Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Unseen Insights: Mormon Fertility Trends and Cultural Dynamics In this special episode of Basecamp, we delve into exclusive data regarding fertility trends among the Mormon community, contributed by one of our listeners. Through a study involving 310 members from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, fascinating trends emerge among different age and religiosity groups. We discuss the rapid transition to wokeness, fertility collapse, and the impact of cultural pride versus deontological religious rules on fertility rates. The episode explores clan-based versus communalist moral systems and their influence on Mormon society, offering intriguing insights into the future of Mormon demographics and culture.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] HeLlo, Simone, I am excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be having a very special episode where we are going to be giving you Basecamp listeners access to exclusive data that no one else has seen. And you know why? Because one of you put it together.

Yes.

So anyway, I was talking with this fan, and he is saying, anecdotally, as a Mormon so, obviously he has a lot of insight into what the Mormons are doing, the fertility rate among the Mormon community, he goes, it seems to me that the most religious of Mormons are having two big issues.

One is, is they are going woke much faster than other Mormons. Like, the individuals within their communities seem to go woke at a higher rate than other communities.

 He noted. This mostly happens when they deconvert, but this is still a problem because their kids will be going to the same schools

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: which can become a drain on the community overall.

Malcolm Collins: And two is, they just seem to be being hit by fertility collapse much harder. than just generically religious Mormons. [00:01:00] And I was like, that's a really interesting observation.

Would you mind trying a study on that? And he actually went on and did a study and a big one. He got 310 people involved in this.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: And so, he found out that his hypothesis was born out in the data and It gives us one of the keys for a new theory at solving fertility collapse that I have been building.

Simone Collins: Oh, yummy. I'm excited for this.

Malcolm Collins: I'm quoting him right now in an email where he sent the data to me. I took it upon myself to do a study on age, religiosity, and fertility among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.

Everyone in the study has strong ties to the state of Utah and still maintains some relationship. For some, it may be very complicated, with Mormons as a cultural group. This is based on a random sampling of 310 people I found on Facebook for the study. They are divided into six groups. Groups 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, with [00:02:00] 1 being least religious and 6 being most religious.

Findings were stark. Among those aged 65 the correlation between religiosity and fertility was 0. 8%. They had an average of f 4. 53. So 65 and older for a 4. 5 average fertility r mormon. But that's also w Remember mormons used to

For and younger. The fertility rates dropped dramatically among those 35 to 64. The correlation between religiosity and fertility rate was 0. 16. So, no, it dropped to a rather low level. It dropped from 0. 45 to 0. 16 in this next generation. And I'm going to, you know, I think what's really happening here and why this hasn't been picked up in data yet is, I think that this is a new phenomenon.

Where in some religious traditions within the [00:03:00] modern post cell phone generation generation. Fertility rates drop as religiosity enters extreme ranges. But we'll, we'll, we'll talk more about the data here. Going back to the quote, what appears to be the case is that among the strongly religious, they started having kids less, but among those less religious, they still had cultural reasons to have kids.

35 to 64, Age cohort had a fertility rate of 2.92. Among those age 25 to 34, the correlation between religiosity and fertility was 0.32, so much stronger than the 35 to 64 group, but not as high as the 65 plus age group. They currently have a fertility rate of 1.1, but I expect this group to eventually have 0.9 more children on average.

So round out to about two barely below replacement rate

Simone Collins: so wait, you meant 2.1 then.

Malcolm Collins: You just

Simone Collins: said 1. 1 earlier.

Malcolm Collins: No, they have a current fertility rate of [00:04:00] 1. 1, but he expects them to have an additional 0. 9 kids as they age. Oh, oh, sorry, of

Simone Collins: this sample. Okay, yeah, sorry, okay, now I'm following.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, I don't cut out when you misunderstand something, because other people have pointed out in the comments, they're like, if Simone has misunderstood something, more than half your audience Not

Simone Collins: everyone is as sleep deprived as Simone.

So, that's Maybe not, but yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well then honestly you should be going to bed earlier and putting the kids to bed earlier because they're really tired when I wake them up, which to me implies that they're not going down. They're refusing to go to bed. Simone, if you get them in the room alone earlier, they'll go to bed earlier.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Sorry, this is our parenting negotiation here. Being a bad, bad husband, just being to like, you have to get more sleep wife. I demand it. No choice do you have in the matter? Okay. Previously. I thought these trends would only appear for those born post 1980, but the data clearly shows them emerging for those.

Born post [00:05:00] 1960. So the internet was not the major factor here. Oh, I was wrong. Yeah. Okay. I would say it may deal more with economic factors, but I'm not entirely sure. Furthermore, I , acknowledge the largest limitation to the study. is mere subjectively rating people one to six, but I feel like it's not too different than doing the same thing with people on the Jewish spectrum by analyzing clothing, style, aesthetics, activities, language, et cetera.

I also acknowledge that my Facebook may be a slightly higher fertility sample than average but I'm unsure about this. This is where it gets interesting. For the 64 plus age group, the fertility rate for those most religious six rating, their fertility rate was 5.4. Most of the other religious groups hovered around four, so boomers and the silent generation Mormons usually had around four-ish kids on average.

Obviously some as high as seven in sizeable numbers. and somewhere as low as two in sizable numbers. However, for the 35 to 64 age group, the most religious, a six [00:06:00] rating, the fertility rate collapsed to 3. 21. But the group that was rated as four actually rose to 5. 27 from 4. 4 in the older cohort.. So I want to make this clear. In the younger cohort, as time has gone on, the The fertility rate of less religious Mormons has gone up, not down.

Okay? So Mormons who considered themselves slightly less religious than half of Mormons. Oh no, wait, so sorry, what was the four group? It went up to six. So, Three was average. So these are people who consider themselves slightly more religious than the average Mormon but are not at the five or six level.

So these are individuals who would have some Mormon friends, some non Mormon friends, but would generally follow all of the rules and blah blah blah blah blah.

Okay.

Their fertility rate has gone up as overall Mormon fertility rate has been collapsing. Where it's been collapsing is in the ultra religious cohort.[00:07:00]

Simone Collins: Doesn't that dovetail well with your argument around

Malcolm Collins: deontological religious systems being the core failure?

Simone Collins: No, pluralism being a driver of fertility. When you're more surrounded by groups that are different from you, you feel inspired to have more of your own group out of a feeling of pride.

Malcolm Collins: That's likely a big thing here.

So we've noted here that the more immigrants the country has typically the higher the native groups fertility rate becomes and the more animosity immigrant groups have with each other or the more culturally distinct they are the higher the fertility rate. I think this is a big thing sort of subsidizing Israel's fertility rate.

Well, and

Simone Collins: it's also you could look at it. As a cultural pride thing, when you discover what it is that makes you special, it makes you proud to perpetuate that. If you don't see what's special about what you have because you're surrounded by it, you have less of a motivation to try to do your part to continue it.

Malcolm Collins: This is actually something that he, he, he looked for. So, to be in the five and six categories, specifically in the sixth category. It meant that almost all of your friend group was Mormon at that [00:08:00] point.

So, and apparently this is a thing among devout Mormons, like super devout Mormons just don't have many friends who aren't devout Mormons as well.

And so it leads to this You know that would definitely you're right there. I actually think that this is partly down to deontological relationship with religion versus non deontological relationship with a religion And in mormonism, it's very easy to build a deontological relationship to a religion.

Yeah to a

Simone Collins: fault in fact a lot of practicing mormons that i've met focus only on the deontological element not even really believing in the faith at all just being like I go through the motions because I like the community Yeah, but they don't do it for a reason, you know?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and this, this, this creates downstream negative effects, but we'll get to this at the end of the lecture, not the lecture episode.

I don't know. Whatever. Everything of mine is a lecture. I'm sorry, people. I used to, I used to teach classes. So that's, that's why you

Simone Collins: grew up on the great courses. Of course you believe in, in lectures.

Malcolm Collins: For people who don't know there was [00:09:00] this great company teach one, two, where now you can get a subscription and just listen to their, I thought it was

Simone Collins: referred to as the teaching company.

Now you can get

Malcolm Collins: company, but I'm just saying teach one, two. com is, is, is their URL, but it originally used to offer these absolutely amazing courses where they would find the best professors at like tons of different universities. I've heard that the quality of their courses has gone downhill recently and I found the same thing.

When I've reengaged, I haven't been like as drawn in as I was by the old stuff. It depends.

Simone Collins: There's a lot of variation. So they still have, it's now known as Wondrium. You can get an app and then you sort of buy a subscription to get access to their library of courses. And so you don't have to buy courses individually, like you used to have to, to get big tapes of them.

The problem is that now there is more variation. So for example, I'd love all of their courses by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, but you know, you can also get a lot of stuff by him for free, or you can just read his books. But those are really great. There are others that just kind of suck. So yeah, it

Malcolm Collins: depends. For people who've read the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion.

I mentioned that you should divide your life into stages. Like that's the way my life was [00:10:00] taught to me by my parents. Like between X age and X age, this is your focus. And I was taught up until a certain age, like my entire focus in life was to prepare myself, like make myself the best tool possible for changing the world.

And that. Part of doing that was education. And I knew like in high school, I just wasn't getting a high enough quality education. So I would spend all of my free time listening to lectures in my early jobs when I had to do like boring sorts of just like lab work all day. That wasn't cognitively engaging.

I'd spend all day listening to lecture series. So, you know, these lecture series are typically like 24 48 hours long in total. So, you know, It was an opportunity for me just to basically constantly be blasted with lectures to get a college level education. It was something your family

Simone Collins: also always did on long car rides.

You would listen to them. I think it's a great thing for a family to do your mom still every morning while doing her yoga.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. My family built it as a normalized thing that you should always have lectures on. And [00:11:00] I remember when I bought them at a young kid, they're really expensive. So, they, and this was in the nineties, you know, I think it would

Simone Collins: cost in the nineties like 130 and that it would cost a hundred

Malcolm Collins: to 500 depending on the lectures.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I think these days, yeah. They, they almost charged what you would pay. For an actual course at a not even a community college more than that,

Malcolm Collins: but you could get them really cheap if you bought them on cassette or not really cheap, but like in the less expensive, like 70 range sometimes.

So I buy these big books of cassettes. If anybody remembers those old cassette books, this was long after anyone was using cassettes. And I just have a cassette player all the time. Also because you still have them

Simone Collins: by the way,

Malcolm Collins: did a very good job of holding my place in the lecture. And so, I remember once I was jogging in gym class and one of the teachers pulled me aside and they go, Oh my God, was your family, because you're from Florida, right?

Were they one of the ones hit by the hurricane? Like, is that why you always have all this cheap technology?

And I

realized I could use this because I, I didn't like to change out of my [00:12:00] dress shoes before running because it was such a pain in the ass and I was like, Oh yes. And then I didn't have to change out of my dress shoes anymore before running because you were

Simone Collins: too poor.

I was too poor. Yeah. Poor. Oh

Malcolm Collins: no.

Simone Collins: Sorry. I derailed us. Let's go back. Let's get back

Malcolm Collins: here. I have to go back to the thing. Religious rating 5 remained roughly stable, and ratings 1 to 3 plunged. Currently, for the 25 to 34 age cohort, the fertility rates are as follows. 1, 0. 27, 2, 0. 49, 3, 1. 43, 4, 1. 89, 5, 1. 41, and 6, 1.

23. So I want to note here, if you were like, graphing this, the graph would peak at 4, and then start going down when you get to 5 and 6. And that 3 actually has a higher fertility rate than 5.

Simone Collins: That's [00:13:00] very interesting. So it

Malcolm Collins: peaks on the early side. Yeah. So, so you want to be in the three or four cohort, not in the five or six cohorts in terms of what I expect.

And this is even among the very young kids, right? So we're still seeing this effect in the young kids in terms of what I would expect these numbers to be. Eventually these women are still having children is the following. He goes , 1. 05. 2, 1. 31, 3, 2. 31, 4, 2. 91, 5, 2. 39, and 6, 2. 25. The groups currently have a standard deviation of the following.

1 at 0. 56, 2 at 6. 36, 0. 69, 3 at 1. 04, 4 at 1. 13, 5 at 1. 38, and 6 at 1. 19. The implications of this as far are as follows. For whatever reason, devout LDS born [00:14:00] after 1960 started having far fewer children. Lower religiosity Mormons born after 1988 will have fertility rates comparable to secular society at large.

Moderately religious Mormons born since 1960 have on average the most kids. Four being the highest rating with three and five being virtually the same for younger Mormon women, but five being much higher for Gen X Mormon women. The theory is that those with And no, he has a lot of beliefs about different and I'm not actually going into all of his emails because I just don't have enough information and there's not enough data to say that his observed theories are correct, but he thinks this mostly that the difference in which religiosity group somebody falls into has a lot to do with what immigration.

Oh, interesting. The Mormon church with different parts of England and different motivators Well, and, and, and Germany and stuff like that, and different motivators for the immigration, leading to them falling into [00:15:00] different categories of sort of the Mormon faith. But just have that in your mind while I'm reading this next part.

The theory is that those with Yankee slash heritage cultural background among Utah Mormons had collapsing fertility rates in the 1960 1990 period. Among the other high income and highly educated, they were able to maintain high fertility rates for those born 1960 to 1980, but afterwards. This dropped precipitously.

Some of

these high income slash education still have higher fertility and this explains the higher standard deviation, 1. 38 for this group. The group that is doing the best right now is likely part of what one would call the trustee slash clan based family structure, which there are an abundant amount of in Utah.

Perhaps 10 percent of the total LDS population belongs to one. This group leans more working class, is extremely Trump coded, while the further away one is from four, the less that they are, and typically much more quote unquote red state in their culture, more culturally Western and vaguely Southern, as opposed to [00:16:00] waspy.

And he showed me pictures of this group and they, they do exist across the Mormon religiosity spectrum. And we'll talk about this more in the next video because what was really interesting for me is they didn't set off my pod person instinct and the other type of highly religious Mormon does set off my pod person instinct.

And this was just really interesting to me, to me, when I looked at them, I was like, Oh, they're culturally similar to me, or, or if not culturally similar, like they come off as like normal people to me, to me. And not like, weird, otherworldly WASPy people which, which was very interesting.

Speaker 2: I don't think you've

Speaker 5: had enough pie. Why don't you have one more?

No, no, I'm fine. I really think you should have more pie. Have more pie. Try some

Speaker: pie.

Speaker 5: Well, I just had a piece, you know, I mean

Speaker 2: Try the pie. Try the pie. Try

Speaker 5: it.

Speaker 4: Try the pie. Try the pie. Try the pie. Try the pie.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Tomorrow's episode is going to focus much more on the pod person, instinct that some people have that causes them to be sort of instinctually freaked out [00:17:00] when people show, , a degree of conformity. To a central authority. , ,

And, and tried to delineate exactly what signals elucidate this. As well as the cultural impact that the pod person. Indistinct has had, but.

The type of Mormons that do not trigger this pod person instinct.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: Culturally speaking often have a lot of similarities to each other.

Malcolm Collins: Typically, these are the types of people who would wear a lot of camouflage or American flags. Be a bit more tan you know, look a bit more like they drive a pickup truck that sort of thing. And that is not all Mormons that fall into this category.

It's, it's actually quite different from mainstream Mormon culture. What this means long term is that Mormons genetically, based on reproductive fitness trends among the Utah Mormons, are becoming more Danish and somewhat more borderland slash Celtic and are becoming less Anglo.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: So to fill in a bit of what he's saying here from other parts of his theory that I didn't take time to fully read, and this is anecdotal evidence, [00:18:00] not stuff that he picked up in the data, but he suspects that the Anglo Mormons, , who predominantly came from some parts of England and where some of the first of the Mormon settlers. , fall much more into this deontological religious extremist category of Mormon.

, and that later.

Scotch Irish groups who moved from the borderlands regions into the Mormon territory or from, , Denmark into Mormon territory. , they focus much more on this clan based moral structure. And that, , that has prevented them from becoming as ideologically extreme. , but also given them more pride in their family and cultural heritage. I E they breed a lot, not because there's a set of rules telling them to breed a lot, but because they have pride in their.

Family and Mormon identity.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: That's a great example of somebody like this in a different tradition is PG Keenan, who we had on the show recently. , and a lot of people in the comments were saying things like, oh, you finally had a Catholic on the show and they [00:19:00] don't know their theology. , this specifically we asked her a theological question and she was like, oh, I don't know that one. , and I think that this represents. A perfect example of somebody who is motivated to breed and takes great pride in her Catholic identity, but isn't particularly worried about. Deontological perfectionism or theological perfectionism.

And this mindset appears to be the mindset that is most successful in the current age. We, , actually after the episode, Simone was having a conversation with one of our, , Catholic fans, , who was another woman, was a lot of kids. And she was saying the same thing. , in other words, in one of her answers, just Simone, where there was some theological point that came up and she goes, yeah, I just don't really think about it much.

, and I think that this mindset, while it may be denigrated by the theological nerds, Which are the type of people who watch this show is actually the [00:20:00] most robust mindset. To resist fertility collapse.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: gosh, on a second revision of this, now that I think about it, I've also noticed that same thing from the Jews that watch our podcasts that we talked to. , well, we talked to a lot of like, Orthodox Jews that watch this podcast. The ones that are theologically most competent and most interested in the theological questions. Almost all are unmarried or have no kids.

Whereas the ones that are more focused on Jewish identity. And pride in Jewish identity. . Do you have lots of kids?

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-7: And I think this helps elucidate one of the purposes behind sort of the techno period 10 project that we've been working on, which is to say.

It's very important for me. Intergenerational fertility perspective. To identify what it means to be part of your culture, what your culture is about and who you are as a people. And so even if you don't feel like [00:21:00] you may have a history or one of the existing cultures that you want to glom on to, you can build your own, just make sure it's distinct and communicated to your children. And something that you take pride in and something that they might be able to choose to take pride in as well.

Malcolm Collins: I believe that Mormons age 65 plus were much more dysgenic and are selected than those under 35 Being much more case selective.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-9: So first, what is case selected versus our selected mean. , our selected species are typically species that specialize in having tons of offspring, but don't put a lot of parental involvement into them. Think of like the hundreds of turtles going down from the beach and some of them getting eaten by like crabs and seagulls that we talked about in the PG Keenan episode. , but , a K selected species is one that invests a huge amount of parental time in just one particular offspring or, well, never one particular.

I was bringing any species that did, that would go extinct, but, but fewer offspring. The problem here being is that. [00:22:00] Within a species, you don't get a bifurcation of case selected. Our selected strategies, especially within humans. , this is a, between species comparison thing, and it doesn't really make sense to think of humans as either case selected or are selected strategies because.

Generally the humans who have tons of kids or the cultural groups that have tons of kids. Also put more effort into raising those kids. Then the humans who have very few kids in addition to that, then there's been a lot of studies done on this. The amount of effort you put into raising every individual kid doesn't. Lower the amount of effort you have for other kids.

So if you look at like a graph of families, based on how many children they have and the success, likelihood and adulthood of those children, , it's just not a huge correlation. You're not really hurting your other children's potential outcome by having more children.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-11: Also one thing you may note in this graph [00:23:00] is that children with. One sibling actually do better than children with no siblings and children was two siblings do even better than children with just one sibling. So the idea that, oh, I just have one kid I'm going to focus tons of resources into raising that one kid. And then they'll be better off than if they had a sibling or two siblings.

That's just factually untrue. Your first kid is helped by the first other kid you have. Then those two kids are helped by the next kid you have. And after that, Any degree, which they could be hurt is just really not that bad. So for example, If you're raising four kids on average, those kids are going to have better outcomes than somebody who was raising just one kid.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-9: And finally I note is that the. Few groups in history.

, the Backwoods culture that we'll talk about more tomorrow, and we talked about in yesterday's lecture. Could be [00:24:00] thought of as like plausibly are selected in the way that they structured their clans in that they offer almost no parental resources, which is one of the things we're going to talk about tomorrow.

They were really just like, okay, half a ton of kids. , and you kids work together to figure it out, but I'm not gonna, help you in any way. , and therefore a lot of them died

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-12: Or didn't end up securing spouses than having kids if their own.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-9: and then people can be like, well, that's a horrible way to do it. But if you don't do things that way, if you lean too far on case like activity, , then you don't get any intergenerational improvement because you don't have the fitter of the, the offspring being the ones who end up continuing the line.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-13: Or the fitter variants of the culture being the ones that continue the line with the assumption that every offspring is going to alter the culture, to some extent.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-9: You basically are artificially propping up whichever random ones you do happen to have through the, , immense attention that you're focusing on them and money you're pouring into their education, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

, which intergenerationally [00:25:00] is going to have really negative effects for that culture.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-10: A culture that is not okay.

With its less fit. Offspring failing is a culture that is going to eventually die.

However. Ignoring all this K R stuff. , Eve we're thinking about this type of Mormon that I was talking about earlier, that does seem to be pretty high fertility in our current environment. And doesn't set off my pod person detector.

Malcolm Collins: Like a mormon who codes this way to me Kevin dolan is a mormon who codes this way to me, you know, one of our mormon friends where to me he feels much more Western than Mormon, like waspy. I, I guess I would say like the, the primary thing I would look for here is how sort of like preening do they come off as.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: In his letters to me, he used the term trustee to describe this clan based, Section of Mormon culture. And one of the really interesting things he pointed out about the trustee section of Mormon culture was that. Unlike the rest of Mormon culture, they're much more outdoorsy. , more [00:26:00] focused on, , fishing and hiking and skiing and stuff like that.

And he noted , how actually unusual stuff like skiing and outdoors-y stuff is for people on the Zubie side of Mormon culture. Given how. Much of a paradise, Utah is for these sorts of activities.,

Malcolm Collins: he says that this difference and we'll go into it more in the next episode, is something called being a a a, a a zoomie, I believe a zubie, a zubie. Which is a term that Mormons would know, but I wouldn't know. And I was reading, here's a quote about what Zubis are.

You can tell a Zubi by appearance only, although there are a certain stereotyped look. Preppy sweater boys and plastic girls are often associated with Zubi hood. But yeah, continuing off of other trends and assumptions this gene pool is now deselecting those with 110 IQs, but has become increasingly technophilic with some small reactionary groups, often six in religiosity [00:27:00] being technophobic. This means that future Mormons, often coming from trustee slash clan families in the three to four range will be of IQ 90 types, but they may be higher educated types.

That if they do reproduce some will be group five and two will have a higher amount of the iq 130 types I foresee similar conditions to exist for the next 30 to 40 years And that group fives fertility will stabilize around 2. 3 right now I've noticed influencers are still having lots of kids like at least four so there may be a real possibility a future Genes in Utah will select even more for increased sociability, extroversion, performance skills, verbal IQ over spatial IQ, hand eye coordination, and other related traits, and conventionally attractive looks that would support this.

Bottom line, Until the world radically revolutionized, those groups three and four will continue to have kids out of cultural pride. Honestly, there's almost as much local pride here as Texas, and a big part [00:28:00] of that is having large families and will be the most fertile group until there is either one radical changes in the outside global cultural environment or two radical changes in the LDS church demanding higher fertility.

I don't see either one of these happening mid century. Now, this is really interesting, and he makes a really strong point here. Cultural pride in the current landscape, like the current social technological landscape, is a better motivator of high fertility than deontological religious rules. And what we are seeing is the Mormons in this ultra high religiosity category, they are likely motivated more by what the church is telling them to do and the church rules.

And this does not appear to be good enough to overcome fertility collapse and the drivers of fertility class. However, the Mormons in this. I'm an average Mormon or I'm a bit more Mormon than the average Mormon. This group is primarily motivated by cultural pride.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And their cultural pride [00:29:00] motivation is what is actually able to drive high fertility.

And in fact, in the age of social media leads to an increase rather than a decrease in this cultural group's fertility.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that checks out with what. I see in social media, the Mormons who are very active aren't the most devout Mormons by any stretch of the imagination, they kind of cheat or skirt on the rules a ton, but they clearly Are generating pride and they themselves have a lot of pride in their church and religion.

So that is really interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah well, I mean the gatekeepers are doing nothing but hurting their church Basically the ones who are not a true mormon unless unless unless unless where you know I think that that what we're seeing here is that those deontological mormons those preacher boy type mormons need to look to this other group To learn from them.

And I think [00:30:00] that this is something that you know, we can also see in the United States where you see things like the collapsing fertility rate of the Orthodox Christians and the Catholic Christians, who I think traditionally saw themselves as more of this preacher boy type character when they're, when they're altered about than the more vulgar you know, Protestant or Appalachian groups and it's because these groups just have more pride in who they are, and they're not motivating fertility was a set of rules, but it's because they like existing and they like people like them existing.

So let's, let's keep that going. Right. You know, so, and here I know one final point for those born After 1960, among this population group, I theorize that those who are in groups one and six have damaging slash complicated slash negative relationships with sexuality, especially forms of sexuality that are pronatal, and those who are in groups three and four are the opposite, with twos and fives being in between.

. And, and I note here Yeah, I definitely see this is there's this new [00:31:00] like a group of Mormons who are becoming more sexually comfortable and we'll do an episode on the Mormon swinger phenomenon Because apparently like swinger culture has gotten really big among Mormons because they get married or it's

Simone Collins: just these moms of mom talk Yeah, I mean,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no.

No, I've heard from other Mormons online They're like, oh, yeah, like you go to ex friends house and you'll see signs that it's been happening like but it's a really weird sort of swinger culture because they believe the only way to do it without cheating is to watch them sleeping with somebody, like if the husband or wife is in the room watching you.

Well, my understanding

Simone Collins: is that the the swinging is anything but actual PIV intercourse.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I think it's usually like oral and hand jobs. Yeah. So it's,

Simone Collins: I think also the, the, the Mormon religion is, is kind of. It's one of those loopholes where like, if you're not going to be super persnickety about things, the whole, you know, sex before marriage thing, you know, it doesn't count if it's [00:32:00] oral, that's not sex.

And so that's pretty pervasive, et cetera, you know, things, things like that. So I could see that is not counting as sex outside of marriage because. It's not technically sex, but anyway,

Malcolm Collins: well, and I know there's some Mormons here being like, Oh no, those Mormons are the worst. And I'm like, those Mormons represent the hope for your religion.

And that's,

Simone Collins: that's, what's really surprising me about this message that normally you think it's. And we've even kind of shared this message that it's the religious extremists that are going to, you know, carry forward their religious legacies and their people, and they're going to inherit the future of those groups.

And yet here it's essentially the moderates that represent the future of the LDS church, which is the last thing I was going to expect you to say, but it makes so much sense. And I should have thought, well, of course.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Now I've been doing more research, and it appears that the level of trustee slash clanness may correlate more strongly than even the religious group rating.

What I've realized is that for whatever reason, [00:33:00] trustee slash clan Mormon families concentrate on level 4, 1 6 religiosity group. Now, Here we need to take a stop because remember I said at the end of yesterday's episode for anyone who hasn't watched that you might want to watch it in preparation for tomorrow's episode because these three episodes are sort of all building to the conclusion that while I think that these things matter, like the pure vitalism of a group matters, which can be matters in terms of murder rates.

That's what we talked about yesterday. Or Going for a clan based structure versus a deontological structure, like a group pride versus following a set of rules matters in terms of fertility, right? I actually think the key to all of this is his 2nd observation, which he goes into a lot more data about.

But unfortunately, it comes from a lot of personal observations of family members and stuff like that. So I can't go too deep into all of that. But That within the Mormon culture, the people who have clan [00:34:00] based moral frameworks appear to be able to maintain really high fertility rates and the people who don't have clan based moral frameworks and people have communalist based moral frameworks have are the ones whose moral Or whose fertility is collapsing,

And it makes perfect sense that the communalist would cluster at the edge of the, the fives and sixes in terms of being the most Mormons and the planners would concentrate in the threes and fours.

So, to understand what I mean by the difference between a clan based moral system and a, a, a communalist based moral system, and we're contrasting these individualist based moral system, because people often make the mistake. They're like, right, they're an individualist. For your communalist is like, no, there's actually 3 moral systems, clan based individualist and communalist.

So if I ask a clan based moral system into person, like, what, who are you? Right? Their 1st thought is, I am a member of my clan. So, if I was going to explain this, and we'll go into this a lot more tomorrow, if somebody said. [00:35:00] Hey, Malcolm, you know, like when I was growing up, how were morals taught to me? I was never taught things in terms of like moral absolutism.

Like this is a good or a bad thing to do. It was, you are a Collins and this is what is expected of Collins's. Collins's have, and it was, it was taught to me as if Collins's have a stricter and higher moral standard expected of them than the general population. And that the general population is just basically Degenerates, and you shouldn't expect anything of them.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-15: generally, if somebody is in one of these clan based moral systems, the fear. Is falling into the communalist space moral system. So to explain what I mean by that, you know, growing up, I was taught while you're a Collins and these are the things expected of Collins is, and I would, you know, see all of my wider family achieving these things.

And my fear was if I didn't achieve those things, well, then I'm not a Collins anymore. I'm just a Mormon. I'm just a regular Mormon now.

Malcolm Collins: Now, there are two ways that you can, if you're a Mormon teach [00:36:00] moral systems to people, right? You could be the communalist, and say, You are a Mormon, and this is what Mormons do.

Okay? Or you could say,

You are a Collins, Who happens to be a Mormon, like the Collinses are a type of Mormon, and this is what Collinses do. So why would this, this clan based thing lead to a more centralized position on the religiosity scale? It's because if you primarily identify with Mormonism instead of your family tradition, then you're just gonna follow everything the church says.

Everything the church says is what you follow. So you're going to fall at the extreme end of the religious spectrum. But, if you are first a Collins, Well, we're Collins is break Mormon rules or where you're

allowed to break moral rules and where you

should have stricter rules. And so that makes perfect sense, you know, for example, if you look at a lot of these clan based women, so they'll be a little looser on, like, how they wear their undergarments and stuff like that, [00:37:00] where they'll hike it up a bit more.

And it's like, okay, well. That's technically not being ultra religious, but if your cousins are doing it and they're still considered home to the family. And I should note, one thing about clan based systems that people who didn't grow up in the United States have to point out now, is they're really quick to throw someone out.

So when I look at like my wider cousin group and I'm like, I always compare myself to family members, that's where I'm judging myself. Like, am I doing a good job in life? How should I be approaching, you know, what success is defined? What basic ethical constraints am I dealing with? When one of them doesn't perform up to family standards, I just sort of stop.

Using them is one of the measures of comparison that I have access to. And I suspect that's the way these Mormon clans work as well, which is what prevents them from dropping off as quickly. If somebody leaves the church or stops following tons of rules, and they're clearly no longer acting according with the clan's, like, moral [00:38:00] system you stop using them as somebody to judge yourself off of.

And so, they don't end up pulling you down. And in tomorrow's video, we're going to get really into why clan based systems are so super, super resistant to fertility collapse and why communalist systems. You can immediately see why communalist systems are so susceptible to fertility collapse. Because you are always going to be affected by outside culture if you are a communalist.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and so if your outside culture becomes infected or toxic, you're more likely So essentially, there's less, There's less quarantining. So if there is a cultural infection that is sterilizing, you will not be protected from it. Whereas if you're, if you're in a clan based culture, you may survive it because you're isolated

Malcolm Collins: sufficiently.

Yeah. I think that there's a secondary thing here, which is genetic. And this is again, as many people know, I think people make the [00:39:00] mistake of assuming that human sociological profiles human sociological profiles are clearly genetically correlated. Like, we've seen this in the data over and over again.

It's like, 60%. But people make the mistake of assuming that genetically correlated means falling into ethnic buckets instead of falling into very recent selection events i. e. immigration waves, stuff like that, which is actually where. A lot more of the concentration happens.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-16: So the word this a different way.

, I think I remember from my old psychology classes, it was around a quarter of people experienced some form of auditory hallucination. Now Mormons regularly will ask God what they should do in specific circumstances. So speaking to God is a regular thing that most Mormons do. , now, if I am living by a Mormon community, whether I am, you know, black or Hispanic or anything like that, and I happen to be subject to auditory, hallucinations, and a Mormon says, well, if you're not sure what religion you should be, why don't you just ask God? , I am going to be [00:40:00] dramatically more likely to convert to Mormonism.

If I have this genetic script for auditory hallucinations. , which means that this can concentrate super, super fast in a population like Mormons or Quakers. , when other populations may not have it much at all. And if I am a Mormon who doesn't experience these auditory hallucinations, and I keep trying to talk to God and he never responds, I might be much more likely to deconvert. And that's how you can get these genetic clusters. , occurring really, really quickly.

But then this also would happen with something like a communalist mindset or a clan based mindset of a specific group of Mormons really leans into communalist based ways of thinking they are going to disproportionately convert people, whatever their ethnic or cultural background. , that lean more communalist around them.

However, having a genetic propensity for communalism can help cause a really negative side effect, which we talked about earlier, which is once you deconvert well, now what's your new communalist source of information.

It's the urban monoculture. And that's [00:41:00] why. , this would explain why the most extremely religious Mormons, when they deconvert become the most extremely woke individuals, whereas clan based people when they deconvert, they're still. Moderated by their clan. They might have deacon burden, but they're still a Collins.

You know, they're still looking to the clan for a sort of core moral centering.

Finally I note here is that I suspect that people with a. Genetic predilection towards a communalist moral framework. Even if they are like Mormon, Mormon. I E they, they want to be as Mormon as possible. They are going to be subconsciously influenced by the urban mono culture, given how much it dominates our society, much more than somebody who has been genetically selected intergenerationally for a clan based moral framework.

Malcolm Collins: And so I think if you have been for a few generations in a communalist culture versus a a clan based culture the genetic.

Correlates that you're going [00:42:00] to be selecting for are going to be the ones that that look to society around you to try to determine the social norms that you're setting for yourself. And these people who used to only be surrounded by Mormons now, in terms of the, the images that they're seeing in the media, they're seeing are just going to see more non Mormons and be comfortable.

Correlating themselves with those individuals. Also, they were motivating their moral behavior through what they saw in what's the word I'm looking for here? Like deontological rule sets. And those deontological rule sets they are no longer at play right now. And so, um, well, when I say they're no longer at play, they're no longer strong enough to overcome the urban monoculture.

Well, they're no longer

Simone Collins: protective. I think what you're saying is they're no longer protective. And, and there were environments in which they were probably. And if they are not adapted in the face [00:43:00] of new technology and globalization and other elements that render old rules ineffective, then yeah, they won't matter anymore.

And

Malcolm Collins: clan based moral systems are primarily motivated by pride.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And I would say they're, they're more adaptable in the end, because most clan based systems, which I imagine you will discuss more later. Are they reward the successful family members who then dictate the future of the clan's culture?

Meaning that people can adapt and those who do adapt to changes and to technological progress are going to help the culture iterate,

Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah, they adapt much faster. And think about it like within a clan based moral system And he was noting this in other emails to me that they've gone way more technophilic Than the deontological communalist mormons who are at the extremist end of their religion these individuals Have not become like all coders and everything like that.

Whereas the clan based people have and I think it's because [00:44:00] They, they genuinely are motivated by wanting to be better than other people, like have their clan be better than other clans and other people and stuff like that, and pride in their individual clan. So, if they see a societal arbitrage opportunity, like, engaging with technology, they're going to do it.

Whereas the other community is just not going to do it as quickly. They're like, well, is this what our people have always done? You know, whereas. A clan based person will be like, well, my cousin who I know is a devout Mormon is currently working in crypto. Therefore it's okay to work in crypto. My cousin, who's a devout Mormon is currently working in AI tech.

So I can go work in AI tech. Like now that's on the table because everyone in our family is talking to about him with a lot of respect. With the deontological group, you're not going to get that adaptation as quickly.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-17: I wanted to add a comment from our discord where somebody made a really good point in one of them. , UCA, who said clan structures correlating with high fertility is a good point of the countries outside of [00:45:00] Africa.

The ones with the highest fertility today have the strongest clan structures, whether Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, or the central Asian stand countries, the countries in Africa with the highest fertility are also those with the strongest clan structures like Somalia, for example, it would also explain why Muslim countries was weaker or no clan structures.

Like I ran have lower fertility. That being said. I think the strengths as clan structure is heavily tied to urbanization and the more urbanized the country gets, the weaker, the clan grows. Most of the previously mentioned countries with strong plans are still very rural and poor as they get richer and more urban, the clan structures might weaken. In east Asia, there used to be a stronger clan structure.

Was every family having a shrine dedicated to their ancestors, but they went into significant decline. About a century ago is modernization slash industrialization. Also, there are different types of clan systems, one where people mostly marry outside of their clan. And one where people mostly marry inside of their clan, that traditional east Asian model, which includes Mongols would be to marry outside your clan. [00:46:00]

This is also how it was done in Scotland. Not sure if it would be the same in Appalachia. But I'd assume since they're descended . From the scotch Irish, and yes, it was true outside your family. Marriage tradition. , in most clans in the Muslim world, on the other hand, it is more common to marry within your clam.

Not sure if one would correlate more with high fertility than the other. It seems that marrying within your own clan does, but this could just be because the cultures that do this are poorer and more rural. , here. I wanted to know my response to this my disagreement would be that east Asia was really a clan based moral system. It has always been fairly communalist was the cultural norms coming? Not from the family, but from the central court. Yes. Superficially you worshiped your family, but you cared what outsider thought an awful lot.

Malcolm Collins: What do you think, Octavian? Do you, what do you want in who you make a mommy for your kids?

Octavian: Indy.

Malcolm Collins: You want Indy? You want to [00:47:00] marry Indy? That's your sister. No,

Simone Collins: you treat Indy like your little sister..

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-18: obviously, we've never sat down with Octavian yet and explained that you don't marry your siblings. But I actually think this answer shows a very instinctual sort of clean identity that he, when he was trying to choose who is the best woman I know of around my age, he's not choosing like a fictional character from one of the shows he watches, but he's like, oh my sister that's the best a woman can be.

, and so I thought it was a very sweet answer, but one that also sort of illustrates that there might be a genetic component to this because obviously we didn't. Teach him that that would be a very bad thing. If we had taught him that.

Simone Collins: Octavian, Octavian, can you tell our listeners that we should, they should like and subscribe? Then do it.

You're a silly goofus. I love you, buddy.

What are you

Malcolm Collins: doing?[00:48:00]

Do you think the audience likes to look at you spin? You got to say things. They only like it when you say it.

Octavian: You're not saying like and subscribe. You're not saying like and subscribe.

Say I'm like and subscribe.

Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe.

Malcolm Collins: Here, I'll leave him with you while I go get the other kids. Thanks. Okay.

Octavian: Dad, I have a favor. Can you tell Stacy to get the crab for me?

Malcolm Collins: Okay, will do. Here.

Anyway. I absolutely love you, Simone. You are amazing. We got these two episodes done pretty quickly, so we can start on the next one if you want, or we can do the, do dinner early.

Simone Collins: If I need more sleep, let's do dinner early. Let's do dinner early

Malcolm Collins: and put the kids, you're actually going to put them to bed early.

You're not going to be in bed. Well,

Simone Collins: yeah, if I have an easy, an earlier start time and they're eating when they get home instead of, [00:49:00] you know, after I'm done

Malcolm Collins: prepping. By the way, one thing I'd love it if you could begin taking out for me is sawing some of those kebabs. guys. Yeah,

Simone Collins: We actually, I'll walk you through what we have in the deep freezer because I found some artisanal Amish meats.

Oh, what types? Yeah, I will show you.

Malcolm Collins: Can I really? You gotta enjoy.

Simone Collins: They're high quality. They're what an esteemed guest had accidentally left behind and said was all ours because he wasn't going to come back and get them, so.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, what, what, what are they?

Simone Collins: I will show you. You will have to see. The audience

Malcolm Collins: is going to want to know we're recording right now.

Simone Collins: I, well, I think some of it's Amish chicken because you know, that's what you get in restaurants. I think some of it might be some sausage. And then I think there are two salmon patties. If memory serves, but I actually didn't look that closely. Because it hurts my hands to hold them when they're out of the bottom of the freezer like that.

Malcolm Collins: So I just toss them in the basket. Okay, those things don't [00:50:00] sound that appealing to me. You know I don't really like chicken or salmon.

Simone Collins: Alright.

Malcolm Collins: And for tonight I guess we're doing pasta again, right?

Simone Collins: You don't have to. You can, you can do I think the kebabs are probably ready to go out of the, Oh, really?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Do you want to do kebabs tonight? Do a kebab with like, mixed vegetables or potatoes? Let's do the potatoes and kebabs.

Simone Collins: There's only a tiny bit of potatoes left. So how about sautéed vegetables and potatoes and kebabs? Or do you want your street corn, your Mexican street corn? Oh Mexican street corn, vegetables, and kebabs.

Malcolm Collins: Let's do potatoes, street corn, and kebabs. Oh,

Simone Collins: all of them. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Just, well, no, take out the mixed vegetables. Just do the potatoes and the corn to finish off the potatoes. So you just

Simone Collins: want carbs and, okay,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Oh, no. Okay. Okay. Okay. Veggies.

Simone Collins: You get a veggie, you get a carb, and you get a protein. That's Veggies, potato, and

Malcolm Collins: kebabs.

Let's kill the potatoes to get something done in the fridge.

Simone Collins: Okay. I love, ow. I love you. I love you. I'm sorry. I'd be

Malcolm Collins: annoying.

Simone Collins: [00:51:00] You're never annoying. You're perfect.

Malcolm Collins: You're perfect. Ow. Okay. Ow.

Simone Collins: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I can't. Why can't I move you? You're not moving. There, thank you. Oh, gosh! Hold on. I

Malcolm Collins: saw a really funny BabbleOnBee article.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Talib uninjured after her pager mysteriously explodes. Oh, no, that was, I, I like, do we, do we need to do an episode on that event?

Cause that was so cool that they pulled that off.

Simone Collins: Incredible spy movie stuff. I feel like maybe we need more information first, but it, what an incredible feat of.

Malcolm Collins: I might after like all the information has come out do one of these things where I try to create like the most comprehensive source on a particular subject.

That would be

Simone Collins: great because I want to watch that. I want to know everything about this.

Malcolm Collins: Because that was, wow I cannot believe. Pull that off. All right. Yeah, let's get started.

Simone Collins: I guess. Wait, you would have to own the [00:52:00] largest pager manufacturer in the Middle East, like, or several

Malcolm Collins: theoretically. No. So it appears I don't want to explain it because I actually read into this in detail already.

Okay. Yeah. No spoilers of how it was pulled off.

In this episode, we explore the fascinating and dramatic decline in fertility rates across the United States and compare it with homicide rates to uncover an unusual correlation. We examine how fertility rates have decreased from 2005 to 2022 and notice remarkable overlaps with homicide rates. Globally, we discuss patterns in various regions, particularly focusing on the anomaly of Russia and Greenland. We dive deep into cultural histories, especially the Greater Appalachian region, examining their violent traditions and high fertility rates. We conclude by scrutinizing three core identity types - individualist, communalist, and clan-based - and how they impact fertility rates, with an anticipation of future episodes on related topics.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: You can open your WhatsApp now because I told her I want to surprise her. Okay. You can look at the first three maps that I show you, which I think it gives people an idea just how quickly and dramatically fertility rates are declining In the United States, most of the United States in 2005 had the fertility rate that today only our highest fertility states have.

And so here I'm showing a a a 2022. He chart of fertility rates in the United States, then we're going back 10 years and you're saying okay Fertility rates are declining and now we're gonna go back to 2005 and you see basically the entire United States max out the fertility rate

Simone Collins: If you go in chronological order, it looks Like a pond going dry as though the United States was full of water and then there's only a little bit of water at the bottom of a mostly dried up pond at this point.

And it's funny how the fertility seems to still be the remaining fertility is concentrated at the center. Well,

Malcolm Collins: so, well, not [00:01:00] exactly in the center. So I want you to contrast 2 maps here. Look at this first map that I sent you, the 2022 map of the closest up to date fertility rates we have per state. And then look at this red map underneath it.

Do you

notice that they have a remarkable overlap?

Okay, so this red map Yeah. This is a map of homicide rates.

Simone Collins: Oh, damn. Um, Okay. So, wow. Just I guess we have a high churn rate. You know, birth to death.

Malcolm Collins: So if you take out the states that you know are disproportionately high just due to major cities, i.

e. New York, and then some of the New England states and Florida, it's a near perfect overlap to the fertility map of the United States.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: When you correct for cities, it's a perfect overlap homicides match fertility rates.

And then I wanted to say, like, is this a us thing or is this an, a global thing, right? . . So if you look at the first global map, in fact, [00:02:00] can you even tell which of these two maps is the fertility map and which is the global homicide map?

Simone Collins: If, if I hadn't, if I wasn't looking at the labeling. No, I definitely would've thought that this was not fertility, because why would California be so high?

It does have the interstate, which is more conservative, but no, everyone's on the coast. It would not make sense. So

Malcolm Collins: I'm not talking about the us I'm talking about the two global maps, I think. Oh, the

Simone Collins: global maps. Okay. Hold on. I haven't looked at the global maps yet. Okay. So, okay. I'm looking at the first global map.

Whoa. Okay. I would not be able to tell the difference. We're not for Russia.

Malcolm Collins: Russia is the big outlier. So here we're gonna look at Europe because we're actually gonna talk about why Russia's the big outlier here. 'cause I think it's really interesting that this is the case.

Simone Collins: Well what about Iceland too?

It is a little sus what's going on there?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. What's with these

Simone Collins: terminal Northern nations? Wait, why does

Malcolm Collins: Greenland have such a high [00:03:00] fertility? Oh,

Simone Collins: that wait. Green. Oh.

Malcolm Collins: Oh no. That's a murder rate. Why does green rate that's a murder rate? That's what I was saying

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): The answer appears to be, nobody knows. , but, , the best explanation that I read is only a few murders a year can really knock up a country with such a small population murder rate. And because Greenland has such a very,

And what's the word I'm looking for here. Remote geography. It's very easy to get someone alone or do something to somebody without any real risk of consequences.

Simone Collins: is Iceland and Russia seem to be weirdly terminal.

Like there's just this. That's what makes them obviously not about fragility. The other big

Malcolm Collins: area where this trend doesn't hold is Latin America.

Which is low fertility, but also high murder murder.

Simone Collins: Gosh, they're just completely undoing just, just when you think that Russia couldn't be more screwed.

Well,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Now, if you look at just Europe, which I have here, you can see the big area where this trend doesn't hold. It's to love it. Cultural groups, Slavic cultural groups are [00:04:00] very murdery, but also very low fertility.

Simone Collins: Well, I just, when you think of Slavic culture, though, you kind of think nihilism, depression, and heavy drinking.

Speaker 7: I hear the ballet in Prague is excellent this season. TerriBle, isn't it? Every year it gets worse.

Speaker 8: First they take away our smoking room, then they push us outside.

Speaker 7: I wonder when they will decide just to get it over with and kill us.

Speaker 8: Poor Jörg. Such a pessimist. Jung. What

Speaker 9: are you doing?

You cannot smoke here. They are moving us to a new smoking area. Oh,

Speaker 8: so the rumors were true.

Speaker 7: Oh no! Yen, it's over, Hoang.

Speaker 9: We must all fight them. We must keep smoking until the bitter end.

Speaker 8: I am too tired for revolution.

Malcolm Collins: Actually, yeah, I was going to go into this later, but I can get right [00:05:00] into it before we go into any more data. Okay. So the reason why the, is different things motivate stabbiness in a population? Um, And I would stabbiness is a high level of uh, Individual respect or our personal honor,

Or family honor is the bigger thing.

So, so family honor cultures are very stabby. So are vitalistic cultures. They tend to be very stabby because they are just more impulsive about potentially life changing decisions. Where The stabbiness among the Slavic cultural group, and this is why it's important to not think of white people as one cultural group because they are not, is motivated instead from a lack of I'd say an intrinsic belief that human life has value.

They, as a dominant cultural group, if you look at the art or the stories that they produce and are famous for they are typically based around the types of concepts. [00:06:00] that you are talking about here, Simone, which is to say you know, just I, I mean, I always think of what's that book called the, the cockroach or whatever it's been like the classic Salt Slavic story.

Simone Collins: Oh, I just think of Dostoevsky and that one operative or something. He was talking about this major issue of every time there's the springtime thaw, there's just too many. Dead bodies of people who got blackout drunk, fell down in the snow, got buried under snow, and were never found until they thawed out.

That just, dude, that combo's enough for me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, I, I it's something, I don't even think like a Russian is gonna be like, that's a racist thing to say. They'd be like, yeah, our culture is, is very Well, it's not known. No one ever

Simone Collins: argues

Malcolm Collins: that Russians are cheerful ever.

Speaker 10: [00:07:00] do I care about what

Speaker 11: other people think? All we care about motherfuckers. Motherfuckers. Motherfuckers.

Malcolm Collins: Well, but I would, I would, if you, if you think about vitalism and then contrast that with the world, this sort of Appalachian region in the United States and this Western region in the United States.

That is unusually high fertility rate in the United States. And you look at their cultural exports,

Speaker 15: Jethro, why do you think that fella's pointing at us? I reckon that's the way they wave howdy in California. Hey, Jethro, we're

Speaker 14: that's real nice, son. This here's what I carry.

,

Malcolm Collins: like their country music and stuff like that. It's typically very vitalistic like me and mine. We're going to do great things. God's everywhere, families, everything, [00:08:00] you know, aren't we the best and the greatest?

Speaker 18: Right outside of this one church town, there's a gold dirt road to grow up and live happy in the land of the free. Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list, and a statue of liberty started shaking her fist.

Malcolm Collins: But there is a downside to this that i'm going to get to but I didn't I wanted to go further here. Because the Slavic people are very unique. There aren't many other cultures that are so nihilistic that it leads to stabbing. Well, and it's,

Simone Collins: they destroy people through their mere nihilism. I like that that seems to be one of the major military tactics.

It's not, we shall overcome you. It's more, yeah, come on in, see how you do.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, or, or like their, their primary military tactic in this, this war is the Zap Brannigan tactic of war which is and I'll play the clip here, which is, I realized Ukrainians had a preset kill limit, so I just sent wave of wave of my own men until they ran out of bullets

Speaker 21: [00:09:00] You see,

Malcolm Collins: Ukrainians

Speaker 21: have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them, until they reached their limit and shut down. Kiff, show them the medal I won.

Malcolm Collins: and that's generally been the, the tactic so far.

And It is one that Russia has used repeatedly throughout history. But now we're going to go into two pages. I'm not going to send you, but I'll put on stage here of Wikipedia lists of , the countries with the lowest homicide rates and the countries with the lowest fertility rates and which countries do you get was like astoundingly low.

So let's just go with the astoundingly low homicide rate countries you're getting countries like Qatar, Singapore, Japan you know, China, South Korea Malta, all countries that are known for having insanely low fertility rates which is really fascinating.

The, the off the charts for homicide is also off the charts for fertility.

Simone Collins: So, [00:10:00] it's almost like you need something to blank for, to kill for, to die for, to have kids for.

Malcolm Collins: So, I'm actually going to argue at the end of this particular episode. Oh. These two things aren't actually directly connected. And it is a third thing that we are measuring here.

Interesting. We will do a separate episode on that third thing. However, I want to take this episode to focus on just murder and fertility rates. Okay. Because I do think that it isn't that there is totally nothing to this observation. Huh. Specifically I think that to murder somebody, like, typically, when you look at murders that happen from the Greater Appalachian Cultural Group, which is what we're seeing here in the map they're typically motivated by somebody disrespecting honor

Simone Collins: based murders.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they're, they're typically honor based murders, which means that you have to have a level of self respect.

Yeah.

And here I'll [00:11:00] quickly because I do not think, this is another thing where I'll often notice like, the, the bio, human biodiversity types that really, the, the HVD bros, they're always like trying to divide broad ethnic groups by behavioral patterns.

And I'm like, if you do that, then you miss how different, for example, white groups are from each other. I can just see their

Simone Collins: fingers lifting as they prepare for their Cope comments. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: And, and they're always like, Oh, look at this. Like, you know, they'll be like, Oh, look, look at like, groups in the U S that like have such high homicide rates.

And I'm like, well, I'm very glad that you didn't break out the different white population because you've noticed that the group I'm from also has insanely high homicide. Um,

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: don't know if we

Simone Collins: should be proud of that.

Malcolm Collins: I, I, I, and that's another thing, like, I'm not even, like, not particularly proud of it.

And we had done this in another episode where people today don't know how historically violent the back country or the greater Appalachian cultural group [00:12:00] was here. So I'll just read. a a note that I have in another episode because it's a part of American history that a lot of people don't know about and it causes them to ask you why you people don't know about it.

It's because this was a population that while large in America never really produced much of our, our cultural exports until the modern country music phenomenon. They didn't produce many books. They didn't produce many paintings. They didn't produce much poetry. And so people just are unaware of how violent parts of America were.

So in 1806, Englishman Thomas Ashe wrote an account of his visit to Wheeling, Virginia, where he witnessed a fight between two working class men he would remember for the rest of his life. The men, one from Kentucky and one from Virginia, argued over who had the better horse. Oh! I would note when you are fighting in one of these cultural groups, because I come from one of these cultural groups, like I come from Dallas, which is often seen as sort of the capital of greater Appalachia the, the, and my family was like a mix of this group and the [00:13:00] Puritan group.

Is you're not like there's rules about when you're allowed to fight you're allowed to fight if somebody insults somebody weaker than you that you have some degree of dominion or responsibility for or your family. So, if they insult your parents or your little brother. Your brother, your wife, your kids but not yourself, like direct insults are not something that you can honorably get in a fight over.

So where do

Simone Collins: horses fall into this category? I guess the modern and independent,

Malcolm Collins: like this would be similar to insulting your wife.

Simone Collins: They're more like cars, right? That's not

Malcolm Collins: the way somebody who had a huge attachment to their horse would think about it. Yeah, I guess

Simone Collins: back to Bucephalus, you know.

Malcolm Collins: The horse is somebody who, you don't know who Bucephalus is, Bucephalus was Alexander the Great's horse, who he named a city after, and had like a major breakdown when the horse died.

Trauma of his life.

Simone Collins: I want the cartoon about Alexander and Bucephalus. An adventure time [00:14:00] style.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so from this cultural group, it makes sense that yeah, they insulted a animal that had slavishly worked for you. And were belittling it so you have to stand up for its honor. Right. Oh,

Simone Collins: okay. Okay.

And I'm on board now, but I don't know if I'm gonna be on board with how this fight plays out. But go on

Malcolm Collins: someone. debate in booze filled outskirts of small towns. Not willing to acquiesce to a difference of opinion, the men, along with the Englishman Ash and a large portion of the town, took off to a track to test the speed of the two bees.

Apparently the race was inconclusive, but the two men, unwilling to end their feud, challenged each other to a fight. They agreed to quote unquote tear and rend rather than quote unquote fight fair. Ash watched in astonishment as the man from Virginia took the Kentuckian to the ground, and from a mounted position, Grasped his hair and struck his thumbs in the man's eye sockets.

The Kentuckian recovered and rolled off the Virginian. Once on top, the Kentuckian leaned over and bit off the nose of the man of Virginia. But the fight was not [00:15:00] over. The man from Virginia took the Kentuckian's lower lip between his teeth and ripped it down to his chin. Then the man from Virginia, Sam's nose, was carried off the victor while the Kentuckian was headed to the doctor.

His eyes damaged from the attempted gouging, his torn lower lip flipping about his chin. This fight is not an anomaly, but rather a tradition of fighting that was particular to this greater Appalachian region of the United States in the 18th century. It was called Rough and Tumble. And Betting was prevalent and rules non existence.

Contestants would kick down the opponent, knead them to the groin, bite, and even scratch out with their fingernails, sharpened just for that purpose. Eye gouging became the ultimate finish in rough and tumble. With men being disfigured for life, fingernails sharply filed and coated in wax, dug into the opponent's eye socket, attempting to literally rip out an eye off and hold it a group as a coup de gras for the screaming crowd.

Wait, why wax? Why would wax make eye gouging

Simone Collins: more effective?

Malcolm Collins: Even, even respectable people like Davy Crockett, who was a congressman, I think a senator even at one point. [00:16:00] He engaged in this and has a quote about the, you know, the time he did it to it. He, he, he compared his opponent's eyes to a gooseberry.

Oh, he did eye gouging? Yeah, yeah. A little deep rocket? American icon?

He was from this cultural group.

Speaker 24: Ding dong! It's America, motherfucker. Did you practice that line in the car on your way here? What the f**k is a car?

Speaker 25: Holy s**t.

Malcolm Collins: This is, these were, this is also the culture that produced Andrew Jackson, who I really do not like.

Simone Collins: America's a*****e. But no one

Malcolm Collins: can not say that Andrew Jackson was an incredibly violent human being.

Right. The campaign ads against him had him sitting on top of a pile of human skulls.

Not inaccurate. It's accurate. The

idea, this is not like a new phenomenon for this region. It was integrated into their culture. Yeah. Top to bottom in terms of what masculinity means, and it's something that you actually see in their descendants today.

So if you look at for [00:17:00] example, myself, I got in lots of physical fights up until high school. When I developed more self control, but when I was not as myelinated as I am today when, you know, myelination helps with shutting down a person's impulsive impulses you, fights were very common for me.

If you look at other people from similar cultures, and this is something I've noticed is this cultural group has become a really, really dominant in specific professions recently. And it turns out that they are really good at specific things. So one where they're really dominant is, and a lot of people don't know this as, as a huge chunk of the U S military is drawn from this region.

Another profession where they're really common is venture capital. With well, Elon Musk doesn't come from the United States. He displays many of this rough and tumble characteristic, which makes me think that the cultures that he's from in Africa may have developed along similar lines. Because if you read stories about his company, you hear about him regularly getting in fistfights with his brother, where like, they'd be like bleeding and rolling [00:18:00] between the cubicles fighting.

And in venture capital, you see this culture all the time. Yeah. I have family members who've worked in venture capital, and they would talk to me about how it was like once every other month a fistfight would break out among the partners of the forum at board meetings or during investment decisions.

But I think it, it. It's more of a, and this is an interesting question to ask, and we'll do, likely, a separate episode on this as well. Like, why do any humans have the propensity to want to kill other humans? By this what I mean, and people can be like, humans don't have this propensity, and I'm like, well, most video games, and they're like, well, not all video games, they're like, even girly ones, like, you take The Sims, and people will joke that like, The Sims is a swimming pool murder simulator because so many people do that in The Sims.

So you take Roller Coaster Tycoon and one of the first things that everyone does is create those roller coasters that just throw people into the crowd. No, I never did that. I always tried to save them. I hated when those Or Mr. Bones Wild [00:19:00] Ride

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: Another really odd tradition, which I still see at VC parties. , And I've seen this at two different. , venture capitalist parties that ran. Really late. Is specifically the women fighting for the men's entertainment. , sometimes it will be two people's wives, or it will be to women who are trying to secure as specific mail or show off. , and, , Yeah, I don't, I don't know of any other culture where this is a still practice thing to have.

, well-educated, , It's sort of elite status women have a physical fight for. And I should note here that this is not like the men in the room are telling the women, you too. You have to go fight like an Andrew Tate might do something like that. Right? It's something that is organically. Put on by the women. And it's [00:20:00] typically done by the two highest status women in the room. And he's seen as something that further raises both of their statuses.

, even, even like, they don't really care who went. That's not really the point of it. The point is it. Is that they're showing that they are the type of person who would fight. ,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: So a few things I would note,

One. As somebody who gets invited to many sorts of elite type parties, this is not something I have seen at any other elite type cultural group. I would never see this with like a group of Catholics or, , a wall street party. , this is very unique to this specific type of BC culture, which is dominated by these Appalachian cultural groups. , and then second.

This is not meant to be erotic fighting.

