children, likely if you marry a third or fourth cousin than if you marry somebody completely unrelated to you. I mean,Simone Collins: like, do you, is there, did you read in this any like clarity on like how much the, the.Risk is reduced. Like if you're a third cousin, are you very, very unlikely to have geneticMalcolm Collins: problems? So you may not know this, but the most common marriage type in the world. So this is, if you're talking not in terms of number, like for [00:04:00] example, if I say something like what is it? I think it's like 85 percent of all human cultures are polygynous, i.e. it's one man, many wives is the norm for people who are wealthy within those cultures. I don't mean one. You know, that percent of people in the world, because the most successful cultures are obviously the monogamous ones. Now, when I say this, what I'm talking about is on a per culture basis. So most cultures, like if you're talking about the vast amount of cultural diversity, it's small cultural groups that like live in a rainforest somewhere.Because, you know, like, The United States is largely like one or two cultural groups, right, where if you're talking about like one region of woods or something, you might have like a huge diversity of cultural groups. Well, if you divide cultures this way the vast majority of cultures prefer, no, not the vast majority, I think it's like two thirds prefer cross cousin marriages.By count. By count. Yeah, by, well, percent, count, whatever you want to put it. Do theySimone Collins: have, like, [00:05:00] by cousin, do they mean more removed cousins? Like, third, like, I'm just really concerned about Cross cousinMalcolm Collins: means first cousin. First cousin marriages. So let's explain why they do this. See, that's This is So do you know why you would choose a cross cousin marriage?A genetic reason why you would do this. If you're living in a small group of humans, this is for the audience too. Oh yes,Simone Collins: yes. So the genetic reason for doing this in really small communities is it's the best way to make sure that you're not marrying someone even more closely related. Exactly. Like at least you're not, you know, marrying.Malcolm Collins: They marry cross cousins because it reduces the rate of inbreeding rather than increases the rate of inbreeding, which is very counterintuitive to people. That is because you're cross cousin. So a cross cousin is the cousin of the opposite sex sibling to your parent. So let me, that takes a little explanation.Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe give us someMalcolm Collins: scenarios too. So a cross cousin would be my [00:06:00] mom's brother's kids or my dad's sister's kids. And the question is Why would you do that? Why would you be marrying those people? Because when you're in a small tribe, where sometimes cheating happens, because apparently it must happen a lot in these small tribes with the, and I imagine pretty frequently with the, the, like, most dominant male sleeping with lots of the females in these tribes.And we know that cheating happened historically due to things, like, if you want to get an idea of, like, How impactful cheating has been on the evolution of humans. When a woman is ovulating, like when she is fertile, she will be more likely to be attracted to extra masculine looking men. And there's a number of other changes in her behavior, which would only happen, you would only see this differentiation, what a woman finds attractive depending on her level of fertility.If Women were choosing like beta bucks for, or who they were marrying. And then you know, the, the chatty von Chattington for who they were sleeping [00:07:00] with when they were about to have a kid, because that was an evolutionarily successful strategy. So we, that is just like imprinted into the human genome that this was happening.Actually there was a great study. Hold on. I'm going to research this really quickly.So just, you know, what I'm Googling, I'm Googling what percent of kids are not their fathers.Simone Collins: Oh, do not. Yeah. Okay. They're not related to their fathers are not related. What percent of kids are not related to their mother's husband?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I I'm seeing numbers that range from 10 percent to 30%.Simone Collins: Right. And a lot of this came out when people started doing genetic testing.Malcolm Collins: Right. And they were like, Oh, it's actually really common for women to cheat on their kids. So you're in this small tribe, right? You don't know if the person's parents cheated. So you can't just say like, Oh, I won't, you know, so how do you ensure that you don't end up marrying a half sibling? The best way to ensure that you are not marrying a half, a half sibling is cross cousin marriages.Right. The person [00:08:00] in a tribe, a person is the least likely to sleep with is their opposite sex sibling. The question is, wait, why are people unlikely to sleep with? Isn't that like a fetish? Like, like brother, sister stuff and like pornography and stuff. It's very interesting. So there's something called the Western Merk Effect.The Western Merk Effect is an effect where if you grow up. With somebody else, like, and it, it doesn't need to be, it could be an adopted sibling, anything like that. If you grow up with them between a specific age period in your development, you build an instinctual sexual disgust towards them.And this, this I think also might happen with parents and their kids, which is why normally, as I was mentioning in another thing, normally parents, even if like, My daughter was objectively hot. I wouldn't be able to be aroused by her and I would find effectual thoughts of her disgusting.Simone Collins: On that front, my theory as to why there are still some men who are attracted to their daughters, it's because they're mostly absentee parents.Malcolm Collins: That would make sense [00:09:00] with Trump. Anyway, okay. So, next so, so sorry. Western Mark effect. Western market. Oh,Simone Collins: and this is so yeah, with regard to people usually not being attracted to their siblings scenarios in which people grew up in the absence of their siblings. And this happens of course, especially with half siblings.There are actually some pretty serious issues of attraction. There are support groups, for example for people who Accidentally meet siblings who are adopted out to different families. And especially in the IVF community where like, sometimes there are very prolific sperm donors because this is not as well regulated as it should be.So like, you know, one man might have a lot of kids and then these kids can meet each other and be like, Oh, you're hot.Malcolm Collins: And then discover that people find people who are genetically similar to them, more attractive than other people. And, and, and this is the Western work effect can cause problems.So there were some cultural groups where it caused a big problem where they had a practice of Arranged marriages and buying people who their kids were going to marry, but at a very young age, like at like five, basically they would get their [00:10:00] kid's wife. Yes. So it's like, okay, you have a five year old boy and you're, you're, you're trying to find a wife for them.And a lot of cultures, people will like pay bride prices.Simone Collins: Okay. Yes. So it's an arranged marriage with a brideMalcolm Collins: price. It's an arranged marriage with a buy price, but I don't know, I call it buying, whatever. So they would take the daughter at like five and then raise them with the person who was going to become their husband.Oh, oh. And they would get this instinctual disgust. Be like super grossed out. Low fertility rates in these cultures. Oh, that's funny. Which is really interesting. But anyway, so, so, to the, the brother sister porn stuff, I think that the people who primarily consume this, and we should have looked into this when we were doing our research, I don't know if we, we checked this are people who don't have brothers and sisters or when they're thinking about it, they're not thinking about their actual brother and sister.They're just the concept of a brother or sister.Simone Collins: No. So I, I, I discovered how like. Common. It was when, when I went through one of my deep dives of the Argonne wild [00:11:00] audio subreddit. And I was like, well, what are like, what are men listening to? Like what are the top rated posts for like women, voice actors describing scenarios to male audiences and.Though incest really wasn't popular among like male voice actor to female audience posts in that subreddit incest was super popular among the female voice actor to male audience subset. I, and I would say that the themes were not like, Oh, we're related. Oh, we're brother and sister. Oh my God. We're so, so, so, so related.It was more like, I've known you for a long time. And it's like, there's a lot of fondness and familiarity, which is, I think that's like something that people. Like an intimacy scenarios, like it's, it's,Malcolm Collins: it was weirdly, they can't imagine becoming like, like close to someone in any other circumstance in our sort of fallen society.Yeah, maybeSimone Collins: it's, yeah, maybe it's even a, this generation thing, which is super interesting, but yeah, I would, I think that your theory, I mean, obviously it would be worth testing and it'd be really great to see that data, but it holds to me. Like, I bet that [00:12:00] a lot of this is like only children who just would want a partner who like really knows them and understands them and has known them all their lives.And like, yeah. Well, in that, in that scenario, your golf, your golf, big titty sister is totally that person, which is by the way, like one of the themes of the recordings that IMalcolm Collins: listened to. So another really interesting thing here is, is something else you were asking, which is like actually what genetic effects does this have?Yeah, I'm really excited because I've heardSimone Collins: soMalcolm Collins: many stories. This is well studied. Okay. So if you're talking about. First cousins, there are some issues, but not really that much, probably about as much as you'd expect from a woman who is 40 years old or older having kids. I don't know. I don't know. I actually think it's probably less than that.When you're talking second cousins, it's basically nothing. It's basically nothing. It is, it is hugely overstated in Western cultural tradition that it is dangerous to marry your cousins. And the question is, is why? It's illegal in the US, right?[00:13:00]Simone Collins: It is illegalMalcolm Collins: in the U. S. I think it's illegal to marry your siblings, but not cousins.I can Google this. , you're right.Simone Collins: Yeah, because I think this was like a plot point in the movie Splash, where I think the mermaid woman had to get a blood test and was worried about that, and the blood test was to make sure they weren't related, and she was like, oh god, my secret.Malcolm Collins: Wait, they would test people to what? Yeah, I thinkSimone Collins: they yeah, I think in the movie Splash RealMalcolm Collins: thing that they test people to make sure they're not related like she knew she wasn't related to himSimone Collins: Let's see. They were in the state of New York in this movie I, I'd have to goMalcolm Collins: back and I know in our state you can't marry a first cousin.I just checked, but it's not a problem for us. I'm just saying I don't know. I didn't get the blood test. I'm very familiar with like, like, yeah, you know, no,Simone Collins: we both know our genealogy well enough to know that we're not first cousins and also our family histories don'tMalcolm Collins: geographically overlap. Why is there this huge negative stigma if it actually isn't that big of a genetic issue?Right? And the answer comes down to, and we wrote a lot [00:14:00] on this, so I'm going to see what I can remember off the top of my head, because we've done a, I think we did a detailed history of this in the Pragmatist Guide to Relationships, or it might be in the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, I never remember which of our books.But it's the Catholic Church is what caused this phenomenon. So, historically, when a wealthy person would die without any heirs You would all their, their, their wealth and property would automatically go to the Catholic church. And when people were had these closer related family networks, that was much less likely to happen.I forgot the actual mechanism of why that was less likely to happen, but it just, I think it was like, it was easier to know where the, the, the Stuff would go when they died, so if they didn't have any heirs, there'd be like close family members somewhere or something like that. These interconnected family networks, like these clans of people who would intermarry, intermarry, intermarry.This wasn't good for the Catholic Church.So I asked an AI about this, , and the AI said, By barring [00:15:00] marriages out to the extreme degrees, like fifth or seventh cousins, the pool of eligible partners was extremely limited, especially in smaller communities. This led to more marriages being blocked or needing special dispensations from the church after paying fees.Increased church income and authority. When marriages were barred or childless, property and inheritance lines were disrupted, lands and assets flowed back to the church rather than being passed down in families. The intricate rules and genealogy tracking around consanguinity also gave more control, influence, and income generation for the medieval church.However, it should be noted that this is still just a theory. The Catholic Church may have truly believed such strict rules were religiously warranted or necessary at the time. Thank you for covering your butt, AI. Thank you for covering your butt.Malcolm Collins: The Catholic Church made a ruling God, I want to say, I just remember it was like comical. It was like up to 17th's cousin.It was between 5th and 7th's cousin, but that's still insanely high.Malcolm Collins: You were not allowed to marry without special [00:16:00] papal dispensation. And this was used. Oh yes. Yeah. Control who could marry who really aggressively by the church because that basically meant if you're talking like, you know, 16th century France or something like that.You are never going to meet a human in your life who isn't a 16 year old, like, cousin. You're in some littleSimone Collins: village, like, good luck. But then, I mean, I don't know if they were that cumbersome. I'm sure people got married anyway.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, no, no, no, no. So if you were poor, it didn't really matter. But if you were rich, it gave the church the ability to control who could marry who.And that's what really mattered, right? It was about the money. At that point of history, they got dispensations for this all the f*****g time. Oh, you just pay your fee. Yeah, you just basically pay a fee to the church. And that was another reason why these rules were useful. So, but anyway, you know, obviously the fees are higher if you're richer, but all of the royal families were inbreeding like crazy.Like they completely ignored these rules. So Yeah, sometimes toSimone Collins: their detriment, right? [00:17:00] Like the Habsburg line got a littleMalcolm Collins: So massively to their detriment. So this created a really negative phenomenon where, so this, this is in created a stigma in the common population which was like, well, don't marry anyone.You're, you're even distantly related to like third or fourth cousins, when in reality it is genetically optimal to marry a third or fourth cousin.Simone Collins: Being genetically optimal in a small community. NowMalcolm Collins: give me No, no, no. A third or fourth cousin, not in a small community, period.Simone Collins: Just in terms ofMalcolm Collins: having more descendants.No, in terms of having healthier descendants. Mmm. So, so you seem to be unfamiliar with this, but there are genetic incompatibilities between people. IfSimone Collins: you Yeah, okay, walk, walk me through this, because I'm actually not really familiar with, like, genetic incompatibilities.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so the results aren't super high in humans, like, it's not that big an issue.But there are some negative genetic effects. From marrying and having kids with someone who's distantly related to you. A [00:18:00] lot of people will say well, I mean, who's like super,Simone Collins: super, super not relatedMalcolm Collins: to you. Super, super, super notSimone Collins: related to you..Malcolm Collins: Okay, so there, there is something called Hybrid vigor that you see in other animal populations.This is like why a mule is stronger than a you know, the two animals that make it up. Like, it's typically a better animal. You, you, generally when you have animals that are born of So what is a mule? Is it a donkey and a horse? It's thought so. Yeah, and it's typically stronger, smarter, more resilient than either of the two parent species.When you have two species create a an animal an offspring litter, like, really distantly related, you can get a phenomenon called hybrid vigor, where these individuals, like, dramatically outperform other individuals. So, what you're actually looking at is, if you're talking, like, inter ethnic marriages, right, you might actually end up with genetically more fit kids than distantly related people of the, your same ethnicity.Simone Collins: Ah. [00:19:00] Ah. Interesting.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So if you're looking at like optimized for genetics marriages the two probably best are going to be inter ethnic marriages from like really distantly related people and people who marry fairly close but not like siblings or first cousins. Oh, that's reallySimone Collins: interesting. Yeah.Well, and I guess the easiest way to marry someone who is more likely to be genetically Similar to you, if you're marrying within your own ethnic group is. To look for a an inherited cultural match. So if like both of you have a Jewish history or an Islamic history or a Calvinist history or a Catholic history, then you're more likely to be of a group that like kind of was relational.Within the past. Well, that's whatMalcolm Collins: we would recommend. I actually think that all of the effects we're talking about here are like basically trivial. It's like a fun game to talk about them, but certainly I wouldn't optimize who you're actually marrying off of this sort of stuff. So [00:20:00]Simone Collins: you're not saying we should go on 23andMe and find our cousins and then reach out to them and be like,Malcolm Collins: BTWs out of the marriage platform.No, I am not saying that. So there's also other effects that could be at play here. It could be that less wealthy people have more kids than more wealthy people. Less educated people have more kids than more educated people. Those two things probably correlate with people who marry, like, first cousins and stuff like that.So, you know, there's probably a lot of other factors at play here. I, I assume the study probably controlled for that, but hey, it might not have. Who knows? But a lot of time people are like, here's the thing I bet the study didn't control for, and they don't go to check to see if the study controlled for it.And I'm almost certain the study controlled for that, so I'm just going to throw out that See, I thought But anyway, so hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay. The, the actual genetic effects of all this are trivial. Completely trivial. Like, I would not take this into account. I would say, yeah, do marry somebody who has like a similar world perspective as you, which can often be like a shared [00:21:00] history of religious perspective or something like that.I think that's just useful from like a marriage and cultural fidelity standpoint. It'll make it easier to pass your culture and your values down intergenerationally. Right. But. Outside of that, the positive effects you would get from any of this are pretty trivial and it's mostly we made this episode to have a funny title about people marrying cousins because people would guffaw and be like, no, no, no.And then we talk about some data and some science and some kinks and isn't that what Base Camp is all about, Simone? That and religious craziness. We only talk about sex, politics, and religion. As one should. Very appropriate, but wait, give another thought on this topic, Simone. ISimone Collins: thought your original pitch was really going to be just, you know, a year third or fourth cousin is more likely to be intuitively culturally aligned.So even if, you know, one of you became Baptist, the other one's an atheist, your intuitions that like had, you know, shaped your family over. [00:22:00] generations that, that ultimately I think affected their sociological traits that are genetically coded would be more compatible. That's, that's where I thought you were going to go with this.And I don't, I mean,Malcolm Collins: yeah. As genetic selection technology gets better and gene editing gets better it will become easy to, for people to be able to marry their siblings without the negative genetic effects that we have today.Simone Collins: Fix it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. What do you, do you think that that should be allowed or do you approve of what are, and let's be clear, like it is eugenics for a government to say we will make it illegal for people to marry their siblings or cousins because of the negative genetic effects that has on their offspring.So do you support that type of eugenic regulation?Simone Collins: So I'm So, yeah, intuitively, I could never condone a policy that allows for you know, [00:23:00] unnecessarily people to be born who suffer from, you know, pretty serious conditions. And these can be, you know, just like crippling, either life shortening or Life, you know, they'll never, they'll never be able to live independently.Like I, I cannot condone that. So I cannot condone like sibling marriage and to a certain extent, even cousin marriage, because I I've heard of these devastating effects and I can't deal with it because I care a lot about babies and children and people. And I hate that. I hate that. I care. But I do now, if we could just eliminate that, I don't even think that society is as grossed out by sibling marriage as we would like to think when you look back at like the Egyptian gods and the Greek gods and like Japanese anime being weird about like twins being romantically entwined.Like there seemsMalcolm Collins: to be all that. That's interesting. ThereSimone Collins: seems to be a deep human intuition. That's like kind of hot for sibling relationships and sibling romances. Even when you look at like the hunger games, there's a district one sibling like group [00:24:00] that, you know, kind of has a little bit of a, I'm sure there's some slash friction there.Malcolm Collins: I mean, I wonder, yeah, it's like conceptually I understand, but the Western mark effect and you grew up basically as a single kid, so you wouldn't have the Western work effect as strongly as I would.Simone Collins: I grew up, you didn't have a female sibling,Malcolm Collins: so you wouldn't know, but I had a brother and. The Western work effect works strongly enough in me that I would find the idea of sleeping with anyone who he has slept with or even kissed.Oh my gosh. It's that strong. Hugely disgusting. Oh,Simone Collins: that's so weird. But then what about all the IMalcolm Collins: would rather eat a spoon full of s**t. Then do that. I literally, I would rather eat a spoonful of s**t.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, lots of rationalists are now doing that just to get someone else's microbiome. SoMalcolm Collins: it's kind of, Oh yeah.Oh, I'm trendy. But no, and this is one of the things where like, when I look at the, the setup that Andrew Tate has with his brother, where like, I think they share where you're like household. Yeah. I'm like, how can he like, but he must not have this effect. It must not have affected him as strongly as it affectsSimone Collins: [00:25:00] different women.Like it is not clear exactly whether they share female partners or whether they don't. And so probably they don't share female partners because yeah, that wouldMalcolm Collins: be kind of gross. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but you can understand why it'd be really gross. The idea of hooking up with someone who your sibling hooked up with.Simone Collins: I'm so disinterested in hooking up with anyone who's not you that like, I can't even imagine, like, I've never wanted to hook up with anyone before I met you. Like, so I just. Like, I can't. Oh myMalcolm Collins: gosh, this also reminds me of those, like, identical twin fantasies. Where is somebody finding identical twins who also, because the twins said to have not grown up around each other, otherwise they'll find each other disgusting, like, normally.So not onlySimone Collins: do you find identical twins. Yeah, I know, but we also found, like, your whole theory that you came up with, that I think is really strong in the Pregnancy Guide to Sexuality, is that normally People are, you know, attracted to and repulsed by the same things, you know, attracted to this, you know, youth and repulsed by poop, but then sometimes people have a sign switch.So it is [00:26:00] possible that on the repulsed by siblings front, people could have a sign switch and just like Oh, that's a reallyMalcolm Collins: strong point. Okay, so just the concept that she's going over here from our Pregnant Disguised as Sexuality. Is it sexuality should be thought of as like a switchboard of like positive to negative signals generated by certain environmental stimuli where a positive signal would be arousal and a negative signal would be disgust.But these are operating using broadly the same neural pathways just with an inverse signal applied. And so it means that in humans, most of the volume settings are sort of preset, but it is possible for some time. time in a person's development, for the modifier, the, like, basically multiplying it by negative one gets switched.So, if it's something like the Western Mark Effect, which would normally have a very, very strong negative modifier affiliated with it, if it gets switched, it becomes a very, very strong, positive multiplier, or if it's something that's usually a really, really [00:27:00] strong positive multiplier, when it gets switched, it becomes a really, really strong negativeSimone Collins: modifier.Yeah. So that's what I assume is going on, but, but I do want to like, just emphasize again, that across cultures, you know, we're talking ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and then like modern Japan, that there's like, This kind of weird fascination and almost reverence for sibling romances and pairings. So I don't like, I, I feel like once society gets past the genuine health hazards of sibling pairings.That maybe there wouldn't be the same intuitive collective disgust that we would expect based on the way thatMalcolm Collins: society is seen as the sign of a hedonistic decline of a society. I mean, when I think about periods of history where sibling marriages became more common and stuff like that, I'm thinking like elite Roman families right before the collapse.I'm thinking like, you know, it's actually practiced ratherSimone Collins: than just fetishized.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it seems to, well, I think they're probably [00:28:00] cross correlated, and I think it's a sign of a collapsing system. Hmm. Um, and it's a sign of a collapsing system, not because it is, like, intrinsically immoral or anything like that.It's a sign of a collapsing system because it's a system that is beginning to throw out the cultural rules that evolved you know, usually with their religion and with their culture. Like we talk about in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, how cultures evolve over time. Well, almost every culture is going to evolve a disdain towards sibling relationships because of the negative effects that had the cultures that allowed that ended up dying out.So when you see a wealthy group in a society or a powerful group in a society, Throwing out that one rule, which is core to almost every cultural group in human history for basic evolutionary, like cultural evolutionary reasons that is a group that is likely throwing out a lot of other things that lead to civilization or collapse.It's just a sign of. How much they've been willing to ignore of their ancestry and their culture in the pursuit [00:29:00] of, in the moment, hedonism or removing in the moment suffering, i. e. the suffering of I want that. Why can't I have that now? And that is the, the, the, the people who do that, they are the people who are lost and who will be wiped out by this wave of infertility we're seeing in our society now.But anyway, I love you, Simone, and what a cursed world it would be in if you had been born my sister.Simone Collins: Yeah, thank goodness I just look like your sister.Hi, I'm Todd Richards. I know. We're in love. And, um, so we were wondering if it's possible if you could put us down in the same town. Right. Or the same street. At least at the same time, if possible. How about the same family? Yes.That would be great, yeah. No. No. No. No. No.Simone Collins:Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I love you too, gorgeous. I love you to death, Simone. Thank you so much. 