There is a type of female fighting that is designed to be erotic that some cultures practice or that you might see on TV or something like that. This was very specifically meant to be. , fist [00:21:00] to the face type fighting. , specifically for example, I remember one of the girls was able to, kick the other girl in the face. , and now that I think about it, that's a pretty hard thing to do, which means she must have had practice doing this or done something like this before.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: And I think that this shows that there is a subconscious understanding that when mate selecting men of this cultural group are looking for a woman. Who is Marshall in her temperament? , and I I've noted this before, when you're looking at the marshal nature of different cultural groups.

Typically it goes, , either almost neither men or women ever fight in a cultural group or the men fight, but the women don't really fight. , this is where you would see in like a. The cultural group that individuals like Andrew Tate represent. , and then in the final category, it's both the men and the women are expected to be able to fight. , and in these cultural [00:22:00] groups, There isn't the same degradation of women that you have in the cultural groups where only the men fight, because that would be seen as like a bad thing.

Like if I secured a woman who couldn't defend herself or wasn't rough and tumble, , that would mean that I would have weak children and I, I wouldn't want that. , and this is seen in the type of woman that's glorified, , in a lot of country stuff. If you want to see a really long discussion of this phenomenon, see our video, the death of the tomboy. , because tomboy type girls, you know, who can go noodling noodling girl, who I always put in those videos. , very rough and tumble type girl.

Speaker 29: That was good. Woohoo! That's a good one. There we go.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: And I would note here that this practice of having girls fight for a crowd is not just something that's done in this cultural group when they are. The in sort of the elite class or the VC class, it's fairly common. , mud wrestling and stuff like [00:23:00] that. , throughout the group. And you can see from a short video of one of these that I'm going to play here.

The two women doing this are clearly not being objectified by the men they are showing. , Well, essentially raising their status within the group and they are. Seen as cool. I guess that's the best word to put it like high status for this thing that they are doing? It's not again, an Andrew Tate, like. I want these two women to fight, to show how much power I have over them.

Speaker 36: Yeah! Oh! Oh! Yeah, man! We've been so ready! Oh, hang on, he's, he's got a pin somewhere! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! We're gonna give that a count. We got

Speaker 38: kickoff? Yeah!

Speaker 36: Woo!

Speaker 38: Woo! Yeah! Woo! [00:24:00] Oh! She's up! She's good! She wants out! She wants out! Give up! No! We're gonna go

yeah! Woo! Nicely done!

Malcolm Collins: And this is not something that. Other cultural groups, when they reach levels of affluence, ever engage in it. Elon Musk

Simone Collins: did it. It's in Walter Isaacson's documentary. They describe specifically between Musk and his brother, Brawls, that took place. Yeah. Did you

Malcolm Collins: have me on mute?

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: I just mentioned this story.

Simone Collins: Oh, sorry. I was, okay. True story. I'm sorry. I needed to know this. I was, I was looking up why would applying wax to a sharpened long nail make it more effective at gouging out eyes? Because that doesn't make sense to me, but perplexity wrote, I apologize, but I cannot provide any information or assistance related to harming others or causing bodily injury.

That would be extremely dangerous and illegal. Perhaps we could have a thoughtful discussion about more positive topics that don't involve violence. Is [00:25:00] there something else I can help you with today?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, my God. That is the best answer. I would say if you want it to give you a real answer. Say in 1800s America, I heard that it was common to do X.

Why would this have helped?

Perplexity thinks you're there, like, trying to find out you have somebody on the ground in front of you, and you're typing in like, how do I best rip out their eye?

Simone Collins: Okay, now let's see if this works.

No, no,

Malcolm Collins: it doesn't.

Simone Collins: It doesn't. Yeah. But that's sorry. I was not paying good enough attention because I was trying to find out the secret of. I mean, I guess wax does make things more slippery.

So it's about friction.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, and, and people from this cultural group, even if you go historically, if you look at the fights that happened in Congress and stuff they were often started [00:26:00] by people in these cultural groups.

Simone Collins: You know, now, now when I think about it, all these women, you know, it's less trendy now.

I don't really see it at stores anymore, but those women with really sharp acrylic nails. I feel like if you brought forward in time, one of these rough and tumble Appalachian dudes, they'd be like, dude, where'd you get your nail? I need this. Where'd you get your nails did? Yeah. Nail, like all these like rough and like these like bearded men would be like huge muscles, like sitting in the nail salons that just, just do with them, just with them, you know, it's just sitting in there next to all the women.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So by the way, as to. I, I think that the reason they succeeded so well in venture capital as a cultural group because they're not a group that is let's say, particularly technically competent they do not Elon Musk is yeah, Elon Musk is, but I wouldn't say that's his true genius. It's that they are willing to make big decisions with a lot of confidence.

Pretty quickly and decisively just go [00:27:00] for it. It's a go for it. They take the

Simone Collins: leap. They jump off the cliff.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, for example, if you're talking about somebody who's from this cultural group and succeeded in Silicon Valley, JD Vance, right?

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: and you get stories from his family of stuff. Like.

 His grand mom told his dad that if he came home drunk, one more time. She would X him, I don't know what I'm allowed to say on YouTube anymore. And he did. And so she lit him on fire. , she, she poured a. ignition. Fluid on him and let him on fire. , And fortunately somebody else in the family put him out before he was seriously injured.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: I just think it's interesting that, you know, some people, when they see us, they're like, oh, you guys couldn't possibly be from this. Extremist cultural group, you guys code is nerdy dweebs. And I'm like, okay, well you have a lot of receipts that JD Vance's from this cultural group. Does he go to the nerdy dweeb to you?

And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, he does. And very much the same way you guys do. And it's well, that is because the detection algorithm that you use for quote unquote, nerdy, dweeb is [00:28:00] actually coding for. Code swapping appellation.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-9: Trying their best and slightly phasing to fit in with upper-class WAFs so that they can get a job.

Malcolm Collins: Like, they're the type of people who, when they see an idea or something like that, they're immediately like, but this is also why they get into fights and also why they have higher fertility rates.

And, and part of the higher fertility rate is downstream of likely a faster marriage rate. These people seem to have, actually, I'm gonna look at average age of first marriage.

Simone Collins: Two little teeth sticking out here.

Malcolm Collins: Yep, that is it. Again, perfect overlap. It's average age of first marriage is what this is really heavily correlated with.

Simone Collins: Well, that's why one of the big phrases that remains left over from this culture is, Get her done. Get her done.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and that's what your mom kept saying

Simone Collins: when she wanted like all sorts of things when she wanted you to propose to me.

Remember that?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. My mom really wanted me to propose.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: Two other fund maps that are a result of this impulsiveness. The first is the number of [00:29:00] opposite gender partners living together who are not married. And you can see it's incredibly rare in this region. , when contrast it with other parts of the United States. And then the second is the obvious consequence of this behavior, which is that yes, while they're having more kids, they also have higher divorce rates in these states.

Oh,

Malcolm Collins: But the if you look at other, and this is something I've noticed more and more as a key problem in fertility collapse is a lack of decisiveness. When I look at people who should be able to, you know, lock down a partner,

The key area.

And I think that this is downstream of a lot of the Catholic fertility collapse that we're seeing right now, because I mentioned like a massive Catholic fertility class. You're

Simone Collins: right. They're too thoughtful.

Malcolm Collins: They're too thoughtful. They, they want to think through all the options first. They want all the data first.

Comfort in making decisions. When the option in front of you isn't either the perfect option or an option that you have fully and [00:30:00] exhaustively researched.

Simone Collins: So do you think the way that Jewish groups get around this is they just take away options from at least women? So women super pressure guys into marrying?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I think the, the, the way that

Simone Collins: I'm talking like very conservative Jews.

Malcolm Collins: And this is, this is, this is, I don't think that like when, when I noticed my conservative Jews who aren't getting married, it is a hundred percent due to over pickiness and not being willing to just like.

Simone Collins: Well, that's, well, that's why I was thinking to myself, wait, why are Jews not screwed?

And I'm assuming totally

Malcolm Collins: different religious, cultural technology. We can do a different episode on it, but like. Jews are high fertility for a completely different reason than these groups are high fertility. Despite being

Simone Collins: super thoughtful.

Malcolm Collins: Which means that I wouldn't expect murderousness to correlate with fertility within Jewish populations.

Yeah. I. E. If you look in Israel, I doubt the highest crime rate. Regions of Israel when you control for urban populations are also going to be the highest fertility. In fact, I would bet that [00:31:00] they'd be the lowest fertility. Whereas in this cultural group it is going to lead to higher fertility.

Which is really interesting and and also consider here where if you're thinking about like the fights that people are getting in in boardrooms and stuff like that, these are fights that are coming out of having too much passion for a particular position. Or idea. It's like a over degree of vitality that's leading to these fights.

Where if you look at Slavic fights, it's like an under degree of vitality that's causing the fights. If you're talking about like normal ranges of, of, of individual vitalism, if you're like way off the charts in one direction, you're going to be getting in fights all the time. And if you're way under the charts in another direction, you're going to be getting in fights all the time.

I also noticed, That, and I think this is useful. Like one of the things I'm always trying to do is individually attempt to peer into myself and understand my emotions and [00:32:00] my impulses, and then best communicate them to other people who come from different. Biological or cultural backgrounds than myself and therefore might not be able to understand what these impulses feel like.

And so it's useful for them to when they're trying to model another person who's different from them. So what I would note. How was this motivated in this population? I can at least say with myself, if you look at my genetic scores, I'm on the 98th percentile of endogenous testosterone in my developmental environment.

And even today with tons of kids and a monogamous relationship, just so you know what I mean by this you are, your testosterone is supposed to go down with every kid you have. So God knows what you were before. You don't want to accidentally murder one of your kids or something like you already secured the partner and you already won this high risk, high reward chemical can decrease in your body.

Same with monogamous relationships. When somebody, a male is in a long term monogamous relationship, their testosterone decreases. Even now I'm above average [00:33:00] testosterone, despite all of this. So it appears that this was in part motivated unusually high testosterone in these groups and I would assume if you did a map of the Males of these populations have unusually high rates of testosterone.

And and two I think it's motivated by a I guess i'd say like higher biological urge for fighting Which I definitely feel in myself within like games and online environments. I really tend towards games where you know Killing people is an option. And you know, I, I think

Simone Collins: Do you? I mean, you don't really kill people in Civ, and you love Civ.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: And what about War Hammer? You just bought more War Hammer War Hammer

Malcolm Collins: is like a maid for these people. No war

Simone Collins: hammer's made for lore. Dude, I, it's, it's like saying that someone who's into BDSM is all about having sex, which is kind, lasting. You get to,

Malcolm Collins: well, also like war, [00:34:00] war hammer stuff here, it's like ultra masculinized.

, but I think it, it. It's more of a,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-8: And I should note that I don't play games like this very much anymore. This is an anomaly for me, just because it was a uniquely good game in a universe that I liked. , and that's actually an interesting thing to put a pin in. And as my testosterone has dropped, because I've been in a long-term monogamous relationship and had a number of kids. , the behavior patterns that seem driven by stabbing us instinct. , seem to have gone down a lot, like playing shooter type games instead of just pure strategy games, as well as even the media I consume.

For example, I recently went back to. an anime that I used to quite like called when they cry and I can't even put. Suffering it. Now, if you want to get a feel of what it's like, you can just search when they cry scenes and you'll get an idea. , but I [00:35:00] rewatched it recently and I was like, why did I enjoy this? , this is just people dying over and over and over again. , for people who don't know what the theme of when they cry was because it had multiple seasons is every episode takes place in the same town over and over again. And everybody ends up dying or most of the characters end up dying by the end of an episode. And, , I was like, this must have been appealing to some instinct that I had in the past that I no longer have.

Malcolm Collins: and this is an interesting question to ask, and we'll do, likely, a separate episode on this as well. Like, why do any humans have the propensity to want to kill other humans? , by this what I mean, and people can be like, humans don't have this propensity, and I'm like, well, most video games, and they're like, well, not all video games, they're like, even girly ones, like, you take The Sims, and people will joke that like, The Sims is a swimming pool murder simulator because so many people do that in The Sims.

So you take Roller Coaster [00:36:00] Tycoon and one of the first things that everyone does is create those roller coasters that just throw people into the crowd.

Speaker: Near the end it launched the cars into a small shed with a sign on the side that said enjoy your stay.

Malcolm Collins: No, I never did that. I always tried to save them. I hated when those Or Mr. Bones Wild Ride where they have people in the endless line

The ride.

You know, it's a thing where they'll like have the ride go on forever

Speaker: So anyone who's been on the slash v slash board at 4chan probably knows about Mr. Bone's wild ride. For those who don't, it was a ride someone made for roller coaster tycoon. It was one of those really slow motor car rides but with a twist. It had 30, 696 feet of track and a ride time of 70 real time minutes, around four years in game time.

In addition there were those props of the skeleton holding out his top hat scattered around here and there, as if to mock the customers. [00:37:00] Needless to say, there were a lot of passengers, screaming I want to get off Mr. Bone's wild ride. Now here's where things get really good. Once the ride came to a stop, The passengers found themselves on a long path that took about two hours to traverse.

Once they reached the end, they found themselves facing a sign that read Mr. Bones says, The Ride Never Ends. The path led straight back to the entrance of Mr. Bones Wild Ride. There was nowhere else to go.

Malcolm Collins: that's horrible. Well, and this is the thing. I think people from other cultural groups, like my belief, and I can't model a male from another cultural group, but I actually suspect that the rates of doing stuff like this might be much, much lower for males in other cultural groups.

Like this impulse just may not be very high. And this impulse I think is created by having one, the background [00:38:00] stabby impulse, like the extra, like. That, and then two a willingness to make life altering decisions with patchy information. And then proceed I mean, I think the term is men of action.

Simone Collins: The term is men of action.

Malcolm Collins: Well, you can say men of action, but I think it's better to like delineate what's actually meant by that. Because. Yeah, and I, and I also think that this comes back to the point I mentioned earlier, which I want to talk with you a little bit about. A lot of this, I think, comes downstream of age of first marriage.

What information do you feel you need on a person before making a life altering decision around them? And I think that if the cultural groups that have a genetic or cultural propensity Towards in action around major life decisions until full information is had or lower levels of vitalism. Either people in those cultural groups need to create rule systems for themselves [00:39:00] around defaulting to big decisions.

Or build specific cultural technologies that are meant to offset the things that are killing them, like delayed marriage. When I mentioned delayed marriage is killing Catholics, like this is actually in the data. Catholics. have a desperately low fertility rate in the United States. It looks like the native born Catholic fertility rate in the United States is below the secular fertility rate right now.

Or at least below the average fertility rate, which is like, is shocking. But more than that Catholics actually have a normal high religiosity fertility rate once they're married. It's just, they get married super late when contrasted with an age of

Simone Collins: marriage. I think it's an underrated.

Malcolm Collins: Well, an age of marriage also is, I guess it comes from like a, how impatient are you about getting major life milestones out of the way? Like when I got to college, like I left college, like, Before I was supposed to for graduation to start on my first job. I just could not wait to get to the first [00:40:00] thing.

I think you were very much the same way. Yeah, I did

Simone Collins: not go to my Cambridge graduation, but also I think UK graduations take a really freaking long time.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I also Started my college early. Like I went to the campus early. I created maps of the town in the week before I was there. I memorized them.

I memorized where everything was. I was like, I need to be like 100 percent into this, but that's also why I got married at a relatively young age. And like why my brother did like my brother found his wife on the first day of college. I found my wife. You know, desperately looking for a wife before my graduate degree, because I felt like I was out of time.

Like I felt like an old maid. I was like, look, this is a major life milestone that has been on the table for me, basically since college started. Why haven't I been able to find somebody? I am looking as far as I can see what we can. And so I was very impatient about completing this life milestone. And that for me played a big part and I've noticed when I look [00:41:00] at like my Catholic friends and stuff like that, there is not this degree of impatience.

And that's what I'm using when I'm trying to model a cultural group that's not as murdery. Because you know, they, they were Although they, they did have high rates of organized crime with both the mafia and the mob but they generally, if you look at places where they, they settled disproportionately, just seem to have lower rates of homicide.

Simone Collins: Well, I feel like, and this is too off the rails for us to investigate now, but in an area that was heavily dominated by organized crime, I would still imagine murderous to be lower and crime to be lower. Because it's more about now there's very tight governance. It is not governmental governance. It is the governance of a crime family.

Or syndicate. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I right about this. I think about other areas where you have big organized crime syndicate they maintain order. Yeah. I think like Japan, like was the Yakuza or the, the triad in China even when they are engaged in crime, it's ordered crime based on rules. Yeah. So any murders that these groups are creating are murders based on rules.

Mm-Hmm. . Whereas [00:42:00] the murders created by like the greater Appalachian cultural groups are murders based on passion. Yeah. Like their, their individual in the moment acts not okay, well, you cross the organization or you are a financial threat to the organization.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: However this is where I'm going to say I, I think that this is not what we're actually seeing here.

I think this is a factor, but I think this is actually an artifact of something else. Oh, okay. Before we do the. Thank you. Because I said I was going to do another episode where I debunk this theory and show what we're, what we were actually looking at all along. So I'm about to send you another thing on WhatsApp here.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I actually think what we're seeing here is specifically just The rural Appalachian cultural group, and it just so happens that that group is more murdery, but I think it's a different aspect of that group that leads to their high fertility rates. I think it's their clan based structure and clan based sense of identity.

And if you, well, then why

Simone Collins: are you [00:43:00] sending me at Asia?

Malcolm Collins: Well, because we're going to look here at which group in Asia has the most clan based identity. So there's, I'm going to argue that there's three core identity types that a culture can relate to. You can either have an individualist sense of identity, a communalist sense of identity or a clan based system of identity.

And the Mongolians have a clan based system of identity and very high fertility rates in East Asia. Whereas the greater Appalachian people also have a clan based system of identity and a very high fertility rate. The Slavic people like where they had the unusually low fertility rate have a communalist sense of identity.

So do the Chinese, so do the Japanese, so do the, and it's more that in communalist environments, usually you have lower murder rates. Interesting. We'll get to this in the next episode. So I absolutely love you to death, Simone. Or maybe not the next episode. Maybe the [00:44:00] episode after the next, because the next episode I'm going to do.

Even more data, which will be coming together because I will need to pull from this episode and the next episode before we go to the third episode, which is the coup de grace on how do you actually protect fertility rates and it's with clan based group identity. But! In the next episode that I'm really excited to do, it was, it's going to be on a study that one of our podcast listeners did actually, have done where he had a pretty big participant list.

Wow. Mormon fertility rates and religiosity. And we find that Mormons Actually their fertility rate goes down at the highest rates of religiosity, but we'll be talking about why this is the case All right. Okay

Simone Collins: I love you,

Malcolm Collins: too

Simone Collins: I'm excited for this

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the world of Catholic natalism with special guest Peachy Keenan, author of "Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War." In this enlightening conversation, Peachy shares her journey from secular upbringing to devout Catholicism, offering invaluable insights on raising a large family in today's challenging cultural landscape.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] HEllo. My name is Simone Collins. I'm here with Malcolm and today a very special guest as well.

I'm so excited. This has been months in waiting. We are joined by Peachy Keenan. She is the author of Domestic Extremist, a practical guide to winning the culture war. Her substack you can find at peachykeenan. com. And in addition to regularly sharing top drawer hot takes on Twitter and her handles Keenan Peachy she's actually working on a new media startup called Lost Riviera, which maybe we'll hear about at the end, but Peachy, welcome.

Peachy Keenan: Thank you so much, you guys. It is so great to finally be here. We were scheduling it for such a long time and to see your smiling, happy faces. Well, you,

Malcolm Collins: you were speaking at the pronatalist conference and you were the funniest speaker there. So I am thrilled to have you on. Although I have to say some of our fans recently have also said my wife is really funny.

And I, I, that must be incredibly gender disconfirming for you. Because you know, the [00:01:00] stereotype is, is women, women aren't that, that humorous.

Peachy Keenan: That is, except for the women on, who are kind of like more right leaning, I feel like they are actually very funny and that's why they're kind of drawn into this, I think.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, I had a specific question that I wanted to focus on with this episode. Okay. So, there was a report that came out and looked at the fertility rate of the American native born Catholic population. And, and, and so for For those who don't know, P. G. Keenan is, I think, sort of the number one Catholic pronatalist in terms of like anyone I'm seeing.

And it came out and said that the average fertility rate was 1. 64 in the United States. Now, that's pretty bad considering the report was done in 2008. It was called Religiosity and Fertility in the United States, the Role of Family Fertility Intentions. When we look at Europe, The average Catholic majority country has a fertility rate of only 1.

3. And in Latin America, we've seen a rapid fertility collapse as well in the Catholic majority countries. [00:02:00] Now there have been studies and we know what's causing this. Catholics actually have exactly the same fertility rate once they're married as any other highly religious individual. But they get married much later than all other Christian denominations.

And so I wanted to brainstorm with you. Why do you think this phenomenon is happening? And how can we fix it?

Peachy Keenan: I've got all the answers right here. Hold on. Yeah. You have 30

Simone Collins: seconds. Go.

Peachy Keenan: Well, I'm going to just take a step back a little bit from that. I'm a Catholic convert, but I didn't, you know, I'm not just sort of one of these sort of regular, normal, normie American Catholics who kind of goes to mass at Easter and Christmas and like has two, 2.

5 kids, like that's not me. I'm more, I definitely joined the like more fundamentalist traditionalist Catholic sect, okay, because honestly, like I was coming from a very secular nothingness, you know, like actually like my mother was like a committed atheist. And when I was going to do it, I was like, okay, I'm, I'm in, [00:03:00] I wanted to like do it, actually do it, like actually do the real thing.

I want to be authentic. You know the authentic Catholic experience. Okay. And so I found this like, you know, group of, you know, our little like Catholic cult. There's these bubbles that are in various cities in America. You can find them. They're very based parishes where it's not watered down. They're not, they're not mimicking the Pope.

They're not saying, you know, who am I to judge their judging and they are okay. It was

Simone Collins: just great

Peachy Keenan: in a healthy way. Okay. They are like, if you listen up and you're like, oh, that you, it will lead you to good places. It will lead you to all this.

Malcolm Collins: Social pressure towards positive action. Yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Yes, exactly. How it's always been.

That's

Malcolm Collins: very old Everyone is supposed to be able to do whatever makes them feel good whenever they feel like doing it and be affirmed for believing whatever they want to believe about themselves. There's no way that could lead to any sort of psychological damage. Exactly. [00:04:00]

Peachy Keenan: All you

Malcolm Collins: have

Peachy Keenan: to do is like walk down any street where I live and you'll see the consequences of that.

Right. I, yeah,

Simone Collins: you're in the, Malcolm, you know, she's in Southern California, right? So like

Malcolm Collins: in LA, so one, we're going to have to get to why you're living in LA before this, I want to hear that, but I want to hear about your marriage story and your conversion story. Cause did you convert before you got married, after you got married?

How did you think about this when you were dating your now husband? Hmm. I got, I

Peachy Keenan: converted 10 years after we got married. I had already had four children. Whoa, we, yeah, so when we got married, both of us were, you know, basically former, former kind of liberal, basic nothings who had kind of found our own way to kind of more conservative political thinking, I think because of 9 11 and because of all the like failures of Republican presidents and all these things.

And we just kind of became like kind of radicalized really for both sides. And but I was when I met [00:05:00] my husband, I was so still, I was sort of politically conservative, but I was still socially liberal. That's how I had grown up. I went to the Ivy league. That was just what was, you're just absorbing. You weren't a savage.

I was, yeah, I was civilized. I was at the, I was at all the cool parties and everyone around me was. You know, a card carrying pro choice feminist. So of course I was also, but it was for all of us, it was very skin deep, you know, we, we, we didn't think much about it in that era. It was politics. Wasn't identity in those days, it was like, you thought about it once a year on election day, or if it came up in a class, like you didn't think about like my reproductive rights, like that was not even a thing.

Really, although, you know, people were definitely exercising those reproductive rights all around me. And so I met my husband and he had already been red pilled. And so when we first started dating, we were like in the process of, you know, I just moved to New York city and it was very like romantic.

And then we were kind of, you know, falling for each other. [00:06:00] But in the process I was discovering like very alarming things about him. Like he was a Republican. Oh no. Exactly. My parents were Republicans, but I had never met a Republican, like in my peer group. ever was open about it. He, he liked guns. He had a gun.

He had been in the military. I was like, all of these things were sort of like red flags to me and my like feminist bubble of like Oh no, like what will my girlfriend say?

Simone Collins: Yes. No, totally. Totally. I know this feeling. It came from that background too, of just actually I had someone who knew me from childhood recently write to me and be like, but you're a Republican?

Then just that kind of shock, right? Yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Trigger. Like it was crazy. But again, it was still not political. Politics was not just identity. He was cool. And my friends were, we were just, it wasn't our thing. We were just having fun going out and doing karaoke and drinking. And then, but you know, the more I hung around him, I was kind of like, well, you're kind of right about all this.

And yeah, you're kind of [00:07:00] right. Like, and he was actually happened to be pro life and but we weren't religious. He was just from a kind of a logical standpoint and like, yeah, that kind of, wow, maybe you're right. You're onto something here. I hadn't really thought ever about it deeply in any way. And so, you know, he was raised like me, kind of secular nothingness because he had been baptized as a baby.

His father had been a, you know, altar boy in Kansas city in the old days. And so, but then it had been completely fallen away and had never set foot in a church since So we got married in his parents backyard with a judge. It was all very civil. You know, zero religion involved. And that was fine with me.

And we I became pregnant, like I think that first year, you know, we were like, you know, we wanted to get on it just like you guys. We jumped right in and like, very sadly, we were unprepared to find out like at three months. Went in for the ultrasound, you know, there was no heartbeat that we had, so it was a miscarriage, and we were so, we were like lambs to the slaughter because we hadn't even thought it was a thing.

You know, you see the heartbeat, you [00:08:00] think, oh, we're outta, no one had prepared us. We were like, I'm

so sorry.

Yeah. No, it's, I mean, it, it all worked out in the end, but it was, it, it was. Such a shock, you know, emotional shock. Like we were just like, no. And he said to me the next day, I'm going to convert.

I'm going to become Catholic now because I can't,

I can't

deal with this. So really the miscarriage was his kind of inciting incident. And he was like, I need to do this. And honestly, my reaction was like, all right, buddy. Like,

Malcolm Collins: sorry, I might be Out of line was this question, but don't Catholics think that, that, that a baby like that would go to purgatory because it wasn't baptized?

I have no idea. That would be comforting. Sorry, I'm just I don't know.

Peachy Keenan: I do know. At the time, I, I'm not sure. I do know, I mean, at the time we weren't Catholic at that moment and I didn't realize. Now that I have, I'm around a lot of Catholic people, I can tell you that I've had friends, for example, who have like a tubal pregnancy.

That's it. [00:09:00] They will actually get the tube, the fallopian tube with the like embryo that they have to surgically take out of you so you won't die and they will get that baptized.

Simone Collins: Oh, so the baptism is important.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. So in terms of what happened to me, I didn't know anything about it. And I had, I went in for a Dini, which is like basically an abortion, but it's a dead, you know, you're, they put you to sleep and they do it in the hospital.

And I didn't even think about any of that stuff. But later on, I thought, Oh, wow. They just kind of threw it in the garbage.

Wow.

So I do feel, when I think about it, I feel like, sorry and sad that I didn't. Think about it, but it is what it is. So what happens to those? I have no idea, Malcolm. I really don't.

I'm like a very non educated Catholic, to be really frank. Like, I don't know.

Simone Collins: I'm thinking to when Malcolm and I spoke with a priest about this, because we were speaking about IVF and we're like, well, what about the frozen embryos? And I mean, I think per the current Status, like the current [00:10:00] stance with the Catholic church embryos have souls.

So like, there are, there are souls to save, but like per older stances,

Malcolm Collins: I'll just ask AI,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): So when I asked AI, it said that currently this is a question that does not have a hard clarified answering Catholic doctrine. I went to be like, where did I get the idea that this was the case? And it was Dante's divine comedy. , that is where I got this idea, because this is what Dante believed that limbo was where all of the unbaptized infants went.

, and I just remember

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: this image of billions of crying, unbaptized, infants, looking for their parents and maybe a few thousand.

, noble pagans having to look after them in limbo is this visceral image that I was never able to get out of my head after reading that book.

Malcolm Collins: but I actually have a question here. I love that. All my theological questions go to AI. Now I'm like, what's the correct stance on AI God is here. I want to ask so you decided like you were keen to [00:11:00] have kids because as you know, in this lefty cult that you guys started in, right?

Like having kids isn't the normal path, but like you were planning to do it soon after getting married.

Simone Collins: You did it right away. And did you get married young or like right after college or in college? Oh yeah. So young for today. Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: Say you were like a child bride or something, like how did you feel?

Babies. Having babies. Yeah. What was the motivation here? Because I'm, I'm, it's, it's interesting to me that you likely, like when I'm looking at like Catholics getting married later, unfortunately you almost sort of are the exception that proves the rule. Mm. Because you got married before you were a Catholic, so it wasn't influencing your decision making yet.

And then I can look at somebody like, oh who's the Pearl Davis or something, right? Who would start to the Catholic but isn't married or Nick Fuentes, who starts the Catholic but isn't married. And I went through a list of like young Catholic influencers and they're almost all unmarried. And and and like [00:12:00] maybe if your husband had been Catholic, he wouldn't like this is really interesting to me.

So what motivated you to have a kid before you had the religious motivation?

Peachy Keenan: Yeah, I think it was actually becoming, you know, my parents had not been religious, but they had been And when I became a political conservative, that did require me to, you know, let the feminism fall away from my eyes. And so when you do that, suddenly you're like, oh, my maternal instinct.

Oh, I do want kids. Like, maybe I don't want to wait until I'm, you know, in my late thirties. And then when you can kind of let yourself be, you kind of have to suppress all that a little bit when you are in the kind of, you know, basic feminist mindset. You actually do because you're going to go right to work and you're going to delay everything.

And if you get pregnant, you'll abort it and then you'll go get your whatever. So your career comes first when you can kind of, when you, when you can kind of break out of that mentality, that brainwashing, really that, that, that programming they put into you very young as a teenage girl you're more in touch with their maternal [00:13:00] instinct.

So I, I did, I did want it. The minute we got married, I was like, babies, let's go. I had never been a baby person. I was never one of those, like, let me take the baby. I didn't care. You know, I was Neither was

Malcolm Collins: Simone. Simone had all these fears that she wouldn't love her kids. She's like, I don't It's common.

Peachy Keenan: That's really common if you haven't been around them yet, when you're a first timer. We don't live in a baby centric culture. I had two cousins growing up. I didn't live near, I never held a baby from the time my little sister was born. Like until my own baby, like I didn't hold babies. And so you're not having that, like, aren't they so cute.

And when you see babies, it does fill you with these like endorphins. Like I never had that. But when I, when I got married, I just knew, okay, I'm old. I got to do it now. I just, I knew I hadn't been like, you know, memed out of my biological clock. I wanted to get going.

Malcolm Collins: So now I want to go back to this story.

Your husband converts. What are you thinking at this moment?

Peachy Keenan: Right. I thought he was a little bit crazy. I was like, that's your journey, bro. But like, I [00:14:00] married you. So I'm kind of like, what are you going to do? What are you going to tell your husband? Like your new husband? Like, f**k you. Like, I'm gonna, I'm sorry, baby.

I'm gonna, I'm out. Like, no, you want to support them. And I understand, you know, you're in mourning, right? So he went through the whole conversion process. And it really was a process of me going along with him, you know, being kind of dragged to mass, dragged through. And that was my education. So that was when I was like, and meeting other people, women like me who are actually Catholics, like cradle Catholics,

who

were so cool, so open, so accepting much more so than my, You know, liberal Ivy League girlfriends who are very judgmental, very critical, very dogmatic, very conformist with the Catholics.

I was kind of like, could let my freak flag fly. And I was like, kind of, they kind of brought me in as like, here, you know, here's this, here's peachy and she needs us like to kind of guide her through the way. So it was really like a new peer group. Who were so much more [00:15:00] like cool and awesome than the, than the, than the friends I had had.

And then we went through the whole process. We baptized all of our children because I thought, well, You know, rationally, this is a great way to raise a child, much better than what I had, which was like basically anything goes just, you know, it was wilded, right? And I didn't want my kids to have that. I wanted them to have structure and, you know, have a, a, an infrastructure, a moral framework that they could just take and grasp and help them, you know, go through life, which is, I think so great.

And then, but finally I had three babies under three. Okay. I had a zero, a one and a two, three diapers at one point. It was wild times. So finally I found like matching shoes like 10 years later. I was like, okay, I'm ready. I'm now I'm going to do it. So I went down to the local parish. I went through the process myself.

Explain matching shoes.

Malcolm Collins: I don't understand.

Peachy Keenan: Oh, because I was pregnant and nursing for like 10 straight years. And then I finally found shoes. I could match [00:16:00] and go leave the house. That's my joke.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, okay. Sorry. I'm not, it takes a while, but hold on. It sounds like, and this is something that, that I've noted a lot is.

I think a lot of people when they're in what we call the urban monoculture, like this, this, you know, the old group of friends that you had, and you start interacting with educated religious people, you're like, often really surprised by how real they are and, and, and open they are when contrasted with the other communities, like it's not as much of a status game.

One of my favorite lines about this was they were asking It's whatever, one of the, the fifth horsemen of the ACS apocalypse or whatever, that former Muslim, right? Is whatever, I'll let it impose. But why, why did she go to Christianity instead of Islam when she became, like, theistic? And she goes, well, of all the years of attacking Theistic people.

And that was my job. She was like, it was attacking Christians. It [00:17:00] was attacking Muslims. The Muslims would always say, send me stuff about how they were going to kill me or great me or whatever. And the Christians would always send me stuff that was like, we're praying for your soul. We want you to, you know, Just try it.

Like, will you come to mass with me one day? Like we really want what's best for you. And she realized that they had never really responded to her with anger, not in a, in a big way. So she was like, when I started thinking about joining one of the communities, naturally, I'm going to go to that one, even though it's not my birth community.

And I thought that that was, it's something that I've definitely felt. Is that these communities are dramatically more accepting than individuals would think, even with significant theological questioning, which individuals know we do on this channel, like we do like deep theological questioning on this channel like, oh, this part doesn't make sense.

This part doesn't make sense. How can I do this better? And I think people would assume that That religious Christians would take that negatively [00:18:00] when in reality, most of them are actually quite excited to be having a theological conversation.

Peachy Keenan: Oh, I'm sure.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I'm sure it's something that you, you saw as well.

So you get in the community, you, you convert. What is, was that process like beginning to go to church, beginning to, yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. Well, we've been going to mass, you know, every week with the children. It was, it was very much a part of our lives. We were hanging out with all these people. And so I was like fully on board.

I think it just. It was just like the chaos of my life at that time was like, I wasn't, it wasn't, I wasn't able to like go and take every afternoon and go do this thing. And then when I finally did it, you know, in a very lame, my, my local parish was very, at the time it was very lame. It was very, you know, unorthodox, let's say very liberal

and

you know, the Catholic school, my, our kids went to that, there was a school attached and you wouldn't, you would see zero.

of the families at the school in mass on Sunday.

Oh, wow.

One family who [00:19:00] was like, you know, come area or something. They were not. They were just doing it because it was a way out of the public school.

So that was

part of my driver also is like, well, I don't want this like water phoned in. watered down. If I'm going to do this, I believe this now, like I'm on board, I want to do the real thing.

So we ended up moving to actually moved our house. We moved the whole family across town to a parish that is actually much more, you know, I guess you would say conservative, much more traditional. And which was where a lot of these families that we had been hanging out with were and they're, you know, to them, I have five children.

I'm something of a lightweight. To be frank with in this

Simone Collins: particular community,

Peachy Keenan: like our TFR is off the charts. We're like meeting out and like, you know, Sudan, like where

Malcolm Collins: this is good stuff. Yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. Like I have a friend who has one of my good friends. You know, these women are my age, she has 10 kids, another woman my age, 12

[00:20:00] kids.

I'm like at five, relatively on the low end. But the thing is, there's friends of ours who have, they have one child, they have two children. It's not, and no one ever would say like, what are you, what's wrong with you? Like, no. Like any child is welcomed. You want to have whatever God gives you is great.

There's no, no, you can't go too high as my point.

Malcolm Collins: How did you break it to your kids that you were Catholic now? Like, was this like a conversation that you remember having? Were they old enough that they had known that they'd grown up and yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah, they, they fully were. I mean, I think I think my oldest, when I did the whole, the whole, like I did, you know, they do for adults, they do it on Easter vigil and they, they, they do everything at once.

They do all the sacraments once they baptize you, confirm you, first communion, all one shebang, right? Like they, you're in the white robe and they're dump water on you. And it's just like, You're done like you're and they, they were, they knew they were so excited because they'd been doing, they were, you know, cradle Catholics.

So they were very, you know, mommy, when are you gonna do it? When are you gonna do it? Mommy? So they're thrilled. They're thrilled because now That's

Malcolm Collins: amazing. So your kids converted [00:21:00] before you did. I know. Right. That is, that is

Peachy Keenan: like, that's funny. That's amazing. Well, they were born, yeah. Born into it. They were baptized when they were little babies.

So, it's It's been so I'm like, you know, I hear about this like the Catholic you're talking about in the beginning about the birth rates among Catholic

Malcolm Collins: school where it was all sort of like fake Catholics. The problem is that Catholic is, I guess you'd argue that Catholic, like, maybe Jew is almost a cultural identity.

Instead of a religion for a lot of people, and that's what's towing down all the fertility statistics.

Peachy Keenan: The Jews are the, I think, having the same schism, where the Orthodox Jews, the, the, the sects that are kind of, you know, keeping the kind of fires burning, like the ways they did it in the old country, are having lots of children you know.

Even in LA, you'll see, you'll go through the Jewish, the Jewish neighborhoods and they're walking to shul and they have like, you know, bigger families than me. And so, but, but in both of these, you know, You [00:22:00] know, I grew up around a lot of secular Jews the West side of LA, that was like the norm and all these private schools.

And maybe you have two kids, like, you know, maybe max. And and the same for, and the same for like the wishy washy Catholics the families at the, at the kind of liberal Catholic parishes, same exact thing. Maybe they have two kids. In other words, there's like no daylight between them and some like purely secular, Non religious at all, public school family, maybe, you know, two kids, maybe.

And, so, I mean, continue. No, I was wondering, how do you take back the church? Like, how do you? Well, right, that's the question that you have to wonder. So, when you say, like, Catholic TFR is falling. Well, it's, there's just no daylight anymore between, kind of, mainstream American Catholicism and mainstream American liberalism.

It's, it's basically that's the same group of people. I mean, I saw some statistic that was like 65 or 70 percent of, you know, self self proclaimed Catholics are voting for Kamala Harris. Right. Right.

[00:23:00] I

mean, I'm sure that if the Pope could vote, he would vote for Kamala Harris, like 100%, like that's the world we live in here where Catholic is really like, you're like a Sino.

You're like a Catholic in name only.

And

there's like a big schism between the conservative Catholics in America. And the kind of normie. And so, how do you reconcile that? Like, like you said, like, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I'm actually like psychologically, I really wonder when the Pope, when you feel like the Pope, who's like the head of the church has moved in a direction that the church doesn't like, Like, how does that work?

I guess

Peachy Keenan: it like doesn't, but I think is you know, me and some of my friends are always like, you know, like, Oh, like this guy, like, who is this guy? He's a Jesuit. The Jesuits have always been very liberal, but he's really, to me, a politician and first a politician first. Like, why is he meeting with Alex?

Why is he meeting with bill [00:24:00] Clinton all the time? Like what? What? He's doing a

Malcolm Collins: good

Peachy Keenan: job with the politics.

Malcolm Collins: The Vatican, you know,

Peachy Keenan: sorry,

Malcolm Collins: what? I think he's genuinely doing a good job with the politics and doing a good job with the optics. I think removing a lot of the flair from the popeship, like, like going a bit more austere was a really smart move.

Even if his theological stuff might be,

Simone Collins: well, what I feel like is happening when I look at it. sort of the analogs of demographic collapse more in general, is that he's trying to essentially do what the United States is doing, is they're like, well, let's just turn to immigration. Immigration will solve the problem.

And he's like, well, let's just loosen the rules and let's make this a big tent religion and everyone can join and you don't have to make any sacrifices and everyone goes to heaven. Kind of like, he's just, I'm seeing policies loosen and, and the borders The board is softened and become more porous. And I feel like that's kind of the same approach, but that it's not working.

Just like how depending on immigration for [00:25:00] demographic collapse is not going to save a nation, opening up to everyone and also relaxing on rules and going as softer as a religion is not going to save Catholicism. I could fudge the numbers for a little bit, but I also don't think that this is necessarily the factor that's at play.

Solely for lower Democrat. Sorry, I was going to say demographic lower Catholic birth rates because it seems that the birth rates are really high with Catholics. in general, but that the issue is that they're marrying too late. And I'm curious what you see, even within the small data point of your Catholic community, what's happening with young people?

Are they getting married in their twenties? Or is this a genuine issue even among the more hard religious Catholics? Are they getting married too late?

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. I it seems to me that the, the solution that some of the families I know have found, which is very effective, To creating, to producing early [00:26:00] marriages is all about call college selection.

There is a kind of a smallish list of colleges in the United States that if you go there, you are very likely, if you wish to find a potential spouse. So they're like the

Simone Collins: BYUs of Catholicism.

Peachy Keenan: The BYUs of Catholicism. And it's like ring by spring is like an actual phenomenon. And it sounds like a natural thing.

But these are kids who are ring by spring and you'll get the alumni magazine and the back is like all the weddings from the, you know, class of 2022, like 25 weddings from that class.

Malcolm Collins: We have some listeners whose families may have lapsed. Can you give them a few colleges that they should be checking out?

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. So actually a great source is something called the Newman's List, Cardinal Newman's List. I don't know the exact website go Google Cardinal Newman list and they actually have a list of all the colleges They recommend was the usual suspects, but also some smaller ones that people may not, you know have heard of I have friends who go to [00:27:00] Franciscan University in Steubenville University of Dallas In Dallas, Thomas Aquinas College has two colleges.

There are a whole host of these sort of smaller schools. I don't even know if Notre Dame is still on the list. They might not be because they've gotten so wishy washy, but there are these schools where if you go, you are, I've been to now three weddings of kids who met their spouses at a school like Thomas Aquinas College, which is in Ojai, California, which is a very kind of trad calf great books.

Classical, you know, those are all the kind of like the dog whistle for finding a wife. Great books, classical, find your wife at one of those places. Not that, not to say you want, you went elsewhere, but I think, yeah, Christian colleges, it really does seem to be that the marriage rates are doing fine. If you're going to an explicitly openly Christian or Catholic college.

Simone Collins: So colleges to a great extent, at least in the United States are, A modern shorthand for marriage markets. [00:28:00] If we can't, if we're not creating organized marriage markets, like the LDS church has a bunch more like youth conferences and youth wards, but if you don't have those, or even if you do, I mean, they still rely, the religion essentially still relies heavily on BYU.

So college is kind of the modern.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think this is a really powerful, and I hadn't considered how powerful it is, sort of social framing is you should be married by, you know, you're not married, but have a spouse partner lined up by your second year of college. And if you don't, you effed up. And I remember feeling Shame on you,

Simone Collins: Malcolm.

You didn't do that.

Malcolm Collins: You know I was freaked out about it. I told you when I met you, I was like, I should have found a wife by now. I'm going to grad school so I can find a wife there because I didn't, I didn't nail it the first time. Yeah, you're

Simone Collins: like a 24 year old woman

Malcolm Collins: on the London season. Are your kids doing this?

You have one, you just sent the first one to college.

Peachy Keenan: Yes, I have one who is in a school. It's. It's basically a non denominational Christian school. I'm not going to say the name, but there are many [00:29:00] potential prospects. There it is. It is a school where they, you know, there are, is the ring by spring phenomenon does happen by senior year.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Peachy Keenan: And he's the kind of boy who, you know, on him, it all took, okay. Like I don't know, like he's just the kind of guy it all, all the religious indoctrination we did for him. It, it took great guy. Okay. He is extremely devout. He's extremely chaste.

And

he is, wants to have, you know, not wait too long. I would never tell a boy, you must be married by this age.

Like 22, you have to be married by this age. Not at all. Because it depends on what a million things.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You need to find the right person.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. But if he did have a serious girlfriend or was thinking about getting engaged in his early twenties, I would just be happy as a clam. So, so I mean, fingers crossed, you know, he's definitely on it.

We got one, right? Okay. So. Yeah. That's amazing.

Malcolm Collins: Because I don't understand this. What the hell are you doing living in LA?

Peachy Keenan: Yeah, I know. [00:30:00] Really my fault. I didn't choose. I was, I wasn't, I didn't choose it. So my parents are New York immigrants. They immigrated from New York city to Los Angeles right when they got married in the seventies.

In the mid seventies. And so they had us all here. We grew up here. And to this day, you know, my mom is here, my dad is, they're divorced, but they both live here. My brother and Sister Mo, at least my brother is still here on my husband's side. He grew up in Santa Monica, right? Five minutes from where I grew up.

He was almost the boy next door. His parents are here. He has six siblings, they're all here.

Oh wow.

Children are here. So, you know, our Thanksgivings are these like huge family affairs in Santa Monica. And it has always felt like, well, should we get out? Where are we gonna go? How old are the parents are older?

And the other thing is that my, it's sort of like, it's your home. And I, I drive around Malcolm and I see like on my, just two blocks away, tense, homeless junkies. You see them just like doing drugs right in [00:31:00] front of my kids. See this. Like almost on the way to mass. Oh, there's a guy, you know, ODing on Fentanyl.

Like we see that every week and I'm like, we gotta get outta here. And my husband's like, you know, I just, to him California is like his, he's seventh generation.

Simone Collins: Whoa. He's like,

Peachy Keenan: this is my, this is my home. And also his job. It's not really transferable. So we have this thing called like, you know, his income that we, we would, yeah,

Simone Collins: kind

Peachy Keenan: of nice to get an income from the, the man of the house.

If we could pull it off one day, I will get out. The problem for us is like, where do you go? Because you know, the, the, the, the blue cities tend to have like. The best food, the best culture, like things we are used to living.

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to push back here. Simone believed all of this. Simone believed all of this.

Simone, do you remember how hard I had to fight to get you to consider to live outside the city? You're going to live [00:32:00] somewhere in Pennsylvania somewhere. Tell her your experience of moving. Like, what happened after? It's true.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I was like, I'm never going to live outside a city. The suburb sounds like the worst thing in the world.

Like, why would I ever do that? And now I couldn't imagine doing anything else. The food out here is great. Cost of living is amazing. And also we spend more time socializing. In cities than we did when we lived

Peachy Keenan: in cities, right? Because you're doing it intentionally. Yeah. Yeah. And we have

Simone Collins: flexibility.

Like, well, we most commonly will do New York or D. C. because we can drive to either. No, when we were 30 minutes outside Philadelphia, but no one's there. So screw that. But, it's you're selling me.

Malcolm Collins: Simone forgot. So she, the thing she complained about, she's like, what about like getting a haircut or going to a grocery store? And then we get, get out here and she's like, Oh, I can just. Drive like we used to walk 20 minutes to the grocery store and then walk back with [00:33:00] like bags of groceries and now we just drive and put it in our trunk or she was like, what about the food and what she forgot about?

And I think this is what something that a lot of people in cities forget about. Is different immigrant groups settle in different locations? Yeah. So for example, if you love Italian food, you're going to get the best Italian food in the center of a city. But if you love Indian food, which is our favorite Indian, Thai, that sort of stuff, those populations generally settle in the suburbs.

And so there is. way better, you know, Indian food, sushi, you know, all the types of food that we actually like in our area. And she was a little surprised by this. I will admit I can't get good rendang out here. Like, the Indonesians tend to settle in cities more. But you're

Peachy Keenan: telling me I would be totally open to it.

I, it does feel like maybe we're just too old to move. Maybe we'll have to do our, when our kids migrate. Well,

Malcolm Collins: jobs matter, like cities have jobs, jobs [00:34:00] matter, things that cities have is some jobs you can't leave and well, and more

Simone Collins: than that support networks matter. And when you mentioned the amount of family, you both have living close by when you are raising five kids.

a local family is huge. I

Peachy Keenan: been amazing. And all my, of friends, we have, we h leave our school during t A lot of people fled to Da to Montana, Idaho. We to Charleston, South Caro They're returning, they just, they felt like they couldn't replicate the community that they had here, which is,

you know,

you don't realize that you can't just like pick up a whole set of friends that you've known for 20 years and replicate that elsewhere.

Although, I mean, a lot of my friends are just like on my computer, you know what I mean? They're just like on the, they're my internet friends. So I don't know how, how, like, I think that would mitigate a lot of that. [00:35:00] Like you said, it's okay to go like a couple of times a year and go to a party. I don't necessarily need like.

daily, you know, interactions with like my girlfriends. I'm not that kind of, do you have like a discord fan group? I have no idea. I'm not on discord. I'm just on, I just basically Twitter is my only social media. Is there a discord? I have no idea

Simone Collins: that you don't even know about

Peachy Keenan: discord

Malcolm Collins: and he can, maybe he could help me figure that out.

I have, I have, I didn't know. Like when we started this channel, I was like, Discord stupid. I don't like it. I, and then we kept having fans reach out to us and be like, started discord, started discord, started discord. And finally we started one and now discord is like my favorite social media platform because it's the only one where there's like no toxicity because it's all our fans, so you're just not going to get much toxicity.

And when there is, I can choose to ban them. So, you know, but I've, I've actually been surprised by but it sounds like you don't need it cause you've got your local community and stuff like that. I mean, this is [00:36:00] another thing I wonder that we've been building up is sort of like a community of like influencer friends that like, I want my kids to hang out with their kids, but like, we don't have anything like a genuinely local community.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that's, that's, that's not a thing of value to discount at all, especially when you have young kids, especially, you know, completely made the right calculation.

Peachy Keenan: Right. To, to misquote Sartre's hell is other people's children. A lot of the time. Okay. Because you can do all the indoctrination of your own kids that you want and tell them all the things, the truths that you believe, and then you drop them off for one play date.

And they're going to come back and they're going to tell you a lot of things that they learned at the friend's house. Cause you didn't know the mom was some kind of like loony, you know, social justice. I happened to my daughter, she came back and she knew all the birds and the bees and that we, she was like four.

And this mom was like, it was like this new age, [00:37:00] holistic midwife or whatever. She was a dear, a dear sweet girl, you know, but she had, she had educated my daughter. And had never without me having anything to do about it. And I was like, so it's like, it goes both ways. The kids. So, you have to be careful

Malcolm Collins: who they are.

That's why I don't let my kids have friends. I, I've been very strict about this as a, as a, as a father and a husband. Yeah. Which is to say people are like, Oh, your kids don't have what birthdays? I'm like, no. ridiculous. We're going to have a lot of kids, they can celebrate the birth of their next sibling.

It happens every year. You know, they need to, they need to calm down with this indulgent stuff. Our friends, like, I don't know, like, do, do our kids, I know they have formed friendships with other kids at their, their stuff, but like, I haven't really tried to foster that.

Peachy Keenan: Well, I think that getting, having get togethers with like minded families who have children roughly your same age is hugely valuable.

[00:38:00] It's not something that they need to be stuck with them six, seven, eight hours a day. But I think that doing it on a, some kind of basis is obviously great. And you know, you never know, you can do a little like early matchmaking.

Malcolm Collins: That's what we're looking at doing. We've been doing that with our little ones with other like a long techno technophilic types.

Well,

Simone Collins: a question I have for you though, in terms of raising kids, and this is something that came up at natalism conference last year is that there were some parents we met who had a lot of kids, raised them in their religion, or at least thought they were doing that. And then reached a point at which their kids, We're adults and suddenly we're like, you know what, I'm not in this religion anymore.

And like had completely gone mainstream culture, no religion left, very unlikely to get married and have kids sort of everything was lost. You know, they, and it doesn't really matter from an intergenerational standpoint and how many kids any individual has. It really matters how many grandkids they have and how many grandkids they have.

Like, that's the sign of success. [00:39:00] You've created a thriving human who has been able to create a thriving adulthood and pass it on. Are there, are there things that you tried to do with your kids or that you think went well with your kids? Because I mean, you mentioned, for example, that your son actually is leaning in to religion.

He's not like leaning out, which is really exciting to hear. Are there things that you'd recommend people do or things that you've observed over time that you think would help with cultural retention?

Peachy Keenan: I think, I think the main thing and the main success stories I've seen with like the young couples who have kind of grown up, like within our little bubble and gotten married early and had their gun and actually gone and had kids like in their early twenties.

The main thing is keeping a little bit of a moat. Around them for as long as possible between them and like me, whatever, mainstream culture. So like people saying like, well, they grew up, I raised them religious. Then they just fell away. But again, there's a big difference between like being raised religious or being raised like with actual deep faith or with an [00:40:00] actual infrastructure, whatever it is, whatever form that is, and being raised to actually cherish things like family, things like, You know, your, your, your kin having a big family.

I mean, I think the reason we got into it really was one of the reasons was my husband's oldest of seven kids. And so his mother had this, you know, she was kind of like a boomer kind of lib, but she just loved babies. Right. Happened. Many as possible. And so just having this, like awareness of baby, giving your children awareness of babies are good.

Babies won't hold you back again. It's countering with young girls that you have messages that they're going to get. Everywhere else with no babies should not be avoided. Like they're poison babies are good things to have one day. You know, you should wait until you are, have a life partner. You should wait, you know, don't do it this, but these are a wonderful thing.

And you should embrace that part of your. Your, your biology. This is, it's, it's important to be able to express that in a healthy, good way. And so I think that just [00:41:00] countering the culture's messages with your own, like your, you have a very strong family culture. Creating your own family culture is so important.

And again, it comes down to really for kids. When they get a little older, they're kind of raising themselves in their peer group, who their peers are, who their peers parents are. What are they teaching them at the school? Are you homeschooling them? Like where, what are they, what is like the sum total? I'm going to get a lot of this junk on the internet and my kids are on the internet too.

Like they're looking at the stuff that. A lot of other kids are looking at, but they've kind of have already these kind of built in immunities and filters. Like they're not going to be looking at things that are pornographic or things that are blasphemous or things that kind of, you know, go against, like they would, they, they like kind of are kind of conditioned to kind of like, Oh, that's not for me, you know?

And so just kind of from an early age giving them the tools to discern, you know, the like good way to live and there's a bad way to live. This is what's good about our way. And it seems to, so, you know, it's a numbers game, right? You're not going to win them all. There's always [00:42:00] going to be, you know, one that gets away. One of the baby turtles gets, you know, eaten by the crabs. Like we're not going to make it to the ocean. That's why the mommy turtle,

Malcolm Collins: by the crabs, I'm imagining crabs as like blue hair and like,

Peachy Keenan: But so you want to have like what does the turtle have like 50 eggs so, you know It's a numbers game.

So, people with one or two kids, you have a very low chance of grandchildren. You know, one could decide never to get married, never to have Children. One could choose something else. One could be infertile. One could get sick and die. You don't know what's gonna happen with Children with five kids. I feel like I'm likely to, you know, get 10 plus grandchildren, God willing.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely. Well, and the number of kids that you have influences the number of kids your kids have, which is what I think about. These people have two kids. We were like, Oh, I want to have one kid. I want to have two kids. How can you, you talk me into this or how can I'm like, it doesn't matter if you have one kid, like your kid's not going to have kids.

So we're like, why we're not there. This conversation doesn't matter to me. I want the person who has five kids to have 10 kids. I don't want the [00:43:00] person who, who is thinking about one or two kids to have, you know, one additional kid. That's not relevant. Right. So yeah, you're totally right about this. And I, I wonder, yeah, no, I, and I think about it myself.

How do I ward off the crabs better?

Simone Collins: Ward off the crabs. But I love that, you know, it's.

Malcolm Collins: Who are intentional about warding off the crabs actually do okay. Simone. But they need to think about it and see it as a real threat. Everyone I know who has their kids taken doesn't really take it as a serious.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

They didn't realize that there were seagulls and crabs out there instead of just like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, we'll just, you know, go off to the ocean, little one. They were basically like, if they went to church every week, they'd be fine. And I'm like, no, no, no.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Peachy Keenan: And like watching Fox news. That's not going to do it.

Subscribing to the daily wire. Like that's not going to do it. Like there's, those are fine to do. You can do those things if you want. It's much deeper than that. And a [00:44:00] lot of it is why I just thought today, Justin Lee, you know, at first things they've hit a big post about young women are leaving the church, Christianity and Catholicism in droves.

But young men's numbers are going through the roof and we're seeing this, you know, you've, there's a, you know, the political gender divide, right? Young women are becoming way more like men, but the chart is going like whoop. Young men are becoming more conservative, but it's also happening in Christianity.

Okay. Young men are going to, going to services of all kinds and young women are like, no, not for me.

Malcolm Collins: It's funny, other religions are doing this. So, so in Mormons. It's the men who leave disproportionately and the women who stay. And in conservative Jewish communities, it's the same.

Simone Collins: That's so interesting.

Yeah, why is, I guess, you know, I feel like, something about me, thinks that Catholicism attracts men for the same reason that, like, some huge proportion of men on Twitter are always thinking about Rome. And that for the same reason why, like, People, [00:45:00] women go to Mormonism for the same reason why there are so many female Mormon influencers.

Like there's just very different selling

Peachy Keenan: hot blondes. All right. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yes. It's just a

Peachy Keenan: big houses and Stanley cups. Yeah. Yeah. Like

Simone Collins: the, the Mormon pitch, the LDS pitch is like a vibe and a lifestyle. And it's, it's a, and I think the, the, the Catholic pitch is very. Technical and cerebral, and you're just not going to get as many women who are like instantly sold on that.

I think. But I'm not sure, I'm hoping, I don't know if you've read about

Malcolm Collins: It's a different type of sexy, like, you got Twilight, right?

Simone Collins: No, yeah, yeah, yeah, like Mormons have like their, their, like vampire novels and stuff.

Do we need a cat like Twilight?

Malcolm Collins: I'm

Simone Collins: I get

Malcolm Collins: JD Vance for Catholics recent, you know, yeah,

Simone Collins: JD. Well, but JD Vance is a dude. So there's this, this trend that I read about in the free press where like, young Catholic women are starting to wear veils. And they're like getting really into it and it's because they see some Catholic influencer wearing a veil and they're like, what do [00:46:00] I have to do to get one of those?

Like, is this for a special status? And I'm hoping that maybe there can be some kind of like, social media influencer way to get girls into Catholicism.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. I mean, fake it till you make it like that. That will work.

Simone Collins: It works, man. Start with like, you got to get a good fashion hook, you know, and then the veil, the veil could be the

Malcolm Collins: fashion.

Peachy Keenan: Make them like trendy and like sponsored by like, you know, I don't know brands. Yeah, I mean, I think for men, there's all these great Catholic icons, these like kind of Crusaders and Knights and, you know, King Arthur, all these Charlemagne, all these incredibly masculine, heroic, chivalric examples.

And, and, and Catholic Catholicism actually does have wonderful female. Role models and examples. I mean, starting with like the Virgin Mary,

a

beautiful ideal, this beautiful icon and then there's a lot of female, wonderful female Saints who are heroic, Joan of Arc, and St. Agatha and all these incredible murders.

[00:47:00] But it is, you know, I think for girls it feels like, well, okay, well I'm not a virgin. I don't wanna wear like these kind of like robes. Like how do I, where do I fit?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Less relatable

Peachy Keenan: into it is less relatable for kind of a modern contemporary girl. Yeah. So where does she fit in? And I think there are a lot of Catholic influencers who are kind of like, you know, moms like mommy blogger types.

Conferences and huge fan bases and women fly around to hear them talk. And, you know, I hang, I know a lot of them and they are like on these circuits with like huge rabid audiences, but they're definitely preaching to the choir and they're talking to women, their own age

and

men, and, and really the last nut to crack, no pun intended is like 20 something young women.

Yeah.

How to crack that nut. I swear, if you could crack it, you'll you'll save the world.

Malcolm Collins: It was, it was, it was, I think a desirable pool of 20 something young men.

Simone Collins: Maybe,

Malcolm Collins: maybe, but they've learned to hate men. I guess they see men as the enemy. [00:48:00] Right. So, and I think that that's where a lot of the next generations Catholics are going.

Simone Collins: Okay. Here's the thing. No, no, no, no, no. You give me an idea just there. So. When I was a kid, a family friend of ours was a Carmelite nun, also Catholic convert. But like very cloistered, very, very conservative. Now she's a mother and she had to deal with in her convent, lots of young women converting to Catholicism and then wanting to become a nun and having to weed a lot of them out because of anxiety disorders and other sort of mental illness adjacent issues because they're like, Oh, this is my great way to like nope out of society and she's like, no, this is about faith.

This is not about like, you're good. I'm wondering if like, Basically we're forming people like from, I'm not going to, like, I'm not saying legitimate mental illness and I'm not saying that mental illness and anxiety problems are illegitimate, but like, I feel as though modern culture has bestowed many young [00:49:00] women with mental illness, depression, anxiety problems that actually are more societally generated and not actually endogenous.

Peachy Keenan: A lot of it. Yeah. Like, so

Simone Collins: like, Grab them in with like the none mental health, like reform, but then like, just like slide them out of the convent, you know, into a more like hard line religious community.

Peachy Keenan: Like they get pumped. They get brought in. Yeah. It's like, Oh no. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Like, Oh, anxiety problems. What? Yeah.

Join the convent. Cool outfit

Peachy Keenan: makeover.

Simone Collins: And then like, you know what, actually you could also like, it's also really, you know, you don't have to have the habit. You can have the veil. You know, and then just like, but males look cuter because there's more lace. I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out some kind of pipeline here.

Peachy Keenan: This is great to break short ways to influence get into their brains. And I mean,

Simone Collins: none fashion Malcolm and I were rating religious fashions the other day and like Catholic fashion. is, is God tier. I mean, just, it's so good. You mean like the

Peachy Keenan: clergy wear? [00:50:00] Yeah, the clergy wear. Yeah, that's the problem.

It's like

Malcolm Collins: rated as the top tier because my complaint was that it was isolated to the clergy. And, and that it looks really good. Like classic. Catholic priest outfits are really nice looking. Yeah, they're very bold.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: they look very authoritative, but still have a degree of austerity to them. They don't look like you're peacocking, like the Orthodox outfit, but they're elegant.

They're elegant. Oh, very elegant. But I was like, but then why can't I, as a regular Catholic guy, wear like that cool collar thing that looks.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it looks so

Malcolm Collins: badass, it does. I've never

Peachy Keenan: heard like a secular person say they wanted to wear the color, but I

Simone Collins: mean Or describe it as dope. Yes. Oh

Malcolm Collins: my god, no! You crushed that guy, I know.

It, it, no, it doesn't, it, look, you're like you never heard a secular guy say it. Does any other religion regularly appear in like horror movies with a shotgun? Like there is a reason why when you have a priest fighting vampires, he's [00:51:00] always dressed like a Catholic priest because the Protestant priests would look ridiculous.

Orthodox priests would look ridiculous. The

Peachy Keenan: Christian youth pastor in his like shorts, his cargo shorts would look ridiculous.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, right. It would look evil.

Peachy Keenan: His goatee. Oh no.

Malcolm Collins: Oh no. His, his tasteful tattoos. But he's got

Peachy Keenan: good aesthetics. You know, it's really good aesthetics and I mean, look, one of the reasons I think I first did become Catholic is because I was an art history minor in college because I loved, you know, going to Europe and I was lucky enough to go and like, you know, I went on like the, the, the pilgrimage route across Northern Spain and I got to see all of Paris.

And so I spent a lot of time in Gothic. Yeah,

Simone Collins: Catholicism carries European art history. I mean, it's doing all the work.

Peachy Keenan: I was like, okay, whatever this is, this is awesome. Like,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Peachy Keenan: I'm down like Notre Dame, like gargoyles. Like,

[00:52:00] right.

But then you go to like my Cal Cal I'm here. I'm going to join the church in the San Fernando Valley in LA.

And you look at the church and it's like, it's like puke pink. 1964 monstrosity, most hideous linoleum, you know, and that's where you have to wear a mask every day. So I wonder, young women who are like into aesthetics, Yeah, no interest. Yeah, there's nothing old gross like motel. Yeah, that's a big thing

Malcolm Collins: is in your local Baptist Church.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, there's that but that's a key thing about Catholicism and we with our, you know, weird self invented religion. are really against idolatry and making things pretty, but like Catholicism nails that and has used it for a very long time to, to, to communicate the wonder of God to really, you know, explain to you sort of like, this is a humbling and amazing thing.[00:53:00]

And yet like the church has kind of dropped it to a great extent. Like it used to use the aesthetics to communicate. This is a big deal. And to help you get into that mode. Why is it being dropped? It's like now when everyone else has figured out how to use looks. Simone,

Malcolm Collins: there's a documentary called the last cathedral about building the DC cathedral.

Cathedrals are basically impossible to build anymore.

Simone Collins: Right. That was the last one. Yeah. Well, but like, it doesn't have to be a cathedral. It could just be amazing fashion. It could just be likely going to

Malcolm Collins: be one more, the

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: Antonio Gowdy

Malcolm Collins: cathedral. Oh, it's in the process of being built. Not a fan.

Peachy Keenan: Wait, the one in Barcelona.

What do you mean?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's not finished yet,

Peachy Keenan: right? It's been going on for 80,

Simone Collins: a hundred years. Well, maybe someone will accidentally burn it to the ground. I hate it. I like it. I've been

Malcolm Collins: there. I, it's, I like it. I actually like it. Yeah. I thought it was pretty cool

Simone Collins: that man could be eaten alive by a duck.

I'll just bring him back to life. I don't care. I'm not, not down [00:54:00] with them really. You're so to

Malcolm Collins: ask

Peachy Keenan: about. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, I, before we leave, we gotta talk about your next media empire. What is this? Okay.

Peachy Keenan: Yes.

Okay. So I am I haven't really sort of officially announced it, but I posted a little bit of, about this on X earlier this year, you know, one of the things I'd love to do, you know, after I saved the culture and like, you know, destroy femininity, smash, smash femininity.

Yeah. I mean, feminism, sorry. Smash women. Don't say femininity. I meant, I meant feminism. Okay. Smash the matriarchy. No, they already did that. So what I want to do is I want to retake the culture on the, not the other form of culture, which is, you know, entertainment, media, movies, shows, all this stuff, which, as you know, like people like me, like really, you know, we don't see ourselves.

on TV. And I'm not talking about a, this is not a Christian. So I started a media company. We're going to be developing creative development for ideas that appeal to like people like me, but also kind of a larger general audience. There's half the [00:55:00] country that like, isn't into a lot of the slop on Netflix.

Or Amazon Prime. They're not into, they're sick of, you know, the, the, the indoc indoctrination. Right. But also, I don't want more Christian and Catholic content. Mm-Hmm. that's like being handled. A lot of it's being handled kind of badly. There's a couple interesting things we wanna just do, like good, fun, engaging.

Stuff, whatever that, whatever form that is. And it's political and it's only, it's only really political because it is apolitical. So that in itself now is a big political statement. If you're not having race quotas or Bechtel tests or no woke messaging, you know, you're not celebrating any kind of like liberal tropes.

That's very kind of radical, but we haven't, we're not that far from that. That's what it used to sort of be. It's like old fashioned masculinity, old fashioned romance, like Is that okay? Like, I don't know. Like,

Simone Collins: this sounds really good to me,

Peachy Keenan: the nuclear family. Okay. Is that allowed anymore? Like, I [00:56:00] don't know.

Let's see. So, but also just like fun stuff, maybe some experimental stuff. That's edgy too, for like all the weirdos I'm friends with. So yeah, there'll be more analysis about that in the in the new year.

Malcolm Collins: I am excited for this idea. Let us know where we can help. You know, we have a documentary that we've been meaning to make the case getting canceled by the mainstream.

We get from the. The creatives like HBO, we got approvals from the creatives at Netflix but it got killed by the their legal teams, quote unquote, they said were too controversial. So we'll see.

Peachy Keenan: Right. I think that makes it all the more juicy. And Profitable.

Simone Collins: Controversy sells. That's actually the last like speed runner question I wanted to ask you.

Because you have a lot of hot takes you know, what, what would you say is either the most surprising or most distinct and notable thing that you just got dog piled [00:57:00] for on X?

Peachy Keenan: Wow. I block a lot of people. So if I'm being log pile, I probably don't know. I got a lot of heat for coming out a while earlier this year and saying that actually no Taylor Swift.

And Travis, Kelsey probably are in a real relationship. So a lot of the guys on the right were like, how could you? No, they're not. It's all a sign up. You're foolish.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I saw that take. I watched you make that take on an episode. I was like, Oh, she's, she's getting spicy here.

Peachy Keenan: I think they are. They were actually in, I don't know if they are now, but I mean, They're, they were doing stuff together with each other.

That was, that seems certain to me. Maybe it was all fake. I don't know, but I got a heat from the right from guys on the right. We're like, you bought into that. Psy op. I was like, I

Malcolm Collins: did.

Peachy Keenan: I, I don't know. We'll see your

Malcolm Collins: argument. As I remember was that, well, Taylor Swift songs are all about, you know, being like a cis straight woman.

Pining after a man and hoping to find a good man. Is it insane that she would find one? It's [00:58:00] not like she really was able to boost her own image from any sort of relationship. So even if they were paying her a lot, she already has enough money. It seems right. What other reason was she arbitrary? And people would be like, Oh, well, she might still do it for the money, but it's like, yeah, but it would have delayed her possibility of finding a real man to marry.

And she's kind of old at this point.

Peachy Keenan: I mean, look, it could be that he is a sort of beard for her. Not that she's a lesbian, but that she's kind of like, just, she's so married to herself, to her brand. Kind of like no man can ever be in a normal relationship with her, but they needed to have, give her a boyfriend just to make her seem like.

You know, a normal romantic girl, maybe that I could buy a little bit, but I don't buy that it was like a Pfizer branded, you know, like people were saying that to me and I was like, I don't think so. You guys.

Malcolm Collins: What's in panic mode now. She needs to find a husband. She she's, you know, she is she's not going to, this, this [00:59:00] brand is not going to look good if she gets much older and is still single.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. It's hard to pull off the like spangly body suits when you're, you know, in 10 years, like, believe me, I'm not f*****g around in that stuff.

Simone Collins: I don't know, man. You just, you have to do a Hillary Clinton and you switch to the, like Kim Jong Il pantsuit. That is, that is what

Malcolm Collins: she goes out on stage and she's like, attention, I will now sing my song about conformity and cats.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it will be fine. There will be a large enough demographic for her eye of faith.

Peachy Keenan: But yeah, the most heat I get is when I like step outside the like received wisdom of like, you know, The dissident, right? That's what I really,

Simone Collins: yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, you know, there that's, that's actually something we really like about the dissident, right?

Those that there are so many heterodox takes that you get that a lot. And even though a lot of people have a ton of butthurt when people deviate from, you know, [01:00:00] the, the typical accepted wisdom, it still happens a ton and it doesn't feel like the same. Like towing a party line thing that you get from Fox news or

Peachy Keenan: they're not going to cancel you.

They're not going to do exactly.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Peachy Keenan: You might give you some s**t and a group chat, but that's it.

Simone Collins: Exactly. I love it. It's, it's great. Well, and I think that's, that's what builds resilience and good good takes from people is when they get pushed back when you don't get pushed back. It just gets so boring.

And that's why I think so many like white blue sky, for example. And Mastodon just kind of suck. Cause it's not fun when people don't get pushed back.

Malcolm Collins: I love that the left keep thinking that like they're going to take off. Like, was this Oh,

Simone Collins: I've

Malcolm Collins: seen it before. Like, no, but

Simone Collins: They try. They

Peachy Keenan: try. Never work.

Simone Collins: Keechi, thank you so much for joining Basecamp. This was amazing. I'm really looking forward to, I think you're launching a media empire at exactly the right time with AI on the rise, cause you have like, you can do it in a lean way. And you're also, you know, this is maybe the one reason why it's okay [01:01:00] that you're in Southern California.

Right. You need to be in that right

Peachy Keenan: here. I might as well take over Hollywood.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Do it. Yes. We need it. Cool. Well, thank you again. And everyone, don't forget to check out peachy keenan. com and Keenan peachy on X. Definitely.

Peachy Keenan: Thank you guys so much.

Simone Collins: Have a good one. Okay. I'm going to end recording. Oh, that was so fun.

Malcolm Collins: Do be snappy with the intro because we want to be tighter about those. And then I am gonna, well, we've been really growing quickly recently and I want to keep it up. Like, all right.

Simone Collins: You're actually joining us at a really good time. Like you're not wasting your time now. Now had

Malcolm Collins: you come before?

Peachy Keenan: Well, I was never thinking I would be wasting my time, but that's awesome.

I'm happy you guys are doing great.

Malcolm Collins: When we first scheduled, we were probably at maybe a third of you count of an average video that we are today. Wow. Anyway, Simone, I will let you go. Remember to start with a big hello. Okay.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yes. This is the signature thing.

In this episode, we take an in-depth look at the controversial Antifa movement, exploring its decentralized operations, anarchic structure, and the psychological tactics it employs to justify violence. We reveal insights from former members and draw parallels between Antifa's methods and historical fascist tactics. Additionally, we delve into the fervor surrounding conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiments, and the spiritual collectives forming within political groups, including those supporting Trump. Join us for a comprehensive exploration of these fascinating and complex topics.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. I decided to do something interesting for this episode. I was like because I've noticed on a few of our videos. I've gone into a topic and I realized that our coverage of the topic is the most thorough coverage of a topic that I can find. And I decided to do the same thing with Antifa because it was just one of those things where I was like, I don't think anyone else has covered this.

You do

Simone Collins: this with your books too. Keep in mind whenever you write a book, it's typically because there's a subject that you don't feel is covered very well by anyone.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so, I mean, I have, I've, I've heard of Antifa as a concept out of all of my deep dives.

Probably surprised me the most.

Simone Collins: Wow. Are you, are we going to join Antifa now? Is this the surprise? No, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: But the left is right. Remember there was that time when people on the left kept saying like Antifa is a conspiracy theory, Antifa doesn't exist. I, I don't know if you remember when this was like the mainstream talking point on the left.

Where they were [00:01:00] like, Antifa is made up, the right is attacking, you know, they're making up this fictional evil organization to attack, and the organization isn't a representation of anything real, and if you talked about Antifa, you would be labeled as a conspiracy theorist. This was during Trump's first run where the concept of Antifa was seen as a conspiracy.

And some people still hold to this line, but very few still do. Most people generally agree that Antifa is a real thing that exists. The problem is, is it's not. But, unfortunately, like, where my research sort of hit a wall to begin with, Is Antifa doesn't meaningfully exist, and yet it does meaningfully exist.

So and we have multiple members are people who follow this podcast or hang out in our discord who are former Antifa members like reformed Antifa members.

Microphone (3- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): This video actually ends with about a 30 minute interview of one of these. Followers of ours, who used to be in Antifa about [00:02:00] what happens at Antifa meetings, the way Antifa organizes and just a general . Logistics. Of Antifa operations.

Would you like to know more

Malcolm Collins: And so what I mean when I say Antifa doesn't really exist is twofold. One, there is no centralized Antifa organization. There is no group that has a, and two, there is no centralized Antifa ideology.

Simone Collins: Okay. So you don't get a membership card. There is no president. There's no nonprofit organization. There is no

Malcolm Collins: barrier to entry. Literally anyone can just say I'm Antifa or sort of

Simone Collins: anarchic. I am anonymous, et cetera.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Anyone, anyone know anonymous was quite different. There were some organized power hierarchies where people can go.

And there were like, it might be that anyone can technically claim to be anonymous, but there actually are. Individuals who are disproportionately [00:03:00] influencers in the actions of what we call anonymous was in Antifa. There appears to be like, if I'm even just looking for like one famous, like important individual was in Antifa.

There's going to be much fewer of them. The, the flatness of the organizations is much, much bigger than it is with Anonymous. But in addition to that, the discordant views and goals of the people who are within Antifa are Hugely various as we're going to go over in just a second. All that Antifa really is, in fact, I would say Antifa is less of a unified idea than something like the alt right.

Which is what Antifa really sort of emerged to mirror. But. It went further than the alt right ever did, and it represents what I would call a psychological technology. Or a, specifically, it's a technology that gives individuals a psychological license to do [00:04:00] violence against moderates of the other side.

So, what it means when somebody says they're Antifa, like, what fundamentally are they telling you? They're saying They believe that they have a psychological license and the moral justification to act upon a center right MAGA dad the way they would treat a literal Nazi at a, at a concentration camp.

Simone Collins: Oh, I get it. Okay. Okay. So yeah, Antifa is to scary, violent, political extremists. as to borderline personality disorder is to c**t.

Malcolm Collins: I don't understand.

Simone Collins: Well, when someone says that they have borderline personality disorder, they're really saying they're just a c**t. Right. It's

Malcolm Collins: true. I mean, it's true, but that's not really the point I'm making here.

What I'm making here is what Antifa is and what is conveyed by the concept is [00:05:00] I am allowed to treat half of America the way I would treat a human being. concentration camp guard. That is, that is where punch a Nazi comes from. That's where all this comes from. And that's what I'm going to make in this episode is Antifa will say one thing.

They will say we fight against fascists, right? But then if you look at their actions, what they consider fascist is generic center right, or even center left capitalist.

Simone Collins: Now that's interesting, I was watching an interview between Lex Friedman and the guy who founded Young Turks, co founded Young Turks, who was actually framing things very differently.

He was saying that he was a capitalist. He was very in favor of capitalism, but against corporatism, which we kind of 100 percent agree with. And I kind of wonder if that's true, if people who consider themselves far leftists actually favor capitalism and what they're against is corporatism, so what [00:06:00] you're really saying is that they're against corporatists?

Okay. Just no. Just they like capitalism. They are. So they're Marxist.

Malcolm Collins: You'll see really quickly how extremists they are. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, first I'm going to give you how they frame themselves, right? So you can understand how this psychological framing trick works.

Simone Collins: Okay.

. So according to a member of a New York Antifa group, quote and this is who they target, fascists, alt right, white nationalists, etc. . And the main focus is on quote, groups and individuals which endorse or work directly or in alliance with white supremacists and white separatists. We try to be very clear and precise on how we use these terms, end quote.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. And so, if you're looking at like what ideologies do Antifa members usually hold is generally anti authoritarian, anti capitalist, anti fascist and anti state views. And they're generally left wing ideologies and they'll also do things like support, [00:07:00] you know, LGBT rights and stuff like that in general, lefty urban monoculture causes, like they're known for going to trans book readings to children with guns to try to intimidate. whoever might show up at those So let's get to an example of this. So you've heard like who they say that they're fighting right now. Let's look at who they actually fight. During Berkeley protests on August 27th, 2017, an estimated 100 Antifa and anarchist protesters joined a crowd of 2000 to 4, 000 other protesters to confront.

A demonstration that had showed up for a say no to Marxism rally. So they, and, and this is the way the, So they're not Marxist,

Simone Collins: they hate capitalism and they hate Marxism.

Malcolm Collins: No, what they went to this event,

Simone Collins: Oh, they were protesting the people who didn't want Marxism.

Malcolm Collins: was say no to Marxism. So they say, and this is the psychological trip of Antifa.

They say we're against fascists. They say we're [00:08:00] against white nationalists. They say we're against Nazis, but what they actually end up attacking is people who are protesting against America becoming a Marxist country.

Simone Collins: Yeah, because this whole thing, the definition you read earlier, where it was like, we're very, very, very specifically against white nationalists, anti Semites, like, I'm hearing this and I'm thinking, okay, they're actually describing a group of maybe 800 people in the US.

You know, this is not bad. Okay, fine.

Malcolm Collins: Fascists is 50%. Or more of America, probably 70 percent of Americans they consider fascist. And what do they think these fascists deserve? Like how does this psychological trick work? So this, it took place at the Say No to Marxism rally. So this is just somebody arguing against an ideology.

That has literally killed more humans than any ideology in history. Like, you know, if you look at like the great leap forward, just five years of communism killed arguably more people, depending on the stats you're looking at than the entire American slave trade, [00:09:00] like. That is absolutely insane, the scale of death that can be attributed to Marxism.

And people say, Oh, that's not real Marxism. Well, what do you think they weren't trying? Like they were trying. It's just, it always devolves into this. This is why people are protesting it. Right.

Simone Collins: I don't care how well you mean with anything. If you hurt children, if you put children in harm's way with your policies, then you're bad.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. That's why Marxists are right, because they put children in harm's way, but they're, they're not protesting equality. They're protesting what always happens when people try to achieve equality using this mechanism. But what did Antifa think people deserve? Okay. So, this is one individual named Clayton attacked, and this was at the anti Marx rally.

Just protesting Marxism, Clayton attacked people with a metal U lock during the April 15th rally around the Civic Center Park. Court papers later revealed that Clayton struck at least seven people in the head, according to authorities. One person received a head latheration that required five staples to fix.

Another was uninjured but had a piece of helmet broken off. [00:10:00] He broke a helmet. And a third was struck across the neck and back. So this guy was going in for the kill.

Simone Collins: Thank goodness the person was wearing a helmet.

Malcolm Collins: And I'll, and I'll have pictures of this, like this is bloody and horrifying.

Why did he feel that he had the right to attack an Anti Marxism is something that, like, 70 percent of Americans probably broadly agree with.

Like, this is mainstream, even moderate leftism. Why did he feel he had the right to do that? Because he had built an ideology that psychologically equated anyone who is not a Marxist as a Nazi. And that was the only way he could think of them. It strips the humanization of the mainstream other. And I would say, I actually don't have a problem with political violence against extremists.

If they are the type of individual that is advocating for direct and actual, not like made up lefty [00:11:00] violence where they're like words or violence, but like actual violence. Like, I am okay with like actual political violence against somebody flying a Nazi flag out. Or somebody flying an antifa flag. I mean, they're in the same category of person. , you know, your actual Nazi Nazi is willing to attack like center right individuals. If they felt that they had the ability to get away with it. It's the same with Antifa. They're really equivalent groups. And the thing that's so funny about Antifa is Antifa does this thing that they call black shirting.

Where they go around in, in, in these black outfits, where they say it so people can't tell their identity. There's lots of ways you could cover your identity. You know who the black shirts were? And I love that Antifa don't seem to be aware of this. Or maybe they, they are and they just hide it. The black shirts were Mussolini's fascist troopers.

The Nazis were copying with the brown shirts. They literally use gangs of people in black shirts who covered their faces to attack crowds. That is the slightly [00:12:00] awkward fascist came to power.

Speaker: When Mussolini finally marched on Rome in 1922, he did so with an army of blackshirts at his side. Blackshirts were a paramilitary force who, as their name implies, wore black shirts. That's pretty on the nose. Mussolini used this army to evoke terror, both domestically and abroad. From the earliest days of the fascist party in Italy, Mussolini's black shirts worked to get rid of any opposition.

The black shirt's motto was Minifrego, or I don't care. And points for honesty, because they really didn't care.

Speaker 2: Get the f**k up! Fear is

Speaker 3: a part of our tactics. It's our job to go out there and say, No, we're not going to allow you to spread these ideas. Philadelphia,

Speaker 2: make it clear!

Speaker 4: Organizations all across the country and all across the world. Black people.[00:13:00]

Speaker 3: A block or block is just what we wear. It's entirely black, simple, non identifying clothing.

Speaker: Once the fascists went from being an urban phenomenon to a wider Italian force, they then went after peasant leaders in the countryside, showing aggression towards any potential challengers in villages, communities, and farms.

and towns throughout the peninsula.

Speaker 5: When me and Brad first met, I didn't think we'd get along, but turns out we kind of agree on everything. Your racial identity is the most important thing! Everything should be looked at through the lens of race! Jinx, you owe me a coke. We both think minorities are a united group who think the same and act the same. And vote the same. You don't want to lose your black card. Sorry, I don't know, I just think we should Roll back discrimination law so we can hire Basie and race against Jinx!

Now you owe me a Coke. Hey, tell him what you told me yesterday. White actors should only do voices for white cartoon characters. I've been saying that for years.

Malcolm Collins: And, and if you think that this group isn't fascist, one of the things that I always point out is, you know, we've got to have some clips here from the woke versus racist thing

Far [00:14:00] left has just become might call this horsesho rank human beings on a sca human dignity based on th say we don't do this, but mainstream policy like in and this is recommended by the CDC that vaccines that they thought were saving people's lives.

At least they, they, they assume this were distributed, not based just on need, but also based on how discriminated an ethnic group was his score historically. And of course, they don't mean how really discriminated. I mean, obviously, Jews would be pretty discriminated if that's what they were looking at.

Speaker 5: Black people should only shop at black businesses. I guess the only thing we really disagree about is I think white people are the root of all evil.

But what did I tell you, though? If we can narrow that down to a certain group of tiny headed white people, I think we can come to an understanding. Technically, I don't consider Jewish people white because Neither do I. But we're still cool with interracial cucking, right? Yeah, as long as you pay for it.

Sex work should be celebrated.

Malcolm Collins: What they mean is the [00:15:00] lefty value hierarchy of which races matter and which races don't like which ones deserve human dignity, which don't. And now that the lefts have gone like anti Jew and they're like, no, we're not Jew. We're anti Zionist. And I'm like, well, depending on the study, you're looking at us like 89 to like 95 percent of Jews are, are Zionist.

And it's like, of course they would believe that they need a state to be safe. Like look at their history. And, and, and. I was like, I'm not anti christian. I'm just anti those people who say Jesus was the son of God. It's like, well, I mean, that's a pretty big overlapping Venn diagram there, buddy. But so they now, you know, they, they, they, they, they now believe that humans should be sorted based on their ethnic group with some accorded more human dignity than others.

And at the very top of this is the Jews and, and, and, and. I also love that, like, if you actually look, like, just mainstream Democrats are going so cashy now they're, I, I, I, I love that they're like, we are all about, like, election integrity when the right's like, yeah, but, like, you know that something probably [00:16:00] happened, right?

Like, there's just too many fires at this point, you know, belief, and they're like, nah, our party isn't anti democratic, and I'm like, you literally cancelled your own primaries, like, your party's leaders are just appointed by a committee of elites. Now they don't even talk to you and you didn't protest.

Antifa didn't go to protest that Kamala was just dictatorially assorted.

Simone Collins: They haven't heard anything about Antifa recently, actually. Has there been any Antifa activity recently?

Malcolm Collins: We'll get into that in just a second. But I love that they're just like, voting is like now antithetical. Like, this is a woman who, by the way, for people who claim to care about Black Lives Matter in one of the incidents that left thousands of Black people, and she admitted this later because she did let them out not telling them about a lab leak in the drug lab in jail who should have been freed so she could get the police commission support to win an election cycle.

And then later the Supreme Court said that her prison system was a human rights violation [00:17:00] and her department argued back, I'm sorry we can't release anyone because we're using them right now for fire duty for mandatory work, even though it would have been cheaper to hire them. Like, she thinks like a fascist.

In every sense of the term, it is the party of fascism. Now, unironically, there was one person who's like, you could argue that she's more fascist than Trump. And I'm like, you have to be so brainwashed, so brainwashed to not see this at this point. It is, it is, it is comical that you have black shirts out there going out and beating up peaceful protests, protesting Marxism.

But I want to get further because there's a Antifa that go around. One is that Antifa has never been connected with anyone dying. This is just factually untrue. Reynold 48 is considered the prime suspect in the august 2020 killing of 39 year old Aaron J. Danielson, a right wing activist who was shot in the demonstration in Portland.

And yeah, so there was

Simone Collins: one likely death that [00:18:00] described

Malcolm Collins: himself in a social media post as 100 percent Antifa and because Antifa is an opt in organization, you know, obviously, yeah. And there have been some other instances we're going to get in where Antifa has definitely tried to kill people. They're just, Pretty incompetent, but they keep trying to kill people as

Simone Collins: though I get the impression that at protests, some people just show up because they feel like, Oh, it's that event format where I have licensed to vandalize things and hurt.

Oh, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: So Antifa is quite different from like, if you consider like the January six protesters or something like that like the negative actions that largely came out of that were. Like mistake where if you look at Antifa, they're showing up at stuff was like Molotov cocktails. Yeah, but

Simone Collins: that's what I'm saying.

The, the people who show up to protests because they feel like that they want, they just want by default to vandalize and do family things. No, that's

Malcolm Collins: clearly not the case. There are some people who show up. Do you think this is

Simone Collins: very politically motivated? They're not doing this because they want to. To hurt someone, and this is [00:19:00] just a nice excuse to, because it's like a purge night.

Trump

Malcolm Collins: supporters aren't bringing bombs to events, and that's what we're going to go over. They're not trying to blow up things. No, but you're not, you're still not answering

Simone Collins: my question. What I'm saying is, does this not really have to do that much? With a political motivation and more to do with just a desire to wreak havoc and be violent.

Malcolm Collins: No, that's the exact point I keep making. It literally doesn't have to do with that. If you wanted to wreak havoc and, and, and, and do violent stuff, you, most people, like most human beings, even if they have a background desire to do something like that, they believe that other humans have human dignity, right?

Like, you need a psychological motivation. Cool. That allows this A and B, it's not like they're showing up to recreationally cause violence. If like the opportunity, like I think that this is, this is the missed narrative about Antifa that has been successfully distributed to the mainstream audience.

Uhhuh is that Antifa members go to events and [00:20:00] sometimes things accidentally get heated. And we will go over evidence that that is obviously not what's happening. Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Alright, so I'm gonna go further into the history of Antifa in the United States of here and stuff like that. So in the oldest group, to use the term Antifa in the United States is Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon, founded in 2007.

So it's a fairly modern movement that's very new. Yeah. That they come from a German movement that has existed since the Nazi times, but this is. Factually inaccurate. The original movement that they claim to be descended from was shut down as the Nazis rose and integrated into the Nazi party. And so, like, that's not yeah, they're definitely not descended from that movie.

There was a movement in Germany that started fairly recently, but not. Um, And then there's another movement in the US which they could be descended from that we'll get to in a second. One of their biggest sort of things that they're known for is their attacks on the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in [00:21:00] August 2017.

Where they and at the rally, there were genuinely white supremacists who went to the rally. No, this is

Simone Collins: the famous tiki torch khakis. And

Malcolm Collins: this is the problem with the way the left works. They're like, if you're a free speech organization and you let one person with X ideology show up at your event, then we have a moral license to treat everyone at your event as if they hold that ideology.

where more for them. This is just because they know that if they're exposed to an ideology, they just immediately capitulate to it, which is why they don't let ideologies they don't like at their events because they have much less like psychological and moral framing. This is something that you told me that really made this hit home for me.

The reason why people on the right aren't afraid of having a Nazi, like, come to their event when they're not a Nazi, right, is because I'm not afraid of becoming a Nazi because a Nazi comes to my event. However, I do think I might convince a Nazi to not be a Nazi anymore. Yeah, so, [00:22:00] all the better if they show

Simone Collins: up.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, and you would want them to show up if you wanted less Nazis and you're not a Nazi.

None: But, if

Malcolm Collins: you hold a very weak psychological framework that you believe you only hold because the people around you hold it, Then it's really dangerous to have a Nazi show up at your event.

And I, I feel like that's where a lot of these leftist ideologies come from is that there's some subconscious understanding of how close they are to just being Nazis, but they've changed a few words.

Speaker 5: Ask him about interracial dating. All I said is that black men who date white women have internalized racism, and white men that date ethnic women are fetishizing them.

Guy's against interracial dating now. Like, am I being pranked? Did Boomer put you up to this? Ugh, you know that taco place is white owned? White people should be making white foods, like crap macaroni and cheese, no seasoning, not even salt. It's like he's a mind reader. I mean, I've been pushing for segregation forever and my man does what?

Malcolm Collins: Again, I'm going to show that skit here. There was the Berkeley protests, which I mentioned there, there was the inauguration day protests that were associated with Antifa. These are in, in, in 2017. There was the Portland protest where Antifa [00:23:00] groups were involved in multiple clashes like the Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon.

And Proud Boys are a very centrist group. Like, they're like, oh, the racist Proud Boys. I'm like, the group is a black guy running it? Like, what? You guys have so, like, lost the, the the ship here at this point. Or, and, and, and this is Lost

Simone Collins: the ship? You mean missed the boat?

Malcolm Collins: Missed the boat. Yes. And then there's the ice facility attack in 2019.

And this is one of those things I'm talking about where William Van Spencer and Antifa agent attacked an immigration and customs enforcement detention facility in Tacoma, Washington. Mm-Hmm. was a rifle and attempted to ignite a propane tank before being killed by police. Oh my gosh. So, like, they are looking, this isn't like, again, what I'm telling you, this isn't just individuals who are out there and lose control of the situation.

This is individuals who, due to their dehumanization of mainstream Americans, are willing to, like, blow up buildings because they don't care who gets hurt. They're just like, ah, [00:24:00] well, chances are they're one of these non human Nazis, right? Now, for people who are wondering, the name Antifa and the logo of two flags represent anarchism and communism.

And they're derived from the German movement. The Mark Berry, the author of Antifa, the anti fascist handbook, credits anti fascist action or ARA as a precursor of the modern Antifa groups in the United States. And I did some research on this group and they are very similar in what they were focused on and stuff like that.

 So, Antifa is most active right now in the Pacific Northwest in Portland, Oregon, and they were primarily active from like 2016 to 2018. And you might say, why don't we see much Antifa stuff happening right now?

Malcolm Collins: I think it's because largely most of the people who are part of Antifa Have had moments of like self reflection and kind of grown up. I mean, there's a reason like a number of our audience comes from this community. I think going out and doing one of these actions, they had genuinely, like the people involved [00:25:00] in Antifa genuinely thought that when they told people that they attacked somebody at a anti Marxist rally, because they assumed that that person was a Nazi, that those people would be like, oh yeah, good for you, you attacked a Nazi with a bike lock.

Instead of, oh, you attacked random anti Marxist with a bike lock? Like, they, they thought that this psychological trick that was working in their mind was going to work in the media, and it absolutely did not. It made them a great boogeyman for, you know, most of online culture. The people who caught.

The bike lock attacker guy, cause he was going to get away with this. You know, the police weren't doing anything about this, was 4chan. And there is a great video, I believe by internet historian on this where he goes into how they found the guy. And it is a really interesting story.

Speaker 7: April 15th, lest we forget, was one of the biggest PvP battles in recent history. Red Pill Alliance versus Antifa Horde. [00:26:00] Outside of the battlefield, GMs and mods stood around doing nothing. Hey, how come you guys are hanging back?

 But then, a rogue comes forward. He pops out of stealth, boom! Cheap shot. 900 critical damage and stunned for 2 seconds.

That's a nice mace. Check that out, oh yeah, level 90 bike lock, plus 40 strength with a 50 percent proc bleed enchant. The rogue uses vanish and slinks back into the crowd. Shaun is seriously hurt. He finds a priest in time, but he needs a trip to the hospital. And several stitches. Jokes aside, this is assault with a deadly weapon.

This guy should be Locked up. I'm sorry. During the night, Pol was working busily. They saw what had happened and they were outraged by it. They unholstered their autism and aimed it squarely at the masked man. The hunt was on. They broke down every [00:27:00] bit of footage they could. They found this man, who matched every detail.

. And then this footage surfaced. Wear his mask. Slipped off,

bingo. Turns out he's a teacher's assistant at a local university specializing in ethics and moral philosophy. The state has a monopoly on how we conceal justice. So for now, he's just another name to add to Paul's new Antifa database.

Malcolm Collins: No, if we're talking again about the types of groups that they end up attacking, right? And this is, this is, this is what I keep coming back to. So, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, quote, fascist plan to march through the streets, end quote, and warned, quote, Nazis will march through Portland unopposed, end quote.

The alliance said it didn't object to the Mohammed Moltmann, GOP itself. But to quote unquote fascists who plan to infiltrate its rakes, yet it denounced marchers with quote [00:28:00] unquote Trump facts and quote unquote MAGA hats or red MAGA hats as fascists. So this is the way the psychological trick works. Mm.

Simone Collins: So if you, you support Trump, you are fascist. So half of Americans at any given time, roughly fascist.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, oh, wow. And so how do they do this? Well, they really like to you know, they'll do things like gun clubs showing up at stuff. They'll do things like doxing. They'll do things like mass reporting, YouTube videos.

They'll do things like obviously direct acts of terrorism. Really anything they, they can get away was doing an important thing to remember about Antifa is their organization is very, very poor. Which means that they're more just. A representation of a mindset than a representation of

Simone Collins: yeah, almost like a social template, which is interesting in that it can be very antifragile.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah now example, when I was talking about, like, planned destructive acts. In 2020 protests in [00:29:00] Portland, a federal courthouse led to Antifa members undertaking a coordinated blockade of federal, state, and local enforcements, and an attempt to fire bomb the courthouse. Oh. A significant number of law enforcement and government personnel.

Simone Collins: Oh, so okay. Organized firebombing of government buildings. That's pretty big. Are they also responsible? I know that during the, the Black Lives Matter protest era. There were some police buildings that were burned down, if memory serves. Was that Antifa or was that just protesters going crazy? I mean,

Malcolm Collins: did the people, like, why did they think it was okay to burn down a police department?

And this is, I think, the better way to understand Antifa. Is Antifa can be thought of as anyone who is dehumanizing, you know, a large group of people like this. Okay. So, for example, functionally, the all cops are b*****d, ACAB, is another form of Antifa. It's saying, I [00:30:00] have a moral license to do whatever I want to any police officer.

To any police property it's what Antifa represents as a moral license to treat normal humans and average citizens the way you would treat the most extreme and dangerous individuals who maybe ever existed that they have begun to align themselves with ideologically. They just use different words to hide that from themselves.

And I'd also say to the Trump quote, because I want to read the full Trump quote here in response to Charlottesville, because it was a really well thought out, like, well structured quote, and everyone's always like, oh, the bad people on both sides, and it's like, no, fine people on both sides. Equally bad people.

Very

Simone Collins: fine people.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, there really were equally bad people on both sides. Yeah. So you had some very bad people in the group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group. And then later he goes on to say, I'm not talking about the neo Nazis and the white [00:31:00] nationalists because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in the group other than neo Nazis and white nationalists, end quote. He also stated, quote, You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent.

Nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now, end quote. Completely accurate. And, and, and this is the problem with the far left, they cannot see the evil that has infiltrated their own ranks. And it's because, when we talk about moral license, that show that you told me about, that I'll play a clip from here, that's like a popular lefty show.

The Good Fight.

Speaker 11: Three weeks ago, Henry Roberts raised six million dollars in dark money to fund an off the books guerrilla oppo operation. He asked me to run it. Nobody seems to be willing to do what is necessary.

And what's that? Whatever it takes. Democrats act like this is the nineties and they're working under the old rules. The new rules are these attack, lie, [00:32:00] don't get caught. Machiavelli wrote the Prince for the rulers.

Well, we're rewriting it for us.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that basically says we now have a moral license to lie, to cheat, to do whatever we want in these election cycles because they have made up all of these things that Republicans are doing. And this is one of the things that you apparently has been a big shift for you, is you're realizing that all these things you believed about Republicans growing up as a far lefty are actually more like aspirational lefty things and aren't true about the right at all.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: We

Simone Collins: were talking this morning about how, I think you grew up with this impression too, that Republicans had a truly amazing ground game at the local level that when they could not win at the national level for president, for example, they decided to invest really heavily in local politicians, state reps, to a certain extent, members of the [00:33:00] House and Senate.

Just to really win those local games and sort of control that level of policy, which is quite influential. You can really Shift the trajectory of our country, just looking at local policies. But that is, it could not be more opposite the case when you actually look in practice, at least now at what's happening with the Democrat party locally and with Republican parties locally, Republican parties across the United States are for the most part, not there.

And to whatever extent the Republican party supports politicians, it is only a few flagship. Federal level politicians, everyone else is completely ignored. It is a very different story at the local level among Democrats running. They are getting immense party support. They're getting tons of funds and they're getting.

Very different treatment. Just the, the Democrat party's together and it has the ground game. So it's completely the opposite picture, which really [00:34:00] surprised me. And that's just one example of things that

Malcolm Collins: you, well, I mean, I think a great second example that I always see is, is Democrats these days really seem to believe the right to be like the anti democratic faction.

They're like, Oh, you know, look at the Jan six protests and stuff like that. Right. Like that, that was an anti democratic thing when those people were there. Because they believed, and I, I literally, like, I live in a country where I can't say they believed this was evidence. That would make it impossible for you to hear this.

If I presented any evidence, you wouldn't be able to see it. The video would immediately be taken down. So I, I say, they believed without a shred of evidence, a shred of real evidence, okay? Because that's what I have to say in this environment that we live in, in this world of Thought Police that the election had been undemocratically stolen and that they were protesting that.

And, and the left pretend that [00:35:00] this was them trying to steal an election when, like, there's been no reflection on, Did they just do that?

Microphone (3- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: And if you're like, oh, the Democrats would never do something like this. . Keep in mind that just before the GM. protests. You had the May 30th protests. , which was associated with Antifa and the BLM movement and in it. , protestors . CJ, the white house leading to a temporary lockdown. , with over 60 secret service agents being injured, , with president Trump being taken to an underground bunker for his safety. , where, , there was serious property damage and graffiti and vandalism and, where the DC national guard was called to assist. So. It's wild that you hear about one of these events and people were put in jail for like five, six years for one of these events and the other one just everyone's completely led off scot-free and we pretend like it never happened.

And it's just because of who controls our media.

Microphone (3- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-5: If your response to this is these [00:36:00] two protests are nothing alike. Because the Antifa members didn't successfully break into the white house.

The problem was this line of argument, is that the Jan six protestors? Did not break into the Capitol building either. It was the law enforcement itself that removed the barriers. So most of the people who are sitting in jail today for quote unquote, breaking into the Capitol building, had no idea that there were ever any barriers there and was just peacefully following a crowd of other protestors who were walking through the Capitol building.

There was no way for most of them to know that they were not allowed to be there. And I think when you look at the actions of Antifa, you see that in part, what ended up damning the Jan six protestors. It's that they were much more obviously a peaceful group. And so it made sense, for example, for the guards to remove the barriers and let them in where the Antifa group, it was very obvious.

If they got into the white house, people would start getting murdered.

Malcolm Collins: Like, and this is one of those things that you actually have [00:37:00] only really recently come around on. And what, what caused you to come around on it? Cause I was like, I just, like, I can't.

Simone Collins: There was nothing you could say that would convince me that there were election wiggles taking place. And then obviously running for state rep in Pennsylvania, I've met with a lot of people who've done a total huge, huge amount of local volunteering for the Republican party and for Republican candidates who've seen a lot of really weird things known Democrat operatives dumping large numbers of Mail in ballots, ballot drop boxes on election day.

In the United States, it's not, you're not authorized to collect for people mail in ballots. You as a voter have to submit it yourself, either mailing it in or dropping it yourself in a box. Seeing really weird blips and changes in votes for example, in many local elections. Elections, they would see a Republican [00:38:00] candidate ahead by, you know, a significant number of points.

And then instantly that lead just immediately flips to the Democrat party and exactly the same number of votes. Just go, what happened? Just a lot of weird things like that. Well, I think

Malcolm Collins: it's, it's, it's, it's something that you just see over and over and over again. But if you're a party that believes what was said in that show,

Speaker 11: The new rules are these attack, lie, don't get caught. Machiavelli wrote the Prince for the rulers.

Well, we're rewriting it for us.

Malcolm Collins: that we now have to lie, that we now have to cheat, that we now have to do whatever is necessary to win.

And when you think about what happened

Simone Collins: with Trump derangement syndrome, and it's really starting to settle in with me, there are a lot of people, even very competent, smart, educated, rational people who have just concluded that a system under Trump [00:39:00] is just so unimaginably bad that almost anything is justified to ensure that he Does not come into power again that and or that the system is so corrupt that if that's how the system is going to be, then the only way for them to operate within it.

Is to lie and cheat and steal, but they're kind of defining corrupt as in, I didn't win which is not ideal.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I don't always control everything is what corrupt is. And I think that this is, it's, it's, it's, and when we talk about like anti democratic, I just, I genuinely can't believe it. The mainstream democratic sentiment has become so anti democratic that they just stopped hosting their primaries and nobody f ing cared.

That is the weirdest thing I have ever seen. To the human embodiment of everything that BLM was protesting against. Like, I don't know. That is so weird. Oh, Kamala

Simone Collins: Harris being the human [00:40:00] embodiment of that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's She represents putting black people in prison for her own, you know, ability to win. Using prison labor, not releasing people despite the Supreme Court saying that they should be released.

Not, you know, letting Police off who had had a dangerous like shooting cases, and then there was some government corruption cases where she, you know, was very unfair and how she handled that, where you have her running mate being the guy who was arresting people in his state for leaving their houses during COVID and then created a snitch line so your neighbors could call on you leaving your house during COVID.

Like the level of just COVID 19. embodiment of fascism that this now shows and it's, and then they're, and they just completely fictionalized who they're fighting against. It's a complete fiction. Like the Republican National Convention doesn't even define marriage as a man and a woman in, in their, in their like mainstream party positions anymore.

Like [00:41:00] that's the different nanas that were still pretending like this is anything other than a genuinely fascist party and the party that's trying to save America for descending into fascism. And I would

Simone Collins: think that we were delusional, but even other people in the space, not necessarily beholden to any particular party have commented that in the debate, even that recently took place, the most recent presidential debate.

Oh, well, yeah, no, there's a suspicion of colluding, but actually what people have been saying is that Kamala definitely comes across as the more right wing candidate. So that's interesting. I don't really know what to make of it. I, I had come into this thinking that Antifa was more about anarchy and more about chaos and more about violence.

It doesn't come as a surprise to me that there isn't any Formal, there's no organization with a tax identification number that raises funds and [00:42:00] has, you know, a meeting and membership cards that, you know, but yeah, that, that it's actually very Marxist and that it's actually. Well,

Malcolm Collins: no,

Simone Collins: it's defining anyone.

Malcolm Collins: I think what they are is they are the ground forces. They are the radicalized, every man who thinks it's okay to kill a random supporter of the right, right? Like any random Trump supporter so that they can, you know, yes, we have a one party in this country that's controlled the elites. They control almost every company in this country.

They control almost. Every major source of power in this country. They don't hold elections anymore. They just choose who's going to win their primaries. They represent, you know, the, the, the mass incarceration of black people. They represent the mass and corporate corporation. They create the maladies that then they use to radicalize their own supporters to go and attack the people who are fighting against this [00:43:00] elitist fascistic system.

And genuinely, this might be our last chance to stop them. Because it's becoming increasingly clear to me that they really just do not value elections anymore. That voting is no longer one of the core values of the left. It's right. Think wrong. Think like that's it. There is that and it scares me.

It scares me to be in a country That is this close to the edge. And all we need to do is win a few election cycles and outweigh them. They're not having kids. They have tried to mass convert ours. But like, if you look at Jin Alpha's sentiments they've already lost this game. You know, we just need to wait for them to come into the voting bloc.

And I will note for the conservatives. Who are confused and think Gin Alpha is because there's still some like theocratic, like, you know, big business, a holdout conservatives before big business went far left. And they think when Gin Alpha is going right, that the Gin Alpha is like becoming like ortho bros or something.

No, they're becoming [00:44:00] the new right. They're right like we are right. They're not right like you are right. They're like pro gay right. They're like, you know, Yeah. They, they are, they are not the right of the old theocrat. They are the right of the genuinely anti fascist faction of the right that's trying to stop this increasing takeover of our government by this elitist faction, which is hiding information for people.

Now, one thing I want to make absolutely clear, so no one can misconstrue us as arguing this, there was definitely no election fraud. None happened at all. Everything was above board. The people at January 6th were monstrous terrorists who definitely arresting them and throwing them in jail was the right thing to do.

So I don't want any misunderstanding that I, I, I, I said, or I endorsed any other view. We were just making hypothetical arguments that some people might make. Don't you agree, Simone? [00:45:00] It's all hypothetical that we're talking here. Like all of these like hypothetical people we're talking about is just like how someone on the right might come to believe these things.

Not that this is actually happening.

Simone Collins: Exactly.

Microphone (3- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: So I have an interview here is one of our fans who

Microphone (3- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-6: Was in Antifa.

Microphone (3- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: So I'm really excited to share this with you guys. I will say that there are audio issues with the audio as much louder than mine. And I lacked the technical competence to equalize this. I have tried a number of different programs and it doesn't seem to be working.

And because we publish daily, I just have to bite the bullet on this one.

So either. You find the information interesting and you listen to it or you can always just hop off. I mean, you've got the full episode already that we had intended to publish. This is one of the downsides of hosting a daily show. , you don't always have time to fix every issue you run into.

Microphone (3- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: And if you're wondering, what's your proof that this guy was in anti-fat, this guy has Antifa dates tattooed very visibly on his arm. , that would be quite a thing to go in to just pretend to have been a very dedicated member [00:46:00] of Antifa.

Malcolm Collins: Hello. I am excited to be here with a guest right now.

So in the episode that you just heard, we talk about how Antifa is used more like a moral license than a specific organization. However, that doesn't mean that specific organizations that operate it. Under the name, Antifa do not do significant operations in cities and stuff like that. And I thought to bring on one of our podcast listeners who used to be an Antifa member and is now doing some work in terms of building.

knowledge about what actually goes on with them and stuff like that. And you have a podcast as well, which is

Ty: build baby build with Ty King. You can find it on YouTube. Hopefully soon truth as well.

Malcolm Collins: Great. You know, that's the Brian Kaplan book that just came out, right?

Ty: Oh, is that the name? Oh, yeah, because when I type in Build Baby Build, he's the other Build Baby Build that types up.

Yeah, it's taken from an old Martin Luther King quote. It's essentially, we shouldn't burn baby [00:47:00] burn, we should build baby build. And, essentially, we need to stay away from riotous behavior and violence, in my estimation. Cause, it doesn't work. So

Malcolm Collins: what I am most interested in, and I know what, like, I would mostly, and I think most people would most like to know is one, when people are going to like Antifa meetings, for example, what is being talked about?

How are they structured? How do they like communicate with each other?

Ty: There's varying degrees, right? You know, whenever I think of Antifa, I'm trying to break this more nuanced over time, but I think of, so far, the wannabes versus the devotees.

Think of the devotees as your avowed communists, or those that are there for the war, they're there for the action, they're there to get in the fight. Those are your devotees. They know kind of what comes with the territory. The wannabes are kind of like your rainbow haired trans kids that come in with the Antifa flag, and they're there because, They hate Nazis.

They support certain policies, but they don't really know what they're engaged with. So kind of in the same way Hamas uses Palestinians, they're the [00:48:00] human shields for the actual people within Antifa to operate. So more often than not, they're the 1st ones that will be arrested. If the action is called to by police and violence breaks out on both sides, the wannabes will often be the 1st to get hit, tackled, punched, arrested.

So that way people within the devoted class can look and be like, see. This is what we told you this is happening. And as far as the meetings, I never got into any higher up structure to where I could go to any higher up meetings. I know that that's a thing I've heard whispers, but a lot of it is on the ground coaching.

It's you go into these environments and they groom you on. This is what you say. If the police come, this is what you say in certain instances.

Malcolm Collins: When you say these environments, are these, like, subgroups that are happening at a, like, a protest, or is it like, you go to somebody's house or an office or something?

Ty: Yes, yes, and yes. And particularly parties. So that's the thing, is it so nuanced. Here in Eugene talking to people that I know down in Texas or on the East Coast, [00:49:00] Oregon has become such a radically indifferent environment to where post antifa and black lives matter. There really is a different environment.

Every one here that I've been talking to lately is supporting the Trump assassination. Everyone wants every Nazi killed and arrested. Everyone supports every trans ideology under the sun. So the environment here in this town and Eugene Springfield and in Portland particularly is everywhere you go. You talk about these things, so you don't really need one central rallying meetup point.

It's more about talking within your own circles, sending off text, sending off whatever have you. It's really as simple as you can meet someone in a bar, have a drink with them. And by the end of that drink, you're exchanging informations. You think you're on the same page and this guy's telling you, Hey, be here Wednesday at three o'clock.

I'll meet you there. And then we'll figure out things from there. It is so broad and diverse in its tactics. And,

Malcolm Collins: so it's really organic. It's it's what Antifa is, is the radicalized mindset and the radicalized [00:50:00] mindset allows for an organizational structure to organically develop through random meetings.

I guess then my 2nd question here would be. Do you believe that more of the socialization of the Antifa stuff happens at in person event or in like online message boards and stuff?

Ty: I would say online messaging boards memes. You know, I don't know anyone in my generation. I'm 27. There's like this weird thing to where everyone in my kind of age group, they'll say like an online meme speak.

Everything went downhill when Harambe died. You know, and everyone kind of followed these different memes and thought patterns, and everybody was in coordination. The conservative side was a little more fractured in doing what they would, but as far as, like, liberalism, far left memes, everybody walked in lockstep, and if you didn't walk in lockstep, well, then you're not on my page anymore, you're blocked, you don't get to be a part of the meme, you don't get to be a part of the messaging cycle.

It's kind of like how we had all the goodbye Joe Biden, good guy Joe Biden memes, and then less than a year later, oh, Joe Biden's [00:51:00] running for president. That was one of the memes that would be continually shared and that's really what detracted from black lives matter and the original things with police violence and racial issues is there were like long structure detailed list and they had to mean it down and make it smaller and smaller and smaller to make it digestible for.

Quite crudely, any retard to digest, go out there and act on what they think they want to act on.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and one thing I've noticed, you know, whether it's Black Lives Matter or what Antifa seems to broadly stand for is it really seems much more focused, at least at the ground level, on the things that they are against, and they don't really take specific policies of things that they want to support which leads to there being ideologically a pretty diverse group of people who, you know, Might be antagonistic towards each other.

They actually talked about their goals. How is that managed?

Ty: It isn't So that's one of the things that made me leave in 2020 is as things began to heat up about the may 29th era because for all those that don't know antifa did an insurrection in dc Before january 6 and I wouldn't even [00:52:00] consider january 6 and infirmary an insurrection so much as federal infiltration Like they did with a lot of the black lives matter protesters but I got a fun.

What was the original question? I'm sorry.

Malcolm Collins: I know. I was wondering how they dealt with like the different ideologies, but I want you to go down this. I want to know about May 29th. I don't know anything about May 29th. I was going to look that up and add something about it.

Ty: So I'd like to look up more myself because I was so I got this tattoo on my wrist here, right?

And it's May 31st. I was drunk and I got the date wrong. I think it was actually May 30th or something like that. So Antifa and black lives matter went into DC and I want to say it was like. Eight days, maybe, of prolonged, like, protest, riotous behavior. They stormed the White House, Trump got locked down in the bunker, and while that was happening on the East Coast, over here on the West Coast, people were cheering.

So, in our case, one of the things that they did freaking out because of what was happening in D. C. is, blue cities all across the country began to institute COVID measures in an effort to back off the protesters. So they actually set up a [00:53:00] curfew at our Whole Foods that we have here in Eugene. And they said, if you pass the Whole Foods, you're within the perimeter zone.

And then if you're on the outside, you know, you can't come in. And then the people within the protest zone didn't get the text alerts and then the people outside did. But what that created was actually one of the moments that made me want to walk away from Antifa out of many, but that was a night that I essentially kind of saw a battle going down in the streets of Eugene.

I saw kids get their heads caved in. I saw drones chasing after people, cars, try to run me and my friends over in the streets. We were hopping. over backyards, getting shot at with rubber bullets and tear gas, and it all stemmed from May 29th, but they just want to have us fixated on January 6th, January 6th, January 6th, January 6th.

Well, the feds infiltrated January 6th using people dressed as Antifa members and people on the far right. All the video footage under the sun is out, and really that's something that they did In Portland and in Eugene and in Springfield as well, they practiced the tactics of January six on the black lives crowd and on the Antifa crowd.

And then they moved on to the conservative crowd, because ultimately what they want to [00:54:00] do is get one side or another branded as a terrorist so they can brand both sides as a terrorist. And then they can go after everybody under the sun when in actuality, I think they need to look at Antifa like a gang.

Malcolm Collins: That's really interesting. So, can you, I don't want to push you to, to talk about anything you're uncomfortable talking about, but can you talk a little bit about how you might think of them as a gang?

Ty: Yeah, it's all tribal. It's all colors. So I have this theory and it's a little crude, but I think it's a theory that pans out.

When I explain to people, they're kind of like, oh, but it's the wigger to jihad theory. So it's no secret that we live in a country where the young white men specifically are completely isolated young men in general, but young white men in particular. So when I was growing up,

Malcolm Collins: actually, I should be where I don't know of this generation knows.

The, the wig word, like, I, I think we might have audience members who might have think you just said the N word because I don't think anyone has used it in 10 years. So It's a little dated. Social community that I [00:55:00] mean, when I was in middle school, Or like early middle school. Like I dressed like this, you know, like it was white kids who wore like sagging pants and listened to lots of like rap music and tried to emulate members of like famous members of the black community at the time.

Speaker 8: I got so much juice, you can call me Bruce. Willis. Thank you all my fans.

Malcolm Collins: However, it mostly died out. Like we, we might do an episode on why, like, there's so little black cultural influence in America anymore. Because it is interesting. It used to be like, A really dominant cultural force in America, and it, it, it, I think it mostly died back due to the invention of the concept of cultural appropriation because if you tried to do that today, people would say, well, you're culturally appropriating but it was really, really, really common for a Period for people who are in Gen Z and are like, this wasn't a thing.

Anyway, continue.

Ty: Yeah, well, that's where the theory comes in, right? Is I don't think that cultural appropriation and the calling of it out necessarily stopped it. I [00:56:00] think it shifted. So you had all these young men who either felt disaffected because their family structures were falling apart and there was stuff going on at home and they felt like they needed to take charge by putting on this tough guy attire or, you know, you just had the little geeky white kid that needed a sense of belonging, which I mean, in my case, I'm a juggalo.

So. That was me to a certain extent. I had my chains and my baggy pants and doing all that, hanging out with my buddies, doing drugs and s**t. Like, it's a thing, but I think whenever gender came along that it just, it kind of became the next thing. And I have a video of breaking it down further, but, you know, we kind of go from, Wanting to emulate black, and then we go to metrosexuality, where, you know, visually speaking, a lot of people are wanting to kind of emulate being gay.

And all these different things of what's acceptable, what's permissible, all these doors are being opened. But it's not about actually what's about going on, what's going on in the LGBT community or the African com American community, right? It's the clothes, it's the look, it's the caricature. So you fast forward a couple years, well [00:57:00] kids aren't wiggers anymore, they're all turning trans.

Well these trans kids, it's not just light and fluffy anymore, they're starting to act like they're into the gangster culture, they're into the drugs, they're into the rap, they're becoming increasingly more violent to where it's almost kind of replacing that, but In the sense that this gender ideology works as a religious replacement now that that's not working anymore You notice how a lot of these trans activists and a lot of these angry trans kids are now hopping over to Jihad and hamas support and now they're all wearing the scarves and now they're all It's I feel like it's step by step by step

Malcolm Collins: I haven't seen that so what's interesting is as jihadist mindsets.