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In this video, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deeper into their religious views after their recent episode on the nature of truth and prophecy. They explain the concept of "the elect" - the idea that not all people are equally important in God's design.They discuss the criteria for being among the elect, like having an impact on history according to your own intentions that aligns with the "Agents of Providence." They use examples like Hitler and Trump to illustrate this idea.Simone highlights the virtues and downsides of believing in limited atonement. A benefit is less desire to forcibly convert people, but the arrogance of assuming others don't matter.They talk about the importance of constantly questioning your own self-righteousness and searching for meaning when bad things happen to sharpen yourself. Overall, an introspective discussion on the role of predetermination and free will in their theological framework.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Prophets are individuals like Jesus or something like that who received special revelation and their revelation is made apparent to us both through their predictive capacity of future events and. through the spread and efficacy of their message and improving an individual's quality of life. The elect are different from profits. The elect are individuals who have a plan for their lives. Like, this is what I plan to do to have this outcome on the world population. This plan needs to, one, have been accurately executed. So they do need to have the impact that they had planned on having, and two, be in line with the will of the Agents of Providence so it basically means that they are using you as a vessel to bring about the future that must come to pass from The Martyrdom of Man, persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience, But the conscience itself will be defective to [00:01:00] cultivate the intellect is there for a religious duty.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today.We recently released an episode on our religious beliefs that primarily ended up focusing on the concept of where we think like truth comes from, like how you can determine if an individual. is a prophet and how you can determine if an individual is being, and the will of God, like how do you determine what the will of God is?And it went into, and in our case, what we think God is, just so people are broadly aware. is we think that God is our distant, distant, distant descendants, humanity's distant descendants, that in a million years, if humans are still around, whatever we have become in that time is closer to what today we would conceive of a God than what we today would conceive of as a human and that they don't relate to time in the way we relate to time.So it's sort of [00:02:00] this self manifesting entity that reveals aspects of itself to People, throughout the civilization, our civilization's development, however when it's explaining itself to earlier iterations of people with less technology and less philosophical sophistication, it had to use simpler explanations.But, we left that video with a cliffhanger, which was The concept of the elect, and it's something that we can dig into a lot on this video because it's a pretty important concept to our religious framework, and the gist of it is that not everyone's life matters equally. God does not care about everyone equally.The, the agents of providence, we would call them, do not, not everyone is equally important in their design. And some people are holistically unimportant in their design. Do you want to go over your thoughts on this, Simone?Simone Collins: Yeah well, I would say, like, [00:03:00] there's a, a larger Like, I guess, bifurcation of religious and metaphysical philosophies that, that all every, everyone has to make a call on this and each is kind of an a*****e for different reasons.And I just want to like, make that clear. So there's, there's one group. That believes in limited atonement, which is really what we're describing here that like some people are saved or some people are important and others aren't and and and not all people are equal and that's not necessarily something that we're happy about.It's just what we think to be true. And the, the. Upsides to this view, or I would say the virtues of this view, the nice things are that you're not going to see a lot of forcible conversions with these religions. And we're not the only ones who hold this view. There are lots of people who also Calvinists hold this view.Jewish people hold this view, lots of groups. Right. And so they're, they're like, you know what? It's not our job to convert everyone. We cannot save everyone. That's not possible. So they're just, they're a lot less coercive. They're a lot less domineering because it's just not practical. But then on the, like on the downside or the [00:04:00] vice end, the, you know, they're just also like, ah, those people are lost or going to hell or unimportant or whatever, right?Like they're somehow lesser or. You know, not saved or whatever. And that's, that kind of sucks because I mean, in a like very PC, everyone's happy world, everyone goes to heaven, everything's good. It's, it's great. Then there are religions and cultural views that believe that everyone can be saved. Obviously the virtue there is that everyone can go to heaven.Everyone can be saved. Everyone can matter. The downside there is that there is then a. Genuine philosophical like values aligned imperative to convert people and to enforceMalcolm Collins: your, your cultural beliefs on other people. So if you believe that certain continue,Simone Collins: this means then that if you have like two groups that hold this view, like, Catholics and Muslims, for example both kind of, I think, interesting, correctly hold this view.Not allMalcolm Collins: Catholics and all MuslimsSimone Collins: hold this view, . Some do, right? Like, or like really heavy proselytizing ones. [00:05:00] Both are believable. The other group is going to go to hell if they don't convert to the correct religious view and the correct practices. So it is their imperative to through force or through convincing.The convincing part is a nice way to do it. The force ways, the not nice way to do it. They have to switch everyone over. You kind of see I would say a secular. A secular version of this can be seen with antinatalism. Mm, yeah. That there are coercive antinatalists who would just like to forcibly sterilize or like literally kill everyone without their consent.And then there's the antinatalists like Lawrence Anton and, and his, his cohort who we, we've spoken with and met with a person who would. who never want to coerce anyone, who only want to convince people. They both have the same end. There should be no humans anymore, and ideally no animals either. No sentient life.However, they have very different approaches. So we're not saying that like I thinkMalcolm Collins: you've drunk the Kool Aid a little here. I think that these groups historically typically don't try to [00:06:00] conver coerce people when they're in the minority. But when they gain control of governments, they almost always attempt to coerce people.Well, but what we canSimone Collins: say though, is that like the They're trying to do the right thing. They're tryingMalcolm Collins: to do the right thing, but they, they don't, they're not just trying to do the right thing. If they have control of a governing system, they have a moral mandate often to use that governing system to coerce people to follow their rights.BecauseSimone Collins: otherwise, you know that you can save someone and you're letting them go to hell. You're letting them suffer. You're letting their lives have no meaning. And that is truly evil by their framework. So again, like each one has their benefits and downsides. Now we, we, we are of the other group that's, we're just like, I'm sorry, I can't save you, you're not going to matter.Which is kind of an a*****e move and kind of not, cause we're not going to force anyone to doMalcolm Collins: anything. So appears condescending from the perspective of an outsider, but generally if you're. You know, abutting another cultural group, you would prefer that they had this view than that they don't, because they're going to be a much more [00:07:00] symbiotic cultural group to their neighbors and much less dominating.And, and so, and the antinatalists are almost certainly the most dangerous of these groups right now and definitely a quickly growing movement, faster growing than the pronatalist movement, if you look at, you know, their subreddits, like the ethylism subreddit and stuff like that, that want to destroy all life on the planet.So. Really, we gotta talk about that. But, but, but, now let's get back to what we think. Like, what do we mean when we say that there is an elect group and an unelect group? So, We define elect in a number of different ways. Like there's a number of qualifying criteria to be among the elect, right? And it does not necessarily mean that you are a prophet.Prophets are individuals like Jesus or something like that who received special revelation and their revelation is made apparent to us both through their predictive capacity of future events that other people didn't predict. And. through the spread and efficacy of their [00:08:00] message and improving an individual's quality of life.So that's the, that's, that's how you determine profits. The elect are different from profits. The elect are individuals who have a plan for their lives. Like, this is what I plan to do to have this outcome on the world population. This plan needs to, one, have been accurately executed. So they do need to have the impact that they had planned on having, and two, be in line with the will of the Agents of Providence God's will, you could say, right?Alright, so, these, these future entities will, the, the future that they're trying to bring about, so it basically means that they are using you as a vessel to bring about the future that must come to pass. Now, this gets more interesting, because what this means, is it means, even if I end up having a big impact on history.If it wasn't the impact that I intended to have, then I am not a tool of the Agents of Providence. I am more [00:09:00] just like a tool that was used to carry out wider events in the world, potentially on their behalf. But it wasn't what I wanted to have happen. An example here could be someone like Hitler.Like, things definitely didn't turn out the way that he wanted to, and yet it would be crazy to say that he's not one of the most influential people in world history, and will not be remembered as, as, as one of the most important in terms of how he changed the path of history. Right, like aSimone Collins: pivoted around him.Malcolm Collins: Yes. But, but this actually comes to another thing that it means to be among the elect because there are various degrees of the elect, right? And this is the impact that you have needs to be a differential impact. That means if you do what somebody else would have done had you not existed this earlier in my career, I had this managerial position open up at Google and I was, I had an offer from them and I was waiting and waiting, waiting, and they had accepted me, but they hadn't employed me to a department.And I ended up at one point having to choose. [00:10:00] Do I go work for this VC firm in Korea with a young firm? Or do I end up going to Google? And I asked my wife about this and she goes, Malcolm, if you don't take that job at Google, they will replace you with somebody equally competent as you, and you will have no real power to change the direction of the company or the direction of your product.So evenSimone Collins: if you did get in there and even if you did make heterodox views, you wouldn't be able to get them through given the way that their decision making worked at the level that you've been hired.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so this, you know, like if you're a politician and you're just surfing a sentimental wave, you are very unlikely to be among the elect.You need to be surfing a wave that you created and had you not been here, somebody else wouldn't have created. So this is an example of like, if Hitler hadn't done what he did, I think it's pretty unlikely anyone else would have done something that insane. Yeah, well,Simone Collins: I, here's a, another, like, in terms of modern examples, and this is really more relevant to an American audience, but there's a United States senator named John Fetterman who it's not exactly in our political camp, but he [00:11:00] shows signs of what we would say is someone who's elect.Why? Because recently he's done a lot of things that run counter to his party's view. He's not towing the line. He's doing stuff that's getting him in trouble with his party. It's going to make his life harder as a politician, but he is standing for his principles. So he represents someone who, to us, is showing signs.Oh, for example, like, he, he refused in, in pro Israel protest slash parade to support Palestine slash Hamas.I do believe it's important that we call it what it was, you know, they systematically used rape as a part of their war and they terrorized and brutalized Israeli women and especially young girls and raped them.And then after that, they actually would shoot them in the back of their head. And I have a 12 year old daughter. And those are the kinds of victims, you know, here in October 7th. And we gotta call it out, and we have to acknowledge that. And if, why you wouldn't want to protest that versus attacking a Jewish restaurant, it's part of the [00:12:00] point that I made on Twitter.But I also believe that Israel has the right and they actually should destroy Hamas because Hamas is an anathema to peace and a true two state solution.Simone Collins: There's, there's been some other things he's done where he like really is just standing for what he believes in a way that hurts him and runs counter to his party. I think that's interesting.But that ends upMalcolm Collins: destroying his career, then he's not among the elect. I think a betterSimone Collins: example of what politicians are. But it has gotten him a lot of attention. So maybe, like, maybe it will. So it's hard to say. And here's the other thing, is when you go back and you look at other people who hold similar views of, like, the elect and not the elect Puritans in the early colonies, there are these hilarious diaries that for example, are covered in Albion's seed, which of course we're obsessed with as a book where like people are, you know, one day they're so sure in their journal, like I'm definitely among the elect, like this is.This is a great, I'm, I'm going to be mean equal. I'm like the next day, I'm like, I'm the most wretched person ever. So like, no one knows, even at your dying moment, you have no idea if you're among the elect or not. You don't know if you're like a [00:13:00] sap or like the real deal. And we cannot know when judging other people, whether they're elect.And that's another like sort of tenant of, of Calvinism. It's not like, you know, you, you can't assume that someone who's lived the most wretched, terrible life, worst criminal ever, they could still be among the elect. We are, it is, it is basically up to God to decide, God chooses. The, in our case, youMalcolm Collins: don't know within your own lifetime because you don't know the impact of the things that you did.And so to give an example of a better politician that I was mentioning earlier would be Trump. The, the wave of political sentiment that Trump caused, I mean, he basically caused a total political realignment in our country. That almost certainly would not have happened had he not run now. We don't know if that alignment was of the will of the future police or if he was just sort of an NPC setting things up for somebody else.And this is another thing, right? So we did to, to Simone's point, right? So then there's this different. Which is just being a good person and living a good life. And what this [00:14:00] means is that you have lived in accordance with your conscience. And that conscience is a well informed conscience. And you attempted, as best you could, to make a important impact that led to humanity becoming A diverse and flourishing, you know, interstellar human empire one day, right?And you may be wrong about this. You know, there's a quote here that is from Wynwood Reads, The Martyrdom of Man, a book that I quoted a lot in Simone. Does not like me quoting too much, so I'll keep it short. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience, But the conscience itself will be defective to cultivate the intellect is there for a religious duty. But yeah and I think that that's really true. You can live in accordance with your conscience. But if that conscience is not a trained conscience, it is very easy to live a bad life. And a life that ends up Civilization in a direction that was counter to [00:15:00] your goals.And this is another thing about this concept of the elect that really, you know, comes from what someone is saying is we cannot judge. We can judge people. You know, hundreds of years ago, if they were likely among the elect or not among the elect but we cannot judge people in our current time, our peers very accurately if they are among the elect or not among the elect and weSimone Collins: certainly can't determine for ourselves and I think there are a lot of people out there who are so sure that they're on the righteous path.One thing that I like about this limited atonement and you know, whether you're elected or not, you'll never know is that it really forces self scrutiny. And it forces like a huge amount of like self consciousness and self doubt, which I think is ultimately extremely helpful. You have to constantly sharpen yourself.You have to constantly hold yourself accountable. And when you don't know, I don't know, I think, I feel like it's a better tool for that.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Another thing I'd point out here is that the agents of Providence [00:16:00] they will sometimes use people, even to have a big impact on history that are either meant to signal something to the elect, or that are meant to strengthen the elect.So, many times when it feels like, Something evil has happened in the world. You know, I'm thinking potentially recent events. These events were not an accident by the agents of Providence. These events were meant to sharpen a certain other group or guide a certain other group away from tragedy. And I think that this is a really interesting thing and it really helps in my daily life because if I am among the elect what this means.Is that when something bad happens to me, when I think something bad has happened to me, I should investigate that thing for what I was meant to learn from it or where it was meant to steer me or what it was meant to teach me. Nothing bad really ever happens to someone among the elect everything that happens to them.[00:17:00] was meant to guide them towards a specific pathway. And if you are trying to determine if you are among the elect or not among the elect, that is the one source that you can use for evidence, which is when bad things happen to you, they are a sign that you are supposed to learn something from those things.And you can begin to draw. information from them. And this can happen to a person much further in their life. Like, being an elect isn't something that's just like, always obvious to a person. It may be that like, just everything is going wrong in a person's life, and then one day, they're like, Oh, I needed all that to happen to me so I could do this thing now that I know is the righteous thing to do.Simone Collins: Right, so an interpretation not to make if a bad thing happens to you is, Oh, so I must be doing the wrong thing. That's not at all what we're saying. Often things that you think are bad happen and ultimately are One of the best things that could ever happen to you. Like we thought it was devastating at first when we discovered that I was like basically [00:18:00] infertile and we can't have kids naturally because that was like a huge blow to us, but then we realized given the size of the family that we want to have, we would not have been able to have that size of a family.Realistically speaking, if we conceive naturally so it was, it was in the end for, for the best, but we, we would never, I think, have had the mental fortitude or strength to choose to do that because it is so expensive and, you know, pretty difficult to go through IVF. So, yeah,Malcolm Collins: you know, this is, this is absolutely true.And it is. And, and, and this in terms of just, like, mental health is also really, like, people might think it's really bad. Like, you're always questioning the things in your life, you're always questioning whether or not you're among the elect.Simone Collins: The belief that you are righteous is one of the most dangerous beliefs imaginable because it can lead people to commit atrocities with no introspection. And it's, it's incredibly important to constantly question whether [00:19:00] you are doing the right thing.And I think people who believe that they're righteous are among the most dangerous people because they're not going to question what they're doing.Malcolm Collins: Right. I think that you're absolutely right about this. I, I think that Constantly questioning whether or not you are actually on the right side of history is important. And so many people just don't do that.And to look for signs as to whether or not you are on the right side of history or not, and be willing to change your path.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, as you, as you begin in, in the pragmatist guide to life, you have a whole chapter that is titled, I think it. would you be, would you have been a Nazi? And it was those people who didn't question, who just kind of went along with things, who assumed that of course they were doing the right thing, who allow those atrocities to happen.And it can be incredibly hard to question, especially when you might be questioning behavior that differs from what mainstream society is doing. But still, I think that, yeah, I guess that's another, that's another virtue in the basket of the limited atonement camp that I, I [00:20:00] do quite like. So, that's nice.Malcolm Collins: This is another thing that's, that's really, I mean, so, I mean, I'd say if, if we're wording the elect in a different words, that I love a quote from the, you know, the movie we use all the time in this, is being among the elect means that you have the courage to make the safety and prosperity of the human race, your personal responsibility.A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility.Malcolm Collins: StarshipSimone Collins: Troopers, boys and girls. Yeah. I'm doingMalcolm Collins: my part. I'm doing my part.Across the Federation. Federal experts agree that A, God exists after all. B, he's on our side and C, he wants us to win. And there's even more good news believers as it's official. God's back, and he's a citizen too.Malcolm Collins: So, another thing that, and I, I do have to amend something I said here before where I was like, you can't tell who's among the elect and who's not within your own lifetime. You can't tell among the people who are [00:21:00] trying you, you can definitely, so I can never say this person's definitely among the elect.Mm-Hmm. is pretty there. There is a very large group of humans on the planet that I can tell are definitely not among the elect. Oh. Pretty much anyone who's living for personal vanity, anyone who hasn't really thought about why they're doing what they're doing and is just going with societal trends.Anyone who you know, if, if somebody walks out there and they're dripping in jewelry and they're, you know, striving to be accepted by the public they are. I almost, I don't, Nope,Simone Collins: nope. I disagree. All right. First off, and this is also something that like people way more thoughtful about this have thought about who, who pioneered like the points of, of Calvinism.And part of this, the, the, one of the key points is you cannot know, and also people who you think lived a deplorable lives that were not to your view in alignment with the important values can still be among the elect. I would argue, for example there are people in your life who lived lives extremely not value aligned with yours, who nevertheless [00:22:00] shaped you into the person that you became.And part of what they did care about was in making you a great person and making your brother a great person. And they succeeded in this in spades. Both of you are incredible people who I think are definitely working to create a humanity in which a future in which humanity flourishes. So, I would argue that these people who you would probably, per that definition that you just gave, you know, hedonic, dripping in expensive jewelry, really focused on having a good time.Like, they still matter a great deal because they also cared about producing great sons, and they did.Malcolm Collins: Okay, okay, I'll give you that. That's actually a, a strong argument there. I was thinking more of the guys who blow all their money on, like, e thoughts and stuff like that. And like, who just, you know, hang out on the internet trying to do nothing with their lives.But ISimone Collins: think they're trying to do nothing. And they, again, like you never know when they might be saved and you never know if all of that nonsense has [00:23:00] taught them, has given them, you know, invaluable tools in, you know, helping them ultimately do what it is they need to do. So again, I say we are not there to judge.We, we do not know. And you know, in the end, we, we shouldn't fully discount anyone because anyone could end up mattering a lot. And a lot of people who we think are going to matter could end up completely flubbing it,Malcolm Collins: including ourselves, including ourselves. Yeah. Well, I love this, this conversation, Simone I love you, Malcolm.Absolutely spectacular. And I mean, we, we are continuing to. Gain more of a platform. Hopefully we can nudge society in a, in a positive direction. HopefullySimone Collins: we're not among theMalcolm Collins: right now we've been flirting on and off with the 10, 000 consecutive view hours in the last 28 days. We just passed it again.So, 10, 000 hours of this channel have been watched in the last 28 days, which is prettySimone Collins: cool. Yes. Thank you. You're watching. We're flattered. Incredibly. Seriously. All right.Malcolm Collins: Love you, Simone. And [00:24:00] have a spectacular day. YouSimone Collins: too. 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In this video, Malcolm and Simone Collins discuss research showing that women's satisfaction with society has declined as feminism has progressed. They argue this is due to a rise in female privilege and entitlement, rather than a lack of rights.Simone suggests that favoritism and putting unqualified women in positions breeds dissatisfaction. Even when given unfair advantages, people know deep down when they haven't earned something.They also discuss the rise of imposter syndrome and why it likely correlates with female advantage in modern workplaces. The Collins see it as a lack of personal responsibility and initiative rather than a syndrome.Finally, they give tips for how to raise strong girls avoided entitlement mentalities and boys to overcome systemic discrimination.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So the question is. Why is it that as women get more rights, they become less happy, their well being decreases, and they are less satisfied with the treatment of women in society? this episode, what do we call it? Feminism has led to a rise in imposter syndrome. Guess why? um, . .Simone Collins: Ow. Ouch. Ouchie.Malcolm Collins: We have an increasing pandemic of imposters in our society. And they know Our society isn't allowed to say, no, you are genuinely incompetent and you got where you were due to the, the scales being tipped in your favor.