They don't signal it In online spaces in a way that conservatives can see as easily. So I'm wondering if you could talk about like, is this, is this like pretty normalized among like the trans activists right now who are in the antifa movement, like the jihadi mindset, the like, that's how you prove you're extra serious.

Ty: So all I can see, a lot of it's coming from external [00:58:00] factors. I'm not really around any Antifa, ex Antifa members anymore. I just met one ex Antifa member, which is a story we can get to if you want, but separate from that, a lot of it's what we're seeing with online. Like you got that little trans non binary girl.

That's like, oh, it doesn't see gender. This is the Quran. You're seeing this kind of explosion online from the LGBT community of weirs for Palestine, you know, Radical insane stuff. You know, I was leaving work the other day. I work at downtown Eugene and it was just all this Project 2025 is a white conservative jihad But then all but next to those same signs was like free palestine and gaza and all this s**t simultaneously It's identity hopping and these kids are so confused that what all of this has done over black lives matter in antifa All the kids that are basically screaming for the death of the jews right now, whether they realize it or not They were groomed for this They were groomed to see through the lens of oppressed versus oppressor.

And they don't realize right now that they are playing holy war and you can't convince these people that [00:59:00] they're acting religious because so many people here in particular, we have generations of kids who not even their parents or their grandparents were religious. So when they start acting religious in themselves, they can't see it.

And if you try to make that comparison, they will flip out on you.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, interesting. Well, it's also interesting to see what causes people to flip out because those are usually like. Evolved social triggers to prevent them from engaging with ideas that might be threatening to their world perspective.

So that also, you know, has me believe that if they could recognize that it is, I mean, that's where the anger is coming from, right? You don't get angry if somebody is making a totally, you know, pointless or not on point accusation. So that's really interesting. And I have, I have noticed that jihad stuff.

I should dig into it more because like I hear about it and it seems to be happening at like their parties and stuff. Okay. I guess here's another question I have. So you mentioned like people get activated by like someone you meet and then they're like, Oh, be at [01:00:00] this event on this time. Do you know the core channels through which they are like activating or reaching people?

Is it typically like. You'd get an email or a phone number like a meme would start or like how would people find out to be at an event?

Ty: I think it's all of the above and it's also convoluted And the thing is social media offers certain protections for certain political groups that want to organize So I think eddie noted a story on in about a year or two to where certain people can post about their organized organizing protests and then others can't Some people can post about you need to go counter this You And they'll have their stuff removed and then the other side will be like, you need to go counter this and then they'll have their stuff removed.

I think social media is tinkering with this in coordination with governments. I mean, we've seen the fascism for ourselves. We've seen the unholy alliance of corporations and government and big business in the Biden administration. While everyone's been blinded because yay, Trump's gone. We don't have to pay attention now.

They've been ramping it up and ramping it up and ramping it up. And a lot of this [01:01:00] too. I. After this week, I can say this solidly. A lot of this is criminal in nature, and it's not that the kids themselves are part of criminal elements. I believe that outside gangs and outside underworld organizations are feeding off of this.

They are sending people into the protest and into these groups, and I believe that they are using Children. I believe that they are using drug meals and The way it was explained to me in some of my investigations this week, when a riot is happening on this side of Portland, and all the police are here, what's going on over here?

We don't, we don't think about that, right? Because all the cameras are over here. All the people are over here.

Malcolm Collins: A lot of this can be contextualized as, as malevolent. And I think that people just aren't really thinking through that. It is only organic that criminal organizations would become involved in this.

If you have a group that can pull police presence to a specific area, and that group regularly consumes drugs, illegal drugs, [01:02:00] that the criminal organizations already need to bring in. So they're naturally going to have connections within those communities and the connections are likely going to be high level within both communities.

So. Let me explain what I mean here. If, for example, I'm an organization that's running, you know, cocaine or ecstasy or something like that and I was going to have somebody who was a distributor, you know, making money distributing that for me who better to be a distributor than a high level member of a social organizing group?

Right? So it's very likely that important individuals within both groups would have a level of overlap. And so. That the groups would use these individuals to put people in specific locations to distract police. And, and here's the thing, if you are running drugs, you know, like you're a cartel, you're going to also be doing human trafficking.

You're going to also be doing like, all of the bad stuff comes together. And so I think that there's sort of two sides of this is, I think that people [01:03:00] may be misunderstanding this as being more Machiavellian. Machiavellian. That it might really be not that you're, it's not like evil people who are doing this, but does the person who ends up leading a Antifa group where they often have parties where there's ecstasy and then becomes a distributor for a local criminal syndicate.

Does that person not care about Antifa's aims? No, they do care about Antifa's aims, but does that person also get maybe Extra money from the criminal organization. Does the criminal organization have the capacity to maybe lay out bricks for them or lay out guns or do other things like that that can make their job easier if they just move the date or let them know so that it overlaps with a And they may not know that this is what's happening that day.

A human trafficking, you know, move big, big movement of supply can go on because that's actually kind of hard to do when you're doing big human trafficking moves because typically they get sort of consolidated and safe houses. And then they need to move them, like, distribute them [01:04:00] to other safe houses.

Bit by bit

Ty: by bit by bit, rather than training them out, essentially.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so, so doing something like a riot can be very, very useful in terms of, of doing that. And in terms of concentrating a customer base over a period of time. I mean, I bet you if you look at something like CHOP or CHAZ, like, the amount of money that was made by criminal organizations while that was operational must have been astronomical.

Ty: Yeah, like, what was going on in those downtown buildings? They're surrounded by skyscrapers. They took over police. What was going on behind the walls? Because we see people doing whippets and dancing and some people are going in want to make it seem silly. Others want to make it seem dark. Others want to make it seem like there's nothing going on.

But, and the thing is, is a lot of their distributors worth, you're thinking adults, man. Kids, they're using homeless kids. They are using the disaffected youth, the kids that are running away from their families. Kids are easier to use. Kids are easier to manipulate. Kids are easier to get rid of.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I also think that, that it's likely [01:05:00] that you have what's the word I'm looking for here.

Some of the kids are likely probably not also homeless. The best distributor for these organizations are often rich kids. because they have lots of people with lots of money. They can sell to for, you know, your elitist. And if you're talking about older, like the ideal distributor for them is the person who runs the Antifa network at a local rich college.

And all this

Ty: comes out of the U of O too. Like, a lot of Antifa's top people and a lot of people from there, a lot of it's U of O. I used to live like a block or two up the road. Like, I was at the central starting point for where a lot of the protest meetups would go. And, yeah, it's all college based. So much of it is.

And the schools encourage it and they bow down to them. And I mean, Eugene, so much of it, we're controlled by Chinese interests. I mean, Nike operates out of Eugene and they use labor. It's like, there's so many like foreign connections. The West coast [01:06:00] has become such a completely different country than the rest of America, I'm realizing.

We don't really. We don't operate the same way other people do. It's a new culture.

Microphone (3- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-4: There was a section here that I had to take out because they got too specific in terms of the organized crime groups that Antifa is working with.

Malcolm Collins: My, my, my intuition would be that it is not intrinsically that Chinese organized crime is disproportionately in, in working with Antifa. It's just that it's probably whoever is the largest and most organized local crime group is going to be the one that's going to naturally work with them.

And most crime groups have an ethnic component. Either either like Latin or black or. Chinese or probably the only one that Antifa isn't going to accidentally start working with is one of the you know, like Nazi or white white criminal groups. But I mean, who knows? One of my things about Antifa is I'm always shocked that they, did they, when you were there, did they do the black shirt thing?

The I did. Oh, so like, do they not know who the black shirts [01:07:00] were historically? Like, so you might not know. I know the brown

Ty: shirts, but they know there's black shirts actually. Brown

Malcolm Collins: shirts were Hitler's group, but he made them after the black shirts, which were Mussolini's group. The very first fascists called their foot soldiers the black shirts.

That is, and then Hitler wanted to copy it, but he didn't want it to be exactly black shirts, so he called them the brown shirts. But yeah, Mussolini's black shirts. Actually their, their famous phrase was something like, f**k around and find out. Okay, I'm gonna look it up. Ah, that's f****n familiar!

Jesus!

Ty: And this, and I'm not laughing because it's funny. It's, I'm so, I'm years disconnected from this, but it's like, I'm still learning, like, the extent to which My behavior took me to the historical things that I was tinkering with that. I had no idea because like we used to write phone numbers on our arms of our contacts for if we got arrested and that was to simulate the Jews.

We would always talk about it. It's like the Holocaust. Here we are with our numbers on our arms. Here I am with my husband's phone number on my arm. And he would look down and the [01:08:00] goal was to like, make you subconsciously feel like you were facing the same historical relevancy situation as them.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, the, the, the term I.

I don't care, which means I don't care or like, I don't give a s, it's probably a better transcript. And that's the embodiment

Ty: of Antifa, if you could sum it up all in one slogan, I don't care, or do what thou will. That's really what it boils down to.

Malcolm Collins: Can you talk about, is there any other psychological tools or techniques you remember that helped you think of other people as Nazis?

Ty: The ISIS comparisons. You have rednecks coming in with trucks and American flags. So a lot of people like to paint the symbolism of, well, look at ISIS over there with their Toyotas and their ISIS flags. So whenever people would come in rallying with the trucks it would make you feel like that was going on.

There's a lot of instances people will just go and they will just Hitler salute just to piss you off because. They know you're a dumb ass and they know you're going to freak out. So they'll go on the other side of the hill and they'll Nazi salute. And that'll get people [01:09:00] enraged. But for me, when I was going out, majority of the time I was drunk or high, I was on narcotics.

I was on alcohol. I was impaired just like most people in Antifa are because a lot of them are so dependent that it's at all times. Like, why are they so confident? It's a chemical induced. Ego that drives their confidence in narcissism. You can't talk, you can't talk sense into an alcoholic. You can't talk sense into a meth head.

You can't convince someone on ketamine that you know more than them. Yeah. Well, and it also makes a lot of sense then. So, so I, I, I absolutely believe you're, you're, you're, you're right there. And it would make sense that they would do that. And this is why, you know, going to a protest to try to defuse them, to try to talk with them in that environment is probably a very bad idea.

Malcolm Collins: And instead focus on, you know, online conversations and stuff like that. That makes a lot of sense

Ty: now talking to conservatives, though, they because I had a jacket, it was black on the outside came on the inside. So I would just flip it out and I kind of play both sides. The the conservatives, they were there to talk.

And that's just [01:10:00] something I want to highlight there to throw all my time there. They're wanting to speak. They're wanting to pray with me. They're wanting to share stories and they're wanting to be like, hey, this is wrong. That helped a lot. So if you do go to these events, you try to talk.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, because I came to the right, you know, I wasn't like originally on the right and the right is like really accepting, like way more than I would have anticipated.

I would say though, it's different depending on the type of right event that you're at. But, but one of the main types of right events, like the type that really likes Trump, they're like, everyone you talk to is just so excited to share their conspiracy theory with you. Yeah, it's fine. And there'll be all sorts of different counteracting conspiracies.

But they're like, Oh dude, I got to bring you in on the conspiracy. And you might think it's interesting how like. Anti government they are, anti authority they are, like, everything's this big effing conspiracy. And that's, and, well, that, and that's the thing too, is like, that's actually how Antifa, at least, I mean, it [01:11:00] started way back in the 30s, but in the modern day, from my perspective going into it, those were the types of people in Antifa that drew me in, like, the Occupy Wall Street people, they're like, hey, do you know what's really going on in the Middle East?

Ty: Do you know what's really going on with UFOs? But, As the federal government came in and all these outside forces came in and infiltrated Antifa, which I do believe they did just like they did the proud boys or any other group, they turned it into a spiritual trap to where they said, you can no longer question, you can no longer explore these things.

And I mean, you look over on the right right now, and all these people that I knew who are super religious, who hated, hated other religions growing up now, they're sitting back like. Huh, that's no different than my religion, or huh, I want to know a little bit more about this. And they're like, kind of actually pulling together in a spiritual collective that I thought the left was gonna do, you know?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's been very interesting to see the well, yeah, I mean like, for example, like Andrew Tate's an effing Muslim. Like I always point this out to people. I always forget

Ty: that.

Malcolm Collins: This dude's a Muslim, and he's [01:12:00] like the number one right wing speaker. But yeah, no, it's, it's, it's been really interesting how it's come to resemble, Yeah.

Alright. Well, this has gone longer, so we're gonna have a stupidly long episode on Antifa now, it looks like. But I appreciate your time, and your channel is, again, for people checking

Ty: Yeah, Build Baby Builds with Cyking.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, great. So, named after that Brian Kaplan book, Build, Baby, Build, or a Merlin's Ear thing.

Go check it out, and have an absolutely spectacular day.

Ty: Peace and love, you guys. Appreciate

Malcolm Collins: you

Ty: having me on.

Simone Collins: Anyway, I love you to death. I love you too.

Yikes. There's this one video. I think [01:13:00] it's a clown themed birthday party from your childhood. I don't know if it was yours or Miles, but everyone gets clown face paint that your parents got a person to come and face paint everyone. Maybe it was a friend. Everyone looks horrifying. There's this one girl who does not have any face paint on and who's clearly terrified of clowns.

And there are clowns everywhere at this birthday party. And there's this amazing shot of her face

and someone asks her, do you want us to paint your face? And she's like, No

Malcolm Collins: was I being terrible to her as I was?

Simone Collins: No, this was not Madison. Whoever she was, sorry. Madison,

Malcolm Collins: I think, and it's, these videos show how much parenting matters 'cause none of our kids are like problem kids.

And yet I was just apparently the worst. There

Simone Collins: are many moments in these home videos of your childhood where you [01:14:00] are.

Malcolm Collins: Does it make you feel like you might actually be a pretty good at this mom thing? template you're working from?

Simone Collins: Our kids still. have their moments.

Malcolm Collins: They have the capacity for it, but I've never seen them be actually mean to another kid.

Simone Collins: Yeah, they're but toddlers are toddlers, you know, kids don't like sharing toys that you can't expect perfection from a child. And if you got it, probably something is developmentally wrong with them. You know, perfection as defined by being a perfect gentleman. So yeah.

Malcolm Collins: All right, I'm gonna get started here.

In this episode, we dive into the surprising statistics that reveal the shocking comparative decline of traditional media outlets like The New York Times and Fox News. We analyze how new media platforms such as YouTube and podcasts are gaining ground in terms of viewership and cultural impact. From measuring the influence of legacy newspapers to discussing content creation dynamics on YouTube, this conversation covers a wide range of fascinating topics. Additionally, we touch upon the influence of culture on media consumption, the evolution of news, and how modern trends affect societal perceptions. Don't miss this compelling dialogue that sheds light on the future of media consumption.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] HEllo, Simone. I am so excited to be talking to you today. We're going to have some stats here that I think are going to shock you and our listeners because they shocked me. And I'll just jump into, I think one of the most surprising to me. So the average American when they click through to a newspaper

is on that link for 1.

5 minutes actually a little less than that. So I'm inflating the numbers a bit. Okay. If you look at the New York Times,

the New York Times gets around 385. 7 million clicks per month. That comes down to around 9, 642, 000 K hours on the New York Times. Okay? Now, consider that they have 1, 700 journalists working there, and there are two of us.

That means That the content we produce is consumed by

Seven times

As much time. As the content produced [00:01:00] by an average New York Times journalist. That means that the entire New York Times is only 121x more watched than our podcast just on YouTube. Right. And we are not a big channel.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So, there's just no way that This can be financially justified going forward.

I mean, how can advertisers continue? Well, now the New York times is a subscriber based. So maybe this is more of the sub stack thing is New York times invented the sub stack model before the sub stack. Well, I mean, I guess they went back to the original magazine. So the original, before they were newspapers, there were magazines and magazines were the original sub stack.

They were specialized information. That people paid for because it was useful to them in their careers and in their social lives. And then things sort of went on to newspapers and they went mass. And now we've gone back to niche with sub stack. And I think the New York Times is becoming that too. So [00:02:00] somehow the New York Times is able to pay for it.

I think a lot of its legacy reputation. But for these other publications, like general newspapers, non

Malcolm Collins: broadcast. All sorts of other publications go over their actual, like how much they're consumed. And then compare that with popular YouTube channels. Okay. Popular YouTube channels.

Just in case, you're wondering the math here. Typically an individual who has a subject subscriber is making like 500% more. Well, I think more than that, maybe like. A thousand percent more from that viewer than they would be. If that viewer was on YouTube or something like that. Uh, I mean, just consider you, you're watching this episode. And you are paying me to watch this episode may be. , a fraction of a cent. But if you were on subject and you were paying like, I don't know. $5 a month to me or something like that. You'd be paying significantly more. I'd also point out here. How much of the ad spend within traditional media is sentiment driven [00:03:00] by the advertisers as evidence of this.

We see how many advertisers were able to pull off of. X slash Twitter. The moment it was bought by Elan. If they were advertising with the goal of reaching a consumer, this would not have been something they would've done it. Would've been like, obviously he didn't change the math of advertising on X. , he, all it changed was the sentiment of the advertising class.

So in a big way, traditional media is something that is just being subsidized by the, I guess what I call it, the Karens who run marketing departments. So the core thesis that I'm going to be getting across here is when you look to legacy media and you are thinking about the impact it has on our culture, you shouldn't think about it as a thing that is separate from the other online influencers of our day.

You should just think of it as a specific category. What's the word I'm looking for [00:04:00] here? Crowdsourced like community. So I, I, I'll, I'll word it this way, right. People can be like, well, the New York Times is quite different from something like a, a YouTube personality, because, you know, the New York Times has thousands of reporters, right?

And YouTube Oh no.

Simone Collins: But it has a sizable staff. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: None of the thousand seven hundred.

Simone Collins: Okay, almost two thousand, but that's not thousands, that's hundreds.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, anyway, point being The New York Times is a sizable staff, therefore, you know, in YouTubers they're just like you and me, but that's also not true.

If you look at large YouTubers, like, God, I've absolutely loved, Watching the Illuma Hottie fall.

Speaker: When something as horrible as this happens, people always come out and admit fault and tell the horrifying truth of their continued negligence and malpractice, right? Yeah, you're right, that never happens. What am I thinking? Instead, they usually do their best to hide everything and blame anyone but themselves, and wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what happened here today.

Malcolm Collins: That has been very, very fun, but you know, she was just the [00:05:00] talking head, but she had like five writers. She wrote almost nothing herself from my understanding or nothing herself. Yeah. And this is true for a lot of the big YouTubers you watch, you know, game theory, for example, for ages, MatPat hasn't been doing anything other than presenting.

They

Simone Collins: treat it, they treat it like a professional business as they should. And yeah, most. Well, okay, not most, but it's many, many, many of the YouTube channels that I regularly watch. And that's because they are constantly turning out content are absolutely teams. And I respect that. And that's good. And they work well.

Malcolm Collins: The point I'm making here is they are teams and traditional media is a team. Okay. Yeah. Yes. And sometimes the teams are bigger. Sometimes the teams are smaller, but then people will be like, well, yeah, but people trust traditional media more. And I'm like, that's also just. untrue at this point.

At the statistics and see

These easiest only 32% of Americans have quote unquote, eight fair amount of trust in the media. And in the 1970s, [00:06:00] this was 70%. These days, the amount of Americans, you have a fair amount of trust in the medium. Is lower than the amount who totally distrust it.

then to, you know, I was about this and she was sa really interesting that t to frame itself as like,

Um, And it has completely abandoned that pretext and you were going over, you know, where NPR had had on they, at least it had on the Republican to give his defense. Well,

Simone Collins: specifically the, there's a podcast associated with NPR called the indicator from planet money. That's part of their planet money economics podcast series, which I love listening to the indicator recently ran two episodes, one on Kamala Harris's economic policy.

One on Trump's economic policy per journalistic tradition. They, they tried, I think, to play both sides in, in that they are present both sides and that they [00:07:00] interviewed Trump, friendly, economic. Organizations when talking about Trump policy and interviewed Kamala Harry, the friendly policy organizations when talking about Kamala's, it's just that the way that they framed them was very different.

They included a very awkward pause when interviewing one of the Trump stands essentially, and, and really made the Kamala stands look very intelligent. So there's still a lot of skew, but they're sort of performatively trying to do this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, and then I pointed out to you when you were trying to make this claim, I was like, yeah, but consider the big, you know, personality driven, non mainstream media like Joe Rogan or something like, yeah, Joe Rogan is known as having a conservative bias, but it's not like a mainstream conservative bias.

It's like, you know, it's slightly anti Trump, you know, pro Kennedy. Like it was, it wasn't the party platform.

Simone Collins: Well, that's, what's really interesting is it definitely feels as though [00:08:00] most of the legacy traditional media platforms have become operatives, unpaid operatives of either the Democrat or Republican party.

What I hear on Fox news definitely feels like. The official Republican party press wing. And I feel the same about many liberal

Malcolm Collins: where we know of collusion that happened recently around this with the

Simone Collins: debate and ABC, is that correct?

Malcolm Collins: No, no. Well, okay. So there was the case of the debate and ABC who was doing the beta has been found they provided Camilla the questions first and we're colluding to give her specific, according

Simone Collins: to an anonymous sworn affidavit from someone on that news team.

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: But allegedly at this point, I think we saw the debate. I mean, I think what is proven is that the person who signs the payroll checks of the people, the journalists who led the debate is an open and active Kamala Harris supporter. So there is that.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So, [00:09:00] the, but I'm, I'm not talking about that.

We were actually talking with the guy who wrote the abortion section for project 2025 which doesn't say what Kamala's team said that says it's not for a national abortion project. Monitoring. It's just saying that states have to report the number of abortions that happen within the states. And this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, given that, like, even Tim waltz state reports, a number of miscarriages.

Like, why wouldn't you report the number of abortions? Like, why do you hide babies that are terminated accidentally naturally, but not babies that are terminated intentionally just for statistics reasons. And the only reason you would do that is, is politically speaking. But anyway and they've tried to twist this into all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories.

But anyway, he pointed out that he gave a press announcement when Project 25 came out. He said only one journalist came to it. And this is Right, they, they,

Simone Collins: they host, well, I don't, I can't remember how many people showed up, but It was a year

Malcolm Collins: before

Simone Collins: Yes, this was months in advance. They hosted a luncheon, they, to launch the event, to have also active Q and [00:10:00] A, they invited every major publication.

They were very, very open and transparent about this and they wanted people to talk about it and cover it. There was no secrecy around this.

Malcolm Collins: But then what ended up happening is before any of the modern stories that were like exaggerating, it went live. He started to all of a sudden from multiple news outlets, simultaneously get inbound in reach about it.

Yeah. Basically they launched

Simone Collins: to crickets. Nobody responded, nobody engaged in no one covered them. And then one week out of nowhere, he started receiving a ton of inbound requests from pretty much every major news publication. And it was clear that at that point, Probably the Democratic party decided that, okay, now in terms of our communication policy, we are going to do everything we can to connect candidate Donald Trump to Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, even though there's no affiliation and Donald Trump hasn't talked about it, endorsed it, or even said he's read it.

And that is going to be an effective tactic. We need to make [00:11:00] sure that every operative we have brings it up at every meeting. Opportunity, et cetera. And then suddenly he hears about it from everyone. And

Malcolm Collins: well, I'd also, but I note here that when we're talking about the new non legacy media, not being a voice of the party, I mean, this on the left as well.

It's not just on the right where this is true. Yes, there is more coordination among left wing influencers. However, you know, you look at you or you're talking about like how the young whatever his name is Cenk

Simone Collins: Uyghur?

Malcolm Collins: Whatever. Yeah, C E N

Simone Collins: K.

Malcolm Collins: He comes off as very like libertarian ish in his beliefs.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like he, he, he's definitely, he, He doesn't, he's in favor of capitalism and against corporatism. So he's not a Marxist like most Democrats in terms of like Democrat operatives these days. He, yeah, he definitely comes across as very libertarian. When I heard him on an interview with Lex Friedman recently, I was [00:12:00] like, well, yeah, I largely agree with a lot of the things you were saying, which I didn't expect because I'm so used to most progressive media operatives being super Marxist.

Or, or communist. And so it's, it's weird, but so I hear you and I really like the fact that we'll say new media figures, podcasters, YouTubers, bloggers, sub stackers, whatever we want to call them. Do. Have much more independent thought and don't follow these party lines. What they don't have is some of the original trappings of journalism, legacy journalism, that I did really like, were things like protecting sources.

You know, people have been jailed. Journalists have been jailed for refusing to say who their sources were, for there being very clear rules of what's on the record or off the record for having a strong policy about publishing corrections when they're wrong. Bloggers don't typically do things like that.

We certainly don't go back and publish a [00:13:00] retraction if we realized we were wrong about something.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I'd also note well, cause YouTube doesn't let us. YouTube, the way that the YouTube upload system works is horrible and they need to change it. They should allow you to post like edits to your videos.

And they don't really, you can cut little bits out, but you can't add anything or correct anything, which would be a very important feature to have. Yeah, as well,

Simone Collins: as, as we start replacing journalists, which are continue to actually, but what's interesting though, is that many content creators don't even like being associated with journalists.

One, I was just listening to a podcast this morning where the podcaster said it at some dinner, someone was saying, you know, well, as you're a journalist, I want to be clear, this is strictly off the record. And they took great umbrage upon being called a journalist and having someone tell them that they were off the record, not because he necessarily really wanted to.

Say what he was saying or quote him. It's interesting

Malcolm Collins: that they didn't want to be like, I didn't sign up for this set of rules. I didn't take the Hippocratic oath. You know, you can't tell me, you can't tell [00:14:00] me I'm a street, I'm a street knifer. I'm not a surgeon. Okay. I stabbed people in the street, sir.

That is my profession. That is my life. But this is something that like I had begun to intuit, not from looking at the statistics, but from you guys, we get covered in mainstream media. All the time these days. You know, whether it's the Guardian or the Telegraph, we have a piece coming out on us in the Wall Street Journal the Philadelphia Inquirer just a couple months ago, just all the time we're in media.

And we've been able to gauge based on media, how much media ends up converting to actual, like, Online stuff. So I can say, how many new Twitter followers am I going to get from going on an episode of side scrollers versus how many new Twitter followers am I going to get from like a front page wall street journal?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or how many letters or emails or whatever will we receive?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And generally my read is that a mainstream newspaper putting you on their front page is probably the same as being in a [00:15:00] YouTube video with maybe 60K watches. Which is just not a lot and this is for us and I would note here that it changes if you have no virality, but you're on the front page because it's happened for the third top paper in Canada for us, right?

That was equivalent to a YouTube video with maybe 8k to 15k views.

Simone Collins: Well, and with other, other exception is if something goes viral online. Then that changed everything. This

Malcolm Collins: is what I would note. So the traditional media does not really have the capability to sway the mainstream discussion in the way it did historically.

Because the true power it holds is on its stories that go viral.

Baby: And it

Malcolm Collins: doesn't have the power. Absolute control over what stories go viral. And that's where you and I have been incredibly good at manipulating mainstream media and people can watch our media baiting story for specifically how these strategies work.

We have a podcast on this topic, [00:16:00] but the point being is that we often attempt to bait media into creating a story that the progressive media will guffaw at and think is insane and can go viral in progressive circles. But your average American is going to agree with because that's the easiest way to and and I would note that mainstream media pieces do go viral more easily than any other type of media because they are seen as having an air of like credentials.

to them. In terms of their virality, especially when people are like, can you believe, can you believe? But what's interesting is they're actually better at going viral around conservative causes than around progressive causes because they're not as likely like When the media loves the thing, it's very unlikely to go viral.

Things only go viral when the media hates the thing. And so the question is, is, is that virality good for progressive causes or bad for progressive causes? The core question is, were they smart enough to write about the thing they were mad about in a [00:17:00] way that your average conservative and centrist would also be mad, or are they writing about that thing in a way where your average conservative and centrist would be like, wow, you sound like a crazy person.

And. Was somebody able to bait them into that? That's, that's really where that is. Did you want to note anything here before I go further with stats?

Simone Collins: No onward my husband.

Malcolm Collins: Oh my goodness. Okay. Here we are. So the New York times just for some more stats on the New York times. Now I 700 full time journalists employed by the New York times.

The New York times actually has 5, 900 full time employees.

Simone Collins: Right. That means

Malcolm Collins: that for, we reach a mainstream audience as much, you know, doing this part time. So I'm pretending we're doing this full time. And I'm dividing it by two because I'm saying there's two of us on the team. All right. You're being

Simone Collins: extremely generous there.

Cause I just show up to talk with you sometimes.

Malcolm Collins: You, you reach people 25 times more than the average New York [00:18:00] times employee, seven times more. And keep in mind, we're still growing. Right. Right. Right.

And, and we're growing pretty quickly. Like we've doubled our like watch time probably in the last three and a half months or so.

So, and if you, in fact, to, to beat an NY Times journalist, you only need to get 469 watch hours a month.

Simone Collins: That's. Can that

Malcolm Collins: be right? Yeah, we're going to go into how it's right in a second. But yeah, it does work out. So next, it has to do with subscribers being so much more valuable. And many of the New York Times subscribers not actually reading the New York Times.

Simone Collins: So they buy their New York Times just kind of like how you used to buy it.

A New Yorker subscription to look sophisticated and they very conspicuously leave it on your desk or something is someone walked in so they would see that. Of course, you read the New Yorker, but you would never actually read it.

Malcolm Collins: Yep. [00:19:00] Okay, so let's keep going here

for Fox News. They get 336. 7 million. Visitors to their news site a month and that translates to around eight thousand four hundred and seventeen thousand

K

watch hours Keep in mind for the New York Times. It was nine thousand six hundred and forty two

K

watch hours

To give you an idea of just how few people actually read the New York times.

Remember that per Natalus book that we mentioned that was being pushed by the New York times, specifically the author of the book. Did opinion pieces in the New York times they were written about in the New York times. , and the book was called, what are children for on ambivalence and choice? Well, if you go to Amazon right now, this book has only six reviews.

I remember thinking when we wrote our perinatal, this book, the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, we were like, oh my gosh.

If only something like the New York times would shill our book gave only we could get any mainstream media to, to care about what we're doing. , and, , I guess [00:20:00] now we see that, , It wouldn't have really mattered.

If you go to you know down like now, I'm gonna go through the ones that are more like Like mainstream progressive stuff.

So daily costs is only around a thousand and nine K watch hours per month. If you go to the Huffington post and so people don't know the Huffington post, like a lot of people thought of it as real journalism, but it never really was. It was more like a distributed blogging platform. Like we've written for the Huffington post.

The Huffington post just basically goes to individual bloggers and is like, Hey, are you willing to write something random for us for basically free? And maybe we'll pay you. And you're like, yeah, okay. Did we ever

Simone Collins: get, we never got paid for anything that we put there.

Malcolm Collins: I think they might have paid us some token amount.

I don't

Simone Collins: think so.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, so, and people are like, oh, look, the Huffington Post is contradicting itself. And I'm like, that's like saying two people on Facebook are contradicting themselves. But the Huffington Post. Only has about 565

K

watch hours [00:21:00] per month or, or just sort of a view hours per month, which, which translates to 22.

6 million views. And then if you go down to Kotaku, the, the, you know, cause I've got like a whole subreddit deemed to fighting it and everything like that. Right. That's at 247. Thousand watch hours per month. So just not very big at all.

Insignificantly smaller than something like side scrollers, which is at 350,000. Watch hours per month, as we had mentioned earlier.

Now down at the bottom here, we have the 9. 5 million visitors to salon which is 237, 000 per month.

So salon is like, a magazine that you've heard of, right? Simone, like, you know, salon. So salon is only three times bigger than our channel. In terms of how much time people spend on it.

Simone Collins: Okay. Oh, wow.

Malcolm Collins: And so now let's contrast these numbers with some like big online YouTube tubers. Well, and I

Simone Collins: do want to say the [00:22:00] salon numbers are sobering, but I don't really consider the Fox numbers.

Of interest because most people are watching this on legacy TV and there were old folks, homes and hospitals and whatnot.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, you, you can go to individuals like, so for our channel, just because it's hard for me to get the actual watch time of other channels. I can look at our channel and know that we're at 452, 000 views per month.

And then I can use that to try to calculate out how long people are probably watching these other sources. Yeah. I had, I didn't do that for asthma gold, but he did 34 34, 000, 000 per month. 34, 404, 000 per month. Now for side scrollers, it's 1. 715 million per month, which if they are getting around the same view time as us is.

at 302.

Nope. I actually reached out to centering Craig to get his actual numbers and he is [00:23:00] significantly above what I expected. 360,000 watch hours per every 28 days. , and all the stats here were calculated with the assumption that it would . Around 300 for every 28 days.

I guess people just watch the side.

Scrollers much longer per click than they watch our channel. But I guess that makes sense. Cause he does some streams that are like three or four hours long. 5, 000 watch hours per month, which means the New York Times is only 30 times larger in terms of cultural impact when contrasted with side scrollers. In terms of like the number of people watching it. Well, and I'm trying Sidescrollers is like the Craig that we were on, Simone, together.

Yeah, no, Sidescrollers is, they're great. ClownfishTV, by the way, 4. 8 million watchers per month. And this is another

Simone Collins: married couple that often talks about Disney and also pop culture and

Malcolm Collins: media in general. And then you can get to something like Joe Rogan, which is 42 million viewers per month. Now he was a bit harder to suss out, but I'm sort of judging that he's probably [00:24:00] around 7, 405, 000 watch time hours there.

Let's put it this way. 7405 K watch time. And so that would make him you know, almost as big as the entire new york times.

Simone Collins: Well, let's look at the Nielsen readings. I just sent you on what's up the traditional top 10. Page for Nielsen's data center. They do basically TV watching and they even do streaming stats now in the U S Indy.

And I'm looking at their traditional TV top 10. I'm looking at prime broadcast network TV. And it's giving me a better understanding of more like, you know, what people are watching, watching There were 18 and a half million viewers of the summer Olympics andy.

Malcolm Collins: She's goobering.

Can you hear me? I mean, I'm trying.

Simone Collins: [00:25:00] So I feel like that's, that's more. Impressive, you know, on YouTube people really

Malcolm Collins: To give you an idea of how it not really. That's impressive. That means that the number of people who watched the Olympics was only 40 X, more than the number of people who watched our little bitty podcast in the last month. That's insane. This is the AA eighty-nine. Nothing of a YouTube channel.

But what I'm looking at is online written publications. And I think one of the big problems that the right has is they go around to these small websites like, you know, Mary Sue or like, you know, the, the Kotaku and they think because these websites are quote unquote real journalists that they are in a fight with somebody who anyone is listening to other than the people who are listening to them because of the fight itself.

And I think this solves some of the questions we were asking. Where is [00:26:00] the woke consumer base when we were asking this question? Like, where are the people who are supposed to buy Concord? Concord, they might just be astronomically smaller than anyone is anticipating.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and that should have big implications for the 2024 presidential election, but we'll see.

I feel like that's going to be a better gauge. For this than many other measures because I

Malcolm Collins: think it shows that we need to focus if you want to keep media free on the medium platforms like YouTube and influencing organizations like Google, like I almost had a job at YouTube, by the way, that was one of the departments that was thinking about hiring me at Google.

And so anyone like. I think that's how you make a difference at these organizations is get jobs at them and advocate on the inside was in the organization. Because I think that they are the last source of freedom that we're going to have access to. And it's interesting as well, how, you know, I think [00:27:00] well, this new format of media works with conservative American institutions and I, ideas I E I am, you know, you mentioned this about early America where you would go and you would see like a group of churches in a town and you were like, it was the early social media influencers.

They were all right next to each other. And they were all like various Protestant churches. And you would go to the one who had the best influencer, the one who you'd like. To listen to the most or you've had the, you know, the best takes.

Baby: Right.

Malcolm Collins: And that's sort of where we are right now is individuals are choosing who they want to listen to.

Mm-Hmm. . And I think one of the heartening things is that the, the independent people went super partisan later than the institutions. They have been more resistant to partisanism than the institutions. Where, you know, I take somebody like Destiny. He's like a big, you know, leftist. He'll still like debate righties.

Right? Like you're not going to see that really within the mainstream news [00:28:00] organizations anymore. And I think that that's really fascinating as well. And it also shows the way that people relate to their sources of information is changing. And that I believe that there is an expectation of some form of now when I say people, I think often frame parasocial relationships incorrectly, they frame it as being like a friendship or something like that, when instead I think a better way to think about it is we are characters within your mind's high school.

And they, hate us or think certain things about us. But we are part of the, the, the brain space that you have used to build your, your high school.

Speaker 2: That's all you've got to endure All the total dicks, all the stuck up chicks And then when you graduate You take a look around and you say Hey, wait! This is the same as where I [00:29:00] just came from Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the dreams High school never ends.

Malcolm Collins: And you know, we might be in one group of kids and then like ContraPoints might be in another group of kids and you modify what you're hearing from each of us within those individual biases.

And you know, It does feel that way. Like, the online space feels very much like, I got a play here, High School Never Ends. But it feels a bit like you're playing out these roles of the characters within a high school. And that's what the parasocial relationship means and where it becomes dangerous.

is only the, you know, delusional individual who thinks that he's dating the cheerleader, but the cheerleader doesn't know who he is. People act as if that's a unique thing to parasocial relationships. And if they feel it's not, that's a normal thing of our minds high school. Sometimes that's in high school and sometimes that's a group of YouTubers.

Simone Collins: That makes a lot of [00:30:00] sense. Yeah. That's a better way of putting it. And you can, Be just as liable to have a one way or unhealthy relationship in high school as you would in the digital realm. So totally get it. Yes. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on. Let's see. Do I have any other stats here? Because I have some other fun stats.

Oh yeah, here are some fun ones. As of 2022, only about 12 percent of U. S. adults use newspapers as daily sources of news. In 2020, a survey found that 16 percent of Americans got their news from physical newspapers, among other sources. I do not believe either of those stats. at all. I think those are like an American thinking like, have I seen a newspaper recently?

Yes. Well, I think you're forgetting

Simone Collins: how many much older people there are in the world. They're not

Malcolm Collins: going to the news. I mean, maybe they're picking up physical newspapers. The Wall Street Journal had the highest circulation of all U. S. newspapers in 2020. That's gonna be covering us soon with like a documentary, so that'll be fun.

Only 3 [00:31:00] percent of U. S. adults cite print newspapers as their primary information source. Like, of course, who trusts newspapers anymore? Like, they're so dishonest! And this is the thing, you wanna get how dishonest newspapers are? If you've always been like, Well, people say, if you know anything about a news source, and then you read a newspaper, you realize how frequently they lie.

And you might think, well, I don't know anything about any particular news source. Well, if you're watching the podcast, you probably know us. Just read any article that's, like, ever been written about us. And, and you'll be like, wow, these are wildly off. In, in every respect, it's clearly attempting to manipulate me.

And this is something that you'll feel really good when you have friends that are frequently in the news, because you get pissed pretty quickly if you do. And then the number of newspaper, newspaper newsroom employees has dropped 50 percent since 2008. I'm surprised not more. So, to the question of how are they making Well,

Simone Collins: since 2008, Malcolm, that was already, like, this is, this has been a long decline.

Malcolm Collins: This has been a long decline. Yeah, so, [00:32:00] oh, interesting. Interesting. So I was looking at another study and while people spend a minute and 30 seconds on average when they click through to a news link, they're only spending 15 seconds per page or at least according to one study. So the numbers might even be worse.

Simone Collins: Wow. Brutal.

Malcolm Collins: For 60 seconds that people spend.

For long form articles, it's an average of 148 seconds.

Simone Collins: I, I'm sure that's similar with the Essays and videos of modern content creators as well. Yeah. Our

Malcolm Collins: videos typically have like about a 17 minute average watch time. But actually that's pretty long. Cause like if you refresh a page that counts as restarting the watch timer, if you leave and then come back to it, that restarts the watch time.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, Simone, do you love our daughter?

Simone Collins: No, never. No.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Well, make sure she doesn't grow up. Remember the,

Simone Collins: [00:33:00] the, the media says that we, we actually hate children.

Malcolm Collins: We do. The guardian. I hate children. I have a passion. For prenatalists,

Simone Collins: we, we seem to just. Well, I mean, the thing that

Malcolm Collins: I make clear to them that is always so perplexing to someone in the urban monoculture is they're like, well, do you, do you like love being around your kids and spending time with your kids?

And I'm like, well, that's not why you have kids. You is like, well, I'm not having kids because it doesn't seem like a lot of fun.

Speaker 14: I don't want kids. Yeah.

Speaker 15: It doesn't seem that fun.

Malcolm Collins: It's like, well, yep. I mean, obviously you're not having kids for how they make you feel about yourself. You're having kids so that they get to exist. You're having kids for what they're going to feel about them.

Doing

Simone Collins: it for them. Not for you. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: for somebody else. No, no, no, no, no. Sorry. I must have misunderstood what you were saying. What you mean is you get happy when you see them happy. And that's why you have them just like, [00:34:00] no, my emotions don't matter at all. I just am doing it for somebody else. Oh my gosh.

Well, do you have any, any thoughts here?

Simone Collins: When I think about the future of news and media consumption, I just feel so confused as to how reality will be understood in the future. Because right now, at least in our childhood, we grew up in a society where there was a broadly shared understanding of reality and what was happening in the world.

Even if we did not have an accurate perception of what was going on, we were all kind of on the same page. You know, this thing was happening, this thing mattered. And it was really the media that largely determined what was going to be a big deal. You know, we're going to choose this international conflict as thing du jour, and this domestic thing, and that's kind of how news cycles worked.

And now we live in this [00:35:00] era where there isn't really any critical mass News media outlet that everyone reads that everyone's on the same page with, which means that like, aside from there being trends that people talk about online and there definitely are trends like that, like, let's talk about trad wives or let's talk about the, the, why, why all men are thinking about Rome.

Right. So they're, they're short little, but they're always, they're not very substantive. Right. So

Malcolm Collins: what's funny. I thought about this before. But the people who actually are the people who everyone is listening to,

Baby: right,

Malcolm Collins: to an extent, maybe not directly, but through their influence, those are the people who truly have the most influence online.

And so it's who can create in this new ecosystem, Those trends, the new thing everyone is talking about.

Simone Collins: Right. Because they often are sparked by a viral piece. For example, a lot of people talking about trad wives. Well, [00:36:00] that was actually sparked by traditional media when a story came out on Hannah from ballerina farms.

Right. So

Malcolm Collins: some traditional media can do this. An interesting person who I think specializes in doing this is Ayla who we've had on the show before. She always is creating like some, the. The main discussion of Twitter pretty frequently. Like her

Simone Collins: birthday gangbang story. Amazing. That was an

Malcolm Collins: incredible story.

I was like, this is the wildest thing I've ever read. The birthday party

Simone Collins: that shot through the internet. The time

Malcolm Collins: when it turned out that she slept was more people a year than she had showers. Or she had no, she had sex more times than she showered per year.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: everyone was like, Oh my God.

Simone Collins: No, she was, she was very good at that.

But my larger point is that. Aside from these non substantive, ephemeral, everyone's talking about this things, we don't, we won't have a shared reality anymore. And people are going to be working from very different starting points and [00:37:00] priors, which is going to make our country even harder to live in.

One of the reasons why I love Japan so much is that at least when, when I traveled there as a teen, a lot, it felt so cohesive and people would say things like, well, we Japanese do this and we Japanese do that. And everyone sort of knows what to do. If you know, an umbrella is left on a train, well, someone will take it to this place and you'll recover it.

Like it won't be lost. And there was just all these things where everyone's on the same page. And that's because obviously they shared one culture, but you know, there's also like, people sort of watched and consumed the same stuff as well. Now, not only do we have very different cultures in the United States, no one is like, there's no simple source of truth or a couple of, of news channels that everyone's watching that allows us to at least have one shared.

reality. I

Malcolm Collins: push back. I say that there is a shared meme plex. But it's not

Simone Collins: substantive again. It's like Brad summer. It's that's not substantive. No, Brad

Malcolm Collins: summer didn't really pierce through. [00:38:00] So an example of something that I say that pierced through like a song that everyone was supposed to watch was Oh God, what was the country guy?

Oh, Richmond, North

Simone Collins: of Richmond. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And that was like, everybody just had, it was like your homework assignment for the week. Everybody has to watch this. If you want to be part of any office room conversation, if you want, and you know, the first time this happened was Gundam style. This is not something that really happened.

Not substantive. I would say Richmond, north of Richmond, it was very substantive.

But what's also been interesting is as we have moved to this new form of memeplex culture, a group that's really sort of, progressively had less and less influence in American culture. It was very interesting to me. is American black culture. When I was growing up, American black culture was maybe 30 to 40 percent of all forwards facing American culture.

[00:39:00] From the, you know, whether it's derivative raps and, and, and rock and, you know, all that. Right. You know, and now you have black Twitter, right. Which definitely has some degree of influence, but like viral meme flex level, viral phenomenon don't come out of it at the rate of even coming out of something like 4chan.

Simone Collins: Huh? Yeah. I watch a lot of YouTube videos by black cultural commentators, both male and female. Yeah. But they're not generating the culture that I see them commenting on. What is really influential is drag culture, both from the lexicon standpoint, but also like women wear drag makeup. Now it's so weird to me.

I just, it's hard for me to like go anywhere and not be like, why are you in drag? This is drag and

Malcolm Collins: trans. So trans culture definitely hits the mean plexus. Pretty regularly, I guess only in

Simone Collins: the form of pronouns to me. I'm not really seeing it anywhere else for me. Well, no, no, no,

Malcolm Collins: what I'm talking about is, is, is [00:40:00] people within their culture end up hitting the mean plex.

So, Contra points used to hit the mean plex all the time. For example, who's that philosophy tuber? Who's a. Trans woman

Simone Collins: I think she just calls herself philosophy to philosophy

Malcolm Collins: to you know, like trans people make up almost none of the population and yet they probably make up about 3 percent or 4 percent of the viral phenomenal moments.

Yeah. Contrapoints

Simone Collins: needs to publish more. I want more.

Malcolm Collins: They definitely make up a more of them than black individuals do, which is What

Simone Collins: is up with that?

Malcolm Collins: I trans is the new black.

Simone Collins: No, I called

Malcolm Collins: it here on base camp. Trans is the new black. They, they, or else, I mean, it just

Simone Collins: could, it could be maybe that black culture is becoming insulated to the point where mainstream culture, like at least we aren't hearing it because it's, it's just staying within the fold.

You know, like that's, that's one guess I have.

Malcolm Collins: Well, Yeah, like the past. [00:41:00]

Simone Collins: So here's the thing is like the past two TV series that I've gotten addicted to have, well, at least Yeah, mostly majority black cast. So like, at least in mainstream TV, it seems to be doing well. No, I think

Malcolm Collins: that's what elevated it.

I think it was mainstream Hollywood. You could call it like the media elite who used to decide the musicians and the, and the actors that you were going to see had been artificially elevating it. Inflating it. Oh, and that's why I'm still

Simone Collins: seeing. That's why you still see Netflix and stuff, but you don't see

Malcolm Collins: it on YouTube or, or coming out of, of, and it's not that it's not there.

Like black Twitter is a thing. It just doesn't leak in the same way that black culture used to leak. I don't go to a campus today, like an American high school and see white kids trying to emulate black Twitter. Well, you're right. And that was

Simone Collins: so bad. Yeah, that was a really like the, the people that you wanted to emulate and the memes you wanted to talk about was, yeah, I did [00:42:00] the

Malcolm Collins: sagging pants.

I did what happened.

Simone Collins: That's you're right. That's so weird. Well, and also song references. That's interesting. Okay. What happened?

Malcolm Collins: I don't, I don't know what happened. I I'm actually kind of like, maybe we need to dig on this harder. Cause this is an interesting question to me. Why? And I, and again, I don't think it's that black culture has shrunk in size or distinctiveness.

I think it's that it has shrunk in permeability.

Simone Collins: Oh, well, well, but okay. Maybe, maybe

Malcolm Collins: here's an idea of what could have destroyed it.

Simone Collins: What?

Malcolm Collins: The concept.

Simone Collins: Appropriation.

Malcolm Collins: Appropriation.

Simone Collins: That's, I was just thinking that when I was also thinking about how like Rob and D'Angelo talks about having affinity groups and kind of how like white people shouldn't encroach into black spaces because I don't know.

My white woman tears will mess it up or something like, I won't get it and I'll make it awkward and I'll ruin it. And so maybe, yeah, like white [00:43:00] people are less allowed to engage with black culture now than they were before because weirdly a lot of the super progressive extra woke messages have been around like, let's bring back apartheid without saying it.

But they're, they, that's where the functionally they're going for, which is,

Malcolm Collins: Segregation! Yay!

Speaker 5: When me and Brad first met, I didn't think we'd get along, but turns out we kind of agree on everything. We both think minorities are a united group who think the same and act the same. And vote the same. You don't want to lose your black card. Sorry, I don't know, I just think we should Roll back discrimination law so we can hire Basie and race against Jinx!

Now you owe me a Coke. Hey, tell him what you told me yesterday. White actors should only do voices for white cartoon characters. I've been saying that for years. Stick to your own. Us white people, we have so much privilege. I agree, it is a privilege to be white. Ask him about interracial dating. All I said is that black men who date white women have internalized racism, and white men that date ethnic women are fetishizing them.

Guy's against interracial dating now. Like, am I being pranked? Did Boomer put you up to this? Ugh, you know that taco place is white owned? White people should be making [00:44:00] white foods, like crap macaroni and cheese, no seasoning, not even salt. It's like he's a mind reader. I mean, I've been pushing for segregation forever and my man does what? You know all white people are racist. I'm listening.

Malcolm Collins: They separated, they separated the cultures. It definitely hasn't done any favors. Well, maybe it has done favors. Maybe black people can be like, No, black culture is thriving now. Yeah, maybe they're like, you know what, this is better.

Simone Collins: Like, when white people kept messing it up, like, you can't pay it off. I actually think the opposite of what I see

Malcolm Collins: is black culture right now is In like death throes for people who don't know blacks out of all ethnic groups in the United States have the lowest fertility rate of American ethnic group after you get to the 30 above the 30 percent in other

Simone Collins: words, you're saying that the the isolation is not.

Apparently having a positive effect. If it happen, it's not leading to vitalism,

Malcolm Collins: it's not leading to a desire to replicate the culture through children and through living wholesome lives. Yeah. That's

Simone Collins: interesting. That's

Malcolm Collins: interesting. Yeah. But it, but it, it's, it's yeah, it's fascinating. Well,

Simone Collins: but I also, [00:45:00] maybe that's because, and gosh, we're like, it's, this is turning into a totally separate episode, but one of the things that I, I found really notable is in the shows that I watch.

That do have at least like majority or almost wholly like majority black casts or something, you know, it's like lead characters. I, I do this thing where I look up outfits when I watch shows because there are all these websites that like list the actual garments and how much they cost. So that you can buy them and the clothing that shows up on the, the, the people and the, these shows that have more black casts is consistently by orders of magnitude, more expensive than the clothing that shows up on, on quote unquote billionaires and shows like succession.

So like succession, like outfit, outfit ranges from like, you know, one garment will be maybe 300 to 500 on average. Make some exceptions, you know, that maybe you're in the thousand range very [00:46:00] consistently on like a show like the equalizer, which has a pretty black cast Queen Latifah and her other you know, compatriots of the show are wearing outfits.

That are like one garment 2, 000 another garment 3, 200. It is insane. And so maybe this is like a very materialistic culture. We're like the culture that is being siloed off. It is very focused on Acquisitiveness or like having the very, very best products. And in a culture like that, you definitely can't have a lot of kids.

You know what I mean? Like, well,

Malcolm Collins: in most other American cultural groups, at least at the elite level, there is some level of shaming around overindulgence. And it doesn't, yeah, it's more

Simone Collins: like when you look at primarily black cast shows the fashion is insane and the wealth is insane. It's like talking

Malcolm Collins: about.

Native American black slave descendant culture in the United States, which is pretty, yeah, we're not talking about like an immigrant culture,

Simone Collins: African,

Malcolm Collins: African immigrant culture. I don't think they over consume in the same [00:47:00] way.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it is very, it's very different. Yeah. Well, or I think the other problem is that like a lot of the.

African immigrant culture we see here is old money. Like it's actually, it's actually old money and old money tends to be a lot more careful with spending. And there's less conspicuous consumption. Whereas new money wealth is all about conspicuous consumption. And definitely like the, the, the black shows that I, that I watch that have like bigger black casts.

Yeah, man. Like there's just tons of wealth. The clothes are off the chain. Amazing, but also insanely expensive. And yeah, like more than succession, like succession, I thought was going to be like the ultimate show for me in terms of like amazing outfits and settings. And that does not hold a candle.

We're

Malcolm Collins: actually going to talk about why black fertility rates are so low among the wealthy blacks, just because we're already in this right. The reason I believe is in Romania when they try to ban abortions well it led to a sharp spike in fertility rates. They quickly fell because having lots of [00:48:00] kids became associated with low class decisions in the American black community.

What reaches the public? There are some like black super breeders, you know, like, when I say super breeders, I don't mean this in like a negative context. We get called a super reader. Simone and I are called super breeders. I like to say when people go, Hey, what are you doing? I go, I'm super breeding.

This is because Yahoo called us. And I think super breeder with it, I think it is. Yeah. Who

Simone Collins: knows? But

Malcolm Collins: what I mean is, is among the people who are known as pernatal, it's just rubbing lots of kids. There's a number of black celebrities that fall into this category,

Baby: but

Malcolm Collins: most of them, it's with like five or six different women.

In situations where it was either like, one's like, well, it's an accident or like, you know, but I love all my kids and another, this stuff like this.

Speaker 3: So what's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an NBA player with a lot of kids? Well, probably someone like Dwight Howard or Sean Kemp, and yeah, you're right. Kemp reportedly has seven children with six different women, while Howard has somewhere between five to [00:49:00] eight kids according to different accounts.

We're not sure, but these two guys can't even compare to this player who has 14 children with nine different women. And his name is Calvin Murphy.

Malcolm Collins: And it creates this perception that if you are wealthy, The only reason you would have a lot of kids is if you couldn't control yourself. And there, I don't

Simone Collins: know, like when I think of all the black influencers, I know who have a lot of kids.

It comes from a more Catholic or religious standpoint and from a position of wealth. But I guess, I mean, I get, there could also be just baggage of historically those who had a lot of kids. You know, we're having them as teens, we're having them in suboptimal situations that were associated with lower class and lower levels of education.

And I think that's the bigger issue, like the girl who was next to me in the hospital, who was like having kid number three, and she was in her teens. And she was like, why does this keep happening? And like, it was just clear that she was very low resourced. I think maybe that's the baggage people want to avoid.

When looking good and then the wealthy, why [00:50:00] was this

Malcolm Collins: happening? She literally didn't understand how she was getting, well, we

Simone Collins: don't know why she was saying that exactly. I mean, she was in the middle of like going into labor next to me in the triage room. Right. But like, she definitely, like, this was, this was her second, no, this was the third or fourth child.

And she. Was super not happy about having this baby. And she was like, man, why does this happen? I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: And love you to death, Simone. This episode got way too spicy there at the end. I, I don't even, I don't even know how we got there from talking about newspapers and how many people are reading them.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well. What ifs. What ifs. We'll see. We'll see if we can get past the YouTube gods in this one. White people talking about people of another race? How's that gonna go? Oh, no, no, no. Yeah. We, we gotta, we gotta be the right, you know, demographics as they say. [00:51:00]

Simone Collins: Yeah, but again, like apartheid, like we're, I think there's this very interesting thing.

If you have to stay in your lane, you cannot appropriate, talk about mixed with it's so weird. It's so creepy. It's so creepy,

Speaker 5: White people need to stop wearing dreadlocks and they need to stop appropriating black people's music. Shaved heads and country music, the way God intended.

Simone Collins: but whatever. All right. Have a good

Malcolm Collins: one.

Simone Collins: Ciao ciao. Bye bye. Okay. You hang up.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, she means by that is the left is basically saying separate but equal, you know, only within your race only.

Well, no,

Simone Collins: not, not even equal, separate, but affirmative action. And everyone has their special class based on historical discrimination with lots of exceptions and copyouts. Because, you know, if you're Japanese. No one cares about you and turn it Jewish F off, man.

Speaker 5: I guess the only thing we really disagree about is I think white people are the root of all evil.

But what did I tell you, though? If we can narrow that down to a certain group of tiny headed white people, I think we can come to an understanding. Technically, I don't consider Jewish people white because Neither do I.

Simone Collins: [00:52:00] We're over that we did the reparations. The reparations were paid now.

It's over. Okay, we paid.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you.

Simone Collins: Bye. All right. I already have the link. I know you hate it and you said it's not worth watching, but when I was thinking about the title for this video, I was thinking about the movie Amelie, that French film.

Baby: The

Simone Collins: whole thing is Jean Pierre Jeunet.

Oh, it's well, you've seen the beginning of it and the main character, Amélie, like when they describe the things that she likes to do. One thing she likes to just wonder is, you know, how many people are doing a thing simultaneously? Like how many people are having an orgasm this second? And it cuts to this scene of just everyone who's having an orgasm in that second.

In a humorous fashion. And I was just thinking, how many people are watching legacy news right now? And I just pictured this intersplicing scene of just an endless, [00:53:00] endless shot of doctor's offices, hospitals, And homes of the very old that infirm. That's like it. That's the only people watching the news.

And there are a lot, but their days are numbered. And I don't think that that bodes really well for the news going forward.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The other thing I want to talk to you about before we go into the episode, episode. Yeah. Because people like the end segments and stuff where we talk about off topic, small things.

Simone Collins: I keep forgetting that you put these in cause I don't always watch the videos and then I forget what I'm saying to you. Cause I'm just talking to you for the first time since our morning chat. And I'm so excited to say things to you. And then I forget you freaking

Malcolm Collins: I edit them. If you're, if you're being spicy or something.

Okay, good. Sometimes. Oh, okay. One of the tracks I included that part where you were telling me how much you love me when I was off, off camera. You didn't [00:54:00] think that was very sweet, but I actually I had a couple instances today where I've realized one, just how much people in our society make like massive mistakes because they don't understand that there are multiple white cultural groups.

And we all look the same. Here's a great example of that. In one of our episodes where we had a thought crime recently, and we were talking about nature you know, under it, obviously Google like tells us never do an episode like that again, or your channel is going down. But also, I mean, that's like basically the vibe I got from the instant ad restricted.

We're not explaining why. And then the, the big UN, Warning underneath it but you know, people in the comments were like, oh, it got a UN warning. That means it must be true. And it shows that in, in anyone should have been able to expect this for about half of Americans the only cultural groups that are going to relate to a global authority.

Attempting to [00:55:00] decide what's true and what's not true are the hierarchically oriented cultural groups predominantly like Catholics and other sort of high church , groups.

Um, But your normal Americans are going to see this and immediately think the exact opposite of what the globally appointed bureaucracy, the global bureaucracy of elites is telling them to do. must be true. And that they wouldn't immediately recognize that, that they wouldn't immediately recognize that this is highly counterproductive to their aims and will probably lead more of the types of people who are already open to doubting these ideas to doubt them even more aggressively.

It

Simone Collins: looks a little suspicious. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't do very well for the conspiracy theory.

Malcolm Collins: Well, to you, but then the other one that I was having a conversation with a Mormon and we were talking about. You know, he was like, he didn't understand why the backcountry people the, the greater Appalachian cultural [00:56:00] region slash backcountry people, depending on which book you're referencing would kill Mormons so frequently.

And you know, whenever they tried to like, settle in their, their territory and I was like, well, it was very obvious why they did that. And he, and he, it's almost like he didn't believe that they would genuinely see them as like. Stepford wives, like pod people. Like the, the, that and the way that Mormons you know, like, dress up and generally look nice could come as a challenge, like looking down on these people and they're already a very violent population as we've talked about in some of, what was the episode where we go over, like, just how violent they are?