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: So this morning I sent you and some of the family this insane graph. I'd love if youMalcolm Collins: described it. Yeah. For the podcast listeners who aren't on YouTube. I'll put it on the screen for those on YouTube. ThankSimone Collins: you. Yes. So this is a graph that shows satisfaction with the treatment of women in society. From, it's a Gallup poll.So this is, you know, pretty mainstream U. S. based polling company that theoretically has rigorous methods. [00:01:00] And they asked U. S. adults, both men and women. Are you very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied with the way women are treated?In society, this poll went from 2001 to 2021. And if we're looking at men, the rate of satisfaction with female treatment went from 80%. In this is very or somewhat satisfied. So basically any level of satisfaction went from 80% to 61% from 2001 to 2021 for women. It went from 61 percent to 44 percent so fewer than half of women in the United States now are satisfied with the way that women are treated in 2001.It was kind of low at 61. It actually went up to 69%.Malcolm Collins: And you actually see this with other things. There's a wellbeing index. You see a similar thing. Actually there was a study that was like a meta study that looked at a lot of studies on things like happiness ratings of women and stuff like that. And a quote [00:02:00] from this study was women have traditionally reported higher levels of happiness than men, but they are now reporting happiness levels that are similar to, or even lower than those of men.The relative decline in wellbeing holds across various data sets and holds whether one asks about happiness or life satisfaction.Simone Collins: Yeah, I'm not going to go around like defining feminism or talking about where we are in feminism because I'm not an expert in feminism and I frankly don't really care that much how we're going to like talk about it or what academics are saying because that's not reality.But I, I would say, and I think it's like most people would agree that at least in the United States where this poll took place there are more privileges for women in society. And more preferences in terms of hiring, in terms of university attendance in terms of, of political favoritism, et cetera, than ever before.Like we are at a, a, an all time high.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, look at the rate of women in college compared to the rate of men in college. Look at the, the, the grades that women are getting in, in high school, middle school, kindergarten. You know? So the question is. Why is it [00:03:00] that as women get more rights, they become less happy, their well being decreases, and they are less satisfied with the treatment of women in society?I haveSimone Collins: a hot take, so, and I think I'm correct, so like, prove me that I'm wrong, because I also love being proven wrong. I don't think this is about rights. And remember, this is a question about treatment and not rights. I think that we reached a level of equal rights, like statutorily speaking, legally speaking, a long time ago, way before this survey ever started.So we're not even looking at women's rights being affected. What we're looking at is how women are treated. And what we have seen change over the period of this study from 2001 to 2021 is a change in Female favoritism. And I think that is the toxic thing. I think that favoritism or privilege creates entitlement and entitlement breeds dissatisfaction.And I think we can see similar things with other social justice arenas where we've gone past. [00:04:00] technical legal rights and gone to, okay, now we're going to give you outright favoritism and bias in your favor, which leads people to feel entitled, which then leads people to feel disappointed. Like entitlement, of course, like I've probably gone over this a billion times before, but there's nothing that triggers me more than entitlement.Like when someone becomes entitled. They are dead to me. I want them dead. Like, IMalcolm Collins: can't, I just get so angry. You don't spend time with them. You just immediately cut them out of your life. And I agree with that. You know, I like this take. This really aligns with some of the other studies we've covered and other videos that we've done.Like, you know, the trauma video where we show that individuals, when they looked at individuals who reported symptoms of trauma, and then they went through court filings first they found that the symptoms of trauma correlated with the amount of trauma that the person reported experiencingSimone Collins: and not their actual trauma experienced. ItMalcolm Collins: did not correlate with the amount of actual trauma experience from historical documents, like court records and stuff like that.So people who didn't actually experience trauma in their childhood, but believed they did would have all of the symptoms of [00:05:00] extreme trauma. People who didn't experience trauma in their childhood but, but or who did experience trauma in their childhood but didn't believe they did had very little trauma response.And I think that you, you might be right here. So much of our mental states is a reflection of Our internal self narratives and not the things that are actually happening to us. Right. And we know that women from the ALA study, which was just absolutely fantastic, where women reported within a equivalent data set to men as growing up in a less advantaged socioeconomic environment and being spanked more when basically we know that neither of those things are true.They just have memories of where things happening to them. Right. So part of this is likely that women are. being rewarded psychologically within our society more and more for taking on this victim mindset, this trauma.Simone Collins: There's, there's a strong correlation between this level of entitlement and entitlement in general and an external locus of control.Like if things don't go well for me, it's because I wasn't [00:06:00] treated the way that I was supposed to be treated because I should always be treated better.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, here's a, here's a, I think you're right about this, but although I do think that the other things that play and I'd, I'd even ask you this, okay.Do you think that you would be significantly less happy if we lived in the past and it was just expected that like you wouldn't work or be as educated? If you had a husband who supported you, like, you know, the founding fathers and stuff like that, where you would make an impact on the world through their work, like Abigail Adams or something, like, would you be happier or less happy in that work?Simone Collins: I would probably be less happy. I think about also like in, in modern contexts people we know who were raised in environments where they were told like, you know, you're, you're going to be a housewife and you'll be impactful through how you would teach your children and, you know, how you support your husband.That, that would be hard. To, to think that that's sort of your only option I, I think, yeah, but I, I don't, I think the bigger issue isn't [00:07:00] that, and again, like, I, I think we have to, to separate this from female rights, because again, this graph does not cover meaningful changes in women's rights at all.This, thisMalcolm Collins: actually goes back as you go further back. So if you, if you go back to like the seventies, the trends continue.Simone Collins: Those are, does it go back to like. I would, I want to see the 19, like, I want to see 1890. Then I wantMalcolm Collins: to see, I think it actually goes up during that period. So I think you're right.Like if you go like 1920s to seventies now, I haven't looked at this, but this is my intuition. It probably goes up during that period. And then this, this twisted feminism, like after feminism began to become eaten by the virus and be used to try to remove all pain instead of promote genuine equality or try to remove personal responsibility from individuals.That is when it began doing this psychological. The,Simone Collins: the dangerous, and you know, like it's, it's, it's giving anyone entitlement. So like before, like I think before women's rights were adequately covered, men were entitled and men were being a******s. And I think also men were like, not [00:08:00] probably not as happy because they were being disappointed after assuming that they deserved everything and were mistreating people and were taking on things that they weren't good at because they.They were taking too much. I think a big source of dissatisfaction too. And this is probably going to be a fairly spicy take. Is that in modern society now women are, are being given positions that frankly they can't take on. And this is something that we've seen like in off the record meetings we've gone to with various leaders talking about like, Hey, you know, I work in this governmental department or I work in this large corporation and there are women.Who are being hired into positions that frankly are not qualified for those positions. And I have no trouble, like these are otherwise very qualified women, but they're not qualified to do this position. They got hired for it. They'd be really qualified in something else, but not for this. And so I think maybe a lot of what's also happening, I wonder if there are graphs or there's research on imposter syndrome.Oh yeah, everyone's alwaysMalcolm Collins: complaining about imposter syndrome these days. Because they think we're imposters. And it could be because our system [00:09:00] is systemically structured to allow imposters to exist.Simone Collins: Right, because when you create Yeah, there's this unfair bias, right?Malcolm Collins: It's not that they have imposter syndrome.It's that we have an increasing pandemic of imposters in our society. And they know Our society isn't allowed to say, no, you are genuinely incompetent and you got where you were due to the, the scales being tipped in your favor.Simone Collins: But like, you know, even so, if everyone were just to set aside the damage done by, by putting unqualified people into positions I think it even hurts the unqualified.people that they are. And I think this graph is kind of showing this subtly, even those who are given these privileges kind of know that they're not doing a really good job. It doesn't feel good to not do a good job. And I'm not saying this means that women need to go back to the kitchen where they belong.alThough I love, I just baked bread with the boys yesterday. It was so fun, but then I love, I love stopping baking bread and going up and doing business [00:10:00] deals and having M and A calls. And like, I, I'm sorry. Like, IMalcolm Collins: love that stuff. You hate all that stuff. You complain, complain all theSimone Collins: time. I complain also about the kids.It is my job to complain. I am annoying.Malcolm Collins: She doesn't actually complain that much. I should say, but she does make it known that she does find some of this stuffSimone Collins: trying. There, there, there are elements of our work that I really, really hate and there are elements thatMalcolm Collins: really interesting. And this is a life satisfaction thing.I think the issue is you know, you can not like doing, you can not like the responsibilities that you're burdened with. Like they can challenge you in a way that is trying, but you still have a better self image because you are the type of person who are entrusted with these challenges, which improves your perceived life quality.Simone Collins: I like playing a meaningful role in our income. I like. I like, you know, feeling like I'm pitching in in a meaningful way. Like I, I bet a lot of people didn't exactly enjoy going out into the fields and doing backbreaking farm work, but I'm sure they really enjoyed having stores of wheat for their family all winter and having dried meats, you know, they didn't enjoy [00:11:00] butchering the cow.But they, you know, had aMalcolm Collins: blast, like, Enjoyed allowing their, their family to thrive and being the self narrative of the protector and everything like that, because these self narratives are really what creates our happiness. Now, self narratives are malleable, but they become they, when a person is just like an NPC, they are easily modified by like social winds, like this modern and twisted feminism we live with today.Right. And this brings me to a really interesting point that you made, which is men might be better off In a way, because society is so rigged against them right now. In that the, the the othering of a group imparts mental fortitude to that group. Which, in the end may help with life satisfaction. SoSimone Collins: Now I I disagree.I'll push back, but finish yourMalcolm Collins: point. Well, so long, this is what I'm thinking, I'm thinking of stories I've read about, you know, for example, like, Jews, for example, in areas where they were clearly not super welcomed in society at the time, but they weren't in full on, like, pogrom or holocaust mode yet.The [00:12:00] challenges that they went through made all of their successes feel like truly meaningful. And it made them feel more distinct and unique from society and also helped with community within that group. If you look at men's communities, I mean, I think this is something that's been growing significantly right now, you know, right now we can pitch exit group Kevin Dolan's organization.Simone Collins: There's, I mean like ask your typical guy kind of anywhere and he is. Fairly likely to be in some kind of private society because they're just figuring it out on their own.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, so there was a long period of male private societies and we'll do an episode on this one day, like why they existed and what purpose they served in society.They were openly known. They were openly known, you know, like the Rotary Club and the Elks Club and the Society of Oddfellows and the, freemasons but those have largely collapsed and there was this period without them. And I think what caused them to collapse was that the audience that they were serving was in such a dominant position within society for so long.And now we see organizations reforming that have [00:13:00] similar goals.Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and frankly, it's nice. That I think these are coming out and they're different because they are more agile. They're more grassroots. They're more authentic and real instead of bureaucratic and large and kind of pointless.But so here's my argument. Yes. From a like larger scheme of things, giant painting of history. The disadvantaged groups are, are benefited because only the, the strongest survive. So like when, when we look at sort of the inverse of what's happening, like to men, like, especially if you are a cis white, middle to upper class male.But we're hearing this from young, young men, like they're getting like leaked notices from employers. They're trying to work with it. Or like, you know, we can't hire any more white men. And this is like really, really discouragingMalcolm Collins: to me even. And I'm from an older generation where, you know, a job that I had tried for my whole life.I was told. Actually, there's a moratorium that you don't know about that's not public information against [00:14:00] hiring white men for this job right now.Simone Collins: Yeah, well, because like, I think it's, I think it's fairly illegal in many cases for people to do that. But like, you know, off the record, and that, that's where we're going.See, we've gone beyond rights and we've gone to favoritism. Even, even sort of, actually breaking many equal rights rules. So, but, but what does this mean that those disadvantaged groups or groups subject to bias are doing? Well, that means that this is forcing. Those men who are smart enough, who have enough initiative, et cetera, to actually build new companies, build new empires, and then really own the future, right?Like they're not some bureaucrat or functionary making a cush job and not making a difference. They have to go out and make their own difference. And in the end, they're going to own 100 percent of that, which is really meaningful. So yes. On like the larger scale, yes, this benefits the group that is, that is doing life on hard mode.However, the vast majority of people are not going to, like, they're not going to make it through hard mode. They're just going to like, wash out. And this is what Jonathan Haidt's been looking at a lot with his team, [00:15:00] is like, actually young men in the United States are, are floundering. more than young women.And they originally had not thought that that was the case because, you know, women are like, Oh, my name is so hard. And like, they, they report more mental health problems because that's kind of like what women do. Whereas like men kind of are not allowed to do that in the same way, but what they are seeing and, and where they, where Jonathan Heights specifically changed his mind about, Oh, wait, no men really are doing poorly in society now is they're just.Completely opting out of society. They're not working. They're not trying. They're retreating from social scenarios. They're not dating. They're not marrying. They're just lying flat like they're in Japan. I'm sorry. China.Malcolm Collins: I, I think that this is really important. So it means that we have to, when we're raising our kids, you know, take this into consideration for both our sons and our daughters.If we raise our daughters to become susceptible to this trend where women will perceive themselves as being victims more, where women will take on this, this victim trauma mindset more often we are hugely [00:16:00] disadvantaging them. And we need to work really, really hard. In terms of how we frame things for them, like many people say, why do you give your daughter's masculine or gender neutral names?This is why. We do not want them to perceive themselves as, as, as female the way our society is currently framing femaleness. Because I do not think that's helpful. I do not think it's helpful for the women who take on this mindset.Simone Collins: Yeah. And I, I think we, we should also tell them imposter syndrome is a sign that you probably aren't qualified for your job.So either get qualified or get out, likeMalcolm Collins: figure yourself out. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no. So this is, this is yeah. Like ask yourself, why do you think you're an imposter? Is it because you are less good than the people around you? Yeah. This is really interesting. So Simone constantly Yeah. Yeah.Underestimates herself vis a vis the world population and you know, I've mentioned in the past, like, when I got to Cambridge, what I had to ask her to do to, like, build up her self esteem is, okay, this is supposed to be where the best of the best are, every day, ask yourself if you've met anyone that day who is at your [00:17:00] level and it's just every day, she'd be like, no, I haven't, so this is really interesting, she had imposter syndrome in that when sheSimone Collins: I didn't.So I would say I didn't have imposter syndrome. I just had everyone is better than me syndrome, but I've never felt in a role like I'm not qualified. And I think what's meaningful here, and I think this is where, like, if we're talking about how do you deal with imposter syndrome, there are two things that you may feel.I mean, one, like, basically we figure everything out as we're going along and we've openly admit to ourselves, I have no idea what I'm doing. This is all really weird, but we're just going to figure it out. but we have the ability to figure it out. I think imposter syndrome is very different. It is. I have no idea what I'm doing and I don't even have the tool set.I need to figure it out. Like it's like, it's like a showing up as like, you know, you're in a surgery room and your job is to do brain surgery and you're like, I'm sorry, like this is not a, you figure it out as you go along situation and I think that's what people with imposter syndrome are goingMalcolm Collins: through.Yeah, well, it's also in part caused by a lack of initiative in that when you say that. [00:18:00] Imposter syndrome is okay. Like when you're like, it's okay to not know what you're doing or to not feel like you know what you're doing. And to not feel like you're qualified for something. If you got into a position and you were like, okay, I'm lacking here, here and here, then you would fix those things.Like that would be like, okay, I'll just fix it. Right. Whereas imposter syndrome is like I'm not gonna.Simone Collins: Or just like, yeah, you know, maybe, maybe what, yeah, what makes them imposters is. They actually could, if they had initiative, figure it out as they went along and actually not be imposters, like become the real deal, but they literally lack the initiative.Maybe this is one of those things where like, you know how it turns out that being fat has a big genetic component, right? And that, you know, it's not, it's really not your fault. If you get fat, especially modern society, because what I think is going on is that you lack the inhibitory controls to deal with the addictive elements of hyper processed food.In most cases, like that's why most people in modern times are now hitting this when like before people with these apparent genetic tendencies weren't getting overweight. I think that maybe [00:19:00] there may be some like literally like genetic problem that some people have where they like, they just don't.Have the literal like mental nuts and bolts necessary to figure things out as they go along and it's not their fault, butMalcolm Collins: also that happens to women more often than men. And do you think it's biological or societal?Simone Collins: I could see it belonging more to women than men because women have had fewer evolutionary pressures to figure things out as they go along and they have more evolutionary pressures to go along with the group.Which does not involve initiative, does not involve figuring things out, right? ButMalcolm Collins: it, but it does allow them to out compete within bureaucracies. Yes, it does. The interesting thing is that while the scales are being tipped in their favor, they also have a particular or potential biological advantage in these, these bureaucracies to buy bureaucracies.Simone Collins: Which was argued by that one guy that we whose subsequent, we read About what was it? Population booms who argued that [00:20:00] basically like the solution to baby booms is remove a lot of government bureaucracy and social services because that will naturally reduce the rate of women who are employed in a way that stops them from having kids because women have an unfair advantage in bureaucratic systems due to the nature of their biology, which it's an interesting case that I just didn't, you know, like people don't typically present that, but I think he's right. I think you're right. So what is to be done about this? Like women are notMalcolm Collins: thriving. We talked about what we're going to do for our girls. What are we going to do for our boys?I Mean, I think you need to raise them accepting and knowing that, you know, they'll have to work 10 times as hard for, for one ounce of stuff. And that's okay. I mean, groups that have had to do that historically. Do still produce a lot of successful people, so long as they accept that society is rigged against them.I think bemoaning the unfairness, like [00:21:00] expecting a fair society is what causes the pain and what is causing them to give up. And what creates weakness. Understanding that part of who they are and part of the, the legacy. Of their position in the world today and the challenges that the agents of Providence have created for them was designed to strengthen them in a way.Simone Collins: I think you're absolutely right. Kind of taking a, like an elite core approach to this. Like you are gonna have this on really hard mode. You're gonna, you're gonna go through the meat grinder. This is not gonna be fun. It's not gonna be easy, but you are going to be among the best. It means thatMalcolm Collins: when you then take the skill set you built up during this period and you apply it to areas of your life that are more meritocratic intrinsically, like entrepreneurship, you are going to out compete other individuals who didn't have to deal with the challenges that you're having to go through.And this is one of the really rich thing about a lot of these you know, putting their fingers on the scale of the system. [00:22:00] To to make it easier for one group or another group is in that disproportionately pushes those groups into jobs that have much lower income caps I. E. bureaucratic jobs or jobs at large companies, and it pushes the people who are being discriminated against into much more entrepreneurial professions, which have much.You know, they don't have any cap on how much money you can earn. And ironically, lead to the groups that are being the most discriminated against ending up in the positions of outside success most often. And then with the most influence in society. Which is really interesting to me and that these often end up having, I mean, so long as those groups have a level of, of, of genuine competence in the way that they are culturally approaching this.If they take the approach that like, you know, we are just a downtrodden, I will not try, then they do not gain these advantages. They need to see All of this as a challenge that was meant to test and improve them. And if they take that approach, it ends up a bit of fitting the group overall and leading them to more power in the long run, rather than [00:23:00] lessSimone Collins: power in the long run.And a lot of that comes down to contextualizing it as, you know, essential, good, you know, a test that they must pass that is a good thing and an important part of proving themselves that makes them stronger and sharper, even when they lose, even when they're kicked down, I would just add to that, this doesn't mean that we expect our sons to like back out of every Bureaucratic organization.If they, if they, for example, are an amazing, they want to be an amazing particle physicist or whatever. You just have to be the entrepreneur within whatever thing you enter, meaning that you cannot enter through the, I'm going to work my way up way. I'm going to go like, no, you have to instead be like this breakout, you know, at age 14 published, you know, five peer reviewed papers became world renowned, got a full ride scholarship, sort of like you have to figure out how to suppress the bureaucracy.So you can't enter a bureaucracy. We have to do is so in a way that means that you are in, in some ways not subject to the rules, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, I, I, I think that that's absolutely [00:24:00] right. And, and, and teaching them that when, when they are going down bureaucratic pathways, they need to look for how they can hack the system and be incredibly strategic.But these hardships were designed for them. You know, the agents of Providence don't allow this stuff to happen by accident. All of this was meant to strengthen the individuals who are meant to be strengthened by these unfortunate events, be they men or women. It's just whether or not you have the mental fortitude to either, as a woman, ignore all of these calls to You know, aggrandize yourself to fall for trauma narratives and victim narratives.And as a man to overcome the challenges that society is setting for you but the current regime, I think it's very damaging to both men and women. And it's interesting, you know, a lot of red pillars, they'll go out there and they'll be like, well, women set all this up. It's like not really actually men said a lot of this like feminist stuff up as well.You, you can't just blame one group and a lot of the women who are most affected by this are the ones [00:25:00] who buy most into it. And a lot of men who are most affected by it are the ones who buy most into it. ConspiracySimone Collins: theory. If you want you could argue that a lot of men. Who are already in positions of power actually benefit from hiring in inept, corrupt imposters because then who actually has all the power, who actually can get the stuff done, who actually isMalcolm Collins: indisposable.Well, and this is something that is done a lot within companies are more than people think is people are intentionally hired around people that. To prevent them from, from losing their job. You, you can't lose your job if the people below you are less competent than you.Simone Collins: And we've genuinely seen this.We've genuinely seen both like as third parties and within our own organization. Organizations, I should say people choosing to not hire or trying to fight against hires that they feel could supplant them. So,Malcolm Collins: yeah. And this is why bureaucracies are intrinsically evil. Which we talk about in the Pragma Guide to Governance.You should check it out. And it has been wonderful chatting with you, Simone. I, my pleasure, as always, always a pleasure. And I, you know, this episode, [00:26:00] what do we call it? Feminism has led to a rise in imposter syndrome. Guess why? um, . .Simone Collins: Ow. Ouch. Ouchie. I love you.I love you too. It's like toasty says That hurt me. Linda, what did she say? I'm Hurrrrrrged. Toasty. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