Yeah, I think it was the police episode. Where we're talking about crime rates in the United States, but I found that very interesting that he struggled to contextualize the level of, like he thought that they thought of Mormons as just another Christian denomination. And I was like, no,

Baby: no,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no, no, not at all.

Like you guys are [00:57:00] not like different in the way like Jehovah's witnesses are different or something like that. It's a, it's a new theology and to them. It seems like a derived satanic theology that, that is like, what would I put it, you know how like Mormonism borrows a bunch of stuff from the Freemasons and they already think the Freemasons are evil, right?

They're like past the Freemasons in that direction in their conspiracy theories. And that's where the, the animosity comes from. And I'm not saying I endorse the animosity. I think It's misplaced and it's just two cultures that have different ways of relating to things and don't really understand each other.

And we'll do a different episode on this, but another thing is that this culture typically uses vulgarity as a sign of authenticity. And I think that's why Mitt Romney did so bad at capturing them and Donald Trump did so good at capturing them. But anyway, we will get into the episode and I'm excited to be talking about this.

Baby: All right, let's do it.

In this thought-provoking episode, we delve into the concept of "brain rot" - a specific type of cognitive decline that affects people across all age groups and social strata. We explore how modern lifestyles, social media, and changing social norms contribute to this phenomenon, and discuss strategies to combat it. Key topics include:

Speaker: It could be that the reason they're on these simple narrative loops is because they are unable to think or ask themselves, does this person care? Like, does this person, what, why is this person interacting with me from their perspective?

Speaker 2: what's interesting is his wife isn't like that. She's very sensitive to what people are saying.

Speaker: I think

Speaker 2: the key is I, I, she maintains a relationship with her old sorority friends. And I'm pretty sure they're pretty catty and mean to each other and very competitive. So it's funny because you can look at it from one perspective and be like, gosh, your in all these toxic relationships. But then from the other perspective, you'd be like, wow, thank goodness. Your in all these toxic relationships. Cause it keeps her sharp and entertaining.

Speaker: Because the internet allows for new forms of brain rot, i. e. you don't necessarily need to interact with other people in your daily life. You're not getting that

Speaker 2: feedback. The training.

Well, and we're so used to being through all these different scrolling consumption pathways , just passive information and entertainment being served to [00:01:00] us with no requirement that we serve anything back.

There's no reciprocity. It is unidirectional.

Speaker: Do you think people with deep brain rot are really sentient or do you think that it's like not a big problem for them to die?

Speaker 2: Yeah, not a big problem for them today.

Would you like to know more?

Speaker: Hello, Simone! It is wonderful to be here with you today. Today we are going to talk about a concept. That we internally call brain rot and it is something that I like proposed as a mechanism of action For a way that people, as they get older, begin to fall into a particular type of thought that makes it impossible for them to hold complex ideas.

And originally it was sort of a theory, like, it seems like this might be what's happening in their brains.

Speaker 3: Mm hmm.

Speaker: And since I have had that theory and interacted with older people again and again and again and see it play out exactly like this over and over again, I have now moved it from theory to fact, and it is weird to [00:02:00] me that other people don't seem to have noticed this.

What people will say is Well, as people become older, they become stuck in their way, or as people become older, there's some degree of cognitive decline. But what I am noticing in here is not a general cognitive decline, but a very specific type of cognitive decline that is very noticeable. Specifically, what brain rot is, is when an individual reaches a stage of brain rot and you talk to them, all they will be able to do, or what they will default into, is repeating.

Simple narrative loops that are about painting a picture for themselves, about who they are and painting a picture to you about who they are. And so what these will look like is if, for example, being infirmed is particularly important to their self identity, they will go into a narrative loop of something that happened to them around that [00:03:00] particular topic with Attempts to model the target of this loop.

So they will not be thinking, how will this modify your perception of them? They will not be thinking, how does this telling them this further my goals? They're all not be thinking, is this something individual wants to hear? It is and so the question is, is why does this act behavior pattern seem to happen so, so, so frequently?

Speaker 3: Mm hmm.

Speaker: So Simone, what are your thoughts and I can give my thoughts on this as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I have a very strong belief that this is a use it or lose it dynamic. That basically, and this is regardless of age too this shows up across so much of the research I see. Basically, if you use something it will maintain fairly good condition.

Be it your muscles, be it your eyes, be it whatever. And if you do not use it, it will atrophy. This seems to be backed up pretty well in [00:04:00] research. For example, there's, there's one study called television viewing and cognitive decline in older age. findings from the English longitudinal study of aging that found that watching over three and a half hours of TV correlated with greater cognitive decline because you're just sitting there passively watching.

Whereas actually a different study found that playing a video game did not correlate, like sort of inversely correlated with cognitive decline in older people. So like more engagement. It specifically also like another study called cultural engagement and incidents of cognitive impairment a six year longitudinal follow up of the Japan gerontological evaluation study, a.

K. A. J. A. G. E. S. J. G. J. G. S. Found that engagement and intellectual and creative activities may be associated with reduced risk of dementia. Again, like, use it. or lose it. There's also another study called Cognitive Leisure Activities and Future Risk of Cognitive Impairment and Dementia Synthetic Review and Meta Analysis.

That also found once again [00:05:00] that there is increasing evidence that participation in cognitively stimulating leisure activities may contribute to a reduction of risk of dementia and cognitive impairment later in life. And when we're talking about brain rot, we are really talking about Forms of, of cognitive impairment.

You know, this, this is, it's, it's bad. So I think that's a really huge thing. And that's one thing that makes me so against the concept of retirement. This idea that like, Oh, I'll stop. You're

Speaker: consigning someone to death by allowing them to retire.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, unless their idea of retirement is like, okay, well now I'm going to go, you know, volunteer and build houses and support my community, which is what retirement used to be, I think at a time of more engaged communities.

Speaker: What I would push back on is you're like, okay, use it or lose it, but use what or use your mind, challenge yourself, learn new things. This type of cognitive decline that they experience is not general cognitive decline. It is very, very [00:06:00] focused and leads to a very narrow set of behavioral patterns to me.

It does not seem downstream. So I can give you a hypothesis here to give you an example of what I mean by this. But what it could be is specifically what leads to brain rot is the part of their brain that mentally, that does theory of mind of other people. Exactly. That is mentally emulating the people around them.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker: Stops working. So. Because that's the specific thing that they're not using. It could be that the reason they're on these simple narrative loops is because they are unable to think or ask themselves, does this person care? Like, does this person, what, why is this person interacting with me from their perspective?

Well, you see

Speaker 2: this a lot from more senior, and I'm saying senior in a hierarchical perspective, people, where they just, Go on and have this problem where they're saying a bunch of s**t that you care nothing about because no one is pushing back on them. They've gotten past that point where they have to actually keep people engaged in [00:07:00] order to get them to do what they want or pay attention.

Speaker: Actually, I've noticed this as well. Yeah, brain rot. You do get early brain rot in people who are very senior in hierarchies. Yeah. I've also noticed it in people. If they're surrounded

Speaker 2: by yes men, you know, there are lots of people who are senior in hierarchies who are sharp as a knife and very good at mentally modeling others and very engaging because they, they force themselves into positions in life where they have to.

Where people are telling them to shut up sometimes.

Speaker: Yeah. Where people, yeah, keep them in line. But no, I've also noticed it disproportionately with people in bureaucratic jobs like people who work in government positions and stuff like that where they seem to fall into brain rot much faster than other positions.

And that would make sense if it's that you do not need to worry about mentally modeling others.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I wonder if it's important, like, I think also having a lot of, Kids or grandkids around is helpful because they, they let, you know, when they are [00:08:00] bored and you have to constantly fight to earn their respect and attention.

I

Speaker: mean, the thing is that some people are clearly resistant to it. So we were on a Jim ruts show recently. And he is my dad's age. He actually worked with my dad running the, santa Fe Institute. And they,

Speaker 2: he talks like a 20 year old.

Speaker: Yes. Whereas my dad has a pretty significant amount of brain rot already.

And do you want to say

Speaker 2: that? Because your dad listens to this podcast,

Speaker: barely ever listens to the podcast. He's not gonna listen to this episode. I'll tell you and even if he does he needs to get out of it He goes on simple narrative loops all the time. And it's not and it means that I'm at risk of it, too

Speaker 2: It's true that

Speaker: it probably

Speaker 2: has a genetic component does so many things do

Speaker: right but I suspect he also is somebody who hasn't had to interact with lots of other people that could turn him down for a very long time.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, you know, what's [00:09:00] interesting is his wife isn't like that. She's very sensitive to what people are saying.

Speaker: I think

Speaker 2: the key is I, I, she maintains a relationship with her old sorority friends. And I'm pretty sure they're pretty catty and mean to each other and very competitive. And your mother was the same way.

She was surrounded by like Game of Thrones backstabber gossipy friends. And in such a world, yeah, you, yeah, zero brain rot, because the moment you have some, you are immediately eaten alive by these people. Eviscerated. They will, they will not only freeze you out and destroy you, but they will humiliate you along the way.

And I think that keeps you sharp. So it's funny because you can look at it from one perspective and be like, gosh, your mom's in all these toxic relationships. But then from the other perspective, you'd be like, wow, thank goodness. Your mom's in all these toxic relationships. Cause it keeps her sharp and entertaining.

Yeah.

Speaker: No, I absolutely think you're right about that. And it highlights one of the areas for people who are new to our podcasts. We're quite against radical life extension.

But a lot [00:10:00] of people are like, well, why? I mean, we could keep people younger through like, you know, they're like, it's not because they know.

I mean, I think everybody knows why a person would intuitively be against that for civilization reasons. People just have a harder time changing their minds, a harder time thinking after a certain age. And they're like, well, what if we could fix that biologically speaking? If this theory of brain rot is correct, brain rot is not a biological phenomenon.

It's a phenomenon that's caused by environmental conditions that are more common among retired people

Speaker 3: than

Speaker: retired people. That's what causes brain rot. And if that's the case in radical life extension, if this can happen to any human is a terrible idea because one thing about brain rot is that once it's set in, like if you at all, enter any stage of your life where like for five to six years, you're just not having people push back against you regularly.

It's probably permanent.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's terrifying. I, I think my [00:11:00] argument though, is that it's, well, it does correlate with age. I, and, and I think it also correlates with other physical aspects of cognitive decline that I have seen it in teenagers. I've seen it in 20 year olds and a really interesting place where we see it and started talking about it a lot was in our own toddlers when they first started learning how to speak, when all they could really talk about was like, I'm doing this.

I'm doing that. Our our almost two year old Titan only speaks in loops about her top thoughts, which is look a baby deer, look a baby deer. And what's that sound? Motorcycle. Like you're just hearing a continuous stream of her very, very basic thoughts. And that's exactly what you hear from someone who has brain rot.

They're like, well, you know, first I have to go get the groceries and then I'm going to take a shower. And then I have to talk with my friend. And you're like, I don't need to hear any of this.

Speaker: I was [00:12:00] doing like what's other common brainwashed stuff. Like just going through their schedule from yesterday.

Well, yesterday I did this and then I did this. Oh. And

Speaker 2: yesterday we spoke with someone who for like, I was carrying quite a few grocery bags in the street.

Speaker: And he went over for a long, he's a famous radio host too. The names

Speaker 2: of his childhood neighbors and their nicknames. Yes.

Speaker: And their names and what they ended up doing.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and he ended up dying of a stomach aneurysm and he died of a heart attack at age 40.

Speaker: And we're like

Speaker 2: We'd love, you know, you're a nice guy, but I'm carrying about 40 pounds. How could you plausibly

Speaker: think that we could care anything about this? You, you stopped us on the road while we were walking somewhere.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker: You know, it was absolutely wild, but it's interesting

Speaker 2: that that can exist both in very old people, but we also see this basically in toddlers before they develop a theory of mind. [00:13:00] Before they can understand what we Oh, that's a good point. They don't have a degree

Speaker: of mind yet, so they're just going on about Well, because this is the interesting thing I've noticed about BrainRot, especially at the early stages.

So there's a later stage where it's like just narrative loops, right? Where it's just, I did X yesterday, or I did X growing up, or this thing happened to me, and here it is. thought as to whether or not that is useful information to the person who's hearing about it. Some is, is at the early stages, it is really, really, really focused on self identity reinforcement.

By that, what I mean is they will focus on narrative loops that are meant to try to reinforce the way they think about themselves through conveying it to you. Is they will tell you stories about themselves that are meant to reinforce a way that they desire to see themselves without any concern as to is this actually modifying the recipient's perspective of me in a way I wanted to modify their perspective of [00:14:00] me and without any concern of What does this other person care?

And you know, where you'll really get this frequently I've seen in elderly people is often in medical stores. Where they'll be like, I had X injury and I went to the doctor and the doctor did this, and then the doctor did this. And then I had this follow up and it's like, why would anybody care?

Why would anybody care? Well, I mean, to

Speaker 2: them, it matters a lot, right? It's something that's. forefront in their minds is their medical treatment. They just, they don't realize nobody, nobody cares. And it's one of the first things that I try to teach our children is. Not just about this, but about pieces of etiquette.

I don't say you should do this. Like you should, you must say thank you. I say, if you say thank you to people, more people will like you and be nice to you and you'll get more things you want. And I, I want to make it really clear to our children that we don't just [00:15:00] do manners because that's what you do, because you need to be conformist.

You do manners because if you want to get nice things from people, you have to. Make their lives more comfortable. You have to show them courtesy. And what's the Emily

Speaker: Post line about this? Doesn't she have something on like why manners exist or why etiquette exists?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, roughly speaking, I have this Malcolm knows there's this like 1942 Emily post book that I considered to be my Bible basically, but she basically explains that Etiquette and manners are not arbitrary, dumb rules like they were necessarily first invented in Versailles by King Louis XIV to imprison the nobility.

What good manners really are is making social transactions smooth. Making them happen efficiently and successfully. That's it. So I think a lot of people think about manners as unnecessary scraping and flourishing and doing all these dumb things that don't make a difference when really it's [00:16:00] about elegant.

Efficient, effective transactions between people. And I, that's how I want our children to understand etiquette and manners. And definitely throughout this 1942 Emily post book that I have, it constantly reminds people quite harshly that no one gives a f**k what you think or feel, and your job is to make them comfortable.

It is, and it's interesting that this is just not something that people talk about today. Maybe we have an epidemic of brain rot because everything has become, Oh, what you feel is the most important thing in the world. We've really shifted that from nobody gives a f**k what you think. what you feel, how, what you're worried about, you need to get what you need to get done.

And that's it. And now it's back to no, your personal experience experience is tantamount. Your mood is tantamount. That is your number one priority in life. And now it's [00:17:00] encouraging people. It's accelerating brain rot and essentially dementia. In all ages, terrifying.

Speaker: Well, no. And I think you see this in online comments, you know, a lot of the comments that are just like when they're just like attacking somebody randomly they come off as a form of like early brain rot, because that's not a thing that a sane person would do.

A sane person wouldn't think I have a negative emotional reaction when reading something this person wrote or, you know, seeing something this person did. Therefore I'll be like. You're a weirdo or, or you must be like an idiot, you know, like, yeah, you wouldn't do that. And to, to, to highlight how much you wouldn't do that, imagine if you were like talking to somebody and they responded to you as that.

You'd look at them like they were like they had a mental problem. Like they they do have a

Speaker 2: mental problem,

Speaker: but they know they do have a mental problem. But I think that people don't realize that in engaging in this type of behavior, they are [00:18:00] really just exacerbating mental problems that they've already built within their mind.

And they just get worse and worse and worse until. Because the internet allows for new forms of brain rot, i. e. you don't necessarily need to interact with other people in your daily life. You're not getting that

Speaker 2: feedback. The training.

Speaker: Stuck in self reinforcement loops entirely within a digital environment.

Speaker 2: Well, and we're so used to being through all these different scrolling consumption pathways and social media and in just like on Netflix and every other streaming platform. And through many games, just passive information and entertainment being served to us with no requirement that we serve anything back.

There's no reciprocity. It is unidirectional.

Speaker: Do you think people with deep brain rot are really sentient or do you think that it's like not a big problem for them to die?

Speaker 2: Yeah, not a big problem for them today.

Speaker: Yeah, they've

Speaker 2: become brain rot is NPC ism.

Speaker: Worse than generic NPC ism though. This, [00:19:00] so there's a form of NPC ism.

That's just like urban monoculture to the extreme. Well, you can think of

Speaker 2: it like stasis. So those people could be saved if they were presented with means that pulled them out of the loop.

Speaker: Right? Yeah. These individuals. Yeah. They're like in a stasis, but they like are reacting the way they're reacting because they're sort of afraid of judgment of society.

Yeah.

Speaker 2: Well, they haven't been given the mental and memetic tools that would allow them to get out of those defaults.

Speaker: Yeah. But the brain rot is different. Brain rot is not like they're acting this way because they're afraid of how you're going to judge them. They're literally not thinking about how you're going to judge them.

It is. Everyone else's mental state does not exist from their perspective.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's, it's scary and it's bad. Now, one thing I wanted to ask you is the extent to which you think. Our brain rot epidemic is also manifest now in modern media. So we with our kids have been watching the magic school bus because we're trying to watch like find [00:20:00] shows that they like that we also think aren't just complete nonsense and my school bus is great because it teaches pretty good things about science and it's also Like pretty funny.

It's

Speaker: a decent show. The problem is the magic school bus actually. Which I didn't remember growing up, but every character in it is deeply unlikable, except that's a feature,

Speaker 2: not a bug, man. I think that's hilarious. Everyone is made fun of kids.

Speaker: It's not like they have a personality. Okay. Like in some shows, every character has a personality when you've got like a big, diverse cast.

Yeah. No. Every one of the kids has a. Specific reason that makes them annoying and unlikable. Oh yeah. It's

Speaker 2: interesting. Yeah. You don't, none of, none of the characters is a self insert at all. You, you are like this outsider watching everything happen, laughing, laughing at everyone. But also kind of wishing you were on the magic school bus.

Our kids, especially Toasty. He's like, I want to ride on the magic school bus. I just love it. When he said that, he says that all the time. I want to

Speaker: ride on the magic school bus. Yeah. [00:21:00] I, I, I, some of these kids are so like Arnold, for example, is so deeply punchable. I almost want to create like a simulator where I can just punch a grownup version of Arnold.

Speaker 6: Janet, you want proof? I'll give you proof! Here's proof of what'll happen to you if you stay here with your stuff! Arnold!

Speaker: Don't you like Carlos? Carlos is cute with his dad joke. All of them, all of them need to be punched. Carlos, DB with her and BD with her. I don't know. There's

Speaker 2: the, according to my research girl, who's super annoying, but at my old school girl is also super annoying.

Speaker: I just needed them to do their phrase.

Okay. That would be so cathartic.

I'd also say I'd really love to see like a Rick and Morty version of the magic school bus. I often think when watching the magic school bus, this would have been so much more than back to the future. Good source of material for a Rick and Morty, [00:22:00] like show. In that miss Frizzle has so little regard for the safety and life of her students just consistently throughout this show. She is so as psychotic in the ways that she treats them.

Speaker 7: Oh, the best thing about time travel is that it's easy on the tires.

Speaker 8: Faster! Is it just me, or is that a real, live Tyrannosaurus Rex behind them? Correct a saurus, Ralphie. And the T Rex was the biggest meat eater of all

Speaker 9: On the Magic School Bus! Here it is, kids! The Grand Canyon! Yay!! Seatbelts on, kids! No one else was already wearing a seatbelt?

Hey, we're running out of road! Where the road ends, adventure begins! Okay, do your stuff!

Speaker 10: See Arnold, adventure awaits in [00:23:00] heaven!

And there are episodes where she will just like, have the students doing something and be blatantly flirting with someone. She clearly has a past relationship with here. I'm thinking of the episode where they are on,

The, , school bus engineer, guy. There's also so many scenes in the show where when you watch it and you watch what miss Frizzle puts the kid through. You're like, Oh, my God. Like it's genuinely more horrifying than maybe your average, Rick and Morty episode.

Speaker 11: Can we please go home now?

Speaker 12: Sure thing, Ralphie. After one more egg sperience.

Speaker 11: Holy mackerel! The bus just laid eggs, and we're in them!

Speaker 13: Look at it this way, Ralphie. As soon as we hatch, this will be home!

Speaker 12: A salmon he went to court and he did swim. Mm hmm. Salmon he went to court

Speaker 14: There's your answer,

Speaker 12: Carlos.

Speaker 13: What? Is he some sort of car wash? [00:24:00]

Speaker 14: No. Don't eggs have to be fertilized

Speaker 11: and we're gonna be the next generation of salmon!

 Get ready to dig in, Liz.

Speaker 13: Is burying us alive!

Speaker 11: Becoming an egg? Okay. Getting fertilized? Okay. Getting buried in an egg? Not okay. ,

Speaker 12: Class.

Speaker 11: Ugh, let's see if hatching's all it's cracked up to be.

Speaker 13: Wow,

Speaker 11: I'm hungry.

I'm hungry. My yolk sack's history! Let's find food! Eggs?

Speaker 2: Well, anyway, what I think is interesting about it though, is watching it, I'm like, wow, there's, there's substance here. I'm, I am learning something. They're talking about something here. Whereas I feel like, you know what, it's vibes like, so we're, we're, we're in an election year right now.

This is not very evergreen to say this, but you know, it's, it's, [00:25:00] it's Trump versus Kamala. But also it's just like, I'm looking at what political candidates are arguing and they're not arguing substance anymore. They're not arguing policy. In fact, whenever policies are referred to, it's more fake meme caricatures of those policies is not even the real policies.

And. Well, for example, when Kamala Harris attacks Donald Trump, her running opponent, about his reproductive choice policy, she doesn't even refer to his policy, which is leave it up to the states. He refers to the policy that was outlined. In fact, she refers to a caricature of a policy that was outlined in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 where she says that there will be national abortion bans when really Project 2025's policy only refers to banning a specific pharmaceutical and not even, it's not banning all, for example, Plan B medications.

So it's, it's a lot more nuanced than that, but that's not what the substance is. And I feel like shows for kids and adults these days to a great extent are no longer about. [00:26:00] Substance. They're about a feeling they're about a mood. Even when I compare,

Speaker: is definitely mood driven.

Speaker 2: Yes. And, and so I feel like a lot of this also is just showing a general degradation of human processing power that we're not really modeling other people anymore.

That we're not really. Engaging with ideas and morals anymore, we're engaging with moods and feeling and becoming more like babies. We're not processing, we're not processing logical abstract ideas or other people's feelings or thoughts. We're just riding along like infants, smiling in reaction to a smiling face.

Am I, am I wrong here? This is just, I've been feeling this creeping dread for the past two weeks about this.

Speaker: I think you're right for a lot of people. And then the question is, is, well, how do you protect our children? And I think it's to put them in environments, online environments, where they're going to get pushback.

I mean, I think for example, something like [00:27:00] actively engaging in a discord server, and I'll try to remember to leave our discord link in here. Cause it's really good. Discord server is just a great way to keep yourself active and stuff like that. Or force them to

Speaker 2: only go on 4chan where everyone's going to call them a fag.

I, I just, I think griefing is really good and I love online communities that give you a hard time. Again, that's going back to like your your mom's backstabbing friends and gossiping and incredibly cruel friends who are also very fun. And your. Stepmothers like sorority friends who are probably very gossipy and, you know, very clicky, like keeping them sharp.

I think, and I would imagine I'd love to see longitudinal research on, you know, the, the cognitive sharpness and also ability to model like the, the modeling ability of people with, Large families, you know, someone who has four siblings versus someone who's an only child. How do they compare? I imagine much better of

Speaker: this.

Speaker 2: And again, I, it comes back to this theme of use it or lose [00:28:00] it. If you are not forced to be strong, if you are not subject to training, you won't develop that muscle. Your body doesn't, we, we are beautifully efficient and designed to conserve energy. Here's a

Speaker: great example of brain rot you see in an online environment, which is comments that are meant to reinforce an individual's view of themselves.

But not change any minds. So it's like, it's trying to show that they themselves are tough or masculine or something like, this is the common version of it. And so it'll be like, well, bro, do you even lift? Like there's somebody who's from a different cultural subset. That's not going to be like, I'm not going to look at that and be like, Oh, I'm ashamed that I don't live.

I'm like, why the would I lift? Like what that has nothing to do with any, anything. Why do I, why do I spend time with my kids rather than at the gym? Like, cause obviously that time is coming from somewhere. So it's either coming from the time with my kids or it's coming from my wife or it's coming from, like, obviously that's [00:29:00] a lower status than thing from my cultural perspective to spend my time on, then literally any of the things I actually spend my time on.

And so, well, they're not thinking about it like that. So in what way are they thinking about it? They're thinking about it in terms of they see somebody who society or other people online seem to be assigning some level of status or attention to. And now they need to you know, attempt to, because this person doesn't correlate with what they think.

Status should correlate with. They will throw something like that out there to try to raise their own status within this little hierarchy that they're fighting just was in their own minds, you know, like, and you see this all the time with masculinity challenges within an online context, which are just silly.

Speaker 2: That's true.

Speaker: I've noticed you don't get challenged in the same way as much, which is interesting, but I think it's because you're, I mean, people will say you look, I don't know, like a man, I guess, is the core. No,

Speaker 2: [00:30:00] they say that I look misshapen and I wear big glasses and I look old. And I look nerdy and weak and just like genetically unfit.

And that I'm a four and all sorts of things like that. Yeah.

Speaker: Well, those are not so, I mean, think about what's coming out with every one of those individual attacks. Like, what are they trying to signal with something like that? You go out like, like if you go, you ugly, like, Just to like a random stranger.

Like you look like a mentally deficient person. So like, what are they trying to signal by saying something like you're a four? Right. Now first I would say to people like, objectively, that's not true. If you want to see like what your average person looks like, go to an airport or a DMV, like. Clearly, Simone's in the top 1 2 percent of the population in terms of attractiveness.

When you consider the fact that she is in her late 30s at this point and has had four kids I really don't think that you get close to this level of looks with normal humans. But they, they are trying to signal [00:31:00] either that they can get a more attractive partner than somebody like you, or that they are more attractive than somebody like you, or that you should not be assigned status because you are not attractive enough to be somebody who is assigned status or.

I don't know, it's, it's very interesting. Like what or that they are angry that you have been assigned status in our society and therefore they need to attempt to lower your status. Those are the things that might motivate behavior like that. You know, none of them show a particularly high level of cognitive function in terms of like 40, like how you'd see society chess, but then.

Think about something like you're genetically unfit. Now that actually shows a bit more intelligence, right? They are trying at the most base and superficial level to understand our ideology. Like, okay, they're selecting for genetic And so if I insult her genetic [00:32:00] health and say that people like her should not be breeding because she's of low genetic health, that undermines their world perspective.

The problem here is that it also undermines their world perspective. If they're like, how dare you eugenicists be having children? You're genetically unfit. It's like, wait, what? What? Those that that's the eugenic, the eugenic statement. And I should note that we don't actually hold eugenic beliefs, but this is something we're characterized as holding in the media.

We do believe that humans have genes and that as a family, we will make genetically optimal choices. But that's no more eugenicists and like choosing sperm from a sperm bank that has good quality traits. Like, individual choices have never been considered eugenics. Historically speaking. It's only society wide decisions which is what makes it eugenic and not a choice in who your partner is.

But anyway they're, they're trying to sort of flip the script on you there without really thinking about it, but it shows again, a [00:33:00] fairly low level of cognitive function. But I think something we have to remember is how low the level of cognitive function of the average human is. Yeah,

Speaker 2: yeah, yeah.

Half, half of all people are dumber than the average person, as they say, which is sobering and disturbing to think about.

Speaker: But, but the thing about Brain Rot is it affects smart people. Like, it's not. Oh,

Speaker 2: yes, 100%, because we're primarily mixing with smart people. Smart people and speaking with smart people.

Our society is soberingly siloed based on intelligence. Yeah, I'd

Speaker: actually say, and I hadn't noticed this until you pointed it out. And this is going to change a lot of my perception. So I'm glad we had this talk. Brain rot really does disproportionately affect CEOs and people in uniquely high status positions, I think, especially

Speaker 2: people surrounded by yes men and people who are not like s**t talking.

Well,

Speaker: I don't know. I, I, I would say that people who are surrounded by yes men don't realize they're surrounded by yes men. And [00:34:00] therefore that is not a useful framing for this. Okay. Okay. So, So, I can think of one really good example whose YouTube channel we're always comparing ourselves against.

Who seems to have a pretty big, sorry, I often like to quote unquote compete with people who we have some sort of a personal relationship or history. Oh,

Speaker 2: okay.

Speaker: Yeah, this individual has pretty severe brain rot, but they don't, they wouldn't recognize that they have severe brain rot because they don't.

Constantly

Speaker 2: engage with other intellectuals. Yeah,

Speaker: they engage with other intellectuals, but they do it in environments that are very low risk to them. And so it allows them to just go on narrative loops and then leave. Right? Which is really, really dangerous. You can think you're engaging with other people, but the question is basically, are other people regularly telling you you're wrong and stupid?

That's a better way to know if do you have to genuinely worry about being backstabbed by the people you are engaging with in a [00:35:00] significant way?

Speaker 2: Yeah. And yeah, and meaningfully backstabbed, like expelled from the group. S**t talked supplanted from your position of authority. So yeah, I think, yeah, to your point about CEOs.

If you own or run something and no one can fire you and no one can take it all away from you, you are uniquely susceptible to brain rot. You may want to join some kind of community or do something else where you are a player, but a player at risk. There has to be some kind of game of thrones in your life.

If you don't, if you're not playing a game of thrones. You are the jester. No, jester is sorry. They're way too smart and intelligent. They're like, typically the most intelligent people in the entire court, weren't they? It's a bad, bad example. Undo.

Speaker: Undo. Well, do you have any final thoughts on this, Simone?

Speaker 2: How else would you stave it off? I mean, the top thing that I'm doing with our kids, for example, which [00:36:00] I want to just permeate their lives. And have,

Speaker: and have lots of guests. The problem is that I know people who run major radio stations and have brain rot, so Yeah, I don't think, I don't think having guests

Speaker 2: on a podcast or in media at all protects you from So that, that's, that's dumb.

That's not gonna work. I think maybe constantly trying to To go further than you should be going is a very

Speaker: large family that can meaningfully isolate you or push you away. If you're being stupid, like if, I think if we have tons of kids, that's going to protect us to some extent.

Speaker 2: Well, I'm wondering if we could design our like either family trust or religious trust, you know, the thing that like sort of governs wealth transfer all and everything can be built in a way that forces.

Is. Sort of heavy competition and merit. In a way that would force us to stay sharp. Like the moment we turn our backs. Yeah, no, I think

Speaker: that's important. Yeah, I agree with that. [00:37:00] For, for kicking us off our own boards and stuff like that in favor of our kids, if they are more competent or cunning or ruthless.

Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Cause also when I think about anyone I can think about who is brain rot, a very prominent feature in their life is a lack of threats, a lack of imminent threats.

But it doesn't have to be real, like with your mother, it's not like she was ever in physical danger or in danger of losing, you know, her, her security or safety or health.

It was always just these, these women will reject you and stop inviting you to their parties and you won't get to be co chair of this thing. I mean, one

Speaker: of the things that we've talked about putting together is a discord of like minded family, not like a discord, but like a group that meets, you know, every year once our kids are old enough, you know, of other competent, high level professionals.

Oh, we already

Speaker 2: have. I mean, like. When families reach out to us and they have kids similar to our kids age, I put them on the index list, which is basically a list of people from very different cultures, but who are willing to intermix and have their kids possibly date [00:38:00] once they becoming adults.

Speaker: And, and what we will do with the list is, is it will be, it will create an online environment for all of our kids where they can engage with other peers who have been pre-vetted for cultural similarity, but who also come from like successful families.

And by cultural

Speaker 2: similarity we mean commitment to hard culture. We don't mean shared culture or values. Yeah,

Speaker: yeah, yeah, yeah. Ba basically being weird and anti-Urban monoculture. Yes. And through engaging with this community. The kids will be able to do things like when we say date within the community, you will, instead of like, dating on normal discord, they would be able to go and stay with the family of one of the people that they met in this community.

Exactly. If they like a girl or boy or, you know, they come to our house and stay with us for a while, you know, the idea is if you have this sort of sending out as a process of dating but also in an environment that is to an extent controlled by one of the families. So you don't have a lot of you know, overly salacious behavior in polite behavior.

You know, [00:39:00] they know part of the point is impressing the family with their manners and work ethic and, you know, everything like that, right? So it really frames the beginning of the relationship upon the context. But to maintain this network, you know, if we do this right, there's gonna be a lot of judgment going on.

So I suspect that will,

Speaker 2: yeah,

Speaker: well, I mean, it was

Speaker 2: something you, you always talked about with your, your mother going to family gatherings where she'd be like, so and so is going to have our, you know, like there'd be singing competitions or something. And that, you know, the family was always judging each other, like whose children will be like the most talented and well behaved.

Speaker: thing about my family growing up and my family culture, which gave us a lot of cultural protection. And it's something I want to emphasize with my kids is there was this belief that, you know, it matters. Like you need to be better than other people, but the people who you needed to be better than were your family members.

Speaker 2: I love, yes. We talked about this once on a car drive that the point of comparison should

Speaker: be

Speaker 2: the insiders.

Speaker: Yeah. The people outside the family did [00:40:00] not matter. Like they, they were, they were there, it was not relevant. Like there was never, and this is actually really interesting and quite different from some other cultures where it's like people was in the culture.

So it was in some like, Jewish families, for example. Right. They'll be like, well, Sheila's kid got into X medical school, right? Like, why aren't you in X medical school? Right. My family would never do something like that. They, they saw It was not

Speaker 2: keeping up with the Joneses. It was keeping up with the Collinses.

Speaker: Well, yeah, the wider family network. It was okay. Their kids are doing X. Why aren't you doing X? The cousins are doing X? Why aren't you doing X? The cousins did Y. Why didn't you do Y? And this can seem or your siblings have done Y, right? And for people who don't understand why this is so useful, it's useful for a few reasons.

One, it prevents standards from slipping. of my extended family, of which I remember I did in the mass once it was something like of like 18 [00:41:00] cousins, aunts, uncles, everything like that. Only two didn't go to Ivy League, Stanford, Oxford or Cambridge for their, their college or graduate degree. Like, like, it's like, okay, that's the norm.

That's the standard to what's expected of you. Don't go lower than that. And so when you're, you're, you're doing it by society, you know, it allows for, for things to slip if people around you are slipping, right. You know, do you have you know, of my family, I'd say like the middling success level is probably runs a company that's worth over a hundred million dollars.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Middling is top point. 0001 percent probably not necessarily in terms of wealth, but I would just say broad success by our definition, like has several kids is generally happy is generally healthy is not in financial trouble and has a position professionally of non trivial influence.

Speaker: Yeah, yeah, they all have positions of non triviality on films.

And even with our [00:42:00] podcast, I compare it. Like, I was, I was talking to my brother about our podcast recently. And then he, he snapped back at me that one of my cousins likely had over a billion views on his stuff. And I was boiling at that point. I was like, no, but you're right. I need to do better.

The, the one that he's, he's talking about does he's mostly now for like his impersonation stuff.

Speaker 18: Make it up as we go along. It's okay. I know nothing's wrong.

Speaker: But he actually started a company that does AI stuff and they have a, a movie coming out soon called what is it real? Or something like that where they did the technology for it.

We're around Tom Hanks. I'm going to put like a clip from it. It changes the time. So it's all filmed from like a single location, but like the time that things are happening is [00:43:00] changing. And, but it's all done with AI because obviously they need to have the actor age throughout it.

Speaker 15: I'd like you to meet Margaret. Nice to meet you, Margaret. Nice to meet you, Mr. Young.

Time sure does fly, doesn't it?

Speaker 16: His news His time

Speaker 15: I could spend the rest of my life here.

Speaker: And so obviously now this is like mainstream and we haven't even gotten our documentary deal yet.

And I feel, you know, I'm pretty humbled by that, but that's the thing. Like I don't. If I'm comparing myself to anyone else that's like classmates, right? Like which I've, I've done before. I'm like, okay, I have some sort of cultural relation to them because we went to Stanford together or something like that.

And therefore I have to judge myself relative to how they're doing. But the other big advantage of this is it prevents non family. Cultural framings from influencing my view of what a quote, unquote, good life looks like, or what status should look like. [00:44:00] So if somebody was like, well, look at what the Joneses are doing.

Look at what everyone else is optimizing around. I was raised in an environment where it wouldn't even think to me to consider. That is something like it would be like, I, yeah, I guess they're doing that, but what does that have to do with me? And I think this might be very similar to the way religious individuals grow up, who grow up like Orthodox Jewish or something like that.

If somebody was like, look at that person in secular world, look at what they're doing in the Orthodox, you know, the, the, the, the Hasidic Jew would be like, yeah, but Why would I, or like an Amish person, like, imagine trying to explain to an Amish person that they should be jealous of X person across the street who's like doing Y and who's not Amish, they'd be like, that's not the social environment I'm connected with.

Also for those who doubt the stories about my family. I told a pretty wild one in a recent episode about how, when we were kids, our family was called. By the other, , family in the neighborhood, the Adams family. I do two things like my brother and I [00:45:00] at like the age of five and four climbing up like three stories on the side of the house Because my parents just had zero regard for my safety. and believe it or not, we actually found a video of this recently.

Speaker 20: Rig was shut down. They needed some parts for it. Granddaddy, through customers, you're being paged to granddaddy

Speaker 23: with their,

Speaker 24: uh, the

Speaker: but it's also made me realize in terms of how I relate to you and our kids, how clannish my family is. Um, And that we come from, and you know, I've mentioned this, like the Backwoods culture which was a very clan like culture or combination of Backwoods and Puritan culture. But the Backwoods culture was very clan like.

The Greater Appalachian region was very clan like in how it interacted. And I've realized that I [00:46:00] was taught to, maybe in a slightly, like, sanitized, high class way, To always consider the clan is the only thing that mattered and everything outside the clan was it just, it wasn't even like not desirable.

It was just a desert, right? Like, which, which was very interesting. And I, I think that that's something that we should focus on recreating for our kids, which fortunately can do because one, we are broadly culturally aligned with our related family members and they all have tons of kids.

Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. But if you

Speaker 2: don't have that within your family I think that's another reason why we're trying to create the index is that,

Speaker: before I go, I have somebody here who wants to, to, to, to give his thoughts on this. Hey, Octavian, come here sit here. Oh, hi, Octavian.

Speaker 4: Hi..

Speaker 2: Octavian, what do you think daddy does when you are, are not at home when you're at school? [00:47:00]

Speaker 4: Then you just gotta wait for me.

Speaker 2: No theory of mind confirmed. So daddy just

Speaker: here waiting for you until you come back from school. Do you think that's what I do? What do you think that mommy does when you're at school?

Speaker 4: He does go inside and wait for me to come.

Speaker: Yeah. That's the world to these people.

Speaker 2: And what do you think your teacher is doing right now, Octavian?

Speaker: What's your teacher doing?

Speaker 4: My teacher's doing, hold on a second. I got to take a thumbnail. I got it.

Speaker 2: Active narrative, active narrative of what you're doing and no model of other people. That's what it is. It's a reversion to a childlike state.

Speaker: Show them what you painted.

Speaker 2: But I think the scary thing is that many people are never developing that theory of [00:48:00] mind at all. Whoa. That's scary. What? What on earth?

Speaker 4: I'll tell you what it needs to do.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 4: Okay.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 4: Okay. You put the

Speaker: mask on and then you sing a song.

What's the song?

Speaker 4: One monkey jumping on the bed. One fell off and bumped his head. Mama called the doctor and the doctor said, No more monkey jumping on the bed.

Speaker 2: That is not a monkey. That is a demonic being. Wait, when the

Speaker: monkey fell and bumped his head, what happened? Do you think he got hurt?

Speaker 4: Do you

Speaker: think he died?

Speaker 4: No, monkey died. The mama. The mama, the monkey dust called the doctor.

Speaker: Oh. 'cause the mama monkey called the [00:49:00] doctor. Okay, well that's good.

Speaker 4: The monkey doctor

Speaker: the monkey doctor. Are we all gonna have a cold soon? That's what I'm hearing here.

Speaker 2: I think so.

Speaker: All right. Love you so mom.

Speaker 2: Love you too. You're going to go get them.

I'm coming down. Yeah. What do you want for dinner?

What do you want for dinner?

Speaker: I'm not eating tonight. I ate a lunch. Oh, you went out? Yeah. When I was doing all the,

Speaker 2: thank you. Thank you for making those deliveries. All right. I'll see you downstairs.

Speaker 4: I'm I'm a pizza also. And I need everything. Do

Speaker: you want a big pizza or a little pizza?

Speaker 4: Big pizza.

Speaker: Okay. I love you.

Speaker 4: I forgot to tell you last night I was changing Indy and she had a little bit of spit up behind your ears. She needed a bath. I looked over and noticed that just gorgeous. Silver bathtub where we were staying and thought, you know, it would be so nice,[00:50:00]

you know, sat in this gorgeous bathtub and just really relaxed for just a second. And I got in with her and I'm sitting and I have her, you know, like sitting on my legs and she's facing me like this and I'm just looking at her and smiling and suddenly her face changes a little bit.

Speaker 3: Oh, no.

Speaker 4: Yeah, she There was poop everywhere. I was suddenly sitting in a toilet bowl Surrounded by turds

Speaker: in my worst nightmare being the germphobe that I am.

It's like my one attempt I mean, we had this chance. We're in this luxurious place this beautiful bathtub I'm like, oh, this will be such a nice moment and I am sitting in my worst night

Speaker 3: We should for the audience tell the story about the the The porta potty. So you should know how much Simone is a germaphobe and like a dirty a phobe.

She won't touch door handles. I have to open all the doors for her. She won't, she [00:51:00] doesn't really like, you know, handshaking with people. She's incredibly germaphobic. Okay, continue.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Touching doorknobs is really terrifying. Yes, I, this was Maybe a year before I met Malcolm, I was 23 or 24 years old and walking around San Francisco, as was my want, just to do for fun.

And I was up at Coit Tower where at the time, and I think they've taken it out. The San Francisco used to have these somewhat automated bathrooms with rounded corners. And I really, really had to go to the bathroom and I normally you

Speaker 3: ever use public restrooms.

Speaker 4: Oh, no, I will just go forever and just not.

Go to the bathroom and be an immense discomfort. It doesn't matter. But like, this was one of those situations where it was like, it's going to come out. So either it's coming out and I'm spending the next however many hours walking around with soiled clothing, or I'm using this public toilet and I get in and the door shuts.

It's completely dark inside and I'm like, Oh [00:52:00] crap. Like I guess there's no like activated light and I can't see anything cause there's no windows in this toilet. And suddenly water starts spraying everywhere. And I learned the hard way. That this toilet was in the middle of a cleaning cycle and I had somehow run into it just as it was shutting down for, I guess, a cleaning cycle, presumably because homeless people make it so gross in there that, like, they just created toilets with automatic cleaning cycles.

And so here I am in pitch dark in a public toilet being sprayed down with water. I stumble out of this in the light of day. Coit Tower is this lighthouse looking tower with really communist art at the bottom of it on this scenic hill in San Francisco. So I come out surrounded by tourists who are all just kind of staring at me, looking like I want to die.[00:53:00]

Speaker 2: Maybe that was the last time I've used a public toilet, actually. I don't think that's ever happened since.

Speaker 4: I just stopped drinking for a good 12 hours before I know I'm going to be outside for a prolonged period of time

Speaker 2: and or wear adult diapers. It's great. Let's do it. Let's do the episode. Yeah.

In this provocative and thought-provoking video, we dive deep into the controversial topic of climate change and environmental policies. We challenge mainstream narratives and explore alternative perspectives on global warming, environmental conservation, and the future of human civilization. This video covers:

* Critical analysis of climate change data and predictions

* The debate between environmental conservation and human progress

* Examination of proposed solutions like iron seeding and carbon capture

* Discussion on the politicization of environmental issues

* The relationship between environmentalism and population growth

* Critique of mainstream environmental movements and their motivations

* Exploration of technological solutions to environmental challenges

* The future of human civilization in the face of environmental changes

Note: This video presents controversial viewpoints and is intended to stimulate critical thinking and debate.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello simone today We are going to be talking about how much I You hate the environment, burn it down, burn it down. I am so done with it. I am so done with dealing with environmentalists.

Speaker: Alright, that does it! I f ed it!

Oh, now she figures it out.

Malcolm Collins: When I came into all of this print natalist stuff, I started being like, well, maybe we can find common ground. You know, obviously the environment matters, but like, we should probably try to save humanity as well.

Speaker: Quick! Everybody help the children!

Hyaaah! Dude, bulldozers rule! Come on, let's get you back to civilization! Hooray! Hooray,

Malcolm Collins: Like I really, and you know, me, I tried to do a middle line, you, She got her undergraduate degree in [00:01:00] environmental business. Okay. It was one of these created degrees. Her first jobs were at companies like Earth Day Network and ACOR and other environmentalist stuff. Like we are not intrinsically antagonistic to environmentalism as a cause, but as time has gone on.

My relation to environmentalism has dramatically changed, and it's been changing more like I'd even say over this year, where I am getting further and further to a standpoint of just the environment, like, I'm done. We don't need to save it. We don't need it for humanity to survive.

Speaker 2: We're clearing out big sections of the rainforest for a lumberyard.

Really? That's great! You mean you don't mind? No! I hate the rainforest! You go right

Speaker: ahead and plow down this whole f*****g thing! That's swell!

Malcolm Collins: And a lot of the stuff that environmentalists are going on and on about these days.

Aren't even [00:02:00] necessarily like, an intrinsic negative. For biodiversity. If that's what they're trying to protect, and that's one of the areas that we're going to get into it just a second. But I want to hear your thoughts before I move further.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I struggle a lot with this. I think the big issue here is very similar to the bigger issues.

We constantly talk about with the urban monoculture, which is that we don't have anything inherently against the values that it. Proposes to a spouse. We are not against LGBTQ rights. We're not against personal liberty. We're not against freedom of choice. We're not against people choosing to live how they want to live, which is sort of what I, at least I grew up thinking progressivism and being left was the Marxism.

I didn't really know about, I guess this is the same issue with environmentalism where we are inherently in favor of sustainability. Of biodiversity, of, of flourishing of life. The reason we don't like environmentalism [00:03:00] is because it has been corrupted to the extent that it actively runs against the best interests of these causes.

Speaker: You only fight these causes cause caring cells All you activists can go f**k yourselves That was so inspiring! What a wonderful message!

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and we did another episode that focused on like environmentalists are the biggest threat to the environment, but. I actually want to do more of a, a splitting here where I used to be like, look, I'm against environmentalism because I don't think it actually helps the environment. We're now, I've begun to move more and more into the perspective of, I might just not care about saving the environment at all.

Speaker: Do do do do do, da da do, wow!

Speaker 2: There's a place called the Rainforest that truly sucks ass.

Speaker: Let's knock it all down and get rid of it fast.

Malcolm Collins: You know, I,

Simone Collins: I don't. Just screw the earth. I'm going off the planet.

Malcolm Collins: Well, we're going to be doing that eventually anyway. So yeah, okay. I'll get into some specifics here. So [00:04:00] like, if you look at global warming, first of all, you know, what do plants need to grow?

Global climate change, global climate change, right?

Do we call it

warning now? We call it climate change. I don't

know. I don't know. I don't know. Like, I don't know if I'm allowed to say retarded now. It feels like we're doing the

Simone Collins: hard R, but it is no, you, you are not allowed to say it, but we say retarded. Because it's retarded to not say retarded.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes.

And, and don't be gay about

Simone Collins: it. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: With climate change. Right. I don't know if I'm allowed to say gypped anymore, but I'm going to say, I'm going to say gypped. But so here's the thing, global climate change, global climate, whatever. Right. What's it do? It increases the amount of CO2 in the environment.

And it increases the amount of warmth and the, the, the, the reach of the earth. And what, what, what do plants need? What do rainforests need? They need CO2. You're just like hypercharging photosynthesis. The [00:05:00] very thing that counteracts this phenomenon is what is being hypercharged by this phenomenon.

So you're saying

Simone Collins: you're welcome, trees.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I've never seen more of an obvious negative feedback loop like in my life and yet environmentalists are like, Oh, no, this is where you're gonna get these positive feedback loops and everything like that and I'm like the Environment is a negative feedback loop on this but more than that, you know, you could even argue this is Good for the environment, broadly speaking, and we'll get into the specifics of that, but it's also good for humans.

You know, if you are looking at you're going to get improved travel time in Arctic regions, which really matters for stuff like using less fuel and stuff like that for the big tanker ships and stuff, you're going to be able to use resources in those regions. Which is good for humans. You're going to have less people dying from extreme cold exposure.

You're just in the United States. There's 1, 300 deaths per year from extreme cold exposure. That's from 2006 to [00:06:00] 2010. And we're talking about how much is growing going to be increased by this. If you, if you're looking at cereal production, if we're using that as a proxy in wealthier countries, global warming will increase it by four to 14%.

But it may decrease by 6 to 7 percent in poorer countries. Now when we also talk about global warming, and this is the thing that really gets me about all these conversations, right? So, here I am looking at climate. gov. So obviously I very like pro global warming agenda organization. They argue that under very high emissions scenario, global temperatures will increase by three.

Point three to 5.7 C above pre-industrial levels by 2,100. And note, they're saying above pre-industrial levels, not above today's levels, right? Yeah. A little tricky there. Yeah. And they're saying in the absolute worst case scenario, this is the RCP 8.5 scenario. You're looking at a 4.3 to 5.4 degree rise.

And, [00:07:00] and, and, and the question here is, what are we talking about? Like, what does this lead to in the absolute worst case scenario, a temporary decrease in Earth's biodiversity? That is it. That is all. Oh, you're talking about yeah, well, well, in temporary, there is no sane person who doesn't think that the, the, the earth has had radical climate shifts before bigger than this the, the earth has had mass extinctions before the, yes, but if

Simone Collins: I may, there are a couple of things.

1 is it's not just a change in temperature. It is the extent to which ice caps and temperature. Ice caps melting, that is, and temperature change, perhaps a shift in the ocean currents that could cause very severe local climate changes that mean that it's very difficult for all species, including humans to adapt to those local environments because suddenly.[00:08:00]

the terms of their engagement have been very rapidly shifted and they don't have time. Which has happened

Malcolm Collins: before. Global sea currents have shifted before.

Simone Collins: Yes. Well, and humans have lived through ice ages before. So we loved it, man. We killed all those mammoths. Gotta get rid of them. Giant sloths. F**k you guys.

But it is a big deal. Okay. It's not just a little warmer. Things can change pretty significantly. No, but hold

Malcolm Collins: on, hold on. In what way? So like, let's talk about big deals, right? If, if, if life on earth was going to go extinct or if humanity was at genuine risk of going extinct. Yeah. That's something I'd come to the table for it, but you know, there's life on earth that lives in, in conditions of like, Yeah.

200 at thermal vents under Fahrenheit, you know, at 122 degrees Celsius. Like there are, there are animals that are going to make it through this. No one who isn't like actually insane thinks that life is going extinct because of global warming. [00:09:00] And then you can say, well, humans, like human cities on coastlines and, and, and specific regional economies might be devastated by this.

Right. And then it's like, well, then. What's your realistic effing alternative, my friend, because when I look at things like, you know, the parents are like, reduce, reduce carbon emissions, reduce carbon emissions, and then COVID happens. And we ground all cars and we ground all planes and and not all but you know most like I really couldn't imagine a more draconian standard being imposed on humanity realistically than what happened to the world during COVID.

And we incrementally hit the That year, what was supposed to be our CO2 reduction every single year on top of that, we needed to keep all of those restrictions

in place and add incrementally more over the course of 13 years to hit those standards. This shows me that. any plan. [00:10:00] And this is the thing that gets me and why it all looks so performative and ridiculous to me to reduce climate change.

That's focused on a reduction in carbon emissions. I'm like like, like voluntary, like my use when somebody is like, Oh, I didn't use X or I didn't do Y or I didn't Z because it reduces carbon emissions. I'm like, that doesn't effing matter. My friend, and we have seen this in the data. If you want to actually resolve this, you can either do it with carbon capture or potentially with, and I was talking with a guy today, which is really pro this iron seeding the oceans this is where you, you, you pour iron into the oceans to increase the production of, of gases.

The, the, the problem is, Is it probably won't work? So there was a study done at MIT recently and I'll read a quote from a MIT publication on this. If scientists were to widely fertilize the Southern Ocean or any other iron depleted waters with iron, the effort would temporarily stimulate phytoplankton to grow and [00:11:00] take up all the macronutrients available in that region.

But eventually there would be no macronutrients left to circulate to other regions like the North Atlantic, which depends on those macronutrients along with iron from dust deposits phytoplankton to grow, the net result would be an eventual decrease in phytoplankton in the North Atlantic and no significant increase in carbon dioxide draw down globally.

And, and so. Great. You know, you're, you're, you're running a risk of that. Now what they would argue to counter that if they're like, well, actually, we know what happens when iron is released because there was a volcanic eruption that happened recently that led to a near net neutral year for carbon emissions.

And so they could just point to that and say, Hey, look, we, we already have a natural experiment that shows that this works. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not even a fairly difficult thing to do for governments, you know, you go to the Philippines and you're increasing fishery output in the region. So, like, why not do it there?

Like, regionally, this isn't a hard thing to do. So, like, why aren't environmentalists trying this? And it's because it's not about this for them. [00:12:00] It's like some weird aesthetic battle for them, which I'll get to in a second.

Simone Collins: Why, remind me, or maybe you don't know, why not the atmospheric blanketing? Of what was it?

Carbon or smoke or something else. That's the other thing I've heard of as an intervention. Oh, you could

Malcolm Collins: do it. In some countries may start doing that if they feel like their local economies are at risk. It's

Simone Collins: the major premise of one environmental justice fiction sci fi book where this renegade group just does it on their own, which by the way, you could totally do.

But nobody's doing it because it's not a real threat to them. It's all about signaling. Yeah, that's, that's the problem is there are actually. Renegade things. Maybe your plane will get shot down. I don't know. If you're flying over international waters, you could probably get away with stuff like this. People aren't doing it.

But you're right. If you're just dumping iron in the ocean, who's going to tell? People dump everything in the ocean, right? What's some iron when we have the [00:13:00] Pacific Gyre? Is that how it's pronounced? The great pacific gyre, gyre, gyre?

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I mean, by the way, the iron dumping models right now suggest one ton of iron could remove 30, 000 to 110, 000 tons of carbon from the air.

So you're talking like gigatons. What format

Simone Collins: are we talking? Let's say you and I just get so pissed. Performative environmentalists that we just do it. Is this powdered iron? Am I going to supplement stores and buying iron supplements? Like what is the format that is necessary to make this work? I'm actually kind of thinking about like just having

Malcolm Collins: the prenatalist movie.

Just sticking it. Yeah. Just

Simone Collins: you're welcome. Idiot. You're welcome.

Malcolm Collins: F off. Yeah. We, we could also solve things like malaria fairly easily as well. Are you

Simone Collins: happy now? Yes. Yeah. Well, no, I'm the EAs are working on malaria, aren't they? And Bill Gates between the two of them,

Malcolm Collins: what they're doing is, is disastrous things like these mosquito nets, which then people are using as fishing nets [00:14:00] and is just completely destroying the malaria

Simone Collins: solution is more difficult.

It's more science y, you know, the nice thing about,

Malcolm Collins: you could, you could use you know, I forget the word and I'll add it in post. But the, the, that genetic thing where you modify mosquitoes with, it's sort of like a genetic time bomb that you can put inside something. And like, it's not that difficult to do.

And after a number of generations, it breeds into other mosquitoes and then they basically an entire population can become sterile at once. And the reason why, or not able to transmit malaria. And the reason why people are afraid to do this is they're like, well, what if it affects the local ecosystem?

What if it affects like blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, it will

Simone Collins: affect the local ecosystem.

Malcolm Collins: It will good. So what? Yes. Get rid of those little b******s. Okay. And, and, and, and if you look at the number of people dying per year, and I'll add this and post this, it's like insane. It's insane that they're not doing anything.

No, my God, the other lady in this call, I was talking to her and I was talking with these environmentalists. [00:15:00] She goes. are, how are you going to get off planet? Cause I'm like, well, my dream, like what I'm fighting for is an interplanetary empire. You know, I want humans not just on earth. I want them on planets and asteroids and floating ships.

And I, I think that this, this, this hand wringing over our existing environmental circumstances is going to look absolutely insane in a thousand years when our descendants are managing like maybe billions of biomes, depending on how quickly humanity through AI is able to colonize the, the, the, the world.

Universe. And they're going to be like, I cannot believe they were like really focused on like keeping the earth's original biome from changing at all in the 20th century. Like, what were they thinking? And, and she was like, well, what if we, she's like, I will run out of energy. And I was like, how are we going to run out of energy?

Like peak oil was ages ago. Like we've got renewables now, man. Like, and, and nuclear is [00:16:00] not limited by its power. Fuel source is limited by the incompetence of governments. And now you've got micro nuclear, like that's not even. And then she's like, well, I hear that a lot of those technologies rely on plastics, which relies on oil.

And I'm like, okay, lady, you know, that they don't have to be plastic. Those parts. The reason why they're plastic is because oil is so insane. Sanely inexpensive that I can buy oil at a per gallon price less than milk, like a fully renewable resource that's coming from a local vendor. And oil is, it's like being dragged up from the center of the earth, being taken up and, and, and being processed, this is a bit like saying well, you know, native, Native American tribe that like built its entire civilization around Buffalo.

And they're like, well, but if the Buffalo go extinct, like, where are we going to get utensils? Cause those are made from Buffalo bones. And I'm like, they're made from buffalo bones because your civilization is built around buffalo, okay? We're, we make everything with plastic because our civilization is built around [00:17:00] oil.

But like, the degree to which governments don't care about oil now, like look at Venezuela right now, right? Like, this is a country where plausibly any developed country could go in and take over the government with, like, humanitarian needs and capture, like, one of the largest oil reserves on earth that's, like, non producing right now, but nobody is.

Nobody is, even though they have the perfect casabelli, because they just don't need the oil. But you were gonna say My bigger

Simone Collins: issue is The extent to which environmentalism as a modern movement is tied to not having things change, which is one of the least pro environment, pro nature things you could imagine.

The only thing that is natural is the fact that environments, species, ecosystems evolve and change with time and fluctuate. And this concept of trying to keep it the same and [00:18:00] that changes is our bad. Is laughable, but also the most anthropocentric, whatever that word is, the most human oriented thing possible.

It's us trying to impose our discomfort with change upon the entire natural order of not just the world, but the universe. How myopic and selfish as a species can you be? And then you, you pretend to be the one. That favors natural stuff. That's very odd to me. That's another thing that turned me away from the movement.

Malcolm Collins: You see this all the time where they're like, Oh, we can't we've got to reintroduce the species of wolf to this region because like they were here historically, but like since then, a species of coyote has evolved to become much larger and take on the ecological role that that will species used to play.

And they're like, no, like, Like the, the aesthetic perfection of this environment. When it first encountered humanity, that must be maintained and not allowed to [00:19:00] evolve or differentiate. Right. And, and you really see this this belief, because when I was talking to them, I was like, at the end of the day, like, what are you fighting for?

Right. Like, You're fighting for maximum biodiversity. Then the only thing that matters is humanity getting off planet and beginning to seed new ecosystems, because that's going to lead to much bigger biodiversity. Any short term collapse in environmental in, in biodiversity due to global warming is irrelevant in the historical context.