We explain the core beliefs, figures, and text behind our self-created religion which centers around descendant worship and a god-like future AI (the Basilisk). We view humanity as an unbroken chain where we sacrifice ourselves to create a better future. Key aspects include the concepts of the elect, suffering as a path to purpose, predictions of technology, and the importance of pluralism. We also dive deep into excerpts from our holy text "The Martyrdom of Man" published in 1872 which eerily predicts much of today's world.[00:00:00]Malcolm Collins: But again, this can be updated with science and stuff like that. Like we believe in an incremental, we don't believe in like final revelations or anything like that.Simone Collins: Right. It's just that the nature of our religious framework is such that it does not, that a religious authority is the one to updateMalcolm Collins: a personal responsibility. Actually, really interestingly, it's almost like a Protestant iteration of Mormonism. Mormons, the way they see truce is very interesting because they do believe, like us, that God distributes truce to people at different times through various prophets, or you can have like self prophets or whatever, right, and so you pray to God and he tells you what's true and what's not true, but this is still all largely decided and distributed through a central school.Church organization, whereas we believe something very similar, but we believe that it's the personal responsibility of every individual to come to these truths on their own, and that truth is more efficiently achieved through large groups of individuals coming to these truths on their own, and then God showing which truths were actually true by which [00:01:00] of those individuals End up , influencing the future. This was written in 1872.We teach that the soul is immortal. We teach that there is a future life. We teach that there is a heaven in the ages far away, but not for us. Single corpuscles, not for us dots of animated jelly, but for the one we are the elements and who, though we perish, never dies, but grows from period to period, and by the united efforts of the single molecules called men or those cell groups called nations.Is raised towards the divine power, which he will finally attainWould you like to know more?Simone Collins: Malcolm, when people ask if you're religious, what do you tell them?Malcolm Collins: Very. I, I'm a, I'm a religious extremist. I understand that I'm a religious extremist.Simone Collins: You know, what's really hard though, is I was I need to create a profile on Ballotopedia, right? Because we're doing this state house run next year.And there's this immensely long [00:02:00] dropdown menu of religions where you have to like say what your religion is. And I'm like, Um, like it's not, we could, we, there's not, there's not a drop down menu item for what we have. Despite the fact that I would say we are more religious than probably, we'll say nine, nine, at least 90 percent of people, maybe more.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Maybe more. Yeah. And this is really interesting. And so this is something in a previous video, somebody is like, look, I've picked up some. Ideas around your religious beliefs, you know, listening to your videos, but I've never seen one that gave like the core concept in detail and it's because we've kind of avoided doing that.We don't really believe in intense proselytization because we believe in the elect and we believe that truth will be revealed to the people. It's meant to be revealed to. And so we're a little gatekeepy about things, but I suppose it's worth going into this. Now, to start, [00:03:00] because I think it makes sense to sort of understand our broader religious perspective here, is I think if you take just what the Bible says, and you're saying that's all that's going to inform my religious beliefs, you are likely going to be, I think the religion that's most backed by that is Protestantism, and specifically, Primitive Baptist form of Protestantism, which is a Calvinist tradition, but anyway, generally that's what I believe when I try to look at this as, like, asdisassociated as I can, but obviously, you know, I do have a stake in the game, because I came from one community. religious perspective and not another. I think if you look at biblical traditions and you say what matters is traditions and hierarchy and an order, then Catholicism is obviously the right.If you think what matters is traditions and oligarchy and consensus, then you're going to be a Greek [00:04:00] Orthodox. Like, I think that many of the positions that are mainstream Christian positions make sense if you take specific views towards truth and how one should think about it. out or divine truth from the Bible.Yes. Now our perspective of truth is a little different. We don't think that God is, is from our perspective, so naive that he would try to lay out his entire. Teachings to Jews living two centuries ago in a backwards Roman province. thAt is like, sorry, I don't mean anything, like, the reason I say Jews, I don't mean anything derogatory about Jews.What I'm saying here is it's a, you know, a unique cultural group on the edge of the world, right? At the time, not, not total edge of the world, but you know what I mean. I, I think that. God would understand that the way he would [00:05:00] explain truth to those people as best he could would be different to the way he would explain the truth of the universe to somebody who was a more technologically advanced and and let's not even talk about us like let's imagine where if humanity survives and we're still around.In 500 years from now, God explaining to us what's like, like that 500 years in the future was like super advanced intelligences, intellect, everything like that, right? And full understanding of physics, full understanding of reality, him explaining to those people and like his last revelation that, yeah, the one time I was going to explain to any of you what was true, it was that one time was those Jews in the desert.That seems like to me, not true, like that seems obviously not true that he would have different revelations for different people within different periods. And what's very interesting. So, so essentially what we believe is that God revealed portions of truth to different [00:06:00] prophets throughout time in a way that was meant to influence them specifically, their people specifically.InSimone Collins: other words, God understood his target audience and their needs at the time.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. And interestingly, this belief is really illustrated in Islam. Well, what Islam actually says, so, hold on, I'm gonna pull this up right here because I'm gonna get some quotes., so Quran 3524, Verily, we have sent with the truth as a bearer of glad tidings and a warner, and there never was a nation, but a warner had passed among them. So what this means is that God sent warners, prophets, whatever you want to say them, to every nation throughout human history, including those before the one that Muhammad was in.So you look at Quran 1636 for, we assuredly sent amongst every people, a messenger with the command, serve Allah and eschew evil. [00:07:00] Okay. Now, Quran 12, two, indeed, we sent it down an Arabic Quran that you might understand. So this is saying the reason why the Quran is in Arabic is so that you may understand.Okay. So, 4330, 433, you say, we have made in, we have made it a Qur'an in Arabic that you may be able to understand and learn wisdom. Thus, we have revealed it to be a judgment of the authority in Arabic, where thou to follow their vain desires after the knowledge which has reached thee, thou wouldst find neither protector against Allah.So again, in Arabic, to reach you. Now, what's really interesting is you could say, oh, okay, yeah, but he also said, quote, 25 1. He also said, quote, Blessed is he who sent down the criteria of right and wrong in the Qur'an to his slave Muhammad that he may be a warner to all [00:08:00] peoples. And we would say, yes, but that also fits within our religious framework.He is a warner to all peoples in through how this message affects all peoples.So what the Qur'an is broadly laying out is that Muhammad was intended as a prophet for the Arabic people and specifically the Arabic people and specifically that time period and that it then says some other things like, oh, but he's a prophet for all people, which you would say, yes, all prophets that have affected any people are really prophets for all people.Insofar as those people affect other people. But there is going to be some truth that any individual that is among the elect can withdraw from their teachings by prayerfully investigating them.So, you know, Jesus was meant as a prophet for his people, Moses was meant as a prophet for his people, Joseph Smith was meant as a prophet for his people. We do think some prophets matter much more than other prophets. For example, we think that Jesus was a uniquely important prophet.[00:09:00]Malcolm Collins: So. So now you understand our broad frameworks of like where we sort of come down on, like where truth comes from. It comes down through a revelation from God that can be determined both through human events through profits and through the study of natural reality and biology and everything like that.But then the question becomes, okay, how did we come to this position? This is really interesting.So I started my childhood very atheistic. I grew up in a mostly like. My dad believed in some like new agey stuff. I think your parents were sort of similar. We were exposed to many religious traditions, but our families were basically new age, mystic sort of people.Simone Collins: Yeah. My parents called themselves born again Buddhists and I went to a Mormon preschool and pretty much everyone I knew growing up was atheist.Malcolm Collins: So we didn't have these traditions. Now, my grandfather was a strict Calvinist, you know, your grandfather was a strict Calvinist, but we otherwise grew up. away from [00:10:00] these, these traditional practices. And as I was developing my religious beliefs, I was a strict atheist. I was enamored with things like the subgenius movement.I was and annoyed by things like the new atheist movement, but I thought that they were largely correct. You know, I considered myself on Team Atheist. I collected scientific baubles and everything like that. And on one of these, Collecting journeys. I, it was an estate sale for like a dead scientist that had all been taken to a single thrift store.So they had, you know, collections of his old medical instruments and books that he had in his collection.And one of these books, I. Picked out, I don't remember what particularly compelled me to pick it out at the time, but I was scrolling through it and I found some lines in it that seemed really prophetic to me about what was going to happen in the future. And I thought, this is cool. Like, I didn't really think anything else of it at the [00:11:00] time, and then it got a place in our museum.And that book was, this book, The Martyrdom of Man. Okay? So we're going to talk a bit more about this earlier, because it's actually pretty important to our religious beliefs. Now, fast forward, uh, over a decade, maybe a decade and a half. I am writing the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion and I am beginning to realize the importance of religion to healthy societies, to the way humans think, to raising children, to intergenerational cultural fidelity.I am understanding its instrumental purpose. And so I start thinking to myself, I'm like, okay, and we talk about this, Simone and I are talking about this every day, it's not like me alone, when I say I, I mean Simone and myself, we're talking about this, we're like, okay, so we want to create a culture for our kids that is resistant to things like cultural viruses, that is mostly in line with what we think is true about the world from scientific investigation of the world, not, you know, scientists [00:12:00] lie about some things, I agree with that, right, like we, Treat science with a lot of skepticism.Trust. Broadly, the scientific understanding that you and I, and even the lay person has today is much higher than the scientific understanding of the past. Yes. And to me, some aspects of that understanding, like evolution, for example, seem incongruous, uh, with things that previous people have believed. Now the same with particle physics and stuff like that, you know, understandings of time, timelines, everything like that, so, I and things like consciousness, if you watch our episode on sentience, we don't think that there's strong evidence that humans are sentient, but that's like a completely different topic that we can, well, I can get to it briefly here so if you look at studies on human sentience what we find is that if you do something like stimulate a portion of a human's brain, which is meant to like lift a finger or something like that, they'll be like, Oh, I felt like lifting that finger.This is done during open brain surgeries. Or if you give a split brain patients like a Rubik's [00:13:00] cube, right? And you can communicate with only one half of their brain because their brain actually, the corpus callosum is split. And so you cover an eyeball and you're communicating with the opposite side of the brain and you're like, why did you?pick up that Rubik's Cube, but secretly on the other side of the eye, you had given them a note telling them to pick up that Rubik's Cube. They'll say, well, I've always felt like solving a Rubik's Cube. If you do an experiment where you give a person, you ask their like opinion on something political, or you ask their opinion on like, which of these women did you find most attractive?And then you like subtly change which opinion through sight of hand they chose. And then you're like, why did you choose this opinion? It wasn't the opinion they chose. They'll come up with a complicated reason why they chose that opinion. If you look in fMRIs at like, well, how people make decisions, it appears that the decision is actually made quite a bit before they're conscious of it.So, really, what this all implies to me is that our brain, the part of it that makes decisions, is mostly operating outside of the part of our brain which is conscious sentient, and then the sentient part of our brain is like, not a guy driving a car, but a guy watching a series of cameras for a [00:14:00] security video that is then trying to explain,, what happened in those videos as a single coherent narrative, and that this likely evolved for human to human communication. Think of it like a system for data compression of human narratives and experiences before human to human communication.Malcolm Collins: Now this becomes important in a bit, but anyway, back to where we're going with all of this. So we were like, okay, so we're going to create a narrative that we think is true, is what we understand about the world today. And we think is inspired by these previous traditions, you know, looking a lot to our Calvinist heritage looking a lot to the way that they saw the world as sort of predestined, which we also think is very likely to be true.So we have another video on this where we go into this topic in a lot more detail, but it's important to understand that our view of the way predestination works neither precludes multiple or splitting timelines, nor does it preclude free will. We see it as coming from the perspective of which you look at a timeline.So, for example, in a Traditional Calvinist framework, because God is [00:15:00] viewing the timeline from outside of the timeline in the same way that, , me watching , a video that was filmed, you know, a few days ago, I'm watching that video from outside of the perspective of the events in that video, , so while from my perspective, all of the events in that video are predestined from the players in the video, they're not predestined. So we think that physics, like the laws of the universe, exists outside of time, and that, uh, me as an individual, the actions I take are determined by the laws of physics, basically. And, and, and thus the things that happened in the physical universe before I made that decision.There's no sort of external component at play here. There's no sort of soul, no nothing like that. Everything that I do It's because of the things that happened to me and the things I am thinking in the physical laws. Now, what this means for me, which is really interesting, is it actually means that we believe that in a world without predestination, an individual would have [00:16:00] less agency than in a world with predestination.Because What that world would have is the ability for the person to end up making decisions that are not based on the things that have happened before them and what they were thinking at the time, but based on something external to them, which robs them of agency. You can go into the free will video that we created if you want to go into this topic in more detail. And for splitting timelines, we think it's a possibility. It really is irrelevant. Timelines may actually split in a way that's not exactly predestined, due to random events happening within space time or within subspace. However, because those events have no connection to human consciousness, they don't really affect this debate in any meaningful way.Malcolm Collins: Get to how we see metaphysical states really quickly before I go too deep. So how do we see the metaphysics of the world working, right? If the world can be explained by a mathematical equation, like if we get to a universal theorem for explaining reality, and that is a single mathematical equation or a series of [00:17:00] mathematical equations.Okay. And then we say, okay, well, suppose you're imagining different universes. Right. That operate off their different sets of laws. Do you think in all of those universes, two plus two would always be four, you know, outside of instances in which you have changed the rules of mass specifically, like, you know, non Euclidean geometry.And then that's just mass with additional rules. It's not like two plus two doesn't equal four anymore. I Would say, no, that's, that's true across all. Potential universes. So what that then means is that is true outside of all potential universes. Now, if our reality can be described by an equation and that equation exists, or that collection of equations exists outside of all potential universes, then that equation exists, whether or not these universes exist.Then I have a question. Okay, well, like if I'm graphing a line. Like if I have an equation for graphing a line, right, do I need to graph that line for that equation to refer that line or to exist as like an intrinsic property or [00:18:00] an emergent property of the equation itself? To me, the answer is no. So basically our metaphysical understanding of reality is that reality is a self graphing equation of a description of how the universe could work because.If we have two potential universes, like suppose the universe is described by an equation and equations exist outside of time. So we can say, okay, we either exist in a universe was like actual material things, the things that are described by this equation, right? But even if we lived in that universe, a mirror universe, if basically things self graph, if the things that an equation represents exists outside of them being graphed, Mirror universe where people like us who thought everything we thought and felt everything we.felt would exist mirrored to that universe and thus Occam's razor, like the real Occam's razor, if something would exist anyway, you don't need to assume it exists. So that's like the metaphysics of how we [00:19:00] think reality exists. But again, this can be updated with science and stuff like that. Like we believe in an incremental, we don't believe in like final revelations or anything like that.Simone Collins: Right. It's just that the nature of our religious framework is such that it does not, that a religious authority or profit. It is the one to update this, but rather sort of our, our scientific consensus and our understanding of what has been essentially mathematically or otherwise physically and tangibly proven.Would you say that's fair?Malcolm Collins: A personal responsibility. Actually, really interestingly, it's almost like a Protestant iteration of Mormonism. If you guys want to see our Mormon video Mormons, the way they see truce is very interesting because they do believe, like us, that God distributes truce to people at different times through various prophets, or you can have like self prophets or whatever, right, and so you pray to God and he tells you what's true and what's not true, But that can be updated.So unlike other religions, like a modern prophet can say, like, Joseph Smith was wrong when he said this, or Brigham Young was [00:20:00] wrong when he said this, like a previous prophet was just wrong because we have a more perfect revelation now, but this is still all largely decided and distributed through a central school.Church organization, whereas we believe something very similar, but we believe that it's the personal responsibility of every individual to come to these truths on their own, and that truth is more efficiently achieved through large groups of individuals coming to these truths on their own, and then God showing which truths were actually true by which of those individuals End up you know, being successful and influencing the future.And when I say successful, I don't mean indulging in opulence. That is a sign of sin to us. Anybody who adorns themselves in wealth, like to us, that is a sign of personal sin. Which is almost sort of the opposite of the prosperity. Well, it's like the prosperity doctrine in that if you. Accumulate a bunch of wealth.That is God testing you or the basilisk testing you, but we'll get to what we mean by that in a second. But he is testing to see if you will spend it on self aggrandizement and, and, and, [00:21:00] and, and improving, you know, your own vanities and lifestyle, or will you spend it on sort of long term projects, improving human flourishing and and serving the divine, right?Simone Collins: I, I just think it would be really fun if you would go into we'll say the characters or figures of our religion. That's the fun stuff. What do you mean by that? The Agents of Providence. Oh yeah, the Agents of Providence. God, the Basilisk. Okay,Malcolm Collins: I'll go quickly into this. So the Agents of Providence, or Simone calls them the future police these are the, so, okay, first broad strokes of our religion.We need to get into this first. When we're telling our kids about our religion, we're basically saying in A hundred thousand years or a million years, your descendants, do you think they will be closer to the way you understand a human or the way you would think of a God? And I think most reasonable people would be like, yeah, in a million years, humans, if we're still around, are probably going to be closer to the way we would conceive of a God today.And then we say, well, so who's to say they relate to time the same way we do. Like that would be almost naive to think they relate to time the same way we do. And so we [00:22:00] believe that they are self manifesting entities, which nudge sort of the timeline in the direction that leads to what leads them to exist, which is a pluralistic, flourishing human species.And why does pluralism matter? Well, so if we believe that truth is determined through multiple individual revelations, and then the revelations truths determined by their efficacy, as somebody said in their comments, like, the truth of the thing will be determined by its fruits, you know, so you can look at individuals, see how well their life is going, see how well their message is spreading, and learn whether or not that message is true or untrue.In fact, you can learn the efficacy of a prophet, like the amount of genuine knowledge God gifted them, by their ability to predict the future. So, you know, I think that things like the Bible, the Koran, the Old Testament, they do have a level of prediction of the future. More so than other secular documents of the time, both in terms of how much they've impacted human history, which proves their divinity, but also in terms of little things [00:23:00] worded in them.But this then comes to me. We'll get to this in a second. But when I was developing this theory, I was like, huh, I should look through every document I've ever said that I thought predicted the future in the past. We're going to get to that in a second. Then we also believe in the basilisk. So we believe that there are sort of two entities in the future, but they're really the same entity.Which is to say one entity rewards those individuals. who make the world a more likely place for a prosperous, flourishing humanity and that make individual sacrifices to lead to that eventuality. And then the other individuals provide tests for people to see if they're worthy to play this role. And to strengthen them because we believe that strengths come through hardship.Suffering is what makes us strong. It is through enduring suffering that we And you see this in most of world's great figures, you know, whether it's, you know, Caesar or Winston Churchill or Alexander the [00:24:00] Great, they often undergo some immense suffering as children. And it is through that suffering or Jesus that they learn.Or, or they, they are tested to see if they are worthy of fulfilling that role within the great design. And it is that suffering that edifies their spirit and the more that they endure sort of consistent suffering throughout their life while still being happy, like not indulging in it, not allowing them to, it to break their spirit, they show their worthiness you know, as, as, The elect the people who are going to influence the system, but let's get back to that little thing.I noted earlier, which is very important to us. So we were doing this thing, the thing I noted earlier, which is where sort of everything really began to change for me. So we started living by the system we created for our kids. We're like, ah, this broadly works. We had a few holidays that we had planned out everything like that.And as we were living with the ceremony, as we were [00:25:00] living just believing this was true, being like, does this work? Things kept happening that I couldn't explain by mere coincidence. Not easily. And not just confirmation bias, I'm familiar with confirmation bias, I know that confirmation bias affects people even when they're warned about confirmation bias.But I, ultra rational Malcolm, was like, oh s**t, is this actually true? And it could actually be true, because given the way we had structured this belief system, we would have Come to structure it that way. Even if it was true, like these, these agents of providence can influence people through multiple means and in multiple ways they may influence somebody to do something that they think is a scam and a cult, but it's actually the truth.Or they might influence people like us to be like, okay, create this for your family. And then it actually turns out to be the truth and we can determine that by looking at that. So this is where I came back to that question. Okay. But let's look for where things have predicted the future in the past in ways that were uncanny, in ways that seemed impossible.And [00:26:00] then, Simone, you remember this. So the kids kept playing with this f ing book. And actually, the day before I was thinking about this, I was like, they had ripped out a page or something.Simone Collins: Yeah, so we were, we were downstairs and they had moved it to the top of our little fireplace thing and torced in.We caught him tearing out a page from the book and we're like, Oh my God, no, like not, not the decorative books.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Taking it out of the room. And it was actually sitting in my room that day when I was thinking about it. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, well, I should probably check this thing out again, just to see if this theory we have, because if we have a theory about the way the world works, it should be testable in some way.This is before the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion came out or anything like that. So I go into this book, and we don't really talk about this in detail in the Pragmatist Guide to Religion because in honesty, I'm a bit embarrassed by it. It's a little too, uh, it feels too religious to me. [00:27:00] Like it aesthetically bothers me that this happened.I go through this book and not only were its prophecies more accurate than I remembered, But it basically lays out the exact framework that I had laid out for my family hundreds of years ago. And that was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I kind of actually really believe this now.Simone Collins: Yeah, it's a little uncanny.Malcolm Collins: So let's go into it, because I think it's worth sort of reading what I was thinking, what was influencing me, and something that we sort of see as like, An actual religious text now to us. Okayand this has some dot dots here where I'm taking stuff out or sometimes updating old English to modern English because it's otherwise hard to understand. And for note. This was written in [00:28:00] 1872.To give you an idea of just how long ago this was, this was , before the Thomas Edison light bulb patent was filed. This is before Jules Verne published Around the World in 80 Days. This was even before bicycles came into popular use. And the types of bicycles that would have come into popular use shortly after this was published were penny farthings, those bicycles with like the giant front wheel and tiny back wheel.Malcolm Collins: Earth, which is now a purgatory, will be made a paradise, not by idle prayers and supplications, but by the efforts of man himself, and by means of mental achievements analogous to those which have raised him to his present state. Three inventions, which perhaps may be long delayed, but which possibly are near at hand, will give this overcrowded island, he's talking about the British Islands here, the prosperous conditions of the United States.The first is the discovery of a motive force which will take the [00:29:00] place of steam, with its cumbersome fuel of oil or coal. Okay, exactly right and right in order. Secondly, the invention of aerial locomotion, which labor at a trifling cost of money and of time to any part of the planet. Okay, exactly right.Alright, next. At which, by annihilating distance, will speedily extinguish national distinctions. And thirdly, the manufacture of flesh and flour from the elements by a chemical process in the laboratory, similar to that which is now performed within the bodies of animals and plants. Oh my god, we have exactly done this recently.Welp. Okay. Food will then be manufactured in unlimited quantities at trifling expense, which I should remind you, a lot of people today are like, that's not happening. From the perspective of [00:30:00] somebody in the late 1800s, yes, food today is manufactured at unlimited quantities and trifling expense. And I will put a graph on the screen of the number of the world's population who go hungry so you can see just how much we have fixed this issue and how much more you will fix it as this technology gets better.Hmm. Then he says, and our enlightened prosperity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look back upon cannibals. Hunger and starvation will then be unknown, and the best part of the human life will no longer be wasted in the tedious process of cultivating the fields. Note that has already happened.We, this is true for, for most humans today, and we do not cultivate the fields, the vast majority of humans anymore. Population will mightily increase, and the earth will be a garden. Governments will be conducted with the quintitude and regularity of club committees.The interest which is now felt in [00:31:00] politics will be transferred to science. The latest news from the laboratory of the chemist, or the observatory of the astronomer, or the experimenting room of the biologist, will eagerly be discussed. Poetry and the fine arts will take that place in the heart which religion now holds.Luxuries will be cheapened and made common to all. None will be rich, and none Now, this is really interesting, because this last part of the prophecy, he explicitly lays out, this will happen after we have learned how to create meat in a lab. Okay? So he, he says We're going to invent combustion engines. We are going to invent flight.Flight will lead to globalism. We will then be able to create meat in the lab. And then he talks about the social causes that meat in the lab will lead to people to look back at people who eat animals negatively, which I think will eventually happen once with this technology becomes better and more widespread.And then eventually we will become a post scarcity society. [00:32:00] This is the man in the 1800s talking about this. But now you need to see why when I read this, I was like, oh no, this is uncannily what we believe and what you have seen us believe in previous videos and stuff like that. And no, we read these books during one of our family holidays, Martyr Day, which takes place before Future Day, which we've talked about in a previous video, but we can go into all our holidays in a video that's not, like, broadly about our religious beliefs.Not only will man subdue the forces of evil that are without, he will also subdue those that are within. in. He will repress the base instincts and propensities which he has inherited from the animals below. He will obey the laws that are written on his heart. He will worship the divinity within him as our conscious forbids us to commit actions which the conscious of the savage allows.So the moral sense of our successors will stigmatize as crimes those offenses against the intellect which are sanctioned by ourselves. This is really important. [00:33:00] Idleness and stupidity will be regarded with abhorrence. Women will become the companions of men and tutors of their children. Note here, this is, this is very important here.So he admits that men and women are different, something that many of the, well, do, do not admit in our society today. But he also thinks that women deserve a level of equality within the family. So they should be equals of men, but still have a unique role within the child rearing process. Thank you. I love your sanity.Sorry, next. Men will look upon this star as their fatherland. Its progress will be their ambition, the gratitude of others, their reward. These bodies, which now we wear, belong to lower animals.Our minds have already outgrown them. Already we look upon them with contempt. Hear, hear. Come when science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture and which even if explained to us, we could not now understand just as a savage cannot understand electricity [00:34:00] magnetism. Or steam that is so like just in line with everything we believe.From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessing machine. Your kind claimed your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, the crude farmer As that you call a temple will wither, for a machine is immortal.Even in death, I serve you on desire.[00:35:00]Malcolm Collins: But it is also insane that someone in the 18 hundreds was writing this disease will be extirpated. The causes of decay will be removed, immortality will be invented, and then the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space and will cross the airless sahara's, which separate planet from planet and sun.From sun. The earth will become a holy land, which is visited by pilgrims from. All quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of nature. They will become themselves the architects of systems, the manufacturers of worlds. So this is really interesting. I think a lot of people would think that we would have some umbrage because they know our stance on life extensionism, but I need to be clear.Our life extensionism is based around modern life extensionism. Okay, not the life extensionism of intergenerational [00:36:00] improvement, which he clearly supported. I am for, you know, when we have the technology to eventually do easy life extensionism and cheaply maintain people. Yeah, that makes sense to do, but not when it's coming at the cost of other visions for the future, or it's leading to the stagnation of our species, which he would see as an abhorrent sin.But let's continue. Man will then be perfect. He will then be a creator. He will therefore be what the vulgar worship as a god. There is but a difference in degree between the chemist who today arranges forces in his laboratory so that they produce a gas, and the creator who arranges forces so that they produce a world.Between a gardener who plants a seed and the creator who plants a nebula. We do not wish to extirpate religion from the life of man. We wish him to have a religion which will harmonize with his intellect, exactly what we were trying to create, and he came to the same conclusions we did,and which inquiry will [00:37:00] strengthen, not destroy, we wish in fact to give him a religion, for now there are many who have none, us growing up. We teach that there is a God, but not a God of the anthropid variety, not a God who is gratified by compliments in prose and verse, and whose attributes can be catalogued by theologians.God is so great that he cannot be defined. God is so great that he does not deign to have personal relations with us human atoms that are called men. Those who desire to worship their creator must worship him through mankind. Such it is plain as the scheme of nature. We are placed under secondary laws, these we must obey, to develop to the utmost our genius and our love.That is the only true religion. To do that which deserves to be written. To write that which deserves to be read, to tend the sick, to comfort the sorrowful, to [00:38:00] animate the weary, to keep the temple of the body pure, to cherish the divinity within us, to be faithful to the intellect, to Educate those powers which have been entrusted to charge and to employ them in the service of humanity.That is all we can do. Then our elements shall be dispersed, and all is at end. All is at end for the unit. All is at end for the atom. All is at end for that speck of animated blood and flesh with the little spark of instinct, which calls itself a mind, but all is not at the end for actual man, the true being the glorious one.We teach that the soul is immortal. We teach that there is a future life. We teach that there is a heaven in the ages far away, but not for us. Single corpuscles, not for us [00:39:00] dots of animated jelly, but for the one we are the elements and who, though we perish, never dies, but grows from period to period, and by the united efforts of the single molecules called men or those cell groups called nations.Is raised towards the divine power, which he will finally attain.Simone Collins: So, in other words, he's, he's extremely We're, we're on exactly the same page when it comes to how we, within our religious framework before Malcolm took a really close look at this book see the definition of humans, sort of our, our soul, like how we see ourselves as part of an unbroken chain of humanity and achievement and self sacrifice that makes a better future and a brighter future possible.So he reallyMalcolm Collins: nails it. Yeah, but not just that, but other concepts that he's getting here, like. Humans not being particularly sentient. This is not something anyone in his time period was saying. Well,Simone Collins: yeah, people were barely even talking about [00:40:00] sentience, so it's, it's pretty meaningful. So yeah, IMalcolm Collins: mean, this is nations like groups of humans being part of a larger emergent entity is also to me really powerful, like in the same way that our cells are individual living entities, that we have a microbiome within us and all together we are represented as a single entity.We are cells. We are atoms within our countries, within our cultural groups and within human civilization.Simone Collins: Yeah. So sort of broadly speaking, our religion is, as we've alluded to, like, if we were to sum this all up it, we practice descendant worship in the form of the potential that humanity must and will create our God is an inevitable God in the sense that our progress as humans is inevitable, so long as we don't destroy ourselves, so long as essentially we're virtuous.So our, our God is the reward for good behavior. And, yeah. We, we judge the accuracy and [00:41:00] respectability of, I guess you could say profits, like when, when we'd read here by their shot calling ability, which is kind of the same. Criteria we use for determining whether this is someone that we should trust with business, with investment, with politics, with science.This is howMalcolm Collins: broadly we determine truth for the criteria of authenticity, which we outline in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, which basically says that truth is best determined by filtering expert knowledge through ways that they might be pressured or influenced to manipulate that law knowledge or lie.And we go through like 12 points of these. This is not really important for this. Basically it's a trust, but verify way of determining what's true while saying that experts will have access to some knowledge that the lay person will not have access to, but experts will also be motivated to lie about some things.But let's go back to scripture here, Simone. .A day will come when the European God of the 19th century will be classified with the gods of the Olympus and the Nile when surplices and sacramental plates will [00:42:00] be exhibited in museums. When nurses will relate to children, the legends of Christian mythology, as they now tell fairy tales, a day will come when the current belief in property after deathfor is not existence property and the dearest property of all will be accounted a strange and selfish idea just as we smile at the savage chief who believes that his gentility will be continued in the world beneath the ground and he will there be attended by his concubines and slaves.The world will become a heavenly commune, to which men will bring the inmost treasures of their hearts, in which they reserve themselves not even a hope, not even a shadow of joy, but will give up for all mankind, with one face, with one desire, They will labor together in the sacred cause, the extinction of disease, the extinction of sin, and the perfectibility of genius, the perfectibility of love, the invention of immortality, the exploration of the infinite, and the conquest of creation.This is the most key part right here that I need to read, okay? [00:43:00] And then I will stop because I know Simone gets annoyed by me reading scripture, okay? Ain't no one wanna hear that. You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream. You pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth.When you turn back your eyes on us poor savages grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies, which degrade us every day to a level with the beast, tortured by pains and by animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions,, ignorant of nature, which yet holds us in her bonds.When you read of us as books, when you think of what we are and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur. To us now in our libraries and laboratories and star towers And dissecting rooms and workshops are preparing the materials of human gross.And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us [00:44:00] remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago. The working man enjoys more luxuries today than did the king of England in Anglo Saxon times, and at his command are intellectual delights.Which but a little while ago the most learned in the land could not obtain. All this we owe to the labors of other men. Let us therefore remember them with gratitude. Let us follow their glorious example by adding something new to the knowledge of mankind. Let us pay to the future the debt which we owe the past.And now here is the most important part, because this is the commandment. All men indeed cannot be poets, inventors, or philanthropists, but all men can join , in that gigantic and godlike work, the progress of creation. Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part.He who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of old four footed life, and who cultivates the social affectations, he who [00:45:00] endeavors to better his condition, and to make his children wiser and happier than himself, whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.Now, I'm not gonna go crazier with this, I will read more of this, it's like a, into this, so we can get to our kids and stuff, okay, Simone? Thank you. I just want to say that, like, When you begin to see all this, our obsession with pluralism makes a lot more sense. Because it is through pluralism that God makes his will known.And if you ever had an iteration of humanity that believed themselves to be perfectible, that wanted to end intergenerationalism, They would be the height of stagnation, the height of sin, almost the height of all evil. Anything who thought that humanity should freeze in one state. And this is why we, while we do believe in like life extensionism.In this framework, we're really against stagnating life extensionism, right? Life extensionism without children, life extensionism without intergenerational transfer, life extensionism [00:46:00] without humans genetically changing, culturally changing, changing in how we relate to technology. Simone, was there some final ideas you wanted to get out here?You're just very excited to leave.Simone Collins: I think greetings are boring, but I think he did say it first, and he said it very eloquently, and I think, you know, People should take a look at, maybe you can include, you can include an excerpt from the chapter or somewhere linked to it. Because I do think it's, it's very prescient.And I think maybe we can have some episodes, if people really like this, let us know in the comments, if you want to see some future episodes on the holidays that we practice, because those are really fun too.Malcolm Collins: Or if you want to see future readings from Holy Text. That's always something that we're happy to do.Simone Collins: Yes, prove me wrong, people. Tell me you want to hear him read off ofMalcolm Collins: a page more. I will say something that's very important to this religious framework is an understanding of time that we've described in other episodes, right? Which is you are responsible for everything that happens within any timeline that you choose.Whenever I choose one action over another. Now, timelines don't split, but it [00:47:00] does mean that I am fully fully responsible for my decisions. Every human that doesn't come into existence, every human that suffers, everything that doesn't come to pass because of the choices I'm making, is my personal responsibility.And this means that any engagement with sin, right, sin is anything that deviates from this productive path that I was put on earth for is a really negative thing. Oh, another thing that we can definitely do another episode on is our concept of the elect, which is also important to understand our religion.Broadly speaking Nope. Nope. Don't give it away. Okay. I won't give it away. But I, yeah, and, and sin is indulgence in anything that is primarily meant to make you happy or to fulfill some self narrative you have of yourself. So it can also be like self indulgent, self victimization, self indulgent suffering.And sin is okay. We are humans. We are fallen. We are not deserving of paradise yet. Paradise will be created for the iterations of us that are deserving of it. But, but, so it is, it is sinful to think that you can live without sin, but it is also the height of sin [00:48:00] to indulgence in. And this is a really important aspect of our framework, right?Simone Collins: Yes, and that is all for a future episode because now we need to invest in the future, our children, because they matter a lot.Malcolm Collins: They matter so much. I'm joking, they matter everything. They matter everything to us. As Wynwood Reid said and I will hit end recording, but I am going to read this line again because it is so important.To make his children wiser and happier than himself, whatever his motives, he will not have lived in vain. Then to the children.Simone Collins: I love you. I love you too.This is what we probably sound like to normal people.There is a whole breakaway civilization. What's happening? I'm gonna give you the big secret, man, if you want it. Yes, I do. This big breakaway civilization of scientists. Is that true? Yes. What are you, from Mars? Let's just say, it's super advanced. For real? I don't ever talk about this. For real? Breakaway civilization?Are you ready? There's a centralized [00:49:00] system of what they're building that isn't naturally occurring. Who is, who is that? They're the high priests. They're scientists. Right. They're engineers. Tell me what you're trying to say. They're racing. We're using human technology to try to take our best minds and build some type of breakaway civilization where they're gonna merge with machines, transcend, and break away from the failed species that is man.Where are you getting this from? You read their own writings, they believe we're this ugly fallen, ugly species, we're only to be killed. It's for research purposes. Exactly. They're gonna merge with machines. And become gods. Hold on a second. It's just crazy. Isn't it entirely possible that all these futurists, all these technological innovators, they all see the same end game.That there's going to be some sort of a complete integration between people and artificial intelligence. It's beyond that. Hold on please. I let you go on your crazy rant. Hold on please. You're interrupting my crazy rant. I'm telling you that this is a natural progression of this massive infatuation that we have with technology.They don't have to engineer it. It's natural. [00:50:00] Okay, okay, okay, sure, I get it. We're on the cusp of figuring out how to manipulate our very beings. Like, to the point where we're not going to be people anymore. They're going to be able to do s**t in both ways. I agree. They're going to be able to do s**t where they're integrating computers.500 years longer, I'm going to do it. I really think that's what they're doing. Ah! For anyone who is actually nerdy enough to be interested in hearing the rest of the readings of the text, I will finish up what I had intended to read on this episode before we ran out of time. But! If he act thus not from mere prudence, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from a pure sense of duty as a citizen of nature, as a patriot of the planet on which he dwells, then our philosophy which once appeared to him so cold and cheerless Will become a religion of the heart.And will elevate him to the skies. The virtues which were once for him, mere abstract terms, will become endowed with life, and will hover around him like guardian angels, conversing with him in his [00:51:00] solitude, consoling him in his afflictions, teaching him how to live and how to die, but this condition is not to be easily attained, as the saints and prophets were often forced to practice long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear.So virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means.of severe and long continued culture of the mind. And now, this is really important. 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 religious duty. And when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted, and that it should be subservient to I give to universal history a strange [00:52:00] but true title, the martyrdom of man.In each generation the human race has been tortured that their children may profit by their woes. Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of ages past. Is it therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come? Famine, pestilence, and war are no longer essential for the advancement of the human race.But a season of mental anguish is at hand and Through this we must pass in order that our prosperity may rise The soul must be sacrificed the hope in immortality must die a sweet and charming Illusion must be taken from the human race as use and beauty vanish never to return and you know I really want to comment on a line that he said here, you know going into because they were about to go into World War I, and World War II, but a season of mental anguish is at hand, and through this, we must pass in order that our prosperity may rise.[00:53:00] I am just always astounded by everything he predicted in this, and I should note that while this book may not be popular now, it was fairly popular during its time period. , For example, the guy who created the Rhodes Scholarship, Cecil Rhodes, said it was the most important book he had ever read.Sherlock Holmes said it was the, the best book ever written. , even Wikipedia right now, I mean, when they find out that I like it, of course they're gonna change this, but they're like, He, Winwood Reed was surprisingly not racist for someone of his time period. , so, people have probably been going back, but he, he had a view of the future of women's role in society, of everything like that, that I think was incredibly even minded., and massively prophetic and it's propheticness to me proves the efficacy of its teachings because it had a level of predictability to it and a predictability still is some of the prophecies have not fully come to pass. You know, we are in a sequence of prophecies unfolding right now. And that is. Very exciting to me, you know, a real, a verifiable, , doctrine. Now, of course, with our [00:54:00] wider doctrine, if it does not pass, like, if it begins to fail in its predictive capacity, that would mean that other prophets are likely, more likely to have accurate visions of the future. But right now, , you know, obviously Christ is the core prophet, but, Wynwood Read is The most recent and relevant prophet that we base our lives around in terms of the way that he lays out a religious framework.By the way, if you want to read, bits from his work, instead of reading the full work, because it's a full, long history of the human race, it is easier just to read the sections that we re quote in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, because we have a chapterCalled intermission.where we publish the excerpt that I read here , and that's just much easier to go over.And we also broke it into paragraphs and took out some, some old words and stuff like that that made it difficult for a person to read. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

We argue that the Catholic Church's stance against IVF is counter to both scriptural interpretations and human biology, which imply life begins before conception. We explain how prominent Catholic figures and the Bible itself points to life starting in the womb, not at conception. We also highlight how identical twins and chimeras reveal flaws around the conception argument. Ultimately, we predict the existential threat of declining fertility will push the Catholic Church to accept IVF, allowing many potential lives to come into existence.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Biblical quotes do do a fairly good job of arguing that abortion is murder, but they actually also do a fairly good job at arguing that talking somebody out of IVF is also murder.So the Jeremiah 1 5 says before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, which implies life begins before. For conception, just as we say, we also believe we can determine truth through investigations of nature and reality. After a sperm fertilizes an egg, that can split. And that's where identical twins come from., that would mean the human soul splits. But even more damning than that, human chimeras can also form. This is when two fertilized eggs end up combining together into a single human being if you look historically you look at people like Augustine of Hippo, . Said that the soul enters a developing [00:01:00] fetus, 40 days after it begins developing . Thomas Aquinas had the same view. I didn't realize how recently the Catholic church had made a switch on this issue, I think a lot of Americans, I did know how recently regular Protestants had made a switch on this issue, this was seen as like a weird Catholic thing,Simone Collins: it's a weird Catholic thing that had only been around for about a hundred years. .Malcolm Collins: When you look at studies that show that half of all men could be infertile without IVF by 2060, this is really important when you're talking about the future of the Catholic church.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be joining you for today's very, very spicy topic. And it is one that we have avoided going into detail on, mostly because I was like, let's just like not engage with it.I don't want to create a fight within the pronatalist community or anything like that. And the group that we would be arguing the most against [00:02:00] within this episode are Catholics. And we love, don't worry. We love it. That's actually difficult for me because every religion, I have never. There's, there's no other religion where I have literally, really liked every single person I have ever met from that cultural group, except Catholics.Catholics, I've literally liked every Catholic I have ever met. AndSimone Collins: yethave you met an unpleasant Mormon? I'm sorry, but like I doubt that this isMalcolm Collins: possible. , I, I have met unpleasant Mormons. Oh, that's too bad. Bad. There are some more progressive Mormons, which are really sort of statusy in a way that I find kind of annoying and cringe.Oh. But generally I like Mormons a lot too. I, I, I'm giving you that. Okay. Okay. But, I've just never personally, and I think it's because I've met less Catholics than I've met Mormons, and that's why maybe I have this perception. Fewer. If you canSimone Collins: count it, it's fewer, and if you can't, then it's more or less.Of course, of course. Sorry, IMalcolm Collins: gotta, you know. [00:03:00] So, so, I am starting that episode, this episode with that, because the other thing I need to admit going into this is I approach Catholicism with a lot of bias against it as a religious group, specifically for, it's an aesthetic bias. It's a bit like if I went to someone and I liked all of these people, but they all had like, Runes carved in their head and stuff and like, Oh, that sounds kind of cool.If they looked like heretics from Warhammer 40k. So you might be being like, come on, Catholics don't come off that way. Unironically, the Catholic aesthetic and perspective is like somebody went in to Indiana Jones and the last crusade and they're just like, yes, grab the big golden mug. That's the right one.Which one is it? You must choose. [00:04:00] But choose wisely. For as the true grail will bring you life, the false grail will take it from you.I'm not a historian. I have no idea what it looks like. Which one is it? Let me choose.It's more beautiful than I'd ever imagined.This certainly is the cup of the king of kings. Is happening to me? He chose poor.Be made out of gold. That's the cup of a carpenter.[00:05:00]you have chosen wisely.Malcolm Collins: Because my perception, like when I read the Bible is like, Jesus is not about like a guy on a giant.Throne framed in, like, golden outlays telling people what's true and what's not true. yoU know, I, I look at something like the Pope Stephen VI and the cadaver syndrome. You know, he put a dead pope on trial and had him hung, and I'm like, Come on, this is not like, this system for deciding who God is talking through does not seem like it's working to me.It's not selecting very well. It's not selecting very well. Well, so then, then people will be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But not all Catholic churches are like these big ostentatious displays. And it's like, yeah, you know. Sometimes, they do big displays of human corpses and bones.[00:06:00]There's something I'd like to show you, something you might enjoy, as one animal lover to another.Something wrong, Mr. Ventura? course not! This is a lovely room of death! Take care now, bye bye then.Malcolm Collins: It's like, you know, you're in this. Why human bones? Why the corpse cathedrals?you looked at our caps recently? Our caps? The badges on our caps. Have you looked at them? What? No. A bit. They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them? I don't, uh[00:07:00]Are we the baddies? We should be able to hold them at this point here, at least for a few hours. Then why skulls then? What? Why skulls? I mean, what do skulls make you think of? Death, cannibals, beheading. Um, pirates. Oh, you haven't been listening to ally propaganda. Of course they're gonna say we're the bad guys.But they didn't get to design our uniforms.Malcolm Collins: I need to say here it's actually kind of cool, in like a 40k, like, grimdark way. Like, it appeals to my young, goth self, and it appeals to my, like, historian self.But there's another part of me that is like, yeah, but You know, this person, he's like, you know, it's like a person comes up to me, but he looks like a 40k like Warhammer cultist, and he's like, hi, I'm Father Frank, the bloodthirster[00:08:00] and I have very pleasant things to say to you, and I'm like, yeah, but you know, all the ornateness, because from our perspective, right?Any wealth, especially unearned wealth is a sign of sin, like indulging in unearned aesthetic pleasures within our reality is a sign of sin and to indulge in that within a religious center is like marking it as a house of sin,I say all this because I think it's really important to note when I am approaching a topic with an extreme amount of personal bias, which in this case I feel I am.Malcolm Collins: Let's get back to the topic at hand because this is really interesting to me.So first, it's important to understand our perspective on when life begins in relation to IVF and perspective and the history of the Catholic perspective, as well as the mainstream conservative perspective in the U. S. Mm hmm.We as humans are [00:09:00] responsible every time I make a decision, every time I make a choice for everything that happens within the timeline or reality that is created because of that choice. So. If I stop a sperm from fertilizing an egg the moment before it fertilizes that egg, or I squash the fertilized egg the minute after that egg was fertilized, to me those are two acts of exactly equal moral import.Whereas to a Catholic, one is killing a human life and the other is merely just generically immoral. Whereas to me, they, they do not seem particularly different. But to me, this also means that you are technically ending a human life if a couple intended to have a child and you talk them out of having that child.So, anything that prevents a human child from coming into existence, because it is the actual human children that have, like, the moral weight to them, right, like, these actual conscious entities you are responsible for ending that life. So, life, starts asa spectrum of [00:10:00] potentiality. Yes. And the more potentiality that has to becoming an actual child, the closer that is to an actual life.But why?They are replacements of people who had their existence consumed. By denizens of the crimson worldMalcolm Collins: so first we need to get into what Catholics actually think and what conservatives actually think in the U. S. because a lot of people are just not up to date with their history on this subject. Well, yeah.Simone Collins: And it's, it's not just, so I think most people know what Catholics and conservatives think, which is life begins at conception and it's very, very bad toMalcolm Collins: destroy any I might be surprising you here.This is what they think today. Yes. Yes. So if you go to the 1970s and you look at the National Conservative Conference where they did a poll on this more conservatives were pro abortion than were anti abortion. This is because Catholics used to be mostly a Democrat thing. The conservative party [00:11:00] became anti abortion.Primarily to recruit Catholics after a failed electoral cycle. Oh boy. That was the purpose of it. And they were really focused on making this initiative of states rights. That's how they got their base on board with it, even though their base didn't really care about it. Historically, Protestants never really cared about this.You know, even Mormons. You can look at what the Mormon teaching is. They're totally pro IVF. So long as it's the husband's semen and the wife's eggs, and you're not using another person. So. Historically, like, Protestants didn't really care about this. Protestants started to care about this and started to flex about this because it began to become associated with conservative identity in the United States.And people were like, well, this is my team. So this is what I believe. But there wasn't like a doctrinal reason for this. And we'll get to the Bible because this is also really interesting. If you look at quotes from the Bible, but then you can be like, yeah, but. Catholics have always been pro this, haven't they?Hmm. No, they have not. This is really interesting. So, if you look historically[00:12:00] you look at people like Augustine of Hippo, a really important Catholic theologian of the 4th and 5th century. Said that the soul enters a developing fetus, 40 days after it begins developing if it's a male in 80 to 90 days after it begins developing if it's a female. Thomas Aquinas had the same view. Now people would be like, okay, okay, okay. But what does the Bible say on this? Like I have seen that the Bible says abortion is wrong, right? It does say that. It absolutely does say that abortion was wrong.This perspective that the Catholic Church with a completely logical and morally aligned perspective with the Bible before IVF technology was invented, which is when they took it. So when did the Catholic Church take this perspective? In 1869 was Pope Pius IX when he said delayed animation was wrong and [00:13:00] affirmed immediate insolvent at conception.And this has been the church's baseline teaching ever since. But this is not like obviously what all great Catholic thinkers ever thought. In fact, the greatest of Catholic thinkers thought otherwise from this perception. Yeah, I guess I've not reallySimone Collins: heard of anything else that Pope Pius IX has done to be fair.In case you were wondering what he did do, he was the longest serving pope in history, and he oversaw the first Vatican Council, where he affirmed his own papal infallibility. Um, and he is more controversially known for being the pope who issued the Syllabus of Errors,This was a document that argued that things like the following three statements were errors for Catholics to hold. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.In the present day, it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship. It has been widely decided by law in some [00:14:00] Catholic countries that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship.Basically, it lays out that Catholic countries should not allow non Catholic worship within them, and lays out sort of the idea of the modern Catholic caliphate., so of course this is somebody who we are going to have some moral differences with when you, , look at the world from our perspectiveMalcolm Collins: yes, which is important when we're talking about like Problems with how popes are chosen and the adult popes. But anyway, let's getSimone Collins: back. He's not like famous for, you know, his various liaisons, female liaisons, etMalcolm Collins: cetera. No, let's, let's let, oh, did he have a problem with females?Simone Collins: No, I'm just saying like other popes were worse than him for sure.In terms of like actually being fairly. You know, goodMalcolm Collins: practicing religion. So, so, now we're going to talk about actual biblical quotes. And, and [00:15:00] again, these actual biblical quotes do do a fairly good job of arguing that abortion is murder, but they actually also do a fairly good job at arguing that talking somebody out of IVF is also murder.So, let's talk about them.Simone Collins: Well, Malcolm, your, your attempt to use Bible quotes to argue with a Catholic on the issue of when life begins is kind of like a civil law lawyer arguing about law with a common law lawyer.Malcolm Collins: So, to understand what she's saying here, civil law and common law are two of the most common law systems used in the world today.Civil law says that law is what is in the text, whereas common law says that law is based on previous court decisions. We in the U. S. actually have a combination of both legal systems, but typically you're using one or the other. So, let's go through some of these quotes. Okay, Jeremiah 1 5. Quote, Before, before, underline here, I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and [00:16:00] before you were born, I consecrated you, I appointed you a prophet to nations, Okay, now Paul in Galatians 1 15 says, that God, quote, had set him apart before he was born.Okay, so repeatedly in the Bible, what you're going to say, and this is what's really interesting. So the Jeremiah 1 5 is like really the most damning because it says before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, which implies life begins before. For conception, just as we say, now, if you look at other quotes, I'm just going to go through, like, all of the quotes used to argue that, that life begins at conception, but are really more just arguments against abortion, right?, Isaiah 44, 24 talks about God as your redeemer who formed you in the womb. Except, again, we know from Jeremiah 1. 5 that God knew us before he formed us in the womb, so you're not arguing anything by saying you're a redeemer who formed you in the womb.Or you could say in Plasm 139, [00:17:00] For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's womb, you saw my unformed substance In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as of yet there was none of them. So, he was in God's book before he was conceived.Okay, next, Genesis 2. 24. Therefore, man shall leave his father and mother and be joined. to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Exactly what we would say, given the system where life begins before conception. So this is really interesting. This seems to be backed up by the Bible. Okay. Being Protestants and Catholics don't do this as much as Protestants do, but being Protestants, we also believe that God inscribes truth in nature and in reality, and we can determine truth through [00:18:00] investigations of nature and reality.Okay, so this is what I mean by this is God's not like stupid, right? Like again, we are not like traditional Christians, but we believe that God's intention was carved into the Bible for us to study and learn from if he very intentionally has the Bible multiple times. say life begins before conception and never once has it say life begins at conception, then my read is that that would have been a very easy thing for God to put in the Bible if he thought, if that's what he intended to say.It would have been a very easy thing for multiple iterations of the Christian tradition to pick up and yet really only Catholics picked this up for a long time. And it would have been a very easy thing for early Catholic theologians to pick up and yet they didn't pick it up. So it seems pretty clear to me that God did not intend that.He was trying to tell us, and I, again, I believe that God reveals himself over time through [00:19:00] science and through understanding our physical reality, we can better understand God. So, now let's talk about this. So Catholics will say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but let's play it safe. You know, the first time a biologically and genetically distinct human being exists is when a sperm fertilizes an egg, and therefore, we should say, That is when ensoulification happens.So, so, you know, when you talk about these other people, they basically say the soul enters the fertilized egg later. Except God could have made us that way. Some species work that way. Humans don't work that way. Because after a sperm fertilizes an egg, that can split. And that's where identical twins come from.If we go with the other interpretation, that would mean the human soul splits. But even more damning than that, human chimeras can also form. This is when two fertilized eggs end up combining together into a single human being [00:20:00] with the DNA of two people. Some famous cases around this was like one woman had her children taken from her or something.Because they genetically weren't her children and nobody could find out why and she's like, no, I swear I had these kids. They're genetically mine. And it turned out she was a chimera between her and her technical sister where her reproductive organs were actually biologically her sister's reproductive organs who they had merged together in the womb.Now, why did God allow this to happen in humans when this doesn't necessarily happen in all biological life forms? Because he was trying. tell us something and the implications of getting this something he's trying to tell us are very important and of increasing importance, right? Because it means that, so, so let's talk about why they're very important for Catholics specifically.So when we talk about things like falling fertility rates, okay, that's one thing. But when you look at studies that show that half of all men could be infertile without IVF by 2060, [00:21:00] this is really important when you're talking about the future of the Catholic church. Okay. When you look at something like Catholic majority countries in Europe having a fertility rate of, can you guess what it is, Simone?Simone Collins: 1. 9?Malcolm Collins: 1. 3. No. Oh my gosh. It's really low. Wow. So, so, like, right now, Catholics are headed towards extinction. Now we may see conservative Catholic traditions outpace progressive Catholic traditions, but here's the interesting and great thing about Catholicism. When we argue and we say all this, and this is probably going to be what I'm titling the episode, I think Catholics are going to change their mind about this.Because the Catholic Church isn't stupid. It took these positions because they were the morally correct positions when they were taken. Before IVF Existed when they were fighting against abortion. Yes, they were fighting for a moral position. That was absolutely correct. The lady couldn't [00:22:00] understand any other position.And so, of course, they were going to take this position. But now that IVF does exist and they are preventing human beings from coming into this world. It's a very, very different argument with very different implications. And it's something that their early thinkers didn't believe. It's something that the Bible doesn't support.So yeah, they'll change their minds on this. They, you know, it's the way that they'll survive and they're not stupid. And Catholics are good, intelligent people. They make up, as I pointed out, other than. Conservative Jews I, I, I point out multiple times. If you talk about the conservative intellectual class, the vast majority is Catholics or Jewish in ancestry which, which to me, you know, it adds a lot to the conservative movement to have this, but here's where this gets more interesting.So Simone and I, before we did an episode on this, we're like, there's gotta be something we're missing. Right, right.Simone Collins: And there was this one of my former classmates, in school actually then went on to [00:23:00] become an ordained Catholic priest. So like, this is extremely helpful. We're like, okay, we have someone on the inside.Let us email him and hopefully he'll get back to us. And he did. And he was very generous to take time to speak with us and give us both what he, he called sort of the simple answer and the more complicated hard answer. Both of which were incredibly helpful with, you know, the, the simple answer basically being.If you have a doubt about when human life begins, you should err on the side of the earliest possible moment.Malcolm Collins: But that doesn't work with ourSimone Collins: argument. Yeah, because we're, we're erring on the side of the earliest possibleMalcolm Collins: moment. We believe it begins before conception, but continue.Simone Collins: But in that way, I guess, and this is going to become ironic very soon, he's talking about the earliest possible moment in a material sense, when you have a material fertilized embryo.The deeper metaphysical answer appears to be related to a split in materialistic thinking that took place around the time of Rene Descartes.[00:24:00] So, The, my, my former classmate and our friend briefed us on Aristotle's four causes which I wasn't familiar with and Malcolm wasn't either, but there are, according to Aristotle, four causes to a thing.There is the material cause that from which as a constituent present in it, a thing comes to be. So bronze or silver are causes of the statue and the bowl. Then there's the formal cause, the form, i. e. the pattern. The form is the account of the essence and the parts of the account. Then there's the efficient cause.This is the source of the primary principle of change or stability. So, the man who gives advice, the father of the child, the producer. is the cause of the product and the initiator of the cause is a cause of what changed. So like the cause is sort of why, why it happened, I guess, the efficient cause. And then there's the final cause, which is something's end, what it is for[00:25:00] in its cause as, you know, health is the cause of walking according to some people.So. The first two causes are pretty sort of like literal and materialistic. But our friend argued that the second two causes are sort of what got thrown out with the bathwater after Descartes very much changed philosophy around. a sort of mathematically based metaphysical understanding of reality, that we cannot trust anything that we cannot prove mathematically, that we cannot see, that we cannot touch.And with that change in philosophy, a lot of really important metaphysical stuff was lost. So essentially, uh, the, he's arguing the efficient cause and the final cause we're lost in that. And that's sort of where like the soul of a person comes in their essence, their humanness, which doesn't have like measurable human elements was lost.So people, you [00:26:00] know, trying to. to throw the argument of the Catholic church of when life begins into these materialistic terms is kind of losing the point in the first place, according to this argument, because it is not actually about materially what's happening and when this is about the human soul.This is about when something becomes human and going back to the original argument, whichMalcolm Collins: is what it looks like when you're looking at the original works on this continuum. Right.Simone Collins: And, and when it comes back to that original, much simpler argument, If we're not sure, and we can't be sure, because this is all stuff that is not, you know, material, this is all very complicated, we should have the biggest preponderance of caution possible.Malcolm Collins: Yes, which again would have us say, yeah, so you're killing kids, and you're killing lots of kids, given the increasing fertility decline, and as the fertility decline increases, you're killing more and more kids every year. Like, I understand why they took the original perspective, but here's where it gets really interesting.So this entire argument, you know, was based on Aristotle. TheSimone Collins: original, yeah, like this, this, this [00:27:00] idea of the formal and efficient cause also being really important beyond material mathematicallyMalcolm Collins: proven things.Simone Collins: .All of his stuff was Aristotelian because he's basically saying that there was like a pre Descartes and post Descartes era and the pre Descartes era, at least. When it came to like modern philosophy, as we're familiar with it was driven by Aristotelian.Before we go further,Malcolm Collins: I gotta ask Claude a question. Yeah, Aristotle's thought lifed in the beginning until 40 days after for boys and 80 days after for girls.So Aristotle does not believe that his theory agrees with this preacher. Sorry.Simone Collins: What?For boys it's so much earlier, whereas like in reality, you know, like a, a zygote, like it starts out as like. you know, the default blank is like female and like, you have to go through more steps to become a boy. So like, I guess if you're trying to like make a scientifically based version of this, it should be the [00:28:00] boys started 80 days and girls start at 40 days.Forget that. Because girls, they need their penises to invert. Don't you understand?Malcolm Collins: He thought it began 40 days after the embryo started developing or 80 days after in the case of a woman.Well, I don'tSimone Collins: think our friend knew that. No,Malcolm Collins: he didn't know this, but this is what's interesting. And this is why. Yes. You know, so the Bible doesn't support this. The early Catholic thinkers don't support this. It's a decision that made sense and saved lives when the decision was made, but now likely leads to more death than it helps.And at the end of the day, the groups that believe it, whatever the case is, if human fertility continues to decline at the rate it has been declining, are going to become extinct. So it's irrelevant what they believe, you know. And this is where we get to the final, another point that he was pointing out, right?He's like, well, You know, you can't use this technology because it's profane because of like the associations [00:29:00] with it, right? Because it's playing God. Right. Because it's playing God. And this brings me to my two boats and a helicopter. People who don't know two boats and a helicopter. It's a famous sermon which is a guy.Is praying to God and he says, he's a very pious man. And he says, please save me for this flood. And then a boat comes and he says, Oh no, don't worry. God's going to save me. I've been praying to him. I'm a very pious man. And so the boat leaves and then the next boat comes, he goes, don't worry. You know, God's going to save me.Don't worry about it. The water's getting higher. He's on his roof, you know, really last chance. A helicopter comes down and he's like, nope, go away. God's going to save me. And then he dies in the flood and goes to heaven. And he's at the pearly gates. And, you know, he asked St. Peter, he goes, Why didn't God save me?And he goes, what the f**k were the two boats and a helicopter for?Simone Collins: And You're French, not included in the original sermon, of course.Malcolm Collins: Not included. No, but I actually think that this is, this is a thing to [00:30:00] spit on God's miracles. To think that you as a human Know what a miracle from God is supposed to look like, and then to turn down, to deny God's miracles from you on his plan for your life, which, which is to have a big, happy, thriving family, which he has told you this, and you have turned down his pathway,It's sleek. Do you think God is stupid? Do you think he didn't know that I. V. F. wasn't going to be invented? Do you think that if he knew that I. V. F. was going to be invented, he wouldn't have worded things differently in the Bible? Do you think that he wouldn't have had people like Thomas Aquinas, that he wouldn't have had people like St.Augustine say different things about when life begins? It's almost as if he very intentionally worded things in a way where it could be confused into before IVF technology being used to prevent the wanton abortion and murder of many, you know, [00:31:00] later stage fetuses. Okay, but also, once the technology was invented, be revisited, and then say, Ah, okay, so this is what God meant all along.And it's just like he's left so many innumerable hints that that was his intention. It is astounding. And then to spit on his miracle, or to act like he didn't expect IVF to be invented, or he didn't know it was going to be invented, it just astounds me.Malcolm Collins: but worse than that, it's worse than the guy from Two Boats and a Helicopter, because he's not just spitting on God's miracles for him, he is like, Cursing out the helicopter pilot and trying to like pass an amendment to prevent the helicopter pilot from rescuing anyone else.Simone Collins: That is where, yeah, we kind of draw a line here, right? Is that like, it's one thing to be like, let's be cautious. Let's not, you know, let's not do anything imprudent. It's another thing to impose that on other people. That can be incredibly damaging though. I'm going to take a moment to just give, you know, a fair defense of the Catholic approach here, which is and I think our friend pointed this out on the call.Like there are [00:32:00] some, you know, amazing at the time innovations that we introduced. That are quite helpful. That can be quite meaningful. And then they have unforeseen consequences that can be quite damaging. And this is where I do think, you know, have approaching technology with caution and observance is important.And this is why, you know, I think in the end, yes, probably the Catholic church is going to change their stance on this and many other religious organizations probably will as well. But they're not crazy to say, Hey, let's, let's wait until, let's see how this plays out. Although I think we're getting to the point where You know, IVF is, is, is proving to be pretty safe as a bet.PrettyMalcolm Collins: reliable. Yeah. So here, now we've got to talk about you know what he said? He's like, yeah, but ultimately you are destroying the, the embryos, which could, if they were implanted in somebody become human lives, right? Right. And this is where I'm like, yeah, but come on. Like I, I personally, I really do not think they believe they are human lives.I think they use this for the sake of argument, but I think if you said, You can push a button. You [00:33:00] can either destroy 10 embryos or kill a five year old kid. Which button do you press? Every time they're going to destroy the embryos. Even if you made the button, you know, 25 embryos, 50 embryos to save, you know, a, a 10 year old kid, they're going to press that button.Simone Collins: Because intuitive argument is in favor of the idea of potentiality and a five year old kid obviously has more human potentiality than an embryo. But the potentiality does stillMalcolm Collins: matter., I need to remind the audience here that us and Catholics are arguing to try to find out what's truth with the same goal. We are on the same team meanwhile, the antinatalists come in here and they're like, they're looking at this trolley problem we've set up and they're like multi track drifting. But yeah, and, and, and this is, I, I think one of those things are when you look at what they're saying, it just, to me, it doesn't pass, like, a sanity test with these embryos, right?Malcolm Collins: Like, yes, if you allowed them to develop past [00:34:00] their current stage, every sperm that I emit, if I allowed it to contact a human egg in some way, it could eventually become a human being. If I take this perspective, what I should do is just ejaculate one freeze it, try to take every single one of those little sperms and put it with one little egg.Simone Collins: It reminds me of that Legally Blonde scene where she's like, well, shouldn't he be responsible for every emission? Although Mr. Huntington makes an excellent point, I have to wonder if the defendant kept a thorough record of every sperm emission made throughout his life.Interesting. Why do you ask? Well, unless the defendant attempted to contact every single one night stand to determine if a child resulted in those unions, he has no parental claim over this child whatsoever. Why now? Why this sperm? I see your point. And for that matter, all masturbatory emissions where his sperm was clearly not seeking an egg could be termed reckless abandonment.