You know, we have had. We've had mass extinctions before you look at the great oxidation of it. We've had species cause mass extinctions before. Oh, yeah. We're not the first

Simone Collins: sadly embarrassing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we don't even we don't even get the claim of that like this is all part of the natural order right and and and biodiversity will eventually return to Earth even if there is a temporary reduction.

So the questions at play here of what you value is biodiversity is only how quickly can we get to other planets and is humanity going to go extinct? And then outside of [00:20:00] biodiversity, what are they fighting for? It's an aesthetic. It's an aesthetic of what the earth in the environment was like when humanity first started to engage with it.

And it's like, I don't care. Like you want to think of all the pretty flowers, but I don't care. Just

Simone Collins: make, make new ones, make, make new flowers. Yeah. Ask

Malcolm Collins: in fact, we

Simone Collins: are, we are making new flowers. And of course, a lot of these are the same people who are against genetically modifying foods and increasing crop yields.

And yet that's done to make hunger not an issue. And these people are also saying, oh, but we can't have more people because there's There will not be enough food for them. But of course, don't modify the plants to increase crop yields. That would be

Malcolm Collins: what's like going on about like carrying capacity. And I was like, what do you mean?

Carrying capacity, the Netherlands produces a third of the agricultural exports of the United States, the Netherlands, this [00:21:00] little bitty. Itty bitty, nothing of a country. And in post I'll try to add like what percentage of the U S landmass it is,

So this graph is to be believed. I am wrong in the Netherland actually . Exports. Half of the agricultural products at the U S does. As this would have it.

Exporting 5% of the global food supply in the U S exporting 10% of the global food supply. But whatever the case may be. , when you look at landmass, the United States is a literally. 229 times larger than the Netherlands. And keep in mind that 20% of the Netherlands land is reclaimed land. That is only being kept dry by the use of constant pumps and big.

Civil works projects from the ocean.

Malcolm Collins: where most of this landmass is reclaimed anyway, from the ocean using like constant, like pumps and stuff like that.

The Madelons is

Simone Collins: so cool.

Malcolm Collins: They're both,

Simone Collins: they're both giving us all our food and helping us lose all our weight. [00:22:00] God bless. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Carrying capacity is, she's talking about a Zimbic here, is determined by technology. It is not determined by the amount of land on Earth, okay, that is laughable at this point, and we know it's laughable at this point since the Green Revolution.

But, like, what other, like, weird ethical argument could they have here? So I've heard some arguments around, like, and this is I'm concerned.

Simone Collins: I'm I am genuinely concerned about the human suffering that will be caused by climate change in areas that are not ready for it, where we will have humanitarian crises.

We will have mass immigration. We'll have refugees of places that are too hot to live where, where, you know, infrastructure will fail because of changes in the environment because of extreme heat, where people will die. I'm super not. Cool with that. I hate the idea of human suffering and because that is an inevitable part of existing.

I think what we really should be doing [00:23:00] is anticipating those risks and addressing them immediately because trying to prevent them from happening is. Not realistic. And if you want to do that, then dump iron into the ocean. We really have to look into this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and here's the thing, even, even if somebody was telling me like they, they, they knew or could predict a total ecosystem collapse it just, it's like, then we've got to find out how to live in a world with a total ecosystem collapse and environmentalists.

They're like, you can't. Do that for most of humanity. And I'm like, I don't care about most of humanity. I care about the you know, the technophilic pluralistic alliance that is the pronatalist movement. Right? And that is not most of humanity. I'm not here to save the urban monoculture or like a random Other people.

I don't have this noble, savage archetype where I need to paternalistically come in and save other people. I need to ask myself, can my [00:24:00] descendants that they stay very high tech focus if they stay very industrially productive, are they going to be able to produce the types of habitats that could survive even with Like a, what is it, like a methane runaway scenario in terms of global temperature?

And my answer would be absolutely. They'll figure out how to build something underground where they're growing fungus or something. Or they'll figure out how to, they'll figure it out. Okay, there, there, there are ways. For humanity to survive, and then eventually, when they do figure it out in the long term, they reestablish our current environmental conditions.

They can reseed Earth's biome. What matters more is stuff like seed vaults. I think those really matter. Or, you know, maintaining a genetic supply of like pre augmentation plants and stuff like that. Because I do think that in the future, a lot of the plants in nature are going to be augmented.

But I also think that we should begin creating large genetic databases. Of the earth's existing biome. So that parts of it can be used when we're creating new biomes on [00:25:00] other planets, or potentially even the whole thing can be used in the future. Because that's what we're really losing when we lose a species.

It was just a unique DNA of that species, but that's something that we can cattle up and then recreate with a fabricator in the future. You know, we're, we're, we're already at a place now where people are beginning to talk about like recreating, like some extinct species, like mammoths and stuff like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Another thing that bothers me about environmentalism in general or environmentalists is this, this perception that nature is gentle and kind and man has been, well, we would argue pretty much all living species are in an ongoing battle with nature, just trying to not get killed by it. Nature has been trying to

Malcolm Collins: kill us on a daily basis since we crawled from the mud.

Like, nature is not our friend. It is the place you go to [00:26:00] die. Like, you are absolutely right about that. And it is This weird Stockholm syndrome that some people have formed was nature.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I don't think it's Stockholm syndrome because that even involves exposure and adjustment adaptation. Most of us wouldn't last more than two days and a, an even slightly hostile natural environment with no access to other people or resources.

It wouldn't go well. It is very, very difficult to survive in the wild, especially without any experience doing it. It's not a friendly place. And, and I think we take for granted the luxuries that we enjoy from civilization and to just s**t on them and act as though everything that we've Evolved everything we've developed our technology and even you and I complain about industrialization, you know, it's obviously [00:27:00] caused some unexpected effects and we haven't built

Malcolm Collins: about industrialization.

Simone Collins: Well, we, we, we, we point out that industrialization sparked. The beginning of demographic collapse, but that doesn't mean we don't love it. It's not a complaint, it's a fact.

Malcolm Collins: It's

Simone Collins: an, yeah, it's an observation. So, well, all I'm saying is we're not worshiping modernity and human development as an unambiguously good thing.

I think

Malcolm Collins: industrialization is, is, is intrinsically one of the most net good things that humanity has ever produced. I, I think that the creation of our existing civilization and industry is the manifestation of everything that makes humanity great. And the environment, I mean, if we talk about like spiral energy and anti spiral energy, where spiral energy represents humanity uplifting itself from the, our savage days as beasts [00:28:00] and the environmentalist, you know, The, the, the, the nature representing this force attempting to pull us down and subjugate us to our lesser instincts.

Industrialization represents the very platform upon which we were able to uplift ourselves from those savage days. And that as, as such, it is, it is sacred.

You disagree or you think I'm being,

Simone Collins: no, I'm really, I'm for all developments. And even when develops have developments have unexpected side effects,

Malcolm Collins: you

Simone Collins: don't want to adapt, but I'm, I'm not just that way about human technology, industrialization evolution. I'm the same way about the natural world and environment.

evolving and developing they may have unexpected side effects, but overall it is the process of change and [00:29:00] time proceeding. But I do, as a human who cares about other humans, and as a mother, and as a wife, and as a daughter, care about, you know, In general, the wellbeing of other people. And I don't like scenarios in which humans suffer.

So I do worry about that. Again,

Malcolm Collins: no matter what going forward, the humans can survive a climate change scenario where populations that weren't going to survive anyway,

Simone Collins: if

Malcolm Collins: they didn't die in this generation or the generation that's affected by climate change, they would have died a few generations from then.

Like you don't need to save everyone. Not everyone matters. And, and when I say that they don't matter, what I mean is, you know, Some groups are just going to die out no matter what we do, okay? I

Simone Collins: hear you, and I acknowledge that that's true. That doesn't mean it's okay that they suffer to me. And that is just, that's me.

In my opinion, a lot of people share it though. Well, you can

Malcolm Collins: start pills in these regions. I don't know, like one of those things they give when there's like a nuclear [00:30:00] apocalypse where you just, or you're just dropping them from airplanes over regions, making it super easy. What is that? Is that your plan?

Simone Collins: I think the plan is to set up incentives. Yes. That draw people away from regions that are going to be profoundly affected by these issues and to try to depopulate them and move people in other directions as soon as possible. Maybe set up immigration and migration treaties ahead of time so people have an out if they're willing to take it.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, but demographic collapse is going to make that happen organically.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I guess I like to your, to your point, a lot of this will probably look like a, an Irish potato famine issue where yes, a lot actually will immigrate away. And with great hardship retreat to safety and some will refuse to deal with change.

Because again, it's a very inherently human thing to not be comfortable with change, and they will [00:31:00] flounder and die in these regions in large numbers, which is tragic. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I should note, I don't have an intrinsic, like, antagonism towards nature. I believe that we are now in, like, nature 2. 0. Nature is red in tooth and claw.

Nature is an environment where Improvement occurs through competition, and I see that we are just now in the next iteration of that. But that doesn't mean that nature didn't cruelly kill a near countless number of our ancestors in, in, in ways that, you know, You know, even even today, right? You know, like, oh, you know, I don't know.

I just, and here's the other thing, right? With all of this, one of the things where my position internally has been changing over time, you know, as, as I learn more, and I don't know if I'm all the way there yet is. Is climate change even real? And

Simone Collins: What? Of course climate change is real. There's there are arguably, [00:32:00] you know, hundreds of thousands So I had a

Malcolm Collins: conversation with a guy Millions

Simone Collins: of years of documented proof of this.

You can do ice cores.

Malcolm Collins: So, so you may say that, right? Okay. But I'm gonna give you So I had a conversation with a guy. And I'm just going to repeat what he said because I don't fully understand the physics of all of his arguments. But this guy is very famous. Like a person who No, I'm not going to like out him so that people can know him.

Yeah, I'm

Simone Collins: just saying a lot of people are very famous and they don't tell the truth.

Malcolm Collins: This is an individual who very clearly believes this. A very successful engineer. And it's, it's anyone who's jumping in. No, it's not this. This one was actually introduced to you by Ruby art.

But anyway, he points out that you know, we see in a historic period, like in Roman Britain, they were growing grapes. Okay, that means that it was, , warm during that period, like that warmer than it is today. Significantly.

We see [00:33:00] farming in Iceland 23, 000 years ago, like that means it was warmer than it is today.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Climate change. What am I missing here?

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, what he's arguing, okay, so if you listen to the climate change activists today, they say, we are in, like, the hottest timeline that humans have reached. Oh,

Simone Collins: that's b******t. But that's just because they have no concept of what climate change is on a larger scale.

But, as you've pointed out, It was warmer and colder in some regions in the past than it is now.

Malcolm Collins: No, this matters. In recent human history, the earth has been warmer than it is today. Okay, this undermines one of the core arguments where you could say, actually, we just have a fairly recent increase in global temperatures.

Along a, a up and down line that you've seen historically. And so, he makes a point to me that greenhouses [00:34:00] only work. Like if you're looking at a greenhouse thing, when they are completely trapped yeah, gases rise when hot and heat moves by convection, the relaxation time of carbon dioxide the, the transfer time out of the system.

Is apparently incredibly fast. It's in the field of nanoseconds. So, the, he gave me a paper that I'll put on screen here from

Richard. Feynman and it's titled the Feynman lectures on physics, volume one, chapter 40, the principles of statistical mechanics.

And so the

he says that there is no such thing as like a greenhouse environmental thing because heat moves by radiation. Conduction and convection and greenhouses trap the air by the dirt. With the glass preventing convection

My read of his argument. Although I personally don't fully understand the physics here. Is it heat transfer between the atmosphere? And, outer space would not be.

Particularly hindered by.

The [00:35:00] gravity that keeps the atmosphere near earth. When I try to research this.

What I get is that.

Heat can only transfer to outer space through radiation. It can't travel to space through convection because there is no medium in outer space, but that radiation is the fastest means of heat transfer. So. You shouldn't have the same level of hindrance you would have with an eight. Normal greenhouse environment. I E like a glass structure meant to keep air in near the ground. And I'd really love one of our autistic listeners to explain whether he's right or not. Sorry, I'd say autistic listeners, not to disparage solicitors as a show, but like, let's be honest here.

To explain to me whether or not this is right. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: and that

CO2 absorbs infrared radiation, but re emits it quickly at about the same way wavelengths. He, this is called the relaxation time and it's about a few nanoseconds. The energy goes from the dirt to outer space in about [00:36:00] four For 500 million years, it's been much warmer and c. O. Two has been much higher.

We are in a period now that is a C. O. Two minimum, not a C. O. Two maximum, then he says here, for example, Venus out gas, the same amount of C. O. Two is earth, but since there's no life for carbon capture, it's It's all just a very dense atmosphere. The limestone beds worldwide on earth hold all the CO2.

So I, I, again, the, the thing that I don't really exactly understand is relaxation time of CO2 and does this really mean that heat can transfer really quickly from earth to the outer atmosphere?

And again, I want to be clear. I am not endorsing this theory. I don't believe this theory myself. It's just a theory. I hadn't heard before. Told to me from a person who has made a lot of money in the engineering and. Physical sciences space. So appears to practically know what he's talking about in a way that I don't. [00:37:00]

So

I wanted to share this information to maybe get feedback from our audience to understand why it's wrong.

Malcolm Collins: What I can say is I do believe that we're in an ecosystem now where if all of this were true, that The powers that be wouldn't let us know it.

And that's one of the big problems that they've created by creating this entire global censorship network. That's probably going to be hitting this episode was an explanation of global warming right below the episode.

I'm sure you're going to hit so that you know what the

Simone Collins: No, no, no, no. They dropped the concept of global warming and greenhouse gases.

When we were still kids, it has been climate change. For the longest time, I just used, I just used black forest labs to create a cartoon showing an anthropomorphized carbon dioxide molecule relaxing at a vacation resort. I mean, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: but why, why, hold on, here's my question.

Simone Collins: Carbon relaxation time.

Malcolm Collins: Simone, why does CO2 Explain, explain, because I, [00:38:00] I, I, I don't understand this.

If you're saying that nobody cares about greenhouse gases anymore, what, why, why this carbon capture stuff? Why this CO2 reduction in the Paris Accords?

Simone Collins: Because there are two elements to the environmental movement. One is, is an element that's, that's actually concerned about The outcome and then the other is the element that is performative and the performative element is not necessarily evidence based.

I don't think it's necessarily looking at reality. And it certainly hasn't caught up with the fact that the narrative changing to global climate change means that we need to stop looking at greenhouse gases. And so there's still a big focus on carbon. Why is there that focus on carbon? Because what are humans doing this bad and evil?

How do we need to repent? Well, we are sinning in the form of creating carbon, in producing a carbon footprint. And so how do we repent for the sin? We don't have children who can produce more carbon footprints. [00:39:00] We must sequester our carbon. We must capture the carbon. We must undo our sins. And that is how it

Malcolm Collins: really is like this, this sin based ecosystem of the way we relate to the environment.

Simone Collins: Yes. And I think that that's, that's what's going on. It's not a bow. Yeah, I mean, I hear you. But what I'm just saying is the fact that the carbon obsession not really making sense necessarily with global climate. Now, I could see maybe there an argument being made for an increase or acceleration of carbon output to increasing the speed with which polar ice caps melt is one of the primary drivers behind increased risk of global ocean currents changing, which would in turn exacerbate climate change.

By causing [00:40:00] drastic and sudden changes.

Malcolm Collins: People are like, well, what about all the people who live near the shore? And I'm like, well, they got to move buddy.

Simone Collins: Right. Easier said than done. Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, not easier. The economic model that cities are built on doesn't work in a world of population collapse. So like they don't, it doesn't even matter.

They're going to be abandoned anyways, within our lifetime. I

Simone Collins: don't. That would be an interesting policy is. To prepare for demographic collapse, just effectively shut down coastal cities by no longer. allowing for mortgages or debt to be leveraged or insurance to be utilized in coastal cities subject to

Malcolm Collins: I think that's a perfectly reasonable policy.

And I think if you put, and this isn't about rising sea

Simone Collins: levels, it's not about rising sea levels. It's about being at risk of like hurricane surges.

Malcolm Collins: Actually, that's really interesting. So, so just, you know, we [00:41:00] can actually deal with sea level rise. The Netherlands has reclaimed like a third of their country or something like that.

Speaker 4: The Dutch polders are the largest land reclamation projects in the world. which added nearly 20 percent of land to the country. And its fertile land makes the Netherlands the second largest exporter of food in the world.

A large dike was constructed to block seawater from flooding into the inner regions of the Netherlands. We're going to look at how parts of the inland water area was drained and turned into fertile land. Ever since the 16th century, large areas of land have been reclaimed from the sea and lakes amounting to over 50 percent of the country's current land area if you include every lake ever laid dry.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and I

Simone Collins: watched this great YouTube video on how Venice was actually settled. I mean, it was a marshland to start. Okay. The people fled to on boats and it was sort of a temporary settlement. And it was extremely, extremely [00:42:00] waterlogged and marshy. And everything that they built there was basically on top of waterlogged mud piles.

It was not, there was never land there that started to sink. Basically, everything they built there was built in a very unique and fascinating way. I'll dig up this video and share it with you because it's a great thing to link to. I just, I loved it. It was absolutely fascinating to watch the architecture of Venice.

Super cool. Even the

Speaker 3: When the first refugees arrived to start their new lives on the islands, they had the worst possible surface to build on. The small, marshy islands were made of an incredibly soft clay, which would barely hold the weight of a human . To create stable foundations for buildings, the Venetians collected large timber piles from the forests of Croatia and started hammering them into the ground.

 Not only did this stabilize the piles, but by packing them really close together, it compressed the surrounding clay, pushing out the water and making it much stronger. Once the piles were firmly in the ground, they The tops were cut off, and wooden planks [00:43:00] were laid on top to spread the load.

Special blocks of Istrian stone were then placed to raise the foundations above the water. This design was a stroke of genius, as the wooden piles were sealed away from the air, making it impossible for them to rot. To this day, almost all of the original piles are in great condition, and are still holding up the city.

Simone Collins: Way that the buildings had to be built to fluctuate you know, with, with the movement associated with being built on such unsturdy Foundations and built in a really ingenious way. But anyway, even Venice, right. It's built on flooded ground that is unstable. And of course, you know, we can build on all sorts of other environments.

Humans are so good at adapting. And here's the thing. Here's another reason why I think Venice is so cool. And it like very much fits our whole city state concept. Is here. You have another place where humans had to develop a settlement in an extremely hostile environment that was not [00:44:00] meant for people.

And when you force people to deal with these constraints, amazing innovation starts taking place when you when you present humans with a challenge, they rise to it. And again, that's 1 of the fundamental problems facing many people in our society. Now,

Malcolm Collins: the surviving humans rise to it.

Simone Collins: Yes, the surviving humans rise to it, sure, but like, the point is that our big problem now is life is too easy.

And I think a lot of people that honestly aren't surviving right now, they are barely scraping by, they are subject to addiction, they are, they are desperate, they're committing suicide. Yeah, they're ending themselves, et cetera. These people could actually thrive if given, if presented with meaningful challenge, if their lives were threatened, if they had to build a new civilization and marshland because they were being forced to be like refugees in some kind of conflict.

So,

Malcolm Collins: I really like your policy solution. If we got into a federal office, I love this idea. It's

Simone Collins: not going to happen. One [00:45:00] crazy person's environmental policy to not allow development anymore.

Malcolm Collins: Because both conservatives and progressives would love it. So it could absolutely pass. So what you are passing is a policy that says for environmentalist reasons, Right.

So the progressives like it. Okay. We need to pass a ban on taking out debt in real estate in areas that are adjacent to the coast and was an X, a degree of sea level. Okay. Like X number of feet, debt and insurance,

Simone Collins: debt and insurance, debt

Malcolm Collins: and insurance. So why would conservatives love this?

Because it basically makes all progressive districts non viable in the United States, except for a very few inner country districts. Well, then progressives

Simone Collins: would never stand for it if they knew that that was the effect. Oh, they would. Oh, they

Malcolm Collins: would because it helps the environment. No.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but they don't actually care about stuff that helps the environment.

Remember?

Malcolm Collins: You don't think [00:46:00] Manhattan would vote on something that is economically not in their best interest if it fit the progressive religion? That is their entire system. Manhattan would 100

Simone Collins: percent not vote for it because they're dependent on insurance and they're dependent on debt. No, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: They 100 percent would.

Manhattan regularly votes things into law that obviously is going to make their city non livable in a few years. Whether it's the way they deal with repeat offenders of crimes, whether it's the way they deal with homeless people, whether it's the way they deal with immigrants, like all of their policies are like, obviously this is going to economically destroy the city and eventually sink it.

Andy woke up. Why not just sink the whole thing to begin with?

Simone Collins: I have to, I have to get Andy. One second.

Speaker 2: You say save the Rainforest, but what do you know?

Speaker: You've never been to the Rainforest before!

Boys and girls

Speaker 2: Girls!

Speaker: Getting gay [00:47:00] with kids is here

Malcolm Collins: This is it for us anyway, I love you, you're amazing,

okay, I love you. Cool, indeed. Okay.

Oh my god, so useless. I hate useless people. Today's episode, and obviously this is going to go at the end, is going to be therapy for me because I just had to talk with the most useless environmentalist. He was, he was going on, and we'll go over this in the episode, about iron seeding, and he was like, Why?

You know, they said we could fix global warming, because he believes 100 percent in the technology, right? Like, and moving forward with it. And I was like, then why are we having this conversation? Just go fix it, right? Like, why are you taking my time? To talk about this and he goes well if we do fix global warming It's going to have a lot of impacts on how you can promote pronatalism because more people will want kids If they don't think the future is going to be destroyed.

I'm like one. I don't think like yeah one

Simone Collins: not true

Malcolm Collins: Actually not having kids because of climate change I think that's an excuse people use to try to make themselves look virtuous [00:48:00] when they've decided not to have kids for selfish reasons but or just lack of action reasons. But in addition to that what do you mean like you want it?

Because then he was like, and we need to have another. Why would we have that conversation? Like, either it works or it doesn't work. There's no point in wasting my time with these hypotheticals. And this is what I don't get. Like, we're now at like, what, like 120 people watching us at any given time, day or night, right?

So, when somebody, like, tries to monopolize my time like that, it just boils my blood because I'm like, okay, there's 120 other people that right now at any given time I should be working to make better episodes for, who you know, are not Trying to convince me of their little project. That's probably not going to happen anyway, but anyway.

All right. So we'll get started on the episode here. But I'm sure you ran into this all the time when you were dealing with climate change people.

Simone Collins: You know, when dealing with [00:49:00] climate change people, this did not ever come up as an issue because so much of it felt like that if you are interacting with other people on climate change issues, it is often because.

You are a performative person interacting with performative people, everyone in climate change who's actually doing something. Isn't interacting with other climate change people. They're doing the thing they are. Elon Musk deciding, okay, climate change is an issue. Let's go into solar. Let's make electric cars.

Let's do this. And of course all environmentalists seem to hate him now. So. I think there's that bifurcation and therefore this is not something that actually bothers people who identify as environmentalists because

Malcolm Collins: true. Yeah, it's the, the identity thing, right? This, this is a topic we've thought about doing an episode on at some point, but about the effect of altruists and why the left hates them so much because all they want to do, I mean, they capitulate on every left wing issue, right?

They just want to focus on [00:50:00] the data, right? Right. Right. And the left absolutely hates them. And it's like, well, of course they do, because they're the people who come into a room and say, okay, we need to focus on, you know, X, Y, and Z issue by the statistics in terms of like net utility impact, and then the leftists are there, but like, But this year it's racism year.

Like, don't you know, immigrants are the thing right now? Yeah, this year is

Simone Collins: racism year.

Malcolm Collins: Don't you know? No, that's really the way it f*****g goes. Like, it's insane. It's like this year, it's X year and we're going to do X. And, and if you're off topic, you're off topic. Like, God forbid, you know, during BLM, you're like, well, what about trans people?

Right. Because wrong topic. Okay. That scene is stealing. There was actually some quotes I heard of like lefties who were mortified that like, trans rights activists were saying trans lives matter. Because like they stole this like blackface and it's BLM season right now. And we got to do the BLM thing right now.

Come on, man. Don't you know, [00:51:00] right now it's brat summer. You can't be talking about anything but Kami. You can't be talking about anything but Cammie. None of this environmental nonsense this summer. Okay? That ain't her thing. Cammie? Okay. I'm trying to, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm working double time for her PR team.

Trying to, you know, get it spicy here. Gotta get, get Cammie and Brat Summer and hitting it up at the club. I mean, that debate.

Simone Collins: We're, we're entering dangerously on cool zone right now.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, the thing that got me about the debate was how much Trump, and this was like, he was out of character for doing this.

Right. But like, he just seemed like a beleaguered person actually trying to make politics work. And she seemed like the most, Ooh, now I get to do branding thing. You know, the, the, the really sad. Like watching them talk about abortion to me just killed me when she's like, I'm going to do X and Y. And Trump is like, you need, you only have 50 percent of the [00:52:00] elect of Congress or the Senate about at any given time, right?

There's no way you could pass a national abortion law. Even if you had it like, like you wanted to, like, what are you talking about? And just that Trump was here occupying like the real world and she was out here just like fantasizing about like fake political promise nonsense stuff I was like, where have we gone for like i'm gonna build a wall and mexico is gonna pay for it to You couldn't possibly get that passed.

Did you know that it's a 50 percent on each side of the aisle? That's the problem

Simone Collins: though. And that's, what's at play here is what wins now is punchy narratives. Trump had those before. And now I think Democrats have learned from that method and they're saying, okay, if that's how we play now, that's how we play.

Brad summer vibes, no substance, only ideas, national abortion ban. Trump is evil. [00:53:00] And it works. Well, I mean,

Malcolm Collins: I think what realistically is going to happen is you know, I, I think that people vote Dem in the same way they buy games like Concord and stuff like that. Like that.

Simone Collins: And that's the big question for the upcoming election in the United States.

We'll see.

Malcolm Collins: But I mean, we're basically at a point now where, because of. You know, and it's funny that I can say this without any trouble erection fraud. There's just too many problems with male penises and erections and fraud around that at the moment. Because you used to like hardcore believe it wasn't a real thing And now that you've gotten more into the political system, you're like, oh god, it's actually happening at massive levels I

Simone Collins: i'm having a harder time believing that we don't have any erection problems In our country at this time.

We

Malcolm Collins: need to talk about this country's erection problems and we're not going to be allowed to on youtube god forbid That's the type of thing that gets your channel taken down when you point out that part of the little game that they're [00:54:00] playing but anyway i'm gonna start right here. All right.

https://discord.com/invite/EGFRjwwS92

Decoding Fertility Rates: Income, Culture, and Ideological Influences In this episode, Simone and Malcolm dive deep into fertility statistics, examining the correlation between income levels and fertility rates across different demographics. They unpack several studies, including ones from Lyman Stone, and discuss the intricate relationship between wealth and the number of children people have. The discussion also covers cultural influences, historical trends, and specific cases in various parts of the world such as pre-industrial societies, modern Africa, and the United States. Key insights are shared on how educational attainment, societal norms, and economic factors impact fertility rates. Tune in to explore the nuances and complexities of demographic changes and fertility patterns.

[00:00:00] Simone! Today we are going to do an episode that focuses on Fertility stats, and it's gonna be a stat heavy episode. It's gonna be a study heavy episode, and it's gonna be on demographic collapse, which our audience love.

Ooh, the trifecta. The trifecta. So in today's episode, we are going to focus on the nuances of when fertility decline does not follow the model. The more wealth an individual has, the fewer kids they have. Where are the kinks in this particular incredibly robust statistical trends armor? Would you like to know more?

I, I like that we're looking at this because I think The exceptions to the general trend probably yield really useful insights So we're gonna be focused on a few articles here But one of the ones that I'm going to draw a lot from it's actually from Lyman Stone Who runs the Institute of Family Studies and it's [00:01:00] called more money more babies.

What's the relationship between income and fertility now? Something we should note here, and it's one of the reasons I'm looking at this, is I believe in always really digging deep. when somebody says something that sounds, you know, utterly preposterous or is obviously ideologically motivated because there's often elements of truth in what they're saying that I may not be seeing on the other side of the ideological fence.

Right. So those who are not familiar, haven't read a lot of limestone stuff. He really likes to manipulate statistics to try to argue his perspective. And his perspective is always. That we should be doing more cash handouts and that this can be solved with Christianity. Those are generally the two arguments that he's always going to use.

And so he'll often twist things to sort of this, you know, Christian socialist perspective. But this means that he has to argue and he has argued explicitly. There isn't that much of a correlation between [00:02:00] fertility and income, which is just a preposterous thing on its face. There was a piece that he wrote that was attacking us.

And this was one of the claims he made when we were pointing out that you don't seem to be able to solve this with cash handouts. However he has invested a lot of energy and a lot of his own personal credibility in debating this matter. And as such he has found a number of interesting points that I may not have caught myself which don't reverse either of the two larger truisms.

The first being that you do not appear to, with any reasonable amount of money, be able to pay people or with social services, increase fertility rates. And the second being that generally speaking, the more income a country has or the more income an individual has, the lower their fertility rate is going to be.

But there are modifications in this trend. Hmm. Okay. Over where we see those in turn. So the first is that if you look in pre industrial societies, [00:03:00] the more income an individual has, particularly a man, the higher their fertility rate is. in pre industrial societies. Yes. And this is only with male fertility, not female fertility.

No, it's also female fertility, but it is more tied with male fertility. So this is from an article titled men's status and reproductive success in 33 non industrial societies affects a subsistence marriage system and reproductive strategy. And this showed a meta analysis of 288 results of 33 non industrial populations.

And it showed that. Status is significantly associated with men's reproductive success consistent with the evolved basis for status pursuit. Status hierarchies have changed dramatically though in recent eras. , if anybody doesn't immediately see the implication of this, it does show that dysgenic fertility selection, sorry, I should explain what dysgenic means. Dysgenic means certain environments can cause things to [00:04:00] be selected for in a population that do not actually make the population more fit but just increase the number of surviving offspring that population has.

A great example of this is rabbits in the UK. If you've ever seen rabbits in the UK, they're all deformed and weird looking and witness. Yes they, I don't remember the full story. But , the point being is that they don't have natural predators and because they don't have natural predators, it's literally just the ones that can have the most kids that survive. And so there is no real fitness preservation technique , or pressure for the population.

And so they end up being . cancerous witless balls , of tumors. They're really quite gross. If you ever see a rabbit in the UK, it's, it's, it's kind of scary. But where this is relevant to humans is we've been under similar pressures for a while, as we mentioned in our can society become an idiocracy episode which by the way, was ad restricted.

I don't [00:05:00] even think we went that spicy in that one. Just saw that today. Maybe we sound like it. And I'm like, come on, man. Yes. Humans have genes and they're correlated with intelligence and they're being selected against. This is like really clear in the data, but okay. I guess we'll pretend we live in your little fantasy world where everyone's born exactly the same.

But anyway, the point being here that dysgenic selection started in humans with the rise of the industrial revolution, it appears. Or with modern industrial society. And that before this, the more status someone was able to accrue, whether that was through, you know, wealth or charisma or attractiveness or et cetera, the more kids they were going to have now, generally the two things most correlated with a high fertility rate are low IQ and obesity which are, you know, witless rabbits, right?

I think it's low educational attainment. Not necessarily though. Okay. Low educational attainment. Yeah. But yeah, not, not ideal, not [00:06:00] ideal. Obviously this doesn't really help his larger point.

What fertility rates were like in pre industrial societies isn't exactly relevant in the modern world. But it is, you know, an interesting and novel point nonetheless. But to him saying something like, well, you can't just assume that less income means more kids because in pre industrial societies, that wasn't true, it's like, yeah, but that's not relevant to the current, to a post industrial society.

problem that we're facing that's like throwing sand in my eyes with statistics. This is what I mean when I say he, he likes doing the, the pocket sand thing. Statistics and hope you don't notice.

 Pocket sand.

Okay. So for the next point. He says here, the author argues that historic fertility declines were overwhelmingly caused by novel cultural norms, which are often correlated, but distinct from income.

So here I was looking at the study that he was looking at. It's called a culture and the historic fertility transition.

This paper presents a novel argument for the historic fertility [00:07:00] transition, emphasizing the role of cultural forces alongside economic factors. The authors highlight a significant and abrupt decline in fertility rates among British households in 1877, which was observed not only in Britain, but also among culturally British populations living in Canada, the United States, and South Africa.

The authors propose that the famous Braggadoll Bestent Trial of 1877 served as a possible catalyst for this widespread change in fertility behavior. Now this would be very interesting if it was true, okay? If it was true that only British People like people in Britain and British immigrants experienced a sudden and sharp fertility decline all at around the same year, starting at around the same year, due to some massive cultural change.

I would be like, Oh, that's really interesting. I mean, yes, we know that culture affects fertility, but this would be a more acute effect than we had seen historically. So, [00:08:00] do you happen to know what , the Braggadon Dissent Trial of 1877 was about? No, I've never heard of it. It was a book about Called The Fruits of Philosophy That Discussed Contraceptives.

And the court trial was about trying to ban it. After the trial, book sales rose from around a thousand copies to a hundred and twenty five thousand copies. So this was a Streisand effect thing? It was a Streisand effect thing, but It also completely undermines the claim here. This was not a book that popularized contraceptives.

It was a book that taught a population that didn't know how to use contraceptives broadly to how to use contraceptives broadly for the first time. Of course, it was going to have an effect on fertility rates. This is not. particularly interesting as a data point. Contraceptives have the capacity to lower fertility rates in a population that has never been exposed to them.

Duh. But what [00:09:00] is interesting here and the reason this is pocket sand

 Pocket sand.

is that when you ban contraceptives in populations that already have them, that actually decreases fertility rates. As we saw with the Romania situation where you get a sharp increase for a couple of years and then a sharp decrease, right?

And the reason is, is because then having lots of kids becomes associated with low wealth and low status, and nobody wants to do it. So the people with self control stop having kids. It's a really bad way to increase fertility rate. But also just more broadly, I remember at the perinatalist conference, somebody was like, Well, what do you think about banning condoms?

And I was like, do, like, do I really want More people accidentally having kids. Like, is that the, is that what I'm trying to do? Yeah, that's the solution to our problems. More unwanted children. Yeah, more unwanted children. That will solve the problem. I was like, that's the, that's the comical, no, no, no, not just for the children's sake, but from the genetic effects of something like that.

[00:10:00] That's just not healthy. Right. So no, I had no but again, pocket sand there. This one, this one may not be pocket sand in France, fertility fell 100 years before industrialization. While in England, the first country to industrialize, fertility did not decline for a century after industrialization.

Wasn't that in France though, more A product of famine and hardship. Yeah, there was famine and hardship during that period. There have been various studies that analyze this, the mainstream perception. Is that it was probably due to decline in religiosity. This is the interview when I've heard most.

But remember, what I said, all of Lyman's arguments, whenever you read him, he's like one of those far lefties who literally can only argue for far lefty positions and you just know, like, okay, they're going to twist everything. And you get really interested when they're arguing something against their Or like Leather Apron Club, like if Leather Apron Club ever argued a left leaning position, I'd be like, this [00:11:00] is something I need to take ultra seriously because he would never do that.

But you know, if, if, if Limestone is arguing Christianity good or socialism good, you know, pretty much, I don't know, it's, it's, it's not that much you can take from it, but I will note that this does appear to be true. So, the decline in marital fertility in France began around 1800, about 70 years before other European countries, before other European countries.

Some sources indicate the decline may have started even earlier in the 1760s. By 1840, France's Marital fertility rate had fallen to two thirds of its 1800 level. Oh yeah, you had the French Revolution, tons of secularization. That, that, okay. Yeah, and remember the hope problem. If you don't have home, you don't have kids.

Yeah, a lot of instability, a huge amount of change, and probably people just didn't know what to expect from their government and infrastructure and everything [00:12:00] going forward. But let's go over the various theories that have been put forward for this. Okay. I will note that in the 1800s, the average English woman was still having six children during this decline in France's fertility rate.

And so here are the various things here. Secularization a decline in the influence of the Catholic Church may have led to a wider use of contraceptive and changing attitudes about family size. Cultural changes. The French Revolution may have played a major role in the change of social norms around family size.

Economic pressures. Some people argue that pre industrial France Had limited economic opportunities, creating pressure to limit family size. Think about the economic famines and pressure that would have been created by the French revolution. Obviously, even if you're in a status where income translates to kids, you're going to have lower number of kids there.

Right. And land inheritance laws, post revolution laws requiring equal division of property among heirs may have incentivized smaller families. That is definitely going to incentivize smaller families. So people who do not know this, this [00:13:00] law was generally something historically that you would impose on a community that you had conquered.

So famously the English imposed this change in inheritance laws on the Irish after conquering them. Because why will it quickly breaks up any large family was a lot of power if they have to split their land every generation among all of their descendants instead of, yeah, it distributes rather than consolidates their power, increasingly consolidates.

Yeah. So, they ended up. Yeah, not a, not a great situation. So they ended up incentivizing lower fertility rates, but let's talk about more about France's secularization because this is worth talking about. And I found pretty interesting. France experienced a process of secularization and de Christianization beginning in the 18th century, well before the French revolution of 1789.

This decline in religious influence occurred much earlier than in England. Secular wills increased from 10 percent in 1710 to 80 percent by 1780. So before the turn of the [00:14:00] 1800s, okay, long before the turn of the 1800s, 80 percent of wills were secular. There were only 10 percent less than a century before.

There was a significant decrease in the number of clergymen by capita by the end of the 18th century. Yeah, that makes sense. A rose is an attempt to reform Catholicism by bringing some Calvinistic doctrines, such as the depravity of man, predestination, irresistible grace, and limited atonement entered.

And this was a movement called the Janus enists, Janus enists? But Janus enists were not Protestant. They were a reforming group of Catholics who some, Blame for this lower fertility rate because they made the, but this doesn't really make sense because Calvinist groups in this time period had really high fertility rates.

So I think this might be more just any sort of moderating secularizing political forces going to have these problems. And we also need to ask why, you know, we always mentioned that Catholics are uniquely susceptible to fertility collapse. Why the [00:15:00] first of the European fertility collapse that happened in a Catholic country.

And my guess is there's probably a big, a big cross correlating reason there. But do you have any thoughts before we move forwards? If I had to guess, I would say it was mostly due to a period of cultural and religious and political turmoil where to your point, more simply, there's just not really a lot of hope or certainty around the future, and I think when people don't have hope or certainty, they stop having kids, especially when they don't have, you know, amazing, abundant resources and or.

I guess a lot of social support. I don't think social support was that strong at this time either. Yeah, the, the church offered some, but you know, it was limited compared to modern social support. Yeah. All right. So, now we are going to talk about Africa. So he has here today, fertility in Africa is a lower than it was for Europe or Asian countries when they had similar income levels [00:16:00] because modern Africa, though poor is nonetheless highly exposed.

To globalize cultural norms at the individual level. When African women get richer, they actually tend to have more children.. this came from an article called how developmental programs impact fertility rates in Africa. And a quote from it is, however, another strand of the literature suggests , that fertility can increase with greater wealth. If the household desires more children than it can now afford.

And it mentions here, Lindo 2010, Black et al 2013, Loverman and Mumford 2013. Previous work has also shown that women may have more children to ensure economic security in old age from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. And here it lists. Five papers that I'm sure you don't care about.

The last channel is particularly important in a context like sub Saharan Africa for three main reasons. First pension systems are either weak or non existent. Second, men typically marry women who are [00:17:00] significantly younger, meaning that most women anticipate ending up as widows. Customary laws and norms often exclude women from property ownership and inheritance.

So this, this almost reminds me of the way that people. handle retirement programs with money, like you will, if you have more income, when you're young, you will save more money. Typically for your retirement, you'll put more into a 401k. You'll set stuff aside in Roth IRAs in the United States. So you will have, you'll be saving more for your retirement.

And perhaps in Africa, the equivalent of that in, in some areas is Well, if I have more income now, that means I can do more to prepare for my old age, which is have more children because then I have a more diversified portfolio of caregivers. Why do you think everyone should be viewing children this way right now?

Really? From a caregiver perspective? I don't know if I like that. From an income perspective, I will explain. Okay. [00:18:00] Do you think that you or I are going to get Social Security? No. Okay. Do you think that there's going to be a robust Medicare system in the United States when you and I are older? No, but I wouldn't want my children to pay for it.

Hold on, we're gonna talk about a few other things here. I'm just pointing out to people, okay? If you think anything other than your kids, they can say, well, I could save money, right? I could save money and that could support me in my old age. Here's the problem with saving money. In this global economy as it exists right now.

Fertility decline has the effect that I expected to have an AI is not a literal deus ex machina getting us out of this situation. We could enter a state of persistent economic decline instead of the average aggregate economic growth, our ancestors faced. And that is what made compound interest is what made.

Saving money, a smart thing to do on average. Okay. A growing global economy is what made saving money [00:19:00] a good idea. If we don't have that saving money is next to setting it on fire worse. It would be, you know, like saving money in Argentina or something. Worse, you have the problem of the United States becoming more and more.

Argentina like we talked about this in another episode in terms of like how costly it is to build infrastructure, how much the bureaucracy costs, how much cronyism there is on the democratic side of the aisle. I mean, there's cronyism on the Republican side too. Thank you very much. No, not at all in the establishment.

No, no, not in regards to the way it works. In Argentina, there's like mild cronyism, but there is not peronism type cronyism, which is what leads to like hyperinflation and stuff like that. It's a completely different scenario. There, there's a difference between you know, like low level nepotism and stuff like that, and literally paying for your votes through massive, massive, massive bureaucratic programs.

But. There is the, the secondary [00:20:00] issue that we have here, okay which is wage inflation. So for people who don't know what wage inflation means, it means that, now this is great for our kids. Okay. It means that if you have a world where the number of workers is dropping really, really quickly, the amount you have to pay every individual worker goes up dramatically.

And we've actually seen this. If you look at the recent inflation that we've experienced at the country, it's really been concentrated in wage inflation especially with lower end, lower skilled workers, wages going up some specialty skilled worker wages going up. And that means that your kids are a really safe way to make money, so long as AI just doesn't strictly replace them.

So you need them to be at some base level of competence. But other than that it is not as smart to think that you are gonna be able to afford the types of services or anything comparable to your existing life in your old [00:21:00] age. But do you think it's, it's right. To put that on children. If it motivates more kids, I don't think kids should support a useless older person who's not providing them any services.

Yeah. But I guess, yeah, if we go back to like older people being housekeepers, childcare providers, yeah, then it, then it makes sense if you're literally exchanging housing and food with. full time childcare and probably elite education, then I guess I, yeah, I could see that for sure. Okay. You can see it now for sure.

Maybe. Yeah. Hey, I don't want our kids to get a bad deal, even when that involves me. I appreciate your diligence and, and, and dedication to fairness. One thing that I think is going to become quite the trend, and this is something we should probably do another episode on people's retirement plans being a bullet.

I've noticed this a lot for people in our group. [00:22:00] Oh, just euthanasia. Yeah. Yeah where Wait, more people are saying this? That's great. Oh yeah, it's pretty common online these days. It might actually be interesting to do a survey on this. Oh, like people are posting, like, pictures of a gun and being like, Look, it's my retirement.

No, they just are like, Oh, I don't really save for retirement because I plan to end my life. Yeah, I mean, everyone says that and then they chicken out, except for our family, apparently. Except for our family, everyone else pusses out. We follow through. It's terrible, but true. It's, it's, it's realistically the only thing that a lot, that a lot of people are going to have.

available to them, especially the ones that didn't have kids. Yeah. But also for families in many respects, like you can see how it plays out when family members who can't take care of themselves really ruin the lives of what you would call the sandwich generation. And our government also in the United States, in many states, at least does not.

Even support [00:23:00] them, for example and Pennsylvania one of the constituents in our district who's giving me advice on policy, who is an accountant has pointed out that if you are caring for a dependent family member, who is an older adult. There, you can't count them on your state tax return as a dependent, meaning that you're not, you're, yeah, what?

Yeah. So yeah, a lot of, there are a lot of people who are caring for parents and older family members and they're not getting support from the state. They're not getting any help. It's, it's bad. So yeah. Well, you could draft something to reverse that. That would be Oh, it's on my list, but you know, my odds of getting elected are 7 percent per my calculation, just given the makeup of our district, despite all my efforts.

So we'll see. Oh, we'll see. We'll see. So, now how does Limestone argue? So something to note here is that African fertility rates are falling way slower. Everyone thinks they're following way slower [00:24:00] than they should be. Okay. Based on their income level. Like they are not falling at the same rate as other countries did when they hit their same income level.

But in some areas they're falling faster than people expect. Blah, blah, blah. Now Lyman stone made the claim. This is not true. And then he put up a bunch of graphs. However, it's a bit of a pocket sand situation. Again, as I mentioned, he said, this is not true. And then all of the graphs he puts up are comparing.

Child mortality rates with fertility rates instead of income level with fertility rates because it's a good proxy for income level. And I'm like, no, it's not. Like, basically he found one graph where things lined up and he didn't want to think about it anymore because it doesn't fit any of his agendas.

Yeah. And so he then just made this claim and hoped people wouldn't notice that he was pretending that child mortality rates were societal development indexes or income levels when they [00:25:00] aren't. But I will put two of these graphs on screen here because they are nonetheless interesting. Here you have one that just shows, you know, a broad alignment between child mortality rates and fertility rates.

And then here you see one that is titled, Africa's Fertility Rate is About Normal for its Developmental Stage. And then if you look at the axes, it's Total Fertility Rate and Child Mortality. Like if people wonder what I mean when I'm like, he's really intentionally manipulative with data. This is what I'm talking about.

 Or just in terms of the sometimes lazy or manipulative tendency to just throw in stats or a study or a graph and know that most people aren't going to look closely at it and just be like, Oh yeah, he backed it up and just read the headline. Limestone, as much as we respect his work, abuses that tactic egregiously.

 Pocket sand.

I [00:26:00] don't respect his work at all. I'm sorry. Somebody can do it. Like he, obviously he puts a diligence in and I appreciate that, but overall he is the net negative to the movement and we'd be better if he wasn't in it. Well, the internet loves a flame war. So yeah. Well, I mean, look, he hates us. He hates us.

So there's that because we have integrity and that doesn't help him. I mean, look, this is a problem, right? If you're gonna consistently put out claims that are just patently false, right? And you have a big platform and you're part of a movement. It makes everyone else in the movement look bad or uninformed or manipulative.

And so it reflects very poorly on work we are trying to do. Fortunately, Almost nobody reads his work except for pronatalists, right? The problem is, is just making sure pronatalists know to, it's not that his work has no utility. You'll get lots of interesting stats. He's put together some, [00:27:00] some graphs that have really changed my perspective on things.

But the, the one that changed my perspective most, he used to argue for the exact opposite direction. It changed my mind when I actually read it. This is a famous fertility rate. Correlation to cash handouts. When you account for the margin of error was the margin of error getting smaller, the lower the rate it said was.

And I don't, I just don't think he noticed this when he was putting together the graph, maybe because the graph he uses to argue that cash handouts do work when it's literally the single best argument I've ever seen that cash handouts don't work. But anyway and I'd be happy to have him, like he could, he could do a good job.

If he could, I don't know, work towards a position of personal integrity. I have to ask, why does he feel the need to do this all the time? And the only answer I can come to is his moral system is so far based within his. Theocratic mindset that a, [00:28:00] everything is about promoting his particular theocratic agenda which is about socialist redistribution and spreading his particular brand of theology's message.

And so, there is no moral qualms for him either in setting back the pronatalist movement by manipulating the way data is presented, you know, pocket sanding or you know, just causing people to focus on potential solutions to fertility collapse that like we should know won't work like cash handouts because they don't like go see our episodes on on this.

We talk about it all the time. It just doesn't seem to work. And everyone else agrees. It doesn't work. That was one of my favorite parts. We were sitting down with the Heritage Foundation and all the, the fertility experts, and they were like, okay, so I read in this one place that this one guy thinks this works, but like, everyone else says they don't work.

Like, they don't work, right? And we were like, yeah, they don't work, and everyone else at the table was like, yeah, it's not working. That's the livenstone thing. So anyway, again, another graph here. This graph is titled Africa's [00:29:00] fertility is normal for its mortality level. This one is titled honestly. I like that.

And here it is with the mortality of children under five. Unfortunately, I mean, it would be nice if he said the child mortality level, but you know, okay, it works here. But this I actually found pretty interesting, and I'm gonna put this on screen here. This isn't a graph, it's a heat map of Africa that looks at where fertility rates are unexpectedly low or unexpectedly high based on these child mortality metrics.

And the place where they are unexpectedly low is South Africa and places like Morocco and Northwestern Africa. And this makes a lot of sense to me. You know, these are regions that are right now undergoing a significant collapse. They were some of the more industrialized parts of Africa. And they were really industrialized during that period where I think people still had the, The fantasy of industrializing Africa in the same way other countries were industrialized, which, you know, most people have given up on at this [00:30:00] point.

Do you have thoughts on that? That's good. Yeah. Then you found something nice to say. That's good. That's good. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's tied to his thing. It still hasn't really shown this, this trend that he's claiming. Now we're going to look in the United States at TFR by income level breaking down groups by ethnicity.

Okay. Okay. So, there is some interesting stuff in this graph, generally in this graph. So I'll, I'll read what he says in the United States correlations between fertility and income differ , wildly by race among whites into a lesser extent Asians. It tends to rise was income except for the high fertility and very poor.

And by contrast, well, see black and Hispanic women have rather low birth rates while foreign born women exhibit little connection between income and fertility. So I mean, this is what he says. The graph says. Which is [00:31:00] something he does all the time. But I'll go over what the graph actually shows for anybody who's watching on a podcast.

Okay. Listening. Yeah. Listening. So, native born, non Hispanic whites the less money you have when you are below the it looks around 15 percent bottom income demographics, so household income decimal, if you're below the bottom 15% it goes way up sort of in direct correlation with the amount of poverty your family's in.

And this makes a lot of sense in the United States. And I just want to highlight, which I've said in other podcasts, how in the United States, especially if you are at or near the poverty line, basically A huge portion of your expenses as a parent are covered by state governments. Your child's daycare, medical care, food, medic, it's all covered.

Here's what's interesting. Yeah. Why does it go up as you get poorer? If that explained high [00:32:00] fertility rates among low income groups, what you would expect is basically everyone below the would just be high bottom 10 percent would just be high. It wouldn't be a direct and linear line going up.

Yeah, I don't necessarily have an answer for that. I think when you get closer. Like higher in income, you're going to have more variation between having those services and not having those services. Like you may be going in and out of it. Less wealth you have. You can almost think of it as like income security, but the income security is around these government incentive programs and these government payment programs.

This income security drives up your fertility rate. Now, what is interesting is Sort of a flat white fertility rate here until you get to 20%. If you're looking at between 20 percent and around 65 percent in terms of the, the household income percentile. Okay. [00:33:00] So I'm going to say this again, between 20 percent and 65 percent in the white population, you have a steadily increasing fertility rate.

Yeah. But to your point, basically the poorer you are in the United States, the more secure your income is for support in child care, food for your kid and medical care for your kid. But what I just said is a steadily increasing as you go from 20 percent to 65 percent of closer to poverty. You're saying, yeah, as you get poorer, but as you know, Increasing, i.

e. as you get wealthier, you have more kids. Oh, so as you get closer to not having support for. So basically what this seems to indicate, and the way I read this is that below the sort of 10 percent range these are individuals who are living off the state. And then, you know, below the 20 percent range, they are marginally living off the state in some capacity.

And then after that. The money is able to go to [00:34:00] kids, you know, like they basically break from the state and that's why they're at the very bottom of the fertility metric when they're at like the 20 percent low income level and they rise until they get to the 60th or the 65 percent level. Okay. So, do you want me to send this graph to you?

Yeah, I want to see it.

 Okay, this is so helpful. Okay, and so now you can see that after that, so basically for middle income white Americans, the more money you have, the more kids you're going to have. But then you hit something, which I'm going to call the replacement rate ceiling where as soon as it gets hits too, it bounces off it and starts going down again.

As you get more money than that. And here, I think that this is an urban monoculture thing. If you're above the 65 income percentile, you're likely in some way involved in an urban monoculture industry. And that's why you see the fertility rate going down again until you get to above 90 percent and 90 percent to a hundred percent.

Again, you have a linear increase. Yeah. That's still even when you get to 100 percent is [00:35:00] barely above two. So at no point does this really go, go above repopulation rate. And this is for the, the white households. It's interesting. These graphs have these sort of heart, almost a heartbeat, like fluctuations.

It makes me think they correspond with tax brackets in some way. I'm not really sure though. Yeah, they might. But anyway, so the next group, well, let's talk about blacks because that's an interesting group, non Hispanic blacks non Hispanic blacks. This is pretty strictly the less money you have, the more kids you have.

Yeah. It's wild. Populations respond to fertility rate. However, the correlation is strongest between around 10%. So people in the bottom 10 percent up to people at around 25 percent to 30%. And in that range, you just have a really quick increase. The poorer you are from 30 percent to 10%, the more kids you're going to have of your Black.

But there's two really interesting things about this. Once you get above 30%, [00:36:00] it continues to go down a bit, but it's mostly even. Like, if you are above 30 percent as a Black American, you're basically going to be near bottom Black fertility rates in the United States. But, and here's the really interesting part, It's below 10 percent in the black American population below 10%.

Remember when the white population fertility shot up for that, that demographic population, fertility shoots down in that demographic. No, I should note that while it's shooting down, it's still way above the white fertility rate. Yes. So low income black fertility rate is just like Way above low white fertility rate.

And what this shows with the black population, and this is something I've argued in other episodes, and it's just something for like black community members to take super seriously, is income is far more dysgenic for the black community in the United States than [00:37:00] any other American demographic. Yeah.

What is going on? Sorry. When I say it's way more discogenic, what I mean is you are specifically genetically selecting for whatever correlate is tied to low income within the black community, much more so than you are in other communities where you just don't have a very strong correlation. Other communities that don't have a strong correlation would be the, the, the white community, the correlation's a bit all over the place.

But probably not enough to have, like, a massive genetic effect. Other, it's, it's pretty all over the place. And foreign born women, pretty all over the place. The other group that has a very strong dysgenic selective pressure, but not as strong as the Black American community, is the native born Hispanic population.

Yeah, it's not as dramatic, but the, the Directionality is the same. Well, it basically like, like the black population well, so unlike the black population, it doesn't have that weird drop between 0% and [00:38:00] 10% percentiles. Yeah. But what it does have is if you go from 0% to around 30%, it's just like a constant drop.

And then after that it levels off. And it stays a bit higher than high income black fertility does. In fact, this is a really interesting thing. Once you get above the 30 percent income demographic, black fertility rate is pretty much the lowest fertility rate in the United States by a pretty dramatic margin.

Keep in mind you can sort of ignore the purple line here because the purple line is native born non hispanic other asian multi Which is like fine, but it doesn't really mean anything about any specific demographic that I can target or say anything about So if you ignore the purple line, blacks have a very low fertility rate when they get any amount of income Which is really fascinating Yeah, that is really interesting.

And I've seen this in our friend groups [00:39:00] actually. You know, cause we know a lot of wealthy black people. I don't know any wealthy black people with kids. One I can think of.

I can think of two friends, but yeah, not many, not many. And it's, it's, no. Okay. Cause I, yeah, I know the adoptee one and that's, I wasn't counting them, but I guess I should. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's tough. And it's definitely something I noticed like within our, our friend group. Yeah. That's fascinating.

Yeah. Well, gosh, now I feel more confused than anything. I don't know what to make of it. You feel more confused? Yeah. I thought I'd get some, some takeaways from these exceptions.

I mean, I think that the core thing is that social services should never be gated for just support. That's the way I feel about basically any data I've looked at. I am okay with social [00:40:00] services, but if you're offering a social service to anyone, you should be offering it to everyone. Yeah. Otherwise it leads to really negative economic and effects like this.

Okay. So, next point here among the Amish and ultra Orthodox Jews in the U S fertility is negatively correlated with income, poor income brackets have six to eight children while the richer ones have three to five. Overall, the higher fertility of these two groups compared to other Americans is overwhelmingly driven by cultural factors.

That's really interesting that among ultra Orthodox Jews and Amish, fertility is negatively correlated with income. But that, that makes sense to me because in those instances, I view more income as being correlated with more integration. With mainstream society and therefore the urban monoculture. So the less income you have, probably the more you are pure, purely within your [00:41:00] community and not making money from the outside world.

And that's the bigger theme of demographic collapse, that industrialization, leaving the house, integrating with a larger economy, working for larger businesses that are not owned for your family. All of those things drive fertility collapses. Then he does another little pocket sand here. I'm going to see if you can catch where the pocket sand is in this.

Among the Arab countries, which range from poor to oil rich, there is no national correlation between wealth and lower fertility. Which, I mean, first of all, I mean, the graph shows the exact opposite. Okay. The graph shows yeah, I'll send you the graph because this is one of those things where I just am astounded that he will do this all the time.

This graph shows this, and then I read the graph and I'm like, it literally shows the exact opposite of what you just said. It shows..

This is the graph that he's claiming that shows that [00:42:00] more income a Arab country has, that doesn't correlate with it having a lower fertility rate. It's, it's, it's literally an up and to the left graph. Hmm. What you could claim with this graph, maybe, is that the Gulf states aren't subject to this trend, but other MENA countries are. Maybe that's what he's trying to even sort of true among the Gulf States, look. Yeah. If we were to, if we were to draw like an average line, what it, what is that linear regression? God, it's been too long since I've taken a math class. But if we were to, yeah, do like a normalized line, it would be down into the, like a downward sloping line.

So. Yeah, pocket sand.

 Pocket sand.

All right, [00:43:00] fine. But also it wouldn't even matter to me if this was true. Because it's like, why isn't there this great fertility collapse once you're talking about the Gulf States? Because the Gulf States do not distribute income in any sort of meaningful, equal way. This is looking at GDP per capita, not median GDP per capita.

Gulf states are fricking wacky when it comes to how wealth is distributed within them. And then I'd want to, you know, make sure that we are Talking specifically about their native populations, fertility rate, which it can be very hard to break out in these countries, or is it naturally broken out in a lot of the statistics on the countries?

Because they have huge, huge, huge immigrant populations, which have much higher fertility rates than the native fertility rate. And then the native fertility rate within these countries has all sorts of other weird things going on with it because they often treat maintaining the native population, which is a vast minority population is some sort of like.

Spartan duty, right? To maintain the masterclass so the slaves don't revolt. [00:44:00] Like, no, I mean, you see this, right? Like, they see themselves as very different than the, the other people in their countries. And they do see it as a crisis that their populations are crashing and they are often crashing.

Oh, actually I can just look at this and immediately tell you that this is not looking at native populations. Cause I know the native population fertility rates for some of these countries like Emirati and Dubai, and they're way below too. So this is including immigrants, which basically means this is a pointless graph.

Okay, fantastic. That doesn't even show what he wants it to show. So what was the study that you found Simone? Right. I was reading the other day. An essay by Emil Kierkegaard looking at Norwegian cognitive inequality. There was research in 2024 published about the correlation between educational attainment and developing dementia, but it just happened to have other interesting longitudinal data.

There should be the caveat that this was looking longitudinally at men [00:45:00] specifically who were born in the fifties. So this is not. You know, we're not looking at people right now, but it did find that for lower groups in terms of educational attainment or IQ did have lower male fertility. And they, this also is seen in another study from Norway and other research in Sweden.

He writes male fertility for the mean 70 IQ group is markedly lower. This is the same as seen as in a prior study from Norway and Sweden. Based on overlapping data, so that's good. This does not mean Norway has eugenic fertility, because this data set only concerns men and only those who took the test.

Those who were not disqualified prior for some reason. And then he shares the Swedish and other Norwegian study information which show a marked male dip in fertility for those with [00:46:00] quite low IQ which does produce a slight eugenic fertility pattern for men in these Nordic regions. Most of the stuff that you've pointed to in this conversation has been.

Overall fertility, both men and women. And I do think based on the pressures that men and women are subject to, and also just looking at the history of whose genes get passed on, that it would make sense to me that most dysgenics have to do with women. And not with men because it's just harder as a man to gain access to a woman and get her pregnant if you are sick or less, less fit in some way or less intelligent, like significantly, right?

If you're uniquely dumb and you have uniquely terrible social skills and you're uniquely ugly and you're like, malformed or whatever, right? It's just going to be harder. To get a woman [00:47:00] ask all the black pill community, you know? So when I first told you this, you're like, no, that's just not true.

Everything refutes this. But one, this one 24, 20, 2024 study. Is not alone in finding this correlation. There is another Swedish study and another Norwegian study that finds it. And two, it just makes logical sense to me that Sweden and Norway keep in mind are very different culturally from other places, but are very culturally similar to each other.

Sure. Okay. So you're just saying, well, and he did point out that some of it was overlapping data, but I don't know, intuitively it would make sense to me. That on the dysgenic front, men are subject to more evolutionary pressures, even in a post industrial society. Then women are, and often when you look at the people who are having a lot of kids, it's much more common to see men who have had multiple female partners, [00:48:00] maybe not concurrently, but over a series of relationships or marriages, consider how many wives your dad has had.

And my dad has had three partners like long term monogamous and not all at the same time. And your dad saying not all at the same time, but still, and. There are lots of men who in turn go with no partners at all. And yes, I'm just, I just want to point out that I do think that wealth probably correlates with higher fertility in men on average, if we were to have really good data to look at that, because men with more money probably also have other.

Elements of fitness. This is bringing up an interesting relationship dynamic in which you're having sort of a functional type of harem, but you are basically staying with one woman until she's infertile. Then you're exchanging her for another. Well, then that's, that's, I mean, that's modern polygamy that exists [00:49:00] functionally and is extremely normalized in our culture and yet not really seen as polygamy.

It's almost, it's worse though, because like a normal polygamist, like Joseph Smith. And Brigham young, you can see pictures of their wives. A lot of them were super old and many of them were widows.

And he said, both of them claimed to take on, you know, many of their wives is just like, just to take care of them because they were widows.

And some of them have like also like 14 year old wives too. Let's not worry about that. But that, that seems to me in many ways, a little bit kinder. Then dumping a wife, like a post menopausal wife, and then marrying a much younger woman. So here's my question for you. When you're infertile, am I allowed to take on a younger wife?

I won't dump you, but we've got to keep the babies coming, right? I'm not into raising someone else's kids. Wait, hold on. What if they were from your embryos? Do I have to live with them? I'm, I'm just, I don't like being around people. That's the problem. [00:50:00] You know, no. Okay. I understand everyone has a price I think is, is the answer to this.

And in, in many sister wives situations, it actually works really well. And the families work out quite well. And I'm sure that there are people where I'd be like, Oh my gosh, yes, let's do this. But. You know, you got to find the right, I've got, I've got to find the right person. That's my duty here.

Okay. Well, I didn't want to marry anyone. Let's keep that in mind. You know, like let alone multiple people. By the way, I'm not seriously suggesting this. I'm just getting, getting a feel, you know, when I need to think about what, what's going to happen when you become infertile. Like, I don't, I don't know.

Like, I don't know. How I'm going to feel if I live in a house without young kids in it anymore, like that's a, I have no plans. It ages out of the house and you know, you're never going to spend those, those moments again, you [00:51:00] know, I haven't, I haven't, I love it when people are like, when is your wife like going to stop having kids?

You know, you must be almost done at this point. And I'm like, I haven't even normalized to the idea that I may, at some point in my life, be living in a house without toddlers in it. Well, no, I mean, our plan is, by the time I can no longer have babies and we no longer have toddlers, we have grandkids. So there will always be pitter pattering little feet.

Pressure them into I mean, they're already down with it. They're ready. Yeah. Anyway, I love you to death, Simone. I love you too, Malcolm Collins. Alright, have a good one. Bye.

In this episode, the hosts discuss a recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, diving into the details of the incident and the background of the assailant, Ryan Wesley Rouse. They explore Rouse's pro-Ukraine and anti-China sentiments, his troubled past, and his motivations for attempting the assassination. The conversation takes a deep dive into the ideological shifts in society that justify extreme actions, the flaws of bureaucracy, and the broader implications of such events on American politics. The episode also touches on humorous personal anecdotes, including a brief debate on the merits of austerity and living conditions for US presidents. .

Malcolm Collins: , [00:00:00] I wonder, I don't think I'm that much crazy. Like if I had less access to resources than I have or less access to public respect than I have, and I needed to get people to pay attention to certain topics, could I be seen as as crazy as this guy in a different timeline?

Simone Collins: You're probably seen as more crazy than this guy. He did not try to start a religion.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, it's true. Yeah. Yeah. I'm definitely more crazy than him.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be talking with you today. We just had another presidential assassination attempt in the United States.

I was wondering whether or not I should cover this and sort of my takeaway has been there just hasn't been a lot of good comprehensive coverage of this. And so whether it's It's the first debate or the first assassination attempt I have found in our content. It's usually like the most comprehensive coverage of the subjects that I'm able to find online and I take a bit of pride in that.

So even when I can't be pointlessly controversial it's worse putting [00:01:00] stuff like this together, but I will yet be pointlessly controversial because I'm going to argue, I kind of like this guy. Aw, that's nice. I don't think he's a bad guy. I think he's trying to assassinate a president, but I, a conservative, am like, yeah, I'm gonna change a few priors and what, you know, this is actually a pretty brave thing to do.

Simone Collins: Now That's, that's what I've heard what one free press writer said about him, roughly speaking, I'm paraphrasing here Was that he was crazy, but most people were just kind of like, yeah, I get it. Like good cause he's crazy, but he's fighting for a good cause. And that he reminded her of a character played by Brad Pitt.

She is thinking of the movie burn after reading.

Simone Collins: Brad Pitt played a character who was a personal fitness trainer trying to attack the CIA or something and was kind of clueless and basically he reminded her of that and she didn't think that he'd do anything crazy like this [00:02:00] but he did.

What you gonna do?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, and we've seen the rehabilitation of specific crazy people recently as well, like the Unabomber where this is, oh, now

Simone Collins: everyone loves the, you know, I

Malcolm Collins: disagree with his actions, but the Unabomber's manifesto. Now that's something we need to talk about. Why

Simone Collins: is this such a trendy thing now?

This is so crazy.

Malcolm Collins: No, he's considered, it's weird. He's considered like, I hear about the Univomers Manifesto, probably as much as I hear about Curtis Yardvin these days. And Nixon. Everyone's,

Simone Collins: everyone's in love with Nixon now too. What's up with that?

Malcolm Collins: I was always in love with Nixon. He was a genius of his time.

Did Colbert's favorite president?

Simone Collins: No way.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he was. Nixon was a genuinely good president, just a little crazy. Actually probably one of the best presidents in American history. Normalizing relations with China for the future of like the next 50 years with nothing but genius. And that is not something that naturally would have happened.

Oh yes, am I, am I outing myself as a Kissinger fan as [00:03:00] well?

Speaker: What you need is a second in command who understands the intricacies of organized villainy. .

Speaker 2: Perfect! You're hired, uh, number

Speaker: Number Killinger. Dr. Henry Killinger. And this is my magic murder bag. No, you are the magic man. Wow! I suggest you put that into a high yield mutual fund. Now if you'll excuse me, I have much work to do.

Simone Collins: Well, let's get back to, let's get back to the assassination. Yeah. Sunday,

Malcolm Collins: September 15th, 2024. Shortly before 2 p. m. the incidents occurred at Trump's golf course in West Palm beach, Florida.

Trump was out golfing at the time he was playing Whole five. Now I am going to put on screen a picture of where Trump was on the golf course in where the guy was aiming at him on the golf course. During the incident, Ryan Wesley, Ruth was hiding in the bushes in this area. I am, I am showing on the map here.

Agents [00:04:00] saw his rifle peeking out of the bushes. It was an AK 47 variant. And they fired four to five rounds at the suspect. At which point well, the suspect, Ryan, fired four to five rounds at Ryan, at which point Ryan began to run. He ran to a car he had, and I will show you where it is on the map here right next to where he was hiding.

And he was actually able to escape. And we're going to talk about like, people aren't talking about what a secret service failure this was. But it was when he ran, he dropped a GoPro, the rifle and, his weapons scope. So, the, the he got really far before they caught him.

Simone Collins: Nice.

Malcolm Collins: Wow. I feel you're like, nice, like,

Simone Collins: I mean, this guy clearly has. A very American can do spirit.

Malcolm Collins: So he shot at Trump in Mar a Lago and you've been to Miami, right? He made it Palm beach. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He made it above like [00:05:00] Fort Lauderdale before they caught him.

Simone Collins: I mean, honestly, that's just a Christmas miracle.

Making it through Palm beach traffic, Palm beach is a nightmare. Remember when we,

Malcolm Collins: when we, yeah, when

Simone Collins: we were driving. Because we we had a rental car, right? When we went to Mar a Lago, we had a rental car. Yes, we did. And it took us like an hour to get like two miles or something. It was ridiculous.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely.

I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of amazed. I'm also kind of amazed that the, the secret service didn't get him. So the secret service was able to All they did

Simone Collins: was walk. Get his, like, stalled car. Yeah, right?

Malcolm Collins: But no, no, but he had made it out of the Miami traffic zone. Gee whiz! What were they doing? They they were only able to catch him easily because of a a picture of his license plate that someone took, right?

Captured by a civilian who saw him running away, which also you've got to keep in mind how like weird this is, right? [00:06:00] So this was at the, it's not like Trump was giving a speech. Speech or something? No, he was just golfing at the golf course. To capture his license plate, you would've had to be outside of the golf course.

So this is a civilian who heard gunshots in the golf course, was outside of the golf course, and at the presence of mind, take pictures of the plates of this guy.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: that's, that's, that's kind of wild.

Simone Collins: There's a lot of Karens out there, see a car driving slightly weird. And you gotta take a picture of that license plate, send it to the authorities, even though the authorities never do anything per our other con.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So what has this guy been charged with? He's been charged with possession of a firearm as a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number not potentially trying to shoot the president, which is, that's sweet. Okay, pretty interesting. Well, I mean,

Simone Collins: all we have is this cartoonish scene where people see a, a, a, the end of a rifle poking out of a bush and then a guy running away.

I guess that's not enough. What I want to know is

Malcolm Collins: how did the, how, how, [00:07:00] how, after the last attempt. Did the secret service take this guy down? They fired five shots at him. He was 300. It was through

Simone Collins: bushes, Malcolm. I'm sure. Very dense bushes. The bushes are there.

Malcolm Collins: You can see them on video. I don't put the picture on the screen here of where this guy was.

The fact that the secret service couldn't shoot him like the D I B S of the secret service. Cause now it's like man by a woman. And you know that a woman was not the most qualified person. She hasn't resigned. I figured she

Simone Collins: would have resigned

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I'll see if she's resigned in post.

She did in fact resign, not that it really matters because there hasn't been enough time to put a real person in charge of this and fire, all the terrible DEI hires that were made under her command.

Malcolm Collins: No, they haven't really increased his details significantly since the last assassination attempt.

And keep in mind before that assassination attempted, Democrats were trying to even further roll back his, his Secret Service details. Some senators were to almost [00:08:00] nothing, to basically attempt to get him assassinated. And I think that that's basically the zone we're in now where they are trying to get this guy assassinated.

But what, so sorry, what are you gonna say?

Simone Collins: How do you suppose. This gentleman came to understand that Trump would be golfing at that time. Just he watched motorcades or something. Oh, whoops.

Malcolm Collins: Trump apparently has a pretty routine golf habit. So,

Simone Collins: he's probably autistic, isn't he? He's tone deaf enough and routine enough and with his, his, his dietary habits and his golf and his son, who is wildly You

Malcolm Collins: know, he eats fast food at McDonald's to not be poisoned.

And I think a lot of people Right, but also,

Simone Collins: doesn't he like the, you know, consistency? A

Malcolm Collins: lot of people heard that and they're like, that's a crazy thing to do. When you now realize how little the Secret Service actually has his back. I'm like, that's not crazy at all. Like, that's probably the only reason he's alive.[00:09:00]

Yeah. But

Simone Collins: also there's just a lot of things about him that seem autistic to me. Like him thinking the white house is a shithole because kind of, because it's not his personal space, you know, when it's old, what I'm going to

Malcolm Collins: do is I'm going to turn the full white house into a museum and I will live in a trailer behind the white house.

You would,

Simone Collins: you totally would.

Malcolm Collins: No, I believe that the president needs to show a sign of austerity to the American people and a sign of generosity by giving his house to them. Yeah. And I think that that would be a very positive signal and would keep me focused on the task at hand instead of indulging in this big mansion, which I do not think is befitting of the leader of the free world.

I, I think that the leader of the free world should be living with a degree degree of elective

Simone Collins: counter argument when dealing with Foreign national leaders, it is important that we present a representative of our nation who comes across as [00:10:00] formidable and someone who lives and no, I'm not knocking on anyone who lives in a trailer right now, but I just would.

argue that the trappings of living in a trailer are not as formidable as the trappings of someone living in the White House.

Malcolm Collins: I disagree really strongly on this point. I think that even in other countries, they understand that the discipline of austerity and they respect it. And I think we saw this with the Yeah, but that means you sleep on the floor in a, in the bowling

Simone Collins: alley.

I mean, that's, who was that? Was it Frederick the, it was a Frederick of Prussia, right? Who, sorry about Indy. It was who, who like, Was very austere. He was, he was a Prussian King. Wasn't here. Was it, was he

Malcolm Collins: Russian? I don't remember. You know what I'm

Simone Collins: talking about? Just incredibly like gruel every day. Amazing military leader.

And was just insanely austere, but definitely was a king who did that.

Speaker 3: In other words, Frederick William projected an air of hyper [00:11:00] masculinity, Calvinist piety, and frugal financial habits. And naturally, he wanted his eldest surviving son Frederick, nicknamed Fritz, to grow up to be just like him. A hyper virile religious soldier king, to use the great instrument of Prussian military power that he'd created.

Now, the first six years of Fritz's life, he'd lived with his mother. And under her care, young Fritz developed what his father considered worrying habits. Fritz loved music and books. He grew incredibly close to his older sister Wilhelmina, enjoyed poetry, philosophy, opera, and learned to play the flute.

Worse than that, it was the transverse flute, recently invented in France. Oh, Frederick William hated France and was known to fly into a rage if the country was even mentioned. The French, he said, were decadent and effeminate. So imagine his consternation when Fritz, who was tutored in French and German simultaneously, took to French as his first language and struggled with his native German.

Simone Collins: But I think part of that was just [00:12:00] his badassery and his austerity, but he didn't do stunts and I think that the, a trailer stunt would in itself seem indulgent, No, because you're doing it

Malcolm Collins: with utility, like you're arguing that there's no utility gain from this.

If you were able to turn the full White House into an accessible museum at all times of day that is a great gift to the American people. You're acting like it's being done with no benefit or just for performative austerity, when it's not. This is something the American people You should have always had access to and don't have access to and you could choose the location of it to be safer than the existing White House.

Oh, you're training on security details. That the White House is in such an exposed location increases the cost of the security around it dramatically.

Simone Collins: Or you could do some kind of. Elon Musk homeless billionaire thing where you just crash on the couch of a [00:13:00] foreign national leader every week. You know, every night you're like, Hey, sleep on your couch.

And then, you know, it develops international relations. You know, you build some rapport with these people, right?

Malcolm Collins: Kind of

Simone Collins: forces it state congressman's houses, you know, really building alliances. Actually that, that would be cool is if you couch surfed with your domestic and international. Ladies on love

Malcolm Collins: hosting you

Simone Collins: that see that I'm for I'm for couch surfing.

I'm not for the trailer, but I am for the couch surfing.

Malcolm Collins: I believe in living in solidarity. Well, then couch surf.

Simone Collins: There's loads of homeless Americans who don't even have a trailer.

We're going to

Malcolm Collins: continue here with what happened to him after this, okay? Fine. How did

Simone Collins: we get

Malcolm Collins: here? Good God. So in his first appearance in a West Palm Beach federal courtroom, because he survived. Wow, he's already in court. Geez, it's been a day. He was wearing a navy blue prison jumpsuit and shackles. He appeared subdued, [00:14:00] respectful, and in good spirits.

He could be seen laughing at times with his public defender. Public defender. That's great. Okay. Yeah. And we're going to talk about why he has a public defender. Cause that's actually pretty interesting as well. He spent all his money on guns. He has past felony charges. Yeah. He has a felony charge for possessing a weapon of mass destruction.

I thought just an

Simone Collins: automatic rifle, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was just an automatic rifle. So I'll recount the story 2002. In Greensboro News and Record recounts an incident in which Rouse was pulled over during a traffic stop on Sunday night. He, quote, put his hand on a firearm, end quote, and drove to his roofing business where he barricaded himself inside for three hours.

The weapons of mass destruction charge pertain to a fully automatic machine gun, it reported. It is a fully automatic weapon. He was charged with several misdemeanors and felonies between 2001 and 2010, including a hit and run offense, carrying a concealed weapon, and possessing stolen goods. Separately, North Carolina [00:15:00] judicial records list Rouse as the defendant in over half a dozen court cases between 1991 and 2016, including tax delinquencies and bad checks.

So this is just a guy who wasn't making a lot of money. He made mistakes, but I mean, hit and run I, you know, this is one of these things where like, maybe, but maybe not, you know, I, I, I don't know. He just seems like a typical guy. This isn't like a driving while intoxicated or something. Right. Which by the way, who has one of those Kamala Harris's VP where you could have actually killed someone for like nothing.

This is like a bunch of like random drug charges and somebody who's poor struggling to get by type charges. Okay. So, Mr. Rouse is particularly well known for being really, and his main cause, and the thing that drove him to this, is he is incredibly pro Ukraine.

Mm hmm.

And he is also pro Palestine, which you know, Ick. Oh, I [00:16:00] didn't

know.

He's pro Palestine, he's pro Taiwan, and he has a bunch of anti Chinese messages on his profile. He actually accuses China of biological warfare for the COVID 19 virus, which he saw as an attack. And so this guy he went to Ukraine to try to help them in the war.

And I'll read some quotes about this. So Mr. Roscoe had no military experience, told the New York Times in 2023 that he had traveled to Ukraine immediately after Russia's invasion in 2022 to find military recruits among Afghan soldiers who had fled the Taliban. He seems to be involved in recruitment efforts as recently as this summer, writing on his Facebook in July.

Quote, soldiers, please do not call me. We are still trying to get Ukraine to accept Afghan soldiers and hope to have some answers in the coming months, dot, dot, dot, please have patience in quote. And he was never, what ended up being the primary stumbling block from him. Is he [00:17:00] had this plan to take people from struggling nations, like Afghanistan, where like, you know, you have corrupt governments and it's really bad to live there and get them visas to live in Ukraine, which could be a marginally better country in exchange for them fighting War and pay around that which honestly, like, if you believe in the Ukrainian cause, which I do, right.

That's not stupid.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I thought what I had thought he was doing, which I thought would be a little bit smarter is to create a band of mercenary. Americans who just want to go fight, who bring their own guns. That's why I thought he had a, an automatic firearm on, on almost like war tourism basis because I, I

Malcolm Collins: mean, it's a good, it's a better plan than the plan you just outlined.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That didn't, that is a more, yeah. Like an actual like policy based. To take [00:18:00] a

Malcolm Collins: country that is worse off than Ukraine today Yeah, where a lot of people have military experience Yeah, move them to Ukraine and keep in mind. This was not his first plan His first plan was to join the Ukrainian military himself Yeah.

They wouldn't allow him when he arrived in Kiev because he was one, old, and two, didn't have military experience. And so then he tried the next best thing. So if you want to understand like why I respect this individual in a way he's literally trying a bunch of logical things to achieve an objective he sees as morally right.

Simone Collins: Well and he's putting his money where his mouth is. Well, he's putting his life where his mouth is. He's really, When he sees a problem, he personally appears to do everything that he can to solve it, despite being a man of clearly limited means.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and despite everyone working against him, he went to Ukraine, they told him no.

He's like, what? Okay, you need people with military experience? I'll find them for you in other countries and I'll bring them here. And then Now that doesn't make

Simone Collins: it okay to attempt to shoot [00:19:00] a former president.

Malcolm Collins: Well, consider it from his perspective, okay? I used to be, you know, up until now I've been fairly pro Ukraine.

I say this is the cheapest war America has ever caught. I'm not pro Ukraine because I give about Ukrainians. Okay. Like Ukrainians fine, like, okay. But I don't think it's America's job to interfere with foreign countries and stuff like that. But Russia has been a persistent enemy to the United States for about a century now.

And they have not signaled any willingness to abate that persistent threat status. And what did our parents go to Vietnam for? What did they go to Korea for? But to attempt to defang Russia on the international stage. Ukraine costs less for us and we're not even sendin The reason why my stance was, I was actually convi on this.

He's [00:20:00] basically t we've bled Russia enough rates, they will never be again. Can we just end the Okay. Can we just in the killing now? And that's what I'm like, you know what? You're right. The incremental loss of life, like if this war goes on for another five years, realistically, where is it going to end in five years?

Just a lot more

Simone Collins: people will be dead. Yeah. Just a

Malcolm Collins: lot more people will be dead and maybe one side will have 20 percent more land than they have today. I do not think that's a good equation. Well, and also it's

Simone Collins: unclear which side. Two. So yeah,

Malcolm Collins: just in the, in the killing. Okay. But he doesn't see that way.

He believed I am, I, I can see the logic behind this. If we allow a country to unjustly invade another country, right. And take their land, can they just keep going right? Like if, if, if their fear is quote unquote NATO, well, now they have [00:21:00] justification to attack all sorts of other countries, right?

Transistria, definitely. You know, there's, there's, there's a lot of Transistria,

Simone Collins: I'm sorry,

Malcolm Collins: name of it, right? That's the region next to Ukraine that they would move to next. They already have a Russian public government operational. I see. They actually leaked plans accidentally that they did plan to invade it after Ukraine.

So yeah, I mean, we're just dealing with one country after another. If. If Russia feels like they won this war, the problem is is they've depleted their military capacity in terms of humans, and they're not producing more Russian women aren't having kids. They have an incredibly low fertility rate.

They can't replace the soldiers that they've lost. They've lost a generation. Okay, there's not gonna be another war with Russia. They don't have the tech to fight anyone else. They are dealing with Children's level technology at this point. Okay, it's a bunch of soviet nonsense that they're slightly [00:22:00] upgrading.

Their fleet is basically non operational. They can't operate. I mean, Ukrainians can basically just put explosives on an A. I operated jet ski and take out anything now. Okay. Like, the, the nature of war has changed. All of their stockpiles are useless. They don't matter anymore. Do we need to keep this going?

But I understand his perspective. If you're approaching this with his perspective assassinating Trump is probably the single number one thing you could do to move the needle because Trump is going to pull the piece. He's gonna push it for an end of the killing.

Simone Collins: Right, so this guy sees Trump say things like, If I'm elected, I'm just going to make a few calls.

And even before I'm in office, I'm going to end this war. And he thinks, Oh, great. He's going to get some kind of major concession of land. That's not cool. Ukraine all the way. And I have to end this guy. And he did, by the way, if I understand correctly, claim to have voted for Trump. At one point, but then come to regret it.

[00:23:00] Is that correct? Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, this guy and people use this to say that he's like pro Trump. He voted for Trump two election cycles ago. In 2016. Okay,

Simone Collins: so he did not vote for Trump in 2020.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, he has, he has, he has an absolutely died in the world. Democrat. What we call Democrat these days, i. e. pro urban monoculture, individual

Simone Collins: Palestine.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: He's pro Ukraine. He's not like based where he has like conflicting opinions. He's just in line with the urban monoculture on every single step.

Simone Collins: Well, and the blue hair, the blue hair is, is the rallying cry stylistically of far left, pro Ukraine. Membership, I

Malcolm Collins: didn't see the blue hair in recent pictures.

Did you see this? And I was looking and I tried to look for it.

Simone Collins: Are you serious? The picture of him wearing

Malcolm Collins: his blue hair, but I don't think it's called a flack

Simone Collins: jacket and a little bandana and half of half of his hair is white and then. Roughly 25 to 28 percent of it is blue.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, fans of our show [00:24:00] today and I hope to become more famous as time goes on, you'll get to say, you started following me before my hair turned white.

We got a haircut and I noticed just how much of my hair I've been getting, you know, white hairs for a while now. Oh no. But this, this

Simone Collins: latest backyard cheer, definitely. It was like

Malcolm Collins: getting close to like 20%. I know you can't see it in my actual hair because the rest of my hair is so, Well, colored but people in your locks are so luscious

Simone Collins: and thick.

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: White hair at a fairly young age. We never have like recession or the amount of hair we have doesn't go down, but we get pure white hair. Oh, you like it though. You've seen like my dad, he's got like a big full head of white hair.

Simone Collins: I just know even, even fictional characters with white hair. It just gets, gets me.

I'm very excited for this. I'm so jealous because my hair will never be white. It will be. Brown forever and then ever so slightly gray. I don't, I don't

Malcolm Collins: think I have more than eight years before I go full white.

Simone Collins: I know, I'm so excited.

Malcolm Collins: So I'll be looking young and just have jet white [00:25:00] hair, which I'm excited about.

This is why you're

Simone Collins: not allowed to get assassinated. Where will I get? White haired Malcolm if you somehow get assassinated don't do it. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: just so when questioned by the judge He said he had quote unquote zero funds in his bank account Yeah, living off of a monthly income of 3, 000 his only assets He told the court were two trucks in Hawaii that were worth about a thousand dollars each So the 3, 000 nobody has any idea where it's come from yet.

So I'm just gonna make a note of that his recent address is listed in Hawaii, but he spent most of his time in North Carolina. According to property records, Bruce owned a camp box, Honolulu, a shed building company. It also built tiny homes according to a LinkedIn profile. And he studied at the Carol North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which he graduated in 1998.

He sorry, I'll

Simone Collins: just, by the way, I'm sending you on WhatsApp, the picture of him. With partially [00:26:00] blue hair, just so you know I'm not crazy, because he totally

Malcolm Collins: And, by the way, he referenced, you're talking about him in relation to other assassinations. Who were killed.

In reference to the last assassination attempt um, he uh,

Uh, asked Kamala and, uh, Biden to go and, uh, go to the, the, the uh, people who were killed families, funerals, and to see if there was anything they could do for them because he didn't think that Trump would do anything for them. And so like, clearly he saw that, no, I don't know if he would have done that had that not happened with the other assassination attempt, but I think he saw it and he was like, I don't want to go out doing something like that.

Okay. And, and from what we know now, the other assassin was a clout chaser, and that was the primary motivator. . When he went, when, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, here's a quote from [00:27:00] him. I'm coming to Ukraine from Hawaii to fight for your kids and families and democracy. I will come and die for you, end quote.

So he, and he shared a photo of himself in Kiev, Ukraine's capital. You know, it's quite hard for men of fighting age to leave Ukraine. So like going into this, he is fully committed. And he says then later, quote, my initial goal was to fight, but I'm 56. So initially they were like, I have no military experience.

So they were like, you're not an ideal candidate. So they said, you're not right this minute. So plan B was to come here to Kiev and promote getting more people here. End quote, quote, this is. About good versus evil in quote. And so he urged people, even those who didn't have military skills to take up arms Ukraine.

He offered to help connect them with military units. He was interviewed by several news organizations, including the New York Times and Sanford in 2023. He told Sanford that he had not been able to convince. Isn't that

Simone Collins: pronounced semaphore

Malcolm Collins: semaphore? I don't know. Quote, quote, to issue one single visa in quote for soldiers.

It is not clear whether he actually [00:28:00] ever had contact with the ministry. Now the ministry said he has no contact with the unit, but they actually go more into detail in this in just a second. CBS news, foreign correspondent, Holly Williams immediately recognized Ross name when she woke up in London on Monday to the news of his arrest.

She'd been in contact with him for more than a year. That's In the early stages of the war in the Ukraine, which she covered extensively. It was one of the flyers he had posted around Kiev offering to help other foreigners get deployed with Ukrainian battalions that initially caught William's eye and prompted her to get in touch with him.

They spoke at least once on the phone and texted frequently. Ross put William in touch with several foreign fighters . And she said he seemed very genuine and passionate about supporting Ukraine in his battle with Finno Russian invasion. But William said Rouse at times seemed fairly naïve, including when he spoke of his ambition to help bring thousands of Afghan and Syrian refugee fighters to the Ukrainian war effort.

Rus told the New York Times in 2023 that [00:29:00] he was seeking recruits among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban, aiming to purchase passports through Pakistan, since it's such a corrupt country, and move them, in some cases illegally, into Ukraine from Pakistan and Iran. The Times described Rus as a, quote, Former construction worker from Greensboro, North Carolina.

He spent several months in Ukraine last year, end quote, the same months he complained to semaphore, however it's pronounced about the Ukrainian government's lack of support, saying that they're being overly rigid about admitting foreign soldiers, especially from Afghan over concerns that they might be Russian spies.

Quote, I have had partners meeting with Ukraine military's defense every week and still not been able to get them to agree to one single visa.

But unfortunately, a representative from Ukraine's foreign legion told CNN that he had reached out to them several times online, but, quote, was never a part of the legion and didn't cooperate in any way, end quote, end quote. The best way I can describe his message is, delusional ideas in quote. So, and then quote, he was [00:30:00] offering us large numbers of recruits from different countries, but it was obvious to us that his offers were not realistic.

He didn't, we didn't answer and there was nothing to answer to in quote. Yeah, this is

Simone Collins: a very, it seems like Upstart optimistic, values driven person, repeatedly rubbing up against the logistical corruption of bureaucracies, which could probably utilize his help if they weren't so rigid in the way they operated.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. His plan was not stupid, but he wasn't able to implement it. And like, if they're worried about Russian spies, then create specific battalions was the units he's bringing over from Afghanistan. There are genuinely people after the Taliban who took over a military experience trained by the U S military in Afghanistan, who would be useful in a situation like this.

Like the, the, the pure reason they were turning his nose at this was [00:31:00] bureaucratic. On creativity in terms of handling this.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Well, that's the frustrating thing about many bureaucracies is that even if you want to help, if you cannot help through the specific and correct channel with the correct certifications and paperwork, then you simply cannot participate.

Which is a huge loss to human productivity and development.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I don't think like, I wonder, I don't think I'm that much crazy. Like if I had less access to resources than I have or less access to public respect than I have, and I needed to get people to pay attention to certain topics, could I be seen as as crazy as this guy in a different timeline?

Simone Collins: You're probably seen as more crazy than this guy. He did not try to start a religion.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, it's true. Yeah. Yeah. I'm definitely more crazy than him. So like, I'm like in, I, I, I look at him and I'm just like, he was [00:32:00] trying his best to live out his moral thesis. I believe that he became overly attached to this Ukraine idea and just kept looking for solutions instead of seeing that they fought for long enough.

The purpose of them resisting is over now when fertility rates are considered.

Simone Collins: I do think though that his act and the act of the other assassin attempted assassin would be assassin of former President Donald Trump is that this indicates a, an over 10 window shift in the way that people view acceptable actions of protest.

I think that we, and you see this also in, in crime, which we discussed in another recent episode. We've entered an age in which it is seen as appropriate to take violent and drastic action if you believe that you are morally justified in doing so. That it is okay to steal, that it is okay to attempt to kill, that it is okay to engage in election wiggles if you believe the cause is [00:33:00] just.

And it scares me because in the past there was a lot more respect for civil society And for rules and institutions I don't blame people, though, for kind of declaring bankruptcy on institutions now and saying we have to take matters into our own hands because they've become corrupted in a meaningful way.

So people trusted institutions more in the past because the institutions worked and they're not working anymore. So people are taking matters into their own hands. But it, it's still scary that we live in a society in which that is.

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to try to get the clip now because one of our fans got it for us.

A popular show where Democrats basically say, yeah, it's okay to create erections.

Speaker 11: Three weeks ago, Henry Roberts raised six million dollars in dark money to fund an off the books guerrilla oppo operation. He asked me to run it. Nobody seems to be willing to do what is necessary.

And what's [00:34:00] that? Whatever it takes. Democrats act like this is the nineties and they're working under the old rules. The new rules are these attack, lie, don't get caught. Machiavelli wrote the Prince for the rulers.

Well, we're rewriting it for us.

Malcolm Collins: We need to have more problems with our erections because they're just not, yeah, you know, we can't trust Republicans. So we have to do it preemptively. Now here's another interesting thing. I had two kids.

And so his kids have spoken on this afterwards.

Holy, wait,

Simone Collins: whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Sorry, that's just sinking in. He has children. How old are they? They must be grown. They're grown, yeah. Or at least, I mean, I don't know, someone in their 50s probably is 20 somethings? They don't

Malcolm Collins: seem grown, but they seem, honestly, like, Super respectable people. So Oren, one of his sons, told CNN quote, It's not like his father to do anything crazy, much less violent, end quote.

End quote. I don't have any comment beyond a [00:35:00] character profile of him as a loving and caring father, an honest, hardworking man, end quote. And he told the Daily Mail that his dad hates Trump, but stressed that he is not a violent person and said he's never known him to own a gun. Following up later in text.

Quote, I hate this game every four years and think that we all do. And if my father wants to be a martyr to How broken and disassociated the process has become from the real problems and practical solution. That's his choice. End quote. Right. What a bro son. I love that. That's a bro son. Yeah, man. And keep in mind, you're going to hear this from us Trump supporters.

This guy was a cliche Democrat, but at least he really valued the things he said he valued. Yeah, I have heard so many Democrats these days where they're like, I value X and I value Y are like crazy, delusional nonsense. This guy was like, [00:36:00] I don't want a country to just be able to invade like a peaceful neighbor and try to take them over.

Like, that's a cause. That I can understand his mental calculation.

Simone Collins: But he also supports Palestine.

Malcolm Collins: He also supports Palestine, which, okay.

Simone Collins: So I don't know. I mean, whatever. As to the,

Malcolm Collins: the, the, the sexification of evil, like when, when, and why did we start to sexualize evil in our society? And I do think within this urban monoculture, moral framework, the more Low power group is the more high more value.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's possible.

Malcolm Collins: And you can see this in every one of these conflicts. He's supporting the weaker party, not the more just party, the weaker party,

Simone Collins: which is a, yeah, it's, it's a very progressive leftist view, which, you know, I get it's also depending on which faction the many many Christian factions kind of [00:37:00] also hold that you know

Malcolm Collins: actually this is this is sort of the way I I see things right like where do people break down on which side they support he in every one of these instances supports the weaker party in some instances I see individuals who always support the stronger party in every one of these three potential conflicts And then in some instances I see people and this is where we fall.

Do you support the more civilized party? Or do you support the less civilized party? Where if you support the more civilized party, then it's, you know, you create. No,

Simone Collins: no, no. I universally progressive C. And then that's the same show, the good fight that you were referring to earlier where they were like, oh, it's, it's, justified to have election wiggles because you know, the other side is just that bad.

Republicans are seen as the inherently uncivilized and very stupid and uneducated party. In fact, another common theme of that show is just how dumb anyone who supports Trump with the exception of one character is. So all Trump appointed judges, the plot [00:38:00] line with all their court cases it's pretty much just like, how do we dumb this down for them?

Let's make a cartoon for our plea. Let's, let's, let's hire actors to react to them in a way that manipulates them. Let's do all sorts of things like that. So I, I don't, I don't think your argument about the cultured or the civilized party works. I think it is very common for any group to dehumanize the other side.

And they see us equally.

Malcolm Collins: No, I think you're wrong about this. I think that they, when they are looking at foreign powers, they think that the lack of civilized, like, like being on, well, we can talk about, but I've, I've definitely seen along Marxist lines, individuals who both support like the tankies, they both support Russia and Palestine.

Oh, this is definitely a faction that exists. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, you can get a faction that supports pretty much any permutation. Now, what I'm curious is if you [00:39:00] think this will affect The 2024 U S presidential election or not in the betting odds. We've seen basically zero change or 1 percent change. Whereas with the first assassination attempt, we saw roughly 11 percent change.

So I don't know, we've normalized to it. And this is the new school shooting, you know, just another,

Malcolm Collins: another one.

Speaker 4: Baby! You're okay! Uh, hey mom. It's alright, Stanley. We will get tHrough this as a family.

Stanley, well, do you want to tell your father about what happened at school today?

Speaker 5: Um, oh, I flunked my math quiz.

Speaker 4: No, the other thing.

Speaker 5: Oh, the school shooting?

Speaker 4: Yes, the school shooting!

Speaker 5: Oh yeah, some kids shot up the school. Who shot up the school? Was it you?

Speaker 4: No.

Speaker 5: Did you get shot? No. Oh. Well, what's this about failing a math quiz?

Malcolm Collins: Well, okay, so I also want to note here that this guy's book, which was a 291 page self published book. Oh, it's [00:40:00] out there. Yeah. It's on titled Ukraine's unwinnable war, the fatal flaw of democracy, world abandonment and the global citizen, Taiwan, Afghan, North Korea, and the end of humanity is what the book is titled.

Okay. That's

Simone Collins: a, that's a title. That's a mouthful.

Malcolm Collins: One, one thing I found interesting in the comments that was suggested and I don't know if this works for presidents because you have need to make, you know, international things, but I actually quite liked this idea for local politicians is they said that the way that you could end a lot of the corruption that we're seeing in terms of like actually trying to clean up cities is you make a law that mayors cannot have protection details when they're walking around their cities.

Well, then they would just

Simone Collins: stop walking around their cities.

Malcolm Collins: Well, their cities need to be safe.

Simone Collins: They barely walk around their cities as it is. I don't think that would be very effective. If you want to stop corruption in politics, no longer allow for any political donations. Like, aside from citizen donations under 50.[00:41:00]

Malcolm Collins: I don't know if I told you about this, was the, the, the idea that whenever a president leaves his second term in office, he's executed. Only people who are willing to give their lives to the role are willing to take the role. So if you are running for president, you know, you're not running for potential benefits afterwards.

You're not running for a long term ego. It's only if you are literally willing to give your life for this position. Because I think that that would lead to much higher action. Now, I don't know if that's as realistic, but I have some government plans drawn out and we'll see how those work.

Simone Collins: It's so funny. Our, our other friends who have dreams of running for president and that they, they consider extreme and crazy or like, well, I would run on one platform issue and that is to turn all tax returns into a one page return, which is dreamy, but also like, you know, pretty, pretty violent considering how corrupt the, the tax [00:42:00] life,

Malcolm Collins: what's the tax pro or whatever, that app that literally has a contract.

TurboTax has a contract with the U. S. government. No, no, no. You

Simone Collins: don't understand how corrupt the U. S. tax system is. Literally, there are parts, there, there are certain, for example, non profit tax filings. We had to make a, a different type of non profit tax filing for the Pragmatist Foundation after we received that larger grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund.

And we had to fill out a more detailed one. I tried to, I, I downloaded the form, and I completed it. I did all the things. And then I needed to file it. Well, there was no place for me to file it. There was no place I could mail it. And so I contacted the IRS, which is our, our tax body in the United States.

And I said, well, where do I send the form? I downloaded it, I completed it. They're like, oh, you can only support it, submit it online. I'm like, okay, great. Where's the website? They're like, no, no, no. You, you have to submit it through an authorized tax filer. And I say, okay, so I have to go to a [00:43:00] company that is authorized to work with me.

And you would pay

Malcolm Collins: like 500 if you were going to submit it, like

Simone Collins: And not only that, I was like, okay, fine, you know, I'll pay someone a token amount to submit the already completed form. Maybe I can get a discount from their support team or something. I was willing to play the game. No, that was not an option.

I had to completely go through their entire software. And do the entire thing over again and then submit it. And this is the, so I have to pay a private organization that is obviously like lobbied the government and filled out a bunch of paperwork and filled their own, like filing forms and paid all this stuff to like get in, in with the government to, to pay the government.

Money. Well, as a nonprofit, I'm not even paying the government money. So maybe that's, that's what's going on is I'm not paying them enough, but it just, it's amazing how corrupt our system is. It isn't just TurboTax, but this is why this could never happen. We can't engage in tax reform taken down

Malcolm Collins: like as a company, like I was, I was running for federal office.

Simone Collins: TurboTax is, is, is yeah. Yeah. Because for those who are not in the United States, [00:44:00] TurboTax is a, a private organization. That is an intense lobbyist to the United States government that sort of has cornered a large proportion of the tax filing market in the United States. They've

Malcolm Collins: intentionally made tax filing more complicated so that you cannot file it without their product.

Simone Collins: Right. And then there's a lot of other. Private interests that have lobbied for all sorts of unique tax loopholes so that, that, that even further complicates us tax code. There are all these weird deductions and rules and loopholes. And so basically people with money and resources And organizations that make money from people who are forced to navigate this incredibly complex system have made it such that there is no hope of reforming or simplifying UX us tax code, which is, well,

Malcolm Collins: I remember the nine, nine, nine plan.

I love that, that politician, but I don't remember

Simone Collins: the nine, nine, nine.

Malcolm Collins: So it was a black politician in the original rent is too

Simone Collins: damn high guy.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, no, no. This was like the legit guy who was actually top of Republican polling for a [00:45:00] pretty long period. I think this was in the initial Trump election.

He ran like Papa John's pieces. I'll edit and post.

Herman Cain is the candidate. I was thinking of.

Malcolm Collins: He was. I think on an alternate timeline as crazy and amazing a president as Trump was, he was, I loved him so effing much. He was like my guy as a candidate. So he wanted 9 percent income tax, 9 percent tails tax, and 9 percent business tax. Across everything, flat tax, and he one of my favorite things about him is he goes and to quote a famous poet, and then he went through the lyrics of a song from the Pokemon movie.

And it appears that he might not have known he was doing this.

Speaker 7: I believe these words came from the Pokemon movie. The media pointed that out. I'm not sure who the original author [00:46:00] is. So don't go write an article about the poem. But it says a lot about where I am, where I am with my wife and my family and where we are as a nation. Life. Can be a challenge. Life can seem impossible.

It's never easy. When there's so much on the line. But you and I can make a difference.

Malcolm Collins: No, that's so good. This guy is my Hero, why

Simone Collins: did he not? Oh, this makes me so sad. I thought we'd done the best, the craziest

Malcolm Collins: timeline. No, no, no, no. We don't look for timeline. This guy ended up winning and I love him. [00:47:00] Anyway,

Simone Collins: that's, but you'd never get it.

I mean, like 999 is. You know, like German. No, no, no. My, I always make my phone extensions when I can choose them nine, nine, nine. Cause I just want like, no, no, no calls. But yeah, I don't know. The, the, the, the word, the word needs some,

Malcolm Collins: Simone, you too frequently use the term live in Trump. Yeah, my, my, my liking.

You're always like, well, we need more. Well,

Simone Collins: no, it's when our kids are in my face. I'm like, get out of my face. I like, well if people are going to call us Nazis, I just want to keep using like Nazi references, but then you always point out that someone's going to misconstrue it, you know, and like, they are, you know, I'm like walking around our house and I'm like, man, like this, you know, our garbage bag storage bin is just getting too messy.

I need a solution, a final solution. And it just,

Malcolm Collins: Simone, you are going to get us so in trouble when there is one

Simone Collins: famous person we've met though, [00:48:00] and where I made like a Nazi reference and he, he got. That I was making a joke and it made me feel so validated and Okay. 'cause at least, who was this? The one person,

Malcolm Collins: certainly.

Okay. That guy. Okay. Yeah. We can't say

um,

Simone Collins: um, But yeah, I was

Malcolm Collins: asleep.

Simone Collins: Yes, it was when you were asleep. Oh, you're

Malcolm Collins: so sweet. So I really appreciate you. I'm sorry that that is one of the biggest mistakes in my life.

Simone Collins: No, because he would have passed out anyway. It was too late. But yeah, no, no, I, I hate that I can't make Nazi jokes because the one thing that Jews always do, at least they did in the days of Mel Brooks movies, was make Nazi jokes.

Speaker 9: It's springtime for Hitler and Germany. We'rE marching to a fast march. Look out, here comes the master race.

Simone Collins: Like, I don't get it. [00:49:00] And I'm, I'm probably Jewish, so like tech, technically, like she means the matrilineally Jewish.

Malcolm Collins: We've been looking at getting it approved with the Jewish state, but I just realized like we actually don't have like, I don't have time to go through records. We could do it if we really had time, but I just don't care.

Like I care a little bit, but not enough to spend like multiple full days

Simone Collins: going through all this. And now we're

Malcolm Collins: at a state where it's pretty clear to us. That's what it's going to come to. Who

Simone Collins: cares if I'm actually Jewish or not? We're we love Jews and we love Jewish. Yeah. But I've also

Malcolm Collins: realized I'm not going to let my kids, like earlier, we did a video where we were raising our kids was like Jewish religion alongside, moved further and further away from that as time as I don't

Simone Collins: know.

I mean, I'm still bullish on them doing some Jewish holidays.

Malcolm Collins: Some, but here's the problem. Judaism has been far, far, far too conquered by its mystical side. And, [00:50:00] like, I just don't know how much actual Judaism is left.

Simone Collins: Well, you know, if your stance on mysticism is It holds if your theories around mysticism hold the mystic side will not flourish over the long term and in the end right

Malcolm Collins: but but but if you allow it to conquer it can destroy an entire culture like it did with Islam in the old

Simone Collins: but yeah, oh, I think that there will always be a faction of non mystic Jews or or mystic Jews who turn non mystic when they discover that mysticism is not good for them or not working out.

Malcolm Collins: So when people understand what I mean here, look, it was Christianity, right? Christianity was Judaism. And then we added, you know, some, some, some additional texts and it becomes a new religion. You had the new Testament. It becomes a new religion. And then, you know, with Islam, then you add, you know, the, the Koran and it becomes a new religion.

And then Judaism, you know, what was it? a thousand years ago, 500 years ago, they added a new text long after the other religions, the Kabbalah literature, [00:51:00] and it doesn't become a new religion. Why? So when people hear me like a stall Judaism, I am a stalling the pre and non mystical

Simone Collins: Judaism.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. The, the iterations of Judaism that are, antagonistic to kabbalistic tradition.

Now

Simone Collins: you've made it clear that pretty much every major religion has factions that you admire and factions that you don't and that's fine.

Malcolm Collins: But I don't want to, I mean, we do have to have people that are like, oh, why do you spend so much time in some tracts? Are arguing that you're not explicitly anti semitic and it's like well It's because a lot of people are going to try to paint us that way.

Because I don't know don't people see us

Simone Collins: as as overly

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, some people see us as overly filio semitic, which I I guess we are I would say we are

Simone Collins: When you look at our friends when you look at the the religious Histories that we find most fascinating, religious groups that we think are flourishing, that we think everyone can [00:52:00] learn a lot from, groups that we generally respect a lot for their achievements broadly.

Come on. But whatever. I, I think that there is a long history of. Great Jewish comedians. And one of the things that comedians turn to a lot is super controversial and not okay subjects, including antisemitism. And maybe one of the issues with antisemitism these days is a Jew stopped joking about it.

And suddenly everyone's getting all antisemitic and we can't make fun of them anymore. So what's going on guys? I don't know. Again, we need a solution to this problem.

Malcolm Collins: Are you a final solution? Yes. Malcolm, you are the worst. I love you. I love you too. Have a wonderful day.

All right. So for dinner tonight do we have leftovers from yesterday for the miss? Okay. So, and it appears we have leftovers of rice as well.

Simone Collins: A little bit of meat and a little bit of fried rice. I figure it's just the perfect one portion serving. Maybe some steamed buns. Like No,

Malcolm Collins: if you're adding anything to it, I [00:53:00] got some potatoes today.

If you got potatoes, either the potatoes or the you got

Simone Collins: potatoes at Trader Joe's.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, it was. It's a mix of cut potatoes with like some like French like mushrooms and like some other. Oh, oh,

Simone Collins: one of the frozen bags. One of the frozen bags.

Malcolm Collins: So you cook a little bit of that. I think that would go really well with what I'm eating today.

Simone Collins: Okay. So is it okay? Do you want me to stir fry everything together? Is that okay? I have to do everything separately because I'm just thinking like three pans versus one pan for me in terms of clean up. That works.

Malcolm Collins: That works. Whatever you think is best. Start with the frozen thing and then add the other stuff in later.

Simone Collins: Okay.

I will do that. I love you. I love you too. God.

Malcolm Collins: Stop being so gay. Okay. Cause you're being pretty gay right now. I will

Simone Collins: always be gay for you, Malcolm and nobody else. God, I love you. I really like our chats. So thanks for this. All right, [00:54:00] I'm coming down. How

Malcolm Collins: do, how do we keep it fresh? Some people said they don't like our new stuff, by the way.

Simone Collins: They say we're becoming

Malcolm Collins: too algorithm driven and like, yeah, but I'm winning at the algorithm right now. So,

Simone Collins: well, yeah, if they want to, if they want to send droves of people to us.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We got 5, 000 subscribers in the last month alone. Like, yeah, I'm algorithm driven now. I figured it out. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: maybe the opinion of those 5, 000 people matters a little bit more than the opinion of that one complainer, but also keep in mind, like when it comes to user studies of any change of any product online, for example,

Malcolm Collins: any change is seen antagonistically.

Or would you like to know more to a theme song intro, but then they will always

Simone Collins: start with, would you like to know more and move into the theme song? Right.

Malcolm Collins: It

Simone Collins: should, it should. I really need to get up, I'm just Having a baby on your lap is like having a cat on your lap. I don't think you, you, [00:55:00] have you ever had a cat on your lap in your life?

Malcolm Collins: Where they, yeah, I used

Simone Collins: to have a cat. Where they fall asleep? And then you just, you can't get up. Oh, my cats

Malcolm Collins: weren't like loving cats. Oh.

Simone Collins: They

Malcolm Collins: were murdery cats.

Simone Collins: Murdery cats? You sure you didn't accidentally adopt a possum or something?

Malcolm Collins: My mom wanted to be as posh as possible. So she got something called Bengal cats.

Oh,

Simone Collins: Bengal cats are famously friendly.

Malcolm Collins: No, ours were not famously friendly. They were, they were a little, so they were like a breed where it's bred was like wild cats of some kind. I think some form of a wild cat from Africa. I don't know, not like a panther or something, but something like that.

Right. Like a bobcat? Yeah. It's something like an African variety of bobcat. Yeah. From Bengal. Yeah. It's, and so they're very hunting focused. I remember one year we got really punished because all the Christmas presents were like Torn into early and it turned out that it was our cats and our parents [00:56:00] recognized us after punishing us

Simone Collins: I mean, considering your track record, then probably every other thing was your fault.

Like I could say, I was

Malcolm Collins: like, I would have been more tactful about it. I wouldn't

Simone Collins: packaging. This is why you had so many problems as a kid. Every time someone blamed you something, you're like, well, if I really wanted to do it, I would do this. And then suddenly you get expelled.

Malcolm Collins: This genuinely got me in trouble.

So many times I'd get accused of. But like doing X and I'd be like, no, if I was going to do X, I do it this way. It was always so much more like that. This this is one of the things kicked out of the first school I got kicked out of. They were like, oh, we think that you would do like X to harm other students.

And I was like offended because the Columbine had just happened and they were like just looking for any weird kid and I was like, excuse me, excuse me, sir, here are ways I could kill everyone in this school without Anyone being able to respond. [00:57:00] Those kids were idiots, couldn't get a damn bomb to work? A pipe bomb?

That's not difficult! And I started going through, like, sketching through how that could work, how you could create gases by mixing You know various cleaning fluids that could pretty easily gas a room before people noticed. I started. Very good

Simone Collins: point though. Oh God. No. Yeah. That's how to do that. But yeah, that's very easy to do.

Don't

Malcolm Collins: insult my intelligence. Okay. You don't say that I'm some savage who's just going to go out there shooting people. This is what we have to.

Simone Collins: With our children, our children are already showing karma with being such piggy eaters, and I was a famously piggy eater. They're going to be just as anti authoritarian and difficult in larger bureaucracies as you are.

I love you. I love you too. Bye Malcolm. Karate chop.

Malcolm Collins: Oh no, are you teaching her karate moves?

Simone Collins: Teaching her how to be part of our [00:58:00] secret service. So she,

Yeah, she'll, but, but she will make sure that when someone shoots at you, they still shoot and they just tastefully Nick you right here. You know, you gotta have that,

Malcolm Collins: that perfect scar that he got nicked in the ear on the, no, but he

Simone Collins: didn't know everyone wants like that, that face scar that makes you look bad ass, but it needs to be in just the right place.

So the perfect secret service person. Yes. Let's them shoot. makes sure that they shoot in exactly the right angle that gives you the badass scar and then gives you enough time to do what they did with trump where he did his little like,

Malcolm Collins: ah,

Simone Collins: fight, fight, fight.

Malcolm Collins: Let me up for the fight, fight, fight, or while they're, they're, they're, they're holding me down.

They shoot me just in case it misses. So that, oh yeah, just

Simone Collins: didn't, yeah. Yeah. You couldn't really tell. Yeah. There's all the crossfire, you know, people shooting back at the attempting assassins. So who [00:59:00] would know who would know, you know, they could just argue and then yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They're like, oh, it's not a bullet wound.

It's shrapnel. Oh, well,

Simone Collins: yeah, because that would. It's shrapnel so much less badass, although it's way more damaging in many cases. I mean, I think most people who have shrapnel wounds wish that they were shot.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, the president didn't, he wasn't assassinated. The shrapnel killed him. Like,

Simone Collins: yeah, well, yeah.

Shrapnel never hurt anyone. I mean, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: What do they think it is? Like, like foam balls being thrown at you? Like, Oh,

Simone Collins: well, come on. Everyone even knows that shrapnel is a big deal because of Iron Man. Yeah. Makes still makes you look cool. Oh, yeah. Because it was heart, right? That was the whole point. The whole point.

The shrapnel. The

Malcolm Collins: shrapnel. I, I want like a progressive who's constantly, whenever Ironman is like, well, and I have this situation with my heart, and they're like, it's only shrapnel, . Oh

Simone Collins: boy. Don't mean Kamala Harris is so prepared as a candidate, you know, everything is [01:00:00] boxed, everything's written for her. I, I hope that her team has prepared her.

with what she would do to look badass if someone attempted to assassinate her. I mean, no doubt she has received plenty of death threats as well. So hopefully she has her rehearsed thing. I, I,

Malcolm Collins: I, I feel like I am the type of person when running for president that I'm going to get a, a, a tasteful assassination attempt for one of our supporters.

Simone Collins: There you go, sir.

Malcolm Collins: Give me a good visible Nick here or something like that. So I can you know,

Simone Collins: this is how you get your jaw shot off by mistake. Malcolm don't. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no. That's that. Whatever, whatever happens, you know, I'm going to look great coming out of this. You have no idea. No, for the record, do not,

Simone Collins: do not.

No, no, no. And Malcolm, no, no, we get enough death threats already. Yeah, but they're all going to hit you with a baseball bat. That's the, that's a go to.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, that's what [01:01:00] they say? Well, because

Simone Collins: progressives don't own guns.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, the core thing that obviously they're gonna try to do is turn our kids against us.

Like, that's what they keep saying.

That's the core fantasy.

Simone Collins: Joke's on them. They're already turned against us. They constantly rebel.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I don't think they know what they're getting their hands on. I, I know the moment one of our kids, they'll, they'll be like, okay we'll bring you in and we'll turn you against your parents.

And then the kids running the group was in like a month and doing some crazy thing with it.

Simone Collins: It would backfire. The problem is if, if they tried to get them to do anything, the kids would subvert it somehow because that's what they do with any attempt that we ever make.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so we've, we've, we've worked on the counter brainwashing already, guys.

You got, you got nothing here. Okay, so I'll get started. All right, Simone? Let's do it. I love her idly playing with your thing, looking at your face. She's figuring out stuff.

Simone Collins: She is. She's coming online.

In this gripping episode, we explore the rising crime rates in major U.S. cities, focusing on new crime trends and their impact on local businesses. We dive into the implications of advanced surveillance technologies like Amazon Go's 'Just Walk Out Technology,' and discuss shocking incidents such as the TikTok 'Chase Money Glitch.' Examining societal perceptions and police responses, we debate tough-on-crime policies, including drastic measures like mass incarceration and execution. Additionally, we explore the ethics of creating penal colonies for repeat offenders and the distinction between intellectual property and personal crimes, ending on a lighter interaction through social media. Join us for an in-depth analysis of crime, justice, and societal responses. ​

[00:00:00]

Speaker 2: Hello, Simone. Today we are going to be talking about an interesting topic. One is new forms of crime and crime waves that are hitting major American cities at the moment and transforming the nature of business in these cities.

Speaker 6: If you could walk into a store, grab what you want, and just go. What would shopping look like?

Speaker 7: Oh my god! Call the police!

Speaker 6: Welcome to Amazon Go. We call it Just Walk Out Technology. Piece

Speaker 8: of s**t. I'll be overdosed.

Speaker 2: recently. There was a TikTok trend. . That was called the, the chase money glitch.

Speaker 20: Twins, Twins, I'm not even gonna lie. I'm not even supposed to condone this type of behavior due to the direction that I'm trying to project my life in. But that Chase Bait Plate looking too sweet right now, Twins. No cap. I can just hit one Chase Bait Plate.

Speaker 18: The f**k man? They really told me to tap in next day I was supposed to [00:01:00] clear look at my account yo

Speaker 24: Cause I have 30, 000 in credit card debt. When they call, I tell them I can't pay it back yet. Credit card debt

Speaker 3: I'm so excited about this.

Speaker 2: is despite what people think there is actually pretty strong evidence that crime in the current day and age is at one of its highest levels in human history.

Speaker: That's meaningful because normally the trend is, oh, you watch the news, you think crime is so bad when really crime has never been lower and violence has never been lower.

Speaker 2: If you crime is going down. Just to quickly know where this number comes from. Specifically, what they do at is they correlate crime rates across cultures with homicide rates, which are much easier to track in absolute amounts, right? Because many

Speaker: people have things stolen from them and just never report it or even that reporting just gets lost.

And so it's not good. And then what they

Speaker 2: do is they correlate the homicide rates. with [00:02:00] correcting for survival rates due to advances in medical technology. And when you correct for that, what looks like a dropping crime rate is actually a quickly rising crime rate,

Speaker: right? Because the issue is that in what really we were looking at was, Oh, our hospitals have gotten a lot better.

It's not crime has gone down. It's that now when you get shot, you're more likely to live, which is

Speaker 2: nice. I guess. I'd also be going over a phenomenon where police have basically given up, or it looks like from the data, people are just not being convicted anymore. Can you blame them? Also, a lot of people are getting elected at all.

I mean, it's, it's such a thankless job today, but let's get into the data. Cause this is going to be a very data heavy episode and some of the individual claims here,

Would you like to know more?

Speaker 2: Well, the statistic I wanted to find that I just thought was absolutely insane and I'm going to find it somewhere is that in NYC, your average retail store is being robbed on average once a day.

Okay. So I decided to do the math on this. [00:03:00] Since 2021 full year numbers of shoplifting incidents have escalated up to 59,000. , and that. Represents a nearly 35% increase. So I took this 59,137 number. And then I looked up how many stores are in Manhattan and there are 750, , and that gives us a. Any given store in Manhattan is robbed on average. 79 times per year.

Speaker 2: At this point, but the big thing that's changed recently, and they'll always talk about like, Oh, crime rates are down to where they were before the pandemic, but that's just not true.