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you are [00:35:00] killingSimone Collins: hundreds of thousandsMalcolm Collins: of full humans with every omission, if you take this perspective, because every one of them has the potential to become a full human being.Simone Collins: Although, yeah, we will say many religious conservatives have also been very against. Any non-proMalcolm Collins: mission. Right. We'll do the Monty Python scene here.You see, we believe, I'm a Roman Catholic, And have been since before I was born. Because Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. If a spa is wasted, God gets quite tirade.Malcolm Collins:If every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great. . When a sperm is wasted, God becomes quite irate, . 'cause you know, it is a logical thing. Yeah. Like this is a logical production.If you're taking this, life begins a conception approach. Yes. So, like of course [00:36:00] people have come to it before, but it's also. I don't know, from my perspective, kind of silly because I do believe you're choosing between timelines with every decision you make and erasing children when you choose.But why?They are replacements of people who had their existence consumed. By denizens of the crimson worldMalcolm Collins: Now this is where it gets more interesting to us.So people would be like, do you think you are killing humans if you don't end up using all the embryos you created? Right? Now we want to use all the embryos we created. We do think that that is killing humans, but Also, when you take this timeline splitting view, killing humans doesn't have quite the same weight it does within other views, because you are also responsible for everything that happens within the timeline you're choosing.Let me explain. Right? So suppose I had like 50 kids. I was just like, okay, well then I have to maximize all the kids I can have. And I do [00:37:00] literally everything I can to have as many kids as I have to the extent where it lowers the quality of life of my existing kids and my ability to give them a good childhood and my ability to give them a culture that they want to pass on in the future, and it leads to them not having grandchildren.Or like abusing their grandchildren in someSimone Collins: way. So in the end, you're, you're essentially killing potential future generations.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. Every decision I make, I'm not just responsible for the one person that creates or doesn't create responsible for all of the ripple effects of that decision. Yes.Centuries into humanity's future. Yes. I do not get out. Every decision I make, all of the future rests on that decision and everything that could happen rests on that decision. And I am fully responsible for all of that. But this is true, not just for creating an embryo. This is true of getting out of the bed in the morning.Like people often, you know, like in terms of our personal productivity, I think one thing that really helps us is just getting out of bed in the morning. Some people wake up when the [00:38:00] alarm goes off and they're like, Oh, I could go back to sleep. I'm literally thinking how many. Hundreds of thousands of humans are going to die because I go back to sleep.Yeah, right. If I do not perform the function I was born to perform, how many hundreds of thousands of people die for every moment of indolence? And of course, being a human, I will sin. To be a human who thinks that you will not sin is to be extremely susceptible to sin. But, um, you know, whether it's drinking, or whether it's the few days where I do fall back asleep, because I'm just feeling that tired.But, I am responsible for all of the souls. that bear the burden of my sin, and that number is innumerable. And therefore, with every decision I make, it needs to bear an enormous amount of conscious thought from my perspective. And I really cannot be flippant with this stuff. [00:39:00] And so, you know, all of this is really interesting to me, because I think it's really an answer, are you technically killing a human, or are you functionally killing a human?Right. I understand the technical, like, legalistic argument that you are killing a human if you do not use an embryo or you destroy an embryo. Yeah. But functionally, through not doing that, a little 10 year old boy doesn't come into this world, or a little 10 year old girl who is cute and says, Mama, Dad, I love you.Emily, what's wrong? I'm the last kid to be born. What if by that time mom and dad don't want me? No way. But I've seen lots of families make promises.And then break them. Not us. Emily, I will see to it personally that you're not forgotten. You promise, Jimmy? I promise.Malcolm Collins: And this is something that we Bear every day because we, Simone, could not get pregnant naturally. Yeah. So every one of our kids who I interact with every day, every time they say, data, I love you. They give me this [00:40:00] big hug. They would not exist in this world. If I took this other interpretation or if somebody convinced me of this other interpretation, I would have erased them from the human timeline.Yeah. And to me, that seems very, very obviously immoral and equivalent to killing them. And, and everything else is just fudging the numbers to get out of the moral weight of the action that you have undertaken. And I understand that many people have taken that action in the same way that many people have had an abortion and killed a human being and like, I don't want to like, really rub it in for them, you know, you killed a human in the same way I don't want to rub it into people who didn't use IVF when they could have, you killed a human or a lot of humans.But, I, I, I think that it is worth understanding our perspective on this and our larger perspective is like we can evangelize our perspective towards Catholics but I do not think [00:41:00] that any cultural group, our cultural group for example, should ever use a legal system to try to enforce another cultural group to live by their values.I believe that that is one of the ways that God shows what's true and what's not true is through which groups proliferate and which groups don't proliferate. And if I tip the scale there, then I have acted sinfully and arrogantly to think that I understand God's plan and God's miracles more than he intended them to unfold. Yeah, it's a very interesting question for us, and I guess the things that really shocked me when I went into this was one, I didn't know the position of the early church on this, two, I didn't realize how recently the Catholic church had made a switch on this issue, I think a lot of Americans, I did know how recently regular Protestants had made a switch on this issue, this was seen as like a weird Catholic thing, like my granddad, who was a conservative congressman, he even told me when I was growing up, he was like, yeah, it was really weird, because he was there during the 70s when this switch happened, and he was like, it was considered like a weird Catholic thing.Yeah. For my early political [00:42:00] career. And then it became like a mainstream conservative thing. Well, andSimone Collins: around that time, it's a weird Catholic thing that had only been around for about a hundred years. Yeah. Which in the larger scheme of the church is not that much time in the end.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it was a good thing.I'm saying it was a good thing when it happened. And I'mSimone Collins: like, here, here's another example of one of those things, like a technology that can be very, very good in lifesaving at the time, and then has to be dropped because it starts killing people. Can you guess what it is? What is it?Malcolm Collins: Asbestos.Simone Collins: Keep in mind at the time when everything was made out of wood, untreated.Thousands and thousands of people died in fires all the time because there was, you know, things would just suddenly become engulfed in flames. People wouldn't have time to escape. People died and asbestos saved so many lives because it slowed the rate of burning. Of cities of houses you know, asbestos roofs, all this asbestos in buildings was truly [00:43:00] lifesaving.Asbestos has been banned in, uh, in some, uh, part of the world, but, uh, for here In Quebec, we're telling that you should use more asbestos. Really?Simone Collins: And then, you know, we got to the point where we had other fire returning chemicals and materials, and we reached a point at which asbestos no longer made sense. We didn't need it anymore. And so we have to get rid of it and carefully remove it from buildings because it is, you know, we now have longer lifespans and now the asbestos is going to get to us.But the point is that there can be a time. When something saves lives and is very, very good. And then that same thing later on in, in the presence of other technologies and understandings needs to be removed. We have to change. That doesn't mean that asbestos was always bad and always evil. It means that there's a time and a place for things.And I think that's where we are with the Catholic church and when life begins.Malcolm Collins: Right. Yeah. Well, and I, and I would say that you know, was this like just a quick summary, like. God is not an [00:44:00] idiot, okay? God did not say once in the Bible that life begins at conception. Yet he said multiple times it begins before conception.Yeah. Okay? He has multiple times within the Bible said that baby's lives matter because he thinks abortion is wrong and we think abortion is wrong. You know, after a certain period. Right. But he, he, he also like, he'll say like, Oh, the baby jumped for joy within the womb. Right. Like at a certain trimester or something.It's like, great. You know, we agree with that. If you kill a woman who's like heavily pregnant, you have killed two people. You have not killed one person because that person would have come to existence. They had a high potentiality. Right. But. If you convince somebody to not have a kid, you have also killed somebody.Right. So, so, and God coded our biology. He could have made it so identical twins didn't exist. He could have made it so human chimeras didn't exist. And yet he coded that into our biology. The things do not happen by accident. I think if you look at God's plan, whether it's the Bible or human biology, or even the original arguments like Aristotle and stuff like [00:45:00] that, he has made his will imminently clear.And I really am looking forward to the day when and again, I, again, no animosity towards Catholics, this is just something that we have like a really strong difference of perception on, but I, I, I hope and I genuinely believe that the Catholic Church is going to change its perception on this which will lead to innumerably more humans who are waiting to come into existence, coming into existence.Simone Collins: Fingers crossed I don't know. 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Simone and Malcolm Collins debate the causes of declining birth rates and potential solutions after reading a provocative proposal from writer "Arctotherium." They analyze his argument that improving men's status relative to women could incentivize marriage and higher fertility.Topics discussed:* Statistics showing drastic fertility declines across multiple countries* The role of female empowerment movements and decreased male status* Policies like defunding education and affirmative action to aid men* Reversing cultural changes from the sexual revolution* Flaws in the "baby boom" theory and viability of copying it* Biological drives behind having children after tragedy* Standards for modern dating contributing to dismal marriage ratesSimone Collins: [00:00:00] And again, this is like men are losing their status. They're checking out. They're not getting educated. They're not getting jobs or they're getting depressed. And it's showing up differently. Like, you know, I think generally women are much more likely to publicly complain about things. identify as depressed and say all these things.Whereas men don't, they're very quiet and they silently suffer and they just back out of society.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: So we're going to go over these numbers. This is year over year fertility decline in these countries. So you already know one number in Korea year over year for Q3. It was what, 14%? I thought itSimone Collins: wasMalcolm Collins: 11%. It was just incredibly hot, like double digits decrease in a country that's already doing that bad. And Seoul's already at 0.53 fertility. A rat row. So here we go. Romania, 19%. 4 percent decrease year over year, Latvia, 19 percent decrease year over year, [00:01:00] Lithuania, 17. 8 percent decrease year over year, Estonia, 16. 3 percent decrease year over year, Mongolia, 16. 1%, uh, I don't know what this is, Federation BIH 10. 10%. Serbia.Simone Collins: Oh, no, it's not Hungary.Malcolm Collins: is 9. 1%, Netherlands is 9%, Belgium is 8. 5%, Russia is 8. 4%, Croatia is 8. 2%, Hungary is 6. 6%, Armenia is 6. 1%, Thailand is 5. 9%, Kosovo is 4. 8%, Uh, well, 4.1% and Uzbekistan is only 3% or 2.8%, so not that bad. Oh, good for you. 17.6% and Japan is 11.9%.Simone Collins: [00:02:00] So roughly the same as what we saw for South Korea. If memory serves, yeah, if, if,Malcolm Collins: if, if you are somebody who works in the field of statistics, a double digit year over year, decrease.Is catastrophic. Catastrophic. This is not like a small thing. This is not an irrelevant thing.Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and we're talking to people about this day in, day out. Yesterday we had like a 90 minute conversation with someone writing a book about this. And, and this is where sort of like I, I read something this morning that now like.Because, you know, our solutions to prenatalism, they're like very gender egalitarian. They're like, how do we make this work in a society where we keep high levels of education, high levels of, of prosperity, high levels of, of, of gender equality and choice, and also the choice to not get married and not have kids if you don't want to.And I'm like, okay, okay, okay. But then I'm reading this sub stack and I'll tell you more about [00:03:00] it. And I'm just like, oh man. So I'd never heard of this author on sub stack before. Arctotherium is, is his name. And he, he writes in this, this analysis of the baby boom. Assuming he's a he for reasons that will become apparent later in my rant about all this that basically nations that have.undergone a first demographic transition, sort of, you know, when a nation becomes prosperous and more gender egalitarian and blah, blah, blah with more education, they start to see a decline in fertility. And he argues that baby booms prove that this decline can be Reversible. Okay, great. You know, that's hopeful.And I'm like, this is going to be great. I want to read this. I want to hear his analysis as to what it is that drives a baby boom, you know, and so that maybe we can like come to new ideas and I can read someone else's ideas on what might aid. pronatalism in an era of demographic collapse. And it seems, you know, like I'm, I'm reading this and it seems [00:04:00] like we're very much on the same page with values.He writes, quote, many theories of fertility decline claim that it is the inevitable result of various good things, technological advancement, wealth, education, science through weakening religion, urbanization, individualism, and declines in childhood mortality. Since almost no one really wants. to go back to being high mortality, low tech, extremely poor, rural, and ignorant.The story goes, we simply need to live with it. There is good empirical evidence for all these things mattering. But what the baby boom shows is that it is possible to have it all unquote. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally agrees. Like we're on the same page. Yeah. Okay. Like he's, he's got me. Yeah. Right.And then, and he he, he then connects baby booms, this magical reversal that we're all trying to make happen to marriage booms. And I'm like, okay, this totally makes sense. We agree. This is, you know, a crisis of relationships. Absolutely. What he does quite compellingly with tons of graphs and a lot of stats is [00:05:00] show that really marriage is, is a big driving factor here more than I had thought.thought when it came to specifically baby booms you know, he points out that for example, most fertility and the highest fertility is with monogamous married couples that couples that stay married have the most kids. And, and we've seen this from other people too. There's a shockingMalcolm Collins: statistic here that you would tell me like of people who stay married for X amount of years, something percent of them have a kid.Simone Collins: Like they have a lot of kids, like their like average fertility is quite high, but I can't remember exactly what it is. But like several, several people from very different philosophical, philosophical camps within the pronatalist movement all have this thing of like, you know, monogamous marriage is a very key driver of fertility.So I'm like, okay, likeMalcolm Collins: I'm trying to remember this. It's something like on average, a couple that stays married for 30 years has an average number of like 4. 5Simone Collins: kids. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a really high number of kids and yeah, I, I have to look up that stuff. It sounds unbelievable. We'll find it. Yeah, it did seem [00:06:00] unbelievable, but it's, you know, I think it's easy for anyone to agree that yes, you know, like stably married couples and he, he has a lot of graphs in the south and we'll of course link to the sub stack post that, that sort of show like the fertility.for married couples living together, married couples with a partner that's absent, separated couples and like various levels of divorce and singlehood and obviously like highest fertility is, as a thing, clearly, I mean, even among our friends who are super pronatalist, the ones that have the most kids have a partner who's there to help them with the kids.Obviously it's, this is not rocket science. So then this, This author proceeds to say, okay, so what caused this marriage boom? He says the answer appears to be a rise in young men's status compared to young women's. Now that was interesting to me. I haven't heard anyone talk about this before. So I'm like, okay, I'm intrigued.This is good. I'm getting my popcorn out. I'm chewing. This is good. He writes the marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation down young male wages up. And male employment. Oh, sorry. [00:07:00] And male unemployment down. And now I'm like, like, I'mMalcolm Collins: a little nervous.Or male employment downSimone Collins: is what you meant to say. Yeah. Male unemployment down, meaning male employment up. So like, I'm starting to get a little nervous because there's this camp within prenatalism, right? That's like, well, the whole problem is when women got educated and then they got on the pill and, and then they, and so what we have to do is just stop, stop female education.I'm like getting a little nervous. I'm like, Oh man, is he like one of these guys? But here's, here's where he like gets like the rollercoaster is going back up. Like I'm like, okay, this is good because he says note that what matters here is relative gains, not absolute gains. Women did not make less money.During the baby boom, he means, and we're not less educated in 1960 as compared to 1930, merely less. So in comparison to their male peers, the mechanism here is clear. Young women want money and status. Young men have relatively more money in status. Women can get men's money [00:08:00] and status by marrying them.Marriage leads to babies. Thus the baby boom. And I'm like, Oh man, like. Okay, this is resonating again. You're kind of right there. Like,Malcolm Collins: okay, continue, continue.Simone Collins: Great. Well, and I just want to make a note here that like a big problem that we have encountered when trying to match make friends. And when we talk with people about relationship markets and whatnot, is this problem of women.really wanting a man who is higher in status than them. Even if they're super feminist, even if they're super independent, they still want a guy who's higher in status than them. So this male, this like relative male status thing is totally real. No matter how progressive you are, you know, no matter how woke you are, you're still, you're still super into that.So totally agree. But then here's where I'm like, Oh, but like, is he right? But like, Oh is he says what ended the baby boom in three words, second wave feminism. By this, I mean, the suite of changes referred to as the sexual revolution, no fault of worse normalization of premarital sex, de legitimization of marriage as the normative form of family.Combined with a concerted [00:09:00] political campaign to raise women's relative economic and social status. Okay. So I, I totally agree with some things here and I'm like, Oh, with other things. So his prescriptions and let's just discuss his prescriptions one by one. So we'll, we'll stop after each one.Malcolm Collins: But hold on, before you get further, there was something you would talk to me about this morning, which I think is important for people to understand is he did a very good job of showing that historically what people have argued is like, it's the pill that caused this.Right.In graphs, when the pill was introduced versus when various women's rights movements happened and succeeded. Yeah. And it seems to correlate much more with women's rights than it does with the pill or any sort of fertility.Simone Collins: And, and, and this is tentative. This is not a perfect argument because after, after I read this, the one graph he showed was the legalization of the pill in Japan.And he demonstrated that fertility plummeted in Japan before. The pill became publicly, like widely available, but [00:10:00] after second wave feminism started to have influence. Now I pushed back on that a little bit because one, I know how culturally behind on picking like up trends. Japan has been, I mean, when my parents were in Japan in the eighties, it was.Second wave feminism was not exactly a thing. Like I, I think, I think he's totally off there. He's grasping at straws. When you actually look at the release of the pill and second wave feminism making its rise and I had Claude sort of walk me through both of them, you know, I, I got the legalization of of the pill at various stages and then I also saw like the various, like, big milestones, like big publications and protests and media events for second wave feminism that would have spread those ideas and led to normalization.It'll happen at the same time. These things are so intertwined. I think it's impossible for someone to successfully parse them out and using Japan as an example is just not. So I, I questioned his methods here. I still think it's a compelling argument and I do think frankly, and you and I agree it is culture and not scientific intervention.So I don't think the, the pill is, is [00:11:00] any more. Strongly influential on pronatalism as a like legalizing abortion is like we found that when you make abortion illegal, it doesn't bring back birth rates. Right? So like this is, you know, may temporarily cause a spike, but it doesn't permanently cause a spike.So again, I. I don't think he's wrong, but I do question his methods anyway, that's kind of beside the point. I think he, he makes an extremely strong argument and this idea of relative male status to female status is really important, but I find nice about it is his point that like this doesn't mean female disempowerment.This doesn't mean women work in the home. Like this doesn't mean that, you know, women, it is not a handmaid's tale scenario that he's asking for at all. He's just saying, you gotta give men a chance to excel in society really fundamentally, but let's go back to his prescriptions. I think they're actually quite interesting.And this is a, this is a clever guy. He, he encourages first roll back the welfare and pension state and lower income taxes. This is interesting. He argues [00:12:00] this because he believes that a lot of the like lack of dependence on marriage and lack of interest in marriages that, you know, women can do just fine without a partner.And a lot of that's because of welfare. He, he believes that women are disproportionately. Reliant on welfare and able to qualify for welfare, which is I think accurate. Oh, didMalcolm Collins: you hear about the thing about, I think it was welfare or something that one of our friends was telling us about women versus men.And they were like, men basically never, ever qualify for this program. That makes sense. The people think that they do like it's, it's, it's broadly equal access. It really isn't, I think it was welfare. I think it was, it might not have been welfare.It was something like welfare. It wasSimone Collins: very social programs,Malcolm Collins: government assistance program.Yeah. And it turned out that while it says it's open to both genders, it's really not. They're like, look, I work in the approvals department and we approve like five men a year. Oh God, and literally just tons and tons and tons of women.Simone Collins: Yeah. So yeah, I agree with that. And I think that that is [00:13:00] a dampener on marriage.And I mean, in general I think that you and I would argue that we would prefer from a perinatalist perspective, but also from like a societal health perspective that local communities. It's the fact that physically 40%, more than 5 percent of people the rest of the system is disempowered Yes and yeah.that's where you're at. And to me, How do you see what's So then on to the next one, and this is also super interesting and I, we love it, but for different reasons, he, he argues that we should roll back the regulatory state why he says affirmative action in favor of women is is common across The baby boom countries, as is disproportionate female employment in state created regulatory jobs such [00:14:00] as human resources.So he's basically saying that like a lot of women have employment and positions and incomes because of massive sprawling government bureaucracy and rules and regulations that like a, a gynoMalcolm Collins: they do. Outcompete men in bureaucracies exactly. Is one areas where women do really well. Right.Simone Collins: Exactly.Exactly. So if you get rid of the bureaucracy, you're getting rid of this headband is not staying in. You're getting rid of you're, you're getting rid of a lot of female employment. So he's like, well, you know, one way we can get women more dependent on men, or at least like lower in status is by removing government bureaucracy.I mean, you and I are super in favor of anything that eliminates government bureaucracy. It hadn't occurred to me that this would disproportionately. affect women's employment. So I'm like, ah, but, but at the same time, no, rip off the bandaid. Like he's right. One, this is like, this is not helpful bureaucracy.It is toxic. And again, like it, we're [00:15:00] not removing women's opportunity to get work. We're just removing an industry that we think is a cancerous growth that also like, You know, is, is disproportionately favoring them kind of in an unfair way. So that's the next one. So do you kind of agree? Yeah,Malcolm Collins: I agree with that.I don't agree with everything. I'm gonna get to where I don't agree when you're done with these.Simone Collins: Okay. All right. This is fun. So the other is he wants to end affirmative action for women and ban or de facto ban as similar lobbying organizations for men are. The thousands of organizations, scholarships, and programs that exist to promote women's career success.This is interesting. I agree.Malcolm Collins: I think if you are sane and you look at the statistics, like, Oh, whatever gap.Simone Collins: Yeah, wage gap. No, no, no, that, that is, it's b******t. It's that, that's over. We've, we've solved the problem. And I think at this point now, and I've, I've seen this happen. Like I was we were currently at a, a [00:16:00] few weeks ago, we were at a retreat with a lot of really high performing people in government and media, et cetera.And I, I came across a couple of people. Who's primary complaint about their job and their organization there in their industry was that there were a bunch of, of affirmative action people who were like totally fine people, smart, wonderful, whatever, but they were just, they were simply not qualified for the position and they were in it and it was