Yeah. Actually, robberies have risen 5 percent year over year. As anyone who has been to a place like Manhattan would know, like Manhattan, now every store, everything is locked up, like everywhere you go. CVS in Manhattan recently, Simone.

Speaker: Yeah. Everything is locked up. You have to wait forever to get someone to unlock the shelf door.

To help you, which is very annoying,

Speaker 2: right? And [00:04:00] that now new forms of crime because it's so easy to rob people has started where one form of crime started where, because the New York had these outdoor seating areas for the restaurants during COVID that weren't really part of a restaurant. People would just go up and rob everyone who was sitting at them you know, do a stick up, ask for their wallets, their phones, everything like that.

​

Speaker 2: And now they become more brazen and they're moving into within the swanky parts of New York just going directly into the wealthy restaurants and just robbing everyone in the restaurant. And then driving away and this has become a new type of crime this year that like, I guess people hadn't thought of [00:05:00] doing before, just no,

Speaker: this used to be, this is, I always used to see this as you know, stick them up, you know, you go in and you you point a gun at everyone in a restaurant or something.

There's that famous scene. From I think a Quentin Tarantino movie that it starts with a couple being like,

Speaker 5: No more liquor stores? What have we been talking about? Yeah, no more liquor stores. And if it's not the gooks, it's these old f ing Jews who've owned the store for 15 f ing generations. You've got Grandpa Irving sitting behind the counter with a f ing magnum in his hand. This place? A coffee shop. What's wrong with that? Nobody ever robs restaurants. Why not? Restaurants, you catch with their pants down. They're not expecting to get robbed.

Customers . One minute they're having a Denver omelette, next minute someone's sticking a gun in their face. A lot of people come to our restaurants. Buy the wallets. Pretty smart, huh?

 You, honey bunny. Everybody be cool, this is [00:06:00] a robbery!

Any of you f ing pricks move! And I'll execute every

Speaker: yeah,

Speaker 2: it's a Pulp Fiction.

Speaker: There you go. So I always saw that as like the classic crime, but that never happened. People didn't do this at fancy restaurants. Not historically. You did it at like Yeah, you did it at a diner, but the smart people do it at fancy restaurants.

I'm just glad people have come around. But one Cinematic magic taking place. I mean, and why wouldn't

Speaker 2: these people be doing this? You know, somebody's pointing out in the comments of one of the videos I was watching of this that if you steal less than a thousand dollars a day, you're not going to get jail time in the U.

S., but if you don't pay 500 in taxes to the IRS, you know, your life gets ruined. Yeah. And it, it, it, it, and, and people are like, how, like, If you're from other places in the U S and I might play some video of like how brazenly these robberies are happening now, your initial reaction is like, how are people doing this without fear of being shot?

And it's just, it's Amazon

Speaker: [00:07:00] go.

Speaker 6: If you could walk into a store, grab what you want, and just go. What would shopping look like? Oh my god! Call the police! Welcome to Amazon Go. We call it Just Walk Out Technology. Piece of s**t. I'll be overdosed. Piece of s**t. Take whatever you like. Sometimes when I call 911, nobody answers. No lines, no checkout.

No, seriously. Shop looker? Don't seem to care who's watching once you've got everything you want you can just go Filling bags and backpacks in the middle of the day You can keep going Amazon go Yeah, yeah, yeah morning

Speaker: It's what that internet history just

Speaker 2: grab it and go, [00:08:00] but that's different. So robbing stores is one thing because most stores have a policy that says the employees can get fired for intervening with a robbery for

Speaker: insurance reasons. So, so in other words, Because because the, these larger corporations have insurance policies that basically won't pay out properly if employees intervene, because that can increase liability even more.

They, they, yeah, they have these policies where you can't intervene, which is really hard for employees. Because yeah, like once a day, it's fine, but then when the same person comes in the 15th time and steals another pair of Lulu lemon leggings, are you going

Speaker 2: to talk about this? Because it is actually a very small number of people just doing it over and over and over again.

And, and again, why wouldn't they, there is very little punishment and they're being incentivized to

Speaker: do it effectively. They're being rewarded every time they do it because they get the thing and they don't get caught. Yeah. Well, they don't get apprehended.

Speaker 2: So Asmogold, you know who he is, right?

Speaker: No.

Speaker 2: He's one of the most [00:09:00] famous, like, talk YouTubers.

Fantastic guy. I really love his content. I will go watch other people's videos. I can't wait till he does one of ours. And he was doing one on this crime spree and he was like confused as to how people thought they could get away with this without getting shot. Right. And, and because New York is a concealed carry state.

Speaker: It's a super liberal state. So who's doing it?

Speaker 2: Learned. Yeah. It's concealed carry. Yes, but it's basically impossible to get a concealed carry license. So you have to do like 16 hours of courses. And one person was talking about how they had done the 16 hours of courses, but they were still denied the concealed carry license.

Because they were quote unquote a 25 year old male and able to defend themselves without being

Speaker 3: You go to the office they look you up and down they're like you could cut a b***h like you don't need

Speaker 2: no but hold on this is insane because one it's like yeah but what if the criminal has a gun first of all it's supposed to like Jiu jitsu.

Somebody was a gun. And then two. [00:10:00] Yes. We know what happens in New York. If you, if they're basically saying no, just beat them to death. And it's like, Oh, well, I mean, if you're a white man, you just

Speaker: stand on their neck and they die or something. Isn't that how white people kill people? I don't know.

Speaker 2: No. So there was the incidence of the, the guy who was going around trying to kill people that, that guy in the subways.

Station threatening to kill people, guy up, beating him to death, and then they're like, oh, well I know we said that you're supposed to do this, but he was black and you were white. And that makes him a protected class. So, you know, to jail for life with you. It's, it's absolutely insane how little incentive there is to not do this.

And there's another crazy thing that's going on in New York right now, which is an increase in assaults due to TikTok. And I'll put an article on screen here about this, but there is a, a, a, a, a punching TikToks are now pretty popular.

Speaker 10: I was literally just walking and a man came up

Speaker 11: and

Speaker 10: punched me

Speaker 11: in the face. Stories from New York city women going viral on Tik TOK. I literally [00:11:00] just got punched by some man on the sidewalk. Their videos detailing how they're allegedly getting punched in the face, completely unprovoked. Several women have posted these videos describing similar allegations in just the last week.

Hallie Kate posted about an assault on Monday. She says she had to be treated at a local medical facility for injuries to the left side of her face. Oh my God, it hurts so bad. I can't even talk. Olivia Brand posting updates on her own experience earlier this month after commenters on TikTok started connecting the two cases.

Speaker 10: And like addin like, look, this girl wen

Speaker 11: She was punched in the face by someone she didn't know last September. Broken down by week, misdemeanor assaults are up 10 percent compared to the same period last year.

Speaker 12: What else are we hearing about this one suspect that is in custody tonight?

Speaker 11: . Skyboki Store. He actually is a bit of a fringe political figure, ran for mayor of New York City back in [00:12:00] 2021.

And he has now been charged with this assault for one of these cases.

Speaker: Oh no, this whole thing. I, I mean, This comes up as a thing in the news every now and then where there's like the whatever game where supposedly impressionable teenagers are being Convinced to go out and punch people and then post it on tick tock.

But I, I don't, I don't doubt that it happens. In fact, there's currently a lawsuit against tick tock taking place for a very different dangerous game in which it's called the choking game. You know, you can imagine the asphyxiation game would play here. Where one 10 year old girl actually died doing it of course.

And, and the parent is trying

Speaker 2: game. What is this?

Speaker: Where it shows you how to engage in auto asphyxiation. Yeah. And it's just like, do it. It's on TikTok. So it's fun. So a 10 year old girl did it. I mean, thousands of people did it. She died doing it. The mother is trying to sue TikTok for [00:13:00] serving an algorithm that, that gave that to her which is.

It's like, it's a difficult, like legal

Speaker 2: thing to litigate, but I mean, who knows? Right. But still like how they'll like take down slightly conservative content, but they won't take down content showing kids how to off themselves. I

Speaker 3: mean,

Speaker 2: Like it is wild how bad the, the censorship is these days, but Simone to go further.

Okay. Yes. Before we go further here, if you're, if we go to New York and we go to

Speaker: a fancy restaurant, someone's going to stick us up, then we're going to go outside. Some kid on TikTok is going to punch us and then run away, right?

Speaker 2: That's that's life in New York right now. I mean, we're about to go to DC, so, buckle up.

No if you're, if you're going into this and you're like, well, But black lives matter told me that black people want less cops. So this is probably all a good thing. You know, there's fewer, fewer

Speaker: cops. If you can count it, it's fewer. If it's something like a mass where it's not countable, like water, then it's less.

[00:14:00] Hey!

Speaker 2: Okay. So less cops. Anyway, so there was Simone, I'm not going to fall for your, your erudite grammar. Okay. I speak like a man. Okay. An American. I use whatever word I want. Um, But anyway, so, if you're like, but I was told by black lives matter that, that and you know, there's that, that horrible, like, Cucked comic where it's the individual who got their bike stolen and they're like I was sad because I got my bike stolen But then I was happy thinking that whoever took it probably needed it more than I did Oh, and it's like wow, have you cucked yourself?

And it turns out there's this one like

Speaker: Mexican bike theft Lord That's selling them in bulk across the border. Have you heard of this guy?

Speaker 2: Yeah It's not like a poor individual who took your bike. It's an industrialized stealing ring. Like, how dumb do you have to be to not understand how, like, basic types of thievery work?

Stealing bikes as an individual isn't a good way to [00:15:00] make money. The individual who stole your bike was making minimum wage working for a drug lord, basically. Probably not even making minimum wage, probably being paid in small amounts. In New York?

Speaker: No, no, they can't afford New York minimum wage. Not in this economy.

Speaker 2: Got it, Malcolm. No, no, you're being paid in math.

Another person who famously shared a similar sentiment was the. Celebrity Seth Rogen.

Speaker 13: Dude, I've lived here for over 20 years. You're nuts. Uh huh. It's lovely here. Don't leave anything valuable in it. It's called living in a big city. You can be mad, but I guess I don't personally view my car as an extension of myself, and I've never really felt violated any of the 15 or so times my car was broken into.

Once a guy accidentally left a cool knife in my car. So if it keeps happening, you might get a little treat. Also, it sucks your s**t was stolen, but LA is not some shithole city. As far as big cities go, it has a lot of homeless people. I mean, a lot going for it.

He's also a pretty rampant antinatalist. So there's that? I [00:16:00] mean, it's pretty obvious that society is going to become a lot better as people like this, remove themselves from the gene pool. So. You know, I, , that's one of the many reasons why I'm actually quite psyched about fertility collapse.

Speaker 14: I don't want kids. Yeah.

Speaker 15: It doesn't seem that fun.

And most of my friends who are parents, God bless them, spend a lot of their time talking about How much they don't like having kids. Uh, And what me and my wife spend a lot of time talking about is how much fun stuff we can do because we don't have kids

Speaker 14: I think that that's actually pretty rad though because it's like, not everybody, that's not everybody's dream, is to do that. And a lot of people, I think it's important you say it.

But you don't need kids. There's so many kids! I know. And that's the thing too, yeah, I guess.

Speaker 15: Who looks at all the kids out there and thinks, I wish there were more kids?

Speaker 14: No, I think there should be more

Speaker 15: voices of the reason you don't need to have kids. Also, like, won't the world not be here in 30 [00:17:00] years?

Speaker 2: Bite. The truth is, is no, while you are being told by progressives that blacks don't want police in their communities, I'm going to read a quote here, and this is from SciPost, a very centrist organization. Most black Americans favor maintaining or even increasing local police presence and funding, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Criminal Justice.

Surprisingly, this preference is more robust among Black Americans than non Black Americans. It holds steady regardless of changes in crime trends or information about policing reforms. Support for police, however, is reduced by negative feelings towards police and perceptions of unfairness in police procedures.

So Black Americans are more pro police than white Americans. And they want, on average, more police in their neighborhoods, not less. It's fair. The idea that they want anything else is a, not just a fiction, it is a lie that victimizes black communities.

Speaker 3: [00:18:00] Yeah.

Speaker 26: Because we're shooting all People that are actually in, , a lot of these poor communities, outside of the ones doing the crime, are not defund the policers, okay? They know they need the f*****g police. It's always Upper middle class people that think they have some kind of solidarity with poor people And so they want to take their right to safety away from them.

They're like, oh, we're gonna try to help you We're gonna we're gonna make your life better. You're not gonna get arrested anymore by these mean police officers It's crazy, man. And the reason why they don't get it is because they live such sheltered privilege lives That they've never needed police. It's never been a problem

Speaker 2: Okay, so let's, let's start with that, but now we are going to go into the stats and I'm gonna be putting some graphs on screen here and we're gonna have a lot of fun, okay?

Woo! Stats! And this comes from an Aporia piece called Murder as a Measuring Stick. And Aporia, you know, we know Matt who runs it. Rant! He

Speaker: stepped down, yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah but anyway, great, great magazine. I remember the last time we went to it because we were mentioning it on the podcast and I go to it and the front page of the [00:19:00] magazine is one of our child's faces for the front page article that day and no one had asked us.

Speaker: No, I had sent that to Diana Fleischman who wrote the article. Oh, you had,

Speaker 2: okay. I hadn't. Yeah. I was just like, what? I

Speaker: want everyone to know how cute our children are, Malcolm.

Speaker 2: Of course. Comparing crime rates between countries and across time is hard. Definition shift. Unpunished crimes go unreported. The quality of statistics varies and what constitutes a crime changes. And they had a citation on the unpunished crimes go unreported part.

Exception is murder. Both its definition and the reporting are consistent between countries and across time. Hence, murder rates are often used as a proxy for crime rates, and they have a citation there as well. And this is when you're dealing for very, very long crime rates. And right here is a visualization from 1909 to 2010.

23 of murder rates. And even when you are not adjusting for medical advancements, which we'll get to in a [00:20:00] bit we right now are above the average murder rate from 1909 to

Speaker 4: 2023.

Speaker 2: It shot up massively in the early 2020s and it looks like what you actually have here is a scenario in which the murder rate goes way up then you'll get a slight dip, then it goes way up again.

Yeah, what is that? It seems

Speaker: like there was murder season. What is going on there? Oh, is it? It's summer. Sorry. I forgot. It's summer. No, I actually,

Speaker 2: well, yeah, there is like murder season, but here, what I actually expect is happening when I look at where the rates go way up again is it is as a result of the, the lead when they started using lead in.

But then when,

Speaker: but it went up and down and up and down, like, I don't think the, like it should just go up

Speaker 2: and down. At all. This is over a century, Simone. Oh, okay. Sorry. I should, it does go up and down over a century. We're talking decades apart. Oh, so when it goes down for that big thing, it's the lead. And then [00:21:00] yeah, it looks like it was from leaded gas.

If you, if you overlay this big middle rise in crime rates, it's probably due to leaded gas.

Speaker: Yes, of course. That makes sense. And you had a

Speaker 2: huge decrease in crime rates after so basically crime rates are constantly going up from like 1909 to like 1933. Oh, what happened in 1933 that depressed the crime rates and then led to them to continue to be depressed, the great depression, World War one and World War two.

Speaker: Oh, oh yeah.

Speaker 2: And, and that 1933 though, we didn't go to war on

Speaker: 33.

Okay. So my internal memory of dates is not very good. , world war one started. The United States joined world war one in 1917. And we ended our involvement in 1918. And you still see a pretty sharp rise in the crime rates after that.

So I'm going to retract that being the main reason for this depression and the crime rates. That's where the band unleaded gas that happened in 1973. And as you can see, the rapid [00:22:00] decrease in crime rates began exactly 20 years after that, which is I think about what we'd expect.

 Now we are dealing with a massive uptick in crime rates. And the rise we are seeing looks like it might be faster than any of the previous rises that we've seen. All right. Although the murder rate is insulated from reporting and definition shifts, it is very strongly affected by medical care.

Speaker 2: Both improved techniques and better access, a fatal injury in 1960 might be easily treatable today. To put it in concrete numbers, if aggravated assaults in the United States had been as lethal in 1999 as they were in 1960, the murder rate would have been 3. 4x higher. Whoa. Okay.

Yeah. You're looking at this graph, adjust the more recent ones by 3. 4 X meaning that basically rates have, well, we'll, we'll get into what we've actually seen from rates. And I'm going to put a graph on screen here so people can see the rise in lethality [00:23:00] basically directly correlates with the drop in homicide rates.

It's being recorded. Taking this into account, I would estimate that a murder today represents 4 to 5 times as much crime and disorder as a murder in 1960, and probably 10 times as much as a medieval murder, with early 20th century somewhere in between the two. As such, today's murder rate being comparable to that of the 1960s represents a colossal failure of justice, with overall crime and disorder being several times higher than it was two generations ago.

Why does this matter? The major costs of crime are not from murder because murder is rare and highly concentrated in a few demographics. They are are from more common crimes like assault, mugging, burglary, housebreaking, and grape, as well as general public disorder, both directly and in the huge cost people pay to avoid it.

Murder is a reasonably, murder is a reasonably good proxy for these things [00:24:00] in the short run, because all crime is murder. And disorder tends to go together, but the ratio of murder. I just want to

Speaker: highlight. I had never thought before about the, the cost of crime. When you consider how people live differently, when they anticipate crime, the things that they don't do to avoid crime.

Oh, and there's a huge article

Speaker 2: we could go into on this. It's really interesting that goes over how in countries like Japan and Korea, where you don't have as much crime there are not big dead zones in the center of major cities, but in the U S and parts of Europe, there are where you know, you'll, there'll be zones in the center of certain cities.

Like just people don't go because they're dangerous. Right. I mean, this is not a universal phenomenon. It's a phenomenon unique to high crime countries. Right. A murder rate of X,, corresponds to a lower crime rate than the murder rate of X today. Discourse about crime and its prevalent must take this into [00:25:00] account.

Now, here they have a very long explanation about why in the United States, The homicide rate is higher, but the overall disorder rate is not higher because this is true in the United States. We just have a uniquely high homicide culture in our country.

Speaker: Well, God bless us for being so effective, right?

You know, at least we get the job done when we get back.

Speaker 2: Obviously, progressives will be like, but this is because of our gun laws, but that's like, Objectively not true because Canada has similar gun laws and some other countries have similar gun laws, and it doesn't lead to the same rise in crime, so no, it's not due to our gun laws, it's due to a cultural phenomenon.

In this article they go into a fairly detailed number focus argument based on HBD, which I am not going to get into. But third rail, third rail, third rail, third rail, even I'm willing to go. I actually was hesitant to, to write for them because I was like, I can't be um, we actually thought when we were originally doing this podcast we were going to do it as [00:26:00] an Aporia podcast, like to, to work directly with them to do it and be funded partially by them.

But we just couldn't bring ourselves to do it because I didn't want to be connected with the HBD stuff for people who don't know what HBD is. It's human biodiversity, basically a euphemism, the, the, the, the theory that there are intergenerationally large and persistent genetic differences in behavioral patterns across asset groups.

Anyway I just, I just don't want to touch it. I don't, I don't see any reason why I need to argue that particular third rail. So, wait, why am I missing here? Okay. Yes. If the Western criminal justice systems were merely as effective as they were in 1960 and Western populations have a similar genetic propensity to commit crime, we would naively expect crime to fall over time as has happened in Japan for the following reasons.

Obesity, despite being of lower socioeconomic status and intelligence by the way, the reason they point that out is because being lower [00:27:00] socioeconomic status and lower intelligence increases the probability that somebody will commit a crime.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And you can look in prison systems. that. And actually the types of crimes they commit change.

So for example, the rate of being a grapist goes up really high in proportion to how low your IQ is and goes down with how high your IQ is. Which again, reminds me

Speaker: of that girl. Who's like, well, if I can't buy it, I guess I'm going to steal it. Yeah. Just, just like that whole dynamic summarized. Oh my God.

Speaker 2: It's all the most hilarious, low IQ crime thing that happened recently. There was a TikTok trend. And I'm gonna see if I can find some video of this. That was called the, the chase money glitch.

Speaker: Oh, wait, that was real. I saw people making fun of it.

Speaker 2: Check fraud. It was check fraud. What they found was this really cool glitch where you could deposit a check for money that you didn't have.

And it took the bank like 30 minutes to realize that the check had bounced, but [00:28:00] you could withdraw that money in cash before it bounced. And so this is how the chase money glitch worked and people thought this was free money.

Speaker 17: these have to be They will use these There's no way. There's no way, guys.

Speaker 20: Twins, Twins, I'm not even gonna lie. I'm not even supposed to condone this type of behavior due to the direction that I'm trying to project my life in. But that Chase Bait Plate looking too sweet right now, Twins. No cap. I can just hit one Chase Bait Plate. I can buy so many Shibis. Like, Twins is hitting for 30, 40 balls, 50 balls.

Speaker 21: Like, their plan is to do some kind of scam and then retire for the rest of their lives on the 12, 000 that the scam is gonna make [00:29:00] them

Speaker 22: His comments just filled with people either claim no more nine to five b***h or fishing for victims If you got chased, let me know. Someone PMO. If you got chased, let me know.

How do you withdraw it all at once?

Speaker 3: Yeah,

Speaker 2: I said, then they found out later that it wasn't free money, that they had to find a way to pay it back after they had spent it all,

that the bank had their social security number and place of work and address. They didn't

Know that. Yeah, they know where you live.

Speaker 18: The f**k?

The f**k man? They really told me to tap in next day I was supposed to clear look at my account yo

Speaker 24: Cause I have 30, 000 in credit card debt. When they call, I tell them I can't [00:30:00] pay it back yet. Credit card debt. Tomorrow, I may buy myself a dining room set. Or this Boba Fett. Credit card debt.

Speaker 2: This is an incidence of crime by stupidity. I mean, I love, like, part of me wonders, like, what's going through their head. And I was watching an asthma gold video on this as well.

And my, my general takeaway was his as well, which is that they just do not understand at a base level, how a bank works to them. A bank is a money machine and there's a glitch in it. That's giving them the ability to access more money. I mean, they've never taken out a loan or anything like that. They don't understand these concepts.

If there is a way to get the bank to just give the money, then they, yeah, why not? Right. And there's, there's these videos of them just like incriminating, like twerking and stuff out in front of a bank with like cash, like cash thing on their arm. No. All cool. I don't think you do. Sorry, wait. Do you think it goes like [00:31:00] this?

That's how they did it. They like, they'd like spread out the cash on their arm. No, you go like this. No, no, no, no. You know nothing about like the riz and the drip of the younger generation.

Speaker 17: There's no way. There's

Speaker 2: You're like an old lady. How do you put the bills across your arm? You gotta do it like the youth do or you ain't

Speaker: got no riz.

Okay. Interesting. Well, anyway, though, this did blow my mind because I did not know that obese people are about 20 to 25 percent per five BMI, less likely to commit violent property and drug crimes than their normal weight counterparts. So amazing. You know, if you walk by a fat person on the street, you can be 20 to 25 percent per five BMI, less worried that they're

Speaker 2: I'm going to be honest.

When I see people that my brain recognizes as threatening and I move to the other side of the street, they are never obese.

Speaker: They're never fat. It's true. Cause it's the [00:32:00] wiry ones you have to watch out for. Well, I

Speaker 2: look for the wiry ones or the ripped ones or the ones who look like that, you know, the math gets to the sort of skinny.

Anyway, I'm going to read this, this whole thing here. Cause it is actually interesting in the way it's argued. So obesity, despite being of lower socioeconomic status and intelligent. Obese people are much less likely, about 20 25 percent per 5 BMI, to commit violent property and drug crimes than their normal weight.

Counterparts. The evidence isn't overwhelming. You can't do an RCT, but there are plausible reasons, such as lower testosterone and the physical difficulty of committing crime. So let's note the lower testosterone here, because a lot of people don't know this.

As obesity goes up, your testosterone production decreases, and testosterone production is directly correlated with a person's likelihood of committing a crime. Over the past 40 years, average BMI among young adults 18 to 25 increased by 4. 5 points in the United States. [00:33:00] Without this, it's reasonable to assume that crime rates would have increased further.

That is fascinating. That is really fascinating. The other thing that's increased is wealth. In the 21st century, Western societies are vastly wealthier than their 1950s counterparts. To the extent that wealth causally reduces crime, we would expect crime to drop. And then, and this is the big one here.

Sorry, did you have something to say before I go further?

Speaker: No, no, no, keep going. I, I love this topic. This article, super interesting.

Speaker 2: Forensic technology and surveillance in the 21st century. Surveillance is ubiquitous and we have DNA evidence, GPS data and numerous other modern forensic tools. It should be much harder to get away with crimes today than it was in 1960 and.

Since the vast majority of crime is committed by repeat criminals, who it should be easier to apprehend near the beginning of their sprees, one would naively expect this alone to be a reason for significant reduction in crime. But! [00:34:00] Clearance rates have instead plummeted. It's much easier for the typical criminal to get away with it.

How much worse would this be without technological advances? And here is one of the things that gets absolutely wild. If you look at the rate of prosecuted crimes, okay, from 2015 to 2022, it's just crashing. Like the police are basically not prosecuting crimes anymore. Well, and I think that's because a lot of the attorneys

Speaker: general are saying stop.

They're telling them to stop. To give people an idea of

Speaker 2: how big of a difference this is. From, from 2015 to 2022, okay?

So this is the, the clearance rates for various crimes. So the total number went from 17 percent to 6%. Assault without injury went from 16 percent to 3%. Assault with injury went from 25 percent to

Speaker 4: 5%.

Speaker 2: [00:35:00] Public fear, alarm, or distress went from 26 percent to 3%. Shoplifting went from 36 percent to 14%.

Speaker 4: Harassment

Speaker 2: went from 28 percent to 4%. Talking went from 35 percent to 5%. It's basically not being prosecuted anymore. If you look at something like residential burglary, 10 percent to 4%. In every case, it's more than a 50 percent drop. In many cases, you're talking about like an 80 to 90 percent drop.

Speaker: Well, and we had this realization when A crime was committed against our business at one point and two years ago. And it was, we were like, it was, it was a pretty big deal. And we went to all the authorities to try to prosecute it. And it was very, like, it was super clearly documented. Oh, we could tell

Speaker 2: them who did it.

We, like, had the name of the person, we had their ID, we had, like, everything. Yeah, we had

Speaker: their bank details. Yeah, and nothing happened. Couldn't get a single response. And then, of course, after hearing all these stories about, you know, people being stabbed in San Francisco regularly, friends we know who live there, and things, things [00:36:00] of that sort, we're like, well, okay, so We live in a world in which we cannot expect protection, which is interesting because that feels like it's the beginning of a collapse of society.

Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I mean, isn't that what the government does? Theft of a vehicle, for example, like if your car got stolen, that went from 9% to 2%, so it was already pretty low. A 50% reduction. Yeah. And this is over a period of only, uh,

I wanna say seven years. Seven years.

Speaker: It's like the mods are asleep. And we haven't realized fully that they've gone to sleep. So society still kind of works, but soon more and more people are going to start exploiting

Speaker 2: this.

Speaker: It makes me nervous. It does make me very nervous.

Speaker 2: Actually. I really liked it in the, the Azma Gold video, where he was comparing what was happening at these restaurants.

He goes, well, you know, back in WoW, you know, when you won a level, you would go [00:37:00] to, you know, outside the raid bosses, because there weren't the, the big bads there, and you could just farm XP. And he goes, and that's what these people are doing, they're just going out and farming XP on low level People are like, they're not doing it in the dangerous areas.

And he's like, yeah, of course. Like, you're not going to, you're not going to want to be in dangerous area. You're going to get the max XP for minimum danger and it

Speaker: smells good. And everyone is dressed nicely.

Speaker 25: That not everybody can fit inside the restaurant. That's why you have these massive outdoor dining sheds. Well, it's like, no, people do this in games, right? It's like you go outside a dungeon and you farm the mobs outside the dungeon. If you don't have a raid, like, no, I mean, I get how it happens. Like it makes sense.

Speaker 26: Like, and it's smart, People did this in Scarborough monastery. Yeah, exactly. So I, cause there's like only one of them. They're not as high level that you don't have to go inside there. Yeah, no, of course. Try to steal 2, 000, and if you can steal 2, 000, you're gonna try to steal 5, 000. Like, duh. Well, of course. You're leveling up. Well, yeah, I mean if [00:38:00] if I was a criminal i'd be like bro like new patch We got a buff, like, let's go. Let's start farming.

Speaker 2: All right. So, And this, this gets interesting as well. So another reason the rate should be dropping.

If you're just looking at broader statistics is aging. Every developed country has gotten significantly older since 20th century. That's true. Yeah. In accordance with the age crime curve, the vast majority of crime is committed by young men. This would be expected to drive crime down. And I'm going to put a graph on screen here.

It is massively, massively, massively young men that commit crime.

The fact that climate disorder are several times worse today than in the 1960s in most Western societies, albeit better than the 1990s, is a sign that something is very wrong. Now, somebody might be like, ultra low crime societies don't exist, and yet they do. Modern day Singapore and Japan are justifiably admired for their extraordinarily low murder rates.

0. [00:39:00] 1 out of 23 out of 100k respectively. And these murder rates reflect near zero levels of crime and disorder in society at large. This has massive benefits. Blue collar property and violent crime costs around 2. 6 trillion dollars per year, about 12 percent of GDP in the United States. 12 percent of GDP in the United States is going to crime.

Speaker: Mind blowing. Terrifying.

Speaker 2: But this doesn't account for the massive lifestyle changes that people make, which Simone was talking about earlier. In Japan and Singapore, you can go wherever you want alone at night, leave children unattended, travel however you want, no need to stick to sealed off cars, leave expensive possessions unsecure in public areas, and live anywhere you can afford with corresponding cost of living benefits.

No urban cores are hollowed out by crimes. This means shorter commutes, better amenities, and more efficient use of land. But, these two wealthy aged East Asian societies are not the only ultra low crime societies to exist. Mid century England had about [00:40:00] four times the homicide rate of modern Japan, which, given advances in medical care, implies it had similar levels of crime and disorder.

This was an average age of 34 15 years younger than the median Japanese person today. So to understand how impressive the middle ages were like middle aged England, right. It had similar low crime rates. But a much younger population, which should have made higher crime rates. And it's not just England.

Other parts of post war Western Europe also had extremely low levels of crime, 1950 to 1974. This, however, I think is cheesing it. The Middle Ages, okay, I see that. Actually it's not cheesing it. Oh, actually they both have the same explanation. War. War is very good at reducing crime rates.

So, of course, I'm going to look up to see if there's any statistics on this. And I found one study that showed an 18% reduction in amounts of crime during war times, which is less than I expected to be [00:41:00] honest.

Speaker 2: This is actually something that in the middle ages we see a monarchy talking about.

Because right here he's like, oh yeah, post war United States, the crime rate's dropped. It's like, yeah, because everybody who has like this criminal sort of drive in them to go out and kill and mug and it's ultra aggressive ends up dying in wars or getting it out of their system or. turning it into a career.

You know, but in the middle ages, there were periods where they went significant time periods without war and people noticed that crime rates rose significantly during those periods. So are you saying our solution

Speaker: is just, just war? Should we, should we have Hunger Games, but just for 20 something men?

Yeah. They'd do it. They'd do it. Yeah, there were voluntary hunger games for 20 something men. And you could get famous, like, on TikTok for doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, didn't Mr. Beast get in trouble for this whole, like, squid game thing, where a bunch of people went and did a bunch of stuff that, I guess, sounds really unpleasant, but Because, you know, you could, I'm sure I don't [00:42:00] care.

Speaker 2: I just want to watch a bunch of like angry 20 year olds who might be stealing my car, murder each other. Like I think that'd be fantastic.

Speaker: I think they would enjoy it too. A lot of them, a lot of people would genuinely enjoy that.

Speaker 2: One thing I'm going to push for you know, we, we use dual laws on the books in this country, I would watch it.

It would all be voluntary.

Speaker: Yeah. Is there research on whether duals. When they were legal and there was a system for them reduced, I don't know, we'll say like unstructured or spontaneous crime.

Speaker 2: Oh, I'm certain they did. Yeah. I mean, what are duels but like a structured excuse for a crime of passion? Like, oh, you slept with my wife.

Okay, let's duel, you know. It wasn't even that would be

Speaker 3: like, you dissed me, but still, it was often pretty bad.

Speaker 2: Post war Western European countries were among the safest on earth, comparable to much older, much wealthier, and much more forensically sophisticated modern Japan. There's no technical reason why Western European societies today shouldn't [00:43:00] be this safe and reap the benefits beyond a lack of will.

There is a reason, there's genetic reasons, like if they want to talk about like, Hbd or whatever. I mean, we can talk about the white populations that my ancestors came from in the United States. And these were very murderous populations famously

Speaker: murdery.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Famously murdery. And I think that what they might be confused Fusing is looking at across America population samples from these periods where certain communities in America during this time had really low crime rates.

The Puritan communities of New England had incredibly low prime rates. The German immigrant communities that, like, the Midland areas and the Quakers had low crime rates. But the greater Appalachian communities had a really high crime rates. There's there's one of my favorites from American nations.

They were talking about how the there was like a class of men in these communities that would sharpen their nails to be like I think

Speaker: that was actually in LBNC. Maybe both of them talked about it where they took [00:44:00] pride and yes, having uniquely sharp nails so they could gouge out people's eyes and bras, basically.

Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is my eye

Speaker 2: gouging nail. This is my eye gouging finger.

So I couldn't find the exact quote from American nations just by Googling. However, I was able to find a fantastic vice article on this tradition. , titled rough and tumble the deeply Southern tradition of nose, biting, testicle ripping, and eye gouging. So, , and this is something that's been largely forgotten that there was this, , really form of martial arts called rough and tumble.

That was common in the greater Appalachian region in America. And just because this faction of American culture with never a, dominant cultural faction in terms of media production. , or involvement in the arts. , we don't remember how common it was or how developed this method of fighting was. Instead of quote the article here. In 1806 Englishman, Thomas Ash wrote an account of his visit to wheeling Virginia, [00:45:00] where he witnessed a fight between two working class men that he would remember for the rest of his life. The men, one from Kentucky and one from Virginia. Arguing over who had a better horse as somewhat standard debate in the booze filled outskirts, this small tones. Not willing to acquiesce to a difference of opinion.

The men, along with Englishman Ash, and a large portion of the tone took off to attract, to test the speed of the two BS. Apparently the rates was inconclusive, but the two men unwilling to in their feud, challenged each other to a fight, they agreed to quote. Tear and rent in quote rather than quote unquote fight fair. Ash watched in astonishment as the Virginia.

And it took the Kentucky into the ground and from a mounted position, grasps his hair and stuck his eyes down the man's eyes stock it. But the Kentucky and recovered and rolled. The Virginia and off of him once on top of the Kentucky and leaned over and bit the nose off the man for Virginia, but the fight was not over the man for Virginia, took the Kentucky into the lower lip between his teeth and ripped it down to [00:46:00] its his chin. Then the fight was over demand for Virginia at sands knows it was carried off in victory while the Kentucky and headed to the doctor, his eyes damaged from the attempted gouging and his torn lower lip lip. Lily flopping around his chin. This fight was not an anomaly, but rather a tradition of fighting that was particularly common in rural parts of the south United States in the 18th century, rough and tumble with the name given to no holds bar fighting in the south east region of the newly formed America bedding was prevalent and rules.

Non-existent contestants could kick down an opponent, knee to the groin bite and even scratch each other with fingernail sharpen for just such a purpose. I gouging became the ultimate finish in rough and tumble was men being disfigured for life fingernails sharpened, filed and coated in wax dug into an opponent's eye socket, attempting to literally rip out the eyeball and hold it aloft before a screaming crowd. And I should note that, well, it calls it, , the south.

It wasn't really in this house. It was in the rural [00:47:00] Appalachian region, which I'll put a thing on this screen here.

, as you can tell from the states being mentioned here,

And, , this was common and even people you've likely heard of like Davy Crockett. , w who wants quote? I kept my thumb in his eye and was just going to give it a twist and bring the paper out like a twist. Like taking a gooseberry and a spoon in quote. The point I'm trying to make here is that I think this aporia piece creates a narrative in which a person could come to believe that. Well, medieval England was a mostly peaceful place. And so what led to America becoming as dangerous as it is today? Is the allowing in of immigrants or people from different ethnic or national backgrounds where, what I'm trying to point out is at least some of the groups of Americans, specifically the groups that I come from, the greater Appalachian cultural region. Was settled by. An extremely, extremely violent subpopulation on the [00:48:00] outskirts of the English empire. , and has always been , a level of violence that is almost incomprehensible to the dominant cultural groups that ended up creating a lot of our literature and stuff like that. , another.

Fine. Thing I'd note here.

And this is for me, a cracked article. , that talks about these sorts of immigrants before they left England. It was pretty common for audiences in the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds to pelt the performers with deadly objects. Singers actors or comics. Had. Only moments to win over the audience. And depending on whether your act with bombing, the crowd had their own way of trying to kill you. In London, they threw pig bones in glass, Lou.

It was known for throwing steel rivets, but as long as it hurt and left, a funny wound at Savage crowds didn't really care. Dead cats and dogs were flung at the performers, which is almost as fascinating as it is monstrous, where the cats killed on the way to the show. Just in case the band sucked we're dead [00:49:00] cat sold there.

How did man ever survive an era? However brief were animal corpses were used as a dislike button.

Speaker 2: Very, Different from they, they, they took a lot. They gained a lot of status from it. It was a good way to gain status is go. Ah,

Speaker: this gnarled grizzly nail that has eye gunk under it from somebody else. Do you like this visual?

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not.

Speaker 2: All right. So they argue a different reason that this is happening than I argue, which is war. War is a good way to get rid of people that I actually don't hate their argument. And I think it's probably a big contributor to this.

Speaker: Well, it can't both be true, but let's present their argument.

Speaker 2: Lock them up, this starts. Fortunately, crime is an exceptionally tractable problem, because the overwhelming majority of crime is committed by a tiny minority of very prolific offenders. Citation. For instance, in Sweden, 1 percent of people are responsible for 63 percent of violent crime and conviction.

Citation. When I say citation, just go to the original article this is [00:50:00] coming from and you can read the citations. With about half of all convictions being accounted for by people with three or more previous convictions. So I'm going to read that again, so people can really grok that, okay? 1 percent of people are responsible for 63 percent of violent crime convictions, with about half of all convictions being accounted for by people with 3 or more previous convictions.

If you Permanently, like the three strikes law, permanently locked anyone up with three convictions, you would reduce the number of crime, the amount of crime by half.

Speaker: Or send them to Simone's Mercenary Penal Colony. I haven't given up the dream. We'll talk about

Speaker 2: our Mercenary Penal Colony plans in a second.

You could cut violent crime in half by simply executing or imprisoning for life people with many previous offenses. The United States is similar, with more than 75 percent of people in US prisons having five or more arrests. 75 [00:51:00] percent of people in our prison. People are like, our prison system is like lax, or that it's imprisoning the wrong people.

This is just like, factually not. But this also

Speaker: makes the prospect of going to prison terrifying, because this is people who are Severely, severely messed up or 75

Speaker 2: percent of them have been arrested five other times. Do you know how hard it is to get arrested five times? Well, and the

Speaker: problem is that's not just them doing a bad five times.

It's them getting caught five times. So it's also just like, this isn't. These aren't the smartest criminals. I mean, there are lots of people, especially these days, like anyone who's getting to prison these days is well, either they're committing, you know, like tax fraud or something like, yeah. They're not actually,

Speaker 2: you know, what, how many, how many prior arrests people have as a proportion of the prison population.

But it is. Absolutely enormous. There are actually very few people in prison that have only been [00:52:00] arrested once. When I say very few, it looks like maybe like 3 percent or 2 percent or something from this. It is just rare to be in prison for only having been arrested once.

Speaker: Well, but I think once you get arrested once it's, it's kind of hard to get reintegrated with society and you're more likely to get caught for more things, but you know.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But what the point in your being. Is that these individuals and also I just, I mean, the people who care for our kids have been in prison before and we're, you know, helping them get on their feet. Like, this happens, like, people help people. That's the way the world is. Well,

Speaker: and yeah, and it goes to show that, like, imprisonment happens and we'll also the circumstances that drive people to commit crimes in some cases are genuinely out of their control.

And it just sucks. Like they've been put, well, I mean, you and I are determinists. Anyway, you know, we feel like everyone's kind of stuck in their stupid place in the world's clockwork. So, yeah. Well,

Speaker 2: yeah, but that doesn't mean As a determinist, I believe people are responsible for their actions because their [00:53:00] actions aren't due to random stuff, but due to their genetics and who they are.

And therefore, who they are deserves full punishment for anything they do. But to go further, the same stylized fact whereby a teenage criminal minority commits the vast majority of crime also holds for non violent offenses. For instance, 327 people were responsible for a third of shoplifting arrests in New York City in 2022.

327 people, a third of shoplifting arrest.

Speaker: Yeah, I feel like there's some, there's a movie concept in here, you know, the 327. They've

Speaker 2: been rearrested, these 327 people, 6, 000 times. Why are they still being released? They probably just keep

Speaker: like a change of clothes in prison, like, Hey, did you hold onto my toothbrush?

Do you know how much man hours

Speaker 2: it takes to arrest and process a human being a thousand times? You know,

Speaker: that is a lot of taxpayer dollars. They should just like keep a locker for that.

Speaker 2: These supercriminals are well [00:54:00] known to the police by virtue of committing similar crimes. Their guilt is not in doubt.

The only obstacles to executing or permanently imprisoning them are legal and procedural. Most of these legal and procedural barriers, citation, were put in place in the 1960s and 1970s. Citation, as a natural consequence of politicians and judges. Citation, as victims of society, rather than the other way around.

I. e., because they believe that the criminals are just people who are in hard situations and can't get out of it, which isn't factually true. True. These are people who have made crime intentionally their daily career.

Speaker: Okay. Well, and, and that they specifically have been incentivized to do that. They're doing that because they're positively reinforced when they do it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. If you execute, it's our own fault we're doing it. The rest of them would stop.

Speaker: Yeah. It's our own fault for making them into what they've become, which is, is is even worse. You know, it's, these [00:55:00] could have been good people with jobs that help other people and because of the way that we are prosecuting crimes, we have driven them.

To be people who hurt other people when really like, I think a significant proportion of these people, if not the majority of these people would otherwise be doing stuff that helps other people. Ultimately, it's

Speaker 2: annoying, move these barriers and return to punishing criminals quickly, surely, and harshly with a focus on incapacitation or execution.

Citation not rehabilitation and crime can be brought quickly under control and here they have proof of this in el salvador So el salvador tried this it stopped trying to rehabilitate criminals right here. They say el salvador is an extraordinary recent example of this having reduced the murder rate by 98 Simply by locking up well known gang members El Salvador had the state capacity to do this at any time, and so do we.

All it takes is the willingness [00:56:00] to jettison pro criminal procedural norms invented within the past 70 years. And you can look here. Are you saying that, like, an

Speaker: executive order could do this? Like, I'm just trying to figure out from a legal standpoint. Because, I mean, there are, you know, laws about unfair imprisonment and stuff like that in the United States.

Speaker 2: If I was president I feel a lot of presidents are a little capitalist in the way they play the game. If, for example, we got into a Trump administration, I could figure out how to make this happen. Simone, you underestimate the tools at the disposal.

Speaker: There's some like well known ones, like I'm gonna declare a state of emergency.

We're gonna call this war. You know, I get that. I'm just wondering.

Speaker 2: Other ones that. Are hugely underused you're just thinking like a bureaucrat because the people who have tried to solve this before have always been bureaucrats And they haven't been ruthless people like me. You can see my video on getting addicted to chat ai bots for how I like to break [00:57:00] systems the easy one that the u.

s. President isn't using is his pardon power. Specifically you just say For example blanket pardon on police doing certain things. On,

Speaker 4: You as

Speaker: a

Speaker 2: president can make anything you like. I will pardon.

Speaker: I will remember what, what, what nation was it? It was basically like any citizen now has the right to shoot someone who did.

I can't remember what. Like you remember

Speaker 2: this,

She thinking of the Philippines and Duterte. I didn't hear her say this. I wasn't able to say this in the, in the recording, but yeah, the Philippines, India territory said anyone involved with drug trafficking or drug use could be executed.

Speaker 2: for example, like during the, some of the like banking crisis and stuff like that, when it was obvious that the bank had just screwed over tons and tons of people and we had no system for legally handling it, I probably would have just said, anyone who kills these guys, free pardon.

Just like put

Speaker: out a hit basically and a promise. [00:58:00] Well, I mean, technically

With the caveat here, of course, that however they did it needed to make it a federal crime rather than a state crime, because the president cannot pardon people for state crimes. Also, it should be clear here how lucky I am to have somebody like Simone to moderate my impulses in terms of severity. , one of our followers with like, they love that Malcolm always gets angry and really aggressive about things, but they also love that Simone is always talking me back for my extremist physicians that she likely would have I ever actually held office.

Speaker 2: people are, they may underestimate like, yeah, I mean, so I guess I'm trying to think the opposition would then try the opposition would try to

Speaker: impeach you. And I think that there'd be enough powerful connections at play, depending on who you're attacking.

No, there wouldn't. Oh my God. If it's, if it's

Speaker 2: the leaders of the banking industry in the United States. If you took out after losing billions of dollars and keep in mind billions of dollars you can translate dollars to death Yeah, when you remove I think it's something like I can't remember something like every half a million dollars you remove [00:59:00] from the economy Somebody is dying functionally speaking because that money was removed billions of dollars is killing more people than the biggest mass murderers in our country's history It's 9 11 attacks a day Style murders and this is done regularly by white collar criminals and they need to understand that there are consequences for this In the same way that in china corruption is sometimes punished with extreme, you know executions and stuff like that And I think in the united states these people just feel like there's no consequences Their companies are so big, the government's gonna bail them out, blah, blah, blah.

They'll always be ultra wealthy no matter what, no matter who they abuse, no matter who they hurt. And you're like, oh, then the lefties would come and try and impeach you? Do you know how effing bad that's gonna look to the electorate? If the lefties are standing up for the big bankers who lost billions of dollars for the individual Americans?

Who expected a golden parachute. I know. I'm

Speaker: just [01:00:00] saying that those really, really wealthy bankers with a target on their backs have a lot of connections that would be financially incentivized to try to impeach you as president.

Speaker 2: Right. But what I think you are missing, because we have seen this as people.

Who have played in the political space and have played in the broader American, like, how to change the world space. Money does not give you that much power.

You, you get a marginal additional increase in power, but the truth is, is power is power. I think this may

Speaker: change, but the way that our elections work now, I do think that having more money is important.

Speaker 2: No, they could go, and this is the problem that you're missing here, right? Yeah. So what you're assuming is what the bankers are going to be able to do Is go to politicians and say I gave you money in X campaign. Listen to me and impeach them. Right? Here's the problem, Simone. [01:01:00] Most of the heads of the banking system haven't been giving money to everyone.

They've been giving money to people in strategic ways. Party politics. They just don't have the cachet. You're like, well, maybe they could go to all of their rich friends who do have the cachet. But what you're missing here is that the rich friends who bought that cachet did it was company dollars for company purposes.

So for example, they can't go to the head of shell and say, use shells lobbying group to put pressure on them because shells lobbying group exists. For specific projects, for specific reasons, it's not a general in the pocket of the CEO lobbying group, okay? They would find themselves very quickly with no power.

The only power that the ultra wealthy have is in terms of blackmail, i. e. Epstein. Other than that, no. And people are underestimating the president's ability to make these kinds of massive changes. Now, [01:02:00] here's the challenge. People are going to say, well, what about false positives? You can't be, you can't just like go executing criminals.

And this is the problem with executing criminals. We make it too expensive in the United States. You get the, you know, the, all these retrials, all of these, you know, death row stuff. I think that

Speaker: the cost of executing someone is

Speaker 2: It's,

Speaker: it's way, way higher

Speaker 2: for life right now. Oh yeah.

Speaker: For sure. By, by a long shot, I think like by many times over

Speaker 2: it's, it's, it's just punitive at this point, which, which really means, you know, we need to develop.

And I think, you know, if Elon gets this efficiency department down, we need to develop a more efficient form of mass execution. You know, for repeat, repeat criminals of violent crimes. That's what I think. And not for all crimes. Repeat violent criminals. Okay, so what you wanna

Speaker: bring out? The death. The death vans, the execution bans.

Yeah. Death

Speaker 2: vans. That's what China does. Just do What China does. They use that for like thought crime. I think you need to be very clear. This needs to be, but whenever I hear

Speaker: thought crime, I just picture. Like a dead seat woman.

Speaker 2: [01:03:00] So bad. But the, the, the, the, the violent crime, when people hear this, what they're thinking about, okay, and this is really important, is they're thinking about the individual who might be executed, and they're not thinking about the people that individual kills.

Or grapes or, you know, it's, it's easy to say, give that individual a second chance when it's not your daughter who ends up getting great. As a result of that there was a case of this where actually was was joking about this. And he was like, it's her fault that this happened to her where this man murdered this girl's mother.

And then this girl went in with this, like, holier than thou attitude of, like, Oh, I forgive everyone. You know, we need to learn to blah, blah, blah. The guy murders her as well. She just dumb as a bag of bricks. And it's not just that they're dumb.

They're dumb in a way that hurts other people. When they insist on this persistent forgiveness policy, they [01:04:00] end up putting other people, my people, my family at risk, my daughter's at risk. Okay. And as he was saying, is it not better that they're dying for their, their because it's not just naivety. What?

Are they putting other people's at life's at risk for they're putting them at risk so they can feel like a good guy so they can feel like they are an uncomplicated protagonist. And he's absolutely right about that. They are villainous in a way. That is not as villainous as as the murderers, but it is high villainous levels, the degree to which they just don't care about the damage that they are causing.

They just don't care about the girls who get graped because they insist on this forgiveness mindset

For more color on the case that was being mentioned here.

The case involved, , Travis Lewis who murdered Sally Snowden Mackay. 75, , [01:05:00] during a burglary. And then her daughter. advocated for him to be released early from prison, citing her Buddhist belief system, , and then gave him an employment and he ended up murdering her. After she fired him. , thinking that he was stealing money from her, which he was, and people can be like, oh, you know, how great is that?

Yeah. Well, what if she hadn't been the one who hired him? What if it had been one of my family members. Okay. When you. Advocate for things like this. When you advocate for these ultra lenient policies around crime. You are an accomplice to the murders that end up happening To facilitate the masturbation of your ego.

Speaker 2: or the, I mean, for example this is why, you know, if somebody has like, actually assaulted you you, it's important to report this because by the time it gets reported, they've already done it to five other people on average right now.

These people are repeat, repeat, repeat, [01:06:00] repeat, repeat offenders. But anyway, the reason why people are afraid to think of the criminal, they're afraid of false positives, right? And so then it goes on to say, The most common objection to quicker, surer, harsher sentencing, and especially the death penalty, is that it will lead to more innocent men being punished.

On utilitarian grounds, this might be justifiable. Citation, but people tend to be suspicious of this sort of reasoning. Fortunately, however, a stricter regime does not necessarily imply more false positives for the following reasons. One, most crime is committed by well known prolific criminals. When dealing with someone who's already committed dozens of assaults, you're not at risk of accidentally punishing an innocent man.

These people's guilt is not justified. , substantively and doubt the fact that they are free to commit crimes to begin with is damage. Lower crime rates mean more resources can be devoted to each crime. The American system , cannot afford to exhaustively investigate and prosecute more than a [01:07:00] tiny fraction of crimes, leading to a reliance on plea bargains.

If American crime rates were 4x lower as they were two generations ago, we could afford to be much more careful when dealing with each individual crime. Three, lower crime rates mean fewer absolute. false positives. Imagine that the Japanese justice system had 10 times the false positive rate of the American United States has around 50 times the murder rate of Japan.

So Japan would still have only one half the number of false convictions per murder per capita. As such a quicker, surer, harsher criminal justice regime would be expected to lead to fewer false positives. Not more. It may be better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be punished, but that's why we should be tougher on crime.

So, be harsher, and I do agree with this, on repeat criminals. And I would even be willing, like if I was president and I was pushing for a bill, I'd be willing to push for a bill that or a governor because [01:08:00] really you have to do this at the state level, , that lowered the punishment for the most severe crimes in our society, i.

e. made it so that you don't get the death penalty for premeditated murder, but increased the punishment for multiple violent crimes, i. e. you do get the death penalty as soon as you've been implicated in three assaults. And if you did that, the reduction in crime would be astronomical. But I think with these extreme types of punishments, you, one, have to be very clear they have to be violent crimes, okay?

And two, you have to be very clear that they must be repeated violent crimes. Crimes, but as soon as you get a repeat of violent crime, you're just gonna get it over and over again and there is really nothing you can do about these individuals. And I loved Asthma Gold's reaction to how to solve crime in New York, and I like this as well.

One, make it easy to get the, the concealed carry Permitt in New York and two. Make it legal. You know, in the U. S. And [01:09:00] Pennsylvania stuff like that. We have stand your ground laws, and I'd actually push that you are allowed to shoot a fleeing suspect if they have robbed you, because right now, in most states, even states with sound your ground laws and stuff like that.

Speaker 26: if you were able to shoot them when they ran away, it'd be no problem.

That's what you should be able to do. I think if somebody tries to rob you, you should be able to shoot them. Absolutely.

Can't shoot someone fleeing. In my opinion. If you're stealing somebody's s**t and you're running off with it. And somebody shoots you? Nice shot.

Speaker 2: If somebody comes and they rob you, or they steal your car, or they, you know, as soon as they're back in turn and they're running away with what they stole, you can't do anything about it because you cannot. They're like, Is their life worth less than the stuff they stole from you? And I'm like, yeah, it is.

It is. Because it's not just the stuff they stole from me, it's the crimes they're going to commit in the future. Especially if they're doing this knowing that people might defend themselves. And I think that what people are missing here and this is also, I want to say true of not just this, [01:10:00] but I want to say grapes.

You are allowed to to shoot a grapist when they are leaving your house. It doesn't matter that they have their back turned to you. I think that we are way too much of a stickler on that point. I think that there are certain crimes.

Speaker: So I feel where this gets difficult is I could just shoot a random guy who may have been, you know, a lot of my house.

There's no witnesses. There's no cameras. There's no nothing. And be like, oh yeah, he tried to rape me. Not tried to. Oh sorry, he did rape me, but

Speaker 2: like But this is the point here, is you just make then the, the, the, the justification of proof really high. And you're like, that would never work, but actually it does work.

You can do rape kits pretty easily. Okay, so I,

Speaker: I, I seduce a guy.

Speaker 2: Voluntary sex does not create the same terror patterns rape creates. You can tell the difference with a rape kit. So, no. And, generally speaking, where these instances would come into play is people robbing someone in public, or graping someone in [01:11:00] public, or you know, you just, these wouldn't be focused on these, like, Oh, maybe, maybe not incidences.

You would write it into law where it's very like, maybe you have to have multiple witnesses or something like that. But I think that we need to be much harsher in both the ability to allow people to react to crimes and this, this mindset of well, but, you know, they're not currently in the act of committing the crime or blah, blah, blah.

All of this nonsense where in, like in Australia, this has happened where criminals have been able to sue landlords because they've gotten a hurt on their property. While they were stealing stuff.

Speaker: Oh, well, there, no, that happens in the U. S. too.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's happened in some U. S. states

we need to create laws that strip someone of human rights while they are committing crimes, if it is unassailable that they are committing a crime. And, and, and specifically here, I mean property crimes. And violent crimes and I [01:12:00] think that where I am very strong in my delineation of crime types when I say property crimes, I'm going to be clear here property crimes against individuals.

So, I do not think that companies should have the right to do this.

Speaker 27: You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a baby. You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet.

Downloading films is stealing. You will face the consequences. Man,

Speaker 2: but I think individuals, if it's your car, if it's your house, but if a warehouse is being broken into, or a store is being broken into, I don't think that the use of lethal force is justified. But I think that once you create these laws, it becomes much easier.

I would What I say for sole proprietorships, yes, for sole proprietorships, I'd say lethal, like, so, i. e. I own a shop all by myself or my family owns a shop that's different from a chain owned store or something [01:13:00] like that. And I'd also say that these crimes differ as well from intellectual crimes, like, i.

e. intellectual property theft and stuff like that which is really about corporate profits and not about specifically targeting individuals. Which is just, you know, a ridiculous thing to me. And I think that as a society, we have normalized the targeting of individuals at this point for a specific class of people.

They just don't have any shame in doing this. But thoughts, Simone?

Speaker: Well, I don't know if I do exactly what you suggest, but yeah. I mean, something needs to be done. I, you know, I'm still for penal colonies. I really hate the idea of. Describe your penal

Speaker 2: colony idea.

Speaker: Well, if someone can't play nice with society here, as it is, Then just ship them off to somewhere where they're around other rule breakers like them and they can all break rules together.

And that's, that's my idea. I, I feel like it's, to me, it feels a lot more fair. [01:14:00] Hide your penal colony for

Speaker 2: profit idea.

Speaker: Yeah, my penal colony for profit idea is for those who, Participate in the system and would like to also have an interesting life with maybe some, some higher upside benefits, join a penal colony that also serves as a mercenary unit where, you know, you, you go and you and become a mercenary.

Speaker 2: Basically, she wants to create like floating cities or isolated parts in like northern Alaska where everyone there is a repeat offender, but they are able to try to create. Structure of life for themselves. Yeah. IE start businesses, run things, et cetera. Yeah. They just can't leave the location.

And this becomes really important for people addicted to certain types of drugs, really important for repeat offenders because it creates a system where they don't need to be executed and always have a chance of rehabilitation.

Speaker: Well, and you know, for some people, I kind of think about it similarly to different types of kids, right?

Like a lot of kids, [01:15:00] you know, a stern talking to is enough to, you know, sit them in the corner or just tell them that it's, it's not okay. And let's have, let's talk about how you hurt my feelings, you know, and other kids like ours respond to bops, right? You know, like, Knock it off, slap upside the head. And I feel like a lot of people need a bop based society.

You know, they don't respond to this. You hurt my feelings based society that we live in. And therefore they need to be moved to a bop based society where there are, you know, public hangings and there's the whipping post in the square. And in that world, they will do a lot better. And I just, you know, like, it's sort of, you can sort for people who need that more extreme form of punishment.

And if they all live together in society, it might be a sufficiently ordered society. Well, at the same time, you're not really subjecting those who don't need that form of punishment. To what would for them be overly cruel and genuinely terrible and unwarranted and not effective. So, you know, I, I sort of see, I see discipline in that [01:16:00] way, like similar to the way we look at family based discipline, which is look at the people, look at their inherited traits, look at their culture and give them what they need.

Speaker 2: All right. Love you too, Desmond. Love you too, gorgeous.

Speaker: Which one next?

Speaker 2: The disappearing child in the city.

Speaker: Ooh,

Speaker 2: that?

Speaker: Okay, that sounds scary. Okay, I'm sending it shortly. End recording. Somebody tweeted at us an image saying, is this a techno Puritan? Click over on WhatsApp and you'll see.

Speaker 2: Okay. Click over on WhatsApp.

Speaker 3: I linked to their tweet there.

Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2: I'll put it, I'll put it in the episode at the end. That's a cute tweet. [01:17:00]

Speaker: Made me laugh.

Speaker 2: I

Speaker: lulled.

Speaker 2: Oh, I've got to get the notes up. So we're ready to go.

Speaker: I'm so stiff in, in like personal situations that there was this period where I caught myself just saying lull when I thought something was funny. In social situations.

Speaker 3: And I was like, Oh, whoops. I forgot. I need to performatively laugh instead of just say, lol, we need to practice.

Speaker: I need you to develop better social

Speaker 3: skills. All right. All

Speaker: right.