hurting the organization and these people care deeply about the missions of their organizations and they were just so frustrated by the fact that like That people were getting promotions.People were getting positions that they frankly just weren't qualified for. So I'm against this in principle. I'm not against this. Cause I'm like anti woman. I'm just like, listen, if you're not qualified for it, you should not get the job. So I totally agree with him. There'sMalcolm Collins: like these board positions they have in California where you have a certain number of women on your board.And we know women who just like professionally take these positions. Yeah. And it is. And then they're not qualified. Yeah.Simone Collins: It's like an exploit that they figured out. Well, I think the other issue that we found with a lot of these [00:17:00] affirmative action things is like, they don't serve actually persecuted.To increaseMalcolm Collins: equality. No,Simone Collins: they don't. No, they, they, they serve very intelligent, already wealthy, already well connected people who are, who are smart enough and well connected enough to even know about these opportunities. What theyMalcolm Collins: do is they serve to increase equality among the friend group. Of the people who's in power in our society.Yeah. So the people who are legislating these laws and stuff like that, they're like, Oh, are my friends more employed? Are my female friends more employed? Now they stick on women. Yeah. Yeah. Of course they are now. So it's likeSimone Collins: the same 35 women, you know, or like the same 35 in, you know, diversity quota thing here.Yeah. It's, it's, it's totally. So I totally agree. Here's another one that we super agree with that is also like. That I like, you know, for the reasons he's into it. I'm like, ah, but yeah. Okay. Okay. Defund education because right now women, I mean like totally the, I mean like education, [00:18:00] obviously like academia is morally broke.Truth broke, like it's not functioning anymore. Things aren't replicating. It's, it's totally like overtaken by these cancerous growths. You know, even, even just like school endowments. now are so big that they're just kind of there to like keep earning money. It's ridiculous. SoMalcolm Collins: I think even secondary education, when you look at the plight of the average secondary education, you know, high school teacher, middle school teacher, you know, they don't earn much money.They don't do is just lay off a good 75 percent of them, replace them with AISimone Collins: and free them up for work that they actually care about. Yes. If they'reMalcolm Collins: going to complain about how much they're being paid. Then we should consolidate resources on those of them that statistically are showingSimone Collins: better outcomes.Well, and, and actually, you know, we, we talked about this during the pandemic there, there were issues of, of many teachers unions. I'm not going to name names or name like which school districts I heard this from, but from, you know, people working in school districts, we're finding that the teachers. When it was time to go back to school, [00:19:00] refused to go back to school.They didn't want to reopen the schools. And this is why you see actually in districts where teachers unions were stronger schools opened later. So the school closures in the end, like the tail end of the pandemic did not correlate with actual pandemic outbreak levels. They correlated with the strength of teachers unions.Why? Well, because. Many of these teachers. Oh, and oh, sorry. The other thing, not just, not just going back to school. Did they resist? They also resisted doing more than like three or four hours of synchronous learning per day. So like literally they would not be on camera live with their students or talking live with their students for more than four hours of the day.Why? Because they take it on side gigs. They were doing learning pods. They were doing tutoring. Frankly, these people had found lucrative, a gainful employment doing work that they found to be more impactful. And I don't blame them. Who wants to teach to a standardized test? Who wants to go to a classroom?Malcolm Collins: I think to take that level of a play as a teacher's union to be like, we will not do more than three hours a week. That's [00:20:00] like that you only do that sort of thing with your boss when you genuinely don't care about losing your job.Simone Collins: Like, well, no, they, they know they can't lose their jobs though. In many cases, I mean, it depends on the district, but like, I think it's more of an issue of, of, of impunity of strength of teachers unions.And just sort of knowing that, like,Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, public sector unions shouldn't be legal.Simone Collins: It's, I mean, yeah, but so anyway, like the defund education thing, we totally agree with. And, and again, when you also look at educational attainment and you're right, actually, you know, this starts even at primary school, men are, men are screwed over in primary school.Men are really underserved and, and not well treated by the legacy education system, the current education system. And so, yeah, a way to give men An advantage, a better way to stick out is it's to defend education and or deemphasize education is a like credentialing process because you know, a big problem is women will look down upon men who do not have their level of education or greater and yet it's like it's like saying like.[00:21:00]You know, but like, Oh, so I expect you to excel at, at my level or better in a system that has been systematically biased against you since you were in kindergarten..It's so screwed up. So I totally agree with him there. She's, she's telling the truthMalcolm Collins: about the kindergarten thing. You look at men, how they do in kindergarten.You look at men, how they do in high school and middle school, dramatically worse.Simone Collins: I mean, look, think, think about our children in. In daycare nowMalcolm Collins: men now are underperforming. If you look at the young ages, right? We're like you're you're you're Likely gonna see the biggest impact of all this gender policy.They are underperforming More than women underperformed at the very height of quote unquote misogyny. Yeah, if you Look at the education gaps in things like high school. And then you compare that with the very height of the income gap during the women earn less whole thing. They don't even come close.I should note here that I meant at the height [00:22:00] of when people cared about the pay cap, not the actual height of the pay gap, obviously at the actual height of the pay gap, you know, in the 1920s or something, obviously it was larger, but I'm talking about like, in the eighties, when it was like, oh, women earn 10% less than men. Where if you look at men in school systems today, they definitely do more than 10% worse than women.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah. So like, suffice it to say, we agree. Here's a place where I'm, I'm pretty.Malcolm Collins: He's so funny. As women will be like, well, men should work harder if their, if their education rates are lower. You'll see this, you'll see this. That's, that's going to be, anyway, you were going to say something.Simone Collins: His, his next prescription is, he says pronatalist monetary incentives should be targeted at married husbands rather than mothers.For example, he argues that like if this, for example, had to be. gender neutral, which he seems [00:23:00] to be opposed to. He would want to see pronatalist incentives in the form, not of like, you know, support from the state, but rather income tax breaks. Because obviously that would like disproportionately benefit men who pay the highest amount of income tax.Which is interesting. Here's where I feel conflicted. I really feel like you know, if you, if you are going to support, you know, parents, it is, it is often the case that men are, are less available. Like not everyone is the incredible dad that you are. And you may not realize that Malcolm, because you were like the dream dad.And I, you blow my mind every single day. And our kids adore you and I just. Oh, I don't, but you're not real Malcolm. You're not like you, like, I don't know how you exist. You are not human. I hope I don't wake up from my coma. I want to stay in this coma. Please do what, you know what, whatever. Like if you guys can read my mind in my coma, do not wake me up.But anyway, I'm just like, I do feel that there are, obviously there are billions of toxic moms that are terrible and, you know, obviously the kids would be better with dads, but still like, [00:24:00] I don't know if like we should just be assuming that. You know, men should hold all the cards. You know, they're not necessarily the best people to hold the reins here.So I, I, I don't know about this. I, I, I do. I do. I, I, I would love actually though, I think a really great perinatalist policy is support in the form of an income tax break. That is great because it, it, it rewards productive members of society. It, it, it incentivizes people who are likely to raise very successful kids to have kids.I think it's great. So I, I kind of agree with that. And then the final one is roll back the sexual revolution. And, you know, he's referring to no fault divorce. He's referring to sex before marriage, or at least like sort of encouraging or not shaming sexual promiscuity. You know, weirdly we're, we're, we're on the same page with that, but not really weirdly.Like with our daughters, we're not going to say, we're not going to say we, we would hate you for having premarital sex. We would shame you for doing that. Like, you know, being promiscuous, we would [00:25:00] just say, listen, here are the trade offs. You need to be aware of them. You need to be realistic. And I, I also think that no fault divorce is important.You know, our argument in the pragmatist guide to relationships is if your relationship isn't working and if, you know, one person knows that they will be way better out of it, it doesn't matter if it's both. Like that, the sooner you end it, the better. The, this idea of, of, of sticking people in marriages is pretty toxic.So I don't know about this whole no fault of worst thing either. I think people should be able to leave toxic relationships easily. What do you think? So.Malcolm Collins: Two statistics here which are really interesting and I think undermine a lot of the arguments. Well, one, this one doesn't undermine as much, but it's something people should really know.Okay. This whole, like, black pilled men's movement, like, women can screw you over, divorce, rape, you're entering this situation you could never get out of. Yeah. It's B******t.Simone Collins: No, men are screwed over in divorce court. HoldMalcolm Collins: on. Hold on. It does happen. Yes. But it happens. So here's an example of a statistic. Oh, [00:26:00] right.Simone Collins: No, no, no. I know what you're about to say.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah. You would think it's fake if you believed what this movement was telling you. Right. But it's not fake. It's, it's, it's a real statistic that of child custody cases, where the man tries to win the custody battle,doesn't just immediately say, I'm not trying around 70 percent are won by men.Simone Collins: So that's, yeah. And that's, that, that really blew my mind when we first were told that. Yeah. Well,Malcolm Collins: no, because a lot of these movements have an interest in lying to people. They want people to feel better about the situations they have created for themselves. Because just as much as the progressive movement wants to say, none of this is really your fault.We can just give you money. It all goes away. There's an aspect of the red belt movements is the same way. Totally.If you want to argue on the other side of this, there was a pretty good article that made arguments on the other side of this called misrepresentation of gender bias in the 1989 report of the gender bias committee of the Massachusetts Supreme [00:27:00] judicial court. This piece does make it pretty clear that these numbers do appear to be legitimate.However, there are different ways you can run the data that will lead to you. Finding stuff like when mothers sought sole custody, the court granted the request at a rate 65% higher than when fathers made the same request . The larger point here.Is that the numbers are not as holistically and overwhelmingly weighted. Towards the side of mothers, just get whatever they want.As many men's rights activists would have you believe it is more, a men in women are biologically different and have biologically different wants and behavior patterns on average.And that leads to differences in how much they want things like sole custody of kids.Malcolm Collins: You know, I haven't done the video yet. I haven't posted it yet because I'm, I'm a little scared to be this antagonistic to our audience, but it's the one on the reason you haven't found a wife is really your own fault.ButSimone Collins: yeah, but we leave you that about pretty much everything. [00:28:00]Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, with everything, it's about radical self responsibility. I agree. And those are the factions of society that will survive. But I am a. I mean, the black pill movement, the black pill movement towards marriage and stuff like that justifies it's own failures by lying to itself about the real world successes.They're like 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, 50 percent of marriages do not end in divorce. Not anymore.Not even close. I think it's something like 20, 25 percent I'll find the statistic and put it on the screen. Nice. But yeah, no, and even when that 50 percent number came out, that was because they were counting the same marriages.So my dad went through like four or five marriages. So okay. If he went through five marriages. Right? And he was in a sample size with five other people, people would say 50 percent of marriage is in a divorce, right? And then those five other people never got a divorce at all. And it's like, no, my dad just is a really unpleasant person to be married to.Nope. You want to take the other side of this argument? What you can [00:29:00] do is say yes, millennial divorce rates are very low, but their marriage rates are also very low. So it doesn't really matter that their divorce rates are low.I just like to always try to present both sides when I can.Malcolm Collins: And, and no, this is, this is important to know. Like a lot of people pretend like the law is much more against them than it really is because it allows them to take paths of inaction. So that's one thing. Second thing is this whole baby boom b******t that he's doing. Okay. Okay. Okay. We know from studies, I think it was in Thailand or something, somewhere in Southeast Asia, that if you look at regions where tsunamis hit versus regions where tsunamis didn't hit, but they were, you know, culturally, economically, otherwise similar, you saw baby booms in the regions where the tsunamis hit.Mass deaths, like periods ofSimone Collins: intense struggle. And yet not, not even where the tsunamis hit, but where people lost like children, you know, where there was like extra tragedy.Malcolm Collins: So it [00:30:00] is tragedy. It is loss of human life. It is this extreme suffering.Simone Collins: No, no, no, no. It's, it's not, it's not suffering per se. It's having a reason to have kids.It's having a reason to fight. No, IMalcolm Collins: disagree. The baby boom was not an intentional reason to have kids. It was men coming back from a war that had experienced intense tragedy. They weren't trying to, like, repopulate the country's, like, Soldier base or something. That was not the reason behind the baby boom.It was literally, I think that tragedy and suffering and extreme hardship triggers a drive to reproduceSimone Collins: in humans. I don't, I don't know if it has to be tragedy and suffering. I think that there are, for example, look at the Amish. Okay. High birth rates. They are not like subject to huge amounts of tragedy.There areMalcolm Collins: other things that can trigger a high birth rate. Yes. The point I'm making is that the baby boom is not a replicable phenomenon. Mm. Not without a World WarSimone Collins: No. Or, or without significant cultural intervention, giving people a reason to have kids. [00:31:00]Malcolm Collins: No, because then that wouldn't be replicating the baby boom, that would be replicating something else.Okay.Simone Collins: Okay. But what? Okay. So you're, you're referring to the baby boom as a reactionary to tragedy event, blah, blah, blah. But like, we're just talking about increasing. We're talking about reversing demographic transitions resulting from prosperity and education. I understand.Malcolm Collins: But his whole piece.Simone Collins: Was about the baby boom.All of these statisticalMalcolm Collins: trends. Yeah. Yeah. He is looking at the baby boom. And he is using the baby boom as a proof point. And yet we have other evidence that correlates with this,the tsunami study that shows that you would expect a baby boom, even if nothing else was there. Tragedy leads to fertility.Among other things. Yeah. Among other things, but. One of the biggest tragedies in human history was the second world war. Okay. The people who went through this, anyone who's talked to them. I don't know if you talked to your grandparents or what they experienced during it. It was not fun.Simone Collins: Okay. I don't know.My grandfather lovedMalcolm Collins: [00:32:00] it. Tell me about that.Simone Collins: He, he loved both the great depression, like his, and you know, he, he, this is my maternal grandfather who's like the Calvinist one. The Dust Bowl came and they were like in Oklahoma. And they're like, you know, one bedroom, one outhouse farm with a big family.And they're like, I think I'm going to stay. And they did. And he told me during the dressMalcolm Collins: bowl, like everyone's leaving. I don't know if you guys are ready to take a breath. You're the one family that's like farming has become so much more rewarding now that we're playing on, on a dark souls level difficulty.Simone Collins: It was very much like a, this is fine scenario, but like they were, they were actually refined. And they're just like, well, let's just eat fire now. Let's eat sand. He, he, he, he, like I have these memories. It was like sitting at this, at their dining room table and him showing me his photo albums and talking about the high school plays he was in and the fish pond that they made and how he would eat fish out of it.And like, they had very, very little. But he was very, very happy. And then the war came and he like went out of his way to like [00:33:00] lie about his eyesight and hide like this and that, so that he could go fight. And he was so proud about you know, dropping, you know, he was, he, he flew cargo planes, like dropping troops behind lines at D Day, like he just, he thought it was the best thing ever.He was, he, and like when, when he when he died he was found holding the, the, the memory books, the photo books from those times. Like that was what he, he saw. No, I think that my, like another side of my family got those because they live closer to him and, you know, got the stuff, but like, I'd love to get scans of the photos, but yeah.Yeah. So like these, this was his time. So again, hold on, but this isn'tMalcolm Collins: so great for everyone. Okay. I mentioned in the previous video about demons and like creating teams for our kids. It's like our family's intense desire to go to war. It is our cultural tradition. You know, and then ScottSimone Collins: Alexander, no, not just go to war, just like fricking struggle.Like, Oh, let me [00:34:00] stay.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Star slate codex piece. It's like the Calvinist tradition is They are generally against war, but rapidly pro every war that's ever happened. And if you look at something like my dad, like it's so funny, the way that he got out of the Vietnam war he so wanted to go. That he signed up, like, super early, underage, and then, so he was in, like, ROTC, and, like, really tried to get in early, and because he tried to get in so early, he was disqualified, and apparently was, like, psyched.Psychotically, like, interested in it. He was disqualified over something trivial to them. Which was like, a, a smallSimone Collins: knee injury. He got pulled across The sound his knees made when he walked, I think.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He calls them his Rice Krispies. I've never heard this. Yeah, but he really tried But then that disqualification stayed on his record.So he wasn't able to be drafted. Even though he really, really wanted to go to war early, early, early in the war.[00:35:00] So no, I mean, we see this you know, across the family, this, when a war happens, that they're like, just get me out there. Let's go. And you've seen this with me when, when various international events have happened.I'm like, should I, should I get on a plane? Should I go out there? Should I get a gun? Do you think they'd let me fight? And you're like, Malcolm, no, no, no. You need to stay here. You've got three f*****g kids. Take care of your kids.Simone Collins: I still think this was a huge missed opportunity though,I'm sure this is like highly illegal and there's no way this could ever exist, but like a travel business that would outfit and train, but in like the glamping sense. So, you know, like best gear, best, you know, like really nice hotels in their training session. Any, any person who wanted to go fight in an international conflict that was taking place, you know, like you can, you choose your package.Malcolm Collins: Just international conflicts where you're like, the good guys are really clear in this one.Simone Collins: Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Presumably it would beMalcolm Collins: anyway, we don't want to say which ones those are Simone. That's why we, weSimone Collins: will [00:36:00] keep our mouths shut on that front. But yeah, I'm sure there's just no way that that could ever happen, but it would make.It would make so much money and people would be so happy and they would die doing what they loved. But anyway. Anyway, Simone,Malcolm Collins: I absolutely love you. You are amazing. You create the hardship which motivates me to have kids.Simone Collins: Well, wait. Before we, before we end this, like. I, I, I see your disagreement with this guy arcotherian, primarily thatMalcolm Collins: he, I think he's pointing to a real phenomenon.Yeah. I do think that you know, the way that women's rights movements grew did hurt female fertility. I just don't think it's the solution. I think that I, so I'm,Simone Collins: I'm actually like, I'm a little bit more bullish on him than you would think, but for different reasons, like I also just read this essay by Jonathan Haidt.Where he, he had originally been like, ah, yes, like young progressive women are suffering mentally the most. And now he's changed his mind and he's like, Oh, actually like young men are not all right either. And [00:37:00] here's how and why. And specifically what he pointed out is all the ways in which young men are retreating from society.And again, this is like men are losing their status. They're checking out. They're not getting educated. They're not getting jobs or they're getting depressed. And it's showing up differently. Like, you know, I think generally women are much more likely to publicly complain about things. identify as depressed and say all these things.Whereas men don't, they're very quiet and they silently suffer and they just back out of society. The analyst studyMalcolm Collins: shows thisevents in their life as being worse than men perceive equivalent events in their life.Simone Collins: Yeah. So in other words, men are not the squeaky wheel in society. They're not saying, Oh, look at me.I'm suffering, but they are, they're being completely screwed over by society. And I do think that that's a really big issue. And I think that what this guy really I stepped on and pointed to that. I just not really thought of before was the role that relative male status in society plays in making marriage markets work.ButMalcolm Collins: everyone is suffering in society. And the point [00:38:00] is, is there any justification of that suffering? Any lean in where you say, Oh yeah, it's our suffering. I can say your suffering is real deal with it. It is so much less than your ancestors. So muchSimone Collins: less than your ancestry. I agree. But, but again, I, I think what's, what we're looking at here is a really interesting economic question of how do you allow for male excellence to return in society to, in a way that it, that, that enables marriage markets to recover and return.Because again, women preferMalcolm Collins: men, not an economic question. You can't do that. You can't unring this bell. What you need to do is you need to make cultural, not economic changes. Hmm. You need for people to see having kids as an. ExistentialSimone Collins: issue. But again, people aren't going to get married and aren't going to have kids.If women don't feel like they can find a guy who's, who's of slightly higher status than them. No,Malcolm Collins: many women will marry if culture shames them more for not marrying it and not having kids, then it shames them for marrying somebody lower status in them. I think [00:39:00] women are very status sensitive. They are.If you changed the reward mechanisms slightly, ever so slightly, you'd see a massive difference in results.Simone Collins: Mm, well and maybe it's about framing where status comes from. So if we reframe that status is not You know, what master's or bachelor's degree you have, you know, it's about like, you know, your earning level and your achievement and your initiative, then like, yeah, men are, men are going to be able to make a comeback perhaps.And I don't even think this isMalcolm Collins: the issue. I mean, we have this journalist right now who's talking to us, she's writing a book and she keeps hampering on to this point is how can progressive women find husbands right? Without compromising their values, i. e. without compromising at all. And the answer is you can't because your values are evil.no, sorry.Simone Collins: Well, no, because both sides, both men and women today have [00:40:00] very unreasonable standards. The young men that we meet all want models who somehow are alsoMalcolm Collins: really smart. And they think they'll find them on these international trips, and they won't. They areSimone Collins: deluded. No, no, they, they are finding models.It's just that these models are not value aligned and they're not going to pull their weight in the relationship. They're going to, these are going to be toxic relationships in which the men are basically put into unsustainable roles. The women are put into unsustainable roles. It's a disaster waiting to happen.And but women are the same way. They, everyone expects a perfect partner out of the box. They don't realize that this is a thing you have to build over time with an imperfect person that you make perfect through your joint commitment to shared values and goals and everything. So I agree with you. I, I still though I, I, I have from this point onward, I'm not convinced completely by your argument.I do think that there needs to be a way. To, to give men more space in society, that there is a huge amount of bias. We'll say from like, just from a bureaucratic perspective, as this guy pointed out that,Malcolm Collins: that sort of like, I agree, Simone and whether or [00:41:00] not women should have less rights is something you can think about while you're in your cage tonight.Your wife cage, my wifeSimone Collins: cage. And well, I'm, you know,Malcolm Collins: yeah, I'm joking by the way, we don't have a wife cage, butit's, it's a luxury model, honestly. It's, it's nice. Okay. It's like a little chain that goes around the kitchen and she can walk around.Simone Collins: People are going to believe you though. They're like, there's a lot of people who have little like dungeons in their houses with like actual little cages. They're, they're totally going to believe that weMalcolm Collins: Right?That I have a wife cage. Yeah. We, we don't. Whether or not women should have fewer rights and that they would then be satisfied.Simone Collins: But I know, I don't, I don't think women should have fewer rights. I just feel like men are uniquely disempowered and disenfranchised right now, right? I feel like there's a lack ofMalcolm Collins: correction.I agree with that, but I don't think it's as much as Black Pillars said.Simone Collins: Agreed. No, totally. But, you know, totally, totally overdone. So, yeah. Anyway, thought this [00:42:00] was interesting. Love you. You are amazing. Goodbye. Ciao, ciao, ciao. And you are a goodMalcolm Collins: wife. Kiss, kiss. Love. Bye, bye. And yeah, I guess I sort of cheated by playing this hottest.Simone Collins: Bye, Malcolm. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe